She kept going, pushing herself. Around the second turn to the left she went, then the third. Approximately a kilometer ahead, she knew, was the second branching. After that, she was home free.
Fadi discovered that the police had not only caught sight of Bourne but fired at him. Without asking Kove’s permission, he struck the offending officer a terrible blow that nearly cracked his skull. Kove stood red-faced, biting his lip. He said nothing, even when Fadi ordered them on. Several hundred meters farther, Fadi spotted a stone shard, shiny with blood in the floodlights. He picked it up, closed his fist around it, and was heartened.
But now, this far into the catacombs, he knew that following in a pack made no sense. He turned to Kove and said, “The longer he stays in the catacombs, the greater his chance of eluding us. Split up the men, let them fan out singly as they would in a forest in enemy territory.”
He could see that Kove’s men were rapidly losing their nerve—and that their anxiety was spreading to their commander. He had to get them moving now or it would happen not at all.
He drew close to Kove, whispering in the lieutenant’s ear: “We’re losing the race against time. Give the order now, or I will.”
Kove jerked as if coming in contact with a live wire. He retreated a pace, licked his lips. For a moment, he seemed mesmerized by Fadi. Then, with a minute shiver, he turned to his men and delivered the order for them to fan out, one man to a passageway or arm.
Soraya sensed the branching up ahead. A wisp of fresh air brushed her cheek like a lover’s caress: the access point. Darkness behind her. It was very damp. She could smell the rot as the underground water worked on the earth and wood, decomposing it bit by bit. She risked another flicker of light. She ignored the weeping walls, because she saw the Y juncture less than twenty meters directly ahead. Here she needed to take the left branch.
At that moment a splinter of light probed the passage behind her. At once she extinguished her light. Her pulse throbbed in her temples; her heart raced. Had her pursuer seen the light up ahead and realized she was here? Though she needed to continue, she nevertheless could not allow Dr. Pavlyna to be compromised. The doctor was CI, under deep cover.
She stood still, turned so that she could see the way she had come. The light was gone. No, there it was again, a tiny beacon in the pitch blackness, less diffuse now. Someone was, indeed, coming down this part of the catacombs.
Slowly, she began to back up, edging away from her pursuer, moving cautiously toward the Y juncture, never taking her eyes from the bobbing stab of light. She kept moving, trying to decide what to do. Then it was too late.
Her back foot broke the soft surface of the catacomb floor. She tried to shift her weight forward, but the suck of the disintegrated floor pulled her backward, and down. She flung out her arms for balance, but it wasn’t enough. She had already sunk into the ooze to the level of her thighs. She began to struggle.
A sharp brightening brought the passageway into sudden focus. A black blob resolved itself into a familiar shape: a Ukrainian policeman, massive looking in the confined space.
He saw her, his eyes widened, and he drew his gun.
At precisely 10:45 PM Karim al-Jamil’s computer terminal chimed softly, reminding him that the second of his twice-daily briefings with the DCI was fifteen minutes away. This concerned him less than the mysterious disappearance of Matthew Lerner. He’d asked the Old Man, but the bastard had only said that Lerner was “on assignment.” That could mean anything. Like all the best schemers, Karim al-Jamil hated loose ends, which was precisely what Matthew Lerner had become. Even Anne didn’t know where the man was, an oddity in itself. Normally, she would have booked Lerner’s itinerary personally. The DCI was up to something. Karim al-Jamil could not discount the possibility that Lerner’s sudden disappearance had something to do with Anne. He’d have to find out, as quickly as possible. That meant dealing directly with the DCI.
The monitor chimed again: time to go. He scooped up the translations of the latest Dujja chatter the Typhon team had compiled, picking up a couple more as he stepped out of his office. He read them on his way up to the DCI’s suite.
Anne was waiting for him, sitting behind her desk in her usual formal pose. Her eyes lit up for a tenth of a second when he appeared. Then she said, “He’s ready for you.”
Karim al-Jamil nodded, strode past her. She buzzed him into the enormous office. The DCI was on the phone, but he waved Karim al-Jamil in.
“That’s right. All stations to remain on highest alert.”
It seemed clear he was talking to the chief of Operations Directorate.
“The director of the IAEA was briefed yesterday morning,” the DCI continued, after listening for a moment to the voice on the other end. “Their personnel have been mobilized and are temporarily under our aegis. Yes. The chief problem now is keeping Homeland Security from screwing up the works. No, as of now we’re maintaining a strict news blackout on all of this. The last thing we need is the media instigating a panic among the civilian population.” He nodded. “All right. Keep me informed, night or day.”
He put down the receiver, motioned for Karim al-Jamil to take a seat. “What d’you have for me?”
“A break, finally.” Karim al-Jamil handed over one of the sheets he’d been given on exiting his office. “There’s unusual activity with Dujja’s signature coming out of Yemen.”
The DCI nodded as he studied the intel. “Specifically Shabwah, in the south, I see.”
“Shabwah is mountainous, sparsely populated,” Karim al-Jamil said. “Perfect for building an underground nuclear facility.”
“I agree,” the Old Man said. “Let’s get Skorpion units there ASAP. But this time I want ground assist.” He grabbed the phone. “There are two battalions of Marine Rangers stationed in Djibouti. I’ll get them to send in a full company to coordinate with our personnel.” His eyes were alight. “Good work, Martin. Your people may have provided us with the means to nip this nightmare in the bud.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Karim al-Jamil smiled. The Old Man would have been right, had the intel not been disinformation his people at Dujja had put out into the airwaves. Though the wilds of Shabwah did indeed make an excellent hiding place—one that he and his brother had once considered—the actual location of Dujja’s underground nuclear facility was, in fact, nowhere near South Yemen.
Soraya was lucky in one sense, though at first blush it failed to impress her: Veins of metal in the walls of the catacombs made it impossible for the policeman to contact the rest of his contingent. He was on his own.
Regaining her composure, she ceased to move. Her struggling had only served to work her body deeper into the slurry pit in the catacombs’ floor. She was up to her crotch in muck, and the Ukrainian policeman was strutting toward her.
It was only when he neared her that she realized just how frightened he was. Maybe he’d lost a brother or a daughter to the catacombs, who knew? In any event, it was clear that he was all too aware of the multiple dangers that lurked in every corner of the tunnels. He saw her now where he’d been imagining himself ever since he’d been ordered inside.
“For the love of God, please help me!”
The policeman, as he approached the edge of the pit, played the beam of light over her. She had one arm in front of her, the other behind her back.
“Who are you? What are you doing here?”
“I’m a tourist. I got lost down here.” She began to cry. “I’m afraid. I’m afraid I’ll drown.”
“A tourist, no. I’ve been told who you are.” He shook his head. “For you and your friend, it’s too late. You’re both in too deep.” He drew his gun, leveled it at her. “Anyway, you’re both going to die tonight.”
“Don’t be so sure,” Soraya said, shooting him through the heart with the ASP pistol.
The policeman’s eyes opened wide, and he fell backward as if he were a cardboard target on a firing range. He dropped the light, which rang ont
o the floor and immediately went out.
“Shit,” she said under her breath.
She stowed the ASP back in its shoulder holster. She’d drawn it the moment she’d regained her equilibrium, had been holding it behind her back as the policeman approached. Now her first order of business was to reach his feet. She lowered her upper torso into the muck, trying to splay herself out horizontally. This maneuver also had the effect of moving her closer to her objective.
Float, she thought. Float, dammit!
She let her legs go slack, using the strength in her upper body only to inch forward, arms stretched out in front of her to their farthest extent. She could feel the muck sucking at her, reluctant to release her legs and hips. She fought down another wave of panic, set her mind firmly on moving one inch at a time. In the darkness, it was more difficult. Once or twice she thought she was already under, already dead.
Then her fingers encountered rubber: boot soles! Squirming another centimeter or two brought her enough purchase to grasp the policeman’s boots. She took a deep breath, hauled with all her might. She didn’t move, but he did. His feet and legs angled down into the pit. That was it, though; his huge body wouldn’t budge another millimeter.
It was all she needed. Using his corpse as a makeshift ramp, she slowly but surely pulled herself hand-over-hand up his legs until she could grasp his wide belt with both her palms. In this way, she slowly pulled herself the rest of the way out of the slurry pit.
For a moment, she lay atop him, feeling the thunder of her heart, hearing the breath sigh in and out of her lungs. At length, she rolled away, onto the damp floor of the catacombs, and regained her feet.
As she feared, his light was beyond repair. Wiping off her own, she prayed that it still worked. A feeble beam flickered on, off, on again. Now that she had more leverage, she was able to roll the policeman into the pit. She scuffed at the floor, kicking dirt and debris over whatever blood had leaked from him.
Knowing the light’s batteries were running down, she hurried into the left-hand fork, heading toward the access point nearest Dr. Pavlyna’s house.
At the second refueling stop, the plane carrying Martin Lindros took on a new passenger. This individual sat down next to Lindros and said something in the Bedouin-inflected Arabic of Abbud ibn Aziz.
“But you are not Abbud ibn Aziz,” Lindros said, turning his head in the way of a blind man. He still wore the black cloth hood.
“No, indeed. I am his brother, Muta ibn Aziz.”
“Are you as good at maiming human beings as your brother is?”
“I leave such things to my brother,” Muta ibn Aziz said rather sharply.
Lindros, whose sense of hearing had been honed by his lack of sight, heard the note; he thought he could exploit the emotion behind it. “Your hands are clean, I imagine.” He sensed the other studying him, as if he’d just stumbled upon a new species of mammal.
“My conscience is clear.”
Lindros shrugged. “It doesn’t matter to me that you’re lying.”
Muta ibn Aziz struck him across the face.
Lindros tasted his own blood. He wondered dimly if his lip could swell any more than it already had. “You have more in common with your brother than you seem to think,” he said thickly.
“My brother and I could not be more different.”
There was an awkward silence. Lindros realized that Muta had revealed something he regretted. He wondered what dispute lay between Abbud and Muta, and whether there was a way to exploit it.
“I’ve spent some time with Abbud ibn Aziz,” Lindros said. “He has tortured me, then, when that didn’t work, he tried to become my friend.”
“Hah!”
“That was my response also,” Lindros said. “All he wanted was how much I knew about the shooting of Hamid ibn Ashef.”
He could hear Muta’s body shift, could feel him moving closer. When Muta spoke again, his voice was barely audible over the drone of the engines. “Why would he want to know about that? Did he tell you?”
“That would have been stupid.” Lindros’s internal antenna was focused now on what had just happened. The mention of the Hamid ibn Ashef incident was obviously of extreme importance to both brothers. Why? “Abbud ibn Aziz may be many things, but stupid isn’t one of them.”
“No, he’s not stupid.” Muta’s voice had hardened into steel. “But a liar and a deceiver, now that is another matter.”
Karim al-Jamil bin Hamid ibn Ashraf al-Wahhib, the man who for the past few days had passed for Martin Lindros, was in the process of worming his way into the CI mainframe, where every iota of sensitive data was stored. The problem was, he didn’t know the access code that would unlock the digital gateway. The real Martin Lindros had failed to cough up his access code. No surprise there. He’d devised an alternative that was as elegant as it was efficient. Trying to hack into the CI mainframe was useless. People more talented than he was at geek-logic had tried and failed. The CI firewall—known as Sentinel—was notorious for its vault-like properties.
The problem was then how to get into a hackproof computer for which you lacked an access code. Karim knew that if he could shut down the CI mainframe, the CI tech people would issue everyone—including him—new access codes. The only way to do that was to introduce a computer virus into the system. Since that couldn’t be done from the outside—because of Sentinel—it had to be done from the inside.
Therefore, he had needed an absolutely foolproof way to get the computer virus into the CI building. Far too dangerous for him or Anne to smuggle it in; and there were too many safeguards for it to be done another way. No. It could not even be brought into the building by a CI agent. This was the problem he and Fadi had spent months trying to solve.
Here was what they had come up with: The cipher on the button the CI agents had found on Fadi’s shirt wasn’t a cipher at all, which was why Tim Hytner had gotten nowhere in trying to break it. It was step-by-step instructions on how to reconstruct the virus using ordinary computer binary code—a string of root-level commands that worked in the background, totally invisible. Once reconstructed on a CI computer, the root-level commands attacked the operating system—in this case, UNIX—corrupting its basic commands. The process would create wholesale havoc, rendering the CI terminals inoperative in the space of six minutes.
There was a safeguard, too, so that even if by some fluke of luck Hytner had tumbled to the fact that it wasn’t a cipher, he couldn’t inadvertently begin the chain of instructions—because they were reversed.
He brought up the computer file Hytner had been working on, typed in the binary string in reverse, saved it to a file. Then he exited the Linux OS and went into C++ computer language. Pasting the chain of instructions into this set up the steps he needed to build the virus in C++.
Karim al-Jamil, staring at the virus, needed only to depress one key to activate it. In a tenth of a second it would insinuate itself into the operating system—not simply the main pathways, but also the byways and cross-connections. In other words, it would clog and then corrupt the data streams as they entered and exited the CI mainframe, thus bypassing Sentinel altogether. This could only be accomplished on a networked computer inside CI, because Sentinel would stop any extra-network attack, no matter how sophisticated, dead in its tracks.
First, however, there was one more matter that required his attention. On another screen, he brought up a personnel file and began affixing to it a string of irrefutable artifacts, including the cipher he was using to create the virus.
This done, he made hard copies of the file, put the pages in a CI dossier, locked it away. With one fingertip, he cleared the screen, brought up the program that had been patiently awaiting its birth. Exhaling a small sigh of satisfaction, he depressed the key.
The virus was activated.
Nineteen
ABBUD IBN AZIZ, alone with the waves and his darkening thoughts, was the first to see Fadi emerge from the hole where the grate had been. It had be
en more than three hours since he and the police contingent had gone in. Attuned to the facial expressions and body language of his leader, he knew at once that Bourne hadn’t been found. This was very bad for him, because it was very bad for Fadi. Then the policemen stumbled out, gasping for breath.
Abbud ibn Aziz heard Lieutenant Kove’s plaintive voice. “I’ve lost a man in this operation, Major General Romanchenko.”
“I’ve lost far more than that, Lieutenant,” Fadi snapped. “Your man failed to detain my objective. He was killed for his incompetence, a just punishment, I should say. Instead of whining to me, you should use this incident as a learning experience. Your men are not hard enough—not by a long shot.”
Before Kove could respond, Fadi turned on his heel and strode down the beach to the jetty at which the sailboat was tied up.
“Get under way,” he snapped as he came aboard.
He was in such a foul mood, sparks seemed to fly off him. At such times, Fadi was at his most volatile, as Abbud ibn Aziz knew better than anyone, save perhaps Karim al-Jamil. It was about Karim al-Jamil that he needed to talk to his leader now.
He waited until they had cast off, the sails trimmed. Gradually, they left the police contingent behind, plowing through the Black Sea night on its way to a dockage where Abbud ibn Aziz had a car waiting to take them to the airport. Sitting with Fadi in the bow, away from the two-man crew, he offered food and drink. For some time, they ate together with only the whooshing of the water purling in a symmetrical bow wave and the occasional hoot of a ship’s horn, mournful as the cry of a lost child.
“While you were gone, I had a disturbing communication from Dr. Senarz,” Abbud ibn Aziz said. “It is his contention that Dr. Veintrop is ready for the final series of procedures to complete the nuclear device, even though Veintrop denies this.”
“Dr. Veintrop is stalling,” Fadi said.
Abbud ibn Aziz nodded. “That’s Dr. Senarz’s contention, and I’m inclined to believe him. He’s the nuclear physicist, after all. Anyway, it wouldn’t be the first time we had a problem with Veintrop.”
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