C
HAPTER
S
IX
By morning, Christyne had grown jealous of her son’s ability to sleep anywhere and anytime. Within seconds of crashing on the bed, his breath had become rhythmic and even, and as far as she could tell in her hours of wakefulness, he’d never so much as stirred.
Between the unrelenting cold, though, and her crushing sense of guilt for having gotten them into this, sleep was nowhere in her future.
In those quiet hours, she’d reasoned that if their captors had meant them harm, they’d have done them harm. Clearly, they had a plan, and while she had no idea what it might be, it only made sense that if she and Ryan made every effort to get along—to do as they were told, just as they’d been instructed—then their captors would have cause only to treat them well.
Jesus, it was cold. Even with her coat on, and the blankets pulled all the way to her nose, it seemed impossible to get warm. It had to be warmer than freezing, she figured, because the bottled water they’d found was still liquid, but it had to be close.
Until about an hour ago.
The rising sun had just begun to lighten the darkness beyond the tiny windows at ground level, near the ceiling, when she heard the sound of a shovel scraping concrete, a sound that propelled her back to her childhood visits to her grandparents’ house on Smith Mountain Lake in Virginia, where coal fueled everything that produced heat, from the stove to the furnace. It wasn’t just the timbre and pitch of the scraping that made her think coal; there’s a rhythm to coal shoveling that is unique.
The shoveling continued for about twenty minutes, she guessed, and by the time the noise had ceased, the temperature in their little room had risen dramatically. Now, as the sky beyond the windows glowed pink, the heat had driven her out of her covers and caused her to shed her coat, and she was still sweating. She pegged the temperature at maybe eighty degrees now, and rising—high enough to cause Ryan to stir.
He bolted upright with a loud gasp. “Jesus!” he proclaimed. “Why is it so hot?” He stood and shrugged out of his coat. “I’m soaked.” His sweater came next, leaving him bare chested. He brought it to his nose and sniffed. “I stink.”
“I already knew that,” Christyne teased.
Noise outside their cell distracted them both, the unmistakable sound of the lock being removed and the bolt sliding open. An instant later, the door crashed open with enough violence to slam it into the perpendicular wall and a team of men, all wearing black with masks covering everything but their eyes streamed into the room. There were four of them, and they all carried machine guns locked against their shoulders and ready to fire.
Ryan yelled and darted over to his mom.
“Up, up, up!” they yelled, followed by a stream of orders yelled by all of the gunman, some of them contradictory. “Up! On the floor! On your feet! Hands up! Hands on your heads!”
The effect was utterly terrifying. The contradicting orders froze them in place. As the men yelled louder, Ryan stood with his hands out, as if warding off an angry dog.
Christyne yelled, “Ryan! Put your hands up, for God’s sake.” She demonstrated by raising her own.
Finally, the message got through and he raised his hands.
The gunman settled down, too, to the extent that only one man now shouted orders. “Both of you step away from your beds.”
The gunmen never broke their aim as the Nasbes did as they were told.
The man in charge pointed at Ryan. “You,” he said. “Step away from the woman.”
The woman?
Christyne thought. What an odd way to refer to her.
“Now turn around and face the beds.”
As Ryan complied with the order, he shot a look of pure terror to his mother.
“Please don’t hurt him,” Christyne begged.
The gunman closest to her shouted, “Silence!” and tightened his grip on the gun that was leveled at her forehead.
“Please,” she whispered.
“Boy,” the boss commanded. “Put your hands behind your back and cross your wrists.”
Again he complied, and Christyne started to cry when she saw how badly his hands were shaking. While three gunman held their aim steady, the one doing the talking stepped forward and slipped a loop of plastic over Ryan’s wrists and pulled it tight enough to dimple the skin. That done, the gunman produced a three-foot strip of black cloth which he wove elaborately and expertly around the boy’s arms, and then pulled tight. Ryan choked back a sob as the man drew his elbows together until they nearly touched behind his back.
“Does that hurt?” the man asked.
“Yes.” The pain was obvious in his voice.
“Good. Remember this. Remember the pain.” The gunman drove the sole of his black combat boot into the back of Ryan’s knees, unlocking them and causing him to drop to a kneeling position.
Ryan struggled for balance, to keep from toppling over onto his face. “What did—”
“SILENCE!” This time, the gunman’s voice reverberated in the tiny room.
Ryan fell silent.
“Do not beg,” the man warned. “Do not cry, do not say a word or I will hurt you.”
The man reached out his hand, and one of the other masked invaders handed him what looked to be a black pillowcase. He shook it open and slipped it over Ryan’s head. The edge drooped below the points of his shoulders.
Something broke inside Christyne as she watched them abuse her son. Bound and kneeling, he was so helpless, so vulnerable, even as he kept his posture straight while clearly trying to control his fear through deep, sometimes shaky breaths.
If only she hadn’t been so—
The gunman turned to Christyne. He allowed his rifle to hang limply from the strap that attached it to his neck as he walked closer. The other guns remained pointed at Ryan’s head.
As he closed to within a few inches of her face—well inside her personal space—she could see even in the dim light that the eyes behind his mask were hooded and creased. This gunman was much older than those they’d dealt with the night before.
“Woman,” he said. “Are you frightened of me?”
“Yes.”
“As you should be. The whole world should be frightened of me. Do you believe that I am capable of killing your boy?”
Christyne’s heart skipped. What did he want to hear? What was the answer that would save her son, and which was the one that would harm him?
“I would like to think that no one is capable of killing a child,” she said.
“Ah,” he said. His eyes darkened. “A non-answer. Would you care to try again?”
“Yes,” she said. “I think you are capable of killing my boy.”
“So you must think me to be some kind of monster.”
He was building a box for her, a logical trap for which there could never be a correct answer. She nearly begged him to stop, but then she remembered the warning against begging.
“Is that what you think?” the man pressed. “Do you think I am some kind of monster?”
She looked at her feet. “I think the willingness to kill a child is as good a definition of monster as any.”
The man chuckled, releasing a blast of cigarette breath. “What would you be willing to do to save his life?”
Something icy formed in her stomach. “Anything,” she said. It was simply the truth.
He lightly brushed his gloved hand across her breast. “I want you to think more about that over the next couple of hours.”
He turned abruptly. “Take the boy,” he said.
Time stopped for Aafia, the events slowing to a crawl that allowed her brain to record the details in exquisite, horrifying detail. She caught the flash out of the corner of her left eye, and it synched perfectly with the bright shadow she saw thrown onto the front wall of the school, far on her right. A giant invisible fist punched the ground under her feet hard enough to make her fall.
Even as her knees were collapsing under her, the closest school bus—still fifty yards distant—seemed to bend for a fraction of a heartbeat before all of the glass exploded in a glittering rain and a fireball consumed everything. The bus itself, now on fire, left the ground, tumbled once in the air along its own axis, and then landed on its side.
She had just fallen to her hands and knees when she saw what could only be their minivan reduced to a fiery ball in the midst of hundreds of pounds of twisted, erupted metal. She knew that her father was dead.
Burning, white-hot shards of steel and aluminum whistled through the air, one of them passing over her head. Three feet ahead of her, and a little to the right, Mr. McMillan, the English teacher, made a terrible coughing sound as something sliced through his belly and spilled his insides out. His face looked blank as he fell nose-first onto the sidewalk.
Aafia pressed herself into the damp grass and curled into a ball, her arms concealing her head, as more pieces of things landed heavily around her.
Ten, fifteen seconds later, when the violence was over, the real nightmare began, driven by a dissonant chorus of moans and screams, combined with the whining roar of fires. When she forced herself to raise her eyes above her forearms, her first thought was that she had been killed after all, and that she had so angered Allah that he’d sent her to hell. So much fire, and so much misery.
All caused by the people who’d murdered her father. Was that even possible?
But she remained very much alive.
Soon, people stopped running away in panic, and started running around in a frenzy. Mostly, they were adults, but there were children among them, too. They ran, and then stopped to kneel, and then they would run again.
When Aafia rose to her feet, she understood. There were many wounded, too many to count. Some sat, dazed looks on their faces, while others lay writhing and still others lay horribly still. And the blood. So, so much blood. Everyone seemed to be covered with it. What spilled from the injured seemed almost magically to transfer itself to the people who came to lend aid.
For the longest time—she had no idea how long—Aafia just stood there on the lawn, watching dumbly as the activity swirled bigger and bigger. Teachers and students continued to flood from the school out into the drive, plus some people she didn’t even recognize. As if tugged by the current in a river, Aafia found herself being drawn along, moving closer to the carnage. Somehow, she’d lost her right shoe, one of her favorites—pink with white stripes. Her mother called them her pixie shoes.
Oh, Mama
, she thought. “Oh, Father,” she said aloud. Who would do such a terrible, horrible thing to him? To all of them?
Of all the terrifying sights, the one she refused to look at was the burning hulk of their little van. She wished she couldn’t see the torn bodies and the blood splashes and the scattered body parts.
She needed to do something. She needed to help. Maybe she just needed to cry. She really didn’t know. All of it seemed so make-believe, as if she’d stepped into the middle of the worst video-game nightmare imaginable. Why couldn’t she do anything? Why, suddenly, did everything around her look to be such an odd color?
A teacher’s aide from one of Aafia’s classes—she couldn’t remember which one now—raced past, but then stopped very abruptly and reached out to her. One hand supported Aafia’s arm at the elbow, while the other hand cupped her chin gently at the jawline.
“Oh, honey, you need to sit down,” the aide said. “You’ll be all right.”
And just like that, Aafia was on the ground, staring up into the flawless sky, even though she couldn’t remember doing that. Just as she couldn’t remember what she had done to cut the inside of her mouth. But sure enough, she tasted blood.
An instant later, the sky was gone, replaced by what looked to be a white plastic ceiling with hardware. The world was filled with a new sound. Could it be a siren? And then a stranger was staring down at her. It was a man, a young one.
He smiled at her. “Hi, sweetheart,” he said with a smile that made some of the cold go away. “Can you tell me your name?”
She told him.
“Sweetheart, please stay with me,” he said. “I need to know your name.”
“Aafia,” she said, only this time, she could hear her real voice over the one in her head.
“Can you spell that for me?”
She thought. “I don’t think so,” she said. But she was such a good speller. Why not now?
“What’s your last name, sweetie?” the nice man asked.
“Janwari,” she said.
The face turned confused. “Excuse me?”
“That’s my name,” she said. At least she thought she did. “Aafia Janwari.”
The man said, “Oh, shit,” and then he went away. Aafia went away, too.
C
HAPTER
S
EVEN
Jonathan met FBI Director Irene Rivers for breakfast at the Maple Inn in Vienna, Virginia. A dive by most standards, it was a favorite hangout for the spooky community that had grown up around CIA headquarters, which sat just six miles north on Route 123—or, as it was called within the incorporated limits of the Town of Vienna, Maple Avenue. Jonathan had lost track of the number of clandestine meetings in the open he’d had here over the years, but combined, his didn’t account for one tenth of one percent of the cumulative secrets heard by the restaurant’s walls.
Because the food was good and inexpensive, and the beer was cold and plentiful, the Maple Inn’s clientele attracted the widest possible demographic, from soccer moms with kids to working folks of every color collar. Most important to Jonathan and the people he met with, the waitstaff knew when to take an order and when to stay away.
After their eggs, sausage, and toast had been delivered, and the pleasantries were out of the way, Jonathan got down to business.
“Thanks for coming to my rescue last night.”
She shrugged it off. “The Secret Service has an arrogant streak that pisses me off,” she said. “It feels good to put a thumb in their eye from time to time.”
“Will you be able to keep my name out of the press?”
Irene dipped a corner of her toast in the runny yolk of her egg and took a tiny bite. “The Prince George’s County Police arrested and released a fellow named Chuck Carr last night,” she said. “He was suspected of being one of the bridge shooters.”
“And Agent Clark?” Jonathan had already finished his eggs, and had shifted his concentration to making a sandwich with his sausage patty.
“He was never there,” Irene said, her face showing disappointment. “That was part of the deal with Ramsey Miller.” He was Irene’s counterpart at the Secret Service. “Letting the shooter run away was a big enough screw-up that he didn’t want the embarrassment.”
“So who arrested me? I mean who arrested Chuck Carr?”
“Does that really matter?”
Jonathan thought about that. “No, I suppose it doesn’t.”
Irene smiled. “Good. So, tell me who you saw on the bridge.”
He started from the beginning and went through it all. When he was done, he had Irene’s full attention.
“A girl, huh?” she said. “That’s a twist. You sure it wasn’t a long-haired boy?”
“A long-haired boy with boobs, maybe. My powers of observation are really pretty well-honed. Why?”
She shrugged. “It just runs counter to the profile. These mass-shooting types are always male.”
“I think I saw her drop her weapon,” Jonathan recalled. “Anything useful from that?”
“Generic Bushmaster, two-two-three caliber, modified for fully automatic fire. What concerns me is the marksmanship. Both of the gunmen—gun
persons
—knew what they were doing, and both were firing the same ammo from the same lot.”
“Do you know where they got it?”
“Not yet, but I’m not hopeful that we’ll learn a lot from that. Just a gut feeling. These guys feel trained to me.”
“Any connection to the mall shootings in Kansas last weekend?” Eight people had been murdered in that incident, with over thirty wounded. When the shooters had been cornered, they’d killed themselves rather than being taken into custody.
“Officially, no. Unofficially, absolutely. They were both invisible teens with jihadist propaganda in their pockets.”
“Arab?”
“Not hardly. One of them had red hair. But not all Muslims are Arab.”
“Are you thinking terrorist cell?”
Irene’s eyes grew wide as she feigned insult. “Good God, Digger. We don’t use the T-word for this. The president has made it clear that there will be no domestic terrorist attacks on his watch.”
Jonathan chuckled. “What are we calling it, then?”
“The last I heard, they were ‘unconnected random acts of violence.’ ” She used finger quotes for the last part.
“Needs work,” Jonathan said. “Way too many syllables.”
“Yeah, that’s the problem. Too many syllables.”
A moment passed in silence before Jonathan said, “You should know that Security Solutions has launched our own investigation into the shootings.”
Irene paused in the middle of a sip of coffee. “Please don’t do that,” she said. “I don’t need you exercising your grudge muscles right now.”
“It’s not about me,” Jonathan said. “Of the twelve killed and sixteen wounded on the bridge, three were friends or associates of my investigators.”
She scowled. “How is that possible?”
He shrugged. “The Washington Metro Area is really just a small town with a lot of people in it. My folks don’t ask stuff like this very often. I can’t say no to them. It’ll all be pro bono.”
“I’m not worried about the money—I wouldn’t pay you anyway. I worry about tainted evidence.” She held up her hand before he could respond. “And before you go into denial mode, remember how long we’ve worked together. I’ve never seen anyone who can taint evidence like you can.”
Jonathan resisted the temptation to point out that a not insignificant amount of the work she was referring to was performed at her request. “This won’t be the clandestine side of the shop,” he said. “It’ll all be by the book.”
Irene Rivers was one of very few people on the planet who knew the dark side of Security Solutions. To the rest of the world, it was an investigation firm that worked for some of the most prestigious corporate names in the world.
She wearily closed her eyes. “What can you possibly bring to the table that won’t already be brought by a dozen government agencies?”
“Maybe nothing,” he said. “Maybe a lot. The only thing I know is that I can’t say no to my staff on this one. If I did, they’d just do it anyway. Doing something helps them cope. Makes them feel empowered, I guess.”
Irene’s phone rang in the pocket of her suit jacket. She issued a deep sigh as she reached for it. “Well, I can’t order you not to,” she said. “But please show restraint. If we find the not-terrorists who are committing these unconnected random acts of violence, I will shit all over you if so much as a speck of dust is rendered inadmissible because of something done by you or yours.”
Into the phone: “Director Rivers.”
Jonathan made a show of not listening even as he zoned in on every word. But she didn’t speak. Instead, she just listened and her face darkened. “Okay,” she said at last. “I can be in the office in a half hour with lights and siren. Assemble the section heads and the SAC in Detroit for a video conference at ten. Meanwhile, get Lee and Jeff on the line. I’ll talk to them from the car.”
When she pushed the disconnect button, she shot a pained smirk toward Jonathan. “Be sure to watch the news over the next couple of hours,” she said. “A jihadist just bombed an elementary school in Detroit.”
As Christyne waited for the gunman to return, the temperature in the tiny room soared past sweltering into the range of frightening—easily ninety degrees, if not hotter. The wall on the far side of the room from the door was too hot to touch, leading her to believe that there must not be any insulation at all between the furnace and the concrete block wall. The best she could figure out was that they used the furnace only during the day, and let the fire die at night.
Or, it could be that the heat was a form of torture?
It had been over an hour since they’d taken Ryan, and in that time, she had heard nothing but the drumbeat of her own heart pounding in her ears. Her mind conjured awful things that could be going on, and the imagined images triggered panic. The kind of panic that clouds your thinking and makes you do stupid things.
She wanted to scream, to call out to him. The warnings from the guards made the difference. They demanded silence. Hadn’t she already brought enough harm to her family?
What could they be doing to him?
She took a huge breath and tried to settle herself. The panicky thoughts were counterproductive. She was powerless to affect the outcome of this nightmare. What would happen would happen.
If she told herself that often enough, maybe it would bring solace.
For now, all it brought was more fear.
They had her
son
.
After easily ninety minutes of isolation, she heard movement of the lock again. This time, when the door crashed open, she had been anticipating it, and was able not to yell out in fear. The team of gunmen streamed in as before, guns at the ready, all of them trained on her. As four of them stopped six feet away, the fifth one—the man with the threatening eyes—approached another two steps, stopping only when he was face-to-face with Christyne.
“Where is Ryan?” she asked.
“Put your hands behind your back and turn to face the wall.”
“Please,” she begged. “Is he okay?”
“If you make me hurt you, I will,” the gunman said.
Christyne turned and faced the wall, crossing her wrists behind her back as she had seen Ryan do. The plastic loop closed over her wrists tightly enough to restrain her arms, but not tightly enough to hurt. Yet. A moment later, a hood was placed over her head, but to her surprise, it had a mesh front that allowed her to see. Not well, but enough.
“Walk to the door,” the gunman commanded.
The line of gunmen parted to allow her to pass, and as she did, they curled in around her to follow. The air approaching the door was easily twenty degrees cooler than the air inside the cell. She nearly asked where they were going, but then decided not to. They would tell her what they wanted her to know when they wanted her to know it.
Ryan was kneeling on the floor immediately outside the room, facing her, surrounded by at least a dozen of the black-clad gunmen, all of whose faces were covered by masks. Ryan’s hood had been removed. She could see the desperation in his eyes. His left eye and cheek were swollen and purple. The healthy eye showed an emotion she didn’t quite recognize from him. It was as if something inside him had been rewired.
Once she’d been allowed to see, the gunmen slipped the hood back over Ryan’s face.
Behind her, the man who’d been doing all the talking said, “It’s time now to atone for your sins.”