The Identity Mine

XXXVI

Abrahem Nassir hurried out of the back of an unmarked white van that had parked close to the sidewalk alongside a series of lock — ups near a shopping mall, the bright sunshine much like that of his desert home but tinted with the muddy stain of pollution and smog. He wasted no time in crossing the sidewalk and entering the sanctuary offered by lock up number four.

The location, like everything else, had been chosen long in advance. All of the buildings were privately rented and occupied by vehicle repair companies and dry cleaning firms, most of which were yet to open.

‘Salaam, my brother.’

Abrahem’s eyes adjusted to the gloom inside as he saw Tariq emerge from the shadows, the old man’s moustache gray against his dark skin.

‘Salaam,’ Abrahem smiled as they embraced. ‘Your journey was good?’

‘A touch more luxurious than yours, no doubt,’ Tariq replied as he looked the younger man up and down. ‘But then I am not yet a wanted man.’

‘Give it time, my friend. Soon they will be looking for you too.’

‘Which is why we must hurry,’ Tariq agreed. ‘Your work cannot be completed unless you remain in the shadows until the very last moment.’

Abrahem looked past Tariq to where a series of laptop computers were arrayed across a table, all of them switched on and their screens glowing in the otherwise dark room.

‘Is it done?’ he asked.

Behind the laptops sat two men, both of them typing quietly, their brows furrowed and their faces illuminated by the unnatural glow of the screens.

‘They are completing the task as we speak,’ Tariq replied. ‘They have done well, my friend. Soon we will have complete control.’

Abrahem moved closer and watched as the men worked feverishly, lines of code spilling like digital rain down the screens.

Abrahem had been fortunate enough to have been educated in Saudi Arabia at a private school funded by his late father. There he had learned much about the rest of the world and the technological wonders it held. Although he himself was by no means computer literate, in the sense that he could not program computers or write code, he knew enough to understand than in the digital age a mastery of computers was the key to true power. Vast amounts of data crossed the United States every single second of every day, held its infrastructure together, allowed people to communicate across immense distances without delay. The networks now installed allowed video conferencing and satellite links to the other side of the globe, and all of it was controlled by computers.

‘This is the future,’ Tariq said as he moved alongside his young companion. ‘No more bullets and bombs, no more thugs flying airplanes into buildings. With this technology we can strike at the very heart of our enemy with surgical precision, just as the Americans boast that they can do in our homelands.’

Abrahem nodded. He recalled his rage, boiling even now just out of sight beneath the lid he kept upon it, as he watched the images of American jets sending missiles with impossible accuracy into homes in Iraq, killing militants but also women and children. The Americans liked to play down how many civilian casualties had died in the Iraq wars, liked to pretend that their invasions had been clinically precise, but Abrahem knew that the figure was in the hundreds of thousands. Entire villages had been wiped out, generations of Iraqis lost to the hammer of America’s “shock and awe” campaign, often bitterly referred to as “shocking gore” by a media largely opposed to the invasions.

In return, the Islamist militias that had risen up in the crumbling ruins left behind when the Americans had withdrawn from Iraq had then begun an equally barbaric campaign of their own to grab power in the provinces. With Sharia Law their banner, they had murdered and tortured and maimed and oppressed with all of the fury their firebrand mullahs could wield, ending the lives of countless more of Iraq’s sons and daughters, until now all that remained was the battered, sun scorched remains of what had once been a strong and united country.

And all of it could be blamed upon one individual.

Now, Abrahem could strike back against that individual in a way that nobody had ever seen before. He smiled to himself, his fury momentarily satisfied as he thought of the carnage that he would cause so very soon. But in this horrendous act of international terrorism, unlike that of America’s, there would be no significant civilian casualties but for those who stood directly in his way. Their suffering would come in a different form, the psychological terror that their country was not just unsafe but that their very minds and bodies were no longer their own, that anybody could be controlled.

America had laid waste to Iraq. Now one Iraqi would lay waste to the American Dream forever.

‘How long before the networks are complete?’ he asked, eager to begin.

‘They will be at work for another hour,’ Tariq informed him, ‘and then it will be done. We will have control and nobody will know it.’

The screens to Abrahem’s right showed not data streams but maps of Washington DC, and on those maps were points of light that denoted areas known as “dead zones”, one of which they were occupying at that very moment. The dead zones were littered across the city and indeed every city in the western world, and Abrahem had selected two of them in Washington DC: Bethesda, and an area just to the north of Whitehaven Parkway on DC’s west side, close to the Potomac.

‘The direct links can be established after leaving the zones?’ Abrahem asked.

‘All is in hand,’ Tariq assured him. ‘Right now, all we have to do is ensure that the Americans are headed in precisely the wrong direction just when we want them to be. Before they know what they have done it will already be over, and every American in the country will experience a shock and awe all of their own as they watch their televisions and cower. The whole world will know what you have done my friend, for every single one of them will be watching it for years to come.’

Abrahem clenched his fists as a grim smile spread across his face and his dark eyes reflected the glow of the screens.

‘Where is she?’

‘Just wait a moment!’

The interior of the van was getting hotter by the minute, the sunshine outside flaring through the windscreen as the two technicians sat in front of their screens in the rear of the van and tapped commands furiously into their computers.

Jiang Sin stood behind the technicians with his arms folded as they worked, the van rocking as it drove along a road to the north of America’s Capitol. Jiang was a tall man, a former soldier now employed by the People’s Republic of China’s Ministry of State Security. A patriot, he found himself on enemy soil on a mission that he would never have believed he would undertake, America’s population toiling at their desks and offices and under the burning sunshine, unaware of the catastrophe mere hours away.

‘There, we have her!’

Jiang Sin reached out to steady himself on the back of the technicians’ chairs as he leaned forward and peered at an unsteady image on one of the screens.

It looked as though somebody were filming themselves driving with a hand — held camera, the image jerking this way and that, but Jiang Sin could see that she was sitting in the passenger seat of a vehicle and talking to somebody, presumably the driver.

‘Is that definitely her?’

‘Yes,’ said the technician. ‘We have software monitoring her vocal patterns. It’s her.’

Jiang Sin gripped the back of the seats as he listened to the woman’s voice.

‘… we’re not going to track these people down quickly enough if we go through the normal chain of command. We need to go in real hard and figure out where he is, fast, then make our move.’

A male voice replied from somewhere alongside her.

‘We’re not supposed to even be on the case, remember? If we make a big show of ourselves down here we’ll be the ones in custody.’

‘I don’t care,’ came the woman’s reply. ‘I want Nassir.’

Jiang Chen finally allowed a smile to creep onto his features as he patted the shoulders of the two men before him.

‘Maintain a close watch on her and keep us within a quarter mile of wherever they go, understood?’

‘Yes sir!’

Jiang Chen pulled a cell phone from his pocket and speed dialed a number. As soon as the line connected, he spoke quickly.

‘We have them. Stay close to us and be ready to move as soon as I say so.’