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
Romeo Seven, Joint Base Andrews
Washington, DC
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.
Once resident on the target computer, the file executed, running two subroutines in quick succession. The first presented a set of phony user commands to the Windows-based program that manages DC Water’s analog industrial-control system. It initiated a cascading shutdown of every pump in the network, opening the fail-safe valves and linking the whole system for gravity feed from the highest pump station at Salem Park. The second subroutine destroyed the management program, locking DC Water’s maintenance personnel out of the system.
At 4:25 P.M. Eastern Standard Time, the first DC Water technician discovered the change in pump status. At 4:34, after realizing he was permanently locked out of the system, he contacted his supervisor. Thus, by 4:52, when Agent Celine Jameson called on behalf of the FBI to suggest the possibility of an attack on the city’s water supply, DC Water’s chief of maintenance had a wide-open mind.
Scott had put it all together during his flight back from London. The fragments of code he found on Grendel’s servers were not the type of code that would have crashed the London Stock Exchange. Grendel’s code was a Stuxnet knockoff, designed to attack an industrial system like a power grid or a pump network. The engineer realized that was why Kattan had appeared at the site of the suicide bombing, dressed as a first responder. The front door security at Health and Human Services had been decimated by the attack, and Kattan used the opening to access DC Water’s unhackable servers directly, the same trick he used at Paternoster Square to access the stock exchange.
Never one to present a theory without hard data, Scott wanted to compare the Second Sign Virus with Grendel’s code before briefing the team. Then the neurotoxin hit him and he never got the chance.
As the sun dipped down into the Potomac, CJ and seven members of the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team raced across the treetops in a dark blue Bell 412 helicopter, heading for the Salem Park pump station. All of them, including CJ, were dressed in black tactical gear and helmets. Walker and Heldner were en route as well, with a CDC hazmat van, but they would take at least forty minutes to reach the site.
CJ checked the smartscreen integrated into the sleeve of her tactical jacket. Infrared satellite imagery showed a single individual kneeling next to the chain-link fence that separated the pump station from the high school baseball field to the south. He appeared to be cutting through the wire. She unstrapped from her seat and stepped up between th
e pilots. “Step it up, gentlemen! This is about to be a wasted trip!”
As the pump-house tower appeared on the darkening northern horizon, the figure in the infrared video broke through the fence. CJ tapped the hostage rescue team sharpshooter on the shoulder and pointed to a steel-tube bench mounted on the helicopter skid outside the door. “Get ready!”
The pump station came up fast. As they passed the fence, the pilot turned and slid the chopper sideways while the copilot activated the powerful spotlight mounted on a turret under the nose. The blue-white beam fell on a scrawny individual in a parka and blue jeans. He carried a black backpack and walked at a plodding pace toward the station’s huge open reservoir. He paused in midstep when the light came on. Then he kept going.
CJ grabbed the microphone for the chopper’s PA system. “Stop where you are and lay down on the ground.”
The individual ignored the command, now only twenty meters from the reservoir, a short sprint away. He kept walking.
“Stop!” CJ repeated. “Lay down on the ground. If you do not comply, we will open fire.”
When the man still continued, CJ turned to the sharpshooter. He was seated on the helicopter floor with his feet on the external bench and his Remington M40 up and ready. “Can you take him down without hitting the backpack?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Then do it.”
“Ma’am, if I shoot now, I’ll be shooting him in the back,” argued the HRT man.
“His back is to us because he’s about to dump a bioweapon in that reservoir. Take the shot!”
An earsplitting crack rang out over the steady chop of the rotor blades. The terrorist went down, face first in the grass less than ten meters from the low concrete rise of the southern reservoir wall.
“Let’s go!” shouted CJ.
Unable to land because of the fence line, the chopper pilot hovered twenty feet off the grass. The HRT men unfurled three black ropes from each side, and six of them fast-roped down while CJ and the sharpshooter covered the unmoving terrorist. Once the rest were down and covering the suspect with their MP5s, the other two followed. On the ground, CJ signaled the sharpshooter and another team member to follow her. The rest of the team spread out to look for additional threats.
The suspect was alive, groaning, groping for the backpack lying in front of him. CJ nudged it away with her boot. When she did, the backpack felt light, empty. She picked it up with a gloved hand and pulled open the pockets one by one. There was no canister of virus, not even a glass vial. When she turned the bag upside down, nothing fell out but a worn Quran.
“Ma’am?” The sharpshooter’s face was stricken with guilt—worry that he had just shot a civilian who had done nothing but cut through a fence.
Refusing to accept that, CJ knelt over the suspect and rolled him over. For the first time, she got a good look at him. His face and arms were covered in boils, his eyes sunken and bloodshot. While she stared at him in shock, he gripped her arm with a cold hand and pulled himself up to a sitting position, closer to her face. “I am the third and final sign,” he said with a malevolent grin. “Now comes the Mahdi.” Then his body convulsed and a spout of blood erupted from his lips.
CHAPTER 66
Paphos International Airport, Cyprus
See anything?”
“Not yet.”
Nick and Drake stood on an empty white beach a hundred meters south of the CIA refueling point, scanning the black waves for their transport to Israel. They had been on Cyprus for hours. The wait was maddening.
Unlike Farnborough, the Agency hangar on Cyprus was as rusty and dilapidated on the inside as it was on the outside, nothing but four corrugated steel walls, a big rubber fuel bladder, and a drywall bathroom with a reeking, stopped-up toilet. When they first arrived, Nick had found a quiet corner of the hangar—as far from the bathroom as possible—and made several calls. He tried to contact his family, but his efforts were futile. Katy had no phone. The older Baron was not answering his cell. Why should he, after the way Nick had left things?
Nick left messages on his dad’s phone, at both hotel rooms, and the front desk. Never once did he get an actual human being on the line.
After his attempts at direct contact failed, Nick tried another tack. He called Walker and convinced him to try his contact at the Mossad. The result was disappointing. The colonel refused to tell the Israeli that a nuke was entering his country. Such a warning, if incorrect, had massive consequences, and the Triple Seven’s evidence was merely circumstantial. Instead, Walker told the Mossad agent that a bomb was headed for Jerusalem. The contact actually laughed. There was always a bomb headed for Jerusalem. The man thanked Walker for his call and told him that with the usual daily threats and with the massive influx of tourists for the eclipse, the Mossad did not have time to hunt down a dotard American professor and his daughter-in-law.
Later Walker had informed Nick that he and CJ had a lead on the virus. Scott had figured it out. Nick was relieved that the engineer had recovered, but he sensed that Walker was holding something back. When he asked about it, the colonel cut him off. Heldner’s CDC team was ready to roll. He had to go. That was the last Nick had heard from headquarters, more than an hour earlier. Now, standing on the beach in his bare feet with Drake, his phone rang again, but this was a call he expected, and it was not from Romeo Seven.
“Go.”
“Nightmare One, this is Rawhide Two. Light your firefly.”
Nick kept the phone to his ear and removed a clear, one-inch-by-one-inch acrylic cube from his pocket, sliding a little black switch on the side forward with his thumb. The electronics within began to tick, once per second.
“Rawhide Two is visual. Cover.”
Nick slipped the cube into his pocket. The fabric of his canvas pants partially muted the infrared flash it gave off with each tick, otherwise the powerful little beacon would block out half the coastline on Rawhide’s night-vision goggles.
Drake raised his own night-vision monocle, holding it with two hands like a pirate with a spyglass. “I don’t see him.” The big operative panned the monocle from the left all the way to his right until he was looking down at Nick. “Your pants are flashing, though. Very hip.”
“You’re hilarious.”
“Nightmare One, Rawhide Two is padlocked on your position. Stop firefly.”
“Nightmare copies. Firefly off.”
Even with the monocle, Drake was not able to pick up the SEAL raiding craft until it was fifty yards from the beach. Nick did not see it until it was half that distance. The Navy man drove the black dinghy right up onto the beach and then jumped out to hold it still in the sloshing tide. No one spoke. Nick and Drake ran to him, helped him push it back out into the waves, and hopped in.
White spray kicked over the side as they built up speed. Despite its power, the outboard motor was quiet, and when their squat, stocky coxswain finally spoke, he barely raised his voice above a conversational tone. “Gentlemen. My name is Chief Morales.”
Nick could not see much of his face in the moonless dark, only the silver droplets of saltwater glistening on his bushy black mustache.
“I’m not supposed to ask who you are,” continued the SEAL, “but you must have some serious connections to drag us all the way out here.” He flipped his NVGs down in front of his eyes and adjusted the boat’s course to the east. “Rawhide One is thirty meters off the bow and already under way. We’re going to join up hot, so you’ll want to keep your heads down.”
Nick and Drake bent forward, but Morales shook his head. “I mean way down.”
With his chin behind the bow rail, Nick could see little on the dark horizon. It didn’t help that he had to keep wiping the sea spray from his eyes. Then a silhouette formed ahead, racing to meet them—a black trapezoid rising just above the water’s surface. Nick dropped his head below the rubber hull and braced for imp
act.
The starlit floor of the dinghy went completely dark as it slid into the small rear bay of its mother ship. As soon as the bay doors closed behind them, Nick felt the larger craft rise up and rapidly accelerate, bouncing on the choppy sea. Dim blue lights flashed on, and the water in the bay drained out, allowing the dinghy to settle onto rubber rails, giving them all a little more headroom. Nick glanced around at the angular gray walls. He allowed himself a smile. He had just caught a unicorn—or at least, it had caught him.
The M80C Dagger was the Sasquatch of the maritime community—rumored to exist, occasionally sighted, only seen in grainy videos shot from a great distance. The stealth boat was sleek and thin, with a faceted structure and an M-shaped hull that rose out of the water at speed and sank at idle so that it could hide amid the waves. If anything could get them into Israel undetected, the Dagger could.
The chief led them forward through a corridor barely wide enough for one man. While the two Triple Seven operatives steadied themselves against the walls, the squat SEAL walked unaided, despite the pitch and roll of the boat. He led them up to the cockpit where the boat commander sat at controls, his face illuminated by the white glow of a wide forward screen. He was big, almost as big as Drake, with a square jaw and dark features, as if he had some Native American in the nearer branches of his family tree.
“Lieutenant Jonathan Lighthart,” said the SEAL, his voice also carrying a Native American flavor. “Welcome aboard and thanks for ruining my day off.” Lighthart’s eyes never left the forward screen. At the speed it was cutting through the waves, the Dagger could not be left to an autopilot.
“Happy to be aboard,” said Nick.
“Always a pleasure to ruin a Navy man’s day,” added Drake.
Like the Triple Seven’s M-2 Wraith, the Dagger had no windows. Sensors embedded in the hull fed the forward screen. A grayscale, enhanced-infrared image showed them a clear picture of the waves ahead. Across the bottom, a six-inch-tall strip displayed close-in sonar returns. Flecks of blue and purple appeared and disappeared as the system found contacts and quickly dismissed them as small biologicals.