by Kyle Mills
She leaned back against the wall while he tried to will her to give him the go-ahead to get them the hell out of there.
"We could still send my friends at NSA an e-mail about this."
"Absolutely," Brandon said hopefully. "We could send it right away."
"But then what?" she said. "What if there are people at the NSA who are involved? What if they think it's a hoax? We're just going to hit send and walk away?"
"What else can we do, Cath? Drive around asking if anyone's seen something that looks like a nuclear warhead lying around? I understand what you're saying, but sometimes you've just got to pull back and regroup. When we're safely out of here, we'll be in a hell of a lot better position to follow up on this thing than we are now."
She fell silent again, this time for more than a minute. Finally, "Okay. We e-mail my friends and then we run."
Brandon resisted the urge to jump up off the bed and kiss her, instead just nodding gravely.
Being about six inches too tall, their truck had resisted every effort at hiding it in an underground parking garage. In the end, they'd been forced to leave it in the back of a small, razor-wire-encircled lot guarded by a single middle-aged man in grubby traditional dress. Fortunately, the general temperament of parking lot attendants seemed to cross cultural lines, and he could barely even be bothered to look at them as they passed by.
Brandon ducked his head in the driver's side and Catherine did the same on the passenger side, beginning a thorough search of the cab. It was the only piece of evidence they had, and Catherine wanted to see if they could find anything helpful before she sent her e-mails.
"Christ," Brandon mumbled.
"What? Did you find something?"
He pulled an empty soda bottle from beneath the seat, holding it up so she could read the label: Mecca Cola.
"Nothing quenches my thirst after a hard day of killing infidels like --"
"This is serious!" she said in a loud whisper. "You --"
"I know. I'm sorry," he said, leaving her to search an empty glove box while he walked around back.
The bed of the truck was covered with green canvas in a configuration that conjured thoughts of wagons from the Old West. Instead of a wooden gate, though, there was a heavy flap held closed by rope.
He glanced behind him for what must have been the hundredth time since they'd left the hotel and saw that the sun had sunk almost to the tops of the roofs across the street. Above, the sky was still an almost malevolent blue, promising nothing but dry, punishing heat for the next century. He hadn't been in Jordan long, but he was starting to get an idea of why these people were so pissed.
The rope came free with a little effort and Brandon threw the flap back. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the shadow inside, and when they did, he froze.
After a few seconds he heard Catherine's muffled voice from the cab. "Brandon? Is there anything there?"
When he didn't answer, she came around the back of the truck and stood next to him.
"Oh, my God."
"Okay," Catherine said, trying to steady her voice. "We can't panic. We just need to stay calm and think this through."
They'd retreated across the street and were standing in front of a crumbling stone house with laundry hanging from the windows.
"Didn't you see them putting it in there?"
"Like I had time to look over all the cars before I decided which one to steal?"
"Don't get mad," she said. "I'm not saying it's your fault. It just happened, okay?"
The truck was clearly visible from where they were standing, parked innocently along the back wall of the lot. It seemed strangely natural there, as though it had been stalled in that space for years. Nothing at all would suggest that it contained a weapon capable of flattening Amman and everything around it.
"That's it," she said. "We have to go to the embassy."
"No. No way."
"Brandon --"
"Hamdi's going to be watching for that. I know you don't think he's a terrorist, but are you sure? Because if you're not --"
"I don't know if you've been paying attention," she said, in something between a shout and a whisper. "But there's a --"
He clamped a hand over her mouth. "We stick to our plan. With one slight modification. Tomorrow morning we're going to buy a couple of shovels and we're going out to the desert and bury that thing. Then, when we're confident your NSA buddies are on the up-and-up, we'll tell them where it is. This works for us, Cath. Think about it. When they lay their eyes on that thing, our story's gospel."
Chapter FORTY-SIX
A dull glow had started on the other side of the shutters, but it wasn't strong enough to overcome the darkness in the room. In fact, the more Catherine stared into it, the darker everything seemed to become.
She was lying on her side in the lumpy bed with Brandon right behind, his arm thrown across her. She moved slowly so as not to wake him, gently gripping his hand and pressing it against her bare stomach.
Their role as a married couple had left them with a single bed in an un-air-conditioned room so hot that she'd had to strip down to her bra and panties in order to sleep. Or at least that's what she'd convinced herself of last night. The obvious truth was that it had been a rather desperate and poorly conceived come-on -- a ploy to help her forget. If only for a little while.
Of course, Brandon saw her advances for what they were and gracefully deflected every not-so-subtle hint, feigning complete ignorance with an ever-deepening glint of worry in his eyes.
The problem, though, wasn't so much that he seemed to think that she was slowly going crazy, it was that she wasn't sure if he was wrong. She hadn't slept at all, despite the temperature dropping at least forty degrees overnight. Instead, she'd just lay there, her mind repeatedly failing to process all that had happened. Every time she tried to calmly think through their situation, she found herself drowning in the enormity of what she'd done.
Because of her, there were eleven nuclear warheads out there. What if they were smuggled into the United States? Even if her friends at the NSA took her warning seriously, how many could they hope to intercept? Five? Six? That left most of America's largest cities gone and tens of millions of people dead or dying horribly. It left the world order in shambles and perhaps millions more starving. It left the Middle East open to a retaliation that was impossible to even imagine.
She felt the waves coming over her head again and she squeezed Brandon's hand tighter, closing her eyes and just trying to keep breathing. He was the only person she had left, but he didn't belong there with her. She had no right to let this destroy him, too.
He wanted her to run with him, but what then? He'd been so smooth in trying to convince her how critical her survival was, but it was a lie. Once she told the NSA what she knew, she would have no purpose other than to inhabit a richly deserved prison cell and to watch the deaths of the millions of people she had doomed.
A few angry shouts filtered through the shutters along with the strengthening light, and Catherine finally closed her eyes. She saw the warheads, and Richard, and Brandon. She saw fire and endless deserts.
The shouting outside grew in volume and she tried to shut it out. Only when it was replaced with something that sounded like a speech did she open her eyes again. The voice was unamplified, but had a rhythm and pitch that identified the message as political.
Brandon stirred, pulling her tighter against him and mumbling, "Shut up, man," into the back of her neck.
The voice became a shout and then fell silent after coming to an important sounding conclusion. A moment later cheers forceful enough to rattle the windows erupted.
Brandon bolted into a sitting position, blinking groggily. "What the hell is tha--"
The sound of gunfire brought him fully awake, and he shoved her onto the floor, landing on top of her with his feet still tangled in the sheets. The cheering was deafening now, but there were no more shots as Brandon dragged her to the wall.
"They couldn't be . . . ," he started. "No. No way. They couldn't be out there for us, could they?"
Catherine shook her head violently, trying to clear it. Had they left a trail? Had they missed something? She just didn't know.
Brandon must have seen her helpless expression because he gathered up the sheet twisted around his feet and wrapped it around her. "It's okay. We're going to be all right."
When he tried to stand, she held his arm. This was insane. She had to pull herself together. This wasn't his responsibility.
"Come on, Cath. I have to --"
"No! I'll do it."
"You're not --"
She leaned forward and kissed him, his momentary surprise allowing her to stand and move into a position where she could see through the gap between the shutters.
The street was crammed full of men to the point that they seemed to be a single entity, ebbing and flowing, shouting as though from a single, massive throat.
Almost directly across from their hotel was a man standing on the hood of a car, straining to be heard. Another burst of machine gun fire erupted, and Catherine resisted Brandon's effort to pull her back to the floor. The shots weren't aimed at them. In fact, they weren't aimed at anything. It was just the Arab equivalent of a standing ovation.
The hotel manager flashed his slightly plastic smile as they descended the stairs, raising his voice to be heard over the roar of the crowd outside. "Good morning."
His English seemed perfect, but was really just the result of some narrowly targeted practice. "Good afternoon" and "Good evening" had an equally upper-crust British feel, but beyond that his communication skills were unreliable at best.
Brandon pointed to the closed door at the end of the lobby. "What's happening out there, Hussein?"
The man's eyes widened for a moment, indicating surprise at the question and not just his normal comprehension problems. "You no hear?"
"Hear what?"
"Israel," he said and then made a motion that resembled a baseball umpire designating a runner safe.
Catherine had positioned herself behind Brandon, having learned that despite playing the respectable married woman, Hussein found dealing with her directly rather distasteful.
"I, uh, don't understand," Brandon said, prompted by a jab in his lower back.
Hussein squinted for a moment and then came up with "Israel, bomb. Atomic." Then an exploding noise.
"What?" Catherine shouted, coming out from behind Brandon to face the hotel owner for the first time since they'd arrived.
"Cath -- I've got thi--"
"What did you say?"
She hadn't thought that she had any adrenaline left after feeling nothing when the shooting had started outside their window. Now it was coursing through her again. "Tell me what you said?"
When Hussein just stood there staring, she went for the door.
"No! Danger!" he said, running to block her path.
"Get out of my way!"
"Catherine . . . ," Brandon cautioned.
"Did you hear him? We've got to go, Brandon. Now! He can't keep us here."
Brandon grabbed her by the arm and pulled her out of earshot of their host.
"I heard what he said, Cath, but I'm not sure what he meant. Are you? And what are you going to do about it? Look, I haven't said anything up till now, but you're not thinking straight. We need to wait until things cool down out there and --"
"Then don't come with me."
"Cath --"
"I'm serious, Brandon. Look, I can't tell you how much I appreciate everything you've done. But you should stay here and concentrate on getting yourself out of the country. If I can come, I will. But this isn't your fight."
Brandon went through the door first, with Catherine right behind. She had a death grip on one of his hands and the other was clamped around the cloth belt at his waist.
While Hussein had no real affinity for either of them, he did recognize their value as conduits for American dollars. His hope that his favorite paying customers would live to spend a few more nights had prompted the donation of some of his and his wife's old clothes.
The overall effect of Brandon's disguise was mediocre at best, but most of the people on the street were too occupied to pay much attention. She, on the other hand, was almost completely enshrouded, with only a narrow strip around her eyes that made the crowd they were pushing through even more frightening and claustrophobic. She had a purpose again, though, and she used that to shut out everything but getting through the cheering, jostling men around them.
"Are you sure you want to do this?" she shouted in his ear. He didn't answer.
She'd tried to get him to stay behind, but it was just an act. She would have never made it by herself and, even more selfishly, she wanted him with her. Once again, Brandon Vale was trapped in a situation he had nothing to do with. And once again, he'd proved that he was much more than most people would give him credit for.
The sun had finally cleared the rooftops and the air was so humid with sweat that the shop windows were beginning to fog. The crowd moved back suddenly, pinning them to a wooden fence as the speaker continued to speak from the hood of his car. Catherine wrapped her arms around Brandon's waist and just held on.
She wasn't sure how long they were stuck there, but eventually the mob shifted and they started forward again, slipping through a quickly narrowing gap between men whose barely controlled religious ecstasy had them leaping up into the air with such force that they nearly fell every time they landed.
A few lucky dodges and a fair amount of shoving left them standing in front of the gated door to the Internet cafe they'd been in the day before. Brandon pulled Catherine in front of him and grabbed the bars on either side of her, partially insulating her from the chaos of the crowd. "Is there anyone in there?"
She pressed her face against the bars, then slipped a hand through and pounded on the glass door. A moment later, the owner of the cafe appeared at the back to wave them off. He was about to turn away when Catherine pulled the cloth from her face and hair. The man inside froze for a moment and then rushed forward while Brandon turned to confirm that they weren't attracting any undue attention.
The gate clicked open and they both slipped through. The cafe's owner immediately slammed the bars shut again and locked them in place with a panicky twist of his key ring. When he finally faced them, he jabbed a finger violently in the air. "This is insanity! Why are you here? Have you not heard what has happened?"
"I'm sorry," Catherine said in a voice meant to be soothing, but sabotaged by an undercurrent of panic. "Is your connection still working? We need to get on a computer."
He glanced over his shoulder at the crowd now pressing against the increasingly flimsy-looking gate. "Take one of the computers at the back. The far back."
The headline on CNN. Com was bad, but not as bad as the ever-escalating images Catherine's mind had conjured on her way there: "Israel Threatened by Nuclear Terror."
She skimmed the article, paraphrasing for Brandon while he watched the crowd outside.
"They put one of the warheads in front of a government building in Jerusalem and then called the police and the press. They said they had eleven more --"
"Ten," Brandon corrected.
"They say all of them have been set with three-week timers and that they're hidden all over Israel and the Occupied Territories * * *
She fell silent, her initial relief that no one had been hurt disintegrating. There were millions of people in Israel. Thousands of years of human history . . .
"Catherine?" Brandon said. "Come on, stay with me. Why would anyone do something like this?"
She took a deep breath and let it out slowly.
"Cath?"
"There's some Islamic rhetoric about the Jews being a blight on Arab land and an affront to God, and identifying the terrorists as a group no one has ever heard of. Their warning included the serial numbers on the warheads. The Russians are stalling but . . ." She fell s
ilent.
"What?"
"It says that the American government has confirmed that the numbers are valid."
"So? We knew that."
"The quote is from Edwin Hamdi."
"Hamdi," Brandon repeated quietly. "But why would he be involved in something like this? Aren't we friends with the Israelis?"
She leaned back in her chair, the computer screen going slowly out of focus. "Think about it, Brandon. Both the Jews and the Palestinians think God gave them Israel and neither is ever going to budge. The problem gets worse every year, and every year we get dragged farther into it."
"So you're saying he just decided to get rid of the problem?"
"I don't know. It seems crazy, but there's sort of a twisted logic to it. Give the warheads to a bunch of Muslim fanatics and tell them to destroy Israel . . ."
"But the Arabs want that land! It's all tied up with their religion and history. They'd be cutting their nose off to spite their face."
She nodded. "You just summed up the Arab people, Brandon. And terrorists are even worse. They don't care about accomplishing anything meaningful for their people -- they just like to make grand, pointless statements."
"Then why the warning? Wouldn't it be a bigger statement to just set them off and kill everyone?"
"Hamdi," she said. "I've never met him, but he doesn't have the reputation of being a maniac. He wouldn't want to kill millions of innocent people. He's giving them a choice -- a chance to move on."
Brandon opened his mouth to protest again, but for some reason didn't. "So what do we do?"
She thought about that for a long time, and the more she did, the more her mind cleared. She had almost no chance of stopping this, but now at least she had enough information to try.
"You're going to get out of the country and disappear, Brandon. You're going to run somewhere you'll be safe."
"You mean we. We're going to get out of here and go somewhere safe."
"No."
"Catheri--"
"I can't walk away from this, Brandon. I can't."
Chapter FORTY-SEVEN
The mix of fear, anticipation, guilt, pride, and so many other emotions was virtually impossible to fully hide, and Edwin Hamdi cast his eyes down whenever he could. There was something hypnotic in the swirling grain of the desk in front of him, something that helped him maintain the carefully constructed aura of calm he had wrapped himself in.
