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she said. “What if I don’t know what you’re talking about?”
    “I’ll kill you,” Frantoni said. “And if I’m right about a secondary set-off and somebody else waiting to hit a switch, I’ll die with you. Now, you may want that to happen. In which case consider it a victory for you and a loss for me.”
    The woman took a deep breath, her hazel eyes on Frantoni, still composed, with a trace of uncertainty crossing her brow. “What if I tell you what you want to hear?”
    “We take the device and walk out of here,” he said. “We go to my car and drive to my office. A bomb crew will take the device and you and I will sit. Have coffee. Talk.”
    The woman swung a few strands of hair from her forehead and smiled. “You might have the right device,” she said, her confidence back, matched with a swagger he had not yet seen, “but you picked the wrong girl.” She rested her head on Frantoni’s shoulder and whispered into his ear, “I’m not the one supposed to set it off.”
    Frantoni released his grip on her arm and pushed her away. He scanned the faces in the baggage area, estimating the starter would need to be within fifty feet of the satchel.
    “You have less than a minute,” the redhead said, standing behind him, hands and arms folded across her chest. “That’s not enough time to find the face you’re looking to find.”
    “Unless I bring the face to me,” Frantoni said.
    “There’s only one way to make that happen,” she said, “and that’s not in the good guy rule book.”
    He turned and faced the redhead, nine millimeter held low in his right hand. “I’m not a good guy,” he said.
    He raised the weapon and fired two bullets into her chest. The force lifted her off her feet, arms and legs spread wide. She landed with a thud against the hard floor, her head and back taking the brunt of the blow, lines of blood flowing out of both corners of her mouth, her eyes staring at a gray ceiling, red hair matted to one side.
    She was dead before she hit the ground.
    Frantoni wheeled around, surveyed the screaming crowd. Passengers were scurrying for cover, children shielded by the bodies of their mothers, the elderly collapsing to the floor, hands covering the backs of their heads. Frantoni grabbed the satchel in his left hand and ran, heading for the terminal exit, airport security in pursuit, screams and shots coming at him from all sides.
    He was holding a satchel packed with heavy explosives in his left hand. Police snipers were stationed in the areas above the terminals, frozen in place, unsure of their next move.
    And somewhere in the middle of the madness, a terrorist waited to press a red button and slaughter hundreds.

Chapter 9
    New York City
    I sat behind a desk, a hand-carved chessboard composed of characters from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories spread before me. I moved a pawn made to resemble a London bobby, sat back and gazed up at the still photo that filled the length of a fifty-two-inch flat screen. I was in the den of a four-bedroom apartment I kept in a Manhattan high-rise, staring at a face that belonged to a young man with short cropped hair, dark, penetrating eyes, and well-groomed brown beard. I had read through a thick file folder, now resting next to the board, filled with details both monotonous and monstrous. The young man was twenty-nine, born in Chicago, raised by relatives in Egypt and educated at Washington University in St. Louis and at Yale. He was the older of two sons, his father a respected chemist, his mother a social worker, both now living in a town house north of Michigan Avenue.
    His name was Alshair Al-Madel and he was a chemical engineer by profession and one of the world’s most feared terrorists by choice. A long list of biographical information ran down the left side of his photograph, but I didn’t need to read it. I knew all I needed to know about him, the cause he believed in, the religion he embraced. Al-Madel had a small