“Amundsen what?” Lennon asked.
“The U.S. camp in Antarctica. Look, it doesn’t matter. It’s not working here. Did your people sabotage this?” Then he looked at Ahmed, sitting on the couch across from him, pious in his head scarf. Or you?
Lennon, so confident on his own soil, turned away for the first time. Ruhi wondered if his most recent torturer just realized that Al Qaeda’s penetration of his agency might have gone deeper than he’d thought. It was one thing to leak information that a U.S. spy in your custody had a computer so powerful that both the man and his weapon might be worth scooping up — if you were launching cyberattacks to murder America. But it was quite another matter if Al Qaeda operatives or sympathizers in your agency had sabotaged the network program most critical to the mission’s success.
“They wouldn’t have to be super techs to just screw it up,” Ruhi said. “Did you get anywhere near this?” he asked Ahmed.
“Ruhi, how can you accuse me of such a crime?” Ahmed spoke soothingly, in such a practiced voice that Ruhi knew his cousin had used it many times before to try to deflect suspicion. “I would—”
“How can I accuse you?” Ruhi fired back. “I’m here because of you.”
Ahmed shook his head, looking offended. “No, Ruhi, we were both moved like chess pieces. I assure you, this is the first time I have ever seen your computer.”
Lennon nodded. But of course he would agree if the two were in cahoots.
What a hall of mirrors.
What could he possibly make of his cousin’s double-agent claims? Though they might explain why Ahmed escaped from his family’s home on the night Lennon nabbed Ruhi — and then turned him into a double agent.
But if Ahmed really was working both sides of the battle, he was playing a much more treacherous game than Ruhi, if that were even possible. That’s because Ahmed was answering to Al Qaeda and the Mabahith, two bitterly opposed forces — notwithstanding the latter’s traitors — while Ruhi was providing information to U.S. intelligence and the Saudis, who shared a common interest in stopping the cyberattacks.
“Your master technicians,” Ruhi said to Lennon in a lacerating voice, “probably fucked it up when they were trying to get past the firewalls. So if I’m grabbed now, do you know what that means? This thing”—he almost pounded the laptop—“won’t perform, but they won’t believe me, so they’ll torture me to try to get me to do the impossible. And then there’ll be no way to stop the destruction of my country.”
Lana walked down narrow concrete-block stairs lit by bluish light, entering an extensive bunker nestled below the drifting sands of the Arabian Desert. It was carved out of the denser earth below. She found the walls, tinted gold and orange, almost beautiful, but crumbly to the touch.
Before she could take more than a breath, the CIA station chief, a squat man so pale that he might never have emerged from the underground labyrinth that he called home for weeks at a time, handed her a document. He did the same for all the SEALs.
“Just sign them. ‘Sheep-dipping’ time.”
Turning each of them into CIA functionaries. That would be to abide, on paper at least, with both U.S. and foreign covenants. Thus, with the stroke of a pen the SEALs and Lana became employees of the agency.
Lana signed under shadowy light, hearing the low hum of generators.
My God, she thought as she settled at a desk with her computer, there’s even an espresso maker. But as she turned on her laptop, she realized that what the bunker did not provide, most assuredly, was any connection to Ruhi Mancur’s device, a veritable clone of her own computer. She scrambled for another minute to try to find a link, looking up at the chief in exasperation.
“I can link to ISPs in five European countries. What I can’t do is link to Mancur. Do we even know whether he’s in Sana?”
The chief, laying the signed documents on a cabinet, affirmed that Mancur was in the city.
“How far away is he?” Lana had little sense of distance down there. From the bird, Sana had appeared large, mushrooming into the surrounding sands with what looked like a dense maze of arteries radiating from the city’s heart.
“Forty-five, fifty minutes at this time of day.”
“Either you move him here or you move me there, but we have to get his computer in my hands so I can work on it.” All along the plan had been for her to take control of his laptop, even if she were hundreds of miles from him. But her inability to link to it made that impossible, so now she’d have to get her hands on it to enable her to have remote access later.
The station chief wiped his lower face so forcefully that he peeled his lower lip open. Then, in an even more unflattering move, he tugged on his ample wattle, repeating the tug twice more. “There are huge risks in taking you into Sana.” He worked his wattle again, adding, “But it’s an even bigger roll of the dice to extract him. We don’t want to do that until he’s taken.”
Bizarre, she thought: The plan to bait the attackers might be too successful too soon.
“You’ve got them,” the chief said to her, glancing at the SEALs. “So you get moving.”
She and the SEALs dashed back up the stairs into the dawn.
“We’re not going into the city,” Travis had reminded her with evident relief on the chopper.
Yes, we are, Lana said to herself now. Right into the Sana cesspool.
Emma could see most of the kids in the bus, plus the hijackers, now that the tanker truck’s headlights were pouring through the windows. She’d seen Hamza’s animated face and heard his back-and-forth with the female driver. Why would they send a woman? All Emma could figure was that whoever was trying to save them didn’t want the terrorists to freak out by having some macho guy show up. But for that very reason, she wished a dude like Daniel Craig’s 007 had come to the rescue. Her mom’s big crush, though she’d never admit it. But Emma had caught her watching that movie for the third time the day before the first cyberattack.
She wondered what her mom was doing right now. Probably scared to death, if she knew her daughter was on this bus. But her mother had always been trying to get her to join some kind of activity.
So I did, she thought. Great timing, huh, Mom? Sorry.
Emma meant it, too, stripped down now to longing and love and a deep desire to throw her arms around her mother again.
Whatever her mom was doing had to be better than this, right? Sitting on a bus with a suicide bomber holding a frickin’ nuke.
Emma looked back at the guy with the backpack and trigger in his hand. He’d fallen asleep. Thank God. His head hung forward, chin to chest, and his hands—
Jesus H. Christ. His finger was resting on the trigger.
“Hamza,” she said as respectfully as possible.
He’d moved down the bus steps and poked his head out an inch or two, staring intently as the truck driver set up to fill the tank.
“Hamza, sir?” she called out louder.
His eyes turned to her, feasted on her. A wide, dark, murderous gaze. He hauled himself up into the bus proper and headed toward her, pulling out the filleting knife.
“Trying to distract me? What kind of plan do you have, spy’s daughter?” He raised the knife. He’d already cut her neck.
“No plan,” she pleaded. “Look!” She pointed to the bomber.
Hamza yelped. Emma heard the panic catch in his throat. He rushed past her.