Lethal Code

CHAPTER 20

When Lana awoke, she was so groggy that it took several anxious seconds for her to remember where she was: a hangar in the desert. With them. She blinked the blurriness from her eyes and saw the SEALs gathered around a computer screen.

One of them walked over to her. The New Yorker. What was his name? “Gabe” came to her as he asked if she’d like coffee.

“Yes, thanks.”

Always affirmative on that score. She needed to wipe the sleep from her entire system.

He returned with a travel mug. Black. That would do just fine.

She stood, no more steady than a weather vane in a storm, wondering how long she’d slept. A glance at her watch told her almost three hours. More than enough to bring her around for quite a while.

Travis, the commander, threw her a quick smile, then pulled a jacket off a folding chair and told her to have a seat.

“What’s that?” she asked, looking at what appeared to be satellite video of a large crowd surging against a tall cyclone fence. Not the greatest resolution, but she made out heavily armed troops standing by on the other side.

That’s America, she realized before anyone answered. She wondered how she knew so instinctively.

You recognize your own tribe, she told herself. Sometimes as easily as you recognize your own face.

Travis was saying something to her.

“Sorry, I missed that.”

“That’s O’Hare in Chicago,” he repeated. “All flights are canceled, but something like twenty thousand people are down at the airport trying to get out.”

Veepox, she remembered. Deadly. Agonizing. Fiercely contagious. The plague that had been carefully engineered by both the Soviets and her own government must have made it down to Chicago from Minneapolis. The Mall of America had been ground zero for the contagion. What was it about terrorists with all their symbolic targets: World Trade Center? Mall of America?

“They can’t contain that,” she said, thinking it might make it down to Maryland in days. To Emma. She thought better of her words: “Can they?”

“If they hold firm in Chicago, they might be able to stop it,” Travis replied. “They’re saying they can, and that they’ll shoot anyone who breaks through that fence. They actually shot out the tires of an old prop plane that was trying to sneak away. It was rolling down the runway, seconds from liftoff. They’ve got to hold the line there, Lana. Hold the line,” Travis said once again, as if for the benefit of the soldiers on screen.

“How bad is it in Chicago?” she asked him.

“Spreading like crazy. The only thing they can do right now to stop it, so there’s a huge military presence. Army, Marines, National Guard, Coast Guard, and Navy have Lake Michigan. The Air Force has pulled more old fighters from the mothballs and has orders to shoot down anything that flies. They actually took out a hot-air balloon twenty minutes ago.”

Hot-air balloons? About as low-tech as flight got. But about par for the course now.

She thought of her friends in the Windy City. Good times on Rush Street long ago. She wondered if any of them were part of the mob raging at the fence. If her Emma’s life were at stake, she would have been trying to get the hell out of Dodge, too.

Travis clicked on the touch pad, shifting to another satellite view. She wondered what country’s links the SEALs were poaching from. Not the U.S.’s, that was for sure.

The new video was sharper. It showed a truck stop. Empty lot except for a couple of semis and a bus she recognized at once. She’d seen the choir bus only on the day of the first cyberattack, but its rounded shape and blue paint were unmistakable.

“What’s happening to them? Why are you showing me this?”

Travis took her arm. “Holmes says you should know.”

“Know what?” she exploded. “Emma?”

When he didn’t answer immediately, she knew the answer. “What’s she doing there?”

“She joined the choir. She’s okay, Lana.”

“Don’t tell me that. There’s a satellite staring at it for a reason. What is it?”

He explained what had happened. Highlights only.

Oh, God. “Why the hell didn’t someone tell me right away?”

“When, Lana? During the siege at the embassy? Your rescue? Flying out of Riyadh with you hanging out of the chopper? We wanted to make sure you got some sleep. We need you thinking clearly. Now you know everything we know.”

Not everything. He hadn’t told her what kind of bomb was on the bus. She took a breath, and then asked.

“We’re not sure,” Travis replied.

“What are they saying it is?” Those pigs always told you.

“They claim it’s a nuclear bomb. Backpack bomb. We’re trying to confirm that. They’re trying to get it to Times Square.” Travis shook his head. “It’s not going to happen. They’re never getting out of that truck stop.”

Never getting out alive. That’s what you mean.

“So they’ll set it off there.” Lana rose, kicking the chair aside. “Jesus Christ. I should be there.”

Travis jumped up, held her arms, stared right in her eyes. “No, you should be here. I’m going to tell you what Holmes told me. The only way we’re going to shut these fuckers down is by penetrating their codes, by hacking them to death. Do you hear me, Lana? Hack. Them. To. Death.”

“It won’t stop some suicide bomber with a nuke.”

“No, it won’t, but what you don’t know is that they have taken control of the country’s nuclear arsenal. All land-based missiles are now aimed at more than a hundred American cities.”

Lana backed up, almost fell.

“That’s what’s at stake. And we’re pretty damn sure we’re moving you right into the heart of it.”

“How do you know that?”

“We have Mancur waiting. He’s the bait. There’s strong Saudi intelligence.”

“The Saudis!” Lana felt like tearing out her own hair when she realized whom they were depending on.

“Yes. Don’t dismiss it. You’ll be working with Mancur. You think it’s a coincidence that he was picked up and ended up here? Don’t you know Holmes better than that? Once you’re in Sana, it’s you and Mancur. He gets in there, you’ll be twenty-four-seven on your link to him.”

“If they grab Ruhi, they’re going to drag him off and squeeze every last drop of intelligence out of him. How am I supposed to take care of him with a computer link?”

“Because every last drop of intelligence is in the computer code you designed for him. You’ll take control of his computer. Plus, you’ll have your eavesdropping program. You’ll listen. You’ll have an Arabic interpreter, if you need him. Look, Ruhi will be with them, if this plays out. Let them penetrate your firewalls. Let them think they’re smarter. Then spend every second you can looking to penetrate theirs.”

“And if I have to just shut them down, if I can’t finesse it, then Ruhi’s dead.”

“That’s right, he’s dead, and the country survives.”

She nodded somberly, knowing she’d do it to Ruhi. She’d do it to herself. “Look, even getting Ruhi in there is a long shot.”

Travis shook his head, his neck so thick it looked like it could handle the weight of five men. “Mabahith let it leak that Mancur’s firewalls can’t be broken. Whoever’s working this madness will want him. Hell, I’d want him. They’ll want any bit of protection so they can cover every contingency as their countdown finishes. They’re looking at the total annihilation of America. They’re not going to take any chances, and that, Lana, gives us our only chance.”

“But those kids are finished,” she said, gazing at the screen. “There’s nothing I can do to stop them. Why do they even want to blow up New York if they’ve got nukes fastened on every single city?”

“All they’ve done since the start is crank up the hysteria. They want to blow up New York so the rest of the country gets a real clear picture of what they’re in for. They want complete madness in America before they destroy it. Lana, take them down over here and there’s no telling how the crazies on that bus will react. Right now they’re set on having their own Armageddon. They think they have the most powerful force in the universe on their side — God. Show them something different, and maybe they’ll back down. But even if they don’t, there are tens of millions of Emmas whose lives are riding on everything we’re doing.”

Travis let go of her arms. She felt boneless, like she could melt into the floor. He led her back to the chair she’d kicked aside, sat her down.

“How sure are you that we’re moving in on them?” she asked. At that moment, she wanted nothing more than to smash the invisible enemy into the farthest reaches of the universe.

“We’re close enough to smell them. In twenty minutes we’ll be cleared to fly to Yemen. We need you there. All of you, Lana. Your heart, soul, and that incredible intelligence of yours. You want to stop them?” He jabbed his finger at the screen. “Then you have to stop the bastards down in Yemen.”

She stared at the bus. The pictures showed only hints of color, but enough to make a small red spot glow. That’s when she noticed that it was blood on a body. “Who’s that?” She hoped like hell it was one of them.

“The choirmaster. Pastor William Sr. is what all the kids called him. One of the best in the country.”

“I’ve heard of him. You know those kids saved my life.”

“I do know that.”

“So they killed Pastor William?” She shook her head, thinking sorrow never stops.

“Horribly. To make a point.”

About violence, death, the unbending willingness to kill. She understood all that because she felt it too. Wanted it right now as much as she’d ever wanted life itself.

“What do they know about Emma?” she asked.

“They know,” Travis said. “So they’ll keep her alive. They say you’re a spy, so she’s the best chip they have.”

“Don’t ever call my kid a chit again.”

“Sorry. All I’m saying is Emma won’t be the first one to die. That’s just a cold fact.”

Deputy Director Holmes had a series of monitors in his office, all solar powered. One showed Times Square, its big electronic billboards dark for days. No flashy ads for music, software, Broadway shows, or blockbuster movies. Nothing but black screens at the heart of the nation’s entertainment center.

Holmes turned to McGivern and several lesser aides as the Sony screen blazed to life with a crescent moon and star that made New York’s inveterate wanderers look up and take heed. Holmes, too. On the screen and on the street. Those suddenly glimmering lights looked clean and bright and maybe even beautiful — until a voice, deep, resonant, and male, spilled out of unseen speakers used only for emergencies.

“Not again,” Holmes groaned, sitting forward.

“Worshippers of the fallen God, of infidel passions and satanic verses, listen to what we have to say.”

Times Square was not crowded but the booming words drew people running down Broadway to stand in swelling groups, staring upward at the symbol, as if it alone had become animate, the voice they heard so well.

“We are bringing a great gift to your city, to the seat of all sin, to the heart of your foul exports. A gift that will burn you alive. We will make 9/11 look like a child’s game. Nothing that lives will be spared. Not your babies, your children, or your sick.”

News crews raced into the street, working with reserve batteries to shoot the stunned reactions of the growing crowds. Where did all those people come from? Holmes wondered. And they were still coming. It was as if they had been cued for the next stage of the national tragedy, and yet he knew better. He knew that they were desperate for news — good news — and had been waiting days for the lives they had once known to come back to them. Most assuredly, they had not been waiting for this:

“You can try to run now, but your cars have no gas, your buses and trains no fuel. You will never run far enough to escape the flames that will chase you down. And after you burn to ash, you will know the eternal fires of hell. But you will show the rest of the country what awaits them — Judgment Day on earth.”

Those words suddenly lit up the giant billboard. Holmes saw people taking pictures. For what? he wondered. Why in God’s name are they doing that?

“When we are done, every American will be dead; your country will be as much a wasteland as your unforgiven souls.”

People yelled defiant curses at the crescent moon and star once more blazing on the billboard. Then the screen went black, as if heeding their fate, but the voice carried on:

“We have warned you repeatedly. We warn you no more.”

A mushroom cloud burst into brilliant blooming reds and oranges on the giant screen, casting shades of the promised flames on the street and buildings.

“This is good,” Holmes said.

McGivern agreed.

There was no need to spell it out. They all understood: The bus hijackers were still determined — or under orders — to get their bomb to Times Square. The ominous display, the wretched words, meant that rescue teams still had a few hours left to try to stop those children and millions of others from dying.

But the message also meant that the terrorists’ claim of a nuclear bomb on the bus was unlikely to be a bluff.

Ruhi woke up from his nap in the back row of the SUV and saw Sana in the morning’s earliest hours. It loomed before him as they drove across the desert, a pauper’s city with so few lights in the bleak darkness that it might have been abandoned by all who could flee. And perhaps they had, but more than two million people remained, living amid frequent and often long-lasting power outages.

The country was on its knees, running out of oil and water, the two substances that made life in a desert land bearable. Yemen was the mendicant of the Middle East. Little wonder that Al Qaeda drew young men so easily from the ranks of the nation’s disaffected. Yemen had become the chief focus of American antiterrorism efforts, which only served to enflame so many Yemeni: Three different bomb plots against the U.S. had been hatched there, including the infamous — and painfully ineffective—“underwear” bomber. It was as if in the midst of so little, at least some had achieved a desired notoriety by becoming the bête noire of the world’s mightiest nation.

Ruhi would have wagered that out there more plots were unfolding, for how could they not in a country that could manufacture so little else? It was certainly the consensus of two intelligence agencies that the biggest plot in world history had come to life in those desert sands and mountain redoubts. And who was he to question the men who had so ruthlessly taken over his life?

In little more than a week he had gone from director of research for the Natural Resources Defense Council to bait for the CIA, thanks to his supposed computer skills, which had withstood the test of the Mabahith.

“How do you even know that they’ve heard of my so-called skills?” he asked Lennon, seated once more in the front-row passenger seat.

And what was he supposed to do when they abducted him and demanded that he display the power of his knowledge? Die, that’s what. Or worse, not die, he thought immediately. Become, instead, the object of their undying hate.

“We are riddled with Al Qaeda supporters,” Lennon answered him. “We are sure they know you are on a mission for your country, and what other mission would it be at this point? What other mission matters?”

“So your secret organization is banking on your inability to actually keep secrets?” The irony astounded Ruhi.

“Yes, in a word,” Lennon said.

They entered the center of the squalid city, driving through a labyrinth of streets where he imagined men hiding in the darkness, staring at the big SUV with eyes dark as demitasse. They certainly could not roll down these streets unnoticed, even at this hour. Neighborhood Watch had nothing on the surveillance skills of people desperate for life’s necessities — and able to earn them only by diligent observation.

“We’re here,” Lennon announced as the SUV rolled to a stop.

The officers in the middle seat, who had flanked Ruhi for the first part of the journey, climbed out.

Ruhi sensed their reluctance, saw their wary eyes scanning darkness so thick that it might have hidden the sun.

“Now you, let’s go,” Lennon said to him.

Ruhi crawled over the seat and stepped out into the cool air, the desert having exhaled the last of its vast heat.

He saw that the officers, including Lennon, had their guns out but held to their sides discreetly, black barrels against black slacks, no more visible than white shells on blinding beaches. But no one would surprise and take them as easily as Candace had been claimed.

Lennon drew Ruhi into an old building with a dimly lit outer arcade with arabesques carved into the columns he passed. They walked past an elevator that looked eerily like a cage. Five flights of stairs later, Ruhi wondered what had become of his fitness. Had he succumbed to terminal fatigue? He barely kept up with Lennon.

Down a narrow hallway he toiled, catching his breath as he passed under a single bulb, yellow as the mountains they had passed, the ones that had looked so completely lifeless.

Lennon knocked twice on a door. Raising his gun, he turned a brass handle and stepped into a candlelit room. Three men sat on a sofa. One was hooded, but Ruhi would have known his cousin Ahmed anywhere.

The stealth helicopter flew without lights. This time Lana was belted in, not held by Gabe or serenaded by a Springsteen song.

The SEALs were quiet. No joking around. No hard-ass humor. Mission bound. For Lana, that would soon mean sitting in a room linked to a satellite and working on her computer. And if she were extremely lucky — or the shattered intelligence services of the U.S. extraordinarily adept at adjusting to the most extenuating circumstances — she would be in touch with Ruhi Mancur, aka the “bait.” His future looked no brighter than her daughter’s, whose likely fate she could not put aside for more than seconds.

After the blow of learning about Emma, Lana had received her computer from Travis. Shockingly, she had lost track of it during the frantic escape from Riyadh. Even more startling, she’d fallen asleep in the hangar without realizing her loss. But a separate team of SEALs had been assigned to the computer’s rescue. Those three men had traced an electronic locator deep inside the device’s densely constructed core to find the laptop in the hands of a young woman in a head scarf.

“Give it to me,” said a bearded man who resembled the hundreds of other Saudi males taking control of the corridors and offices that been in American hands only minutes before.

Tearfully, the young woman had handed it over.

Lana knew nothing of this, just that her computer was back in her possession, while her only child’s life depended on other men like the SEALs almost seven thousand miles away.

Not only men.

Kalisa Harris drove the tanker truck off I-295. She wore faded Carhartt jeans, Red Wing boots as scuffed as a bootblack’s hands, and a plaid flannel shirt that had been purchased originally at an Eddie Bauer’s in Chicago, then picked up in a Goodwill by the FBI in Atlantic City three months ago. She’d chopped off the sleeves, exposing arms that were toned and tattooed.

A Geiger counter had been installed under her seat. The FBI special agent in charge, the SAC, had instructed her to leave her door open and pull as close to the bus as possible.

“And if they hear the damn thing?” she’d asked, already in character with a female trucker’s seductive CB drawl.

“Appeal to their manhood,” said the SAC in his $2,000 Armani suit. “If they’ve got a nuclear bomb, they should be happy to have it confirmed. Tell them that now we know they’re not bluffing.”

“That’s assuming I get a word in edgewise before they shoot me. How many am I going to be dealing with?” Kalisa had asked, wanting to cut to the chase.

“Four. They’re all in head scarfs playing the macho jihadist, from what we’ve seen and heard. The leader’s been on the radio speaking perfect English, so we’re almost certain he grew up here. Then there’s the guy with the backpack bomb. He’s on the rear seat. Two other gunmen are on board too.”

What did Kalisa Harris have? Her .45 and the go-ahead to use it — if she saw an opening. She’d been field-tested plenty and found to be superb in critical situations. She’d already played out a deadly gamble in a hostage rescue in Cleveland two years ago. Four dead. Not the kids.

“You’re gold-plated,” the director himself once told her.

She preferred Kevlar, for all the good it would do if those boys on the bus decided to end the world as they knew it. Her weapon of choice was strapped to her calf under the billowy Carhartts, chosen for that very reason. She was a crack shot. Turned down a spot on the Olympic team to serve her country in the aftermath of 9/11. No regrets.

But Kalisa Harris was sweating. It was “a hot New Jersey night.” She knew that line from some song somewhere. Plenty humid, too, which wasn’t part of any verse that she’d ever heard. The drive had taken much longer than she’d expected, even with a tow truck clearing away abandoned cars that would have stopped her rig. The added pressure of running late bore down on her like a pile driver.

She used the signal code for a guy named Hamza.

“I’m the driver. I’m about to pull in. This Hamza?” The lion. Which made her think that he’d watched one too many Disney movies growing up.

“This is he.”

“Please tell me if you want me to put the diesel in the underground tank or deliver it directly to the bus.”

If he wanted it pumped from an underground tank, because he feared having the tanker truck close enough for a direct fill, then the Geiger counter in the truck wouldn’t work.

“Pump directly from your truck. It will be quicker,” Hamza replied.

Relieved, she said, “Okay, will do. Can you see me?”

“Are you a woman?”

“That would be a big ten-four. Last time I checked, anyway.”

When he didn’t respond, she clicked again. “Yes, I’m a woman.”

She would have bet that gave him a moment of relief.

“How long is the hose?” he asked.

“I’ve got fifteen feet of it.”

“Use all of it. Get no closer. Whom do you work for?”

Whom? This is he? Son of a bitch speaks without an accent and uses perfect English. Not just brought up here, but probably went to a pricey private school. And this is his payback? His manner would have incensed her, if she’d let it. But of course she nipped that dark bud before it could bloom.

She rolled to a stop, answering him, “Richfield Oil. Garden City, Long Island.”

“I don’t believe you. Stay as far away as you can, or I will shoot two girls. The one who could be your sister, and the white one who’s the daughter of the spy.”

Kill either one and I’m going to want a drop to load of hate on your sorry head.

Kalisa left the engine running and opened the door, pausing when she saw that her headlights were shining on the faces of frightened children on the bus. She had no difficulty reading the rich full lips of a young girl pleading, “Help. Please help.”

I’m here for you, little sister. I’m here.

A second later the first click-click from the Geiger counter sounded, loud as a cathedral bell in the silence of that station.