Actual Stop (Agent O’Connor #1)(6)

I paused deliberately. Akbari’s jaw tightened, and a light sheen of sweat broke out across his forehead.

“We’re already off to a bad start, Mr. Akbari. You’ve just lied to me twice, which doesn’t bode well for the rest of the interview.” I paused again. “Are you familiar with criminal law?”

Akbari shook his head and licked his lips.

“Title 18, United States Code 1001 is a particular favorite of mine. I won’t bore you with all the legalese. You can look it up yourself sometime if you’re so inclined, but basically it says that it’s a crime to lie to federal agents. Did you know you can go to jail for up to five years for violating that statute? Eight, if the matter under discussion relates to terrorism. And that’s in addition to a hefty fine. You’d be amazed how often I need to bring that up. I’ll admit, it makes me long for a simpler time when people were honest and respected the law and those who work tirelessly to uphold it. It breaks my heart when I have to remind people of their duty as human beings to do unto others.”

Meaghan bumped my leg under the table, and I used my hand to hide my grin. Okay, she was right. I was laying it on a tad thick. But the bastard had lied to my first two questions. And they were the easy ones. What was I going to get out of him when I started asking questions I didn’t know the answers to?

“Let’s try this again, Mr. Akbari. How long have you lived here?”

“Three weeks.” His shoulders slumped, and his voice came out a bit shaky.

I nodded. That was the answer I’d been looking for. “And where did you live before this?”

“Rockville, Maryland.”

“Who did you live with down there?”

“My mother.”

Three for three. Perfect. Now came the hard ones. I opened the folder on the table in front of me and retrieved a clear plastic envelope containing a counterfeit one-hundred-dollar bill. I laid it flat on the table between us and studied him to gauge his reaction.

Akbari’s eyes went flat as he stared at it, and he clenched his hands together.

“Do you recognize this?”

Akbari hesitated. “It’s a hundred-dollar bill.”

“Very good. Do you have any idea why I might have driven over here so late in the evening to ask you whether you’d seen it before?”

Akbari shook his head, but he couldn’t seem to take his eyes off the bill. I didn’t expect him to recognize it. Not that exact bill anyway, which was a prop I’d borrowed from the Counterfeit Squad for dramatic effect. We’d gotten it from a bank in Manhattan, which had received it from some store’s night drop bag. It was scheduled to be entered into evidence later in the week. We had no idea where it’d come from or who’d passed it off to the store. The only things that bill had in common with the one I was asking him about were that it was fake and it was a hundred. Everything else—identifying numbers, the paper it was printed on, the method in which it’d been counterfeited—was completely different.

Showing him the bill did serve a purpose, however. I mean, besides making him think I was a superagent and had gotten my hands on the fake hundred he’d passed at a grocery store down in Maryland. I peered at him as he looked at the note, watching carefully for the recognition I was positive wouldn’t come. I was right. It didn’t. And that alone said more than anything he could utter for the rest of the interview.

When my friend Sarah had called me from D.C. earlier that day to ask me to run down this lead, she’d suspected this guy was just a low man on the proverbial totem pole, and if he did have any involvement in the actual printing of the counterfeit currency—an unlikely scenario, as far as she was concerned—it was superficial at best. If his reaction, or complete lack thereof, was anything to go on, he wasn’t involved in the printing at all. If he had been, he’d have recognized that the bill I was showing him wasn’t his work and would’ve known I was bluffing. Clearly, this guy wasn’t a major player in the operation. But I suspected he knew who was, and that was the information I was really after.

I gave him another moment to formulate a reply. He didn’t. He just sat there looking at the bill with a dazed expression. Time to turn up the heat.

“A few weeks ago you visited a grocery store in Maryland and attempted to use a counterfeit hundred-dollar bill to pay for a carton of milk and some eggs.” I was very careful to word my statement so as not to claim that the bill in front of me was the bill he’d used. “The clerk recognized that the bill was fake, and you left abruptly when she mentioned it to you. They pulled video surveillance of the cash-register and parking-lot areas and tracked you to your car. You were identified by your vehicle’s license plate. The store footage of you that our agents in Maryland viewed matched your Maryland driver’s license photo. There’s no doubt it was you on the tape, but, just to be sure, the cashier was shown a photo lineup. She identified your picture immediately.”

Akbari said nothing for a very long time. His unflinching eyes merely continued to look blankly at the bill in its plastic envelope. Every now and again his hands balled up into fists, but that was his only reaction. I let him wallow in his own thoughts for a bit. As he did, I leisurely read through the papers in the folder I’d brought with me, and every once in a while, I jotted down a note.

Eventually, I’d had enough. I glanced at my watch and noticed that we were quickly encroaching on prayer time. I cleared my throat to get Akbari’s attention. He jumped and looked up at me for the first time in several minutes.