Critical Mass

by Whitley Strieber

  She knew she shouldn’t do it, but she found herself navigating to craigslist. What was Rashid really doing, anyway, worrying about such a thing as a time like this, to the point of violating orders?

  She went to the D.C. section, then to collectibles. She searched on “rug,” and there it was, the only one. She opened the page. Stared, confused. How could you sell anything with this sparse offering? There was no picture. There were only four words of description: “Antique Sarouk carpet, purple.” Not even the size. And yet he said he had a bite? Impossible, he was a complete idiot.

  She knew that she shouldn’t use her skills for this, but nevertheless she hacked into their civilian Internet service provider, Washington Cable, and was soon looking at the server space allocated to Rashid’s account. She opened his e-mail.

  Nothing there except spam, some from as long as six days ago. So if he had read his e-mail as he said he had done last night, why was his spam still on the server? It would have been downloaded with the rest of the e-mail.

  She looked in the record of items he had recently sent. There was an e-mail there, its subject heading “Sarouk Carpet.” She opened it. There was only one word in the body of the text: “Purple.”

  Odd and odder. She saw the address of the recipient, a Gmail account. If she wanted to go any further, she would need to contact Google Security. It wasn’t difficult. Her program automatically secured the legal permissions necessary.

  She wouldn’t be alone, though. Every keystroke would be recorded, and Legal might have questions later. If she couldn’t answer them, she’d end up under investigation.

  She couldn’t honestly check the box that said it was a national security matter, not quite. It was just—well, it was odd, that was all.

  But this was Rashid, her brother, perhaps too intense about his religion, but certainly a patriot! She was going paranoid. Because this was an insane thing to do, an abuse of power, probably a criminal act.

  Instead of checking the box, she did something that was far less illegal, and replied to the buyer as Rashid. She could see that the buyer wasn’t in his e-mail account—probably still in his car, in fact—so she spoofed him: “This is Rashid. I am sorry, I have decided not to sell my rug. The offer is withdrawn.” She hit send—and immediately the message returned. She checked the network, the servers. The backbone was intact. The route was clear. The problem was quite simple: the address no longer existed in Gmail.

  In other words, the recipient had closed the account as soon as Rashid had sent his strange, single-word e-mail.

  She sat, staring at her screen, thinking. Her heart was blasting; sweat was running along her underarms.

  Now she returned to Google’s security sign-in area. She certainly had justifiable suspicion this time. “Rashid,” she whispered, her voice miserable.

  She checked the boxes, checked that this was a national security matter, and that she had probable cause.

  From behind a veil of tears, she sent her request to Google. Sometimes there was a delay. They had their legal issues, too, their oversight protocols. But not today. Today, the reply came back in just seconds. The Gmail account had been opened this morning from a T-Mobile HotSpot in Alexandria. It had been open for just six minutes. Of course, the account’s information still remained, but all it did was direct her to that particular Starbucks. She noted the address, though, because she knew now that this was important. Her heart was breaking, but her mind was clear.

  “Purple” was a coded message, and therefore her brother was involved in something. What if it had to do with the nuclear attack? Oh, but God, no, that was impossible. Rashid might be tangled up in some silly extremism, but not that. Or there might even be some innocent explanation—a secret society, perhaps. Wahabis in the United States were secretive, and for a member of this community to be flirting with them—he would be very careful.

  Still, he had violated the most important order he had probably ever received in order to transmit a code word on a morning when he should have been racing to his dispersal point.

  She threw her head back; she clenched her jaw; the tears rushed from her eyes; her nails dug into her palms. Then she drew breath, and a choked cry came out of her, instantly silenced.

  Again, she heaved, fighting herself, clapping her hands over her own mouth. She forced herself to stop shaking, to swallow the next scream.

  Their father would weep with rage to know that the effort he’d made to get his kids around the prohibition against Muslims in intelligence work had led to this: “Senator, you know Rashid and Nabila from their babyhoods! You know what kind of kids they are!”

  She told herself that it wasn’t just them, not just the Muslims. After all, had divisions between families like this not happened here before, in the Civil War? But this was her brother’s betrayal of her and of their country, not the betrayal of some other brother from long ago.

  Jim had warned of a penetration and a serious security problem. She had known at once that her work would be of intense interest to anybody wanting to follow the CIA’s efforts to contain this problem. She was an important link in that chain.

  So they were almost certainly watching her online activities. Of course they were. But this also meant that they had seen what she had just discovered about her brother.

  They would have to act, and at once.

  She picked up her cell phone—and then turned it off. She took the battery out and laid it on her desk. She closed her laptop, unplugged it, then removed the battery. She dropped the computer and the battery into her backpack.

  How long might she have? Not long. They might be on station somewhere in the neighborhood. Probably were.

  Rashid had left her here not to die but to be killed.

  She left her office. She knew she had no time to waste, but the weight of the lost past, as she went through the house, slowed her movements. Leaving here was pushing against the strength of a river that was made up of the pictures on the walls, the carpet that had pleased Daddy so much, the couch Mother had loved. Nabila could hear the happy voices still, her mother calling her from the kitchen, her dad—well, she had felt herself a royal child once, simply to be his daughter.

  Feeling now like a refugee from some sort of hurricane, she bowed her head and left the house. Rather than taking her car, she walked down to the coffee shop on the corner. She had no intention of using the WiFi node there—or of using the computer again, not until it had been completely examined by digital security, in the unlikely event that she managed to reach Langley.

  She walked past the silent houses and the houses where people were leaving, filling their cars, calling to their children, throwing their luggage in, their clothes in piles. An SUV raced away, followed by a dog running hard. The vehicle rounded a corner, the dog still behind it, his big ears flapping as he ran with all his might.

  She found the old pay phone in the cul-de-sac beside the coffee bar and dug into her purse, praying that she had change.

  She put in two quarters. Dialed. She scrambled for more money. Paid more. And heard ringing. Again. Again. “Please, Jim, oh, please!”

  “Please leave a message.” His voice, at least.

  “Jim, it’s Nabby. I think Rashid is in it! Oh, God, Jim, help me! There is a word, I think a signal. ‘Purple.’ That is, the word ‘purple.’ Jim, where are you? Am I talking to a dead man?”

  Unwilling to hold the line open longer, Nabila hung up and walked quickly away. She wasn’t sure where to go. The Metro? That might help. Take a few stops, then phone Marge, see if she could be picked up.

  But how could she know that whoever showed up could be trusted? She could not know.

  She turned a corner, and saw coming this way a car that was too careful to be anything but a spotter. She stepped back into an alley. The car went past.

  Her heart hammered. The car was looking for her and therefore the car was proof. Somebody had indeed been watching her every online move, and had seen her make her discovery about the c
arpet sale.

  She watched the car stop at the far end of the alley. There was no time now; whoever was surrounding her would have her in their gun sights in minutes.

  They were probably a detail from some agency or other that had been ordered to bring her in or kill her or whatever. They themselves wouldn’t even know why—or, ultimately, where—the order had originated.

  She went down the alley and into the tangle of bushes behind a row of houses, and used the crackling shrubs for what cover they offered.

  Then she saw a man watching her from the tall back window of one of the houses. He wore a T-shirt and had a rifle ported across his chest. She had never felt so acutely aware of her black hair and enormous brown eyes. All she lacked to make her identity certain was a burka. He stared with the steadiness of a practiced hunter. She smiled at him and went on along the alley. Ahead was 9th Street, and just down the block Eastern Market and its Metro stop. But was the Metro still running?

  Just as she exited the alley, another suspicious vehicle, this one a white Jeep Cherokee with tinted windows, came around the corner and passed her going north on 9th Street. She tried to duck back, but it stopped. It sat, motionless, engine running. Coming through the alley from the other direction were two men, moving fast. They had pistols in their hands.

  She looked again toward the man in the house. Was he a civilian, or another pursuer? No way to know, and no way to know if he would help her or hand her over.

  She opened the gate to his back garden and went in. Motionless, he watched her come. Behind her, the men moved more quickly. She reached the house. He opened the door.

  “I need your help.”

  He drew her in.

  20

  YOU HAVE NEVER MATTERED

  Alexei offered Vladimir a Sobrainie. Vladimir looked hungrily at the black tube. “Not smoking,” he said. “It is your last lung,” Dr. Abramov had told him. “Respect it.”

  The two men watched the valley, waiting for the last pink echoes of sunlight to disappear. Birds, screaming faintly, sailed in the high light.

  “You do it,” Alexei said.

  All the way from Tashkent, they had carried on a desultory argument, drinking and watching the bleak landscape pass by. “It’s for you to do.”

  “It’s loathsome.”

  Vladimir made scrambling motions with his fingers. “They’re going to run all about screeching, ‘Don’t, mister, don’t.’ ” He chuckled. “You will do it because you are an exceptional man.”

  When Alexei started with his knife, he couldn’t stop. He terrified even himself, the way he killed.

  Far below, a truck wound its way along the road. From the installation there was not the slightest sign of activity. “Such peace,” Alexei said.

  “You’re a superman, Alexei.”

  “Let’s go, then.”

  They were in Afghan dress. Vladimir wore a pakol, the favored hat of the mujahideen who had destroyed the Soviet armies. Alexei was in a dark lungee, clumsily arranged, which the meddlesome desert wind threatened at all times to unwind. He felt the wind, cooling quickly now, as it insinuated itself under the folds of his chapan. He would have preferred the sand-mottled uniform of Russian desert forces, but the American, British, and French satellites could all see two people moving in terrain this sparse, and would immediately notice them. Soon, the drones would arrive, and then God knew what might happen.

  Alexei stopped. “Now, what is that spit of land? Is that it?”

  Vladimir unfolded the oilcloth map, which whipped in the rising wind. “God, I hate deserts,” he muttered. The damned Americans had turned off their Global Positioning System, so the Garmin that Mother Russia had bought for them was now nothing more than baggage. But it had an MP3 player in it, so they could listen to music, anyway. “This is it,” he said. “Down there, we find the air shaft.”

  “Why not just let the Americans complete their fez-boil? We could go back to Tashkent now and drink.”

  “I have plenty yet.” He produced a flask.

  “How many of those did you bring?”

  “You’ve stolen everything else of value in my pack. You should know.”

  “I only steal what others don’t need.” Alexei took a swallow from the flask. “Jubilee, no less.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. That’s Hennessy X.O.”

  “I only drink patriotically.”

  “Then I will be drunk while you kill the children.” He pointed. “That’s the right ground formation; the entry is there.” As he moved ahead, he heard Alexei scrambling along behind him.

  “Do we know why we’re doing this?” the young man asked.

  “Do we care? Without Las Vegas, my hopes for a better future are lost.”

  “Your sense of humor is too French, dear Vladimir. There was a time when a statement like that would have sent you to the gulag.”

  “True enough, under Stalin you would be Beria and I would be dead. Now, it’s the time of the thinking men, so I lead and you do the bloodletting. It suits you, anyway. Your butcher’s hands.”

  “I have the hands of a pianist.”

  “Same difference. Did you ever see Denis Naumov perform? His hands look like roasts, but his Debussy—amazing.”

  “Naumov. Debussy. When I hear the word ‘intellectual,’ I go for my gun.”

  They came to the entry port. It was a kilometer from where the fezzes were living, and nobody but a Russian with a proper schematic could possibly get through to the personnel deck. Vladimir had never been inside the installation. They’d been shown photographs, though, so they would be able to comb through it until they reached the flesh. Then their orders were to kill everybody, no exceptions, no mercy, no bribes. If they did not do this correctly, they would, themselves, probably be killed.

  Often Vladimir wondered if he actually cared for his own life. He had when he was young, certainly. Had loved it, loved just to breathe. They don’t say it in the movies, but when you kill for a living, gradually you also die. Then you are like he was now—dead and alive at the same time.

  He had a condo in the South of France, in the development of La Californie. He was happy there, happy to watch the French with their snails for luncheon and their wonderful legs. He would get drunk there, good and drunk, and recite Lermontov, who had been his father’s favorite and was therefore also his favorite. “I love you, my friendly dagger, dear friend forged of Damascus steel.”

  “You’re mad as a Chechen, Vladimir.”

  “Mad and sad, which is to say, Russian. Come now, roast-paws, let’s do this work that is ours to do.”

  “You call it work?”

  “What else is it?”

  They entered the air shaft, bending low and moving fast, their way lit by their powerful German-made flashlights. The deeper they went, the louder the intake fans became. Soon they were churning and wind was whipping past the men’s heads. “Don’t let that idiotic turban get into that thing,” Vladimir said. “I don’t need your head torn off.”

  “I was issued this turban.”

  “I was issued a turban also. Do you see me wearing one?”

  “I see you wearing the uniform of the bastards who wrecked our army.”

  “Let me ask you this, Alexei. What is one mujahid with a cigarette lighter responsible for?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Six Soviet tanks.”

  “Traitor.”

  “Just getting your blood up. Here’s the hatch.” He opened his general-purpose tool and loosened the old bolts, probably last tightened thirty and more years ago, by some sweating Soviet technician who was now an old man with a nicotine-stained moustache—or, more likely, dead.

  They had to heave the heavy hatch back together. “The USSR built to last.”

  “But not my flat.”

  “Worthless roast-hands, what are you doing in our glorious FSB? Ah, the quarry is heard. Listen.”

  Wailing Arab music echoed from beyond the end of the tunnel.

  “D
o they have happiness? Humor? All of that wailing . . .”

  “A love song. Her man is a shit.”

  “All fezzes are shits, in my experience.”

  “You fuck their sisters in Tashkent.”

  “I have to. They demand it. Anyway, they’re not Arabs. Just with the mullah shit.”

  They went out into the broad personnel tunnel, carefully closing the inner access hatch behind them. Silent now, each intent on his work, the two men moved off to their respective areas of responsibility.

  Vladimir had to kill his old friend Aziz, who used to masturbate in his bedroom, leaping like a great frog while he did it, no idea he was on video in ten different departments of the FSB, let alone the iPods of many of the department heads’ teenagers.