“Before you sleep, make your absolutions,” Nasiji said, as Thalia cleaned the table. “Tomorrow we won’t have much time. Make your peace with Allah tonight. Think of the reasons you’ve chosen this path. Think of what the Sheikh”—bin Laden—“said before the Crusaders came to Iraq.”
Nasiji pushed back his chair. “Come with me,” he said. He walked outside.
In the dark, under the clean pale starlight, the three men stood shivering. A thick crust of snow covered the trees and the earth, white and silent, reminding Bashir how far he was from home.
“I shall lead my steed and hurl us both at the target,”
Nasiji said.
“Oh Lord, if my end is nigh, may my tomb not be draped in green mantles. No, let it be the belly of an eagle, perched on high with his kin. So let me be a martyr, dwelling in a high mountain pass among a band of knights.”
Nasiji reached out his hands for Yusuf and Bashir.
“Tomorrow we descend from the pass.”
A FINE, KNIGHTLY MOMENT.
Then Bashir had come to his bed and his wife had clutched at him with the same ardor she’d displayed all week, grinding her hips against his and making the fluttering noises that he’d thought until now existed only on the banned pornographic channels that half of Egypt watched on satellite television. He wondered if she was making love to him, Nasiji, the bomb, or all three at once.
When they were done, she wrapped her arms around him and whispered, “Tomorrow.”
She was nervous, Bashir thought. Understandable. “My love,” he said. “I wish this weren’t all happening so fast. If we had time, I would have sent you home. But it’ll be safer for you to stay here. You’ll just have to tell the Americans when they come that you didn’t know what we were doing, that we kept it secret from you—”
“My Bashir. My husband. I’m coming with you.”
Bashir was silent. He couldn’t have heard her right. “No,” he said finally. “I won’t allow it. You don’t understand what these bombs do—”
“I do.”
He rolled atop her, pushing her down. “You don’t. And as your husband, I order you—”
“I’m coming. Bashir, if they find me here, do you think they’ll believe I had no idea? Why shouldn’t I come? Why shouldn’t I be part of this?”
“All right,” Bashir said. Nasiji wouldn’t possibly allow her along, but for tonight Bashir decided to let her think she’d be included. Otherwise she would never sleep.
“Are you scared, my husband?”
“Why would you think that?”
“There’s no reason to be. This, what you’ve built, it’s Allah’s will.”
“Yes? Did you speak to him?” Bashir tried to smile in the dark, to make his words a joke, but he couldn’t.
“I’m not a
prophet,
Bashir.” Not a hint of laughter in her answer. “But this I know.” She kissed him again. A few minutes later, her breath eased and he knew she was asleep beside him, one hand wrapped around his arm, her nostrils fluttering, her full lips opened slightly. The sleep of a child. His wife, blessed with a certainty he couldn’t imagine.
33
T
he Black Hawks from Langley and the Pentagon arrived on the back lawn of the White House just as the armored limousines from the FBI and Foggy Bottom rolled through the E Street gates. One by one, a string of grim-faced men made their way into the west wing of the White House. Midnight had already passed, but each visitor had independently chosen to wear a freshly pressed suit and a smoothly knotted tie. The gravity of this meeting demanded formality.
Inside the White House, they were directed not to the Situation Room, as they’d expected, but to the Oval Office. No one questioned the choice. Like the suits and ties, the Oval Office seemed appropriate. Anyway, the Situation Room was cramped and low-ceilinged and not particularly comfortable compared to the double O.
The meeting had been scheduled for 12:15 a.m. and the president didn’t like latecomers. Duto, the last to arrive, slipped in at 12:13 and took his seat beside the secretary of defense. Everyone else in the room was equally senior: the director of national intelligence, the director of the FBI, the secretaries of state and homeland security, and the national security adviser. Principals only. The director of Los Alamos and the general in charge of Strategic Air Command were waiting by their phones in case the president had questions, but they weren’t part of the meeting.
Duto had been in this office hundreds of times before, but he couldn’t remember a situation as serious as this one. The confrontation with China had been tricky, but they hadn’t realized how tricky until after it ended. At the time, no one had really thought they were facing a nuclear threat. This time they knew better. And until they could narrow down where the bad guys were hiding, they had only two options: tell everyone in the country and create a national panic, or hold the information close while they searched in secret.
Duto didn’t mind letting someone else make the decision. The way he saw it, his job was to lay out the options, maybe pushing one a bit more than another, but never explicitly expressing his opinion unless asked. After the president decided what to do, the agency would carry out his orders as best it could. In truth, though, the CIA’s powers were more limited than either its critics or its supporters believed. Want to invade a country? Call in the army. Hoping for a prediction of what Afghanistan will be like twenty years from now? Get a crystal ball. The agency was neither all-powerful nor all-knowing. It gave its best guesses, did the nasty work that no one else would, and tried not to embarrass the United States along the way.
It was a big, heavy bureaucracy, and Duto spent much of his time just trying to keep it going, and much of the rest keeping it afloat in the even bigger bureaucracy that was the American intelligence community. He didn’t set policy, and he didn’t try to embarrass the president. And so he survived. He’d survived two administrations, a mole, Guantánamo, and that near-miss in New York. He’d survived long enough to defend the CIA’s turf, his turf, from the FBI and the Defense Department, which had tried to muscle in on the covert operations that by right and custom belonged only to Langley. And yet some of his own agents, the very men and women whose turf he was protecting, had the gall to call him a lapdog.
Like John Wells. Duto knew exactly how Wells saw him. And Wells had proven useful the last couple of years, no doubt about it. But he didn’t like Wells and he never would. The guy grated on him. Wells was like Kobe Bryant, Duto thought. Big skills and an even bigger ego. Guys like that always imagined they were indispensable. And they were, for a while. But no one was indispensable. These guys, they lost a step and the game moved past them. The teams were eternal, but the players came and went. One day, Wells would lose a step, too. And when that moment came, Duto would gladly show him the door.
BUT FIRST THEY HAD
to get through this night, and the next day.
In the Oval Office, Duto and the other six men waited in silence. No one wanted to be caught bantering about the weather or the Super Bowl when the president arrived. He showed at 12:17, wearing khakis and a blue shirt, thumbs looped into his belt, as if he were about to host a late-night card game instead of discussing the most dangerous nuclear threat the United States had faced since the Cuban Missile Crisis. His chief of staff, a tall man with pasty skin trailed a step behind. The chief of staff’s name was Bob Hatch. Inevitably, and accurately, he was known in the top ranks of the government as Hatchet.
The president nodded at each of the men in the room and sat down behind his massive desk. Tucked under his arm, Hatchet held the briefing book that the CIA and FBI had prepared two hours before. At a nod from the president, Hatchet dropped—not placed, dropped—the book on the desk. It thumped against the wood, the sound of failure. The president put a finger on top of the book.
“Here’s my executive summary. We don’t know where these men are. Nor their names. Nor who’s paying them. Nor if they have a working bomb. Nor their targets. As for the Russians, they’re lying to us, but we don’t know why.” The president’s eyes had locked on Duto. “Director, would you say I’ve accurately summarized the report?”
“Mr. President, I can’t disagree with what you say. However, we have made great progress in the last six hours. We believe that in the next few hours, certainly by sunrise, we will have the names and passports under which they entered the United States. We’re pursuing every possible avenue to get answers to your questions. As to whether they may attempt to use the bombs for ransom, we judge that possibility unlikely, sir.”
The president took his eyes off Duto and glanced around the room. “I hoped this report would help me decide whether I should postpone the State of the Union. Or evacuate New York and Washington, God forbid.” He tapped the book impatiently. “Instead I get this. I can’t order any evacuations, not off this. I’m not going to terrify the country until I’m certain what we face. I’m not going to cancel the State of the Union either, though I am going to order the Vice to stay home. Just in case. Until we get more information, I don’t think we should make anything public at all. We’re going to treat this as a law enforcement matter. BOLOs, right? That’s what they’re called?” He was looking at the head of the FBI now.
“Yes, sir. Means be on the lookout for. We send them to the agencies, counterterrorism units at the big police forces—”
“I know what it means and what you do. So we’ll start with that. And if you can nail these guys down to the point where going public would actually make sense, I’ll reconsider.” Again he looked around the room. “I’m not going to do anything as juvenile as threatening to fire any of you. We’re way past that. I am simply going to tell you something you already know. We need to find these men before they blow this bomb. Or it’s
over.
Understand?”
Silent nods.
“Now, let’s turn to another equally pleasant topic. If we don’t find it. And it takes out midtown Manhattan. Or the Loop. Or this very office.
What then?
If it turns out that this weapon has come from the Russian arsenal, what then? Do we hit back? With what? We’re going to talk this out for fifteen minutes. Then you’re going to go back to your offices and make sure it never happens. But first. This is a yes-or-no question. We’ll discuss it after. How many of you think nuclear retaliation is justified in the case of a nuclear attack on American soil?”
Duto had thought he’d understood the danger they faced. But he realized, as the president asked his question, that he hadn’t. Not really. The late-night helicopter ride to the White House, this meeting, they’d all seemed almost unreal. No, they hadn’t found the bombmakers yet. But they would, and then the world would go back to normal, and this night would seem almost a dream. Or, more accurately, the crowning moment of his career, the moment that would put his memoirs on the best-seller list.
But now the president was asking about nuclear retaliation. The president believed this bomb might go off. And if he believed it, Duto had to believe it, too. A nuclear bomb on American soil.
“I want a show of hands,” the president said. “If you believe nuclear retaliation is justified, raise your hand.”
There were seven of them in the room, not counting the president and his chief of staff. Seven hands rose. “Now, what if it’s a Russian nuke but we can’t be sure the Russians were involved? What then?”
Christ, Duto thought.
Can I? Can we?
But he kept his hand up. There could be no excuses. No honest mistakes. Someone would have to pay. And as he looked around the room, he saw he was in the majority. Only the secretary of state and the director of the FBI had lowered their hands. Five-to-two in favor of retaliation.
“Doomsday it is,” the president said. He didn’t smile.
34
N°
. Bashir heard a voice, not inside his head but a real voice, a man speaking. Had he fallen asleep? The clock said 1:58, so he must have. But he hadn’t. He was sure. He sat up and looked around, but the room was empty. It had spoken with such power. Allah? Muhammad? Whoever had spoken, he needed to obey.
No.
He couldn’t allow it. He would go to the stable and take the the uranium and disappear. Maybe he would go directly to the police. Or he would simply vanish. In a day or two, he’d call Thalia and tell her to go back to Egypt, call Nasiji and Yusuf and tell them to leave, that the police would be raiding the house and the stable.
Either way, Washington would still be standing tomorrow. Yes. He breathed slowly, inhaling and exhaling five times, a step he sometimes took before entering the operating room. He waited for doubts but felt none. He was making the right decision. He touched his wife’s forehead and she stirred in her sleep. And then he rolled out of bed and noiselessly padded to the rocking chair—a relic of the house’s previous owners—where he’d stacked his jeans and sneakers and sweater.
HE PADDED DOWN
the second-floor hallway, sneakers cradled in his hands, trying not to set off the creaky wooden planks. He edged past the bedroom where the Repard kids had once lived and where Nasiji and Yusuf now slept in twin beds decorated with Star Wars blankets.
A plank groaned lightly and Bashir pulled his weight off it and leaned against the wall waiting for Nasiji or Yusuf to rouse. But the rhythm of their breathing didn’t change. So Bashir slipped down the stairs and pulled on his shoes and walked out the kitchen door and—
Creak!—
How had he forgotten the soft plank on the porch? He waited for the house lights to come on, for Nasiji and Yusuf to emerge.
I heard something outside. I wanted to check.
The house stayed silent. After a minute, Bashir headed down the path connecting the house and the stable, a river of brown brick between the snow-covered ground on either side. Yusuf cleared the path every day. He seemed to enjoy shoveling. Bashir wondered what Yusuf thought of the bomb. He’d never said. He reminded Bashir of a tiger at the zoo in Cairo, a big lazy beast. Once the tiger had strolled to the front of his cage and pushed himself up on his hind paws and leaned against the bars. He towered over Bashir, three meters from his paws to the black tip of his nose. He yawned and turned his head and looked Bashir up and down, slowly, almost gently.
Meat,
his eyes said.
And I’m hungry.