Act of Revenge

Flash forward

The laugh was deep and dark, the sort the Devil himself would make if he came to life.

“You control these people,” said the terrorist. “You put them on the stage like puppets.”

“I control no one,” replied Massina.

“It’s your time to die, Puppet Master. You and your city. Time for the apocalypse and God’s final glory.”

80

Chelsea turned over and opened her eyes, struggling to focus on the alarm clock’s small blue numbers. She saw a 5, but couldn’t make out what followed.

4.

8.

5:48 a.m.

Shit!

She needed to be at work at six for a test run of a new bot series. She swung her feet over the side and slipped out of bed, heading quickly for the bathroom.

Johnny stirred under the covers.

In the two months since they had first kissed, Chelsea had spent many nights with Johnny. It was a unique experience, first because he lacked “real” legs and generally, though not always, took them off to sleep.

But there were other things that made it unique, special. Most of the men she had dated were computer or science geeks, whizzes who fed that part of her. Johnny was the first man who fed something else, a part more physical, more emotional.

They had things in common. First and foremost, they’d had similar life-and-death experiences, and in the same places at the same time — she’d been there when he’d lost his legs; he’d been there when she was nearly raped and killed.

More: They were both Red Sox fans. They liked to take long walks and bike rides, especially by the water. They both liked to listen to indie music. They liked to share interests. Chelsea was starting to like alt-country, thanks to Johnny. Johnny was starting to appreciate fusion cooking, thanks to Chelsea.

But there was no denying basic differences: He didn’t spend his days thinking about computer code or how to best train a piece of software to be self-cognizant. And she didn’t spend her days thinking of how to preserve situational awareness while escaping a kidnapping attempt or consider the pros and cons of nonlethal shotgun charges.

They came at life from different directions, with just enough in common to meet at many different intersections. And that seemed to be what both of them needed.

And the sex.

Awkward and nervous at first—how do you make love to a legless man? — it was now comfortable and gentle, yet reassuring and fulfilling and all those other words teenage magazines promised and adult magazines said were difficult to achieve.

The fact that Johnny didn’t have his legs was always a fact, always something they were both aware of — how could they not be? And yet it wasn’t the only fact.

Caffeine. I need serious amounts of caffeine.

“See you later, Sleeping Beauty,” she said, grabbing her Nikes and tiptoeing for the door.

Chelsea made it to the lab with about thirty seconds to spare. She walked directly to the test board, where the test coordinator and a half-dozen other engineers were waiting. They’d already run through all of the pretest workups; the systems were green and recording.

Also waiting were eleven Smart Metal employees who’d volunteered to participate in the exercise. And it was an exercise: they were going to play soccer with Peter, who was sitting beyond the cones and taped field boundaries in the cavernous interior of Subbasement Level 3. Peter had not been programmed to play and had never even watched a game. Once the session began, Chelsea would give him a verbal command to join one of the squads. What happened next was up to him.

“Ready?” asked the test director.

Chelsea donned a headset and walked over to the robot. “Peter?” she said.

RBT PJT 23-A acknowledged by turning one of its claws. Chelsea looked back at the director and gave a thumbs-up.

A whistle sounded, and the game began, “red” with the ball and moving into “blue” territory. Blue was down a man but otherwise the teams were evenly matched.

“Peter,” said Chelsea as the whistle blew. “Observe game. Join on blue’s side.”

Peter reoriented his “body,” directing all of his visual sensors toward the field.

By the time Chelsea had returned to the bank of monitors, Peter had walked onto the pitch. He appeared to be observing, taking a spot near blue’s penalty area.

Eight different screens at the main test bench recorded the bot’s thought processes as it worked, with different analytic tools analyzing the data. Chelsea focused her attention on a tool that selected out open questions — queries by the AI engine as it proceeded.

Peter had tried to access Smart Metal’s information system to gather information about the game, but the system had been closed to it. So it turned its attention to the game.

Most of its attention. It devoted about 20 percent of its resources to trying to break through the security system barring it access.

An interesting decision, thought Chelsea.

One of the red players took a pass and began dribbling in Peter’s direction. Peter took a step forward — then promptly sat down. Play continued around it, but the bot remained frozen on the ground, not even watching the action.

Expecting a malfunction, Chelsea looked at the monitors. Peter’s “brain” was still operating normally, according to the data; it just wasn’t moving.

And it was still using twenty percent of its processing power to try to get into the Smart Metal system.

“So is Cristiano Ronaldo in trouble or what?”

Chelsea jerked around. Louis Massina had snuck in to watch the demonstration.

“I’m impressed that you know a soccer player,” said Chelsea. “But Peter’s on defense, and Ronaldo plays forward.”

“He doesn’t seem to be playing at all.”

“I know. I’m not sure why.”

“What’s he doing?”

“Analyzing every play he’s seen,” said Chelsea, freezing the screen that displayed data on the processors. “It accesses recent memory, but it’s also looking to compare it to its stored history.”

“Why?” Massina bent over her shoulder to examine the data.

“I don’t know. I could arbitrarily put a limit on the processing loops or time—”

“No, I don’t think so,” said Massina. “It has to learn. It should be able to set those limits itself. But it is similar to Syria. He adopts a base position when confused.”

“But he’s not in base position.” Chelsea suddenly felt as if she had to defend the bot. “He’s thinking.”

“He should react.”

“He usually does.”

Massina smirked, and Chelsea knew why—usually wasn’t good enough. And a human being in either situation would not have hesitated.

“The interesting thing is that this is new,” noted Massina. “Peter has learned to hesitate.”

Chelsea furled her arms in front of her chest and leaned back in the chair. She hadn’t thought of the situation that way before, but Massina was right — the bot had performed without hesitation in hundreds if not thousands of roughly analogous situations before.

Was this good or bad?

She glanced at him for an answer, but instead he looked at his watch and changed the subject. “I need to show you something.”

“OK. When?”

“Now.”

“I’m supposed to supervise the rest of the experiment,” she said.

Massina nodded at Peter, frozen on the field as the players moved around him. “I think he’s gone as far as he’s going today.”

“But Peter—”

“They can continue the tests and diagnostics without you. He’s grounded until we figure it out anyway.”

“But—”

“This is more important,” said Massina, starting away.

Ten minutes later, Chelsea got into the back of one of the company’s black SUVs, joining Massina. The truck had no driver; or rather, no human driver — it was guided by Smart Metal software, still being tested for commercial use, but more than adequate according to Massina.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“Across the river.”

“Is this one of our projects?”

“It is, and it isn’t,” he said.

“Shouldn’t one of us sit in the driver’s seat?” she asked.

“You’re welcome to if you want.”

“Will you tell me where we’re going then?”

“The car knows. That’s enough.”

Chelsea stayed in the back. Massina spent the ride going through emails, checking in with his assistants — both real and virtual — and in general clearing away as much of his normal routine as he could.

Thirty minutes later, the SUV pulled into the parking lot of an abandoned shopping center. Built in the late 1960s, the place had succumbed to the competitive pressure of Amazon.com and Walmart a few years before. Its metal facade, virtually untouched since its opening, was streaked with rust. The sun-faded outlines of letters from old store logos lined the roof, a ghost alphabet of now-dead retail.

“Are we going shopping?” asked Chelsea.

“Not quite. Come on.”

Massina got out of the truck and guided her to a door that had once led to a restaurant at the side of the complex. Two armed guards were standing just inside the door. They nodded at Massina as he passed.

He walked through the former restaurant, now empty of furniture. A single light lit the interior until he reached the mall proper, where the light from the skylight was augmented by an array of LEDs whose color and output changed depending on the time of day.

“The escalator doesn’t work,” he told Chelsea. “So watch your step.”

Another pair of guards waited downstairs. The security station was augmented by a sniffer and a metal detector; a pair of combat mechs stood nearby. Each was a miniature gun chassis, with four 9mm machine guns. An elevator door stood about fifty feet away; Massina walked to it.

“Put your hand on the plate,” Massina told Chelsea after demonstrating. “We can’t go anywhere until it decides you are approved.”

“Am I?”

“Up to them.” Massina smirked.

Chelsea did as she was told, putting her hand on the plate. A light at the bottom glowed green, and the doors closed.

The elevator took them down to a mechanical level. Well lit, it was filled with large pipes and conduits, as well as stacks of furniture and other items taken from the stores above. Massina led Chelsea past them to a solid steel door, remarkable only because it was brand-new. He put his hand against another glass panel, then motioned for Chelsea to do the same.

The door opened with a pneumatic hiss. Behind it was a computing center. Six men sat at terminals. Two typed furiously; the others were scrolling and reading.

“What’s going on?” Chelsea asked.

“We’ve broken into Daesh’s communications network,” said Massina. “We’re monitoring what they’re up to.”

81

Ishmael Peterson — otherwise known as Ghadab min Allah, aka Samir Abdubin, aka the Butcher of Boston — squeezed his fist as the airplane rolled toward the gate.

It had taken him nearly forty-eight hours to arrive in North America. He still had a long way to go, but he’d calculated that the airport would be the most difficult hurdle, the one time when he had to stand face-to-face with the authorities.

He would show no fear, but that was hardly enough.

The door to the cabin opened. He rose from his seat in first class and joined the parade of passengers leaving the plane.

“Have a pleasant visit,” said the steward at the door.

He smiled, unwilling to test his accent even with a single word. His English itself was fine, but he wasn’t positive about the accent. He’d practiced by listening to podcasts for several hours each night over the past several weeks, but there had been no way of testing himself adequately.

Ghadab’s Canadian eTA — an electronic travel authorization — showed that he was an Israeli citizen. This matched his passport and driver’s license, as well as his credit cards and two receipts tucked in amid the bills. He also had a letter from his “cousin” in his pocket and pictures of his “family.” He’d memorized the details, of course, as well as his explanation for why he was visiting — sightseeing and vacation — as well as an extensive backstory.

But one little mispronunciation — a long vowel where a short was expected — could upend everything.

The bags took a while to arrive. Two men in uniform walked dogs around the crowd. Ghadab smiled at the dogs — more for practice than anything else. They took no notice of him.

Reunited with their luggage, Canadians headed for a lineup of machines that allowed for automated processing. Ghadab went with the other foreigners, joining a queue that looked almost exactly like the ones he had studied before starting his journey.

He clenched his fist again as he joined the line. The hardest thing was to smile.

Smile.

Who could smile after such a long flight? The passengers behind him looked worn and tired. A few were annoyed.

He’d fit right in.

Something banged up against his leg — a four-or five-year-old tot had escaped its parent.

Before Ghadab could find something to say, a woman appeared with another child in tow. She grabbed the youngster who had bumped against his leg, scolding him in French.

“I am sorry,” she told Ghadab in English.

“Go ahead of me,” he said.

“Are you sure?”

She reminded him of Shadaa. Not physically, but the way she spoke — tender, yet sturdy.

Now it was easy to smile, though it was leavened with sadness.

What I have lost!

“Go ahead. You have children. I have…” He shrugged. “Nothing.”

The woman herded the two children and a large suitcase into the line. The queue suddenly spurted ahead, and Ghadab found himself facing a border-entry guard. He held out his passport.

“You’re with them?” asked the man.

“No.”

“It was nice of you to let her go. How long are you visiting?”

“A week. My flight—”

The guard’s machine beeped, having already read the passport and matched it with its central records. “What do you have in the bag?”

“My clothes.”

“Nothing to declare?”

Ghadab shook his head.

“Have a good visit,” said the guard, waving him through.

82

The terminals in the computer center — nicknamed the “Annex” by Massina — were connected to a Cray XT5 system, whose Opteron quad-core processors were arrayed to produce almost 2.7 petaflops — roughly 2,700,000,000,000,000 floating-point operations per second. That was computing power of an extreme magnitude, beyond even what Smart Metal housed. As a point of comparison, the National Center for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory was capable of 1.3 petaflops (or at least had been, when first delivered some eight years before; there had been modifications since). A personal computer might run 7,000,000 flops, assuming neither its processor or software had been optimized.

But what impressed Chelsea most was not the Cray, or even the fact that it could penetrate in real time the encryptions used by the Daesh terrorist network. It was the fact that Massina had erected the center without her knowing. The personnel — two hardware engineers and a software expert pulled from security projects, along with a human-language specialist — reported for work each day at the regular Smart Metal building (“home base”), and were then surreptitiously transported here.

“A lot of the work is being done by automated scripts,” said Massina, continuing his tour. “We collect, decrypt, analyze. We’re spending a lot of time in their chat rooms.” He gestured at an empty workstation, where lines of dialogue scrolled up the screen. “The translator gives us conversational Arabic, but it’s not as necessary as I thought. Besides our own identities, we’ve managed to masquerade as other members of the network. Not everyone here is Daesh. Most aren’t. But two of the personalities check out as commanders — we buffer them out after they come online, subbing for them.”

“Does the CIA know you’re doing this?” Chelsea asked.

“Not to this extent,” said Massina.

“Shouldn’t you tell them?”

“They have not been the most cooperative,” said Massina. “Frankly, I’m not sure whether to trust them. I think they originally got us involved so they’d have someone to blame if things went wrong.”

“We were an important part of the operation.”

“As it turned out. They play a lot of politics, Chelsea. I’m sure you’ve noticed.”

Chelsea couldn’t argue, but she did trust Johansen, as well as the others on the team. They were truly patriots and believed in what they were doing.

“Come over to this station.” Massina led her to a computer at the far end of the room. Converted from space that had stored the mall’s vehicles, it still smelled faintly of diesel. The interior had been lined with a double layer of copper to isolate communications. It had then been covered with insulation and Sheetrock, but never painted; the screws that held the walls in place looked like rivets in the plastic ribs that ran from floor to ceiling.

“This is Ghadab’s last appearance online, an email.” Massina tapped a few keys and an email appeared on the screen. It was from an AOL address to a Gmail address. “Unencrypted, and not a direct code as far as we know, but obviously a signal of some sort,” he added.

“The 13th is today,” said Chelsea.

“Maybe.”

“Notre Dame — Paris?”

“I don’t know,” said Massina.

“Notre Dame — that’s a huge cathedral in Paris.”

“Yes, but I doubt that’s where it actually refers to. This was open — I’m sure they would call it one thing and mean another. But the French have been hit hard over the past year and a half,” added Massina, “so just in case, I passed the information on. Security was increased there, especially at the Île-de-France. All of Paris is on high alert.”

“That’s good.”

“We have tracked the email recipient, or at least where it was physically read.”

“Where?”

“Montreal. They’re on alert, too. Or so the CIA says.”

“So — why are you telling me all this?”

“I want to adapt some of our AI programs to examine the communications and the points of contact they use. I need someone who can adapt the programs quickly, someone who’s already familiar with them.”

“You want a program that can learn how to hunt for terrorists without being instructed on every step,” said Chelsea.

“Exactly. Something that could make up its own rules on procedures — that would be smart enough to invent new identities if that was necessary. And more.”

“More like what?”

“If I knew what more I needed, then I wouldn’t need the program.”

83

At almost that exact moment, Johansen was arguing that the Agency should form a formal partnership with Massina and share everything it knew about Ghadab and his operation. What he had turned over to the Agency — through Johansen — indicated he was already running a parallel intel operation, and getting good results.

“He’s getting rumors,” CIA Director Colby replied. They were sitting together with two members of the Daesh Terror Desk, the agency’s unit coordinating efforts against ISIS, and the DDO, Deputy Director of Operations Michael Blitz. Blitz was here mostly as a courtesy; though he was Johansen’s boss, the mission had been routed through the Daesh desk, specially established and answering directly to Colby. The secure basement room was shielded from eavesdropping by (among other things) a layer of copper foil.

“He’s fleshing out Ghadab’s network,” said Johansen. “He’s done more in two months than the NSA did in two years.”

“That’s not fair,” said Colby. “The NSA gave us similar intercepts. A lot more. What’s his motivation?”

“I don’t understand.”

“Why is he doing all this?”

“Revenge. He wants to get the bastard.”

“He wasn’t personally attacked.”

“No, but he feels as if he was.”

“I could see if there was a contract involved. Money. But just revenge?” The Director shook his head. “What if he’s purposely misleading us?”

“Impossible. Let me share the data we found in the bunker,” suggested Johansen.

“How’s he going to use it?”

“I don’t know. That’s why I want to share it.”

“If it gets back to Ghadab—”

“He already knows we have it, or at least suspects,” said Johansen. “It makes sense to work with Massina. He’s helped us a lot. We have to trust him.”

“We don’t have to trust anyone,” said Colby flatly. “Go ahead. Talk to him. While you’re at it, find out the extent of his operation. I want to understand exactly what he’s capable of. And remember. He is not us.”

I’m sure you won’t let me forget, thought Johansen, standing to go.

84

For Johnny, love was like a constant, mild high punctuated by moments of wild joy and the occasional flip into a dark hole of pessimism. He’d been in love before, but that was back in high school and his first year of college, and most likely a simple crush, as those things were defined. The rest of college saw a series of extended hookups, satisfying at the same time but never particularly deep or long-lived. Joining the Bureau led to a long dry stretch, imposed by lack of opportunity as well as the rigors, first of his training and then his early assignments.

Then came the accident, his legs. Even after he was fitted and moving around, the drugs killed his libido, an unfortunate but common side effect. The next round of meds had the opposite effect, but meant mostly frustration: what woman, he thought, would want a legless lover?

And then came Chelsea.

Finding out that he could make love, that he could enjoy it and that she could enjoy it — it was like he’d been allowed to live again.

Recuperating from the accident had been extremely difficult physically. But mentally — in some ways he’d used his physical rehabilitation as a crutch, a way to focus on something, anything, rather than what it meant to be a man without two legs.

If I want to get better, he told himself, I have to build my muscles. I have to get my body to adjust to the meds. I need to push, keep pushing.

Do it. Think about nothing else.

Pushing himself physically to his limits meant he didn’t have to think about anything else. Pushing himself to take the job, to keep up with others, to surpass the others… he was too exhausted at the end of the day to give a lot of thought to what it would mean to make love to someone. Or not be able to do that.

The relationship wasn’t just sex.

Talking to her, having dinner with her, sitting on the couch with her bunched up against him, walking along the river — he wanted to be saturated with her presence. He couldn’t get enough.

Johnny realized this was all a phase. Part of him was on guard against it — because part of him believed that the attraction wouldn’t last. Not for him: that was solid and unshakable. But Chelsea — she could do better than a man without legs.

They were very different people. She was smart and he — he wasn’t dumb, but few people were in her ballpark even.

And their backgrounds. Hers was very solid upper middle-class; his was working-class. In the good years.

He was white, she was black, or part black, to be precise. And on and on and on…

So, inevitably, given all their differences, Johnny knew, Johnny feared, that eventually they would split. But these moments of fear were far outweighed by the sheer joy of being near her, thinking about her, and making love to her. He thought about her constantly, at work, at home, in the gym.

“Smith machine today, huh?” asked one of the trainers, walking over.

“Nobody to spot,” said Johnny, pushing the weighted bar up to complete his set.

“How much can you bench?”

Johnny shrugged. He had worked out the week before with 750 pounds — nearly four times as much as he was able to do before his accident. The drugs had done more than just help him recover; they’d made him better. Literally.

“I’ll spot you,” said the trainer.

A half hour later, workout done and freshly showered, Johnny tossed his gym bag over his shoulder and headed out the door, walking toward the restaurant where he’d arranged to meet Chelsea for dinner. The recent run of good weather held; a slight breeze off the ocean nudged the temperature just below seventy-five. Johnny detoured briefly to drop off his bag at his house, then continued to the restaurant, Zipper, a fifteen-minute walk away.

Zipper was an old-school neighborhood bar turned punk performance space transmogrified into a hip grill before reemerging as a quasi-neighborhood grill. It had more substantial fare than the average bar, but it lacked televisions, so there was no possibility of catching a game afterward. Chelsea loved its food, and with the Red Sox on the West Coast, there wasn’t any good baseball on until later anyway.

As usual, he beat her there. The hostess gave him a table next to the window. He ordered a beer, then checked his email and Facebook account; fifteen minutes later, he was three-quarters of the way through the beer and Chelsea had yet to arrive. He texted, but got no reply.

She’ll be here. Her phone is dead or she’s on the T or somewhere something not to worry not worry. Don’t.

Twenty more minutes and another beer passed before Chelsea rushed in, nearly out of breath.

“Hey,” he called.

“I’m sorry I’m late,” she said, leaning into the booth to kiss him.

“Didn’t even notice,” he lied.

“How was your day?”

“Easy.” He shrugged. “After Syria, everything’s easy. How about yours?”

“Mr. Massina offered me a new assignment.”

“Oh, yeah? What?”

She shook her head.

“You’re not going to tell me?” he asked.

“Can’t.”

“Not a little?”

Another head shake.

“Are you taking it?” Johnny asked.

“I’m thinking about it. Seriously.”

The waitress came over. Chelsea ordered a white wine. Johnny asked for a refill.

“So, like robotics or AI?” asked Johnny.

“I can’t say.”

“Even to me? I’m in security, you know. I’ll find out.”

“I don’t think you will.” Chelsea put her hand on his. “I’m sorry I was late.”

“Not a problem.”

“I may be late a lot, on this new project.”

“Hmmmm,” he said, drawing a breath as a sharp twinge of fear hit. It was physical — his stomach tensed and he could feel himself wincing. Fortunately, the waitress had just returned with their drinks.

“I think you should take it,” Johnny said, knowing it was the right thing, the only thing, to say. “I really think you should.”

85

Ghadab sat at the bow of the small boat, watching the quiet shore to his right as they moved slowly south across the small lake. The glow of an American customs and immigration station lit the top of the trees about a half mile from the water; his boat’s electric engine was so quiet he could hear a truck pull up to the stop to be inspected.

The man at the tiller said nothing. He was in fact a very quiet man; since picking up Ghadab at the airport, he had spoken less than a dozen words.

There were many places to cross the Canadian-American border without being detected. Most were on land, but Ghadab had chosen a water route; he’d seen so much of deserts lately that the wet morning chill and rising fog were more than welcome.

Vermont stretched out in the distance, a gray hulk behind a grayer screen. Ghadab shivered beneath his heavy sweatshirt, watching for any unwelcome movement. The small skiff turned to port, angling to a spot a few hundred yards beyond the floating dock of an abandoned camp. The man steering the boat at the stern killed the power and they drifted to shore, riding the momentum and a slight push from the wind until the keel hit sand. He hopped out, pushing the boat farther onto the beach.

Ghadab tossed his knapsack onto the sand. He’d bought it in Montreal, the same day he replaced the clothes he’d carried in the suitcase.

Among his other purchases was a large combat knife.

He gripped the knife now in his left hand as he put his right on the gunwale. Pushing down, he jumped off. The sudden shift in his weight unsettled the boat; it flipped down and began taking water over the side.

“So sorry, brother,” he said as the other man grabbed for the boat.

By the time the man thought to reply, his throat had already been slit. The blade was sharp, but not very long, and Ghadab had to push it back and forth, as if sawing a piece of wood.

The man fell back against him. Ghadab pushed him over and then with his foot held him in the water until he was sure he was dead.

“To have witnesses would not be acceptable,” Ghadab whispered. “Go to God.”

He tossed the knife far into the lake, then hiked ashore. There, he took off his pants and shirt, exchanging them for dry clothes from his pack. He put on a pair of sneakers, shouldered the rucksack, and began walking through the open field opposite the lake where he’d come in. Once used as a summer camp for overweight teens, the lot and surrounding property had been vacant for over a decade. A faded sign near the road proclaimed it the new home of a housing development that had gone under in the bust.

Ghadab walked south on the road for about fifteen minutes, until he saw a pair of headlights approaching. He checked his watch, then stopped and waited.

Revenge was almost at hand.

86

“Cooperation is supposed to be a two-way street.” Massina folded his arms over his plate of now very cold spaghetti. “I give you information, and you give me information. We work together to develop leads, to solve problems. I help you, you help me. I can’t help you if you don’t tell us what you know.”

“I’ve given you everything I’m authorized to give you,” said Johansen. “And more.”

They were sitting in the basement of an Italian restaurant in the North End. Massina knew the owner, who’d opened the room just for him and the CIA officer. It was one of the more private places to talk in the city, assuming you wanted a plate of pasta at the same time.

“I don’t want to argue with you,” said Massina. “But our results do depend on what we start with.”

“The disk I gave you has all the data from Syria.”

“I needed that two months ago,” said Massina. “We could have decrypted it for you.”

“We’re on the same side here, Louis. You just need to bear with us.”

“You know where our friend is?”

“South Africa, we believe.”

“You’re wrong,” said Massina. “We think he bought a ticket to Argentina a few days ago.”

“Argentina?”

“The problem is, I’m not sure whether to trust you or not. So I don’t know if you said South Africa to throw me off.”

“No. Of course not.”

Hearing someone coming down the steps, Massina held his tongue. Johansen turned to see who it was.

“More wine?” asked the maître d’, appearing with a bottle. He was the owner’s son and had known Massina since his father opened the restaurant some eight years before.

“I think we’ll just finish the water,” said Massina. “Come back in a few minutes and ask us about dessert.”

“Very good.” The maître d’ glanced around quickly, then headed back to the stairs.

“I’m trying, Louis,” said Johansen. “We want to work with you. We do. The Director does, not just me.”

“All right,” said Massina. But it was a noncommittal “all right.” He’d considered showing him the Annex as a gesture of goodwill, but had changed his mind.

“How good is your information on Argentina?”

“Solid. The question is where he went from there.”

“No clues?”

“None.”

Johansen nodded. “We’ll look into some of the chat rooms, go from there.”

“Fine.” Another neutral comment.

“I’d love to say hi to Johnny and Chelsea,” added Johansen. “Since I’m here.”

“I think we can probably arrange that,” Massina told him.

“I know it can be difficult dealing with us,” said Johansen. “But believe me, we are doing everything we can to get this guy.”

“You’ll want to save a little room for a cannoli,” answered Massina. “They’re incredible.”

87

Strictly speaking, Chelsea hadn’t done any programming in the three and a half days since she’d started working at the Annex. Her task was more like that of a curator, or maybe a tutor employing a modified version of the Socratic method. She’d installed the latest version of an AI engine they used as the kernel for many of their bots, adding two extensions that made it easier for her to monitor its progress and to add information.

After loading the program, giving it access to a database provided by the CIA, and connecting it to the internet, she’d told it to locate Ghadab. Since then, the computer had built a lengthy profile on the terrorist that included a number of aliases not in the original files the CIA had provided, and two look-alikes whose facial features were close enough to fool most visual-recognition systems.

It had also traced a series of financial transactions involving stolen credit cards and two legitimate Daesh bank accounts, one of which had been used to pay for a credit card that purchased a ticket to Buenos Aires from South Africa. At the same time, it had prepared a psychological profile that would have surely wigged out a human profiler and provided a number of further clues, most especially his interest in knives, which inspired the program to check arrest records and crime reports in hopes of finding hard data.

It had also wandered around the world, turning up things that had little bearing on the situation. Socrates — the AI program didn’t actually have a name, but since it operated largely by asking itself questions, Chelsea had tentatively dubbed it that — had decided to flesh out Ghadab’s ancestry, trying to construct a family tree. This produced a small booklet-sized list of ancestors and possible ancestors — many more of the latter — which the program then examined in depth with no visible payoff. Ghadab’s parents had come from Oman, and it was possible that some generation before the family on the father’s side had been related to the sultan’s family. But no present member of the extended clan, let alone anyone remotely close to the ruling family, had been in contact with him for over a decade. His parents had died when he was very young; he and a brother were raised in an orphanage. Accessible records were scant at best, but the brother did not appear anywhere, not even on the rolls of the local school Ghadab had attended; the program posited a 95 percent chance that he had died.

There were similar branches and dead ends, explorations of trivia and probes that seemed to lead nowhere.

The others had infiltrated the Daesh communications network, developing enough information to identify the key members of its recruiting team in Europe, along with a list of places where recruits would go. So far, however, they had failed to turn up the same sort of contacts in America. Did that mean there was no recruitment network in America? Chelsea doubted that could be true and had proposed using the AI program as part of the effort to investigate it. Her idea was a very contemporary take on the Turing test, first proposed by AI pioneer Alan Turing in 1950: a computer that could fool a human into thinking he or she was talking to another human would demonstrate independent intelligence.

Massina had vetoed the idea, not because he thought the computer would fail the test — on the contrary, he had every expectation it would pass — but because even he didn’t have infinite resources to devote to the project. And as important as uncovering an American recruitment network might be for the country’s security, they had no reason to believe that it would help them find Ghadab.

And Massina was all about finding Ghadab. He was obsessed with it.

Chelsea had known Massina for several years, since meeting him during a lecture at Stanford she’d been invited to as a high schooler. Though others found him somewhat standoffish and often irritatingly driven, she liked him and was easily the engineer who was closest to him. Massina was relentless when pursuing a technical problem or exploring some area of science that interested him. Now that same obsession had been turned on Daesh.

How far was he willing to go? He had given the government a host of equipment and the services of two employees in an effort to nab him. When that didn’t work, he’d started this — an effort that must be costing him millions of dollars.

What if this didn’t work? What would he do next?

What would satisfy the obsession?

Chelsea’s workstation pinged a message from Massina:

She typed back an answer saying she’d be there, then sent a message to the automated driver tasked with bringing everyone to and from the Annex.

In the meantime, the program had been busy exploring knives. It had taken a special interest in khanjars, curved daggers often used for ceremonial purposes.

“What’s the connection to Ghadab?” she asked, scrolling through the list of databases and websites the program had consulted. It had gone into a museum, slipping past security protocols to find a list of artifacts available only to curators; it had looked up news stories and examined medical records.

Chelsea opened the inspection tool to see what the machine was finding. Among other things, the curve of the blade tended to make a deep but straight cut…

“Well, duh,” she said.

The AI began searching through police records. There were many knife attacks in the country, but none used a curved blade.

It retooled, examining the wounds that led it to conclude a khanjar had been used, then trying to extrapolate the killing action — how the knife was wielded — against different blades.

There had been several deaths in New York City recently, but the string had started a month ago, when Ghadab was still in Africa.

Then it brought up a seemingly random crime — a Canadian found with a slit throat in northern Vermont.

And from there, an avalanche ensued.

88

Ghadab knew only one of the American brothers: Amin Greene, whom he’d met at a Pakistan training camp as a young man. Greene, several years older than him, was an American citizen, and after working with the Taliban in Afghanistan under a false name and passport for a short time, he had returned to America to wait. Initially a member of a cell funded by al-Qaeda, he had become associated with the more enlightened branches of jihad and renewed his acquaintance with several important brothers, including Ghadab, through visits to Belgium over the past four years. He was an extremely careful man — he would never fly directly to Belgium, for example, rather entering the country by car or train with a false passport to make himself more difficult to track — but at the same time he was obsessed with explosives. The look on his face, even when lighting a firecracker, betrayed something akin to sexual ecstasy.

And he loved lighting firecrackers.

“You’re going to draw attention to us,” scolded Ghadab after Greene lit and tossed a small pack of firecrackers off his back deck.

Greene stared intently at the yellow speckles as the firecrackers popped and sizzled on the rear lawn. The smell of spent gunpowder tickled Ghadab’s nose, reminding him of the fight he’d left behind some months ago. It was a sacrilegious tease.

“Aren’t you worried about a fire?” asked Ghadab.

“Overrated.” Greene’s accent was very American, but then he’d spent his entire life here. He barely looked Arab at all, though his grandfather and mother had been Iraqi.

“The police may hear,” suggested Ghadab.

“State police are twenty miles away, and they know me,” said Greene. “We don’t have town cops. Even if we did, I’m way out in the boonies. Relax.”

“We have important work.”

“Of course.”

“I need to retrieve the diagrams. And to find the woman.”

“I understand all of your requirements. It will happen. For now, relax. Have a beer.”

Ghadab frowned. “You have a good life here. Perhaps it is too much of a distraction.”

Greene smiled and lit another firecracker. He waited a moment, then tossed it so high it exploded in the air.

“I’m ready,” he told Ghadab. “I’m more than ready.”

89

Understanding the program’s analysis required a crash course in forensics and anatomy, and as smart as Chelsea was, there was no way after half an hour for her to be absolutely sure that Socrates had drawn a valid conclusion about the knife wound. And if it had stopped there, she might well have written it off. But while she was reading up on wound patterns and the location of blood vessels in the neck, Socrates was out making other connections, exploring boat rentals and gas station purchases.

Collecting a good portion of this work involved penetrating supposedly secure networks — problematic at best from a legal point of view, but that wasn’t something Chelsea spent a lot of time thinking about until after she got the text from Massina saying that Johansen was in town and wanted to say hello. By then, she had already worked up a quick presentation for Massina on what she (or rather, Socrates) had found. She called over the car and ran for it as quickly as she could, eager to share what she had found.

It was an age-old question: in the race to save lives, did the ends justify the means?

Clearly, the CIA thought so — but they also wanted to cover their butts, which was why they had gotten Smart Metal involved in the first place. Any illegal, or even questionable, activity could be blamed on the company.

Massina was OK with that. Was she?

How far had she come in the past year, from creating bots that could rescue people from burning buildings to this?

I haven’t done anything wrong. Not even illegal that I know. I’m helping save lives.

Chelsea told Massina she would meet Johansen in the Box; the two men were waiting when she arrived. Walking in, she waved her hand perfunctorily, freezing Johansen as he rose to greet her. She put her flash drive into the receptacle used by the presentation computer and immediately launched into a brief. A map flashed on the screen, flight data, a receipt, then an autopsy photo, a close-up, more close-ups.

“The cut pattern is exactly the same,” Chelsea said. “That doesn’t prove that these people were killed by the same person. But it’s an interesting coincidence — especially given that the dead man was on the RCMP watch list.”

“If the dead man was so dangerous,” said Massina, “why didn’t the Mounties pick him up?”

“You’d have to ask them,” said Chelsea. Socrates had data on him, but she hadn’t bothered to bring it. “He traveled to Jordan two years ago, which I would guess got him on the list.”

“Was he on ours?” Massina asked Johansen.

“I’d have to ask Homeland Security. Canadian citizen — I assume he probably wouldn’t have been let into the country. Or if he was, would have been followed.”

“The boat was rented,” said Chelsea, bringing up the receipt.

“I’m not going to ask how you have all of this data,” said Johansen. “Why kill him? Frankly, that argues that this wasn’t Ghadab — he’s going to need help.”

“Not if he’s coming to the U.S.,” suggested Chelsea. “This guy is of no more use.”

“You usually don’t burn your bridges,” said Johansen. “Not even Daesh.”

“The parable of the scorpion and the tortoise,” said Massina. “It’s what he does.”

While in Johansen’s mind the connection was tentative, it was far too important to be dismissed. If Ghadab was in the U.S., an attack was imminent. And if he was involved, it was going to be huge. So instead of flying down to New York as planned, he rented a car and drove over to Hanscom Air Force Base in Bedford, where he could use a secure line to talk to Langley. His creds impressed the security detail at the gate, but inside was another matter, and it took nearly a half hour for him to get clearance to use the system.

He fretted in the meantime. The analysts had always predicted that there would be an upswing in terror attacks as ISIS lost ground. No longer able to contribute in the Levant, as Daesh called it, the sociopaths they attracted would kill in their homelands. The potential targets were limitless.

But Ghadab was a special case. He went big, and if he had concluded that the cause was lost, he’d want to go out in style. He’d want to make 9/11 look like a random IED attack compared to his finale.

Johansen quickly briefed the desk on what he had found. Still hoping to make his flight to New York, he was about to hang up when the Director himself came on the line. Colby had happened to be standing nearby when the call came in.

“I heard,” he told Johansen. “How sure of this are you?”

“Reasonably. It’s only circumstantial, as I explained.”

“This is Massina’s work?”

“His people.”

“We’re at arm’s length?”

“I don’t think that’s an issue,” said Johansen sharply. All this cover-my-ass shit was wearing on him.

“Get back right away,” said Colby.

“I was going to New York. I have a commercial flight and I was going to meet Moorehead.”

“Where are you?”

“Hanscom. It’s an air base outside—”

“I’ll arrange for a flight. Stand by.”

90

They were working on power plants. They wanted to create another Chernobyl.

Or so Socrates thought.

It was a roundabout conclusion that began with an analysis of the data from the Syrian bunker — a chat-room handle that turned up as a user name on a Russian database. That was a weak link, admittedly, but the search trail was highly suggestive, and using time stamps, the program made a host of other connections.

Intuitive leaps, if a person were making them. Algorithmic inferences if you were talking about a computer.

“Algorithmic inference” had a bit of a negative connotation to Chelsea, since it implied that the machine’s thinking was fatally limited by the construction of its programming. And while she had to be always aware of that possibility, in the brief time since developing the program’s present incarnation, she believed Socrates was no more limited by its circuitry than humans were.

But that was all theory. Finding what Ghadab and his minions were up to was reality. Hard reality.

The team Ghadab had assembled in the bunker had accessed a great deal of information about the Soviet (now Ukrainian) Chernobyl power plant and its meltdown in 1986. They had examined schematics of the plant, along with a detailed timeline and even precise calculations of what would have been happening inside the nuclear pile from two months before. They had apparently taken great interest in the response of the people running the plant, as well as the evacuation of the town that followed.

The specific information regarding the accident wouldn’t be of much use: the plant was essentially a one-off technology-wise, dissimilar to plants outside of the old Soviet Union, especially those in the U.S. The circumstances that led to the meltdown were also somewhat unique, with cascading failures and overrides that would be difficult to duplicate.

But the idea that Ghadab was interested in had universal application for most nuclear plants. And Socrates had traced further research — though here the computer’s confidence level on its links dipped below 70 percent — to other types of plants. Ghadab’s team appeared to have been doing research on Fukushima in Japan, among others. Another one-off, perhaps, given the circumstances, but highly suggestive.

Meanwhile, internet-based attacks had been made on nuclear power plants in Italy, France, and Germany. Such attacks were almost routine now, and in any event the ones Socrates recovered had all been turned back. But neither Socrates nor the respective authorities had pinned them on the usual suspects — China and Russia most prominently. The timing suggested they were “due diligence” attacks by Ghadab’s people — probes designed to see if they could easily gather data.

In that case, they’d failed: the sort of detailed schematics of the buildings and security precautions Chelsea thought she would see in preparation for an attack had not been downloaded.

There were other things in the files that Socrates momentarily found interesting — Bitcoin accounts, chat-room records, and even house listings for Argentina. The AI program, however, concentrated most of its effort on the nukes.

Was this an inherent bias in the program? A nuclear meltdown was a very severe threat, and therefore deserving of the most resources? Or was the evidence there strongest?

Chelsea couldn’t decide. And she worried that while Socrates had studied past terror events, it hadn’t correctly concluded that these were all “black swan” events — rare and seemingly random. In short, she was concerned that the computer was making the same mistakes a human might. And there would be no way to tell until they caught Ghadab.

Energized by her meeting with Johansen, Chelsea threw herself into her work, examining Socrates’s logic, working on new extensions that might help it streamline its thought process. She was so deep into her work that she missed several buzzes of her phone announcing incoming texts. It was only when she took a bathroom break to hit the john that she realized Johnny had sent her several over the past hour:

She texted him back:

He responded almost immediately.

(Texts didn’t come through the regular network here; Massina had modified the phones of Annex employees to take calls through the cell tower nearest Smart Metal.)

She got there a half hour later, dropped off by the driverless car. Johnny had finished eating long ago and was sitting in a booth watching the Red Sox demolish the Nationals.

“I saw you this afternoon,” he told her after she’d ordered a burger. “Where were you going in such a hurry?”

“Just back to work.”

“Where?”

“Work.”

“I know Massina set up something new off campus,” said Johnny. “Why all the mystery?”

“You of all people should know I can’t talk about things with anybody.”

“Not even me?”

“Not even you.”

The burger came. She regretted ordering it; she wasn’t nearly hungry enough to finish it. She wasn’t really hungry at all. She picked at the fries.

“I want to tell you,” she said. “I really do. But…”

“Yeah?”

“It’s awkward.”

“What you’re doing?”

“No. No. This.”

“Yeah, those fries look a little burned.”

“I mean, the situation,” said Chelsea. “You can be such a wiseass at times. Inappropriate times.”

Johnny grimaced.

Maybe I’m being too harsh, she thought.

“Want some fries?” she asked.

“No.”

He just said they looked burned. Duh.

“What did you do today?” she asked.

“Usual. Trained some new guys. Worked out.”

“No more personal security for Lou?”

“He doesn’t think that’s necessary anymore.”

“What’s Beefy think?”

Johnny shrugged. “Massina signs the checks. Or maybe he does — how does that work with direct deposit?”

“I don’t know.”

“That wasn’t a real question,” said Johnny. “I was joking.”

“I knew that,” she said, though in fact she hadn’t.

How did thatwork? It went through the clearinghouse system, with tokens attached permanently to the account numbers…

Why wasn’t Socrates following the money trail?

It was discounting it for some reason.

Nice pun.

There must be something there. The Canadian who’d been killed — at some point he must have gotten money from Daesh, maybe years ago.

The algorithms were using an arbitrary time limit: the original program had a cutoff because its processing power and memory were limited. So the search would, by necessity, only go back so far.

The parameter was set by the initial assessment, which in this case probably went to the original attack, and whatever Socrates decided was a reasonable planning period. Or it could go back to Syria — yes, that would seem reasonable, since that was the original request.

But it was too limiting. It was the way a human thought, not the way Socrates should.

I can change that.

“I have to go,” she told Johnny, pushing away from the table.

“Your burger.”

“I’m not really hungry. Bring it home.”

“Where are you going?”

“Back to work.”

91

Johansen had anticipated Colby’s question even before boarding the flight back, but he still hadn’t come up with an answer.

“If Ghadab is in the U.S.,” asked the Director as they sat in the basement secure room, “why hasn’t he contacted Persia?”

“Maybe he has” was the best Johansen could offer. “Maybe Persia just hasn’t contacted us.”

“He told us last time,” said Marcus Winston. Winston was the former head of the terror desk, brought in for consultation. Johansen surmised that he’d had a hand in recruiting or running Persia, though no one had said that.

Persia was a deep-planted double agent who had worked for the CIA for years, having managed to infiltrate the terror network around al-Qaeda. As he wasn’t Johansen’s asset — until this assignment, most of Johansen’s work involved Russia and Eastern Europe directly — Johansen knew almost nothing about him. With the exception of Winston, it didn’t appear any of the others knew all that much about him either.

“He told us about the contact relatively late,” said Blitz, the DDO. “Too late to do any good. I don’t think we can even be sure that he’s on our side.”

“Playing devil’s advocate for a moment,” said Colby, “if Ghadab was planning an attack here, why would he come? He generally works through his people.”

“We killed most of his people,” suggested Johansen. “He wants revenge.”

“I agree with that,” said Blitz. “So he targets D.C. Us.”

“Possibly,” agreed Johansen.

“Persia,” said Blitz, looking at Winston. “He’s our best bet. We have to contact him.”

“I can arrange it,” said Winston.

“No.” Colby turned to Johansen. “Find someone to tell him to come in.”

“He’s not my guy.”

“I realize that. I want someone neutral, that he doesn’t know. I want to see what he does. It’s the only way to test him.”

“Or spook him,” said Winston. “It’ll be much better if he’s dealing with someone he knows.”

“No. I don’t trust him. And we have to test him somehow. Yuri, do it quickly.”

An hour and a seven-shot latte later, Johansen had read the entire file on Persia.

Most of that time had been spent dealing with the security protocols using the secure “library.” It wasn’t a very big file.

He lived in New Hampshire — not all that far from where the Canadian terrorist had been found. He had gone to Afghanistan as a young man. He had been contacted and turned by a third party, who answered to Winston.

Two days before the attack on Boston, he had sent a message to Winston, warning that something was imminent. There were no other details; apparently the warning had not been specific.

Impression — the Director felt Winston had screwed up somehow. But he wasn’t sharing.

In any event, that wasn’t his concern. He needed to find someone to get a message to him.

Who do I trust who owes me a favor?

92

Ghadab grabbed a college ID off a table in the campus café before going to the library, scratching the photo image just in case anyone bothered to ask. He memorized the name — Mitchel Cutter — and his graduating class, repeating the information to himself as he walked across to the library. He needn’t have bothered: there was no security or even a clerk at the door.

The internet computers were all taken. He sat down nearby, joining an informal queue.

He glanced around, effecting a bored look while watching the students and gathering information on how the process worked. It was simple, really: scan your ID, get an hour on the machine.

There was a girl at the far kiosk with long black hair. She reminded him of Shadaa.

He imagined Shadaa in a T-shirt and jeans, with sneakers half-off her feet. He imagined Shadaa pounding the keyboard as the girl did, then stopping to push the strands of her hair back.

It was almost a reincarnation.

The girl rose, her session over. Ghadab forgot his task. He rose, following her down and then out the door, along the walkway that led to the street.

Work to do, he reminded himself. But he kept following as she walked down the street.

She’s not Shadaa.

Ghadab kept thinking she would turn up the walk of one of the houses lining the street. When she did, he told himself, he would keep walking, turn back.

But she didn’t turn on the first block or the second or even the third. When she came to the fourth corner, she crossed against the light — there was no traffic, and she didn’t even have to pause. Ghadab continued on the opposite side, watching out of the corner of his eye as she went down the block, turning onto a side street.

I’ve come this far. Why not?

He waited a moment, then crossed. He remembered the feel of Shadaa’s hips.

God sent her as an angel, to give me a glimpse of what waits.

Small stores, cafés, and bars clustered on the next block. Picking up his pace, Ghadab saw her go up the steps to a bar that called itself Angels Hideout.

Surely that was a sign, he thought. Ordinarily he would never go into a bar, but surely that was a sign.

His hand trembled as he put it on the rail going up the steps. He was more nervous than he’d been at the airport.

The noise hit him like a physical thing, pounding at his head. He’d been in places like this before, in Europe, in Argentina, yet this felt completely new, unknown. The interior was divided in half, with tables on the right and a long bar on the left. It was a college hangout; undoubtedly many of the patrons were underage, though clearly no one cared.

The place smelled sweet. Ghadab walked to the far end of the bar before turning and scanning the crowd. She’d sat at a booth alone close to the front of the room. He’d taken a step in her direction, debating how he might introduce himself, when a young man about her age came up from the back and sat across from her.

Ghadab stepped back to the bar, watching. The girl put her hand on the man’s hand; he didn’t remove it.

“Whatcha gettin’?” the bartender asked.

It took Ghadab a moment to realize the question was meant for him.

“Seltzer,” he said.

“Somethin’ in it?”

“No.”

“Lime?”

Ghadab shook his head. The man stepped away. Ghadab looked back at the table but his view was blocked by a waitress.

“Two bucks,” said the bartender, sliding a tumbler toward him.

Ghadab reached into his pocket and fished out a five-dollar bill.

So this is what we must have looked like, he thought, watching across the room as the couple talked. The girl seemed reserved, formal — as Shadaa was. She sat with her back straight against the bench. He liked that; she had virtue.

The boy — they were all alike, Westerners. He was trying to get her into bed, clearly: Look how he pets her hand.

Ghadab couldn’t blame him. But she wasn’t having it.

She laughed, and the laugh stung Ghadab.

His thoughts turned dark. He would kill her in the worst way possible.

Ghadab missed something. In the moment he’d blinked, the girl had gotten out of her seat and begun to walk away. She was upset. The boy didn’t follow.

She walked like Shadaa.

Ghadab left the drink and money on the bar and started outside, dodging a group of men as they entered. One of the men didn’t like something about the way he looked or moved and put his hand out as if to stop him; Ghadab tightened his eyes into a glare. He had a folding knife in his pocket, but it wasn’t necessary: the young man moved out of the way with a sneer. Ghadab brushed past.

You’ll be dead soon anyway.

The girl turned to the right when she reached the sidewalk. Ghadab started to follow, his pace gradually increasing.

His heart began to pound. He needed her now. He would have her now.

He quickened his pace. She was a half block ahead, ten yards, five. Ghadab glanced left and right. They were alone.

She crossed the street, angling toward a set of porch steps. Ghadab slipped his hand into his pocket, grabbing the knife as he stepped off the curb.

A horn blared. He jerked back as a car swept up behind him. A college-aged student was leaning out the driver’s side window, cursing at him.

“Hey, asshole!” shouted the kid.

Before Ghadab could react, the night erupted with a blue strobe light. A police car was just down the street.

Run!

Ghadab took a step back to the sidewalk, unsure what to do. He slid the knife back into his pocket. The car that had nearly hit him stopped abruptly. The police car pulled up behind his left bumper, blocking traffic in both directions.

“You all right?” asked the policeman as he got out.

“Yes,” said Ghadab.

The cop motioned with his hand, thumbing back in the direction of the bar. Then he walked toward the car he’d just stopped.

Go! Go!

Ghadab put his head down and walked swiftly away.

This was a warning. I need to focus on only my mission. I must move quickly, before I make another mistake.

93

Some people watched TV to relax. Massina worked out problems.

Or tried to anyway. And the problem that he kept coming back to was Peter.

The bot and its autonomous brain had been their biggest success story… until he became Hamlet, thinking rather than doing.

Why? It wasn’t a mechanical problem, nor an error in coding as far as either concept was generally understood. The bot had chosen to think rather than act.

Was it afraid?

Massina dismissed the notion out of hand — machines did not know fear. The bot considered the possibility that it would be damaged every time it was given a task, but even an assessment of 100 percent would not prevent it from carrying out a task. And neither in Syria nor in any of the exercises had the probability of destruction come close to that.

He wasn’t necessarily thinking about danger. He was running memory routines against present simulations — essentially comparing his history to his present situation. Which made sense: it was a way to find a solution to a problem. Except he didn’t solve out the solution and act on it.

Was he thinking about who he was?

Literally, yes.

It took Chelsea several hours to change the base parameters Socrates used to conduct its searches; inserting the new programming with the requisite debugging took two more. But the change yielded immediate results — the computer matched a cash withdrawal at an ATM near a hunting store in suburban Montreal, and from that match, discovered a pair of credit cards used to buy clothes. Chelsea had just off-loaded details of the clothes — three of the bar codes included reasonably detailed descriptions — when Massina surprised her.

“I thought you went home,” he said, looking over her shoulder.

“Not yet,” she said.

“I have an odd theory about RBT PJT 23-A,” said Massina. “I’m wondering if he’s becoming self-aware.”

“It knows where it is.”

“True, but more than that — gaining another level of introspection. Why it doesn’t act?”

“How would we test that?”

Massina shook his head, as if he were apologizing. “I haven’t figured it out yet.” He shrugged, honestly unsure but clearly intrigued by the problem.

“It’s philosophy more than coding,” said Chelsea.

“No, it’s always coding. We just haven’t caught up with him yet.” Massina’s wry smile changed to something more serious. The intrigued wizard disappeared, morphing into the concerned and rigorous boss. “What are you working on?”

“I had an idea,” said Chelsea. “We’ve gone back and figured out some clothes Ghadab might have been wearing. If we can match that to visuals, maybe surveillance cameras—”

“We? You and the program?”

“Socrates.”

“You gave the code a name?”

Chelsea shrugged.

“Maybe you should call it a night,” Massina suggested.

“We have a couple of bank accounts we can track,” said Chelsea. “I’m not going to leave until I get more results.”

“All right. But stop using ‘we,’” added Massina. “The AI program is just a tool.”

“Socrates,” said Chelsea. “His name is Socrates.”

94

The air was different. Wet. Pregnant.

That was what he always noticed about America. No matter where Ghadab was, a city, a suburb, a farm, the air smelled different than what he’d grown up breathing. It wasn’t just the scent of diesels or factory gases, the exhaust from cars or cows. It was more intrinsic.

Some would put it down to humidity, the most obvious difference to the deserts of the Middle East. There was something to that, especially on a day like today, when rain was only a few hours away. But Ghadab knew it was more than that, more an expression of the country and its people. What they breathed out.

And what he was now breathing in.

Ghadab continued down the long, twisted gravel driveway of the safe house, walking in the direction of the highway. Large fields lay to either side; given over to hay, in the early predawn light they looked more like jungles than cultivated farm acres. A large barn leased to a local farmer sat in the distance, close to the highway. In the shadows, the structure looked like a squatting soldier.

The image gave Ghadab some comfort.

He continued walking, strolling leisurely. Casual movement helped clear the mind of thoughts. Then, with distractions gone, he could focus on the tasks of the day.

Dealing with the traitor was first.

He had reached the highway and started back for the house when he heard the pickup. He stepped to the side and waited, watching as the headlights swept up from the road. The driver saw him and slowed before pulling alongside.

“Commander, you are up early,” said Amin Greene, leaning across the cab to talk.

“I always rise before dawn.”

“Can I give you a lift to the house?”

“I prefer to walk, then pray.”

“I’ll make you breakfast, then.”

Greene let his foot off the brake and moved away slowly. He was a jolly sort, perpetually happy, easily amused.

Useful, though not deep.

By the time Ghadab got to the house, it smelled of strong coffee. Greene was stirring a pancake batter.

“It’s time for prayers,” said Ghadab, entering the kitchen.

“A few minutes yet,” said Greene, glancing at his watch.

“Now, by my watch.”

“Of course.”

Greene turned off the flame and followed Ghadab out to the porch. Ghadab unrolled his prayer rug; Greene found one near the door and together they prayed.

As Ghadab finished, he took the knife from his belt.

“I have done you a mercy, though you don’t deserve it,” he said, reaching his arm around the front of Greene’s chest and pulling up quickly to stab his throat.

Taken by surprise, Greene grabbed at his chest, then floundered as Ghadab sliced him again and stepped back.

“You are a disgrace to the cause,” said Ghadab.

Greene started to shake his head. Blood fell from his neck like a waterfall, seeping in places, spurting in others.

“You spoke to them just before Easter,” said Ghadab. “The Turk learned this. I didn’t believe him, but I have seen the proof in your bank accounts.”

Greene slid down, eyes still open, but definitely gone.

“You will serve us in death,” said Ghadab. He took a flash drive from his pocket and slipped it into Greene’s. “So perhaps you will be considered a martyr after all.”

95

Gabor Tolevi had run dozens of “errands” for Johansen, but never in America. It was easy enough, though: a signal had been sent, which would require the contact to meet him at a Dunkin’ Donuts coffee shop just outside of town at exactly 12:03 p.m.

The shop was nearly deserted when Tolevi arrived a few minutes before noon. A quick glance around told him the contact wasn’t among the patrons — all but one were women, and the exception looked to be seventy at least, and very white.

“Coffee,” he told the girl at the counter.

“Donut?”

“Just coffee.”

“We’re serving a new lunch menu.”

Tolevi stared straight ahead.

“What size coffee?” asked the girl finally.

“Large.”

He gave her a five and told her to keep the change. He went and found a booth on the side.

Tolevi had no idea what his contact looked like; Persia was supposed to approach him, signaled by the New York Times he unfolded on the table.

They’ll need to revise their procedures soon, thought Tolevi. There won’t be any newspapers left in a few years.

He could see most of the parking lot from his seat. A car pulled in — right on time, Tolevi thought, until he saw that the occupants were both barely teenagers, one black, the other Hispanic. Neither gave him or his newspaper a second look.

And so it went for an hour. Even with their new lunch menu, business was not exactly booming. No more than twenty people came in, and none of them looked remotely like they might be his contact.

This sort of thing had happened to Tolevi more than he could count. It was never a good sign, but it was not necessarily disastrous. It could mean that the contact was being watched and had bailed; it could mean he hadn’t gotten the message. It could mean he felt he was being taken advantage of and wanted to demonstrate that he was worth more than he was being paid — respect always being a function of the money involved.

It could mean many other things as well. As far as Tolevi was concerned, its only importance was that it made it necessary to call Johansen.

“Didn’t show,” he told the CIA officer as he walked to his car.

“Not at all?” There was no alarm in Johansen’s voice, but still, the mere fact that he answered — Johansen did not like to talk on cell phones, especially ones that were not encrypted — was a surprise.

“No, he did not.”

“OK. I’ll text you an address.”

“I have other things to do.”

“I need this,” said Johansen.

Tolevi hung up. He considered driving back to Boston, but there was always a chance that he might need Johansen for something important in the near future. Even if he didn’t, having the CIA as an enemy always complicated one’s life.

The phone rang five minutes later — not only was it a call rather than a text, but it was far sooner than he expected.

“This is the address where he works. I need you to bring him to me.”

“What?”

“I need you to do it.”

“This is way out of the ordinary.”

“You’ll be paid, don’t worry. I need you to bring him to Langley.”

“Me?”

“Don’t take no for an answer.”

Tolevi knew where Langley was, of course, but he’d never been there. The request was completely bizarre. But Johansen not haggling over money — that was the most suspicious thing of all.

The company Greene worked for specialized in demolitions, primarily taking down derelict buildings. Destroying things made some people very happy, including the woman who worked as the company receptionist.

“Good afternoon!” she said, practically shouting.

He nodded. The floor was heavily carpeted but still squeaked as he walked across the room toward her desk. She was the only person in the very large office; it was easy to guess she didn’t talk to many people in the course of the day.

“I’m looking for a friend of mine, Amin Greene,” he told her. “We were in high school together.”

“High school, God, what a glorious time,” said the woman.

I’ll bet you were a cheerleader, he thought. Or at least on the pep squad.

“I still have some of my best friends from those days,” added the woman. She started naming them.

“So, is Amin around?” he asked finally.

“He took off this week. His mother…” She shook her head. “Not doing well.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

“Let me get his address for you. I’m sure he’d love to see you.”

The address was twenty miles out of town. Tolevi drove past the driveway a couple of times; it was impossible to see more than a sliver of the house. He found a place near a culvert down the road to park, then hiked through the woods a short distance to the field at the side of the house.

A split-level dating from the late 1980s, the home was spectacularly unspectacular, the sort of place built without much thought and lived in with even less. But Tolevi hadn’t come to critique the architecture. Taking no chances, he took out his pistol and walked across to the side yard, approaching from the side of the house that had no windows. After making sure there were no cars in the driveway at the front, he swung around to the back and came across the yard. Shredded fireworks filled the path and the nearby grass.

Going up two at a time, Tolevi bounded up the stairs to a deck made of pressure-treated wood, badly in need of paint or at least cleaning. Spent matches lay all around.

Gotta like a man who believes in fireworks.

Tolevi peered through the sliding glass door but couldn’t see much inside: a dining room table, some chairs, but otherwise, nothing.

He could break in, but undoubtedly that would be subtracted from his fee. And it might make it more difficult to convince Greene to come to Virginia with him. It certainly wouldn’t help. So Tolevi decided to walk around to the front door, where he rang several times. Getting no answer, he tried the knob — it was locked.

It wouldn’t take all that much to force it, but once again he left that as a last resort. He went first to the garage, which was also locked, then went back up the stairs to the sliding door. It slid open easily — with the help of his credit card, which slid through the jamb with space to spare.

“Hey, Greene!” he yelled, standing at the threshold. “I gotta talk to you. Some of your friends need you.”

There was no answer. Tolevi took out his gun again and, holding it close to his body, entered.

Modestly furnished, the house didn’t appear to hold many secrets. It was clear that the owner was a single male — the couch and chairs were mismatched; the sink was a mess. Down the hall, the sheets and covers on the bed were haphazardly spread, though the rest of the room was orderly enough.

The room across from the bedroom was used as an office; there was a computer screen and a keyboard on the desk, but no computer — obviously, a laptop usually sat here. A wire led to a USB hub, and another set of wires — along with a little outline of dust — showed where an external hard drive had sat until very recently.

Curious, Tolevi went through the drawers and found a flash drive; he left it. There were some bills, all in Greene’s name.

A set of file cabinets against the wall demonstrated organization an OCD sufferer would have been thrilled with — folders for everything from groceries to land taxes, auto insurance to car washes, all separated by year.

Tolevi couldn’t help but check the bank accounts. There were two, checking and savings; each had less than five thousand in it.

But his three credit cards were paid in full.

Back in the kitchen, Tolevi opened the refrigerator and checked the milk. It had been purchased not more than a day or two before, if the freshness date was to be believed.

There was a whiteboard on the wall. It looked to be something of a makeshift to-do list or calendar, though all but one entry had been erased beyond readability.

Farm—5.

What farm was that? Tolevi wondered.

He found the answer, or at least what he thought was the answer, in a file of tax receipts in the office. The property was on his way out of town anyway, so he decided he’d swing by and see if there was anything worth seeing — maybe some unexploded fireworks.

Borya called when he was about a mile away.

“How are you, sweetie?” he asked, punching the Answer key on the car’s display.

“Can I go to Jenny’s house and help her with her homework?” asked his daughter.

“Is she going to help you with yours?”

Borya laughed. “That’s crazy talk.”

“That’s fine. You’re not doing your internship today?”

“Chelsea gave me a project at home,” she told him.

“And how’s that coming?”

“Piece of cake.”

“Humph.”

“So can I go to Jenny’s?”

“As long as it’s all right with Mary.”

“See, I told you he would say it was all right,” he heard her shout to the babysitter as she hung up.

He might have called her back if he hadn’t seen the number on the mailbox matching the address. He stopped quickly, skidding a bit on the gravel, and pulled in. A dilapidated Victorian-era house sat on a hill a good three hundred yards from the road. The driveway was so pitted, he decided to leave the Mercedes at the bottom and walk up.

What he’d seen in the other house made him somewhat less cautious; he walked along the driveway for a good two hundred yards before swinging wide to get a look at the back. Unlike the other house, there was no deck, or door that he could see. Nor was there a garage.

Which meant this place, too, was probably empty.

But just to be sure, he went up the side stairs to the porch, maneuvering gingerly to avoid the two broken steps. He started to bend down to take a look in the window, when he saw that something was propping the front storm door half-open.

A leg. Attached to a body. A body in a pool of half-dried blood on the porch.

“I’m guessing you’re Amin Greene,” he told it, taking out his cell phone.

96

“There’s no question now that Ghadab’s in the U.S. And we have to assume that he’s interested in you. You specifically, Chelsea.”

Johansen’s face filled the screen at the front of the Box. He was in D.C., or at Langley, or somewhere — he didn’t say.

Chelsea glanced at Massina, standing a few feet away, arms crossed in front of him. Johnny and Bozzone were behind him.

“Where is Ghadab now?” asked Massina.

“I don’t know,” said Johansen. “The data on the flash drive we found points to Boston. They have plans for Fenway Park, Faneuil Hall, Bunker Hill, and a few other places around town.”

A USB flash drive had been discovered on “Persia,” a CIA double agent discovered killed by knife wounds on a farm in Vermont. There was no question in anyone’s mind that the man had been killed by Ghadab; the wounds were very similar to those of others he’d killed. The drive contained a host of documents and backed-up web pages that, as Johansen said, seemed to indicate Boston was once again a target. So much so that a special task force with the CIA, FBI, and state authorities was going to set up shop in town.

Johansen had shared the entire contents of the drive, though not the drive itself, with Massina’s team at the beginning of his briefing. The Agency theorized that Persia was planning to give the drive to his contact when Ghadab discovered his treachery and killed him.

“The one thing that doesn’t make sense to me,” said Johnny, speaking for the first time since the meeting started, “is the drive. Why leave it in his pocket?”

“Everything was still in his pockets,” said Johansen. “His wallet, money — it looks like there was an argument, and he fled.”

“That doesn’t sound like Ghadab,” said Chelsea. “He’s very methodical.”

“Granted. We can’t rule out that this was a misdirection play. We’re looking into other possible targets. But we would be foolish not to put Boston on high alert. The FBI is trying to track him down.”

“Maybe he tied Chelsea to Palmyra,” said Johnny. “But what about the rest of us?”

“Everyone who was on the mission may be a target,” said Johansen. “But we found her personal information on the drive.”

“What do you think, Chelsea?” asked Massina.

“He’s definitely in the U.S.,” she said softly.

“We can have a dozen marshals from the U.S. Marshals Service watching you around the clock,” said Johansen.

“I don’t think I need that,” said Chelsea.

“You need some protection,” said Johnny.

“A whole army?”

“We can make it as unobtrusive as possible,” said Johansen.

“I agree, she has to be protected,” said Massina. “As does Johnny. We welcome the assistance — our head of security will work with your people.”

“The attack is going to be made against nuclear plants,” said Chelsea. “That’s what they were researching.”

“That may have been his original plan,” agreed Johansen. “But now — this data is different. And power plants, they are very hard to hit.”

“There’s always the fear factor, though,” said Massina. “Even an unsuccessful attack would panic a lot of people.”

“True.”

Chelsea’s attention drifted as Johansen outlined the precautions they would take. It seemed unreal. She doubted she was really the target.

He figured out that the dead man was a CIA agent somehow. He’d use that.

What’s the real target?

Boston again?

No terrorist had ever hit the same target again, at least not so quickly. But sometimes the most obvious solution was the right one.

Johansen signed off. Massina stood up.

“Everyone will be guarded,” Massina said. “We will provide a safe house — safe houses. Beef is in charge.”

Bozzone nodded.

“No unnecessary risks for our people,” Massina said. “For anyone.”

“So what are you going to do?” Johnny asked her as they left the Box.

“I’m going back to work,” she said. “What else can I do?”

97

In the days that followed, Boston became something of an armed camp. Homeland Security issued a blanket warning, saying an attack was imminent and that Boston appeared to be “high on the list” of potential targets.

A deluge of news reports — most wildly speculative — filled the web and airwaves. National Guard troops moved onto power installations in every state, not just Boston. Police forces suspended vacations. People suspected of terrorist leanings were brought in for questioning or put under surveillance. Police officers, many armed with AR-15s and shotguns, guarded every notable building in Boston, and much of the Northeast.

Boston’s mood was defiant. People went about their business with a definite edge. Even though the Red Sox were out of town, thousands of young fans showed up at Fenway every afternoon to keep vigil, staying well into the night. Other citizens gathered spontaneously at the city’s landmarks. The police didn’t like this — they argued, with some logic, that the presence of so many civilians increased the danger, presenting rich targets of opportunity.

But who could take issue with the attitude? Who would have expected less?

Massina understood: You don’t mess with Boston. You don’t mess with America.

But he was frustrated. He knew far more than the kids who slept on the grass at the Common, but he was just as impotent. Socrates churned through millions of leads, yet produced nothing tangible. The chat rooms Massina had lurked in buzzed, but the identities he had linked to terrorists had disappeared.

Johansen — who’d come up to Boston as part of the task force — claimed to be sharing everything he knew, but Massina still had doubts.

On the morning of the third day after the general alert had been sounded, the FBI staged a series of raids in the Burlington area, along with smaller actions in Minneapolis and Portland, Maine. Twenty-five would-be terrorists — several of whom had been first identified by Socrates — were arrested; two caches of weapons and material that could be used to make bombs were seized. A similar raid in the Montreal area by Canada’s Mounties yielded ten terrorists and a small armory’s worth of weapons.

The news media exhaled.

But Massina didn’t. Ghadab wasn’t among those arrested, and until he was found, the danger remained.

Six hours after the raids were completed, a liaison at the FBI forwarded the names of the suspects and what was known about them to Smart Metal. By that time, Chelsea and her team — augmented by a dozen other Smart Metal employees and two “loaners” from the NSA — had fed the names to Socrates.

The results were very disappointing. As Chelsea put it in her 6 p.m. briefing to Massina: “Aside from the geography, we’ve found no link between any of the people who have been arrested and Ghadab.”

“Does that mean there is no connection?” Massina asked. “Or we just haven’t found it?”

“Hard to know at this point.” Chelsea was talking to him via a secure link they had established between the Annex and the main building. “I have something else I thought we should try. The identities of the people in the bunker — Johansen never shared that with us.”

“Do they know who they are?”

“I’m sure they do.”

“I’ll ask. That may just send us on some wild-goose chases,” added Massina. “I’m sure the CIA has already checked into them.”

“We have to keep trying. And Socrates is better at teasing out connections than they are.”

“Or at least that they let on,” said Massina. “I’ll talk to them.”

Chelsea had the profiles within an hour. The AI program thrashed away, exploring their profiles and plotting possible links. Unlike the first few days where she’d constantly been tweaking the program, there was now little for her to do aside from occasionally looking at what Socrates was probing. The connections it found seemed fairly random, even to the computer: 50 percent probabilities and less. Nothing pointed back to the U.S., and even the connections to Ghadab and the rest of the Daesh hierarchy were tentative.

Hours passed. Chelsea felt her eyes closing; the next thing she knew someone had jerked her leg.

“What?!” she yelled, bolting upright.

“Hey, relax,” said Johnny, standing over her. “I was just checking to see if you were awake.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Looking after you.”

“I’m fine.”

“Good.”

“I’m going to be working the rest of the night.”

“Good,” said Johnny. “I rotated in to supervise the security team. You’re part of my mission.”

“Well, then, get me some coffee.”

She tried smiling. Johnny didn’t seem to think it was much of a joke.

“When was the last time you got some real sleep?” he asked.

“I’m all right.” She got up and walked over to the coffee machines. With the increase in staffing, they had added two microwaves and a pair of refrigerators, along with two more coffee makers.

“Seriously, you do need to get rest.”

“An espresso machine would be better,” she told him.

Johnny followed her over. “You mad at me?”

“No.” She poured herself a cup of coffee. “Want one?”

“Sure.”

Chelsea pulled over a cup and poured. “I gotta figure this out. We will,” she added.

Back at the console, Chelsea scrolled through the windows detailing what Socrates was up to. It had located what appeared to be a safe house in Chechnya; it highlighted the information, putting it in a special tab for further investigation.

“Here’s what I don’t get,” he told her. “Why do they have so many computers there?”

“Where?”

“In the bunker. Why? No guns, no explosives—”

“Everybody uses computers. They were planning.”

“If you’re talking to people, one or two will do it. Surfing the web — they don’t use it for porn.”

“Oh yeah they do. You should see what they look at. Violent stuff.” Chelsea shook her head. The Daesh people who worked with Ghadab were sick misogynists.

The ones that didn’t prefer little boys, that was.

“You’re thinking they’re primitive,” Chelsea told him. “Like because they’re from the Middle East, they don’t use computers. That’s not true. They’re crazy, but they’re not primitive.”

“What were they using the computers to do?”

“Map targets.”

“But you said they were looking at Chernobyl. There are no other plants like that, right?”

“It’s the idea that’s important. And we’re missing data,” said Chelsea. “If we had the original computers, if we had all the data, maybe we’d know.”

“Sometimes you can have too much information,” suggested Johnny.

“Not in my world,” she said, turning back to the screens.

Of the prisoners and the others who’d been in the bunker and identified already, one was a doctoral student in nuclear physics — which reinforced the nuclear-plant theory.

The others had all been software engineers or computer-science majors. Two, according to Socrates, had been active hackers, running scams on Facebook and harvesting credit-card numbers from European retailers.

Not one had anything in common with the people arrested earlier in the day. They did, however, have links to Ghadab.

Subtle links. They’d been in the same countries at times when he was there. They’d looked at the same websites, listened to podcasts from the same demented imams.

Maybe there were messages there. Socrates kept probing.

They were onto something, Chelsea thought, but they didn’t have it yet.

An hour later, even Chelsea had to admit she needed a break.

And food.

“I’m going to go get something to eat, take a shower,” she announced to the room. “I’ll be back.”

“I’m coming with you,” said Johnny.

Chelsea knew it made no sense to object, especially as he enlisted two other security people — John Bowles and Greta Torbin — to come along as well. Bowles was rather tall and sinewy; Greta was nearly a foot shorter but had fought mixed martial arts. Both were armed with AR-15s.

Johnny insisted that Chelsea put on a bulletproof vest before they went upstairs. Too tired to argue any more, she cinched it up, then fell in between Bowles and Torbin as they went up to one of the SUVs. Johnny got in the back with her; the others took the front, with Bowles at the wheel.

“They had hackers,” Chelsea told Johnny as they started for her home on the west side of the city. “Pretty good ones.”

“OK.”

“And a programmer who worked on environmental controls.”

“Like global warming?”

“No, environmental controls. Like cooling, that kind of stuff.”

“Maybe they want to attack our air-conditioning supplies.” Johnny laughed.

But Chelsea was serious.

“There must be a connection to what he’s doing now.”

“You’re looking for logic from a nutjob,” said Johnny.

They drove the rest of the way in silence. It was a little past six, but it seemed to Chelsea there was far less traffic than normal, as if the city was still not quite sure whether to go fully back to normal or not. A few blocks from her apartment, Chelsea realized she had left the air-conditioning off while she’d been gone; the rooms would be sweltering. She took out her phone, then keyed up the app that controlled her lights and appliances.

“Preset One, make it cold,” she told the app.

The screen blinked, then presented a quick environmental rundown — the apartment was eighty-six degrees.

“Good thing you don’t have a cat,” said Johnny, looking at the screen. “It’ll never cool off. We’re like two blocks away. Come over and rest at my house.”

“No, I want to go home.”

Bowles slowed as they turned onto the block, looking for a spot to park. Chelsea leaned forward to tell him to just let her off — he could park down the street — when she saw a flash from down the block.

Something exploded to her right — a missile had just struck her apartment.

98

Massina had just turned from his desk to look out the window when he saw it flying in the distance: a Sikorsky S-92A, a huge beast coming in from the north, low, in the direction of the city center. The sun glinted off its nose; it looked like a muscular cat striding across the northern reaches of the city. The helicopter veered in his direction, banking and then leveling, heading directly toward his building.

Directly toward it.

Massina watched as it grew bigger. It was low, barely above him — descending, in fact, in his direction.

Get out!

He reached the outer office just as the helicopter smashed into the exterior windows.

99

“We’re under attack!” Johnny pushed forward against his seat belt, leaning toward the front seats. “Get us out of here!”

Bowles had already thrown the SUV into reverse. They spun into a U-turn. Johnny grabbed Chelsea, pushing her down in the seat.

“Hey!”

“Keep your head down until you’re out of here. Bowles, get us over to the office.”

Something exploded behind them. Another missile, Johnny thought, or maybe an IED.

He pulled out his radio, which was set for the common security channel. “Somebody just attacked Chelsea’s house,” he said. “Call nine-one-one.”

“Johnny — the Smart Metal building’s just been struck,” said the desk man. “Something flew into the top floor.”

“No.”

“Outside — there are IEDs. We’re under attack here.”

Johnny heard an explosion over the radio.

“Bowles, we need to get to the Mountain.”

The Mountain was a safe house near Bald Hill well northwest of the city. Massina had purchased the property several years before, keeping the two buildings on it vacant. In the past few days he had clandestinely had work done to increase its security. Two Smart Metal security people were stationed there around the clock.

“I need to get back to work,” insisted Chelsea.

“We need to keep you safe,” said Johnny.

“If we’re under attack, I need to get to work. Get me to the Annex so I can help track him down.”

“Johnny, Bozzone’s been hit,” said Peter Mench, one of the shift supervisors. “A truck hit the front of the building and blew up at the barrier. We need you.”

“Secure it. I’ll be there in a few minutes.” Johnny put his hand to his forehead, as if rubbing the outside of his brain might organize the cells and their thoughts inside. He’d expected something like this, trained for it, prepared, but going from the theoretical to the reality always involved friction — it never happened the way you thought it would.

“The building’s been hit,” he told the others. “Drop me on Cambridge and take Chelsea to the Mountain.”

“I need to be somewhere I can do some good,” protested Chelsea.

Johnny ignored her. “She’s your priority,” he told Bowles. “I can get to the office probably quicker on foot anyway.”

“I’m not running away,” insisted Chelsea.

“You’re not.”

Bowles slammed on the brakes. The traffic ahead had stopped dead.

“Throw it into reverse,” Johnny insisted. His brain hiccup was over — he could see what he had to do clearly and easily. “Go over to Longfellow, get away from the city. Go!”

Bowles veered into a U-turn. The street ahead was clear.

“Drop me here,” shouted Johnny. He unlocked the door and put his hand on the handle as Bowles screeched to a halt.

“I love you,” he told Chelsea as he went out the door, the SUV still moving.

“Me, too,” she said weakly.

It was the first time either of them had said that to each other, or to themselves.

100

The blast of the helicopter striking the external wall of the building threw Massina against the glass at the front of his outer office. He managed to put his prosthetic right arm up as he hit, which absorbed some of the shock and saved him from a concussion. But the blow disabled the mechanics in his arm, bending one of the main “bones” or rods. Rising slowly, he saw his assistant, Teri, fumbling for the door a few feet away.

“Come on,” he told her, pushing it open with his good arm.

The building’s original early-twentieth-century curtain wall had been reinforced with heavy steel, and while not designed specifically to withstand an explosion, it withstood the crash without catastrophic failure. The glass was another matter — the helicopter impaled itself in the office, its nose a few inches from Massina’s desk. Exactly thirty seconds after impact, a timer ignited a bomb located in the rear of the cockpit; the explosion brought down a good portion of the ceiling and floor, along with part of the interior walls and roof above the room, damaging the structural members and starting a mini landslide of material toward the ground. At the same time, it ignited the fuel that had leaked from the aircraft. Flames quickly spread into the building, lapping at the carpet and whatever wood and plastic they could find. Two of the three zones of sprinklers covering the floor had been damaged by the crash and explosion; the fire leaped through those sections, racing toward the elevators.

Massina and Teri struggled down the hall, dazed by the smoke and dust as well as the explosion.

“Stairs,” said Massina. “We need the stairs.”

Finding the door, Massina pushed it open, bracing himself for he knew not what: flames, maybe, or a gaping hole. But instead, fresh air surged into his face.

Safety.

“I’ll be down in a minute,” Massina told Teri, pushing her through the threshold. “I need to make sure everyone’s out.”

Teri started to protest, but Massina stepped back quickly and shut the door. Alarms blared; water whistled through the broken pipes of the extinguisher system. Smoke, heavy with toxins from the carpet and other materials, stung Massina’s face. A spray of water doused him as he turned back to check the other hall for his people; he could feel soot caking on his head and face.

“Out! This way!” he yelled, pushing open the door to the Administrative Functions suite, where personnel and related matters were handled. Smoke seeped through the walls and water sprayed from the ceiling; the emergency lights were on, along with an alarm light that blinked on and off like a lazy strobe. The office and its cluster of desks and cabinets looked empty, and Massina was just about to go back out to the hall when he heard a moan from the back.

Jason Vendez, the head of Finance, lay on the floor, pinned between a desk and part of the caved-in wall. Massina tried to grab the desk with his prosthetic arm, which ordinarily would have had no trouble leveraging the furniture out of the way. But the arm was broken, unable to respond properly — it was an odd sensation, his brain thinking it was moving yet his eyes registering that it wasn’t.

Massina squeezed between the desk and the wall, aiming to lever his feet against the desk. That didn’t work; he swung around, butt against the desk, feet against the wall, and tried again. The desk shifted and he fell to the floor as Vendez crawled free.

“I’m OK, I’m OK,” Vendez repeated as Massina helped him to his feet.

“Who else is here?”

“No one.”

“The smoke is coming in — we have to get out.”

Out in the hallway, flames flickered along the bottom of the wall. A layer of smoke had risen to the ceiling, a poisonous cloud layer dividing the air. The smoke drifted toward them slowly, lowering itself as it went.

“Who’s here! Who’s here!” shouted Massina. “Go to the stairs!”

If anyone answered, he didn’t hear. He pushed Vendez toward the stairs, then went down to the next suite, looking inside. The rooms on this side were farthest from the explosion and appeared intact — and fortunately empty.

Massina pushed open the door to the last office and yelled inside. No one answered.

Water from one of the burst pipes shot down from the ceiling. He stepped into the office, crossing through the spray.

“Anyone!” he yelled. “Anyone!”

The room was empty.

He turned and nearly knocked over Vendez.

“I told you to go down,” Massina screamed, angry.

“I’m not leaving without you, Louis.”

“Come on, then,” said Massina. “Crawl.”

The smoke had sunk so low there was less than three feet of clear air left. Knots of toxins swirled downward, tiny twisters of poison. Water dripped in large drops, springing from the leaks in the pipes above, impotent against the fiery onslaught.

They had just reached the door when the building shook again, the tremor so strong both men lost their balance. As Massina fell on his back, he saw the hallway wall begin to collapse. He held his breath and leaped upward to grab the door handle. As he did, the wall next to it began to crumble. Massina’s fingers touched the handle, then involuntarily pulled back — the fire had warmed the metal to well over a hundred degrees. He fell back to his knees; before he could rise, the ceiling collapsed, knocking him to his stomach next to Vendez, burying them both in a wet spray of mud and Sheetrock.

101

“I need my laptop,” Chelsea told Bowles. “Stop at the Annex.”

“Johnny told us to go to the Mountain.”

“He didn’t say I couldn’t get my laptop. I can work from the Mountain.”

Bowles didn’t answer.

“It’ll only take me a minute,” Chelsea added. “We’re going right past it. There’s no attack there. Take the ramp.”

Bowles waited until the last moment to veer off the highway. He ran through the light and sped up toward the complex.

Looking through the front windshield, everything seemed normal. Aside from a small cluster of white clouds, the sky was azure blue, the sun bright yellow.

Behind the car, black smoke rose from downtown.

Greta Torbin turned on the radio, fiddling until she found a news station.

A helicopter has struck a building downtown, believed to be the Smart Metal Company Headquarters. There are reports of several IEDs and explosions, and a shooting in the T line…

“Maybe you should turn it off,” suggested Bowles. “We don’t need a play-by-play.”

“Leave it on,” said Chelsea.

The reporter continued almost breathlessly, describing various attacks, some based on things he had heard over the police scanner, some on Twitter, some from other stations. A few of the reports were clearly wrong — he claimed Logan Airport had been shut down, but Chelsea could see airplanes rising in the sky on a clear path to and from it.

“Five minutes,” said Bowles, pulling into the entrance to the mall. “Five minutes or we are coming down and dragging you out.”

“Five minutes,” answered Chelsea.

Bowles sped toward the entrance, then did a power skid to turn sideways so he could let Chelsea out as close as possible. She hopped out of the car, leaving the door open as she sprinted to the security station. The two men on guard raised their weapons, then realized it was her. One pointed around the X-ray machine, indicating she should skip the check — a violation of protocol, even for her, but understandable under the circumstances.

She had gone around the machine when something exploded in the lot behind her. Chelsea spun back and saw flames leaping from the SUV — it had been hit by an antitank missile.

The two guards ran toward the vehicle. Chelsea started to follow, then stopped, unsure what to do.

“No, keep going,” ordered a man behind her.

He grabbed her by the midsection. She kicked his kneecap and elbowed his stomach, but was hit hard in the side of the head before she could spin out of his grip. She fell to the pavement, her head rebounding off the concrete. The world dimmed.

“Finally we meet,” said the man, pushing his face into hers.

Ghadab, she thought as she blacked out.

102

A man driving a delivery van had crashed into the steel barriers between the street and the sidewalk in front of the Smart Metal building; a moment before impact, he set off the fertilizer-based bomb packed into the rear. The explosion had buckled a portion of the front of the building, but had done far more damage to the structure across the street.

Johnny Givens reached the scene two minutes after the explosion. Combusted metal and concrete filled the air, thick enough to obscure the sun. Sirens roared in the distance but so far neither police nor firemen had arrived. Two or three cars, so twisted and split they couldn’t be identified, sat like discarded bones in the street.

There were body parts everywhere, but no live people, at least none that Johnny could see.

He picked his way through the street, jumping past a long gash in the asphalt, nearly tripping over a jagged claw of concrete on the sidewalk. The stone facade at the Smart Metal entrance was scarred black; a slab of metal blocked the doorway, having fallen from above. Johnny doubled back around the side to a second entrance.

The two security men there raised their rifles as soon as he turned the corner.

“It’s me, it’s me!” he shouted, raising his hands. “It’s Johnny!”

They looked spooked. Johnny felt his heart clutch — they were going to shoot.

“It’s me!” he shouted again, stopping.

Finally, they lowered their weapons. He walked toward them quickly.

“What’s going on?”

“Beefy’s downstairs,” said one of the men—“Snake” Boone. “He’s pretty hurt. He was outside when the first suicide bomber hit.”

Two men in suicide vests had arrived at almost the exact moment the helicopter struck the building. The truck bomb had followed a few minutes later, either delayed or purposely timed in an effort to catch people as they evacuated.

“Keep the place locked down,” said Johnny. “No one in or out.”

“Right.”

“Not even Massina himself,” added Johnny. “No one!”

He pushed inside. Expecting chaos, he found silence instead. The entire first-floor lobby was empty, except for security teams crouched in defensive positions at the center of the hall and behind the mashed front entrance. Johnny ran to the post at the main entrance.

“Most of the employees are in the basement,” said Corey Draken, who was in charge of floor security. “Sweep teams are working their way up.”

“Where’s Massina?”

“Computer has him on the executive floor still. Where the helicopter hit. Vendez is with him.”

Massina coughed so hard it felt as if his chest was turning itself inside out. He crawled forward, trying to escape the blanket of soaked Sheetrock. Water cascaded down the side of the left wall. But the right wall, still dry, turned blue with flames as the fire reached it.

Vendez, struck by part of the wall as it fell, lay on his stomach a few feet away. Massina shook him, but got only a moan in response.

“Time to go,” said Massina.

He pulled Vendez with him a few feet, getting away from the worst of the debris. The stairs had been cut off by the collapse of the ceiling and the wall. There was another set at the far end of the building, but that was on the other side of the fire.

Best bet is to go to the window and wait, Massina thought.

Not much of a bet.

Better than being here.

“Come on,” he told Vendez. “We’ll go into one of the offices. This side, away from where the helicopter crashed.”

The north stairwell between the fifth and sixth floors had collapsed. One of the three elevator shafts appeared intact, but the car was stuck on the fourth floor and wouldn’t move, even in emergency manual mode.

Johnny, standing with one of the sweep teams on the fourth floor, had the automated security com operator connect him to Boston’s emergency response center.

“I have two men trapped on the top floor,” Johnny said. “We’re going to need a ladder truck.”

“Got it,” said the man. “They’re estimating five minutes.”

“That’s too damn long,” said Johnny, snapping off the Talk button.

The small office at the back of the personnel section appeared at first glance a haven; drenched by the water, it was intact and several degrees cooler than the hallway. But as soon as Massina stood up, he realized safety was a mirage: smoke was furling in, choking off the oxygen. He dropped quickly to the floor, his eyes and throat burning.

Coughing, he crawled to Vendez near the window. Vendez was slipping in and out of consciousness.

“Stay with me,” said Massina as Vendez’s eyes closed.

“Oh, yeah,” said the Finance chief.

“Stay awake. I need you. Not just today, tomorrow.”

“Uh.”

Vendez started to slide to the floor. Massina stopped him, then lowered him gently, realizing there was better air there.

Or at least hoping there was better air.

“I wonder if the phones are working. What do you think, Jason?”

Massina didn’t expect an answer, and he didn’t get one. He lowered his face to the floor, took a big gulp of air, and held his breath. Then he jumped up and grabbed a phone from the desk.

The smoke stung his face so badly he couldn’t open his eyes. He put the receiver to his ear, but heard nothing.

Dead.

My cell?

In all of the confusion he hadn’t thought of using his own phone. He pulled it from his pocket, put his finger on the print reader, then pulled up the directory to call his security desk. Only after pressing the phone icon did he notice the message at the top indicating that he had no service.

He almost threw it down in anger, but stopped himself. It was important, it was critical, to remain calm, to be calm, to think.

Think.

They know we’re here. They’ll send help.

Maybe a ladder truck.

The ledge outside. It’s wide enough to stand on.

Massina knew this from experience — unfortunate experience, but then he’d lived to tell about it, so how bad could it have been, really?

Not as bad as this.

“We’re going out the window, Jason. Come on.”

Vendez didn’t answer. Massina tried to get him over his back, but it was difficult without the use of one hand and arm.

I’m never going to be able to climb up to the roof with only one hand. I can barely make it with two.

He pulled Vendez with him anyway, moving backward along the floor. As he reached the glass, a red flare shot into the room near the door. A black cloud rolled in behind it.

Massina lowered his chest to the floor, trying to find clean air.

There was a loud pop, then a crash and a crackle, a thousand glasses falling from a cabinet to the floor at the same instant. Massina looked toward the window — a piece of metal had flown through.

Another aircraft?

The metal moved back and forth quickly. Another probe appeared, then a dull gray cloud — it was RBT PJT 23-A, better known as Peter, smashing its way inside to rescue them.

Ten minutes later, Peter deposited Massina in the second-floor lounge, where Smart Metal’s nurse had established a triage center. The bot had taken Vendez down first, then raced back to get its maker.

It was a quick and dizzying ride down the face of the building. Peter’s clamps were quite tight — Massina’s first thought when he arrived was that would have to be adjusted.

Gulping pure oxygen from a tank, he cleared his head and looked for Beefy. Instead, he found Johnny Givens striding across the room.

“Everyone’s accounted for,” Johnny told him. “We have thirty-three people hurt, two with probable internal injuries, a lot of broken bones, some smoke and light burns. But everybody’s alive.”

“Where’s Beefy?”

“He had a head injury and a compound fracture of the arm. Maybe a busted rib. He’s conscious downstairs. The nurse gave him a shot of morphine to ease the pain.”

“Chelsea?”

“On her way to the Mountain.”

“The machines?”

“Everything downstairs is fine. They went into shutdown mode automatically.”

“All right. I’m going to the Box.” Massina patted him on the back. “Good decision, sending Peter.”

“I didn’t,” said Johnny. “Near as we can figure, he went on his own.”

103

Chelsea’s head throbbed. The scent of diesel filled her nose, diesel and something caustic, ammonia-like. She tried to move, but her hands were restrained behind her back — she was in a straitjacket.

No, just restraints. Not too tight, but enough. No escape.

Where was she?

Moving.

A van.

Have to get out of here.

She pushed her arms, trying to free them. But that only made the restraints tighter.

No one will know where I am.

They can track my phone.

Where is my phone?

She didn’t feel it in her pocket. They’d taken it and her wallet and her keys. Everything but her watch.

The watch.

The backing.

Scrape it off, said the voice in her head — her father. Press it against your skin.

I can’t.

Stop your whining and do it.

Yes, Daddy.

Chelsea twisted her hand, scraping as best she could. The watch, loose on her hand, flipped over. She kept scraping.

“Coming back to us, princess?” sneered Ghadab. He loomed over her. “Don’t fear. I haven’t killed you yet. There’s still more time for that. This, this I want.”

Ghadab leaned down and Chelsea felt something poke her in the wrist. Her watch flew off. Her wrist stung.

“Bandage her,” Ghadab told someone behind her she couldn’t see. “I don’t want her dying yet. There’s much more to enjoy before that deliciousness.”

104

A storm of emotions flooded through Massina as he parsed the different media reports. There had been as many as a dozen bombing attacks spread across the city, not counting the ones at Smart Metal. But there were no reports of hostage-style attacks like those that had hit the city months before. Nor had there been a direct attack on any of the power plants in the region, or the airport. With the exception of areas hit by suicide bombers — including his building — electricity was still flowing.

Which wasn’t to say that the city was going about its business as if nothing had happened. Boston was in lockdown, with the National Guard rushing to close all of the major highways in and out. The monuments were closed; city and state police were enforcing a curfew.

Ghadab obviously was behind this, Massina realized. So where was he?

“Why isn’t the line to the Annex open?” he asked Telakus, who was handling the com section at the consoles.

“We’re having trouble with all our lines,” Telakus replied.

“We shouldn’t have trouble with that. It’s direct. Try Chiang’s cell phone.”

“I did. It went straight to voice mail.”

Oh, no.

“Get one of the Nightbird UAVs up, and fly it over the Annex,” Massina told Telakus. “Have it feed us video.”

Neither the city police nor the FBI emergency posts had any information on Ghadab. Massina tried calling Johansen, but he went directly to voice mail.

By the time he finished leaving his message, the UAV had been launched. He walked over to the console where the controller was sitting — they were using a remote setup, having flown the bot from one of their test yards near the river — and watched as it sped northward.

If you subtracted the police vehicles and troop trucks, there wasn’t much traffic. In sharp contrast to the first round of attacks, the city looked amazingly calm.

Is this all you got?

Massina saw the smoke from the wreckage of the SUV miles before the drone closed in. He kept telling himself not to jump to conclusions, not to worry, not to think the worst.

It can’t be our vehicle.

But it was.

The aircraft circled several times so they could examine the wreckage. There were two bodies inside, both in the front seat.

“Johnny, you better come down here,” Massina said over the company circuit.

Johnny sensed that something had gone terribly wrong as he made his way down to the Box. After realizing there was no cell service, he’d tried checking in with Torbin via their satellite connection, but gotten no response.

Still, seeing the burned-out hull of the truck was a shock. He couldn’t breathe; he felt the way he’d felt when he woke in the hospital after he lost his legs.

“They’re gone,” said Massina softly.

“God,” muttered Johnny.

Time contorted, somehow moving fast and slow at once. He felt as if he could leave his body and circle the room several times before a second passed. Yet it also seemed he’d been standing there forever, unmoving, welded to grief.

“Chelsea’s not there,” said Massina.

“What…? What?”

“Here.” Massina pointed to another screen.

“What is this?” asked Johnny.

“The watch. She’s still wearing it.”

Johnny looked at the screen. “Where?”

“Heading south, toward Cape Cod maybe?”

“Pilgrim,” said Johnny. “The power plant.”

The Pilgrim Nuclear plant was among the most heavily guarded facilities in the Boston area, let alone on the East Coast. Ghadab would be a fool to attack there.

But it seemed clear that was where Chelsea was being taken.

Massina called their liaison at Homeland Security, warning him.

“I’m going down there,” said Johnny when he got off the phone.

“I don’t know that you’ll be able to do anything,” said Massina.

“I’m going.”

“Wait,” said Massina.

The look in Johnny’s eyes made it clear he was determined to go, no matter what Massina said or did.

“The FBI is sending a chopper down there,” offered Massina, conceding. “Let me see if I can get you on it.”

105

It was all moving together perfectly. Surely this had been God’s plan all along. Ghadab had let his ego get the better of him, believing he was privileged to watch the final apocalypse in person. But God had humbled him. As he deserved.

Ghadab was still important. In fact, perhaps more than he realized. He would initiate the end days, reveling in its joy from Paradise, not earth. The Americans would surely seek revenge after the destruction of their birthplace city.

Shadaa, too, had been part of the plan. God had shown him the power of love — it could be as strong a motivator as religion, if properly understood.

And now he did.

Ghadab ran his thumb along the edge of the knife. It was a long blade, purchased at a hippie military surplus store near Burlington. Beautiful in its simplicity.

Not a khanjar, but certainly serviceable.

106

A state police helicopter had tentatively tracked Chelsea’s locator to a van driving south on Route 3. But even as the van neared the turnoff for 3A — which would take it directly to the power plant — the police coordinator wasn’t convinced that the plant was the target.

“If it’s a kidnapping, the last place they’re going to go is the power plant,” he told Massina.

“This isn’t your ordinary kidnapping.”

“They won’t get to the power plant.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of.”

The state police were feeding real-time images of the power plant to the Box via the CIA connection; the image was from a police UAV circling around the plant. The helicopter Johnny was aboard was just coming south, not yet in range of the van.

The exit for 3A north of the plant was open to allow residents to get to their houses. But the van passed up the ramp, heading instead toward the interchange with the access road. This was closed off, and heavily guarded besides.

He’s going to ram the barrier and that’ll be the end of it, thought Massina. The end of Chelsea, probably.

He felt helpless.

Ghadab was a fool — going to such elaborate preparations only to thrust himself against a police barrier and die in a hail of bullets.

No, that wasn’t him at all. He was crazy, but smarter than that. He’d know his computers were taken and might even have suspected that his men would talk.

He wasn’t going to go throw himself against a police barrier. Not there.

Not there.

“Passed the interchange,” said the cop. “Still going south, turning off at White Horse Road — they’re going the back way? They’re going the back way!”

107

There were so many trees lining the road that Johnny couldn’t see the van as it sped past the residential area, heading back north toward the power plant. A barrier manned by National Guardsmen as well as plant security and local policemen had been set up three days before at the main entrance. Alerted by the state police, a team moved a pair of heavy troop trucks across the road about fifty feet from the intersection itself; the entrance to the power plant was blocked by two other trucks, which together straddled the entrance. Behind them was an up-armored Humvee, with a gun turret.

Nobody was getting in that way.

“Take out the tires and stop them,” said Johnny. He had a headset connected to the command frequency. “Shoot the driver — they have a hostage.”

“They’ll try,” said the pilot over the interphone circuit, an internal line only those in the helicopter could hear. “Leave the line open.”

As they came up toward the intersection, Johnny saw men taking cover behind the trucks. There were snipers along the roadway and a set of spikes that would shred tires farther along. A police car with its lights flashing was ahead of the spikes, and two officers were standing out in front of it.

They waved their arms as the van approached, but it was clear the vehicle wasn’t stopping.

Oh, God. Oh, God, no!

He could see a burst of glass as one of the snipers took out the driver, but it was too late — the van swerved slightly, banging the front of the police car and then careening across the spikes as it erupted in a fireball so intense the men behind the truck threw themselves down or ran back for more cover.

Oh, God, no…

108

Massina stared at the screen as he scrolled through the data, trying to piece everything together. The link to the Annex was still out; he had Chelsea’s last report but nothing more recent.

Trying to blow up Pilgrim? That makes zero sense. And nothing in this report comes close to hinting at an explosion, so…

What the hell is he doing?

Ghadab was not a stupid man. Evil, a psychopath, the Devil incarnate… but not dumb enough to think that he could crash into a power plant and do damage on the scale he dreamed of.

Socrates had to have something.

Chelsea!

He couldn’t watch her die. He had to do something instead. Something tangible. Even if it was a dead end.

“Come on,” he told Boone. “I need you to drive.”

“Where?”

“The Annex.”

Outside the door, Massina stopped short. RBT PJT 23-A sat nearby, in full-ready state.

“Peter, come with me,” he told the bot. “I may need you.”

The bot jumped to follow.

Traffic had been shunted away from the city, and the streets were relatively clear once they got a few blocks from the building. Massina had grabbed a sweatshirt to hide his arm; he sat in the front seat next to Boone, turning the problem over in his mind.

Ghadab had to want more than simply killing him and Chelsea. He wanted Armageddon and would never settle for mere revenge.

Oh…

“We need to get to Cambridge,” Massina told Boone. “Fast.”

Given that the attacks in downtown Boston were barely an hour old, Cambridge was almost supernaturally calm. True, there were plenty of police and other security types scattered around the MIT campus, but there was still a queue in front of the coffee truck parked outside the building.

Under extreme protest, Boone dropped Massina off near the building and squealed off to find a parking spot in a nearby lot. Though he’d promised to wait, Massina walked briskly past the guards at the front and around the corner to the side door. Here, he showed the man his license — and the card that indicated he was a member of the board of trustees.

“We’re going to have to pat you down,” said the guard. “Could you take your sweatshirt off?”

“Gladly,” he told the officer, who was an MIT employee. “I just want you to know, I have a prosthetic arm, and the surface was damaged. So you’ll see metal. It will look a little strange.”

The guard gave him a funny look and took a half step back, as if he were expecting a trick of some sort. Massina took off the sweatshirt and lifted his arms. He had been able to get a temporary repair to the prosthetic, which gave him better control and mobility in the arm and hand, but not a lot of strength.

Meanwhile, two other guards looked on from the vestibule nearby, more out of curiosity than concern. Behind them stood a pair of National Guardsmen with M4s.

The pat down was quick and light.

“You can, uh, put down your arms,” said the guard, handing back the sweatshirt. “You’re here to do what?”

“I’ve come to see Jack, the student manager?”

“You know the way?”

“I’ve been here once or twice.” Massina had actually been in the building at least three dozen times over the past five or ten years.

“You’re Louis Massina, right? The robot guy.”

“That’s me.”

The guard nodded. He gave him a visitor badge and a small detector that would keep track of the radiation he was exposed to. Massina clipped it to the pocket of his jacket, then walked across the hall to the stairs.

“You better come with me,” said Massina.

“I can’t leave my post without permission and—”

“Screw permission,” said Massina, starting down. “It can’t wait.”

They called the building the Blue Mushroom, partly because the containment vessel that covered the nuclear power plant was blue and partly as a very twisted joke. It looked more like a water tank than a mushroom, and as a piece of architecture it was about as interesting.

But the Blue Mushroom’s purpose had nothing to do with architecture. The plant was one of a small number of research facilities around the country constructed in the 1950s and early ’60s. Besides having helped educate several generations of nuclear engineers, the reactor could be credited with saving a number of lives: its radioactivity had played a role in various cancer therapies.

Like every nuclear power plant in the U.S., it had been designed in such a way that a nuclear explosion was impossible; nearby residents had far more to fear from the butane tanks on their barbecue grills than the plant.

But just because it couldn’t explode didn’t mean it couldn’t present a danger. As Fukushima, Chernobyl, and even Three Mile Island showed, there was always a slight possibility of an accidental release at the plant or, far worse, a meltdown that would irradiate the area. To guard against that admittedly remote possibility, nuclear power plants had layers and layers of precautions and were subject to constant monitoring. The Blue Mushroom was no different.

The reactor control room looked as if it were the set for a slightly dated sci-fi movie. Banks of wall-to-ceiling green metal cabinets lined the walls, housing different instruments and monitoring systems. Lit by overhead fluorescents, the floor shone; there was a slight hint of ammonia in the air, as if the room had just been sanitized. Ordinarily, the control room was staffed by one or two students; today there was only one.

“You need to shut the reactor down immediately,” announced Massina. He was alone; the guard had remained upstairs. “Begin the shutdown procedure.”

“Who the hell are you?” asked the student.

“Shut it down.”

The student stepped in his way. Another came down the hall behind him, an AR-15 in his hand.

“Who’s in charge?” asked Massina.

“I’m in charge,” said a man, rising from behind the console on Massina’s right. “I’m so glad you finally figured it out. I was concerned that I wouldn’t have the pleasure of seeing you off.”

It was Ghadab min Allah, with a grin on his face and a long combat knife in his hand.

109

The safety protocols put into place because of the emergency meant the helicopter had to land a good distance from the van. Rather than waiting for one of the state troopers to ride him down to the site, Johnny decided to run. And run he did, his prosthetic legs carrying him at a tremendous clip, moving so fast that if he were competing in the Marathon he surely would have set a world’s record.

He smelled it first: a bag of fertilizer dumped in a charcoal grill.

The thick black smoke from the explosion and fire had dissipated, but what looked like a gray mist hugged the charred remains of the truck and two vehicles it had rolled into as it exploded. The intense fireball had scorched the ground and nearby vegetation; trees some thirty yards away were scarred black, and the pavement was a slick black splotch, still sticky with the heat.

Three men and one of the women who’d been at the barrier were lightly wounded in the explosion, cut and bruised, but otherwise the only casualties were the people in the van.

The nuclear power plant was safe, though at the moment that was little consolation to Johnny.

As he approached the van, one of the police supervisors, a lieutenant, put his hand out to stop him.

Johnny stopped and held up his credentials, but the lieutenant didn’t budge. “My — my, uh, wife, was the hostage,” said Johnny.

It was the only word strong enough to let him through, Johnny intuited. And at the moment, he couldn’t have felt any more pain than if it’d been true.

The lieutenant stared at the credentials balefully, then put his radio to his mouth and called in the ID. He held his other hand to his ear, listening on the earpiece.

“I have to see,” said Johnny, starting past. “Let me. I’d do the same for you.”

“Yeah, OK,” the lieutenant told the others. “Let him. But listen, it’s a crime scene,” he added. “It’s a crime scene.”

Johnny barely heard. He knew he should prepare himself for the worst, but there was no way to do that. There was no way to prepare, period.

So he just walked.

Two National Guardsmen were standing near the back of what had been the van. It was open, burned-out, empty. Johnny walked to the front cab and peered in. The van had turned over as it exploded and landed on its roof. The driver, burned to a skeleton, hung from the seat belt, bits of fabric glued to the bones and skull.

“Where are the other bodies?” Johnny asked, staring.

“Other bodies?” One of the soldiers walked over to him. “Sir?”

“The woman. The hostage.”

“There were no other bodies,” said the man.

“None?”

“Just this bastard.”

“You’re sure?”

“Pretty damn sure. Look — he’s burned to shit, but he’s the only one here.”

110

Chelsea tried to move her arms but it was no use; she was strapped into a restraining jacket like a 1960s mental patient. She looked down into the clear water, peering at the top of the nuclear reactor. The water was bubbling, and given the heat in the room, she was sure it was boiling. The place smelled of steam, like an iron ready to press a wrinkled dress.

It’s not boiling. It’s my imagination.

The water bath doesn’t boil. I’ve been here. I’ve seen this.

It looks like it’s boiling.

Mind tricks.

I need to clear my head and figure a way out.

There were voices. Chelsea lifted her head, straining to hear.

Someone moved through the fog.

Massina.

I’m hallucinating.

Massina stopped at the railing.

Ghadab came toward him, trailed by the pair of “students”—clearly his own people, whom he’d managed to substitute at some point over the past several days… or maybe weeks, even years.

The computer geeks he’d gathered in the Syria bunker had obviously been working on a plan to make the reactor go critical while fooling the monitoring devices into thinking nothing was wrong. He’d managed to get his own people onto the reactor team — maybe they were all deep-planted agents, or maybe he’d brought them over when he decided on his target.

It was all moot now. The reactor core must be in breach: an unstoppable chain reaction spewing radiation.

This was not a nuclear bomb; Cambridge and Boston and Massachusetts would remain intact. But people would die — at least a few hundred in the blocks close to the reactor. Thousands more might succumb over the succeeding years to radiation-caused cancer or some other disease that took advantage of their compromised immune systems.

As horrible as it was, as unthinkable, the loss of life was not the worst thing that would happen. The center of the city would be abandoned, perhaps for a century. The university would be permanently damaged, shunned.

That would pale next to the longer-term consequences. People would want, would demand, revenge on a scale beyond anything before.

Unleash a nuke on us, we will unleash one on you.

It was not inconceivable that Mecca would be leveled in retaliation. And then?

Once used, nuclear weapons would be “thinkable” again. North Korea, Iran — who would use them first, and what would the consequences be?

Massina took a step along the railing, backing away from Ghadab. The kid with the gun waved it in Massina’s direction.

Three against one was bad enough, even if he’d been thirty years younger, but the gun made the situation impossible.

The knife wouldn’t be much fun either.

Massina jerked his head upward and saw that a bundle had been tied to a rope dangling from the block-and-chain mechanism over the cooling pool.

Old clothes?

A doll…

Chelsea!

“Yes, that’s your woman,” said Ghadab. “How does it feel to see your people dying?”

“Let her go,” said Massina. “It’s me you want. Right? You left enough clues that I would come and see this.”

“I expected you sooner,” bragged Ghadab.

“My life for hers.”

Ghadab pointed the knife upward. “Would you trade her life for the city’s? You can save her, or save the city.”

The terrorist was implying that the reactor could reach its final critical meltdown in moments — that there was only a short amount of time to stop it.

Maybe he was right — maybe there was still hope. But if so, what would he do? What could he do?

“Let her go,” said Massina.

“I can drop her in the water.” Ghadab pulled a smartphone from his pocket. “Then she’ll die instantly. And you won’t have a choice — your city will burn. And your puppet will, too.”

“That’s not what Allah wants,” said Massina.

“What do you know of God’s will?”

“I know he doesn’t want slaughter.”

“You know nothing of religion.” Ghadab’s tone was adamant, angry — he’d been taken by surprise by the argument, clearly, but it was one he couldn’t ignore; it touched him to the core.

“Everyone who follows you,” said Massina, “dies because of your crazy beliefs. You’ve turned your religion into something perverse. God doesn’t ask for destruction.”

“Silence, blasphemer! You dishonor the one true God.”

“You’re not even a true believer.”

“I know you, Satan. I know you’ve pulled all of these strings, like some master manipulating his puppets.”

“I’m not Satan. I have no puppets.”

“Look at her!” Ghadab shouted, pointing to Chelsea twisting above the pool. “She’s already sick from the radiation.”

“You expect Armageddon,” said Massina. “I know from your notes in the bunker. But that’s not going to happen. The West will simply crush you. If there were ever an Armageddon, it would be Islam that would be eliminated, not the West.”

“You have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Explain it to me, then. If you are what and who you say you are, enlighten me. Or are you just a psychotic, as even the Saudis claim you are?”

Ghadab felt his anger rising beyond the breaking point. He struggled to control himself — there was still so much to be accomplished.

But he couldn’t. He drew back the knife and aimed his body at Massina.

He saw the American’s shoulders start to droop. The man was a coward!

Disappointment mixed with triumph.

Then, in a flash too quick to record, surprise.

Massina launched himself arm-first into Ghadab, slamming his arm into the terrorist’s windpipe like a baseball bat. Ghadab gasped as he fell backward, rolling over the railing and into the containment pool.

Light flashed in the room, then the overloud echo of rifle shots — the security guard who had reluctantly followed him down had appeared at the doorway, only to be chased back by gunfire from two thugs who’d been with Ghadab. But the guard’s tardiness had been for a good cause — he’d brought reinforcements. The room lit with a white flash, instantly followed with a boom that hollowed out Massina’s ears — a flash-bang grenade thrown by a member of the local SWAT team, assigned as backup security for the campus.

Massina climbed to his knees. He couldn’t hear — the explosions had rendered him temporarily deaf.

Two bodies lay on the platform nearby — the “students” who’d been with Ghadab.

Massina got to his feet and went to the control panel. The emergency shutoff was a simple lever; remove the guard and pull it, and the reactor would automatically begin shutdown.

Except, knowing Ghadab, things wouldn’t be that simple.

Massina took his hand off the panel.

“Chelsea.” She was suspended from a rope tied through a hoist in the ceiling; the end was secured on the railing. But before Massina could get to it, he felt himself pushed hard to the floor. One of the SWAT team members appeared at his side, screaming something.

“I can’t hear you!” Massina shouted back. “The grenade. I’m Louis Massina. We need to shut the reactor down! I need Chelsea! My employee!”

The guard from upstairs ran over, yelling to let him be. Massina was pulled to his feet. He rubbed his ears and the side of his face. His senses were returning, but he felt as if he were underwater.

The guard took hold of the rope Chelsea was suspended from. Tugging, he swung her toward the rail, where one of the SWAT team grabbed her. He quickly cut her loose.

“Chelsea?” asked Massina. “Do you know what they did to the controls? Are they sabotaged?”

She blinked, then shook her head — but was she answering him or saying she didn’t know?

There were footsteps in the hall. Two of the SWAT team members moved into a blocking position.

“It’s us!” yelled Boone. Beams of light danced near the doorway. “The power’s been turned off upstairs.”

“Let them through,” said Massina.

Boone and a half-dozen guardsmen came into the control room. Johansen followed.

“We need to shut the plant down,” said Massina. “But I’m sure the controls have been sabotaged.”

“A crew from the Department of Energy is on their way.”

“Good,” said Massina, taking out his phone. “In the meantime, I have another plan.”

By the time the Department of Energy specialists arrived, Massina had already started dismantling the plant’s nuclear rods. Or rather, Peter had. Working with data provided by Telakus back at Smart Metal, Massina had sent the bot into the containment pool with instructions on how to remove and stockpile the rods. It was a good thing — a close inspection of the control panel revealed two charges that would have blown up the entire room had a controlled shutdown been attempted. And the control program itself had been sabotaged, making it impossible to shut down the plant from the panel.

“Your bot is doing a great job,” said the lead DOE expert. A Virginia native, the nuclear scientist’s faint accent carried through his containment helmet and suit. “We’ll be done inside the hour.”

“Mmmm,” said Massina, staring over the rail.

“Dr. Massina, you really should go upstairs with the others,” said the DOE expert. “The radiation is well beyond normal.”

“Two chest X-rays an hour,” said Massina.

“A little more than that, actually. To be precise—”

“That’s all right. I was joking.”

Upstairs in the guardroom, Massina found Johansen talking on his secure sat phone. Boone was frowning nearby. Chelsea, wrapped in a blanket, sat on a metal chair. A paramedic was taking her blood pressure. She looked tired, but more angry than hurt.

“Are you all right?” Massina asked her.

“Yeah.” She was hoarse.

“You should get combat pay,” suggested Massina.

“Talk to my boss.”

“I will.”

“You put Peter back to work?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“You trust him?”

“Enough. He rescued me.”

“What?”

“They were running diagnostics. He knew I was in trouble, and he came to help. Our learning program — he’s learning better than we thought.”

“You know why he froze?”

“I think he’s trying to figure out who he is.”

“Huh? What do you mean?”

“I’m not sure yet.”

Johansen had finished his call and walked over. “How did Ghadab get out?” he asked.

“He didn’t,” said Massina. “I pushed him in.”

Johansen shook his head, then pointed to the nearby security console. “He’s not in the pool.”

“Sure he is.”

“Screen 12.”

The TV screen was the second from last in the bottom row; it showed the video feed from a camera at the bottom of the containment pool. The image was a little blurry, but clear enough for Massina to see Peter pulling the last fuel rod from the reactor.

There was no body in the water anywhere, just the bot and the rods.

“I don’t understand,” said Massina. “I hit him hard enough to kill him.”

“Maybe not,” said Johansen.

“Where did he go? How did he get out?”

Johansen’s pursed lips made it clear he didn’t know.