They were not cops.

Nobody would admit who or what they were now. Only what they’d been. The old one was former Delta, former SF. The young one had also been with Special Forces. They’d been through the looking glass and now they carried nothing in their wallets or on their gear that could be traced back to the military. They were simply known by their mission name: Northern Route.

They were volunteers, totally on their own.

An hour ago they snatched a Saudi Arabian businessman off a busy street, stuffed him in a Chevy van, and brought him to this crummy little room from which the air conditioning, the desks, and the chairs had been removed. There was a touch of method in the selection of this room: the sensation of slow suffocation as an interrogation tool. For now the prisoner remained blindfolded. A little later they would take the blindfold off.

So it was just the three of them, and a lot of sweat, and the worn gray carpet, the bare walls, and the gray ceiling tiles crowded overhead with their grids of monotonous dots. And now the walls, carpet, and ceiling started closing in to form a solid block of heat.

The old guy wiped sweat from his forehead and said, “The right way to do this is we should be sitting on a runway. Three hundred thousand Arab types down the road in Dearborn for these wrongos to hide out with. And there’s not a single military base in this whole town. That’s real smart.”

“Hollywood, man-just cool it. It’s only half an hour. They’re on the way in from Willow Run to pick him up.” On him, the black guy nodded at the third man in the room.

“What would be nice, Bugs, is for Omar here to tell us something.”

Bugs shook his head. “Never happen. We can’t make deals, that’s for the suits. But my guess is this guy’s hardcore Qaeda. No way he’s gonna talk to anybody. Nah, I think he’s gonna sit out the war on the beach in Cuba.”

Hollywood nodded. “You hear that, Omar? Camp Delta. Nice eight-by-eight chain-link dog kennel. Got your little rug and your prayer arrow scribed on the concrete floor.”