Hunting Saleh
Louise McCabe stood at the interrogation room window watching the suspect fidgeting at the interrogation table. As she prepared to question the young man, she wondered how much he knew and how much of that she can get him to tell her. This was the last place she expected to be, wanted tobe, when she got up this morning.
An hour and a half ago, she was standing in her kitchen watching Randy and David playing in the back yard. She could not have imagined being happier, totally unprepared for the phone call that brought her here, that would change her life, and that of her family, forever. She thought of her children. It seemed just yesterday that Randy was born. Now he is nearly five and David is seventeen months behind. Tom, her husband, is the absolute love of her life, her rock, the one she cannot imagine living without. Now they are all threatened.
As she smiled at Daisy, her four-year-old Golden Retriever, always at her feet, that fateful phone call snapped her out of her reverie.
“Hello.”
“Louise, this is Bill Lawson. Got a second?”
“Sure, what’s up?”
“We just picked up someone who apparently works for Saleh. If possible, we need you to meet us at the FBI facility in Manassas as soon as you can get here. We want you in the interrogation. It’s very important and we can’t tell anyone else, at least not yet.” At the sound of the name, Saleh, Louise’s heart skipped a few dozen beats. While working at the Defense Intelligence Agency she tracked this monster for five years but never got a bead on anything about him. Nothing they could use to track him. And now this name was just dropped in her lap.
“Let me call my Mom to see if she can watch the kids.”
“Please. Since your DIA clearance expired, I’ll clear it with the FBI to grant you temporary entry to the building and the interrogation.”
For five years after college Louise worked as an intelligence analyst at DIA, specializing in terrorist identification and tracking. She developed a special interest in the one to whom she gave the name Saleh. He was her pet project. Louise took a leave of absence five years ago when she became pregnant with Randy so she could be with him full-time until he started middle school. It was a decision she and Tom agreed would be best for him. She extended her leave when David was born seventeen months later. Her clearance was kept active for three years in case a critical need developed in her specialty, but it was eventually terminated.
Louise loved putting pieces of the puzzle together, gathering information on terrorists and their operations, looking at correlation data from the National Counter-Terrorism Center (NCTC), trying to get one step ahead of the bad guys. She was an analyst, not a field operator, so for her, it was an intellectual exercise, a battle of wits. It was on her mind a lot now that a new administration had taken office. She knew it would be a matter of time before the new administration is tested, led by President Patricia Harbourne, the first woman President.