Abuse of Power

29

Exhausted as he was, Jack couldn’t sleep.

It was nice to be on a mattress again, and have the warmth of a working radiator, but he spent the next two hours unable to stop thinking.

There were big thoughts. He was unable to put aside the pieces of the puzzle, the disaster waiting for so many people if he failed. His tired brain told him to drop the whole thing in the lap of the FBI or the CIA but he didn’t dare. For one thing, they probably wouldn’t believe that “wacko” alarmist Jack Hatfield. For another, by the time that machine got into motion and up to speed, the event could well be in their rearview mirror.

There were smaller thoughts. He wept inside for his watch, violated by Swain and necessarily discarded like so many other parts of his life. He kept telling himself that it was only a watch, that he’d always have his memories, the good and the bad. It was like death. Be happy for the time you were together, the memories you built, rather than mourn the future that was never guaranteed.

Yet that watch had brought him comfort so many times over the years. A sense of calm. There was nothing that could ever replace it, and he cursed Swain for using him, for knowing instinctively that Jack would never leave something so valuable behind and using that knowledge against him.

Against all of them.

He remembered the violence and death that had descended on that apartment house and was overwhelmed by survivor’s syndrome. He took no solace in his own relative comfort and security. Despite his admonitions that Sara not blame herself for what had happened, Jack couldn’t fight off his own guilt. People had died because of his failure to realize he’d been used. And it was quite possible that many more would die before they saw an end to this.

“Stop it,” Jack finally said through his teeth. “You’re going to save lives!”

It was a tragic corruption of his comment about preferring the death of a hundred million Muslims to a hundred million non-Muslims. The lives of dozens of people had to be surrendered in the hope of sparing millions more.

That was the math of modern-day antiterror activities. It was only a waste if he failed. That kept returning him to the biggest thought of all:

“The infidels will soon see destruction that will make 9/11 seem like child’s play.”

Operation Roadshow, coming to a city near you.

When? How? That question had yet to be answered.

Jack was finally starting to drift off when he heard the faint flush of a toilet down the hall. A moment later a silhouette appeared in the bedroom doorway-Sara, barely visible in the light from the window.

“You left me alone,” she said softly.

“You looked peaceful. I didn’t want to disturb you.”

“Probably happy to be rid of me for a while.”

“Never,” he told her.

She came into the room. “I said some terrible things to you last night. Sometimes I speak without thinking.”

“You’ve already apologized for that, even though you didn’t need to. You had a right to be upset. We both did. Nobody should ever have to see what we saw.”

She closed the door behind her now, then moved to a small television in the corner and turned it on, tuning it to an Arab station, which was playing only Arabic music at the moment. Jack wasn’t sure what she was up to but he didn’t protest when she came over to the bed and lit the scented candle that was sitting on the nightstand. Her long brown hair was highlighted against the window and he saw a light snow falling outside.

He didn’t know if he should trust this, or her motives. It didn’t matter. He instantly felt himself stirring.

“I don’t want to be alone right now,” she said, then reached a hand under the back of her T-shirt and unfastened her bra, dropping it to the floor. Her breasts shifted, reacting instantly to the brush of the fabric.

He didn’t look away this time. “Neither do I.”

“I want to forget for a while, Jack. Can you help me do that?”

“You have no idea how much I’d like to try.”

He hadn’t bothered to take off his clothes before lying on top of the bed, and she came to him, reaching for his belt and unbuckling it. She unfastened his pants and pulled them away, freeing him, then took him in her hand, gently kneading him as she leaned forward and kissed his lips.

Then she pulled away, whispering softly against his cheek. “Make me forget, Jack. Please make me forget.”

As he drew her nearer and removed her T-shirt and panties, she began to moan deeply and loudly. Loudly and deeply. In the midst of their heat, such a state of abandon was reached that the normally voyeuristic Jack, who liked to watch himself make love, actually fell from the bed onto the hot radiator. But, like the Indian fakirs who can be on a bed of nails without later showing puncture marks, Jack did not scorch or burn, nothing visible remaining except a small soreness days later.

Once he was inside her, she began to cry and shudder in a series of small convulsions. He had never been with a woman who reacted like this and was both surprised and excited by her abandon.

Her cries became veritable screams as she moaned, and her eyes became glassy with passion. As Jack continued to bring Sara to an increasingly greater state of tension and release, tension-a violent begging for release and then the convulsive wave-her screaming became threatening.

He tried to quiet her by putting his hand over her mouth while continuing to stroke with his loins and lips.

“Quiet, quiet,” he tried to command hoarsely. “Faisal will hear you.”

He reached for her T-shirt and couldn’t believe himself as he pressed it over her mouth, holding it down hard against her lips by pressing it against the sheets, one hand on each side of her face.

Their hips were in perfect synchrony and she continued her cries and screams, now muffled beneath the shirt, as Jack made love to her as he had never made love before. Sara bucked and arched and was in a world he could never see.

Then it was over and they collapsed onto the bed, sweating, chests heaving. Sara rolled toward him and snaked a hand across his chest as she nuzzled his neck.

“Thank you,” she murmured.

“You don’t know how long I’ve been wanting to do that.”

She smiled, kissed his neck. “It couldn’t have been that long. We barely know each other.”

“This’ll sound crazy,” he said. “But I think I’ve wanted you most of my life. Even before I knew who you were.”

“Well, I’m here now,” she said, then moved atop him, reaching a hand down to take hold of him again. He put his arms around her, running his own hand along her spine, brushing his fingertips across her flawless skin — until he felt something there and suddenly stopped: the long thin puckered flesh of a scar, just above her right hip. He hadn’t seen or felt it before, had somehow missed it in the darkness and the heat of the moment.

“What’s this?” he said, before he realized the words were out of his mouth.

She stiffened against him now and he knew he’d made a mistake. She rolled away from him and stared at the dark ceiling, as all of his efforts to make her forget vanished in that instant.

She seemed to go away for a while, lost in a memory, then said, “You asked what happened to me. What made me join Brendan and the others.”

“I’m sorry, Sara. Really. You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”

She turned toward him and ran her hand along the side of his face. “I do want to tell you. I want you to know everything there is to know about me.”

He studied her. “I’m listening.”

It took her a moment to gather herself. “When I was a young girl in Yemen, I was just like Abdal al-Fida. A true believer. I think that’s why it was so easy for me to convince him that we were kindred spirits. I knew that fervor, that hatred. It was a hatred that had been nurtured in me by my own father.” She paused. “But I was female, and sickly, and when my brother Kafir was born all of my father’s hopes for a great soldier of Allah landed on him.

“But Kafir was an unusual child. Intelligent, very wise for his age. And he was a disappointment to my father because he didn’t share our passion. He was always questioning us. Why did we believe the things we did, when a careful reading of the Koran showed that it clearly preached peace?”

Tears filled her eyes now. “My father beat him, but Kafir never gave in. Never compromised his own beliefs. And I found myself coming to admire him for it.

“When I turned seventeen,” she continued, “I got very sick. One of my kidneys failed and the other required regular dialysis, and it was clear to the doctors that I needed a transplant. Neither my father nor my mother were a match, and the thought of going to a thirteen-year-old boy seemed wrong somehow. But Kafir volunteeredinsisted on taking the test-and when the results came back it turned out that he was the perfect donor.

“Two weeks later I had this scar, this gift from my brother. Without him, I wouldn’t be here.”

She paused again, as she wiped her tears with her forearm. “A year went by and both of us had grown strong again, bound together not just by blood, but by flesh as well. Then, on a warm afternoon, Kafir left school early one day. Call it fate or coincidence or simply bad luck, but as he walked past a synagogue a car parked in front of it exploded, taking half the building and my brother along with it.”

“My God,” Jack said.

“No,” Sara told him. “Not God. Not Allah. This was simply the work of men, men like my father whose hatred was so strong that it took the life of an innocent young boy. A boy who had more potential, more nobility, in his small body than any of them would ever understand.”

Jack held her as she sobbed. Her tears were warm and dear against his chest. As much as their lovemaking, that gift of trust was precious.

“Did they find the bombers?” he asked.

Sara collected herself. “No. And that is the sickness of it. It could have been anyone. Rogue Muslims of the same branch or a different branch… Not knowing who had attacked him made me realize that their hatred was my hatred. It didn’t matter who held it. It was wrong.”

“That was a pretty big thought for a teenager to grasp.”

“It wasn’t just a ‘thought,’ Jack. It was a vision — from Allah. What you Christians call an epiphany. I could not shake it.

“My mother had a breakdown and had to be hospitalized. My father was inconsolable, and within the year I knew I had to get away from there.” She paused. “So I moved to London and vowed that I would do whatever I could to keep another Kafir from being lost to the world.”

She was silent then. Jack could feel the emotion draining away, her shoulders relaxing. He wanted to respond, to find the perfect words to soothe her.

But before he could speak, they heard a loud, steady beep coming from the living room.

Faisal’s laptop.

They had to scramble to get dressed before the beeping woke Faisal. They just made it to the living room when he stumbled in and plopped in front of his laptop, punching a key to cut the notifier and examine the results.

It didn’t look as though their lovemaking had bothered him. Jack and Sara shared a secret smile.

That felt good, too.

“There’s another level of encryption,” Faisal said. He was still half asleep and yawning, staring at the computer screen with bleary eyes. “Whoever sent these e-mails didn’t want people like us getting nosy.”

“So Alain was right,” Sara said to Jack. “This could be significant information.”

There were five open e-mails stacked on the screen, each sent to tdl@alliedharborassoc. net, and each with a single line of text. The lines, however, were a jumble of letters and numbers that made no sense: EFDH3054383 gjvaf Nhthfg gjragl Gjragl Uhaqerq UEF uggc://ovg. yl/umfLZ3

Jack looked from the hash to Faisal. “I thought that program was supposed to translate all this stuff.”

“That was the second level of encryption,” Faisal said. “The difficult one. But not to worry, these all look like simple ROT-13 cyphers.”

Jack was clueless. “What’s that?”

“It’s a rudimentary form of code based on the old Caesar cypher. A lot of gamers use it to hide cheat codes and spoilers on Internet forums. They’re extremely easy to crack, which is why the sender used that second level of encryption.”

“So how does it work?” Jack asked.

“You replace each letter by the one located thirteen letters after it in the alphabet. For example, an A becomes an N. I have the lookup table here.”

He punched a key and a small window popped up, showing: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz NOPQRSTUVWXYZABCDEFGHIJKLM nopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklm

“Decryption is a fairly mindless task at this point,” he went on. “The numbers will remain the same. All we need do is transpose the letters and we’ll know what these messages say.”

Faisal had already gone to work, using another computer application to quickly translate the lines. When it was done, he stacked the decryptions on the screen: RSQU3054383 twins August twenty Twenty Hundred HRS http://bit.ly/hzsYM3

Nobody spoke for a long moment. Jack felt his heart begin to race. “I think we’ve just hit pay dirt,” he said to Sara. “You realize what this is, don’t you?”

“I’m not sure what the first two lines are all about,” Sara said, “but that last one’s an Internet address. So I’m guessing these are the date, time, and target of an attack.”

Jack nodded. “The first one looks like a serial number of some kind. Or maybe the ISO number for a shipping container.”

“Could be a shipment from Chilikov, if Haddad was successful.”

“That’s what I was thinking,” Jack said. “But what about this ‘twins’ line? You think it’s a reference to the twin towers? A reminder of their last big hit?”

“The infidels will soon see destruction that will make 9/11 seem like child’s play.”

“It could be that,” Sara said. “It could also be two prongs of an attack, two cells, matching automobiles being used for smuggling-anything. But whatever it means, August twentieth is only three days from now. Saturday night.”

Jack gestured to Faisal. “Can you paste that URL into a browser? I want to see what they have in mind.” He added as an afterthought, “Please?”

Faisal did as he was asked. When he clicked the address, Google Maps came to life on screen, showing a satellite image of San Francisco. Flagged in the middle of it by a big letter A, was one of the city’s best-known landmarks.

The California Palace of the Legion of Honor.

Jack’s mind suddenly flashed on that afternoon at Pagliaci’s, when Danny Pescatori gave Tony a VIP invitation to the museum gala. He’d forgotten about it until now.

And it was scheduled for this Saturday night.

“My God,” he said, his heart kicking up a notch as the realization sank in like a depth charge to the brain. “They’re going after the President.”