DIFERRI MADE A couple of wrong turns before he found D-2471, near the northeast corner of the storage center’s second floor. He paused in front of the locker, then slipped his key in, wondering what he’d see. Maybe there’d be a camera crew. Maybe the bag would be filled with money, crisp hundreds in packets like in the movies. Or maybe his key wouldn’t work at all.
But the door opened easily, and when DiFerri turned on the overhead light he saw nothing but the oversized canvas bag that Bokar had told him to expect. He took a tentative step into the room and closed the door. It shut behind him solidly, and he wondered if he had locked himself in. But when he checked the handle the door swung open smoothly, and the corridor outside looked just as it had a few seconds before. DiFerri closed the door again, wondering why he felt creeped out. He’d watched
On his way to the locker DiFerri had seen a half dozen signs warning against smoking, but he didn’t see one in here. Screw that guy at the front desk. He tapped a cigarette into his palm and lit up.
ONLY ABOUT A handful of civilians had been inside the storage center when the man with the key came in. They were not evacuated; Duto and Kijiuri had specified that the center should operate normally unless someone tried to remove the bag. Nor did the commandos approach D-2471. But everyone in the center was being shadowed. If the bomb detonated, the commandos would evacuate the civilians from the building, by force if necessary, and take them to a temporary decontamination center NEST had set up a mile away. There they would be checked for radiation exposure.
The computer simulations that NEST had run suggested a 70 percent probability that no civilian would be exposed to harmful levels of radioactivity, as long as everyone escaped the building within three minutes of an explosion. Of course, those odds left a 30 percent chance of harmful exposure, but that couldn’t be helped.
AT THE SPORTS bar Exley found a dozen agency officials watching the monitors. Inside the locker a perplexed-looking white man puffed on a cigarette and nudged the canvas bag with his foot.
“This guy?” she said to Shafer. The guy looked like a mechanic, maybe an out-of-work trucker. Anything but a terrorist.
“You know as much as I do.”
“What about the NSA?” The National Security Agency had recognition software that could match facial photographs with a database of suspected al Qaeda members.
“Nothing there. He’s probably just a Dixie cup,” Shafer said. “Hired in case we’re watching.”
“Charming term,” Exley said. “Dixie cup” was agency jargon for someone disposable, someone who could be arrested or killed without consequence. “I don’t get it,” she said. “If they went to so much trouble to bring the stuff in, why are they treating it like this?”
On-screen, the guy in D-2471 poked at the bag, then squatted beside it.
“We’re so screwed,” Shafer said.
She knew exactly what he was thinking. The agency and the FBI were in an impossible position. The guy in the locker probably had no idea what he was playing with. Then again, he had the key. He might be a genuine al Qaeda operative, a true believer who happened to look like a trucker. Until they arrested him, they wouldn’t know. They couldn’t move too quickly or they might blow the operation. But if they moved too slowly, they risked letting the guy blow himself up, especially if he was a dupe.
Exley felt the way she had when she was seventeen and trying to learn to drive a stick. Lay off the gas, drop the clutch, slip the transmission into gear. Easy.
Only she couldn’t do it. She had burned out the clutch on her brother’s old Willys Jeep. Boy, had that day been awful. Worse because her brother was so locked up fighting his own demons that he hardly paid attention when she told him what she’d done.
She brought her attention back to the screen. The guy was still playing with the bag. “So…we let him open it?” she said to Shafer.
“If you’ve got a better idea now would be a good time to share.”
She didn’t.
DIFERRI STUBBED OUT his cigarette on the locker’s concrete floor. Time to get to work. He cautiously opened the big canvas bag, pulling down its black plastic zipper to reveal the smooth metal top of the aluminum trunk inside.
He tried to lift the trunk out of the bag. It was heavier than he had expected. His grip slipped. He grunted and let go, and the trunk thudded against the floor and banged into his knee.
“Dammit,” he yelped. The complaint echoed in the locker, and again he considered leaving, telling Bokar that he couldn’t open the trunk. No. He’d always wanted to be on TV, and he wasn’t going to blow this chance.
He tried again, turning the trunk on its side. He found a digital lock with a numeric pad instead of a keyhole. Just as Bokar had promised. The lock’s red LCD flashed the time: 15:47:05…15:47:06…. Shit. He had less than an hour to get downtown. As Bokar had told him to do, he tapped the pound key on the pad three times. The clock disappeared, replaced by a blinking row of dashes. DiFerri pulled his battered wallet out of his pocket and found the piece of paper with the code that Bokar had given him. 4308512112-9447563-01072884.
DiFerri carefully punched the numbers into the pad. By the time he finished he was sweating, and not from the heat in the airless room. He hoped he had gotten the code right. He punched the pound key three times, as he’d been told. The code disappeared, replaced now by a timer.
10…9…8…7…
Holy shit.
6…5…4…3…2…1…
He lumbered to his feet and tried to back away.
LIKE EVERYONE ELSE watching in Langley, Exley could see exactly what was happening inside D-2471. The cameras were good enough to catch the terror on the guy’s face as he stepped backward. Then the bomb blew. The explosion echoed inside the communications center, and the monitors went black.
The room was silent. Exley could not stop replaying the panicked look she had just seen. He was no terrorist, that guy. He didn’t belong in that locker. She had just watched an innocent man die. For the first time in history, a radioactive weapon had exploded on American soil. And she and everyone in this room had allowed it. Their mistakes had no end. Shafer’s joke about the Dixie cup seemed unimaginably callous now.
Then the ringing of a phone, and another and another, broke the silence. The communications center began humming like a casino on New Year’s Eve, technicians shouting to the commandos inside the center. The mission wasn’t over. The Delta units and the Albany police had to evacuate everyone within a quarter mile while NEST’s scientists determined how much radiation the dirty bomb had released. Plus, they would have to figure out who the guy in the locker had been and track his movements and accomplices as far back as they could. Though Exley had little doubt that the trail — if they could trace it at all — would eventually lead back to one Omar Khadri.
Exley felt a murderous rage replace her shame. In all her years at the CIA she had never been so angry. She knew that personalizing these battles didn’t help win them, but she couldn’t stop herself. This man Khadri was toying with them and killing Americans for sport. He had to be destroyed. “Whatever it takes,” she said to herself under her breath.
Shafer heard her. “Yes,” he said.
KHADRI WAS BRUSHING his teeth in his motel room in Kingston when he heard the first television bulletin.
“This is Scott Yorne with breaking news from Channel 2, your capital area news leader. The Albany Police Department is evacuating parts of western Albany following an explosion in a storage center on Central Avenue. Authorities are advising everyone else in the region to stay inside for at least two hours. So far, police have been tight-lipped about the nature of the explosion, but they promise us more information as soon as possible…”
So Farouk had told the Americans about the bomb, Khadri thought. Otherwise they wouldn’t be evacuating the city. They had been watching the locker and knew what it held. Or thought they did, anyway. They would be surprised when they got inside. Khadri smiled briefly as he looked at his reflection in the bathroom mirror. His
