The image of the gun in Mahmoud’s waistband flashed in Samir’s mind. He scrambled to find an excuse to avert the confrontation. Then an idea emerged, and he let his shoulders sag. “Must you really?” he asked, feigning a yawn. “I did not sleep well last night, and I’d like to get back to Warrensburg before I’m too tired to drive.”
Markus lowered his clipboard, his face registering genuine concern. He gestured over his shoulder with his pen, pointing at the guard-house. “You know, we just made a fresh pot. And we have those foam cups — the big ones. I’ll have Tom get you one while I check in the back. Follow me.” He turned toward the facility.
The speed at which his excuse had backfired staggered Samir. “I… uh… No, thank you. I don’t drink coffee.”
Markus stopped and turned back, dropping his eyes and fiddling with his papers. “What was I thinking? That’s a Muslim thing isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Samir lied. Then he quickly followed with, “For my mosque, anyway. Look, I’m fine. I just want to get going.”
The border patrol officer raised the clipboard in the air and started leading Samir to the back of the vegetable truck. “And you will, Sammy. As soon as I get a look in the back.”
As Samir followed behind Markus, he ran his hand along the side of the truck and slapped it a couple of times, trying to make it look like a natural, casual thing to do.
Markus stopped at the corner of the box and turned. His free hand came to rest on the grip of his gun. “You sure you’re okay, Sammy?”
Samir’s heart now raced so that he could hear its pounding in his head. He wondered if Markus could hear it too. Sweat formed at his hairline, icy cold in the northern air. He swallowed. “Yes. Of course.”
At the back of the truck, Markus courteously held a flashlight on Samir’s shaking hands while the farmer searched for the right key. “Where’re your gloves, Sammy?”
The phone in the guardhouse rang.
Samir stopped. “Do you need to get that?”
“No. Tom’ll get it. Go ahead.”
“Of course.”
As Samir pushed the key into the padlock, Tom appeared at the guardhouse door, shouting toward the scales. “Phone, boss!”
Markus sighed and shook his head. Then he straightened up and shouted back. “Take a message!”
“Can’t! It’s headquarters, the division chief. Something about the new threat level. He wants to talk to the shift manager. Stat!”
In the midst of their conversation, Samir had a flash of brilliance. He jiggled the key and then huffed dramatically. “It’s stuck. Probably frozen. Happens all the time. Wait here, I have some lock deicer in the cab.”
Markus looked back and forth between Samir and Tom, who was still waving the phone. He shoved the flashlight under his arm, checked a box on the paperwork, and then pulled the documents off the clipboard and handed them to Samir. “We’re good, Sammy. See you tomorrow.”
Five minutes later, Samir’s heart was still pounding. He took a sip of coffee with a shaking hand as he passed a blue-and-white road sign that read WELCOME TO THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.
CHAPTER 64
The sun had risen high above a white overcast sky by the time Samir stopped his truck again. They were in a small parking lot lined with bare oaks, a parking lot that Mahmoud had directed him to. The student was in the passenger seat, digging in his backpack, and Samir hoped that it was not for some form of payment. This was supposed to be a charitable act. His eternity depended on it.
Samir watched with worried eyes as Mahmoud paused his searching to stifle a coughing fit. This was not the first. Mahmoud had grown increasingly ill throughout the journey. Samir patted him on the back. “Are you sure you’re going to be okay?”
Mahmoud looked up from his bag and offered a weak smile. “I am fine, just worn out from the journey across the ocean.”
At that moment Samir was overcome by a coughing fit of his own. He suddenly felt very tired. “Perhaps we are both coming down with something,” he said, wiping his mouth with his sleeve, but when he looked up, Mahmoud was pointing the handgun at him. It now had a suppressor fixed to the barrel.
“Perhaps we are,” said Mahmoud, and fired two shots into Samir’s chest.
Samir could not speak for the pain and shock. He felt like his heart and lungs had exploded. His vision turned gray. Mahmoud faded from sight. From beyond the veil, he heard the young man speaking to him softly, gently.
“You have served Allah well, my friend. So I have spared you the suffering you would have endured before the end. I, however, must bear it a little while longer.”
Then even the gray turned to darkness. Samir knew no more.
Mahmoud laid the driver back in his seat and brushed a hand across his face to close his eyes. Then he pulled the man’s parka closed and zipped it up to hide the bullet wounds. He shut off the engine and lights and tucked the keys into the glove compartment, along with the gun and silencer. He would not need a weapon anymore.
The snow crunched beneath Mahmoud’s feet as he walked toward the wide tangled oaks at the western edge of the lot, only stopping once for another fit of coughing. He would have to bring that under control, he thought, at least for a few more hours. Red spots of blood stained the snow at his feet. Mahmoud kicked and stirred the white powder to cover them up.
He found a short paved path through the trees and emerged on a little two-lane road that separated him from another parking lot and a long brick building. As he crossed the street, backpack slung over his shoulder, he gazed up at the building’s tall octagonal clock tower and smiled. It reminded him of the minarets at home. At its base, next to the arched entrance, was a plaque that read ALBANY-RENSSELAER STATION, AMTRAK, DEPARTURES TO BOSTON, WASHINGTON DC.
CHAPTER 65
Dr. Patricia Heldner sat hunched in a black rolling chair in Romeo Seven’s otherwise stark white medical facility. Her back ached. Her head pounded. She had been there for hours, slowly bringing Scott out of his drug-induced coma.
From the tests she conducted along the way, it appeared the engineer had not lost any cognitive function, though she could not be certain until he was fully awake. There had been clear damage to the nervous system, however. Significant damage. Dr. Scott Stone would likely never walk again.
Moments after Heldner injected the last dose of stimulant into his IV, Scott’s eyes fluttered open. His irises shifted around the room, but his head remained fixed to the pillow, and Heldner wondered if the paralysis was even worse than she thought. “Take it easy, Scott. You’re in the clinic. You’re okay.”
Scott stared at the ceiling. His words were slurred by the drugs and the inevitable cotton mouth of long-term sedation. “The computer virus. I’ve got to tell the team.”
“Yes,” said Heldner, patting his forehead with a cloth. “You were working on the Second Sign Virus, but you need to let that go, now.” She hesitated. “Scott, there’s something I have to—”
Scott’s head came off the pillow and he grabbed her arm. His eyes were wide, urgent, his jaw clenched. “No! I mean Grendel’s virus, the one we all forgot about.”
Just off the Capitol Mall, in a dark room on the ground floor of Health and Human Services, a rack of servers labeled DC Water whirred to life. An alien program that had lain dormant on the system for the last three days awakened and transmitted an executable file, which flashed at the speed of light through five miles of fiber-optic cable to a computer at DC Water’s Blue Plains control station.