The man listened to an instruction.
“Okay. I’ll shoot him as he comes out.”
Another pause from the other side of the conversation. He picked up the gun again, and was looking through the scope as he spoke.
“Yeah, yeah. You get the stuff I sent earlier?”
He got a quick affirmation, then continued: “No, I’m telling you, she didn’t see nothing. She ain’t laid eyes on me once. I was in my little hiding place when I took those, but it looks like I was right next to her. Ought to keep that scientist of yours plenty motivated. Just let me know if you want more.”
He was nodding as more squawking came from his Bluetooth.
“Yeah, I’m straight. I can take her out anytime you want. You just give me the word and the old lady is as good as gone.”
The voice on the other end began wrapping up the conversation, but the man cut it off. There was movement in his scope. The big guy who had come in the government car was coming down the front steps. The man with the wine stain trained his crosshairs on the big guy’s head.
“Hang on, hang on. I gotta go. He’s coming out. I’ll shoot him right now.”
He kept the big guy in his scopes for another long second.
Then he lowered his gun and reached for his camera, which was at his feet. It had a 300-millimeter lens, which he used to zoom in tight on the big guy. After the autofocus did its work, the man with the wine stain jammed down the shutter button. The camera motor clicked off two dozen shots in less than two seconds.
The man quickly peeked at the screen on the camera, ready to fire off a few more if need be.
But it wouldn’t be necessary. He had captured this stranger—whoever he was—quite clearly. He plugged the camera into his laptop and began uploading them to his employer.
CHAPTER 11
SOMEWHERE IN THE MIDDLE EAST
T
all and angular, with close-set eyes, a nose that dominated his long face, a ratty beard that obscured his chin, and a white turban wound atop his head, Ahmed heard it all the time: he looked like a young Osama bin Laden.
He took it as a compliment. Many of the people who said it were admirers of bin Laden, even if they’d be careful around whom they’d admit that. They’d considered bin Laden a brave leader, even if they hadn’t agreed with his ultimate tactics. Nothing wrong with being compared to someone like that.
Also, bin Laden had enjoyed the company of many wives. Ahmed wouldn’t mind that part a bit. He didn’t even have one.
He leaned back at his desk. People often thought men like Ahmed didn’t have desks, that they spent their lives out crawling around in the sand like some oversized scarab beetle. But no, he had a desk and an office. It was a large office, with plenty of room for a television that he kept tuned to Al Jazeera and for the prayer mat that he reverently unrolled five times daily and turned in the direction of Mecca.
The room was located in a building that was older than Ahmed’s great-great-grandfather, within a walled compound that had been in Ahmed’s family for many generations before that.
It did not look like much now, he knew. Long ago, Ahmed’s family owned all the land around it, giving the compound the look of an estate. But slowly, through the generations, his forefathers had sliced off one piece of land after another, until only a handful of acres were left. The area, which had once been rural, had slowly been developed until now it was a densely packed residential neighborhood. The compound was fronted by a narrow street that carried its share of traffic. Unremarkable houses, far younger than the one Ahmed sat in, ringed it on all sides.
Had any of his neighbors been asked, they would have said that Ahmed was a quiet businessman who mostly kept to himself.
They might have said they found the razor wire atop those walls to be a bit excessive, not that Ahmed was particularly interested in their opinions on the subject. They certainly wouldn’t have known about the fully automatic rifles he kept at the ready. Or the men he hired to wield them. Or the things he asked those men to do with them. The guns would not have been in keeping with his businessman persona.
That was part of what the walls helped hide. Ahmed loved those walls for that reason and for others. The walls were what turned his house into a sanctuary. They had protected his great-great-grandfather and all the men in his family who had come since. Whatever havoc was going on in the world around him, the compound—its buildings and its land—could be protected.
And there had long been havoc here. This part of the world was called the Fertile Crescent, the cradle of civilization. Many, many generations before, Ahmed’s ancestors had been among the first humans to form sedentary agricultural settlements, domesticate animals, and cultivate grains. They made calendars by tracking the waxing and waning of the moon, learned to predict the floods of the mighty rivers, built trenches to irrigate their crops, made the land into something valuable.
And then they started fighting over it—and had been doing so ever since.
Ahmed’s family had gotten out of the farming business long ago. There were better ways to make money. The land and climate had changed much. The Fertile Crescent was not as fertile as it had once been.
And yet still people fought over it. They fought because of religion, because the old maps had different lines on them than the current maps did, because new factions took over governments and used their power to make life miserable for old factions.
Ahmed was no mere bystander in these battles, of course. Far from it. War. Chaos. Confusion. These things were all good for Ahmed. If people in this part of the world ever stopped beating their plowshares into swords, it might be trouble for Ahmed. He was one with the sword-bearers. The peace that do-gooders kept thinking they could bring to the Middle East did not interest Ahmed in the slightest.
There was a knock at his door.
“Come in,” Ahmed said at the start of a conversation that would take place in Arabic, both men’s native tongue.
A young man with a long beard and a turban that matched Ahmed’s entered the room. “We have the promethium secured,” he said.
“Excellent. It is shielded, yes? I don’t want my men getting sick from radiation poisoning.”
“Yes, sir.”
“How much did it end up being?”
“Three hundred and eighty-two pounds,” he said.
Ahmed’s eyes went wide. “You’re sure? That’s more than I was anticipating.”
“I saw it register on the scale myself.”
“And it is pure, yes? As pure as the other shipments?”
“Absolutely.”
Ahmed smiled and leaned back. “Three hundred and eighty-two pounds of pure promethium. Praise be to Allah. The best yet. This will be good for us all.”
“Praise be to Allah,” the man replied.
“You may go now.”
The young man complied with the order. Ahmed picked up the phone. There was much to be done.
CHAPTER 12
LANGLEY, Virginia
I
t was a good thing Jedediah Jones’s people could only see his outsides.
Outwardly, he staked his position at the center of the cubby with his usual calm, assured demeanor. His face was a Venetian mask their eyes could not penetrate. His shirt, which he had changed sometime in the middle of the night, did not have a wrinkle on it.
It was his insides that were a rumpled mess.
His power was based on having made himself a go-to guy for other powerful men over the course of years and decades. Presidents. Senators. Cabinet members. Other parts of the CIA. They all came to Jones to fix their problems. They all needed Jones.
This was what drove him. His work ethic was something akin to a lifelong manic phase. His standards, unyielding for all those around him, were even higher where his own behavior was concerned. If an issu
e could be solved with hard work—and Jones believed more or less everything could be solved with hard work—he was equal to the task. He was the man who never let anyone down when it mattered.
Until now. Facing the most serious threat to national security since that horrible September day in 2001, Jones was foundering. It was now nearing twenty-four hours since planes had started falling from the sky, since the powerful men had turned to him for help, and he had no solutions for them.
What he had was Derrick Storm’s conjecture that some kind of laser beam was causing this. Jones knew not to doubt Storm. If anyone could intuit from looking at one piece of metal what had happened to a whole plane, it was a man like Storm, a man whose intuition seemed to border on clairvoyance.
But Jones had also not taken Storm’s theory to any of the powerful men. Not until Storm had more than just a piece of metal to go on. It was too unformed, too likely to be flawed. Jones had made a career out of not being wrong, and he didn’t want to start now.
In the meantime, Jones had set agents in all corners of the globe to work. He had ordered them to break laws, confidences, bodies—whatever they had to do to get him information. He, himself, had not slept. The powerful men were depending on him, waiting for him to produce. And he was disappointing them.
What was the opposite of power? Impotence. That’s what Jones felt. It was splashed across his face: the sheer misery that he wasn’t doing enough, that he was slipping. It was the most horrible sensation imaginable.
Then it got worse.
Standing in the middle of the cubby, surveying his people at work, he recognized that something was wrong before he even knew what it was. One of the techs was sitting up in his chair, pounding furiously on his keyboard, horror in his countenance. He had headphones clamped over his ears and was perhaps unaware he was suddenly exuding stress from his body.
Jones reminded himself that he was the boss. His people needed his unflappable, steady leadership. They would be rattled if they saw him react in any overly demonstrable way. Making sure he was composed, he walked slowly over to the young man in question, and gently placed a hand on his shoulder.
“What is it, son?”
“Sir, the computers picked up unusual voice patterns from Emirates air traffic control. The number of discrete sounds per second went off the charts, much more than what you’d get for a sandstorm or a near miss. I had to backtrack the algorithm in order to switch from passive to active listening, but as soon as I tapped in I—”
“Spit it out, son.”
“Sir, a plane has gone down.”
“Where?”
“It was on approach to Dubai International Airport. It was approximately seventy nautical miles from the field and it went into a spin. Sir, York, Pennsylvania, is approximately seventy nautical miles from Dulles. Those planes also went into—”
“What are the coordinates of where it crashed?”
The tech pointed to a series of digits on his screen.
“Wallace,” Jones said to another one of the nerds. “Get me eyes on 24.344057 north, 55.559553 east.”
“Yes, sir,” a voice from three desks away said.
“Put it up on the main screen when you have it.”
The other techs were, by now, aware of what was unfolding. Jones could see their heads moving, their attention being ripped from their terminals. The volume in the room had increased threefold.
“What towns or cities are nearby?”
Another voice volunteered: “Sir, that’s just outside Al-Ain, right near the border of Oman. Al-Ain is a city of a little more than a half million that’s known for its—”
“I’m not going on vacation there, damn it!” Jones barked. “Tell me about the highways. If we’re seeing a repeat of the Pennsylvania Three, the weapon will be near a highway.”
“There are several major ones connecting Al-Ain to Abu Dhabi and Dubai. E-16, E-95, and E-66 go north. E-22 and E-30 go west. E-7 heads west into Oman. We’d need more information to narrow in on which one is being used.”
At that moment, the thirty-foot screen at the front of the room blinked onto one image. In the middle of a tan, empty stretch of desert, there was the splintered husk of what had once been a commercial airliner. Several of the plane’s pieces were strewn on the desert around it. Smoke poured from where one of the engines had come to a rest.
“Damn it,” Jones said. “Bryan, who do we have on the ground in Dubai who might already be compromised?”
Kevin Bryan consulted the roster he kept in his head and spat out several names. Jones picked Michael Reed, a man whose bungling had led to his exposure to the Emirates intelligence community a few days earlier. Reed was due to ship out of the country before the Emirates special police force could gather enough evidence to arrest him.
“Tell Reed to alert UAE authorities immediately,” Jones barked. “They have to get all planes off this flight path. If this is like Pennsylvania, any other plane coming in on this approach is in danger.”
“Is it possible this crash is unconnected to the Pennsylvania Three?” Bryan asked.
“We’ll find out in the next few minutes. In the meantime, it won’t hurt to act like we’re seeing the second act of this attack.”
“Yes, sir,” Bryan said.
Jones turned to another one of the techs. “Figure out which flight that is. Download its flight plan. Trace backward over the last fifty nautical miles from where it crashed and set a search grid of two miles along either side of the line. Pay particular attention to areas near highways. If Storm is right, there’s going to be some kind of laser beam stationed somewhere in that grid. I want it found.”
The tech balked. “Sir, that’s…that’s a needle in a haystack.”
Jones glared at him. “Then you better sift through it until one of your fingers gets pricked. Understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
Jones swore. All around him, the considerable computing power he had assembled—and the talent he had brought to the cubby to work it—was being strained to its limit. Jones realized his fists were balled. He forced himself to flex his fingers.
It was possible that plane had gone down due to natural causes. But Jones knew the odds. Commercial airline travel was, statistically speaking, about as safe as a walk across your living room. Maybe if it was a third-rate airline in a developing country that didn’t have the money to maintain its fleet, there could be problems. But the Emirates was one of the most sophisticated countries in the Middle East, one that had smartly reinvested its oil money into infrastructure, education, and health care—things that would still be there even when the oil finally ran out.
A sick, sinking sensation was spreading to Jones’s stomach. He realized he was holding his breath. He exhaled softly. The Pennsylvania Three went down within twelve minutes of each other, at 1:55, 1:58, and 2:07. It had already been seven minutes since the first plane was stricken. If they could just get through the next—
“Sir!” one of the techs called out. “Another plane over Al-Ain has gone badly off course. The tower in Dubai has lost contact. I’m listening in now. They’re freaking out.”
“Coordinates?” Jones asked.
“Twenty-four point four-nine-nine-six-four-six north, fifty-five point six-nine-six-five-oh-nine east.”
“That’s maybe fifteen miles from the first crash,” Bryan said. “The first was just to the west of E-95 highway. This was just to the east of it.”
“Narrow our search grid to the E-95 corridor,” Jones ordered. “Can someone get me eyes on this plane?”
On the large screen, there came the satellite image of a plane in flight—but only barely. The sight was so incongruous as to even shock Jones: the aircraft’s starboard wing was missing. What was left of the plane had entered a tight, clockwise spiral. There was not nearly enough lift coming from its one remaining wing to keep it in f
light or on course. It was difficult to gauge its altitude from a two-dimensional picture, but whatever height it had, it was losing fast.
The cubby had gone silent. Some of the best and brightest computer jockeys in America had been reduced to horrified spectators. There was nothing any of them could do to save the doomed souls aboard.
All they could do was watch as the plane plowed into a dune in an empty stretch of desert. It kicked up an enormous cloud of sand that obscured their view of the aircraft breaking apart under the enormous force of hitting the ground at such a steep angle and such a high rate of speed.
Jones slammed his fist on a desk next to him. Several techs snapped their heads in his direction.
They had never seen him lose his cool.
THE NEXT THIRTEEN MINUTES were ones Jones did not want to ever relive.
Two more planes that had not been able to scramble away from the danger zone over Al-Ain were struck and fell to the desert like wounded birds.
Jones and his people could only sit and watch, cataloguing each disaster, trying to find patterns. The similarities to the Pennsylvania crashes were already obvious, except they were happening half a world away.
When it had stopped—partly because the UAE authorities, warned by Reed, had gotten all the planes out of the air—Jones sat in the chair at the desk he kept in the middle of the cubby. He buried his face in his hands. The Pennsylvania Three had been joined by the Emirates Four. And yet, even having narrowed their search grid, they had not been able to locate whatever was making it happen.
“Sir?” Bryan said, holding a phone toward him. “It’s Storm.”
“Jones,” he said into the mouthpiece, his voice cracking slightly. “I assume you’ve heard about what just happened on the Arabian Peninsula.”
“I have.”
“Please tell me you know something.”
Storm spent the next five minutes briefing Jones about his strengthening conviction that a high-energy laser was responsible for the crashes. Jones, in turn, told Storm more about what they had just witnessed taking place above the Arabian Desert.