Lethal Code

CHAPTER 17

Lana was shocked by the fury of the Saudis pouring over the tall, dun-colored wall. They rose up along the entire length of it. Many shook their fists in triumph and screamed before jumping onto the embassy grounds. Behind them, tall lush palms moved languidly in a mild breeze, their calm appearance an eerie backdrop to the mob’s rage.

She watched a man crumple to the ground upon landing, then grab his lower leg as if he had snapped his ankle. She might have been the only person to notice his agony. The other demonstrators — even those who almost fell on him — raced right by the prone, pained figure.

An explosion turned her attention to a steel reinforced gate at the south end of the compound. In the attack on the U.S. embassy in Tehran, the angry Shiites had only needed to use bolt cutters to open a gate. Here, their bitter and longtime rivals, Sunni Muslims, needed a great deal more — and had just demonstrated their powers of procurement.

In the next few seconds, dozens of demonstrators raced through the bombed gate — and hundreds more pressed forward, forming a great, seemingly endless flood of men.

Ambassador Arpen paled. His hand rose to his throat, as if he already feared the nature of his death.

“Call someone,” he yelled at his executive assistant the moment the stately, middle-age woman poked her head in the door. “We need protection. Where are the Saudi police? This is U.S. soil. Call them!” he bellowed at her.

You can call till your fingers go numb, Lana thought, but the cork is out of a very unsettled bottle. She didn’t think any police force was likely to jam it back in, certainly not in the minutes — maybe just seconds — that embassy personnel had before the wrath of so many Saudis closed down around them.

She was sure the entire compound was in lockdown, but the mob had already blown open a steel gate. Doors would be the proverbial putty after that. The fact that there were bombs showed that this was hardly a spontaneous demonstration, at least by those equipped with the hardware to penetrate sophisticated U.S. security. Lana had no doubt about the backbone of this operation: AQAP.

One protestor carried a large American flag that was almost fully engulfed in flames. Pieces of the Stars and Stripes broke off as he ran. The flaming swatches had to be burning others in the densely packed horde, but no one dared to put the fire out.

A crude figure of Uncle Sam bobbed above the sea of heads, but other than the posters of Lana and a handful of signs proclaiming the U.S. to be the demon incarnate, there were few other displays of printed animus. Maybe AQAP had made it clear that this would not be a polite protest, but a siege. It sure looked like one.

They hate us.

Lana knew there was no mistaking the depth of ill will. And there would be no escaping the anger. On a government-to-government level, there might be friendship, or at least a relationship of convenience. But the Saudi street wants us dead. That last thought had her shaking her head.

She kept her eye on the ambassador, guessing that whatever security could be spared would try to protect him.

He had taken control of the phone himself, screaming into the mouthpiece the same question he’d yelled at his assistant: “Where are the Saudi police?”

Not here, and not likely to show up anytime soon, was all Lana could think as he slammed down the receiver.

The cyberattacks had shifted the balance of world power with precipitous speed. Former friends — or frenemies, more accurately — were backing away from the U.S. as fast as picnickers from a park skunk. It looked like frenemy number one, Saudi Arabia, was even willing to let Americans…

No, she barked at herself. Don’t even think it. But the stubborn impulse to acknowledge a brutal possibility would not ebb, so she finished her sentence with the succinctness of death itself:… be slaughtered.

Three uniformed men rushed in. “You have to leave,” the first said to the ambassador. “Now!” Not that the ambassador showed any reluctance to flee.

Embassy staff and other security officers also crowded into the office, then proceeded to smash the computers, even the ones on the ambassador’s desk, until the hard drives lay in pieces. They used cudgels that might have been kept on hand for precisely that purpose.

Paper files — no doubt just as damning — were hauled from file cabinets and thrown into shiny metal carts. Documents marked “Secret” fluttered to the floor. No one bothered to scoop them up. It looked like a drill they might have rehearsed many times, but terror had taken over.

“Burn them! Burn them!” a senior embassy official yelled. She looked rattled, wet-eyed, but not as shook up as the ambassador. As the three-man security detail escorted him from his office, he shouted at them, “Don’t let them take me. Whatever you do, don’t let them near me.”

None of the officers responded to him.

“Where are we going?” Arpen now shouted, his voice high-pitched with panic.

“Just keep moving, sir,” was the only response.

The ambassador sounded pathetic to Lana, but she trailed his security team closely. She knew she could not, under any circumstances, fall into the hands of AQAP. Only minutes ago a poster of her had been burned, to the cheering approval of the throng now invading the embassy grounds.

The officers moved the ambassador quickly down the hall. He looked back, spotted her, and yelled, “Go away. Burn files! Do something useful. You’re not coming with me.”

A scant second later, she wished she’d followed his order — instead of him: Five scruffy men with beards burst out of the stairwell and headed straight for them.

“Oh, God,” the ambassador cried, echoing Lana’s thoughts for the first time.

The men had their weapons drawn and overwhelmed the three security officers before they could even draw their guns. The five shoved them aside, along with the ambassador, and grabbed Lana.

“U.S. Navy. We’re taking Elkins,” one of the SEALs announced in a deep Texas drawl. “Out of our way.”

A large man gripped her left arm and hauled her down the hall. The commander caught up and took her right. Two of the SEALs worked the point; one covered them from behind.

“SEALs?” Lana asked the new guy on her right. He seemed to be the commander. “Really?”

“We’ve been called a lot worse,” he responded calmly.

“What about me?” yelled the ambassador, running after them.

“Go away,” the SEAL covering their rear yelled at him.

Lana glanced back as the ambassador tried to push past the officer. Bad move. In a flash he was pinned against the wall.

“I mean it, Ambassador Arpen. This isn’t your show.”

The diplomatic food chain had never been clearer.

“We don’t use elevators unless we have to,” said the commander as they swept her into the stairwell. He was as square-jawed as Superman. He even had a cleft in his chin. “Power goes out, and we have to break out of the damn box.”

They were two floors above ground level. Embassy personnel rushed past them, going up the stairs. A woman shouted, “They’re breaking down the front door.”

When Lana paused to look at her, the commander growled, “Don’t stop!”

As they hit the ground floor, one of the two SEALs on point peered into a lobby with a lavishly tiled blue fountain. Before he could close the door, a dozen Saudis ran into view. They spotted him — perhaps the others too — and sprinted toward them. The SEAL coming up the rear released three tear gas canisters. The rest resumed their downward flight.

She heard the gas hissing above the screams and the thunder of pounding footsteps.

“Go, go, go!” the commander growled.

The two men in the lead threw open the door to an underground area that was bigger than any big-box store in Bethesda. It looked like it had been built for parking, but there were no cars that Lana could see, only evenly spaced concrete pillars.

Now they were running. She was lifted off her feet repeatedly. She knew she had never moved this fast and was unlikely to ever again.

That was when the lights went out. She guessed a main power source had been compromised — by a bomb or a malicious pair of hands. Darkness descended quickly as a clamp. But in startlingly fast fashion the SEALs had headlamps lighting their way.

“We’re big bright targets now, men,” the commander drawled, “so go — go — go!”

“Shit! You hear that?” the man on her left muttered in a thick New York accent.

Hear what? Lana couldn’t hear anything — at first. Then, above the SEALs’ heavy footsteps she heard the shouts of men chasing them, countless shoes pummeling concrete.

The SEALs veered left. In seconds, Lana saw that they were headed toward an older Japanese four-wheel-drive van with a notable amount of ground clearance.

“This oughta be fun,” the New Yorker said.

They were fifty feet away from the vehicle. She looked back over her shoulder. She couldn’t see their pursuers in the darkness, but it was definitely an unruly crowd that sounded like it was growing by the second.

They can’t know it’s me. How could they?

But the unwanted answer came to Lana the next moment when she realized that the mob would be looking at five men racing away with a lone woman.

Who else is it going to be?

The van doors were unlocked. One of the SEALs pushed her into the middle row. A hijab was thrown over her. Two SEALs garbed her so fast she wondered if they’d rehearsed those moves, too.

At the same time, the driver started speeding backward. She turned, frightened to find the van hurtling into blackness. But she saw why when the headlights revealed a thick stream of men — more than a hundred, easily — racing at them. They were so close the driver couldn’t have turned around right away without moving the van within easy striking distance of them.

But he can’t keep this up, she thought with another glance back, expecting at any moment to crash into a concrete column or wall.

She reached for her seat belt, but the New Yorker grabbed her hand.

“Uh-uh,” he said. “We don’t get caught in elevators or cars.”

Right then the driver whipped the wheel around. The tires squealed, and the van did a 180-degree turn, rising up—Oh, shit! — on two wheels and barely missing a formidable-looking post.

For a nanosecond she felt suspended in space. Then all of their weight shifted with the momentum, and the van smacked back down on all fours. With another squeal they were off, speeding through the cavernous realm with the headlights on.

The sound of the mob softened. But less than twenty seconds later a solid metal garage door, wide and high enough for a semitruck, appeared in the headlights in front of them. The commander, riding shotgun — and never had that term resonated more starkly for her — pointed a remote and clicked.

The door rose—slowly.

The driver braked till they rolled toward it at five miles per hour.

“They’re still coming,” announced the officer who covered the rear action. “Forty meters.”

The door clanked as it opened, creaky as an old man.

“Who designs these things?” she asked, anguished.

“This isn’t an emergency exit,” the commander replied. She read the tension in his jaw. “This is purely a service entrance, so we’d better hope the caterers, or whatever you people use this thing for, aren’t on the way down.”

“Twenty meters,” the officer in back yelled. “Getting closer. Fifteen.”

“Go, go, go!” the commander said again. “It’ll clear.”

“Ten meters!”

The driver hesitated.

“That was an order. Go, goddamn it!”

The driver shook his head, but floored it. When the van bumped over a raised metal plate, the clearance was so slight that the roof hit the bottom of the rising door. Lana looked up and saw a crease three inches above her head.

Even before they cleared the exit, the commander hit the remote again.

Without an order, the SEALs on either side of her tossed tear gas canisters out of the old vehicle. They rolled toward streams of men slipping under the door.

“They’re picking those things up and throwing them back at us,” reported the officer in the rear seat.

He no sooner spoke than one of the canisters banged down on the roof and bounced noisily off. Enough profanities followed to paint a prison blue.

“How many are there?” asked the commander.

“A helluva lot. That damn door didn’t go down any faster than it went up.”

“Ain’t democracy great,” the New Yorker cracked.

“They’re still slipping through there,” the SEAL behind them added.

“What’s ahead?” Lana asked.

“You tell me,” the commander said to her, gripping his handsome jaw. “Just joking. We hope pure fucking chaos. That’s our favorite medium.”

“You’d love the States right about now, then,” Lana said.

“Been there, done that,” he replied. “And now we’re getting a taste of it right here, aren’t we?”

Lana nodded as daylight opened up ahead.

“Head scarfs, glasses,” the commander ordered.

The SEALs had them on in seconds. The commander and the men on either side of her had prayer beads out, in a fair imitation of piety.

“You are not to say a word, no matter what,” the commander said to her. “Play the meek Muslim woman all the way.”

She nodded again, this time with her head down, assuming the part.

“That’s a good start,” he said. “As of now, you have five brothers.”

In arms, she thought.

They burst into the brilliant Saudi sunlight. Lana suddenly realized that she was perspiring profusely.

It was about to get a lot hotter: A sea of men and boys pounded on the windows, engulfing them in flailing fists. The driver was forced to slow down. The crowd shouted imprecations. She didn’t know the language, but there was no mistaking the mood.

“What are they saying?” she asked, keeping her head bowed.

“That we work for the Americans,” the commander said. “That we’re turncoats.”

“What do they want?”

“They want us to stop, and that’s the one thing we never do in a situation like this.”

The mob pressed in on all sides. The driver now slowed to the speed of a brisk walk: fast enough to display a sense of purpose, but not so fast that he’d run over anyone.

She wondered, though, how long before a cell phone delivered the daunting news: Those are Americans in the van.

Ruhi harbored a faint hope that Candace’s murder had been staged somehow, or rendered through the magic of digital production. He was staring at the darkened screen when Lennon spoke up:

“My men will take you to a shower. You will have clean clothes. Then we will talk. You may eat at that time, too. Do you like coffee?”

What? Ruhi was confused, still not as lucid as he would have liked. Finally, the question registered. “Yeah, sure.” But he didn’t believe a word of what he’d just heard.

The shower was cold, bracing, perhaps by design. It focused his thoughts quickly.

She can’t be dead. Never a religious man, he now found himself pleading to an Almighty as nebulous to him as dark matter itself: Please let her be alive. He remembered her brutal death and thought, Anything but that.

Ruhi turned his attention to his naked body. Lennon’s waterboarding had been far more punishing than the Americans’ torture. Even his dog bite throbbed almost as badly as it had when the local anesthetic wore off at the Farm. He didn’t remember them touching it, but he’d blacked out. Had they probed it, studied the ragged flesh to see if the bite was real?

“Get out of there,” ordered one of the guards outside the stall.

After dressing, the men led him to a cubicle in the same large room in which he’d been tortured, but at the other end — far from the board and bucket.

A plate of falafel and hummus, along with strips of roasted lamb, awaited him at a card table. So did Lennon.

“Go ahead, eat,” he told him. “You will need your strength.”

For what? Ruhi looked back at the board. More of that?

But he said nothing. He didn’t even pause when he thought the food might be poisoned. As long as death came fast.

“You are a mystery to me,” Lennon said after watching Ruhi eat the last of the lamb. “You gave up the name of Elkins, but you never did give up the name of the agent. Your heart made you strong, didn’t it?”

Ruhi didn’t answer, but looked up from his plate, asking, “Was she really killed? Could they have faked it?”

“Believe me, Ruhi, they do not have a little Hollywood studio to fake that kind of crime. But we do. I did not want you dead, so I had my men use video of them threatening her with the sword that they put up on the Web. I wanted you to talk, and you did, in a manner of speaking. I can tell that she means a great deal to you.”

Ruhi filled with the biggest breath of his life. Immensely relieved, he asked if Lennon knew where the jihadists had taken her.

“We’re working on that. Your adopted country is trying to find her, too.”

My adopted country. The barbs were back. But Ruhi didn’t care. People were looking for Candace. There was hope.

“Eat,” Lennon said. “I’m telling you again, you really will need your strength.”

Ruhi helped himself to more hummus as Lennon went on:

“We are on the same side, in the bigger picture. Look, I do not like the way your country operates here, but I am a realist. So is the king. We were not nearly as concerned about Lana Elkins or Candace Anders as we are about AQAP, but if we do not stop them they will cut off her head. They have cut off many heads. On the other hand, we now know that you are not Al Qaeda.”

“I told you that right away.”

“Every suspect does. It means nothing. But I started believing you when you gave us Elkins. As I said, AQAP would not be likely to know that. But I was sure you were not with them when I saw your reaction.”

Ruhi looked over to where he had been shackled, but said nothing.

“AQAP has been getting all the rabble into the streets,” Lennon continued. “They want to take over our country.”

“That’s no secret. I’d know that from reading the Washington Post.”

“But they are very emboldened now, Ruhi. Since the U.S. went down, a lot of bad people are getting bolder, and a lot of us are not happy about that. There has always been an element of Saudi society that, let us say, is a bit unsettled, misguided, if you will. They are… susceptible.”

“Like the ones who attacked us on 9/11?” Ruhi couldn’t resist.

“ ‘Us.’ So America is truly more your country now than your homeland?”

Ruhi nodded. Lennon shook his head, went on:

“So, yes, then, like the men who attacked your country on 9/11. But do you think they would have spared the palace or our king if they had had a similar chance? They want to destroy the monarchy. I doubt you are a monarchist, though, are you, Ruhi?”

He didn’t respond. What he felt about the Saudi royal family would never help him here.

“It does not matter. I know your type. You are too American, too ‘us’ now. You cannot understand your birth country any longer. But I am sure you understand that the devil you know is better than the devil you do not know. That is an Americanism I have always treasured. It is not a simple world, but the monarchy is much better than Al Qaeda or any of the ayatollahs in Tehran. So we are going to let you continue with your mission with one huge condition.”

Here it comes. “Okay, what is it?”

“Every bit of intelligence that you gather will be shared with me — without exception. And you will not divulge any of our agreement to—”

“What agreement?” Ruhi interrupted. “I haven’t agreed to a damn thing.”

“But you will. Let me go on. You will continue to track down those cyberattackers who are destroying your country. We do not want to see America so weak. We get one billion dollars a year in arms from your generous taxpayers just for military aid. We need those fighter jets and tanks, and then there are all those American dollars for our oil. So go save your country. But you, Mr. Ruhi Mancur, are now working for your other country, the one that claimed you first. Or else you will have a very difficult time in the next few days.”

“Are you trying to turn me into a double agent?”

“Strictly speaking, the answer is yes. But you are not, in this case, playing one side against the other. Let me put it this way. Saudi Arabia and the U.S. have a strong common interest at the moment.”

“You’re joking, right? You expect me to report to you? And how come you didn’t grab Ahmed?”

“We tried. We are holding your Uncle Malik for questioning. But your cousin was gone when we arrived, while you were sleeping. Ahmed is a slippery man. We are looking for him everywhere. Your uncle Malik is helping us. We are all Saudi Arabians. We are your family, first and foremost. That is my point. Do not ever forget that.”

Ruhi stared at Lennon, knowing that he himself had passed another test.

“Now I want to ask you about the tools of your trade,” the Mabahith man said. “We have our best people working on your computer at this very moment, and they are so frustrated that they want to beat it with hammers because they cannot get past the firewalls. They say you have the most sophisticated encryption system that they have ever seen. I am not going to ask who did that for you, though I have my suspicions. I am not even going to ask if you do that kind of encryption work yourself, but I think I know that answer, too. We will have ample time later, if you survive, to chat about your computer. But I will tell you that we think it is vital for us to leak information to certain quarters about the superb software that we have discovered in your possession. We think that might help you on your great quest and serve our needs as well.”

“How’s that going to help? You’d be turning me into a target.”

“That is right,” Lennon said, smiling broadly for the first time. “When we let it be known that you have these extraordinary skills, maybe strong enough to save your country from final destruction, they will come looking for you. They would be fools not to, and they are not fools, Ruhi.”

“Hold on. You’re not trying to turn me into a target. You’re trying to turn me into a piece of bait.”

“We already have, Ruhi.” Lennon’s eyes fell to Ruhi’s thigh, the one bearing the dog bite. “We embedded a tracking chip deep in your muscle. Only a highly skilled surgeon can remove it without doing crippling nerve damage and possibly even cutting the femoral artery. The chip is so close to it that you couldn’t pass a blood cell between them.”

“I don’t remember anything like that.” But he did recall staring at the wound in the shower, wondering if it had been tampered with.

“Of course you don’t. You were blacked out long enough for the surgeon to inject a drug to keep you under while he performed the operation. The painkiller will be wearing off soon. You will want these.” He handed Ruhi a bottle of Tylenol 3, just as Ruhi’s minder at the Farm had. “Don’t take too much. You need a clear head more than you need pain relief. Besides, from what I have seen, you handle pain very well.”

Lennon leaned forward and offered a paternal pat to Ruhi’s knee, then added, “We have our computer skills, too. Maybe a little crude at times, but they serve our purposes well. And now, Ruhi, so will you.”