“If you turn around or speak even a single word,” said Mr. Priest, “I will have one of your children shot in the stomach. You’re not a field operative and have never served in combat, but I’m sure you’ve heard stories about the degree of pain associated with a stomach wound of that severity. It’s a slow death marked by unimaginable suffering, though I’m sure you will be able to imagine everything.”
Kang was too terrified to even nod.
Mr. Priest smiled. “Very well. Now do as you’re told. I don’t even want to hear you breathing loud. I have important work to do and need to concentrate.”
Twenty minutes later Mr. Priest sat back from the keyboard and turned to Kang.
“Good lord, man, did you just piss your pants? You did. You’re standing in a puddle of it.” Mr. Priest shook his head in disgust. “Some people have no self-respect.”
He went back to his work.
Downloading the files was time-consuming because they were so large and because there were so many of them. There were only twenty-six project files of interest to him — those for which he already had buyers — but Priest wanted to take all of the active R & D files from the last five years. That would confuse the computer forensic techs who would be assigned to determine the purpose of this theft.
To facilitate the theft he’d brought six ultrahigh-capacity external drives and the necessary cables. He also used the military intranet to transfer large portions of it, routing them to 111 dummy mailboxes he’d created over the last three years. Those e-mail addresses recoded everything and bounced them out to hundreds of other e-mail accounts around the globe. At each step the data would be coded again and again until not even a superintrusion computer like the Department of Military Science’s MindReader could tag it as being what it was. Mr. Priest had spent millions to hire the very best hackers to build his network.
That data would eventually come home to Mr. Priest’s private mainframes, the six Titan supercomputers he’d acquired through many removes from a friend in Russia. That computer, Zarathustra, was protected against all forms of invasion. Mr. Priest had even tested that claim by running programs filled with the kinds of keywords that would attract MindReader. After fifteen months of dangling bait in the water, Mr. Priest was convinced Zarathustra was impregnable.
He paused in his work and sniffed, wondering if Kang had gone another step down into personal degradation, but he shook his head. The man’s bowels were still clutched tight. Good; that would be so unpleasant.
When the process was done, Mr. Priest removed the cables and stowed the drives back into his briefcase. Then he removed another external drive, plugged that in, and sat back, rubbing his tired eyes. The screen display on Kang’s desk flashed with a status bar. The four-hundred-gigabyte Trojan horse was uploading quickly. He appreciated the speed and sophistication of Kang’s computers.
Finally Mr. Priest stood, leaving that last drive in place.
He came over and stood directly behind Kang, careful, though, not to step in the puddle of urine around the man’s expensive shoes.
“Listen carefully now, my friend,” he said quietly. “You know the terms of our agreement. You know what will happen if you break your promises. I’m leaving now. You will sit at your desk and wait for my call. You will not touch the external drive that’s plugged into your computer. If you even touch it, I’ll know. I’ll get a signal and so will my field teams. And you don’t want that, now, do you?”
Again, Kang was too terrified to speak.
Mr. Priest patted him on the shoulder.
“Good-bye, Dr. Kang. Here’s hoping the day ends well for both of us.”
CHAPTER SEVENTY-EIGHT
The Mullah sat in his tent and ate chicken and lentils while the men around him argued. This was a difficult meeting. An important one, because these men had brought old hatreds with them to the Mullah’s tent. These were men who had sworn death threats against others seated nearby. No one had been allowed to bring a weapon with them. Only the Mullah’s men had guns. Each of the others had ten hand-picked men outside, seated on the ground under palm trees. They had been instructed to read the same key passages of the Koran and to talk only among themselves. They were told that it would be a great sin against God to break the temporary truce the Mullah had called for. The men obeyed, but they glared their hatred at the others who sat only yards away.
Inside the tent, the Mullah listened to representatives of the Taliban and al-Qaeda. There were Sunnis here seated next to Shiites. There were leaders whose tribal conflicts were numbered in centuries. It was a gathering many of these men and all the rest of the world said was impossible, even unthinkable.
The Mullah had greeted them all as brothers. Seating was arranged by lottery, with no one receiving favored placement. Even the Mullah had drawn a colored stone from a bowl to receive his place.
When he was done eating, the Mullah set aside his food, washed his hands and face. Then he led them all in a carefully chosen prayer, one that had been selected because it did not play into any sectarian ideology but simply worshiped God. When this was done, he asked permission from the group to turn on his laptop computer. They agreed, though some were very cautious and uncertain.
Akbar brought the machine and placed it on a small table beside the Mullah. The old man turned it on and brought up a news update from Houston, Texas. It showed the mountains of rubble of what had once been a hotel a few weeks ago. Towers of work lights had been erected and crews of emergency personnel were picking through the debris while the voice of a reporter said that there were still forty-seven people missing and presumed dead. Rescue workers had found parts of another thirty-two. All of the other dead had long since been removed.
“You see this?” asked the Mullah. “Do you see how much damage has been done to our enemy?”
The others nodded. Many of them eyed him with suspicion or anticipation. The Mullah smiled and placed his hand over the screen.
“I did this,” he said.
There was a moment of dead silence.
Then everyone began yelling. Shouts of praise, harsh denials, accusations, and even threats. The Mullah let it all wash over him. Finally it was his calm lack of response that quieted the tent. They fell silent one by one, and he nodded to each man as they did so.
“Of course you do not believe me,” he said, still smiling. “Why would you? Anyone can point to an event and say, ‘I did that.’ We have in the past, each in our several groups. It is a tool of fear and confusion, and they are both arrows in our quiver.”
No comments, merely silence and a few nods.
“I do not ask that you believe an old man when he makes what appears to be a wild claim. I would never insult you in such a way, my brothers. It would be unseemly.”
A few more nods, but the men seemed to be ready for a trick.
“It is out of my respect for each of you and for all of us in our beliefs that I do not ask for trust but instead offer proof.”
One of the men spoke up at last, a Taliban warlord who had fought at times with and against the Americans and whose father had died fighting the Russians. He said, “What proof is this?”
“Before I show you, my brother, I want to explain why we have not openly declared the attack on Houston to be part of our jihad.” The Mullah gazed around, fixing each man in turn with a serious, penetrating look. “Some of you are here because you are already part of our new caliphate. Others, I believe, have come because you heard the rumors. Speculations in the world media and whispers from the mouths of our own people. You have heard of the Mullah of the Black Tent. You know that I have, because of the grace and guidance of God, directed our forces toward making greater gains and also helped them evade reprisals from our enemies.”