by John Case
Andrea Cabot tuned out. She already knew more about Culpeper than she wanted to, thanks to an avalanche of flash cables that started to arrive within minutes of the event and had not yet diminished. She knew more than the expert or the reporter or the crazed eyewitnesses or the spokespersons for NOAA, FBI, and FEMA.
She knew that Culpeper had been deliberately attacked, that the array of disasters was not the result of a “solar storm” or “geomagnetic anomaly” or “coronal mass ejection.”
It was the result of an electromagnetic pulse of precise dimension and unusual power, probably from an E-bomb, but an E-bomb of “an unprecedented level of sophistication and precision.” What really stunned the analysts were two facts. The first was the power of the pulse. The banking facilities in Culpeper had been hardened against conventional EMPs, as was true of most sensitive facilities. This EMP had overwhelmed state-of-the-art shielding. The second thing the analysts couldn’t get past was the “surgical” nature of the attack. That was alarming. That meant the attack involved technology that the Pentagon itself did not possess.
In some ways, though, the assessment had set her mind at ease. It meant that Culpeper had nothing to do with her – and a good thing, too, because she already had a lot on her plate.
She came out of Baby and lifted into Cobra.
Two weeks ago, she’d picked up chatter about an upcoming chain of attacks against “Western” hotels in Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur. Something spectacular and coordinated in the Qaeda style.
But the boys over here would not be employing anything like the Culpeper device – whatever it was. They’d attack with fertilizer bombs. Or with improvised explosive rigs strapped to the chests of young men with Down’s syndrome.
Which was another way of saying that Culpeper was somebody else’s problem.
Forty-one
Waverly, Nebraska | June 9, 2005
WILSON TOOK A long shower, shaved carefully, then dressed with the care that people reserved for important occasions. It was part of the process of readying himself, a way to bring focus and gravity to what he was about to do.
His clothes were an exercise in misdirection: a cheap pair of athletic shoes and a dark blue jumpsuit with an oval patch containing the name “Jim.” He had a clipboard as well, and a plastic pocket protector with a couple of ballpoint pens. The K-Bar knife from the army-navy store fit comfortably into the large pocket of his jumpsuit. Unlike the rest of his outfit, the knife had nothing to do with misdirection.
He smiled at the workman in the mirror.
Then he put on his watch – not the Garmin, but the watch they’d returned to him the day he’d left Allenwood. It had been taken from him in San Francisco nearly a decade earlier. The feds had put it in a box, and the box had followed him on his long journey through the prison system.
And while he was doing his time, and the watch was running down in the company of his “personal effects,” what had Robbie Maddox – the sleazeball who’d set him up – been doing? While Wilson had nothing to look at but a slice of sky, where had Maddox been and what had he seen? How many meals had he eaten with friends, while Wilson had his food shoved at him through a wicket in his cell door? How many women had Maddox known while Wilson sat by himself, talking to the wall? How much music had Maddox listened to while Wilson tried, and failed, to shut his ears to the constant slam of sliding cell-block doors and the incessant patter and shouts and cries of men without hope?
These were rhetorical questions with a single answer, and Wilson knew what it was. Most of the time, Robbie had been in the joint himself. Two years here and there, a year somewhere else. It was all in the report he’d commissioned from a P.I. named Charley Fremaux, in Chicago.
It took Fremaux less than a week to find the snitch. He was living in Waverly, Nebraska, a suburb of Lincoln, where he had been for more than a year. Injured in a car crash that the police thought was part of an insurance scam gone bad, Maddox had moved in with his older sister, Lynn, a librarian who lived alone. Long since recovered from his injuries, Maddox continued to enjoy his sister’s room and board.
Wilson studied himself in the mirror. He knew that what he was about to do was self-indulgent. It wasn’t part of his larger plan. If anything, it put the plan at risk.
But Robbie Maddox had buried him alive. He’d lied and cheated, bartering Wilson’s life for a few weeks on the outside. There was no way for Maddox to repay the time he’d stolen.
Wilson worked to quiet his mind. He held the image of a leaf in his mind’s eye: a green leaf, caught in a spider’s thread, the leaf spinning and fluttering in the invisible wind.
And then he headed for the door. For Robbie Maddox, time had run out.
Broad daylight. Not just any daylight, but broad daylight, the kind of daylight in which banks get robbed and people get gunned down.
The phrase interested Wilson. Included in the account of a crime, it always carried a note of outrage. It suggested a state of illumination so thoroughly bright and all-encompassing that wrongdoing should be inconceivable. A light that cast no shadows and left no place to hide. Any crime committed under its auspices was all the more horrific.
At one o’clock in the afternoon, Wilson stopped at a pay phone outside a convenience store to call the library where Maddox’s sister worked. He asked to speak with her, and when she came on the line, he hung up.
At one fifteen, he parked the Ford Escort he’d rented around the corner from the little rancher at the address Fremaux had given him. Clipboard in hand, he walked to the front door. A motorcycle sat in the driveway, which suggested to Wilson that he was in the right place at the right time.
He knocked.
When the door swung open, Maddox had about half a second to get away. But it took him a full second to recognize the man in front of him. By then, it was too late. Wilson threw an overhand right that shattered the bones around Maddox’s left eye, and sent him reeling into the living room. Wilson followed him into the house as Maddox, stooped in pain, screamed, “What the fuck?!”
There was a poker standing beside the fireplace with some other tools, and without thinking, Wilson grabbed it. Maddox staggered backwards in a panic, stumbling against a coffee table, hands in front of his face.
“Hey –” he said.
Wilson drove the poker into the side of Maddox’s knee, dropping him to the ground with a scream that kept on giving. He looked around. The door was still open, but it didn’t matter. This wasn’t going to take long. He slammed the poker into Maddox’s shoulder. Then the other shoulder. And again.
Tossing the poker aside, he got down on his haunches beside the man who’d set him up. “Jesus, Robbie, it’s been a long time! How you been?”
“Ohhh, man …” Maddox’s voice was a low quaver, a mixture of terror, pain, and recognition. His speech came breathlessly, in gasps. “I didn’t know! I mean, what I was doing, I – I’m sorry, man! I’m really –”
Wilson reached into his jumpsuit, withdrew the K-bar knife.
Maddox saw it, and sunk deeper into the shag rug. “Please …”
Wilson buried the knife to its hilt in Maddox’s chest, then pulled it out and made sure of things. Grabbing him by the ponytail, he jerked the snitch’s head to the side, and back, and slashed his throat.
Then he got to his feet, surprised to find himself out of breath, watching the dark blood pool around his shoes. As he started to leave, a thought occurred to him, and he turned back. I really ought to take his scalp, Wilson thought. It would be, like, an homage. He considered the idea for a long ten seconds, standing in the doorway with the knife, dripping in his hand.
But in the end, he decided against it. He wasn’t a savage, after all, and besides – where would he put it?
Forty-two
Kuala Lumpur | June 10, 2005
AFTER A LONG, long day, Andrea Cabot was drifting in a pleasant half sleep that promised to deepen into the real thing when something began to nag at her. She shifted position and tugged
at one of her pillows. She’d already pulled two all-nighters this week, and she was dead tired. She longed to be unconscious.
And so she drifted down, a delicious, lolling descent into a real slumber … when a bolt of realization jerked her upright.
It’s a test! Culpeper was a test!
The phrase swam up from her memory. She’d been with 2-TIC at the time and she’d been looking at surveillance footage with a Brit from MI-6 and that chubby guy from the Bureau – what was his name?
Kovalenko.
The three of them watched it over and over: the man with the hat and the sling, the man who’d left a pair of suitcases packed with newspapers near the British Airways counter and then departed. Which had caused the evacuation of the terminal.
It’s a test, Kovalenko said, after they’d screened the footage for about the tenth time. And he was right. Andrea knew he was right.
The Brit didn’t get it. If you want to blow up the airport, why not just do it? he’d asked. Why practice?
But the Brit had been missing the point. The test was not to see if the man in the sling could get the suitcases into a dangerous position. The test was to see if the man would do it. The man was being tested, not the plan.
Woven through this recollection was everything she knew about Culpeper – what she’d seen on CNN and what she knew from the cables and gossip. Culpeper was a black hole. But why Culpeper? Why just Culpeper?
Everyone thought it was because of the banking nexus there, that it had been a strike at the financial heart of the west. But Cabot didn’t buy that. The presence of SWIFT and the Federal Reserve installation may have played a part in target selection, but she thought the attack was confined to Culpeper because it was a test.
But a test of what?
This was where the third, truly alarming, train of thought came in. This one involved Hakim Mussawi, lying on the table, coming off the Anectine paralysis. She’d check the transcripts, but she didn’t think she was mistaken in her recollection.
“There’s an American!” he’d gasped, spitting out the words as if they could save his life. “He’s building a machine.”
What kind of machine? she’d wanted to know. Thinking, of course, a bomb.
But no. Mussawi said that the American was building a machine that was going to stop the world.
Or not exactly that. It was going to stop the motor of the world.
It was this phrase, gasped out in extremis, that now caused the hair on the back of her neck to stand up.
What had the expert on CNN said that morning? He’d been talking about an old movie, but what he’d said was: “For Culpeper, the world has stopped.”
Andrea squeezed her eyes shut. There was something else: that fuck-up in Berlin, the Bobojon Simoni mess. The follow-up intel from that fit into this somehow. She threw on her clothes. Was she crazy? Did this shit actually fit?
Though she almost never drove herself, she was in no mood to wait for her driver. Getting the BMW from the garage, she launched the car into the chaos of KL’s streets, where even at two a.m., there was a surprising amount of traffic. Despite the hurry she was in, she took the time to make sure she wasn’t being followed. Keeping her eyes on the rearview mirror, she made a series of left turns, effectively turning in a circle over the course of a dozen blocks, then reversed her course with a U-turn in the middle of a crowded intersection.
She ought to call Berlin, she told herself. Pete Spagnola was the guy. She’d pick his brain, try to nail it down: What was it about the Simoni incident that set off the alarm in the back of her head?
Then there was Mussawi. He was being held on an aircraft carrier in the Sea of Japan. She was going to need another session with him. She’d need to chopper in.
And last but not least, Ray Kovalenko. That thing with the suitcases. There was no reason to think that the man in the sling had even been a U.S. national, let alone the “American” Mussawi was screaming about. But the surveillance footage from Dulles nagged at her and it wouldn’t hurt to touch base with Ray.
Cabot glanced up at the array of clocks – nine p.m. in Berlin. Unless there was something special happening, Pete wouldn’t be there. She called the switchboard. They could give her Pete’s home number.
But, no. He’d been “rotated” back to Langley. “His duties are being handled by Ms. Logan. Shall I connect you …?”
“Madison Logan.”
“You’re working late,” Andrea said.
“No, you’re working late,” said the preppy voice at the other end, displaying an impressive understanding of Cabot’s whereabouts.
“Yes, well, a thought woke me up and I wanted to talk to Pete. About Simoni? I’m assuming you –”
“I’m well briefed on that,” Logan reassured her. “How can I help?”
“Those steg files on Simoni’s computer. I’m talking about the bank accounts that received Qaeda money? I can’t quite remember, but didn’t one of them walk back to a U.S. national?”
“Well, that’s the thinking, although I’m not sure there’s actual proof. It was an account at the Cadogan Bank on St. Helier. Is this important?”
Cabot ignored the question. “Who handled the investigation of the account?”
“It was the FBI Legat in London,” Logan said. “Kovalenko.”
“Ray!” Cabot said.
“You seem surprised.”
“No, no,” Cabot reassured her. “Just a small world.”
*
As Kovalenko listened to Andrea Cabot, his stomach churned. And the longer he listened, the worse he felt.
She was giving him intel from a rendition, the interrogation of some raghead. And what she was saying made his heart stagger in his chest.
“… ‘stop the motor of the world,’” she said. “That’s what he said: ‘there’s an American who wants to stop the motor of the world.’ Now I’m thinking – that sounds like an EMP. That sounds like Culpeper.”
“Andrea,” he gasped.
“Wait wait wait,” she said. “Let me just get through this before it all just … disassembles in my mind. Now the guy we picked up in KL – he’s the one who gave up the Qaeda operative in Berlin – the one who got shot.”
“Bobojon Simoni.”
“Right. And Simoni’s computer was the source of a list of bank accounts.”
Kovalenko’s heart was sinking. Not just sinking, hurting, a burrowing pain in his chest. This is the way it could happen: heart attack.
“And you got sent out to check on one of those accounts, am I right, Ray? Cadogan Bank, St. Helier?”
“Andrea,” he said. His voice had barely enough velocity to make it out of his mouth.
But the bitch kept talking.
“Didn’t you find out that account belonged to an American? An American, Ray … you see where this is going? An American who got money from Qaeda, who wanted to build an engine that would stop the world. Well, I think he’s made a start. So we have to talk to that American. Right away. Who is he, Ray? Where is he? Whatever you’ve got – gimme, gimme, gimme.”
Kovalenko’s mind was whirling. Stop the motor of the world. Straight out of Atlas Shrugged. “Francisco d’Anconia,” who once had an account in St. Helier, was the guy who did Culpeper – he had no fucking doubt.
And now his mind presented him with a scene in the Nightingale Arms where the man from the firm in Dublin was trying to give him the data he’d collected on d’Anconia. Biographical details. D’Anconia’s real name. What was his name? Bork? Burke. That was it – Mike Burke. He’d actually written it out for Kovalenko. On an index card. All he wanted was to have the restrictions lifted on his father-in-law’s firm.
And what did he, Ray Kovalenko, do with this gift of information? He’d glanced at the card, yes, but what did he do with it? He didn’t remember.
The information had seemed unimportant. He’d intended to send it to Washington, but … he hadn’t done that. The truth was, he didn’t remember doing anything with the card.
It must be in the office, he told himself. Or – what had he been wearing? Maybe it was in some pocket. The truth was he had no idea where it was. It was possible – no, he wouldn’t do that, would he? – that he’d thrown the card away.
At the Nightingale, Kovalenko remembered telling Burke that the information on the card wasn’t worth much. He remembered making Burke so mad, the fuck looked like he was going to head-butt him.
And now, unless Kovalenko could find that card, he was going to have to go crawling back to Mike Burke. Begging him.
“Ray?” Andrea said.
“I don’t have it. But I’ll get it.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ll get back to you.”
He heard her shriek as he was putting the phone down: “Ray!”
Forty-three
John F. Kennedy Airport | June 12, 2005
BY THE TIME flight restrictions were lifted, fourteen hours after Burke’s arrival at JFK, the terminal was a wreck. People were surprisingly patient and cheerful, but there was no water or food and the restrooms were alarming. It was six more hours before Burke got a seat on a flight to Reno. By then he was willing to go anywhere within a thousand miles of his destination, but since this flexibility was shared by virtually everyone in the terminal, it did no good.
Once in Reno, though, he rented a car, intending to drive to Fallon. But when he started nodding out behind the wheel, he pulled into a Travelodge outside of Sparks, and collapsed into bed.
The next day, it took him two hours to get to Fallon, a time he spent rehearsing his spiel for Mandy Renfro. He was a reporter, writing a piece for Harper’s. … Somehow it didn’t sound particularly convincing. But it was the best he could do, really, so he drove on, relying on the Mapquest directions to get him there.
The trailer and its setting were tidy and neat, surrounded by a low white picket fence. He stood on the doorstep, holding the wilted bouquet he’d bought that morning at a convenience store, and rapped on the door. It was opened by a very old woman in jeans and a gingham shirt. Her eyes were a startling pale blue.
