Lethal Code

CHAPTER 14

Ruhi was sprawled on the floor of the large, swiftly moving van, surrounded by four bulky, bearded men. None was masked. Neither did they blindfold him. They might as well have announced that they would never be accountable to him for what they had done — or were about to do. They had Flex-Cuffed his hands and ankles, closed the doors, and shut off the world.

Not one of them spoke. After Ruhi’s initial outcry—“What are you doing?”—he quieted, too. What was the point? They were field operatives, doing what they did best: abduction, subduing targets.

The seconds ticked away. He felt the miles adding up. The men leaned against the walls, he presumed. He could not, of course, see them in the complete blackness. But he sensed their breath and body heat receding.

His worst suspicion was that the men hailed from the Mabahith. No sane Saudi wanted to trouble the nation’s secret police. But he, Ruhi Mancur, American and Saudi citizen, had traveled 6,750 miles to put himself into this painful predicament.

You’re a real wunderkind, Ruhi. He shook his head in the darkness. What was I thinking?

He told himself that he’d been caught between a rock and a hard spot, and that he’d experienced the rock, right? In America. Well, this was the hard spot.

They must have Ahmed, too, he thought. First, the son-of-a-bitch cousin leads American intelligence services to my doorstep. Now he’s brought in the Mabahith. Ruhi was no expert on the Saudi secret police, but just about every reasonably educated Saudi knew the Mabahith held people at Ùlaysha Prison, or Al-Ha’ir Prison, both within a few dozen miles of Riyadh.

Mabahith… The very word made him shrink inside. In the furthest reaches of memory, he recalled Deputy Director Holmes saying that he was tougher than he thought. But Ruhi knew better. That dog had scared him nearly senseless back in the States. But now—

The van turned a corner so sharply that Ruhi’s thoughts rolled away as he pressed against one of the men’s legs. Then the vehicle went airborne — or so it seemed — as it started down a steep decline. A hill? Possibly. Riyadh certainly had some. But Ruhi concluded from the smoothness of the descent that they were now speeding into an underground facility.

Moments later, the van slowed and came to a stop. The men stirred. One pressed the flat of his hand on Ruhi’s shoulder, the universal language of “Don’t move.”

The door flew open. Ruhi blinked. The sudden glare of artificial light almost blinded him. In Arabic, a man asked simply if he was Ruhi Mancur.

“It is him,” said the man whose hand had not shifted from Ruhi’s shoulder.

The next thing Ruhi knew, two men grabbed his feet and dragged him across the floor of the van. No one reached to support his upper body. He saw the fall coming, which did nothing to ease the drop to the concrete floor. He managed to cushion the blow partly with his right elbow. But his head crashed hard, and the bright lights above darkened in an instant.

WE’RE TRYING, Holmes texted Lana at the U.S. embassy in Riyadh. Encrypted, without question. BUT WE HAVE TO GO THROUGH CHANNELS. IF WE GO DIRECTLY TO THE MABAHITH, THEY’LL KNOW HE’S WORKING FOR US. AND THEN THEY’LL KNOW WE’RE, ONCE AGAIN, VIOLATING ALL KINDS OF AGREEMENTS NOT TO OPERATE IN THE KINGDOM WITHOUT THEIR APPROVAL. THAT WILL MEAN…

Lana tuned out even as her eyes scanned the rest of the message. She knew what it meant when one of your own fell into the hands of another country’s secret police.

She quickly replied: AGENT ANDERS IS WORKING WITH THEIR MILITARY INTELLIGENCE. CAN SHE FIND A WAY?

It wasn’t as if they weren’t prepared for this kind of contingency. The problem was that in the delicate dance of the spy trade, every situation was unique. There were no formulaic solutions.

Lana walked down to one of the washrooms. She splashed water on her face, wondering what the hell they were doing to Mancur right now. She admired him. Yes, she knew he’d been boxed into a corner by the one-two punch of the NSA and the FBI, but he still could have refused, or been so fearful that they wouldn’t have dared use him. He was a young man for such a weighty mission, and deeply inexperienced. Which is probably the only reason he agreed to take it on.

She stared at her face in the mirror above the basin. Then she shook her head and turned away.

As she exited the fully tiled washroom, replete with mosaics of orchids, she spotted the ambassador, Rick Arpen, coming out of the men’s.

“My office,” he said to her, pointing down the hall. “We need you right now. My aide was just texting you.”

“I was—”

“Right,” he cut her off. “Let’s go.”

Something wasn’t right. By the ambassador’s urgency, it seemed he was clued into the Mancur disaster. But Arpen wasn’t supposed to be in the loop. He needed deniability when he met with the king or any of the royal’s closest advisers.

But Ruhi wasn’t the reason he’d summoned her. She understood that the moment he led her into his private conference room. All of the embassy’s top staff had assembled — and none of them was supposed to know anything about Mancur, either. All looked as tense as guy wires attached to a leaning structure. In a manner of speaking, that’s what they were.

“There’s not a single train running in the United States as of fifteen minutes ago,” Ambassador Arpen told them, taking off his wire-rimmed glasses. He held them out as he spoke. “Our enemy has announced what they call ‘The Final Countdown to Our Total Destruction.’”

“But if it’s just the trains,” a redheaded woman said, “maybe their ‘invisible invasion’ is actually failing.”

“That’s just for today,” the ambassador replied. “They made that clear minutes before the trains stopped. Not even the diesel-powered ones can run with switches and signals down. The enemy says that every day they will execute another catastrophe, each one worse than the day before.”

“Didn’t they say they were going to take down the whole grid at once, like last time?”

“Are you complaining?” Arpen said sharply. He put his glasses back on and glared at the redhead. “They said the panic in our country has been so ‘entertaining’ and so ‘instructive’ to the rest of the world, what with the widespread rioting, shooting, and so forth, that they want to ‘bleed us to death slowly.’ Today, trains. Tomorrow? We don’t know, but the FAA has canceled all flights immediately, not that there’re many takers. The CIA estimates that if the enemy focuses on taking down the major sectors sequentially, our nation could be completely shut down in seventy-two hours. But that’s not the worse news.” Arpen took a deep breath. “The president has just confirmed this to his top staff and communicated it to our embassies around the world. Here it is.”

He held up a sheet of paper. It looked, in that moment, archaic to Lana. Like a diplomatic cable of old. But also more real, more eerie an item than anything in the world of screens and cursors.

“This is top secret. You will not breathe a word of this to anyone. The terrorists have secured access to more than a thousand of our nuclear missiles. That means they have taken control of the warheads and launchpads. And they are, even as I’m talking to you, targeting our cities and those of our closest allies. Our most skilled experts have not found a means to override their commands.”

A gasp came from the redheaded woman. Others showed their horror less demonstrably, with silent shakes of the head or by looking away.

A man with a Santa Claus beard and shocked demeanor spoke up from the other end of the table: “They’ve got control of the circuitry, the computers. I get that. But can’t those missiles be monkey-wrenched, if everything else fails?”

Ambassador Arpen nodded. “Right. Except you have to gain access to them through the most sophisticated control panels in the world. Or what we thought were the most sophisticated control panels in the world. And it’s not like we can bomb those missiles with impunity. Even monkey-wrenching them has to be done with the greatest care. If we can’t get our nuclear engineers inside those silos and other installations, all bets are off in that regard.”

He turned to the rest of his staff around the table. “Look, I also have to tell you that the president has just confirmed that the enemy has taken control of vital U.S. stores of Veepox.”

Lana suppressed a gasp.

“I didn’t even know we had Veepox,” a young man said.

“Of course we have it,” Arpen retorted. “Because we can’t trust others not to have it.” The parity of pain. “There’s no good news here, people. This is asymmetrical warfare, and all the weapons are pointed at us.”

“Even the Veepox?” Lana asked.

“I don’t have confirmation of this, so I hesitate to say, but the enemy claims they are releasing it right now in an unspecified location.”

“This is madness,” the bearded man said.

A stillness followed his words. It was the most frightening silence Lana had ever heard.

The ambassador cleared his throat. “The CDC is, as you might imagine, doing everything it can to detect outbreaks and plans to confine them, but there’s no antidote for Veepox, and the CDC’s travel and communications are terribly hampered.”

Hampered? Lana thought bitterly. Try shattered.

“What about the threat to the children?” asked a young translator with a husband and two young twins in Alexandria, Virginia.

“Despite their threat to do so, there has been no word about any action directly targeting our kids,” the ambassador answered. “So that’s the one bit of good news.”

“But they haven’t been making empty threats,” the translator said.

Arpen merely shook his head.

What else can he do? Lana asked herself.

“This is unbelievable,” said a middle-aged woman in a navy pantsuit.

“It’s all too believable. It’s happening right now,” the ambassador replied.

He urged them to return to their desks. “Keep working. Do what you do best. It’s all we can do.”

Agent Candace Anders sat in her hotel room staring at her computer screen. Her orders were clear enough — and deeply disturbing: Go to Yemen immediately.

WHAT ABOUT RUHI? she texted back.

HE’S NOT GOING ANYWHERE.

SHOULDN’T I STAY IN RIYADH THEN?

NO, IF HE GIVES YOU UP, YOU NEED TO BE OUT OF THE COUNTRY.

The irony stunned her: Candace’s intelligence boss was saying that Yemen, with its widespread lawlessness, would be safer than Saudi Arabia. He was probably right. But what about Ruhi’s safety? She hated leaving him at such a moment. It felt like abandonment of the worst sort.

The communication from the Farm continued: FLY TO NAJRAN. YOU’LL BE MET BY AL JUHANI. Fahim Al Juhani was an operative long active in the region. HE’LL PROVIDE PROPER ATTIRE FOR YOUR JOURNEY AND TAKE YOU OVER THE BORDER.

Flight time was in about an hour.

Move.

Emma looked out her window, wondering aloud if the big blue bus would really come. She’d heard the cyberattackers had shut down the trains and that “More is in store,” according to the excited news anchor she’d been watching.

“They’re coming. Don’t you worry, girl,” Tanesa said. “When William Senior says there’s choir practice, it’s going to take more than some terrorists to stop him.”

“Well, you got to wonder, with everything going—”

Right then Emma stopped talking because the bus rolled up in front of her house.

Despite trying to keep a cool demeanor, Emma was excited. She did love to sing but had always thought choirs were not for girls as hip as her. She had fantasized plenty about standing at a mic singing (well, screaming) obscene angry lyrics at kids dancing (well, bashing into one another) in a seedy nightclub.

But Tanesa had challenged her, saying, “You probably can’t hit the high notes anyway.”

So Emma had let go with a soprano range that visibly startled her caregiver. She’d hit those upper Cs as if she’d minted them.

Which, to be fair, Tanesa had matched without any difficulty at all, then moved down the range with equal aplomb. Emma hadn’t even attempted the lower register.

Tanesa then said, “Emma, your voice has a really pure quality, even if your mind is on your underpants too much.”

That had thrilled Emma. Not the underpants part, but hearing that she had a “pure quality.” It was the first time she didn’t feel bullshitted by a compliment. Tanesa was tough. So when she said Emma could try out for the choir, actually audition for William Sr., some kind of religious man or preacher or pastor, or whatever they called themselves, Emma felt genuinely excited.

“You sure I have to go to church to do this?” she asked Tanesa as they headed out the door to the bus, suddenly nervous about meeting a whole new group of kids, especially the older ones.

“Yes, I’m sure. You want to sing about the Lord Almighty, you don’t get to try out in a shower. You go to His house, and then you thank Him for your God-given talent, because that is what you have.”

“How do you know it’s a Him?”

“I don’t. It’s just what we say. But you can think whatever you want.” Tanesa smiled as they approached the sidewalk.

Emma followed suit, thinking, Wait till Mom hears I’m going to church.

The door to the bus swung open, and they hurried up the steps. Not until it closed did Emma see the gunmen and a big black man tied up and gagged.

“Pastor William!” Tanesa cried out.

Emma looked around, panicked. Men with guns and head scarves stood on both sides of the bus. At least four of them. But the one closest wore a heavy canvas backpack that had a tube with what looked like a trigger sticking out the end.

Crossing the Yemeni border proved painless. Fahim Al Juhani bribed the border guard, as customary as praising Allah, while Candace — in hijab and veil — kept her head down like a good subservient woman. They passed through an opening in the ten-foot sandbagged barrier that divided the two nations and headed south.

Fifteen miles later, in the burning sunlight of the unforgiving desert, they passed several Bedouins on camels. One of them watched their small sedan speed by. He did not take his eyes from the vehicle. It was as if he’d never before seen an automobile.

Moments later, Fahim slowed. Candace looked up. Another Bedouin was crossing the two-lane road with his camel. The animal stopped in the middle of the road. The Bedouin climbed down and took the reins, pulling on them — to no avail.

Fahim looked tense. Candace saw his eyes searching for a way around either side of the big beast, but a culvert ran under the highway right there.

Of all places.

“This doesn’t look good,” Fahim said, wiping his brow.

She saw sweat spots on his keffiyeh. Then she glanced at her watch. “We’re fine, Fahim.” They were headed to Sana, the Yemeni capital and the country’s largest city. “We have time.”

“That’s not what I mean. Why would they be crossing here?”

He slowed to a crawl. The camel driver stopped pulling on the reins, like he was giving up. Then he turned to them with a semiautomatic handgun and started shooting.

Candace watched the horror unfold in what seemed like slow motion. The man was not shooting at them. He was aiming at the tires — and hitting them on the driver’s side. That’s when she realized they were in serious trouble. He must have known the car was bulletproof, so that meant he also knew who they were and why they were wanted. They’d been targeted.

She raised her own semiautomatic and tried to lower the window. Fahim yelled, “No! Keep them up. This is a trap. There’ll be more.”

Fahim tried to speed away on the flat tires. He bumped the camel hard enough to make it bolt, opening up the road. But they were going no more than ten miles an hour.

Off to the right, Candace saw a dual sport motorcycle race from behind a dune. A second appeared on its tail.

They overtook them in seconds, shooting out the tires on the passenger side. Not one of the shooters wasted a bullet on the windows. They were disciplined, which scared her even more.

Fahim rode on rims until a Hummer with camouflage paint pulled across the road a hundred yards ahead of them, blocking any possible path. A man raced around the back of the vehicle, shouldering a rocket launcher. He aimed at the windshield. Another man raised his hand for them to stop.

Fahim braked. Neither of them said a word.

“Get out,” one of the motorcyclists yelled in accented English. “Out! No guns! Hands up!”

Candace was hoping a car or plane, something, would come along. Someone who could stop this. But no one appeared. She guessed that all the traffic on the road had been blocked.

She opened her door, and eased out with her hands up. The heat alone was an assault.

Fahim climbed out from behind the wheel. Both of them were thrown against the car. They faced each other over the hood.

More men poured out of the Hummer. Two of them pulled her belongings from the car. Two more stripped off her hijab and took her gun. She was in jeans and a T-shirt.

No one spoke as they went about their work, plundering the trunk, tearing through their luggage.

She watched a man walk up to Fahim, followed by a guy with a camera. The first one placed his pistol to Fahim’s temple and fired twice.

He crumpled to the pavement, out of Candace’s view. The man with the camera tilted it down, then raised it and pointed the lens at her. She stared into it numbly.

A loud engine approached from her blind side, drawing closer until it stopped. Candace prayed it brought help — a last-minute rescue from friendly forces. But when she turned, her blood ran cold: It was an old truck with an open cargo area crowded with armed jihadists. They jumped to the road and rushed toward her.