by Jack Mars
Susan sighed. Terrorist organizations released videos on a daily basis. Suicide bombers preparing for their missions, prisoners being executed, religious figureheads making proclamations… It made for dreary watching. And it was probably the least of their worries right now.
“What is the video about?”
Anne’s voice sounded small and girlish from the other side of the thick wooden door. Still, Susan wasn’t about to open the door looking like this. “Uh, they are threatening to… uh… destroy the United States.”
“And our people consider this a credible threat?”
“Yes.”
Susan looked at Pierre. He shook his head.
“Tell them I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
*
“Who are we looking at?” Susan said.
There was a still photo on the video screen. It showed a brown-skinned man with a long black beard, speckled with white. He wore glasses, a white turban on his head, and a black robe. He was very thin.
“The man’s name is Abu Saddiq Mohammed,” said Kurt Kimball, Susan’s new National Security Advisor. He had been in the job two days. Three days ago, he had been working for the Rand Corporation, writing briefs on international hotspots and terrorism threats. Kurt was tall with broad shoulders, and as bald as a cue ball.
Twenty people sat at the conference table and lined the walls in the new Situation Room. The Room, as the staffers were starting to call it, was taking shape on the fly. It had been in almost constant use since Susan had taken the oath of office. People were taking their meals in here. There were threats emerging everywhere you looked.
Kimball went on. “Saddiq Mohammed was born sometime in the mid-1950s among a tribe of border-crossing desert nomads in the southern Arabian peninsula. He probably has no formal education. He went to Afghanistan to join the mujahideen fighting against the Russians, perhaps as early as 1979 or 1980. As you know, that loose confederacy of fighters coalesced over time into various factions, including Al Qaeda. Since the death of Osama bin Laden and the disappearance of Ayman al-Zawahiri, Mohammed has taken on an increasing role as a mouthpiece for Al Qaeda, though he claims no leadership in that or any organization.”
“Where is he now?” Susan said.
“No one knows for sure. We believe he’s in the tribal regions of Pakistan, or possibly under protection of the Taliban in eastern Afghanistan. He may cross back and forth across the border, depending on what kind of heat we’re bringing. His people are careful to use generic and obscure backgrounds whenever he makes a video. In the video you’re about to see, all meta-data has been erased, including time, date, and location. The video itself was uploaded to the internet from an empty warehouse in Belgium frequented by squatters and heroin addicts.”
“So how do we know it’s authentic?” said Richard Monk, Susan’s chief-of-staff.
Kimball was undeterred. “We’ve used voice recognition software to pattern Mohammed’s voice. We have numerous good samples from previous video and audio, and the voice on this tape is a match. We know it’s him. In the beginning of the video, he refers to former Speaker of the House William Ryan and the attempted overthrow of the United States. No discernable splicing has been done, which means the video was filmed sometime in the past week.”
The footage began. It was nothing exciting. It showed the man sitting in a chair near a wall made of what appeared to be red sandstone. He spoke in Arabic, into a microphone clipped to his robe. He seemed to read from prepared remarks. Susan couldn’t understand a single word he said. The clip lasted slightly more than a minute.
“Okay,” she said. “So what did we just watch?”
“The whole video is quite a bit longer than this,” Kimball said. “There’s a lot of typical stuff in it, and he hits notes everyone in this room is probably familiar with. He criticizes the apostate leaders of Iran, and calls for all pure Muslims to resist Iranian incursions in Syria. He criticizes Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, and likens it to the Holocaust. He describes the kings of both Jordan and Saudi Arabia as the minions of Satan. He implores God to bring about the destruction of Russia.”
“Is there anybody this guy likes?” someone said.
A smattering of laughter went around the room.
“Well, he saves the best for last. He describes the United States as the lair of Satan, and suggests that President Hopkins is Satan’s concubine.”
“Terrific,” Susan said. “It’s been quite a while since somebody called me a whore. As far as I know, anyway.”
“I was careful not to use that word,” Kimball said. “But that is the implication. Now here comes the dangerous part. In that last section, he tells all of his followers to have hope, because the soldiers of Allah have acquired the greatest weapon in Heaven and on Earth. They’ve stolen the weapon from Satan’s lair, and God willing they will use it to bring pestilence and plague down upon the heads of the Crusaders, such as Allah did in the time of the Prophet.”
The room was quiet.
“The obvious reference here is to plague and pestilence, and to stealing a weapon from Satan’s lair.”
“The Ebola virus,” Susan said.
Kimball nodded. “He knows about it, which is bad enough. The theft isn’t public knowledge yet. And he’s telling us it’s in the hands of Islamic terrorists, which is even worse. In all likelihood, this means the virus was stolen by extremists affiliated with Al Qaeda. He wouldn’t be nearly as excited if Hezbollah or Iran had taken it. Worst of all, he is clearly suggesting they know what they have, and they plan to release it, either on American soil, or on American military stationed overseas.”
“Hence the reference to Crusaders,” Susan said.
“Yes.”
“What do you suppose he really wants?” Susan said.
Kimball shrugged. “He doesn’t say, so I won’t speculate. It could be he wants to do exactly what he describes, which is bring a plague of Biblical or Quranic proportions down upon the United States.”
“Jesus,” someone in the back of the room said.
“Do you think they can do it?”
Kimball shook his head. “I have no idea.”
“So where do we go from here?” Susan said.
“Well, that’s the thing,” Kimball said. “We have an overture in front of us. It’s a little bit unprecedented…”
“It’s ridiculous,” said Richard Monk.
“Try me,” Susan said.
Kimball raised a hand. “Bear with me. Don’t say no until you hear everything I have to say.”
“Susan, if I were you, I’d say no now,” Monk said.
“Okay, Richard. I’m clear on your position, but I haven’t even heard what it is we’re talking about.”
“There’s a man named Robert Hassan Cole,” Kimball said. “He’s of mixed African-American, Irish-American, and Syrian descent. He was born and raised in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn.”
“I know who he is,” Susan said.
An involuntary shiver ran through her at the thought of him. He was a young American, a failed rapper, who had become a radicalized Muslim, then disappeared into the vortex of war-torn Syria. Eventually, it became clear to US intelligence that the same man was also a black-masked executioner of orange-clad hostages. He often beheaded helpless prisoners with a machete while it was videotaped, to be released later on the internet. Hostages who had been ransomed said that the prisoners had a nickname with which they referred to their sadistic jailer.
“Robert Hassan Cole is Brooklyn Bob,” Susan said.
Kimball nodded. “That’s right.”
“What about him?”
Now Kimball seemed somewhat sheepish. “He’s waiting on the phone. He’s using a satellite phone from inside the city of Raqqa, the ISIS stronghold in eastern Syria, and we have him on the line. He says he’s been empowered to talk to us, and he insists that he will only speak directly to you. We think he wants to offer a trade. We can patch him in to the conference call s
peaker right here on the table.”
Susan glanced around the room at all the faces. They stared back at her. She didn’t know three-quarters of them. They stared at her, almost entirely men, waiting to see what she would say. Their eyes were hard. Masculine energy came off them in waves. They reminded her of sharks.
“What do we know about him?” Susan said.
“Well, he was raised in poverty. His father abandoned the family when he was young, then he, his mother, and his younger sister lived on welfare. His sister was run over and killed at the age of seven by a drunk driver. Cole tested well and was accepted into the elite Brooklyn Technical High School, which he attended for two years, before dropping out at the age of sixteen. After that, he was a petty drug dealer, had numerous run-ins with the law, and he attempted a music career. He seems to have become serious about Islam around the age of eighteen, when he joined a Brooklyn mosque known for harboring radicals.”
Susan pictured someone raised in that way. No father, no money, a dead sister, and surrounded by poverty. It was obvious to her, as a mother, that his feelings had been deeply hurt. He was a wounded child, and he had lashed out as a result. But he had taken it way too far.
Kimball went on. “He disappeared at the age of twenty, and turned up in Syria sometime after the civil war started, maybe 2013. He may have been in Afghanistan before that, and possibly Somalia before that. He’s young, he’s reckless, and he’s a little bit of a clown, but he’s also very smart and very dangerous. You’ve all seen the videos where he beheads prisoners.”
“It’s barbaric,” someone behind Susan said.
“It is barbaric,” Kimball said. “But it’s more than that. It’s a very effective recruiting tool. In that sense, Cole represents a new type of jihadi. He’s a social media machine. His YouTube rants against what he calls the racist West, often set to driving hip-hop music, receive tens of millions of views. He’s a talented recruiter and instigator on Twitter. He’s thought to have raised several million dollars from wealthy Muslims in the English-speaking world. He’s actually so effective at what he does that he’s been accorded special respect by jihadi groups. He speaks Arabic, and he’s a go-between from Al-Qaeda affiliates to ISIS. He’s believed to have been instrumental in developing the recent truce between them.”
Susan got that sense again. Everyone in the room was watching her. It was an uncomfortable feeling. What would these men think if they knew that not fifteen minutes ago she was upstairs crying in the bathroom while her husband hugged her?
They were asking a lot from her. None of them were in the position she was in. None of them had been the target of repeated assassination attempts in the past week. None of them wore body armor every time they went out in public. None of them had been thrust into a situation they neither asked for, nor were ready for.
“What do you think, Susan?” Kimball said.
“Don’t talk to him, Susan,” Richard Monk said. “Please don’t. It’s so far beneath you, and everything you’ve stood for in the time I’ve known you. He’s a terrorist. He’s a cold-blooded murderer. In fact, we have his coordinates from the satellite phone he’s using. I say we just bomb him and do everyone on Earth a favor by getting rid of him once and for all.”
Susan glanced at the black eight-sided conference call speaker at the center of the table where she sat. It was sunny out today, and light from outside streamed in through the windows. A square of yellow light almost reached the speaker.
Susan thought of all the events they had done when she was Vice President. They had seen so many people in so many places. She had done a whistle-stop train tour, riding from Chicago to Oakland, California, on Amtrak one time in the first year after Thomas Hayes had been elected President. It was a publicity stunt conceived by Thomas’s people, and it worked astonishingly well.
Throngs of people came out to the train stations at every stop. She spoke to people of every political stripe. They loved the tour, and they loved her. They brought her roast turkeys and apple-rhubarb pies, home-cooked meals to eat while riding the train.
It was fun being Vice President. In contrast, this was…
This was something else again. It had the quality of a nightmare, one from which she could not awaken.
“Susan?” Kimball said.
She looked up at Kimball and nodded. “I’ll talk to him,” she said.
CHAPTER TWELVE
“If you want to see me,” the voice said, “we’re live streaming on the internet right now. I’ve got a guy here that will send you the link. The link is encrypted, so no funny eyes in the sky can see. It’s just me to you.”
Susan had a funny feeling in her gut. A man in a blue military suit and a crew cut brought an open laptop to the table and placed it in front of her.
“We’re muted,” the man said. “He’s waiting. He can’t hear a word we say.”
“Can he see me?” Susan said.
“No. We’re not going to show him anything. Our people are going to study his video feed to see if we can learn more about where he is. We have his location pinpointed, but we want to see if it’s hardened, who’s there with him, what weaponry they seem to have, what technology, and all the rest.”
Susan nodded. She felt like a little girl, with all these big knowledgeable men running around. “Okay.”
On the screen in front of her, a grainy image began to resolve. It was of a human hand, male, with the middle-finger pointed up.
“You guys see me okay over there? You see me, Lady President?”
There was a low chatter of voices in the room.
“Okay,” Kurt Kimball said. “We need absolute quiet in here. Cell phone ringers off. If you need to be in contact with someone else right now, then ask yourself why you need to be here in the first place.”
Susan glanced around the room. They had already cleared the place out from before. There were maybe fifteen people in the room now, whereas a few minutes ago there had probably been forty.
“Mute is coming off the phone in ten seconds,” Kimball said. “I’m the only one who speaks. Susan, of course that doesn’t include you. If you choose to speak, I will defer to you. I only caution you not to get into a prolonged conversation with this kid. He’s clever, he’s infuriating, and he’ll try to bait you into saying something you’ll regret, and which he can upload to the internet as an audio track.”
“Girlfriend, you with me?” Brooklyn Bob said from half a world away.
A voice behind Susan: “We are audible in three, two, one…”
Brooklyn Bob appeared close to the camera. His face was narrow, with a scruffy black beard and long black curly hair. He had blue eyes, a stark contrast to his skin and beard. He was good-looking, of course—most YouTube and social media stars were.
He rapped on the surface of the camera with his knuckles. It sounded like he was knocking on a window. “Hey! Anybody there?”
“We’re here,” Kimball said. “Can you hear us?”
“I hear you, but I don’t hear my girl Susan.”
“She’s here with us, and is listening to every word you say.”
“Can she see me?”
“No. We have a couple of laptops streaming you, but she isn’t near one.”
Brooklyn Bob glanced away for a second. “Who you kidding, man? You got twenty-nine separate computers streaming me, by our count, clustered in just that one house.”
“Most of them are in other parts of the building. Lots of intel people are monitoring you, Bob, but you probably already know that. You’re a young man with a short future ahead of you. Anyway, suffice to say that the President can hear you, but she can’t see you. She’s not interested in seeing you.”
Bob shook his head and smiled. “That’s too bad. I was planning to show her my joint.”
“Let’s get to the point,” Kimball said. “We’ve got a Predator drone locked on your position, and we’re already running out of patience.”
Brooklyn Bob shrugged. “Do it. Then you wo
n’t even be warned before Allah’s punishment arrives.”
He moved back from the camera lens. The camera panned to follow him as he paced a small room. The room was made of cinderblock and was sparsely furnished. He sat in a rickety four-legged chair by a table. He picked up a piece of paper.
“Nice place you got there, Bob,” Kimball said.
Susan wasn’t sure what to make of Kimball taunting and threatening this person. If this were any other situation, she would find herself appalled by his behavior.
Brooklyn Bob smiled. He shook his head. “Believe me, this place is better than anywhere I lived when I was growing up in the Land of Opportunity.”
He looked down at the paper in his hand, then glanced back up at the camera. He gave a sly grin. “You feeling me, Susie Q? You really ain’t gonna talk, are you? I wish you would. I’d love to talk to you. When I was a boy, I used to jerk off to your pictures in magazines.”
Susan felt her face flush. He was ridiculous. He really would say anything.
“Enough with the foul mouth,” Kimball said. “Let’s hear it. One more word like that, and I’ll call in the air strike. I am not kidding around.”
Bob looked at the paper again. “You heard the message from Imam Saddiq Mohammed?”
“Yes.”
“You idiots translated it correctly?”
“Of course.”
“Okay, then here’s the deal. In his speech, the blessed one talked about a plague or a pestilence. That’s some old-school lingo, right? He was referring to a quantity of Ebola virus that our brothers took from one of your own laboratories. But you probably figured out that part already. Here’s the bad news, from your point of view. There are brothers in the United States right now, in possession of the virus. They know it’s weaponized, and they know how to deploy it. Also, the quantity taken has already been multiplied by a factor of at least one million.”
A burst of murmuring erupted throughout the room.
Kimball raised his hand.
