Katie stood blinking, her ears ringing and her brain failing to immediately register the carnage around her. On either side of her, Josh, Jeremy, and Amanda were similarly stunned, but that passed quickly, and then the tears started to flow. The steps were awash in blood and littered with arms and legs and unidentifiable chunks of… who? She recognized no one. Dozens of people lay strewn across the concrete. Some weren’t moving, while others writhed in pain or tried to crawl away or toward loved ones, their mouths moving but no sound coming out.
Then Katie’s ears cleared and she heard the screaming. And sirens.
86
AFTER MAKING SURE all the drapes were closed, they turned on lights around the house, then Jack called Pasternak and had him pull the van into the garage. The doctor walked through the kitchen door and stopped short. “Is that him?”
Jack said, “No, this is Tariq, the Emir’s bodyguard.”
In fact, it had taken ten minutes of talking to simply get Tariq to admit his own name. Beyond that, he’d said nothing. Chavez and Domingo were tossing the rest of the house, but so far it had all the individuality of a builder’s model home. There were no personal touches.
“It appears we just missed the man himself,” Jack said. “Go have a seat in the living room, Doc. We’ll call you.” He joined Clark at the table across from Tariq. They’d bound his hands and ankles with duct tape, then taped his feet to the kitchen-table leg.
“What happened to your hands?” Clark asked.
Tariq took them off the table and put them in his lap. “A fire.”
“I assumed that. How specifically?”
“You invade my home, drag me from my bed. You are not the police. Who are you; what do you want?”
“You know why we’re here,” Jack said. “When did he leave?”
“Who? I live here alone.”
“Shasif Hadi tells us a different story,” Clark said.
At the mention of Hadi’s name, Tariq’s eyes narrowed ever so slightly, then went back to normal.
“Aren’t you interested in how we found Hadi?” Jack asked. “We picked him up in Rio de Janeiro. After the attack on the Paulinia refinery, he was ordered by the Emir to break contact with Ibrahim, Fa’ad, and Ahmed. The Emir had told him the others had betrayed him.”
“That’s not-” Tariq stopped in mid-sentence.
Clark said, “Not true? You’re right. The truth is we broke your crypto. All those onetime pads embedded in the website banners… We broke it, then uploaded a message to Hadi’s storage site of the day, and sent him on the run-right into our laps.” Clark looked at Jack. “It took, what, ten minutes for him to break?”
“Not even. Here’s another piece of news, Tariq: The cargo ship Losan-we put a stop to that, too. The Salim kids are dead, and the Newport News Fire Department is offloading the propane tanks as we speak.”
This time, Tariq couldn’t help himself. “You’re lying!”
“About what part?” Clark asked. “Hadi or Losan?”
“Both.”
“So you admit who you are and that you know the Emir.”
Tariq clasped his hands on the table before him and stared straight ahead.
From the hallway, Ding called, “John, you’re gonna want to see this.”
Clark and Jack found Ding and Dominic in the master bedroom. Sitting atop a chest of drawers was a laptop. Ding said, “We found it in the nightstand.” He hit the return key.
After a few moments, the Emir’s face appeared on the screen. The backdrop was the living room couch and wall. “My name is Saif Rahman Yasin. I am also known as the Emir, and I am the commander of the Umayyad Revolutionary Council. I speak to you today as a devout Muslim and a humble servant and soldier of Allah. By now the world has already witnessed the vengeance of Allah visited upon the infidel nation of America…”
Clark tapped the return button, stopping the video. “That’s the sonofabitch’s last testament.”
Jack asked, “What’s the date on this?”
“Yesterday,” Dominic answered.
“Christ.”
They followed Clark down the hall and back to the dining nook. Clark sat down at the table while everyone else hung back.
“Tariq.”
“What?”
“I want you to tell me where Saif is and what he’s doing. Before you answer, you need to understand the ground rule: You get one chance to answer, and then-”
Tariq stared ahead. “You’re going to kill me? Go ahead; I do not fear death. I’ll be welcomed into paradise as a-”
“We’re not going to kill you, Tariq, but before another hour passes, you’re going to wish you were.”
Tariq turned and looked at Clark. “I’m not afraid.”
Clark regarded him solemnly for a few moments, and then, without taking his eyes off Tariq, said over his shoulder to Ding, “Go fill up the bathtub.”
Clark had never quite understood the debate over whether or not waterboarding was torture. Anyone who’d either been through it or seen it firsthand knew that it was torture. It got results, the validity of which could be ascertained only by a particularly astute interrogator or subsequent intelligence gathering. Clark was blessed with the former attribute but lacked the time and resources for the latter.
Eight minutes, a saturated towel, and exactly thirty-two ounces of water was all it took. Satisfied, Clark rose from his crouched position over the barely conscious and sputtering Tariq and turned to Ding, who stood, arms folded, as he leaned against the bathroom wall.
“Pull the plug,” Clark ordered. “Get him cleaned up and locked down.”
“You buy it, John?”
“Yeah.” Clark checked his watch. “Either way, we’re outta time.”
87
CLARK STRODE back into the kitchen. “Jack, grab the phone book. We need the closest airfield. Commercial helicopter tours will be our best bet.”
“On it.”
“Dom, you’ll drive. Doctor, are you comfortable staying here with him?” Ding was coming down the hall, dragging Tariq behind him. “We’ll be back for you.”
“Sure.”
Jack called, “Paragon Air Helicopter Tours on Highway Two-fifteen. Three miles from here.”
They were out the door in thirty seconds and on the highway in two minutes. Clark used the sat phone to dial The Campus. Rick Bell answered, and Clark said, “I need you, Gerry, and Sam on conference call right now.”
“Hold on.”
Thirty seconds passed. Hendley came on the line. “What’ve you got, John?”
“I’ve got Jack on the line, too. Our guy is gone, left yesterday. A bodyguard was still at the house. They’ve got a bomb, Gerry, probably something below ten kilotons but big enough for what they’ve got planned.”
“Wait, back up? Is this credible?”
“I believe it is. We have to assume it is.”
“Where’d they get it?”
“No idea. Our guy didn’t have that info.”
“Okay, what else?”
“The Emir’s meeting with six other men about a hundred miles north of here. The bodyguard didn’t have the nuts-and-bolts details, but their target is Yucca Mountain.”
“As in the nuclear waste repository?”
“Yep.”
“It’s not even open yet. There’s nothing there.”
“There’s groundwater,” Jack replied.
“Come again?”
“Think of it as an underground nuclear test. Detonate a nuke under five thousand feet of rock and the shock wave goes straight down. The engineers there have already dug storage tunnels down to a thousand feet. The water table is five hundred feet below that. It’s a geological sieve,” Jack explained. “All the radiation from a nuke goes straight down into the aquifers, then to the rest of the southwest. Maybe all the way to the West Coast. We’re talking about thousands of square miles poisoned for the next ten thousand years.”