Shadow Maker (26 page)

New York

U.S./Canadian Border

M
arkus. That was the name of the border patrol officer who waved Samir onto the scales at the Champlain border crossing. Markus Johnson. He looked like he could have played for the NFL if he wanted to. He had two kids, both of them girls. Markus was the crew manager for the early shift. He once told Samir that the quieter hours suited him and that midmorning release allowed him to spend more time with his family.

Samir could hardly count the number of conversations he and Markus had shared while his truck sat on these scales. They talked about vegetables, about family, sometimes they even talked about Islam. On most days, Samir was happy to sit and chat for a while. Today he prayed their conversation would be short.

It wasn't.

“I'm gonna have to look in the back, Sammy,” said Markus as Samir stepped down from the truck and handed over his freight papers.

The farmer's heart rate ramped up a notch. “Why? Is there a problem with the weight?”

“Oh no, nothing like that. It's just that Homeland Security raised the threat level. No explanation yet, but the new level means we have to check every vehicle.” Markus sighed as he flipped through Samir's papers. “Standard bureaucratic baloney. Don't know what I'm looking for or why I'm looking”—he tilted his head and waived his clipboard—“but I gotta check a box that says I looked.”

The image of the gun in Mahmoud's waistband flashed in Samir's mind. He scrambled to find an excuse to avert the confrontation. Then an idea emerged, and he let his shoulders sag. “Must you really?” he asked, feigning a yawn. “I did not sleep well last night, and I'd like to get back to Warrensburg before I'm too tired to drive.”

Markus lowered his clipboard, his face registering genuine concern. He gestured over his shoulder with his pen, pointing at the guard-house. “You know, we just made a fresh pot. And we have those foam cups—the big ones. I'll have Tom get you one while I check in the back. Follow me.” He turned toward the facility.

The speed at which his excuse had backfired staggered Samir. “I . . . uh . . . No, thank you. I don't drink coffee.”

Markus stopped and turned back, dropping his eyes and fiddling with his papers. “What was I thinking? That's a Muslim thing isn't it?”

“Yes,” Samir lied. Then he quickly followed with, “For my mosque, anyway. Look, I'm fine. I just want to get going.”

The border patrol officer raised the clipboard in the air and started leading Samir to the back of the vegetable truck. “And you will, Sammy. As soon as I get a look in the back.”

As Samir followed behind Markus, he ran his hand along the side of the truck and slapped it a couple of times, trying to make it look like a natural, casual thing to do.

Markus stopped at the corner of the box and turned. His free hand came to rest on the grip of his gun. “You sure you're okay, Sammy?”

Samir's heart now raced so that he could hear its pounding in his head. He wondered if Markus could hear it too. Sweat formed at his hairline, icy cold in the northern air. He swallowed. “Yes. Of course.”

At the back of the truck, Markus courteously held a flashlight on Samir's shaking hands while the farmer searched for the right key. “Where're your gloves, Sammy?”

The phone in the guardhouse rang.

Samir stopped. “Do you need to get that?”

“No. Tom'll get it. Go ahead.”

“Of course.”

As Samir pushed the key into the padlock, Tom appeared at the guardhouse door, shouting toward the scales. “Phone, boss!”

Markus sighed and shook his head. Then he straightened up and shouted back. “Take a message!”

“Can't! It's headquarters, the division chief. Something about the new threat level. He wants to talk to the shift manager. Stat!”

In the midst of their conversation, Samir had a flash of brilliance. He jiggled the key and then huffed dramatically. “It's stuck. Probably frozen. Happens all the time. Wait here, I have some lock deicer in the cab.”

Markus looked back and forth between Samir and Tom, who was still waving the phone. He shoved the flashlight under his arm, checked a box on the paperwork, and then pulled the documents off the clipboard and handed them to Samir. “We're good, Sammy. See you tomorrow.”

Five minutes later, Samir's heart was still pounding. He took a sip of coffee with a shaking hand as he passed a blue-and-white road sign that read
WELCOME TO THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

T
he sun had risen high above a white overcast sky by the time Samir stopped his truck again. They were in a small parking lot lined with bare oaks, a parking lot that Mahmoud had directed him to. The student was in the passenger seat, digging in his backpack, and Samir hoped that it was not for some form of payment. This was supposed to be a charitable act. His eternity depended on it.

Samir watched with worried eyes as Mahmoud paused his searching to stifle a coughing fit. This was not the first. Mahmoud had grown increasingly ill throughout the journey. Samir patted him on the back. “Are you sure you're going to be okay?”

Mahmoud looked up from his bag and offered a weak smile. “I am fine, just worn out from the journey across the ocean.”

At that moment Samir was overcome by a coughing fit of his own. He suddenly felt very tired. “Perhaps we are both coming down with something,” he said, wiping his mouth with his sleeve, but when he looked up, Mahmoud was pointing the handgun at him. It now had a suppressor fixed to the barrel.

“Perhaps we are,” said Mahmoud, and fired two shots into Samir's chest.

Samir could not speak for the pain and shock. He felt like his heart and lungs had exploded. His vision turned gray. Mahmoud faded from sight. From beyond the veil, he heard the young man speaking to him softly, gently.

“You have served Allah well, my friend. So I have spared you the suffering you would have endured before the end. I, however, must bear it a little while longer.”

Then even the gray turned to darkness. Samir knew no more.

—

Mahmoud laid the driver back in his seat and brushed a hand across his face to close his eyes. Then he pulled the man's parka closed and zipped it up to hide the bullet wounds. He shut off the engine and lights and tucked the keys into the glove compartment, along with the gun and silencer. He would not need a weapon anymore.

The snow crunched beneath Mahmoud's feet as he walked toward the wide tangled oaks at the western edge of the lot, only stopping once for another fit of coughing. He would have to bring that under control, he thought, at least for a few more hours. Red spots of blood stained the snow at his feet. Mahmoud kicked and stirred the white powder to cover them up.

He found a short paved path through the trees and emerged on a little two-lane road that separated him from another parking lot and a long brick building. As he crossed the street, backpack slung over his shoulder, he gazed up at the building's tall octagonal clock tower and smiled. It reminded him of the minarets at home. At its base, next to the arched entrance, was a plaque that read
ALBANY-RENSSELAER STATION, AMTRAK, DEPARTURES TO BOSTON, WASHINGTON DC.

Romeo Seven, Joint Base Andrews

Washington, DC

D
r. Patricia Heldner sat hunched in a black rolling chair in Romeo Seven's otherwise stark white medical facility. Her back ached. Her head pounded. She had been there for hours, slowly bringing Scott out of his drug-induced coma.

From the tests she conducted along the way, it appeared the engineer had not lost any cognitive function, though she could not be certain until he was fully awake. There had been clear damage to the nervous system, however. Significant damage. Dr. Scott Stone would likely never walk again.

Moments after Heldner injected the last dose of stimulant into his IV, Scott's eyes fluttered open. His irises shifted around the room, but his head remained fixed to the pillow, and Heldner wondered if the paralysis was even worse than she thought. “Take it easy, Scott. You're in the clinic. You're okay.”

Scott stared at the ceiling. His words were slurred by the drugs and the inevitable cotton mouth of long-term sedation. “The computer virus. I've got to tell the team.”

“Yes,” said Heldner, patting his forehead with a cloth. “You were working on the Second Sign Virus, but you need to let that go, now.” She hesitated. “Scott, there's something I have to—”

Scott's head came off the pillow and he grabbed her arm. His eyes were wide, urgent, his jaw clenched. “No! I mean Grendel's virus, the one we all forgot about.”

—

Just off the Capitol Mall, in a dark room on the ground floor of Health and Human Services, a rack of servers labeled DC Water whirred to life. An alien program that had lain dormant on the system for the last three days awakened and transmitted an executable file, which flashed at the speed of light through five miles of fiber-optic cable to a computer at DC Water's Blue Plains control station.

Once resident on the target computer, the file executed, running two subroutines in quick succession. The first presented a set of phony user commands to the Windows-based program that manages DC Water's analog industrial-control system. It initiated a cascading shutdown of every pump in the network, opening the fail-safe valves and linking the whole system for gravity feed from the highest pump station at Salem Park. The second subroutine destroyed the management program, locking DC Water's maintenance personnel out of the system.

At 4:25
P.M.
Eastern Standard Time, the first DC Water technician discovered the change in pump status. At 4:34, after realizing he was permanently locked out of the system, he contacted his supervisor. Thus, by 4:52, when Agent Celine Jameson called on behalf of the FBI to suggest the possibility of an attack on the city's water supply, DC Water's chief of maintenance had a wide-open mind.

Scott had put it all together during his flight back from London. The fragments of code he found on Grendel's servers were not the type of code that would have crashed the London Stock Exchange. Grendel's code was a Stuxnet knockoff, designed to attack an industrial system like a power grid or a pump network. The engineer realized that was why Kattan had appeared at the site of the suicide bombing, dressed as a first responder. The front door security at Health and Human Services had been decimated by the attack, and Kattan used the opening to access DC Water's unhackable servers directly, the same trick he used at Paternoster Square to access the stock exchange.

Never one to present a theory without hard data, Scott wanted to compare the Second Sign Virus with Grendel's code before briefing the team. Then the neurotoxin hit him and he never got the chance.

As the sun dipped down into the Potomac, CJ and seven members of the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team raced across the treetops in a dark blue Bell 412 helicopter, heading for the Salem Park pump station. All of them, including CJ, were dressed in black tactical gear and helmets. Walker and Heldner were en route as well, with a CDC hazmat van, but they would take at least forty minutes to reach the site.

CJ checked the smartscreen integrated into the sleeve of her tactical jacket. Infrared satellite imagery showed a single individual kneeling next to the chain-link fence that separated the pump station from the high school baseball field to the south. He appeared to be cutting through the wire. She unstrapped from her seat and stepped up between the pilots. “Step it up, gentlemen! This is about to be a wasted trip!”

As the pump-house tower appeared on the darkening northern horizon, the figure in the infrared video broke through the fence. CJ tapped the hostage rescue team sharpshooter on the shoulder and pointed to a steel-tube bench mounted on the helicopter skid outside the door. “Get ready!”

The pump station came up fast. As they passed the fence, the pilot turned and slid the chopper sideways while the copilot activated the powerful spotlight mounted on a turret under the nose. The blue-white beam fell on a scrawny individual in a parka and blue jeans. He carried a black backpack and walked at a plodding pace toward the station's huge open reservoir. He paused in midstep when the light came on. Then he kept going.

CJ grabbed the microphone for the chopper's PA system. “Stop where you are and lay down on the ground.”

The individual ignored the command, now only twenty meters from the reservoir, a short sprint away. He kept walking.

“Stop!” CJ repeated. “Lay down on the ground. If you do not comply, we will open fire.”

When the man still continued, CJ turned to the sharpshooter. He was seated on the helicopter floor with his feet on the external bench and his Remington M40 up and ready. “Can you take him down without hitting the backpack?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“Then do it.”

“Ma'am, if I shoot now, I'll be shooting him in the back,” argued the HRT man.

“His back is to us because he's about to dump a bioweapon in that reservoir. Take the shot!”

An earsplitting crack rang out over the steady chop of the rotor blades. The terrorist went down, face first in the grass less than ten meters from the low concrete rise of the southern reservoir wall.

“Let's go!” shouted CJ.

Unable to land because of the fence line, the chopper pilot hovered twenty feet off the grass. The HRT men unfurled three black ropes from each side, and six of them fast-roped down while CJ and the sharpshooter covered the unmoving terrorist. Once the rest were down and covering the suspect with their MP5s, the other two followed. On the ground, CJ signaled the sharpshooter and another team member to follow her. The rest of the team spread out to look for additional threats.

The suspect was alive, groaning, groping for the backpack lying in front of him. CJ nudged it away with her boot. When she did, the backpack felt light, empty. She picked it up with a gloved hand and pulled open the pockets one by one. There was no canister of virus, not even a glass vial. When she turned the bag upside down, nothing fell out but a worn Quran.

“Ma'am?” The sharpshooter's face was stricken with guilt—worry that he had just shot a civilian who had done nothing but cut through a fence.

Refusing to accept that, CJ knelt over the suspect and rolled him over. For the first time, she got a good look at him. His face and arms were covered in boils, his eyes sunken and bloodshot. While she stared at him in shock, he gripped her arm with a cold hand and pulled himself up to a sitting position, closer to her face. “I am the third and final sign,” he said with a malevolent grin. “Now comes the Mahdi.” Then his body convulsed and a spout of blood erupted from his lips.