But that knowledge had never given him any comfort.
Even now they would be doing the same things he was doing. They had seen their targets. They were preparing their explosives, which they would strap to their bodies. And they were preparing their minds for their deaths.
Muhamed had made lists in his mind of the things he would miss. His mother. His father and his brothers. A future in which he would be married and have beautiful sons of his own. Especially a future in which he and his family would live in a free Palestine.
He even allowed certain silly things to occupy his list. But only for a short time. Drinking cha and listening to the men talk while they played dominoes in the sidewalk cafés. Playing soccer with his friends. Someday seeing movies. Tasting ice cream. New clothes, especially white shirts.
Seyoum Noufal came out to the patio, a strange pinched expression on his long sad face. “Muhamed,” he whispered, as if he were afraid that their nearest neighbor several hundred meters away might overhear him.
Muhamed looked up at him, and he knew what he had come out to say. “The message has come?”
“Yes.”
Muhamed turned his gaze back to the vista of the mountains, the details washing out with the gathering dusk.
The Qur’an says that for every people there is a messenger; when their messenger comes, the issue between them is justly determined and they are not wronged.
His messenger had come, and he would not be wronged, for he had a passage to Paradise.
In three days, freshly shaved, the Semtex strapped to his body beneath his schoolboy clothes, he would enter Rocky Mountain High School as a student. At the very same moment others across the country were doing the same thing in similar small-town high schools, he would place himself in the middle of the school and activate the detonator.
It would be a blow against the infidel, worse in horror than 9/11.
Infinitely worse.
Insha’allah.
PART THREE
FORTY-NINE
McGarvey had all but resigned himself to being too late, as the FBI’s Gulfstream executive jet touched down at Washington’s Reagan Airport a few minutes before dawn, and their F/A-18 fighter/interceptor escort peeled off back to its station ten miles south.
He’d come back to the States like this, with a lot of heavy hitters lined up against him, more times than he cared to count. Yet he’d never had the mindset to simply turn his back on a problem and give up. Looking out the window now, the city across the river like an ancient Rome with its marble statues and granite monuments, he could only wonder at his own persistence.
Just run. Turn around and leave. Go. Give it up.
The city had become an armed fortress since the bin Laden tape. Any aircraft operating within the Washington terminal control area was escorted and would be shot out of the sky if the slightest thing seemed wrong. That included official aircraft.
The flight had been long, doubly so because the pair of FBI special agents who’d been sent over to bring him back to the States had refused to answer any of his questions, or allow him to use the aircraft’s comms gear.
But they had handed him a CIA briefing package that had been rushed out to Reagan just before the Bureau plane had taken off for France. The file had been released on Adkins’s signature, but it had obviously been put together by Otto Rencke. They were deferential to him, but their orders had been very specific.
“Whose orders?” McGarvey had asked at one point.
“Mr. Rudolph’s,” one of them said. “Now, sir, maybe we should all try to catch a few z’s.”
McGarvey had worked with Fred Rudolph off and on for the past ten years to narrow the gap between the Bureau and the Agency. Since 9/11 the two agencies had become even closer, especially since McGarvey had taken over as DCI and Rudolph had become the Bureau’s deputy director. Between the two of them they had done good things.
Already in the thirty-six hours since McGarvey had left, the situation on the ground had changed. Coming in on final approach to landing, he’d seen armed personnel carriers or tanks at all the major bridges and highways into the city. In the distance he’d made out even heavier concentrations of military equipment stationed at the White House and the Capitol Building.
According to the slim, leather-bound briefing book, even if al-Quaida’s attack never came, serious damage had already been done. The public’s confidence in Washington’s ability to protect them was almost nil. But instead of cowering in their homes, curtains drawn, lights out, people were at least going about their business. Schools had been closed for only one day before people began escorting their children back to classes. National Guard troops were stationed in front of the bigger schools across the country, though there weren’t nearly enough troops to do an adequate job for even ten percent of the campuses in each state.
Absenteeism in the workforce had spiked the day after bin Laden’s tape, but twenty-four hours later most people had gone back to work. But no one was spending money, and Wall Street had been thrown into a panic, both the DOW and NASDAQ losing nearly thirty percent of their values before computer-driven automatic controls dropped into place.
Though no public announcement was being made, the Fed was estimating that the U.S. economy was losing a billion dollars a day while the nation waited for the shoe to drop.
All of America’s military units and civilian police forces, from the FBI down to the one-cop stations in small towns, had been mobilized.
Nuclear submarines and guided-missile frigates — in port from Newport and Jacksonville on the East Coast to San Diego and Honolulu in the west — recalled their crews, lit off their power plants, and set out to sea, ringing the entire continental United States plus Hawaii and Alaska with a curtain of steel capable of throwing more firepower, nuclear as well as conventional, than had been fired in all sides of all the wars ever fought on the planet.
The entire array of Keyhole, Jupiter, and other eye-in-the-sky satellites in the National Reconnaissance Office’s suite of technical means were trained first on U.S. borders and areas of interests, and then on known or suspected hotbeds of terrorist activity, including training and staging areas in such places as Iran, Syria, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, and even the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and parts of Montana.
No one seemed to remember, or cared to mention, the Pentagon warning shortly after 9/11, when the U.S.-led war on terrorism was being launched, that all of America’s nuclear might had been useless against the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
The briefing book included a summary of a meeting with the president and his security council that had taken place sometime the previous day. Even the Department of Homeland Security, which had raised the threat level to red at the same time bin Laden’s tape had been leaked to the public, admitted to the president and the NSC that stopping an attack by a determined adversary was next to impossible, given the openness of our borders.
“Even Israel, with its stringent security measures, can’t keep its citizens safe,” Homeland Security’s new director, Peter Townsend, reminded the group. All that was left to do, beside doubling-up on air marshals on all flights over U.S. airspace, was to ignore the ACLU and other human rights organizations and take profiling to new heights.
Most terrorist attacks against the U.S. and its interests had been carried out by Arab males between the ages of eighteen and forty-five. “They’re our targets,” said one of Townsend’s deputy assistants, stating the obvious.