The van slowed and Coffey rose. As he did, he was overcome by a sense of vertigo which brought him back to the floor. He reached along the backs of the two chairs beside the computer stations and struggled to pull himself up. Nausea filled his stomach and rose in his throat and brought him back down again.
A moment later, as black clouds swirled inside his eyes, Lowell Coffey felt himself hoisted up bodily and dragged backward.
EIGHTEEN
They look without seeing, Ibrahim thought.
The young Kurd had shot the wild sheep and dragged it into the road to stop the van. When the driver braked to avoid hitting it, Ibrahim climbed from the ditch in which he'd been hiding. He crept from the side of the road to the back of the van, plugged the exhaust pipe with his T-shirt, and snuck away again. The windows were closed. Once the door was shut, he knew it would take less than three minutes for the passengers to be overcome by carbon monoxide. He had selected a relatively flat stretch of roadway so that when the driver fainted, the van would simply glide to a stop. Then, removing his T-shirt from the exhaust, Ibrahim entered the van and opened the windows. He was both surprised and delighted to find it filled with computers. The equipment and perhaps the data itself would be useful.
Ibrahim checked the three Americans. They were still breathing. They would survive. Dragging the unconscious man to the front of the van, Ibrahim sat him and the others back-to-back behind the passenger's seat. Using his knife to cut out the seat belts and shoulder harnesses, he tied the three people together by the wrists. Then he bound their legs at the thighs and shins.
He took a last look around the van before slipping into the driver's seat. As he sat down he thought he heard something behind him. It sounded like someone gagging. Noticing the flashlight between the seats, he shined it into the back of the van. For the first time he noticed that there were doors in the floor. Drawing the.38 from his belt holster, he walked over. He stopped at the compartments and looked down.
Each compartment was large enough to hold one person. He heard the retching sound again.'There was definitely someone in the left-side compartment.
Ibrahim fought the urge to put bullets into the floor before raising the door. But he knew that whoever was inside would have been incapacitated by carbon monoxide just as the other three had been. Bending, he pointed his gun down and threw open the first door.
There was a woman inside. She was conscious, but just barely so. There was a pool of vomit below her head. Ibrahim opened the other door. There was another soldier inside. He was unconscious. Trapped in the unventilated compartment closest to the exhaust, he had obviously been the most seriously affected of the five. But he too was still alive.
So the American officer did warn these people, Ibrahim thought. They were trying to sneak these two people in to kill them. But Allah was looking out for them, blessed be His mighty name.
Pulling the man out, Ibrahim slipped off his black shirt. Tearing it into strips, he draped the man over the back of the chair and tied his hands to the front legs and his feet to the back legs. Then he went to the woman, threw her over the back of the other chair, and tied her up using the rest of the shirt.
With a self-satisfied smile, he surveyed all his captives one last time before slipping his gun back into his holster and returning to the driver's seat. Flashing the van's headlights three times to signal Hasan to let him through, he put the vehicle into drive and quickly covered the short distance to the hillock.
NINETEEN
Monday, 2:01 p.m.,
Washington, D. C
There was a ping from the side-mounted speakers of Paul Hood's computer. Hood looked at the monitor and saw Bob Herbert's code on the bottom of the screen. He pushed Ctrl/Ent.
'Yes, Bob.'
'Chief, I know you're in a rush,' Herbert said, 'but there's something you've got to take a look at.'
'Something bad?' Hood asked. 'Is Mike okay?'
'It may involve Mike directly,' Herbert said, 'and I'm sorry. Yeah, it does look pretty bad.'
'Send it over,' Hood said.
'Right away,' Herbert replied.
Hood sat back and waited. He'd been busy downloading classified data onto diskettes to take with him on the airplane. The diskettes were specially designed for use on government flights. The jackets became superheated in a fire, though they, could not burn. In the event of a crash, the disks as well as their data. would be reduced to slag.
The White House was sending a chopper to Andrews and putting him and Assistant Deputy Director Warner Bicking on a three p.m. State Department flight to London. Hood was scheduled to meet Dr. Nasr at Heathrow Airport and catch a British Airways flight to Syria an hour later. Hood watched as the computer finished copying files onto diskettes. When the hard drive stopped humming, Hood continued to stare at the blank screen.
'Hold on a second,' Herbert said. 'I want the computer to animate the stuff for you.'
'I'm holding on,' Hood said, a trace of impatience in his voice. He tried to imagine what could possibly be worse than Mike Rodgers having been captured by terrorists.
Mike Rodgers a hostage, he thought bitterly. Your wife disappointed in you. A new problem will give you a hat trick. Still, it was a record he didn't feel like shooting for.
Less than two minutes ago Hood had phoned his wife to tell her he wouldn't be able to make daughter Harleigh's piccolo solo at school that night, and almost certainly son Alexander's championship soccer game on Thursday. Sharon had reacted the way she always did when work came before family. She immediately grew cold and distant. And Hood knew she would stay that way until he came back. Part of her reaction was concern for her husband's safety. American government and business leaders abroad, particularly in the Middle East, were neither low-profile nor particularly well liked. And after her husband's experiences with the New Jacobin terrorists in France, Sharon was less complacent than ever about his safety.
Another, possibly larger, part of her reaction was Sharon's oft-voiced concern that time was passing and they weren't spending enough of it together. They weren't building the memories that helped make marriages rich and durable. Ironically, long hours was one of the reasons he'd gotten out of politics and then out of banking. The directorship of Op-Center was supposed to have been about managing a modest staff which managed domestic crises. But after being drawn into a near-disaster in North Korea, Op-Center suddenly found itself an international player, a streamlined counterpart to the bureaucracy-heavy CIA. As a result, Hood's own responsibilities had increased dramatically.
Working hard certainly didn't make him a bad person. It provided a very comfortable life for his family and it exposed their two children to interesting people and events. But on top of everything else, he had to deal with the fact that his freedom to work, and to work hard, made Sharon jealous. She'd been forced to cut back her 'healthy cooking' appearances on Andy McDonnell's cable food show to twice a week. There simply wasn't enough time to do a daily segment and shuttle the kids to where they had to go and run the house. Though Hood felt bad for his wife, there was nothing he could do.
Except get home on time, he thought, which sounds great on the surface but isn't practical. Not in a city that operates on international time.
'Here it is,' Herbert said. 'Watch the left side of the screen.'
Hood leaned forward. He saw an extremely jerky motion picture of what looked like the ROC sitting in darkness. From the ID numbers in the lower left corner of the picture, he knew that these were successive NRO
