Lethal Code

CHAPTER 18

The Choir’s big blue bus encountered no traffic on I-295 north. The ringleader, the young man who sounded like he’d grown up in America, forced Emma to remain on the floor of the aisle right by his feet. With her back to him, all she caught were receding glimpses of the towering steel girders of the Delaware Bridge as they headed into New Jersey. But even if she’d been up on a seat facing forward, she would have seen only a police escort a few hundreds yards ahead of them and another cruiser trailing an equal distance behind. Law enforcement was giving the terrorists plenty of space. Emma worried that the cops were sure that the bus — and everyone inside it — was going to blow up at any second.

“My name is Hamza,” the leader announced as they drove past a rest stop. He scratched his cheesy beard and added, “It means ‘the lion.’”

He paused after issuing those words, as if the real meaning of his proclamation needed time to be fully absorbed and appreciated by his captives. It was long enough for Emma to bet dollars to donuts with herself that his name had been Josh or Andy or Lucas just a few years ago.

“Okay, Hamza,” the driver said, breaking what the leader might have thought was a reverent silence, “maybe you should get your lion self up here and check out the gas, because this gazelle is going to run out of gas.”

Hamza kneed Emma in the back of the head and ordered her not to move, then swaggered up to the driver and cracked his head with the butt of his gun, knocking the man’s cap off. Emma turned just enough to see a thin stream of blood run down the back of his neck.

“Do not insult me again, infidel, or I will shoot you.”

“Roger that,” the driver said.

Emma stiffened, fearing Hamza would shoot him right then. Instead, he leaned into the driver’s face.

“You think you are playing a game with me, don’t you?” Hamza smacked the man’s skull again. Now she saw two streams of blood running down his neck.

“It’s not a game,” the driver said, sounding chastened. “I can’t control that thing. It’s not like we’ve been able to get any gas in the last few days. So I’m guessing we’ve got fifty miles to fill up. Then it’s going to stop no matter what I do.”

Hamza jabbered into his walkie-talkie, saying that fuel would have to be made available to them or they would start killing kids one by one and tossing their bodies off the moving bus, adding, “We will start with the spy’s daughter.”

He walked back to Emma as he said that and tapped the barrel against her cheek. Emma stiffened. He looked like he’d enjoy putting a bullet in her brain.

Then he stopped, and she dared to glance up. Hamza was staring at Tanesa, and Emma thought, No, not her. Jesus Christ.

“So tell the president to get us gas,” he shouted into his device.

“Diesel,” the driver said. “Gas isn’t going to help.”

“Tell him to get diesel,” Hamza said, but Emma could tell that he did not like being corrected.

As if to confirm this, he walked back up front. The driver tried to turtle his head this time, but to no avail. A third line of blood darkened his skin.

“Inshallah, I should kill you now,” Hamza shouted at the cowering man.

Emma shook her head without realizing it, and then worried Hamza had seen her and would pistol-whip her, too. But he was just now turning away from the driver.

“This”—he held up his walkie-talkie—“lets me speak to the world. Even the president must listen to me. Do you know why? Because we have you.”

That’s not the only reason, Emma thought. It was because they had him, too, the mad bomber sitting straight down the aisle from her in the middle of the wide backseat, all by himself. He had never moved an inch away from the backpack bomb beside him. He looked goony-eyed with glory, like he couldn’t wait to blow them all to kingdom come.

She heard a helicopter, then Hamza barking into his mouthpiece: “Tell them not to come any closer or I will kill her.”

Her?

“But,” Hamza quickly said, “they can use their spy in the sky to see this.”

He grabbed a fistful of Emma’s dark hair and dragged her to her feet. The sharp pain pooled her eyes again, but that instant burst of agony was quickly eclipsed by his next, far more frightening move: roping his arm under her chin and jerking her head up. With her neck fully exposed, he forced her to turn toward the window, then pressed the edge of a long filleting knife, the kind she’d seen fisherman use, against her bare skin.

She saw the copter keeping pace with the bus, guessing they could see what he was doing to her. Now Hamza pressed the blade against her skin.

“Stop, oh, Jesus,” she cried.

“She prays to her worthless God,” Hamza yelled into the walkie-talkie, which he’d clipped to his shirt, “because of a little blood on my knife. I will bleed her like a pig if they don’t leave.”

Emma closed her eyes. Her world was no bigger that that blade, her fears as large as the whole of humankind.

Lana was still in the middle seat of the van, wedged between the commander, the Texan named Travis, and the New Yorker. She did not dare look up, lest one of the men or boys pounding on the windows spot eyes that betrayed a less than pious woman. Travis still worked his prayer beads, subvocalizing as if he knew what he was doing.

With all the pounding on the van, she feared the glass would shatter any second. Then, despite the brisk walking pace that the driver maintained, the mob started rocking the vehicle.

“That’s a bad idea, folks,” Travis drawled under his breath, still working those beads. “Very bad. Prepare to execute our exit, men.”

“Our exit?” she asked.

He didn’t explain. He didn’t have to. The answer came with the metallic clinks of weapons surreptitiously readied.

The van, with its high clearance, felt terribly unstable, like it might tip over any second, as it almost had in the huge open area below the embassy.

“Go, go, go!” Travis growled.

All around her, the SEALs began to shoot, a furious fusillade that blasted out the windows, sparing only the driver’s window and the windshield. Though the shots were aimed above the heads of the screaming, chanting mob, chunks of safety glass showered the crowd.

The deafening sound numbed her ears. She couldn’t even hear the engine when the driver started to accelerate. But she heard the horn when he leaned on it and never let up.

Thump, thump, thump.

She also heard men screaming as bodies bounced off the front of the van and others scrambled to get out of the way.

The van ran over at least one person, maybe two, while the guns continued to blaze. To her knowledge there was no return fire, though that would have been hard to tell with the horn and the nearly nonstop volley that surrounded her.

How long could this go on? she wondered. Were there endless blocks of humanity still ahead of them?

There might have been, but the driver hung a sharp left, scattering a thinner crowd on a narrower street. The SEAL riding shotgun shouted directions. He wore dark glasses. She glimpsed a color-coded street map, presumably of Riyadh, on the inside of his lenses. The map — what she could see of it — changed as they moved. The driver, she now saw, had donned a pair of identical dark glasses.

“Where now?” she asked Travis, looking past him to see the shocked looks on the faces of the people they were passing. Shards of glass still protruded from the black rubber molding in most of the windows, and the onlookers undoubtedly had heard the gunshots.

It looked like the van could be pinned in easily on this street. Lana no sooner thought that than the driver wheeled right, turning onto a thoroughfare with huge homes on both sides. Now the only obstacles were cars, but the SEAL at the wheel darted around them easily.

Just as Lana started to breathe, a convoy of police vehicles pulled into view, blocking an intersection. Uniformed officers rushed to get into position behind the SUVs and cars. They aimed their weapons at the van. The driver took cover by keeping them behind a car in the right lane.

“This is gonna be rich,” the New Yorker said.

“Are we going to stop?” Lana asked.

“Like I said before,” Travis replied, “that’s the one thing we do not do at a time like this.”

As he finished speaking, the first blasts of gunfire hit the van.

Candace sat roasting in a cage made from rusty rebar. Tent fabric was draped over the top and three sides, providing shade, but the heat was unrelenting. At least 130 degrees. She was sure they were covering the cage to hide her from aerial surveillance.

It looked like a Bedouin camp, now that most of the mujahedeen had left. There were two tents, the Humvee in which she’d been driven, which was also covered up, and three camels, presumably for verisimilitude.

She guessed U.S. intelligence knew by now that she had been taken. She couldn’t imagine that her captors had resisted putting up video of Al Juhani’s murder and her abduction. Bragging rights counted for much in that violent realm.

Candace looked at the sky, praying for a drone, even if it meant her own death. What scared her more than dying was what awaited her in the closest tent. She’d seen them carry in two car batteries with wires and alligator clips, plus a toolbox and camp stove. Simple instruments of savagery.

She was so scared she felt sick, but she also felt for her parents. Tim killed in Afghanistan, and their only other child about to be murdered in Yemen.

One of the jihadists opened the tent flap and stared at her. They didn’t bother guarding her. They didn’t have to. The rebar was unyielding, and even if she got out, where could she go? Nothing but endless miles of open desert surrounded them. No one who cared would hear her screams.

Now the man by the tent nodded and smiled. She turned away, knowing that he was already taking pleasure in her pain.

Emma felt the blade slide across her skin, right to the tip, and drop away. He didn’t dig in deep, just enough to make her bleed and scare her almost senseless. Hamza shoved her onto a seat in front of him. She saw a narrow red streak on the knife, right along the razory edge. As if that weren’t enough scary enough, the Islamist grabbed her and wiped the blood off on her skinny jeans. Then he pointed the knife to the suicide bomber in the back of the bus.

She turned and looked obediently.

“They know about you,” Hamza yelled back to him.

Even without looking, Emma knew Hamza was smiling.

“They know you are a special man for special times.”

She didn’t notice the helicopter suddenly veer away, but the leader did. He shouted in Arabic and flashed the blade in the air.

“Yes, a special bomb for a special time.”

Emma made the mistake of looking back at him. He lifted her chin with the tip of the blade.

“You will have a lot of company in hell.”

Lana ducked as the police blocking the intersection continued to shoot at the van. None of the SEALs took cover.

“They’re not going to do any damage by hitting us from the front,” Travis said.

She inched back up, ashen-faced. The commander went on:

“U.S. taxpayers can afford a bulletproof windshield and metal plating all around. It might not look like much, but it’s got a lot of ponies under the hood and an extra-large fuel tank.”

A big bump interrupted him as the four-wheel-drive van jumped up onto a sprawling home’s front yard.

The navigator in the shotgun seat shouted instructions that took them across a lush lawn and down the side of what looked like a mansion, then into a service alley. The sound of sirens rose behind them. But their luck — or skill — ran out seconds later: The service alley was blocked by a police car, and a big Hummer was rolling toward them from behind.

“What the hell?” Lana said.

“My thoughts exactly,” Travis replied. But he didn’t sound overly concerned.

The driver put the old Delica van into reverse, spinning tires so hard and fast that black smoke rose on both sides of them.

He twisted his upper body around so he was staring straight back. Lana followed his intense gaze. The van, which appeared as crushable as a Coke can, and the Hummer, which did not, were speeding right at each other in an alley that allowed no passage.

She grabbed the seat belt, but once again the New Yorker stilled her hand.

When they were less than twenty feet apart — a breath from a vicious collision — the SEAL at the wheel cut hard to the left, so fast that as the backward-racing van cornered sharply into another service alley, it rose up on the left wheels, and this time she knew they were going over.

Indeed, they were. But as the Hummer’s brakes screeched — and its momentum forced the hulking vehicle past the alley claimed by the careening Delica — the left side of the van bounced off a stone wall, which banged the right side against the narrow alley’s other wall.

With a few more vicious wobbles, the driver righted the van and kept the now-battered vehicle in reverse, tires still smoking.

He backed onto a street and jammed it into drive as a chopper headed toward them, swooping so low that the SEAL had to brake.

“Bye-bye, sweetheart,” the driver said, jumping out.

Lana thought he was talking to her, but he meant the van. Travis hauled her out, and the five of them ran to the hovering gunship, run by a U.S. military crew. Cars all around them came to screeching stops. Men jumped out — but only to stare in astonishment. Once more, Lana was pushed on board.

With her legs still hanging out, the chopper rose so rapidly and turned so sharply that she would have fallen hundreds of feet if the New Yorker hadn’t had both of her arms firmly in hand.

She looked over her shoulder, shuddering at the fall she would have taken, stomach rolling for all kinds of reasons.

“Don’t worry, darlin’,” the New Yorker said, launching into an old Springsteen song with a big smile, “ ‘I came for you, for you, I came for you, but you did not need my urgency.’” Now he was joined in by the whole SEAL team: “ ‘I came for you, for you, I came for you, but your life was one long emergency.’”

Lennon helped Ruhi don a white head scarf, much like his own, with a black band around the crown. Then he escorted him, along with three similarly attired officers, into an underground garage.

The five of them piled into a Ford Expedition. Lennon placed him in the middle row between himself and a taciturn man. “Think about getting some sleep, or you may enjoy watching the endless Arabian Desert fly by.”

“How far are you taking me?”

“All the way, Ruhi. Don’t you know that by now? We’re with you all the way.”

“My people are sure going to suspect something,” he said.

Lennon shook his head. “No, your people have been pleading for your release, begging lower-level staff at the palace to intervene. We knew the game they were playing, not wanting to let on how important you were to them. We’ve let them know that you are back in business. American arrogance will assume that your release came from the power of their persuasion, and we will not disavow that. They can have their little victory — for now. We will hand you over to your American minders in Sana.”

“And you’re not worried about Al Qaeda.”

“I would like them to try something. Believe me, I would.”

Ruhi took an obvious look around, taking inventory of the “troops.” Four of them, plus himself.

“It is always the enemy you do not see that you should worry about,” Lennon said. “And if you are Al Qaeda looking to stop us, that is what you should be thinking about. Your minders let your Candace down. They gave her poor cover and one operative. We do not underestimate our enemy, but perhaps that is because we live much closer to him than you do.”

What Ruhi drew from Lennon’s last remark was that they would not be traveling alone when they crossed the Yemeni border.

Ruhi was right.

Deputy Director Holmes was conferring with Teresa McGivern about Ruhi Mancur’s release when his executive assistant, Donna Warnes, entered his office and handed him a file. Warnes exited immediately, as if she knew both the urgency and secrecy of the information.

Holmes opened the large envelope and slipped out a document. Within moments, he shook his head and lifted his eyes to McGivern. “That chopper got close to the bus, but they couldn’t get any radiation readings. None of that stuff is working anymore. They thought they had it up and running, but when push came to shove, nothing registered.”

Military computers and those running the entire U.S. intelligence system had been disabled in the past few hours by viruses that had been “seeded” many months ago, even before the first cyberattack, according to an NSA forensics team feverishly trying to find the source of the shutdown.

“So we have no idea what’s in there?” McGivern asked.

“Just that there’s a man in the back of the bus with what appears to be a backpack bomb.”

Holmes reached into the envelope and pulled out several photos. “They had to use an old film camera to get these. It was just run over here, and I mean that literally — by a Marine marathoner. Can you believe that, Teresa?”

Even Holmes wasn’t sure what begged credulity more: photos that had to be developed in a mothballed darkroom, or their means of delivery. Fuel allotments were so small that any messages and parcels that could be carried by a runner were immediately dispatched in that manner, often with a phalanx of equally fleet-footed armed guards to ensure the safe delivery of top-secret documents.

As Holmes had waited to hear about the radiation readings, he felt like a magistrate in ancient Greece anxious for word of victory or defeat from the prototypical courier, Pheidippides. The renowned herald ran from the city of Marathon to Athens to announce a Greek victory over Persia. “Joy to you, we’ve won,” he supposedly said. But the absence of radiation readings was hardly good news in present-day Maryland, and the photos in Holmes’s hand were even worse. He passed the first one to McGivern, saying, “It shows the guy next to the backpack bomb.”

“That’s a hell of a surveillance shot,” she said. It showed a triggering device at the end of a tube that ran out of the pack. “What do we make of it?”

“Not much,” Holmes replied. “Could be a nuke, could be plastique, could be a red herring to keep us preoccupied while their real intentions are in play somewhere else. I don’t think we can underestimate their canniness.”

“That’s a nice way to put it.”

“I’m doing all I can to keep my profanities in check,” he replied, passing her two more photos of the presumed bomber.

“Can’t the techs tell anything by the trigger? Its width, length, that sort of thing?”

“They’re looking at these photos even as we speak, but I’m guessing not, based on my own experience.” He pulled out the last photograph. “Then there’s this.” He handed it to McGivern, adding, “That’s Lana Elkins’s girl.”

“Oh, shit,” McGivern said, looking at a black-and-white of Emma Elkins staring bug-eyed into a telephoto lens with a knife at her neck. There was an unmistakable line of blood on the blade.

“Where’s her mother?” Holmes asked Teresa.

“Somewhere in Saudi airspace. We don’t know where.” She shook her head. “We’re not in touch.”

“Is the king going to let her go?” Holmes asked.

“That’s what we hear via carrier pigeon.”

Holmes knew she was kidding. What McGivern didn’t know was that he’d already investigated the possibility of using homing pigeons. The military, not surprisingly, didn’t have them anymore. Rest assured, Holmes vowed, they would in the future. At least birds that could fly to and from the White House and all major intelligence centers.

“How bad is the Veepox outbreak?” he asked her.

“Minneapolis — St. Paul is totally closed down. No traffic is moving in or out. The only good news is the outbreak came after air travel ended, so that might slow it down.”

“How many cases?”

“More than a thousand, but that information is fourteen hours old.”

“So we have no trains, no planes, and—”

“They’ve knocked out all the computers at the CDC. That’s the latest.”

The cyberattackers had been as good as their word. Day by day they’d been taking the U.S. apart. In addition to knocking out all military and intelligence communications, they’d disabled GPS and other satellite-based directional capabilities. Holmes believed that the only reason the attackers allowed electric power for many civilian areas was to spread the panic even faster — and to make it clear to the American people that U.S. defense capabilities had been rendered almost useless. From a psychological warfare standpoint, it was a shrewd move.

Highway transportation was also a mess, but the agency’s analysts weren’t so sure those breakdowns would have made much difference, because the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in salt-dome caverns in Louisiana and Texas was no longer functioning. It had been subject to a cyberblitzkrieg that made the Iranian attack on Aramco, which derailed thirty thousand computers at the world’s largest corporation, look like a stalled vehicle in rush hour traffic.

But worse than all the breakdowns in America, in Holmes’s view, was what was to come. He had no doubt that the cyberattackers’ coup de grâce would arrive when they targeted 350 million Americans with the country’s own nuclear missiles. Considering the growing misery of the American people, he suspected that a fair number of the nation’s terrorized population might welcome a quick deathblow.

“We’re not there yet,” Holmes said.

“What?” McGivern asked him.

Holmes hadn’t realized that he’d spoken aloud. “Nothing. Just weighing the worst outcomes, and we’re not there yet. That’s all.”

Teresa nodded, but probably didn’t believe him. They were old hands and had been through a lot of crises together, so she would know something deeply disturbing must be bothering him. She would also know better than to press him.

“What about the embassy?” Holmes asked her.

“They’ve got Ambassador Arpen and more than a hundred and ten embassy personnel. No one has been killed. Some beatings, we understand, but nothing life-threatening.”

“I just wish I knew what was on that bus, Teresa. We can’t let that thing go up into New York. Do we have anything that can get a reading?”

“Yes, we’re already looking into that. We’re resurrecting some old-school Geiger counters.”

“And they’re stopping for diesel, right?”

She nodded. “You want one of our guys pumping it.”

“I do, but make it a woman, someone rough around the edges. Believable. Play to their prejudices. They’re not going to think a woman’s going to be much of a threat.”

“And if the readings are high?”

“We have to find a way to keep them from moving. How many hours away from New York are they likely to be when they stop for fuel?”

“Three, at best. But no matter where it goes off, if they’ve got a nuke, we’re looking at a huge death toll. They’re in southern Jersey now. It’s not exactly the Bonneville Salt Flats.”

Holmes nodded, implicitly acknowledging the brute facts before him. “But the greater metro area has eighteen million people.” He almost said “souls.” It was like he could see them all rising, instantly incinerated. “What do our tactical folks say?”

“That the bus has a range no greater than two hundred and sixty miles on a full tank, and that it had made three runs around the Washington area since the cyberattack, so it probably had between two-thirds and three-quarters of a tank when they started out, but a lot less now. So I’m guessing that we knew even before they did that they were going to have to stop. But the governor of New Jersey is already screaming, as you can imagine, that he wants that bus out of his state.”

Holmes rested his chin on fists. He could not stop thinking that wherever that bomb went off, whether it was plastique or a backpack nuke, those kids would be at ground zero.

Hamza pointed to the police car in front of them as it pulled off the interstate.

“See, those police are cowards. Nobody wants to challenge us because we are such powerful martyrs.”

Hamza’s words appeared to cheer his compatriots. All four of them shouted in victory and shook their fists when the vehicle behind them also exited. The man wearing the backpack bomb was especially vocal.

“We will go wherever we want, and take millions with us,” Hamza announced.

Millions? What is he talking about?

Emma’s mom had a word for creeps like him who thought they were so important that they could kill or control “millions” of people. She wished she could remember it now. Then she did: “megalomaniacs.”

“Do you know what we have?” Hamza asked her, flashing his knife before her face, and then turning his eyes to the rest of the kids on the bus. “Has anyone been able to guess?”

No one volunteered an answer.

“A nuclear bomb! Yes, that’s what it is. Stand up,” he shouted to the man with the backpack.

He stood, beaming.

Hamza nodded at him. Then his gaze swept over all the children. “You will die with great martyrs. But that won’t save your souls.” He shook his head, but Emma saw no sadness in his eyes. “You are all damned anyway.”

Emma watched him flick his knife inches from her eyes. In those seconds, the brutal magnitude of the bomb didn’t register as clearly as the sharp threat of the blade that had already cut her throat and left bloodstains on her collar. She watched him slip it back into a leather sheath that hung from his belt, inches from his gun.

Then she glanced at Tanesa and saw her caregiver’s eyes staring at the knife, too. Tanesa nodded at Emma ever so slightly.

She knew exactly what Tanesa was saying. And if she could do it, she would. But just to be sure, she looked at Pastor William Sr., still gagged. He did not move his head, not even a little, but his eyes opened wide on her and looked up and down three times.

Yes, yes, yes.

He wasn’t trying to stop her. This was no time for caution.