I was ready to get out of this hospital but didn’t know where Jake or our car might be so I punched in his number and caught up with him at the sheriff’s department in Woodborough. After I convinced him I didn’t need to stay here, he agreed to pick me up in fifteen minutes to take me back to the motel. The doctors and nurses might not be happy that I was leaving, but I could deal with that.
Tessa was annoyed that Sean hadn’t called her while she was at Lindberg’s to inform her that Patrick was in the hospital. “I waited because I thought I should tell you in person,” he explained. “I didn’t want you to worry.”
“You sound like your brother.”
He was quiet and she wondered if he had taken that to somehow be an insult.
“Seriously, though,” she said, “he’s okay?” She was uptight enough, and the pickup’s gun rack right behind her head with two guns for killing wildlife wasn’t helping her calm down any.
“From what everyone’s telling me, yes.”
She pulled out her cell phone, but Sean warned her, “I’m not sure we should wake him up. Before I picked you up, they told me he was sleeping.”
She hesitated.
Then set it down.
Both of her parents were gone, and she couldn’t even imagine the thought of losing Patrick too. If he died, that would totally put her over the edge. No question about it.
Death. Too much death.
She found her thoughts returning to her dad’s funeral in June up in the mountains of Wyoming.
After everyone else had left, she and Patrick had stood alone and silent by the graveside. After a while she’d whispered to him, “They say we’re never really gone as long as there’s someone to remember us.”
A moment passed. “Maybe that’s what makes us human. What makes us unique from animals.”
“What’s that? Remembering the dead?” Figuring out what separates humans from other animals had been sort of a big question she was dealing with at the time.
“No, loving them enough to remember them.”
She’d stared at the gravestone and considered his words. The broad sky stretched above her, clouds covering the sun.
“I’ll always remember him,” she said.
“So will I.”
Then Patrick put his arm around her shoulder and they stood there together quietly for a long time as the sun cut through a cloud and caught hold of a mountain range on the horizon.
And then despite herself she’d cried, and Patrick had wiped her tears away.
“Tessa?” It was Sean. “Are you all right?”
It took her a couple seconds to mentally refocus. “How far is it? I need to talk to him.”
“Another thirty miles.”
“Well, just get us there, then.” Yes, her voice was sharp with impatience but it was mostly filled with concern. She hoped Sean could tell the difference.
“Don’t worry.” He stared determinedly at the road ahead of them. “I will.”
38
CIA Detainment Facility 17
Cairo, Egypt
4:24 a.m. Eastern European Time
Terry Manoji sat in his wheelchair in the hospital room in which he’d been confined since the CIA transferred him to this location sometime last year.
Because of the coma he’d been in for eight months, time was a blur, but for the last few months he’d managed to get a handle on the passage of days, because nine weeks ago one of the nurses carelessly brought her Blackberry into his room. He was in bed when he saw it poking out of her pocket, so he sat up, swung his legs from the bed as if he were going to get into his chair, but then forced himself to lose his balance and topple to the floor.
She’d helped him back into bed.
And hadn’t noticed what he had hidden in his hand.
She left soon afterward without realizing that she didn’t have her phone with her.
Although flush toilets weren’t common in the Middle East, because of his condition it was a necessity for him to have one.
There were no surveillance cameras in his bathroom.
Which worked in his favor.
Once in the bathroom, he used the phone to get online.
To get into the phone company’s site he used a little port redirection and quickly gained administrator privileges, then created a back channel so it’d be quicker getting in again later if he lost the connection or when the nurse cancelled her contract after discovering her phone was gone.
Once in their system, he blocked the ability to trace future calls made to and from this number and climbed through the company’s primitive firewalls to get to the central processing facility. After tracing the GPS signal to find out where exactly he was, he put a stop on the GPS tracking. If the nurse or agents tried to trace it, as they undoubtably would, the phone would simply appear to be turned off.
He was online.
Invisible and untraceable.
He was home.
The internet is one big playground, and wherever there’s WiFi or a cell phone connection, a good hacker can jump on the wire, and once he’s in, he’s in. And he can go anywhere.
An hour later, when his interrogators came to search the room for the phone, he’d already hidden it. They meticulously scoured both his room and the attached bathroom but found nothing because before they’d arrived he’d used two discarded latex gloves, tied off, to create a double-layer waterproof bag, and then placed the cell phone in the toilet bowl, shoved back in the pipe so that it wasn’t visible.
He knew he was taking a risk that someone might flush while they were searching the room, but thankfully they hadn’t been that thorough or that careless.
Conserving the phone’s batteries had been a concern at first. The electrical current in Egypt would be 220 VAC, which would fry the phone. However, by the make and model of the two video cameras monitoring his room he knew that they were not infrared.
So he could work at night.
An LED lamp that he didn’t use beside his bed had a DC converter at the plug and, by scraping off the wire’s insulation, he’d managed to create a crude way of recharging the phone by splicing the cord and using a bandage from his arm to hold the battery in place against the exposed wires.
It wasn’t ideal by any means, and he had to be careful how much time he spent in the bathroom on the cell, but he found that charging the phone two to three times a week during the night was enough to get him through.
Then, on November 18, through his online correspondence, he’d arranged everything with his partner after helping clear the way for her escape from prison. Then he’d contacted Abdul Razzaq Muhammad to put his own escape plan into motion.
Since he was surveilled so closely, Terry was limited in what he could do from this room, but during his visits to the bathroom, he’d sent his partner detailed instructions on how to access the back doors he’d left in the military’s top secret JWICS network back when he was still in the employ of the NSA.
And yes, also in the employ of the Chinese government.
Which was actually the reason why, according to his interrogators, the CIA had pressured the San Diego Police Department to announce that he’d died while in custody.
“As far as the rest of the world is concerned, you’re dead and buried,” the man had told him. “So we have nothing to lose keeping you here as long as we want.” Then he’d leaned forward. “Or shortening your stay if it comes to that.”
And so, Terry fed the interrogators just enough information each week about Chinese hacking protocols to keep them coming back.
Now he reviewed his plan.
A distraction layered inside a distraction.
The deal with Abdul Razzaq Muhammad had been simple-Terry would take out the target of Abdul’s choice and Abdul would transfer a rather sizable amount of money to an offshore account and send a team of militants to free him.
According to Air Force Doctrine Document 3-12, or AFDD 3-12, released back on October 26, 2010, there are millions of attempts to hack into the US military’s computers every day. And, as Terry knew all too well, that number had only continued to rise since then.