Lethal Code

CHAPTER 11

Five floors above Ruhi Mancur’s smoldering anger, Lana reviewed all the NSA analyses of his computers. CyberFortress had also been hired by the Lawyers’ League for the Rights of Detainees, just as Deputy Director Holmes had foretold.

Lana was double-dipping. Both the league and NSA were paying her to do exactly the same work. The ethics felt fuzzy, even though each party knew what she was doing. Both apparently felt confident of their goals.

The league wanted to confirm what it believed was Mancur’s innocence. NSA, on the other hand, wanted to know as quickly as possible whether Mancur was part of the cyberattack on the country. If not, then the agency wanted to determine whether his suspicion was correct that the Chinese had framed him opportunistically. NSA also wanted to know if he could possibly make a viable operative.

To avoid even the appearance of war profiteering, Lana was donating all of her fees from the league to the 9/11 Pentagon Survivors’ Fund.

So far she hadn’t found one scintilla of evidence on Mancur’s computers to suggest that Chinese hackers had done anything to implicate him, but that didn’t necessarily make him a liar in Lana’s opinion, much less a cyberterrorist destined to loom large in the annals of infamy. As she knew all too well, Chinese “fingerprints” could be hard to unearth. And she was troubled by the language that Mancur had supposedly used in communicating with the assassinated al-Awlaki. Awkward, in a word. The language struck her as the locution of a hacker imagining how a Muslim might sound while sidling up to a fellow terrorist in the cybersphere.

She’d also been going back over Mancur’s keystroke speed, which could be excavated even now. While his varied, as almost everyone’s did, the emails that were verifiably his — to NRDC colleagues, for example — differed markedly from the cadence used with al-Awlaki.

Both the awkward language and keystroke rhythms could be explained by nervousness — if he had been anxious about writing emails to such a notorious cleric. Or it could be that a Chinese hacker had failed to replicate Mancur’s style with unerring accuracy.

So far, though, she had not found the characteristic irregularities that she and Jensen had discovered when Asia’s most notorious hackers had descended on CyberFortress.

She leaned back in an ergonomically designed chair, pressing her spine and ribs into the webbing that supported her back. Her earbuds were plugged into a full array of devices. After a relaxing breath, she went to work on another series of Mancur’s firewalls.

They were not proving especially difficult to penetrate, which Lana considered another factor in his favor, for surely someone who would launch an attack against his adopted country would never attend to his own security so cavalierly. It also didn’t fit the terrorist profile — and there were profiles for those maniacs just as there were for serial killers. Ironic, she thought, that the threats posed by the Ted Bundys and Jeffrey Dahmers of the world actually felt quaint compared to the wholesale death delivered by faceless cyberattackers.

Which was no small reason that every advance that Lana made in decoding a computer gave her a thrill. That was true whether she was working on the actual device — up close and personal, as she was now — or working at a great distance, applying her own considerable hacking skills. She simply loved to ferret out someone’s darkest secrets. Though she’d be loath to admit it to anyone, she likened herself to a sheriff in the Wild West, holstered up with touch pads and touch screens to bring law and order to an unruly realm.

That’s how she saw the Internet — a technological version of the lawless American frontier. Experts like Lana were constantly on the very edge of an ever-changing world, one that sobered her whenever she tried to imagine what it would look like even five years down the road. It struck her as nothing short of extraordinary to consider the accelerating expertise that had taken place in the past five years, even putting aside the cyberattack that had crippled her country.

On a positive note, what came immediately to mind was how social media like Twitter had emerged powerfully enough to help drive cultural and political revolutions. The “Arab Spring” embodied both. And Wi-Fi had completely untethered entire populations. Flash drives, for instance, enabled individuals almost everywhere to keep massive amounts of data in their pockets. Of course, that technology also resulted in the unauthorized releases of highly classified files.

The Chinese had become infamous for employing their own forms of cybershenanigans. Lana was quick to recognize that if China’s hackers had tried to frame Mancur with those emails to al-Awlaki and other Islamists, they might well have been motivated more by money than ideology.

In China, as in most technologically advanced countries, it wasn’t unheard of for top-end freelance hackers to sell their services to the highest bidder. And which bidders almost always had the deepest pockets? The ones lavished with government largesse — intelligence services.

So in that sense it was also like the Wild West — with official bounties as bright as silver spurs.

But even the most sophisticated hackers screwed up. In millions of lines of computer code, software designers made mistakes, and when hackers found them they often reacted with glee and great malice. But software designers were hardly unique in their fallibility. Hackers made mistakes, too, and it inevitably brought a smile to Lana’s face when she realized that she’d tracked one down and come face-to-face with the anonymous assailant in a virtual O.K. Corral.

Holmes’s interrogation chief marched into his office. Colonel Miles Wintrem had, in fact, worked at Abu Ghraib and the Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan, two of the most notorious sites for U.S. torture. Colonel Wintrem had lost an eye in the first invasion of Iraq, and the black patch made him look particularly pugnacious. Holmes thought it also lent the colonel a resemblance to the late Moshe Dayan, the gritty Israeli defense minister several decades ago. Holmes wondered how many of his underlings even remembered Dayan.

“Do you want him in an interrogation room?” Colonel Wintrem asked.

Holmes nodded. “But one with a desk and something comfortable for Mancur.”

“Comfortable?” the colonel asked, cocking the only eyebrow he had on display.

“Yes. I think he’s had quite enough for one day.”

Wintrem pivoted sharply and made a crisp exit.

Holmes sensed disapproval. Didn’t care.

He turned back to the large screen as the last of Mancur’s fingers was unbound from the wooden armrest. The first thing the detainee did was shake out his hand, as if he’d suffered a shock. In a manner of speaking, he had.

Mancur stood on his own power. Not all of them did after they’d been through a round with Tire Iron and the canine corps.

Holmes saw a mix of fear and fury in Mancur’s expression. Even as the deputy director took note of that, the younger man expressed open disgust when Tire Iron directed two guards to chain him up once more. The full treatment followed: cuffs on the wrists and ankles, and the encumbering chain that linked them both.

Poor son of a bitch.

Holmes didn’t have an ounce of pity for the guilty. String ’em up and let ’em swing. But Mancur appeared to be innocent, unless he was a complete psychopath capable of beating the most sophisticated devices ever designed to test a man’s honesty. Holmes doubted that. But he knew that Mancur’s abuse by his government would likely have stripped the detainee of any lofty illusions about the intelligence services — the world in which he was about to be offered a post.

Yet Holmes had been around long enough to know that it was absolutely necessary for Mancur to have suffered the deepest, most abject fear of what could happen to him, if he was to have even the slimmest hope of surviving as a U.S. operative. The deputy director knew it was optimistic to even think that the Saudi would sign on, given the open resentment he continued to see on the man’s face. But if Mancur were to agree to work for the government that had just put him through his miseries, he might well have to draw on visceral hatred of the U.S. to prove himself to the enemy in the near future. Hatred, in those circumstances, could be a real survival tool. Sometimes the only one you had left.

Holmes buzzed Donna Warnes to check if Agent Anders had returned. He had ordered her to take a breather after witnessing Mancur’s “testing,” the clinical term used for the process that their prisoner had endured.

“She’s just walked in,” Donna replied formally.

“Tell her we’ll be meeting with Mancur momentarily.”

Tire Iron marched Ruhi out to the corridor. Only after starting back to the elevator — and breathing fresh air for the first time in an hour — did he realize that he’d been saturated with the dog’s scent when the beast had climbed on top of him and tried to rip off his face. He didn’t know if he’d ever be able to stand the sight of another dog. Like many Muslims, even lapsed ones, he’d had no great love of them to begin with.

As he passed the kennel, now on his right, he picked up a strong whiff of the scent again — and braced himself for the beast crashing against the cyclone fence. But the animal was either giving him a pass or busy terrorizing some other poor slob.

As he waited for the elevator, he told Tire Iron that he’d urinated on himself.

“Because you’re a pussy,” the behemoth responded.

But after taking him up to another floor unmarked on the elevator panel, Tire Iron and the other guard led him into a room with tall, slate-gray lockers. A man entered with a change of clothes, damp facecloth, and towel.

Ruhi’s cuffs and manacles were removed, and he was ordered to strip down and clean up. Unchained, but hardly unguarded — all three men surrounded him. Each wielded a Taser. He gave them no cause to use it.

Freshly attired, and feeling much less foul, Ruhi was escorted farther down the hallway by the same two guards who had been with him throughout his ordeal. They led him into another room that was about half the size of the one in which he’d been subjected to the dog. It was also furnished differently. A utilitarian-looking metal desk sat in front of the wall that he faced upon entry. A high-backed leather chair rose behind it, and an armchair squatted to the side.

The guards sat Ruhi directly in front of the desk. Though less cushy than the other two chairs, it was still a step up from where he’d last perched.

The room also, thankfully, contained none of the apparatus for waterboarding that had given Ruhi such pause earlier — and no doubt had provided near-death experiences for other detainees.

At the very least, where he now sat contained the veneer of civilization. But then again, he reminded himself, so had America until the attack.

Lana’s pulse was racing as she worked on Mancur’s computers. She’d just found the cyber equivalent of a military feint — a deceptive move designed to throw off an investigator — and batted it down. The success, which felt pivotal, came after two hours of intricate efforts so intense that the time that had passed might have been no more than ten minutes. She’d been lost in the underworld of the cybersphere.

But lost only to time, because she felt certain that she was getting closer to key data. She didn’t know that empirically but sensed it much as blood-spatter analysts, after poring through hundreds of photographs and lab results, might find themselves beginning to read the direction and intensity of a fatal blow. For Lana, it was purely intuitive at this point — and wholly gratifying.

She called Jensen. “I need the last code we wrote for our foreign friends,” she said elliptically, unwilling to trust phones when the much more sophisticated cybersecurity of the country had been compromised so fatally.

“It’s on the way, even as we speak,” Jensen said. “Thar she blows.” Always a nautical man at heart.

With an even faster “Thanks,” Lana hung up and put to work the most advanced tools of her trade bit by bit.

“Or should I say byte by byte?”

She often talked to herself when the trail warmed up. A good sign, and recognizing the sound of her own voice made her smile.

As she neared her quarry, she reminded herself that hackers came up with complex schemes and programs, but nothing in the universe was as molecularly complex as a human’s cerebral cortex. And right now, she was putting every bit—“Or should I say byte?”—of hers into action.

She was still smiling.

Holmes adjusted his tie before entering the interrogation room. He always did that, believing he was according a detainee a degree of dignity by appearing before him as well attired as he would for the president. After what constituted a mock torture session, a man could feel all hugger-mugger. They’d already started to grant him at least a semblance of control when they permitted him to clean up. Now, if Holmes was right about Mancur, the next step to letting him reclaim his manhood would come by giving him a chance to vent. That’s why, for the moment, he’d meet alone with him. Well, strictly speaking, the guards would be there, but not Agent Anders.

The overriding truth of the seconds before they brought Mancur into the room was that Holmes had liked what he had seen of him. Ruhi, as he was beginning to think of him, had not broken under pressure.

What Holmes did not expect was how fast Mancur would pounce. As Holmes stepped into the room, Ruhi’s guards stood back from the chained detainee.

Mancur took one look at Holmes and yelled, “I don’t know who you are, but I know you’re a player. You reek of it, and you should know that I’m innocent before you put any goddamn dogs near me again.”

Holmes didn’t respond immediately, and when he did he surprised not only Mancur but the man’s warders.

“Take off his restraints and please leave.”

Tire Iron looked aghast. “I would not recommend—”

“I didn’t ask for your recommendation. I gave you an order.”

The guards took off the chain, cuffs, and ankle manacles. Tire Iron left them on the floor and started to walk out.

“Take them with you,” Holmes told him. He wasn’t about to let a pissed-off guard leave hard objects next to a man whose own anger could not yet be measured. That was passive-aggressiveness on Tire Iron’s part, thought the deputy director. He would pay for it, too. In fact, if he wasn’t careful, he’d end up pulling guard duty at G-bay, widely scorned as a miserable assignment.

Holmes was hardly unprotected. Security cameras remained on, and highly trained personnel waited only steps away.

“Innocent?” Holmes said when they were alone. “Well, this may surprise you, Mr. Mancur, but I believe you.”

“What was this, then?” Ruhi shook his hands as if they were still cuffed. “Some kind of game?” But he had stopped shouting.

Anger, though, was still present in his tense features; and Holmes knew that if words were rocks, he surely would have been stoned with every syllable that had come out of Mancur’s mouth.

“No, not a game,” Holmes told him. “May I call you Ruhi?”

“May I call you whatever your name is?”

Holmes smiled, almost said touché, and nodded. “It’s Bob. And please do. Look, Ruhi, this is definitely not a game. We have a proposition we want to run by you.”

“We? I don’t even know on whose behalf you’re speaking, Bob.”

He is very angry, thought Holmes. He needs softening. The deputy director pressed a button.

“What’s that for?” Ruhi asked. “Lurch and his sidekick?” He rolled his eyes toward the door.

“Not quite.”

Agent Candace Anders entered the room through a side door that most detainees never noticed till it opened, usually to accommodate a team of security personnel. Ruhi appeared surprised, of course, for another reason, but evidently not pleased. He shook his head and looked away. Holmes watched him closely. This was critical. How angry was he at her?

“You sure had me fooled,” Ruhi said seconds later when he looked back at Anders. “But I guess that’s your job.”

“So was saving your life, but I would have done it anyway,” she replied, working the script like the pro she was.

“Really? And why is that?”

“I think you know why.”

“The fact that you’re saying that in front of him leaves plenty of room to make me wonder.”

“I get polygraphed, too,” she replied.

Oh, she’s good, Holmes thought. Very good. On a tightrope and balanced perfectly.

“Okay, I’m alive, thanks to you,” Ruhi said. “Now, are you guys going to let me go? I’m guessing not.”

“You’re going to have to earn your freedom, Ruhi,” Holmes said.

“Oh, shit. Here we go again,” Ruhi muttered. “You’re the good cop. Maybe she is, too. I don’t know,” he said directly to Candace. “But the way I figure it, Lurch out there is the bad one who’s abused me, by any human rights standard, and yet you’re telling me that I have to earn my freedom?”

“Ruhi, after what you’ve been through since your detention—”

“Try ‘abduction,’” he interrupted.

“Since your apprehension?”

Ruhi waved away the issue in disgust.

“After what we put you through, your freedom will never come easily again. But you could have it, if you listen carefully to what I have to say.”

For several seconds Holmes didn’t think the detainee would listen to him at all. He wouldn’t have been surprised, in fact, if Ruhi had covered his ears with his hands.

But the man looked him in the eye and said, “Go ahead. Tell me what I have to do to get out of here.”

Lana pulled into her driveway still thinking about Mancur’s emails. She’d left a message for Deputy Director Holmes, letting him know that she was getting very close to puzzling out those messages to Islamists. Bob had been too busy to meet with her or take her call. She wondered what he’d been up to.

She’d been plenty busy finding clear evidence of Chinese fingerprints on the emails that Ruhi allegedly sent to al-Awlaki and other Islamists. Enough data that if she had to give Holmes an answer right away, she would have to say that the detainee looked like an innocent man to her, too. His claim that the Chinese were out to get him for his outspoken opposition to tar sands pipelines was starting to look plausible.

It wasn’t as thorough an analysis as Lana would have liked to have performed — and she would go back to work on it from her home office in the next few minutes — but Chinese hackers had definitely sent out several of those awkwardly worded emails, which made them first on her list of suspects for all the others that she hadn’t confirmed. Furthermore, she had found nothing to suggest that Mancur had the technical know-how to replicate the highest levels of cyberspying.

She didn’t bother parking in the garage, because she planned to drive Irene to the Metro station. Local rail service had been restored this afternoon, a miracle that rivaled, in Lana’s view, the rapprochement between her daughter and the girl’s babysitter.

Don’t use that word. It’s “caregiver.” “Babysitter” drove Emma nuts. No sense setting her off unnecessarily.

Lana figured Irene would be overjoyed to be relieved a little early. If a florist had been open, she would have brought her flowers for returning to Emma’s side; but the flower business was not up and running yet. As national priorities went, it fell somewhere south of rodent tacky pads. The latter were in sharp demand because rats had behaved as if the power outage were the bonanza that thousand of generations of the pesky little beasts had been waiting for.

So Lana did not come bearing flowers, but she had rushed into the understocked commissary at Fort Meade to pick up chocolates for Irene.

Pleased to find her front door properly locked, Lana walked in as Irene — still in her pajamas and bathrobe, weirdly enough — careened across the room as if pushed. She stumbled into the stone hearth hard enough to chip a bone.

What’s going on? Was Emma kicking her again? Jesus Christ!

But wait a minute, Lana cautioned herself. Emma’s not doing anything. Emma’s right there, sleeping on the couch.

She looked back at Irene. The caregiver’s mouth was moving, but no words were coming out.

Lana rushed to help her, thinking she might have been suffering a stroke. “Are you all right?”

More mouthing. Still no words, though.

Lana helped her to the recliner, where the older woman collapsed. That was when Lana got a good look at Irene’s eyes. Each one appeared as dark and small as a pebble at the bottom of a deep well. So tiny, so impenetrable, that Lana looked away, searching the room for a reason that her trusted friend was so… discombobulated.

The answer came as soon as she spotted the prescription pill bottle on its side, a handful of Tylenol with codeine lying on an end table.

“Handful” felt like the right word, because it looked like Irene had taken a lot of the opiates.

Maybe Emma had, too.

“Emma!” Lana shook her sleeping daughter when it dawned on her that the girl might have overdosed.

Quickly, Lana dropped to her knees and checked Emma’s pulse.

She had a strong one. Thank God!

“Emma, wake up.” She squeezed her daughter’s cheeks. Slapped her gently.

Emma’s eyes opened slowly.

“Emma!” Lana exclaimed loudly again.

“She’s been real sleepy,” Irene said.

Lana, growing furious, ignored the warbly voice.

“Emma. Emma, darling, it’s me, Mom.”

Her daughter opened her eyes. Thankfully, they bore no resemblance to Irene’s teensy-weensy black pupils.

“Here, let me try,” Irene managed with a slur so thick that her tongue might have been caught in an eggbeater. “She can be a hard one to wake up.”

“No!” Lana pointed a finger right into Irene’s face. “She’s awake. Don’t you even come close to her. Just get your stuff and get the hell out of here. You stole her painkillers, didn’t you?”

“It’s not what it looks like,” Irene said, raising her hand as one does to swear an oath, which was what the addled caregiver apparently had in mind. “I swear to God…”

Her voice trailed off, as if she’d forgotten what she was swearing to. Then Irene rose, but made it only a few feet before sitting heavily on a coffee table.

“We’ve had some challenges here,” she mumbled, “in case you hadn’t noticed. But why would you? You’ve been gallivanting all over the place.” She turned “gallivanting” into a ten-syllable word.

“Your only challenge, Irene, is to get out of here before I have you arrested. Here, sit up,” she said to Emma, who allowed her mother to help her.

“Actually, Mom,” said Emma, eyeing the tipsy Irene, “I think she’s been taking a lot of those pills. You’d better get someone over here for her.”

Lana realized that Emma was right. She speed-dialed Jensen, who brought Audrey on for a three-way call.

“I’m sorry,” Audrey said. “It sounds like a relapse…”

Relapse?

“She’s been completely clean for three years. I’ll come get her. She’ll get help.”

By the time Lana got off the phone, she felt more pity than anger toward Irene. The heavy-lidded caregiver had moved to the recliner, where she lay, eyes glazed, mumbling, “Cable, cable,” as she worked the remote.

Ruhi paced in front of Holmes and Agent Anders. He hadn’t asked for permission to get up, which the deputy director saw as another healthy sign that the detainee was reclaiming his dignity. Traversing the breadth of the room had been Ruhi’s immediate response to hearing that releasing him from government custody would be easy, but getting him out of the crosshairs of his fellow citizens would be much more treacherous.

He stopped pacing and looked directly at Holmes. “Wait a second, you put me in those crosshairs. You can get me out by announcing that I’m innocent. Case closed.”

“We don’t think you understand the anger that’s out there,” Holmes responded. “More than a hundred thousand of your fellow citizens have been killed. And the number of casualties grows higher every day, because emergency services simply can’t keep up with the aftermath of the attack. Even as we’re sitting here, they’re finding more bodies in crashed train cars and burned buildings. People are too scared to get on a plane, and who can blame them when they could start falling out of the sky any second? For all intents and purposes, our country, Ruhi, our country, is at a standstill. And everyone knows that our enemy — the one we can’t even identify to make a serious declaration of war — has vowed that it will get infinitely worse. So, yes, we could tell them that you’re not guilty, but do you really think, given the chaos and anger and disbelief alive in the land, that you’d still be safe?”

Ruhi stared at him. Holmes knew that he’d struck a chord. And he hadn’t exaggerated the threats to the Saudi-born man one bit.

“Let me tell you a sad fact, Ruhi. So far, more than a thousand Middle Easterners have been killed on the streets of this country for no reason other than their appearance. We had four strung up on light poles in Dearborn last night. And we don’t even have a single fact to link this to Muslim extremists yet. And it’s not just men getting killed. Women and children are, too. A mother in a head scarf was one of the three in South Carolina.”

What Holmes didn’t add was that the thousand dead was just an estimate. But then again, you’d have to be an optimist to think that unleashing that kind of fury wouldn’t add to the death toll in the near future. And Holmes was not an optimist. He’d seen too much of the world to fall prey to Pollyannaish appeals.

“Ruhi, I don’t want anything to happen to you,” Candace said. “I’ll be by your side, no matter what you decide. But if you try to go back to your old life right now, it’s going to be dicey out there. I can’t guarantee that I can save you again.”

The unstated part of her comment, as Holmes and Anders both knew, was that she could die trying to save him next time. And if he cared about her, he might want to hear how he could spare both himself and the agent the harrowing dangers of an America none of them now recognized.

Holmes quickly picked up where he’d left off: “There’s a lot of blind anger out there, Ruhi. So, yes, we want you to help us. And if you do help us, even if you don’t succeed in what we want you to do, you’ll always be protected by a grateful government, and so will your descendants. It’s really that critical.” Holmes paused, not for effect but because as his final words came to him, goose bumps rose on his back: “If you’re successful in the assignment that we have for you, it could turn out to be the most important victory ever achieved by a single American. And when all is said and done, you are an American. Please don’t forget that.”

“Did you forget that? From the moment you arrested me?”

“Never. Not for a moment, Ruhi.” Holmes paused, then asked, “Are you game? Do you want to hear what we’re thinking?”

No answer.

Holmes watched Ruhi’s gaze settle on Candace again. They stared intently at each other. The deputy director felt like a voyeur in the presence of naked emotion. He looked away, trying to give them space. He knew right then that Anders felt more deeply for the Saudi than he’d realized. And it seemed clear that Ruhi felt equally strongly about her.

Talk about dicey.

Putting passion into play was a dangerous decision, and Holmes knew that under any other circumstance he’d never countenance such a move. But all the rules of warfare had been broken, and love — or whatever powerful attraction he sensed in the room — was a small violation when weighed against the murderous dictates of hate.