by Mack Maloney
The policemen finally untied the youngest daughter and at last found someone who could tell them what happened.
“The Crazy Americans were here!” she gasped. “They nearly scared us to death!”
But her story seemed unlikely from the start. She said she, her father, and her sisters opened the shop at 4:00 A.M. When they walked in, she claimed, two soldiers were waiting for them. They were soon joined by several more. Each soldier was carrying a huge weapon and was wearing a black uniform with a black helmet. Their faces were masked.
The daughter recognized the stars-and-stripes patch on each soldier’s shoulder, though. It was the American flag.
And these Americans were indeed crazy….
Why?
“They wanted to be fitted,” the daughter said.
“Fitted? For what?” the police wanted to know.
“For women’s clothing,” was the improbable reply.
This made no sense of course, least of all to the two policemen. By this time, the father had managed to catch his breath. To the cops’ astonishment, he confirmed his daughter’s bizarre story.
“They wanted to be fitted with gowns of our material,” he said. “Ten of them in all.”
The police settled the man down, then asked him to explain what happened again, and this time very slowly. And honestly.
But the man did not budge from his tale.
“Ten of them came in,” he said, voice still raspy. “Each one wanted us to sew a new madras for them—head to toe, one long piece of cloth. And we did it, quickly, and at the point of a gun. Then they tied us up, took a bunch of our cell phones and some money, and left.”
He took a deep breath, collected himself again, and then said: “The Crazy Americans came in as soldiers. But they left as women….”
Chapter 25
London
Heathrow Airport was like a ghost town.
It was raining, cold and foggy, as was usually the case at the huge international airport. It was inside the overseas terminal buildings where things were unusual. No bustling crowds. No long lines. No baggage stacked to the heavens. Just a couple bobbies, a dozing TV crew, and some cleanup men.
So many flights from America had been canceled due to the cyber-attack on the U.S. airline system, this part of the huge airport was all but deserted. This was particularly ironic because a week before the place had been a madhouse, with thousands of people stranded and sleeping on benches, countertops, and even the baggage carousels. The rest rooms and toilets had overflowed, food had run out at the concession stands, and tensions had become so high, the Army had been called in at one point to restore order.
This untidy situation had been the result of a massive transcontinental chain reaction. When the impact of the over-booking cyber-attacks first hit, the airlines could not muster enough airplanes to carry every American stranded in England back home again. The lines in Heathrow grew longer and the baggage piled up. One day passed, then two. Then three. Still no additional planes came. With every hotel in London already booked, many travelers had no choice but to camp out at the airport. Tempers were quickly shot, and fistfights between passengers and airline employees became routine. Eventually some people were lucky enough to catch a ride out on the few flights available, while others wound up flying to other destinations, like Canada and Mexico.
But many others simply did not want to fly at all, as it seemed like something catastrophic was going to happen over the Atlantic at any moment. Those who could found refuge in smaller hotels scattered throughout the United Kingdom to wait out the crisis. Others even booked passage on cruise ships and were waiting to sail home.
The crowd slowly petered out. By the sixth day of the crisis, the airport was virtually empty.
So it was a rare occasion that an airliner from America touched down here anymore. But one arrived at Heathrow around 11:45 P.M. local time this lonely night. It was United Flight 333—from Chicago.
It had carried essential businessmen, some government people, and a few celebrities across the Pond. The sleepy news crew was on hand to interview the passengers as they got off, especially the celebrities, so there was a flood of TV lights at the arrival gate. The policemen watched the commotion from across the terminal with bored indifference. The janitors hardly noticed at all.
Deplaning along with the people in the last four rows was Tom Santos. No one took his picture when he got off the flight though, thank God.
The international travel situation was so desperate, even Santos’s tight-lipped government handlers had had trouble booking him a ticket to where he had to go. And still, he was only halfway there.
He’d finished his last flight-simulator exercise the day before. He hadn’t graduated with flying colors exactly; it was more that the time frame for his training had run out. He wouldn’t miss the long hours or the stuffy faux cockpit. But had he learned anything? It was hard to say.
If the question was, Could he start right away as an airline pilot? then the answer was, No. But could he take a big airliner off the ground and fly it safely?
Probably.
He arrived at British customs to find there was no waiting. Every station was open and there were more than enough agents to handle the people getting off the newly arrived plane. This was good. Santos wasn’t feeling too well today. His stomach was acting up and his legs were weak. Standing in a long line would not have helped at all.
He almost lost his balance when he walked up to the open customs station. The customs agent did a quick search of Santos’s bags and found nothing restricted. However, his eyes were drawn to the bottle of bright yellow pills that Santos pulled from his pocket. He asked Santos about them, and Santos explained he had a medical condition and these pills were helping to cure him. As proof, Santos swallowed one dry and claimed to feel better instantly. The customs man was unfazed. He was more concerned that the pill bottle did not have a prescription label or number for the medication within. If the pills were narcotics, then technically, carrying them into Britain unmarked was against the law.
But the customs agent could tell that despite his enthusiasm, Santos was unwell. Just to cover himself, he confiscated two of the pills with Santos’s OK. He would have them analyzed later. Then he took down Santos’s personal information, including his passport data, and let him go.
Santos thanked him, retrieved his bags, and wearily started off for the other end of the airport.
Once he was gone, the customs agent studied the two yellow pills. He broke one in half, wet one end, and sniffed it. It had no odor. He scraped a few particles off of it and put the granules to his tongue.
Tastes like nothing but sugar to me, he thought.
By the time Santos made his way over to the other side of the airport, where flights for the Middle East were leaving, he was barely able to walk. He was so tired, he was having trouble breathing. But he caught a break here, too. There were no lines at these counters, either. No customs, no security.
He walked right up to the ticket desk for Arab Gulf Air and bought a first-class seat to his next destination: Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
He boarded the half-empty flight and took two more yellow pills shortly after takeoff.
But for the first time ever, they really didn’t do him much good.
Chapter 26
Near Bahrait City, Bahrain
The new el-Salaam International Airport was nearly as empty as Heathrow.
The airport, the largest in this tiny Persian Gulf nation, had opened only three months before and was not yet up and running full-time. It did not have its night-flight instrumentation on-line, and it was operating off only two of its four major runways.
Nevertheless, when the airport was open it could handle a fair number of flights. On a typical morning, between the hours of eight and ten, roughly a dozen planes would depart, with about half that number coming in. Afternoons were usually much slower.
It was now 8:00 A.M. and passengers had begun loading for the mor
ning flights out. A traditional month of prayer had just ended, so today was a busy travel day for Muslims, especially local women who could afford to go abroad. The first 10 planes, all regional Arab carriers, were flying to 10 different locations in Europe. The first four were going to Vienna, Bucharest, Munich, and Madrid. The middle four were going to Cyprus, Crete, Athens, and Rome. The ninth plane was bound for Istanbul. The tenth plane was going to Prague. Even if any were flying, there were no direct flights out of el-Salaam to the United States; the FAA hadn’t rated the new airport yet. The destinations of these ten aircraft were typical for people connecting to flights to the United States, though. Nearly 100 percent of the people loading on them were Muslim, most of them women.
Just about the entire el-Habazz terrorist cell was here this morning, too. Nineteen members were on hand; Jamaal el-Habini, the odd man out, was missing. They were sitting far apart from one another in the large waiting area close by the loading gates. Some were dressed like businessmen; others were trying hard to look like tourists. At best, though, they all might have passed for elderly religious students. Abdul Kazeel was not among them.
Due to the flood of airline tickets the cell’s moneymen had secured over the past two weeks, each man was now holding a golden pass of sorts: an actual ticket that had been purchased to use on a connecting flight to America. The thousands of others had been bought, cancelled, then bought again, over and over, to simply obscure the group’s master plan, part of a long line of misdirections meant to throw off anyone who might be on to them. This elaborate, expensive smoke screen only had to last a little while longer.
Each cell member had checked in luggage that was appropriate for someone traveling a long distance. Each was also carrying a Saudi passport (courtesy of Prince Ali Muhammad), a high-powered satellite cell phone, and at least two weapons, including handguns, box cutters, banana knives, and old-fashioned razor blades. These weapons were either in their bags or on their persons, but this caused them no concern. There weren’t any security checkpoints at el-Salaam International Airport. They hadn’t been built yet. As it was, security was barely given lip service at many of the airports in the Arab Middle East. At el-Salaam, passengers walked directly from the waiting area to the airplane. They were not searched; their luggage was not screened.
The cell members rose calmly as their individual flights were called. Two men for each of nine flights; one man, Jamaal el-Habini’s partner, would be flying alone. They barely looked at one another as they left to board their planes. They were composed but also very cautious, as they’d been trained to be. Still, none of them noticed that a lone woman, tall but stooped, in a black madras and burka, followed each pair onto their flight. But then again, why would they? Of the hundreds of people moving around the vast airport, many were wearing the traditional head-to-toe garb.
By 9:00 A.M., the first 10 flights of the morning had left. All of them were jet airliners, some bigger than others. Some filled near to capacity, others almost empty.
The weather was clear, with few clouds and very little wind.
It was a perfect day for flying.
Chapter 27
Aboard Ocean Voyager, inside White Room #2
The Spooks were almost the heroes.
Because they’d cracked the CD-ROM’s second level, and found the reference to the Royal Dubai, the American combat team had uncovered the sea of mysterious ticket receipts. Now the Delta guys were riding on the same planes as the jihad types, using their skills at impersonation and surveillance, following them to their connection points, dressed as women, in a sea of women.
But what would happen when the 10 planes reached those diverse destinations?
No one knew. There was still a piece of the puzzle missing: that elusive last part of the terrorists’ plan. Would it be another all-out attack on America? Would it be a mass destruction of airliners over the Atlantic? Or the start of an incomprehensible nuclear disaster?
The targets and the timetable, that’s all that mattered now. If the Spooks were able to find out those last two secrets and get word to the Delta guys, they would have thwarted the biggest terrorist attack since 9/11 and beyond. The answer, they hoped, lay inside the third and last level of the CD-ROM.
The trouble was, the Spooks couldn’t get in.
The problem was simple. The encryption code to open the third level was actually double-sealed. It required two entries to get in, not just one. This meant the Spooks had to decipher two code phrases to break into it.
Getting the first of these two code phrases had been easy. Using the remaining clothesline letters, the Spooks found the key words follow not desire soon after punching through the second level. Bates recognized the phrase from a passage in the Koran that went: Follow not desire, lest it lead you from the path.
But even though he’d entered in these three words, the third level did not open. Instead, three more blank fields appeared.
That’s when they realized it was a double seal.
“We’re screwed,” Bates said when it became obvious. He spoke for all of them. They had one last, unexpected barrier to crack, yet Jamaal’s Koran could not help them anymore. The pinpricked letters had run out. They’d used them all up.
“The final code must have been given to the mooks verbally,” Bates reasoned with his men as their dank compartment grew even colder. “It’s probably a very common phrase they use among themselves, something that no one would mistake or get wrong. Like one of us saying, ‘Go for it,’ or, ‘Whole nine yards.’ Their last wall of security, the best of all, was the spoken word, the bastards. I’m sure the plan was to use it if the mission described on the rest of the CD-ROM ever got to the point of execution.”
“But how the hell are we going to get it now?” one of Bates’ men asked. “We got no more letters, no more mooks. No more time.”
“That’s why we’re screwed,” Bates replied.
Almost the heroes. History didn’t recognize such things.
They had excuses. Despite their earlier success, decoding was not really the Spooks’ expertise. Bates and his team were geniuses at tracking people and things, but not so in divining codes. The NSA, CIA, DIA, every U.S. intelligence agency, had people who lived, breathed, and slept decoding. It was an art as much as a science, one so intense, some of its top practitioners in the past had chosen suicide once they realized their best work had been done.
But it just wasn’t the Spooks’ thing.
This didn’t mean they’d stopped trying. Just the opposite; they’d been beating their brains out for nearly two hours, taking turns sitting at the computer, trying to conjure up words from the ethers that might do the trick. The mood in the compartment was tense but weary. It had been that way ever since they made their unsettling discovery. There were doubts in here, too, creeping up on them, hanging by the edges. As smart as they were, as a group, the Spooks were also fairly neurotic. What if they were able to punch through the last barrier somehow, but instead of finding targets and timetables, they just found more useless backfill? What if the CD-ROM really wasn’t the final mission briefing disk they’d convinced the combat team that it was?
What if they’d unwittingly sent the Delta guys on a fool’s mission….
All this was hitting Bates particularly hard. He already had the bank bombing weighing on his soul, his mortal sin of hubris and youth. Now the fate of the Delta team was in there, too. How bad was it for him? Since about 0800 hours, Bates imagined he could hear the nautical clock up in Murphy’s cabin ticking…ticking…ticking away…like the telltale heart, even though it was at the opposite end of the boat.
Was there no better way to remind him that time was running out?
It was 0930 hours when Bates took his turn at the old battered keyboard again. White Room #2 was very dark now, with only one lightbulb working, and it just barely. It was also getting very claustrophobic inside.
His men had entered almost 500 different three-word combinations in the past two hours,
none of which came close to breaking the last seal. Wild guesses, educated ones, random typing—everything was tried. Phrases contained on the same pages as the pinpricked letters were attempted, to no avail. The Spooks had even hung up the original 30 character sheets again, thinking that another phrase might be found by rearranging the old letters. A good idea. But it didn’t work.
So the keyboard was back on Bates’s lap now, as his guys collapsed into other seats nearby. He started typing, plugging in the most likely favorites again, just in case he messed them up somehow the first hundred times: Allah is Truth, Praise to Allah, God is Great. Nothing hit.
Just three words…
None the same as before.
Then an odd thought came to him. Maybe they were going about this the wrong way. He had three blank fields staring back at him. With the previous two barriers he had filled in all three encrypt words first, then hit the enter button—and the level popped open. But what if he came up with just the first word of the secret phrase? He would know it was right because if it fit, it would remain in the blank field when he hit the enter button. If it was wrong, it would simply disappear.
Wouldn’t it be easier going for just one word at a time?
He began typing in single words at random, hoping to fill just the first blank. He tried: You, I, We, They…. Nothing happened. Each one went poof as soon as he hit enter. He tried Life, Death, Live, Die. Again, he got bupkis.
He took suggestions from his tired band of tweebs. Get, Give, Don’t, Will, Last, First—all good Islamic words, just not the right ones.
A call from Martinez broke their concentration. It was a short, clipped conversation, the fifth one in the last hour. The Delta boss was reminding Bates that some of his men had been airborne for more than an hour and learning what was inside the third level was getting more critical with every minute. And Bates told Martinez the same thing he’d been telling him for the past hour: that he thought they were getting close. They were worlds apart, but just by listening to the background noise, or lack of it, during the phone call, Bates knew the tension up in the CQ was just as thick as it was down here at the bottom.