He pressed the knife into his neck, drew a single drop of blood. He pointed the blade directly at the camera.
“Allahu Akbar.”
Nasiji stopped the playback. “That’s it. I’m planning to put your names in, too. Let the world see who we are. And if you want to make your own statements, we might consider that. Though I think it works better this way. One voice, yes?”
“Genius,” Yusuf said.
“Bashir,” Nasiji said, a kid fishing for compliments. “What do you think? Maybe I ought to use a plain black background instead of the Iraqi flag. I don’t want them to think Iraq is their only sin.”
BASHIR COULDN’T TAKE
his eyes off the screen, the final image, Nasiji leaning forward, staring into the camera, the dagger held high in his hand. A madman. Or worse. Nasiji’s black eyes seemed to glow red as coals. An illusion of the camera, the spotlight on his face. Had to be.
“Will it work?” Bashir said.
“Probably they won’t believe it,” Nasiji said. “They’ll say I’m lying, trying to get them to attack Russia. But it’s worth trying. I’m hoping we’ll be done in time to set this gadget of ours off at the big speech, the State of the Union—”
“But that’s hardly a week away—”
A week?
This was all going to happen within a week?
“I know. I don’t think we can get the beryllium by then, and if we don’t have it we’ll wait. The beryllium’s the only way we can be sure we’ll get a full detonation. But if we can, imagine it. The whole American government is there. President, vice president, the Congress, the Supreme Court, all of them. All gone.”
“But the security must be enormous.”
“Yes, but they can’t close down all of Washington. And their security, it’s designed against a truck bomb. Not one of these. If we succeed, the generals will be the only ones left. And they’ll want to strike back. Quickly. And if they think we’re telling the truth, they’ll have no choice. They’ll fire all their missiles at Russia. The Russians will fire all their missiles back. The end of the United States of America. Russia, too. Every city will be gone. The two countries that hate Muslims the most, wiped away. The Crusaders, beaten forever.”
And a hundred million people will die,
Bashir didn’t say. More. Two hundred million. Three hundred million. More. A number so large it couldn’t be counted, couldn’t even be imagined.
“Sayyid,” he said. “I want the Americans to suffer. But this . . . will Allah smile on this?”
“Losing your nerve?”
“Not at all. But isn’t there anyone we can talk with, ask for guidance?”
“All these years, they’ve given us war. All these years, Muslims have been dying. We must destroy them, Bashir. Nothing less.”
“God willing,” Yusuf said.
“You’re right,” Bashir said. He wished he could be as sure as he sounded, as sure as Nasiji and Yusuf. “Anyway, I think you ought to have a black flag. Yusuf and I aren’t Iraqi, and Iraq isn’t their only sin. As you say.”
“I’ll redo it.”
“Then what?”
“When we’re ready, just before we go, we’ll send copies to CNN and Al Jazeera and a few other places. We’ll upload it to our own Web sites, too, in case they won’t run it. But we’ll have to time it right, so it isn’t posted until afterward.”
“And if we can’t get the beryllium in time?”
“We’ll wait. No State of the Union. But we’ll still destroy the White House, kill the president, blow up the middle of Washington. And when they see the video, they’ll know who to blame. I’m only sorry we won’t be around to see it.”
THAT NIGHT,
Bashir lay beside Thalia, unable to sleep. When he closed his eyes, he saw Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the charred wooden houses and corpses in the streets, terrified even in death by what they’d seen. He wished he’d never looked.
“What’s wrong, Doctor?” Thalia said quietly to him in Arabic.
Doctor.
He loved to hear her call him that. But tonight the word cut him. Doctors were meant to save lives.
“Nothing, my wife. Now sleep.”
“Bashir, tell me. And then we’ll both sleep.”
Bashir wondered if he could tell her. But why not? She was his wife, after all. “Yusuf and Sayyid, you know, this thing we’re making in the stable, it’s a bomb. A special bomb. Did you know that?”
“Yes.”
“You did?”
“Yes, my husband. I know I’m not very smart, but the things you and Sayyid were saying, I figured it out.”
“A big bomb. It will kill a lot of people.”
Thalia squeezed his hand. “How many?”
“I don’t know. But many.”
“Here? In America?”
“Yes.”
“So it would be
kaffirs.
” Her voice had a girlish excitement that surprised him.
“Muslims, too. It won’t discriminate. And Nasiji has a plan. He’s hoping to start a big war between the United States and Russia. If it works, there could be hundreds more bombs like this. Even thousands, maybe. Does that bother you?”
“No.”
And Bashir’s surprise became astonishment as his wife slid her hand down his stomach and reached for him, something she’d never done unbidden before. Bashir couldn’t think of anything to say, and so he lay silent as she stroked him hard and then straddled his legs and guided him into her, all the while whispering,
“No no no.”
PART FOUR
27
T
he mission could be explained in three words. Accomplishing it required a lot more effort.
Find a ship.
A ship that had departed Hamburg on New Year’s Eve, supposedly bound for West Africa, but had never arrived. A ship that was somewhere in the North Atlantic, unless it was in the Caribbean, or the Pacific, or docked, or even scuttled. A ship that was thoroughly anonymous, not a supertanker or a yacht but a midsize freighter like tens of thousands of others around the world. A ship that was called the
Juno
, unless its name had been changed. A ship that carried no visible weapons but still needed to be approached cautiously. Most of all, a ship that had to be found quickly, so its hold could be searched with Geiger counters, its crew questioned, and its captain put in a rubber room and subjected to every interrogation technique that the dark wizards of the CIA had ever invented.
The task was formidable, even with the National Security Agency and the navy making it their highest priority. Nonetheless, this was the kind of problem the United States knew how to solve, a technical puzzle that could be cracked with pure effort and brainpower. For once, no need to win hearts and minds in Baghdad or Kabul.
Just find that damn freighter.
Around NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, through the Atlantic Fleet command in Norfolk, the order went out.
By yesterday, if possible.
Photographs of the
Juno
, along with its engineering specifications—height, length, displacement, and the shape of its superstructure—were sent to every American and British naval vessel in the Atlantic. Within twelve hours, the Atlantic Fleet had posted frigates outside the major East Coast harbors, from Miami to Portland, Maine. Meanwhile, Coast Guard cutters visited every ship that had docked in the last two weeks and that matched, or almost matched, the
Juno
’s specs.
At the same time, the Atlantic Fleet command ordered destroyers and cruisers to run alongside the main sea lanes that crossed the North Atlantic, in case the
Juno
was still somewhere en route or sailing back to Europe. The Royal Navy sent its own flotilla west. In three days, the vessels identified every ship that fit the
Juno
’s profile. Impressive work, especially considering the winter weather and the fact that the sun shone for barely eight hours a day on the main route between London and New York.
Impressive, but fruitless. The navy’s efforts came up empty. The
Juno
wasn’t on the sea lanes between Europe and the United States. And it wasn’t docked in any port anywhere in the United States, Canada, Britain, or Western Europe.
MEANWHILE,
the NSA’s Advanced Keyhole satellites were searching the rest of the Atlantic. The satellites could capture ships in great detail, down to their names and the foot-square patches of rust on their hulls. They could also take photographs that covered several square miles and captured dozens of boats at once.
But they had a problem. They couldn’t do
both
, not at the same time. The camera capable of both super-wide and super-fine resolution hadn’t been invented yet. And from Greenland to South America, the Atlantic covered more than forty million square miles. Even if the satellites photographed it in one-square-mile chunks, they would need forty million images to cover it.
To work around the problem, two dozen software engineers spent a long night at Fort Meade writing code. By morning, they’d created an application that turned the agency’s face-recognition software into a crude boat-recognition program. The software couldn’t find the
Juno.
But it could rule out in real time ninety-five percent of the boats spotted by the satellites as too big, too small, or the wrong shape.
The other five percent were classified as possibles and photographed again at one-meter resolution. Those images were then reviewed by the NSA’s analysts, who eliminated any ship that appeared significantly different from the original photographs of the
Juno
, on the theory that the
Juno
could not have had time to undergo major structural work since leaving Hamburg.
The analysts were able to rule out another ninety percent of the boats that had gotten through the first pass. Even so, not every satellite shot was definitive. Many of the ships had gray hulls and decks that didn’t stand out against the dark water of the Atlantic. They could only be ruled in or out after being seen and photographed at sea level, by helicopters, drones, or naval aircraft. Their names and locations were passed to the navy for a final inspection.
AT LANGLEY,
Exley and Shafer tracked the search in the annex of the operations center in the basement of New Headquarters Building. The annex and the entire center were classified as Blue Zones, restricted to employees with Top Secret/SCI/NO FORN clearances. Originally, contractors had been excluded, too, but after the operations center went dark twice in six months, the agency gave in and hired a team from Lockheed to fix the electronics that supported it.
The annex was a high-ceilinged room, about thirty feet square, with concrete floors and a distractingly loud ventilation system. On two walls, oversized monitors projected digital maps of the Atlantic, cut up into 400,000 patches of ten square miles each. The maps divided the ocean into three colors. Green represented areas that had been searched and cleared. Red stood for areas where suspect ships had been found and needed to be checked. And yellow symbolized areas that hadn’t yet been searched. An unfortunate choice. When the hunt for the
Juno
started, the Atlantic appeared to be filled with urine.
As hours and then days passed, patches of green appeared on the maps, spreading out from the East Coast along the major shipping routes like a shipborne virus. Tiny blips of red appeared, then vanished. A third monitor contained the names and photographs of suspect ships. As suspect boats were cleared, they disappeared from the screen, replaced with new targets.
On the second morning, the satellites picked up a boat off the coast of Nicaragua that looked to be almost a perfect match. But when a helicopter buzzed it, it turned out to be a freighter that had been built by the same Korean shipyard as the
Juno.
By then, Exley was thoroughly sick of staring at the monitors.
“Ellis. We’re useless here. Let’s find something else to do.”
“Last week you were ready to quit,” Shafer said. “Now you’re looking for work.”
“This is it. One last job and then I’m done.”
“If you say so.”
“I told my kids and I’m keeping my word. I’m serious.” But was she? If an interrogator had shot her full of sodium thiopental at that moment, she didn’t know what she would have said.
“Uh-huh,” Shafer said. “Meanwhile, let’s go figure out where Bernard Kygeli gets his money. If anything happens here, they can call us.”
NO ONE HAD OFFICIALLY
told Henry Williams that his career was over. But he knew, as surely as if the secretary of the navy had sent him a card congratulating him for thirty years of able service and welcoming him to retirement. He imagined the card would have a golfer on the cover and say something like
“You’ve Knocked the Ball out of the Park—Now It’s Time to Hit That Hole in One”
in big block letters that his middle-aged eyes would have no problem reading. Like he was a lawyer who’d spent his career behind a desk instead of a man who’d given up his marriage and everything else on land for a life at sea. Instead of a
destroyer captain,
for Pete’s sake.
But the navy didn’t tolerate failure. And Williams had failed the summer before. Just outside Shanghai, his ship, the USS
Decatur
, had rammed a fishing trawler filled with Chinese college students. The ramming had killed twenty-two Chinese and pushed the United States and China to the brink of war. In retaliation, a Chinese submarine had torpedoed the
Decatur
, killing seventeen of Williams’s sailors.
An internal inquiry by the navy found that Williams had committed no wrongdoing in either incident. But Williams knew he would never escape the stigma of what had happened. During the months the
Decatur
was in dry dock, Williams had been persona non grata at the meetings in Honolulu and Annapolis, where senior officers discussed the future of the service. After the
Decatur
was recommissioned, it had lost its place in the
Ronald Reagan
carrier battle group and been shipped back to the East Coast to do laps in the Atlantic. And his superior officers no longer asked him what vessel he hoped to command next. No, his hopes to move further up the ranks, to earn an admiral’s gold braids, had ended in the East China Sea. In two months, when the
Decatur
was done with this tour, he’d retire. Honorably, with a full pension.