I looked at her querulously. “I guess I don’t understand. Shouldn’t we call the police or the FBI and let them know what happened back there?” I asked.
She gave me a grim look. “You still don’t get it, do you? Why do you think that guy was waiting for you?”
“I don’t know,” I said helplessly. “Only two days I was in Fort, um, I mean Washington, and then I got ordered to come down here to Oak Ridge. I don’t know how they knew I was here or why they want to kill me.”
“You don’t have to be coy around me,” she said. “I know you work for the NSA. I also know the reason why your boss ordered you to fly down here on such short notice.”
I stiffened, “You mean you know about Ginny and . . .”
She nodded. “We’ve known about her little liaison with Ameer for a while. I’ve listened to the tape of your wife’s conversation, and several others as well.”
I grimaced in spite of myself. It’s bad enough when your wife is cheating on you; it’s infinitely worse when you learn that everyone else knows all about it. Angrily I snapped, “That still doesn’t explain why I was ambushed like that.”
She took a deep breath. “Didn’t you think it was odd that your boss would send you out of town like that?” she asked. “Didn’t you think it was strange that they would want you to tell Ginny where you were going?”
“They were trying to keep me from having to confront her,” I said hotly.
She shook her head like I was a slow child in her classroom. “They were trying to use you as bait to lure Ameer away from Fort Meade,” she said. “They wanted him to follow you. They didn’t know what he was up to and they wanted him as far away from the NSA as they could get him. They probably also thought that if he went after you, Henry could take him out. But Henry got careless when he drove you up to Frozen Head, and he managed to get himself killed in the process.”
“They were using me for bait?” I asked, growing angrier by the second at the thought. But before I think about it further, I noticed the first Oak Ridge exit flash by. “Weren’t we supposed to get off there?” I asked.
She shook her head. “That’s the last place we want to go now. We’ve got to get you back to Fort Meade.”
I tried to digest that thought. “Are we going to catch a flight out of Knoxville?”
She shook her head. “No planes, no credit cards, no cellphone calls. I can’t take the risk of another interception attempt. We’re going off the grid.”
“We’re going to drive all the way back to Washington?” I asked in disbelief. She merely nodded.
We hit rush hour traffic in Knoxville just then, and I kept quiet while Esther maneuvered through the congestion. But once we were past and speeding toward the Virginia border, I couldn’t hold my questions any longer.
“You never told me why the Mossad has been following me,” I complained. “For that matter, you haven’t told me why Al Qaeda or whoever Ameer is with is trying to kill me.” Suddenly a not unpleasant thought struck me. “Wait, was that Ameer who blew himself up along with Henry?”
She shook her head. “No such luck. That was actually Ameer’s brother, Hassan. He’s another bad one, and I’m not sad he’s gone, but Ameer is the one we really want, preferably alive.”
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