Ruhi launched himself straight at Ahmed, who simply raised his hand and looked Ruhi in the eye. “I am on your side. I always have been. Time is absolutely essential now. We’re down to less than an hour to stop them.”
Incredibly, Ahmed’s words were not challenged by anyone, not even Candace. In fact, a man named Omar put his arm on Ahmed’s shoulder and said, “It is true.”
“What about the murder of the SEALs?” Ruhi demanded. “And the Mabahith?”
“That was the price we had to pay to get her here,” Ahmed replied calmly, glancing at Lana, who had pulled away from him and was the only other person who looked horrified by what she was hearing.
More than horrified, Lana could scarcely make sense of Ahmed’s words: that he’d casually traded off the lives of all those good men to bring her to the nerve center of the cyberattack. It seemed the cruelest equation of all. But as she stood there, sickened by the brutal logic of Ahmed’s plotting, she also recognized the implacable understanding of war at the heart of his plan.
“Did you get them all?” Ahmed asked a man who stood foremost in the doorway.
“Nobody got away,” he answered.
“Then let’s get her down there quickly.” Ahmed turned back to Lana.
“What about the noise?” she asked him, looking behind her.
“They can’t hear. They’re in a cavern deep underground, and then steel doors have to open when you’re lowered down. Only one person gets in there at a time. That’s part of their security. You’ll be handcuffed, just like they would have done. We’ll try to come in through a ventilation shaft on the far side of the cavern.”
“What do they want from me?” she asked. “And what am I supposed to do? It’s not like they’re going to let me hack their computers.”
“They don’t want anything from you today,” said Omar, speaking rapidly. “They just want you under their control until they launch those missiles. Once they heard you were in Riyadh, they knew you’d been sent to try to stop them. So when Ruhi’s computer ended up in our hands, someone in my agency sabotaged it.” Omar stated that as if it happened every other day. “That’s how they forced your rendezvous with him.”
“So I’m basically dead once they get those missiles launched.”
“No. Just the opposite,” Ahmed replied. “From what I understand, they have plans that go beyond destroying the States. I’ve never been down there, but I know they really want you. So until we can get through that ventilation shaft, listen to what they have to say, but whatever you do, don’t make them want to kill you. We’re going to need you.”
“If we can take control down there,” Omar explained, “we want you to get on their computers and shut them down for good, if that’s at all possible.”
Lana remembered Travis’s words: Hack. Them. To. Death.
Omar looked at his watch. “We’ve got to move.”
All but two of the men rushed deeper into the community center. The pair stayed behind to lead Lana across the floor. They stopped by the edge of a wide hole that she couldn’t see. They warned her not to move. One of them slipped a rock-climbing harness around her. She wondered if it had been scavenged from Westerners scaling peaks in Pakistan or elsewhere in the Himalayas. It was not the kind of gear you’d normally find on a floodplain in the Yemeni desert.
Then the man with the climbing gear clipped a carabiner to the harness and another one to a rope that had hung hidden in the darkness only feet away. He drew her hands around the length, Flex-Cuffing her wrists together.
She didn’t understand the need. It’s not like she was going to let go when they suspended her over the deep emptiness that she sensed below. But then she understood that a real prisoner, knowing she was about to be delivered to torturers and murderers, might undo the harness and hurl herself into the hole. Men steeped in a culture of suicide bombings would be sharply attuned to the self-destructive potential of others.
The pair eased her off the edge. For several seconds she swung over what seemed like a bottomless abyss. She heard the creak of a pulley above her. As the pendulum-like swinging slowed, she felt herself beginning to descend.
Twenty, thirty seconds passed. She counted them out carefully: One-one-thousand, two-one-thousand, three-one-thousand…
When she looked up, only the dimmest outlines of the two men appeared, and she heard nothing but the protest of the pulley. If it suddenly snapped from its bearings, she had no idea how far she would fall.
Fifty seconds passed, then a full minute. Always descending.
Without conscious thought, she began to count anew. One-one-thousand. Perhaps numbers, with their illusion of precision, were the only way she could endure so many unknowns, which included the viability of her life as well as her daughter’s.
The next second her feet touched a metal surface that she could not see, contact that triggered the opening of panels directly beneath her. They parted to what appeared, after so much blackness, to be a blaze of light rising from a cavern at least two acres in size, with rows and rows of computer equipment and what looked like ten thousand miles of wires and cables. She figured every last diode had to be powered by the sun, because nothing less than a powerful array of solar panels could ever generate the juice for such a remote operation.
And there were scores of people. Men in dress shirts, others in ragged jihadist garb. And not just men. Women, too, some wearing slacks, most chadors. An odd mix. They worked at computer stations at least three stories below her. Rows of them. Most paid strict attention to their screens, ignoring her. Or perhaps they’d been ordered to pay no heed to whatever the ceiling revealed.
She scanned the entire space, looking for the ventilation shaft or a means of escape. She saw only the floor, and curved walls and ceiling. It was an arena-size hole in the ground.
Then she saw the man she guessed she would be answering to. He wore no turban, unlike the men waiting for her on the floor below. Nor did he deign to turn to look at her. Large computer screens engulfed him on three sides, and plush chairs and a settee distinguished his large work area from any other.
She looked back at the men waiting right under her, wondering in the final seconds of her descent whether she had been taken captive by Shiites, Sunnis, or Wahhabis, certain only that fundamentalists had her in their grip. Silently, she cursed them all, the fanatics that plagued Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism — every conceivable faith. Why couldn’t they all just pray or chant in peace and leave the less crazed elements of humanity alone?
With that thought she was delivered to their hands. To free her, they cut away the cuffs, then stripped off the harness so efficiently it was as if they had spent their lives bagging peaks instead of people. Another guard kept a gun inches from her head.
Only then did the man at the large computer console turn to Lana, shocking her. He was unmistakably Korean, with bristly black hair, a rectangular face, and almond eyes.
As soon as she saw him, she thought he was probably from the North, and if that were true — and North Koreans were among the real fanatics of cyberterrorism — then she was undoubtedly looking at a veteran of Unit 121, the infamous North Korean cyberwarfare unit. Three thousand strong at last count, which was more than three times the number of cybercounterterror agents in the entire United States.
And we wonder why we’re dropping like flies.
Guards on each side of her, including the one with the gun at her head, guided Lana toward him. The Korean smiled, gesturing to a chair that would force her to face him. Even as she approached — scanning the man’s computers, trying to familiarize herself with them — she could not make immediate sense of this strange alliance. What could jihadists possibly have in common with godless North Koreans? What perverted confluence of desire and ambition could they conceivably share?