She didn’t sit down. Without fanfare, she said, “I’m looking for some inbred rednecks with shit for brains.”
I replied, “I can understand why. They can be quite handsome.”
The correct answer caused her to visibly sag. She pulled the strap over her head, set the thermos in front of me, and collapsed into a chair, her head coming to rest on the table.
I leaned over and rubbed her shoulder. “Congratulations. You’re done. I was beginning to worry about our trip to Angkor Wat. Looks like you get to go after all.”
She looked up, but said nothing, the exhaustion on her face giving me a pang of guilt. And a little pride.
“How’d you get past Radford?” I asked.
She smiled, the blood between her teeth and gums making her look feral. “He slapped the hell out of me. Just about knocked me out. I started faking, crying and blubbering, and that chauvinistic son of a bitch actually turned his back to me and walked away.”
I glared at Turbo, who was studiously studying a computer monitor. “Where’s Radford now?”
“Unconscious in the rental car. You might want to get a medevac to him. His arm’s out of socket.”
Turbo came over and shook her hand, which must have pained him, but not as much as the pain I was going to bring to him in the next few minutes.
“Jennifer, why don’t you go clean up,” I said. “There’s a trailer out back. I’ll come get you in a minute.”
When she was gone, I said, “Turbo, go into the bar and line up your team. I’d like to talk to them about following instructions.”
Turbo looked at the door, then back at me. “Uhh. I can handle that.”
“No, I don’t think you can. If they’d like to put on protective gear, I don’t care, although they didn’t give Jennifer the same chance.”
He looked a little incredulous. “You think that piece of ass is worth taking on my whole team by yourself?”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Knuckles scowl at the verbal slight, then slowly rise like a wraith.
He said, “I want the asshole that hit her first.”
7
Hassan Rafik booted up his Skype account and clicked the call button for a cell phone in Montreal. When a man answered, all Rafik said was, “Call me back on your computer.”
Five minutes later, he was hooked up via voice-over Internet protocol through his laptop. It was completely unsecured, but with the enormous amount of digital traffic on the Internet, it might as well have been encrypted by the NSA. There was no way the Great Satan would be able to randomly pluck this call out of cyberspace, even if they were already listening to Rafik’s cell phone. Discovery would have to be luck because Rafik changed locations — and thus his IP address — every time he called. He had the contact do the same. It was like having a cell phone that changed numbers every time he dialed, thwarting the ability to monitor it.
The contact gave Rafik good news. All of the cells had managed to penetrate their respective electric company’s security and plant the virus. It had not gone without incident, however. He relayed what had happened to Keshawn.
Rafik frowned. “Yet you said all were successful. How did he prevent the discovery from getting out?”
The contact paused for a minute, then said, “He killed him. Don’t worry, though. Keshawn knew what to do with the body. He’s experienced in law enforcement techniques. It’ll look like a robbery in a poor section of Baltimore. One near another substation that the man had visited earlier in the day, so it fits.”
Rafik grinned. He felt like shouting in triumph. Al Qaeda had been trying for years to recruit members who didn’t look, talk, or act Arabic. Men who could easily pass into the lands of the Far Enemy and wreak havoc. All that had gotten them so far was a couple of fat Americans who created a lot of press but couldn’t fight their way out of a baby’s crib.
Rafik had taken a different tack. Instead of trying to get non-Arabs to come to al Qaeda, he went to them. The idea came to him when he learned that Richard Reid, the so-called shoe bomber, and Jose Padilla, the so-called dirty bomber, had both converted to Islam in prison. Planting a Muslim chaplain in the New York prison system, he began to recruit in earnest, using America’s own freedom of religion against it.
The prison had turned out to be the perfect recruiting ground. All of his converts could blend in anywhere precisely because they were Americans, born and raised. The recruits also had no compunction about breaking the law and were used to using violence to obtain their goals. Finally, they came to his chaplain already despising their country’s authority. There wasn’t a lot of quibbling over innocents.
At the core, they were all looking for someone to blame for their own failings, something to identify with that would provide them honor and a reason to exist. It was no different from a Palestinian living in squalor in a refugee camp. Rafik had gladly provided that something, first through the pacifist teachings of Islam, then, when he had culled out the potential mujahideen, through the concepts of jihad in a smaller prayer group. No one in the prison system monitored his chaplain’s preachings.
His idea wasn’t just to convert as many as he could to the jihad but to build a cohesive fighting cell for a spectacular attack. It had taken years, but now it was paying off in unexpected ways. No infiltrated transplant could have averted discovery as Keshawn had done. The mission would have been over.
The contact asked, “When will we insert the real virus? Like I said before, we should have done that initially, instead of this test case.”
“That is the real virus,” Rafik said. “We won’t be risking a second insertion. You can initiate it remotely, right?”
The contact’s voice became agitated. “Yes, of course, but that virus will only disrupt their early-warning software. It won’t do anything to the system itself. What good is that? Was I supposed to give the men a different one?”
“Calm down. You did what I asked. Computer attacks can be fixed in hours. Worst case, they go without power for a day or two. We need to physically destroy parts of the system to cause a long-term effect.”
“That’s the same problem. They’ll just put in repair parts. That’ll take less time than cleaning out a virus. Why on earth would you risk such a complicated plan? I can do the same thing using my computer.”
“There are some components that don’t have spares. Some critical components.”
The contact persisted. “If it’s so critical, it will be heavily protected.”
“You’d think so,” Rafik said, “but the Americans don’t do anything until
“How will you attack them?”
“I’m working on that now. It’s why I’m in Egypt. Just be prepared to receive an airplane in the next couple of weeks. I’ll give you the details when you need them.”
Rafik could hear the disbelief in his contact’s answer. “We have worked together for a long time, but now I fear you’re misleading me. I won’t continue like this. You have never kept things from me before.”
“It’s for your own safety. You live inside the Far Enemy. If you get captured, I want to be able to continue. Maybe not immediately, but soon enough. It’s bad enough that you know all the names of the cell. Trust me, I have found an Achilles’ heel. Just leave it at that.”
Kurt paced outside the Oval Office, hoping to catch five seconds of the president’s time. He had never done anything like this before, only coming to the White House when summoned. The phone call from Cambodia had changed that.
He knew it was incredibly frowned upon to attempt to ambush the president, but he really didn’t have a choice. He was about to divert the next Taskforce mission for personal reasons, and he needed the president’s approval. He also needed a little of the president’s big stick to cut through some Army bureaucracy.
“You sure he’s coming back here before his meeting with the finance committee?”
Sally, the president’s secretary, smiled. “Yes. He always comes back here before heading out again. Gives
