Resurrection Day (10 page)

Nikki parked outside the cemetery. Collins walked alone through the gates in the cold sunshine, while she waited back in the car, knowing that this was a private moment, a moment when he needed to be alone. This day, of all days, he had an obligation to the dead. To stand upon the earth that covered his wife and son, to touch the stone that bore their names.

Collins moved past the tombs of granite and bronze, past the uprooted earth of freshly dug graves and mourners hunched in their own private grief. Some people preferred to inter their loved ones in elaborate crypts, or behind brass plaques in a wall of remembrance, but he had placed his wife and son to rest on a small hill shaded by some pines and a gnarled old arcadia tree. He laid the flowers on the grave, said the prayers and the words he wanted to say, the same words he always said, that he missed them so much, that he longed for them back, that their passing had left such a terrible sorrow, an unending ache.

That nothing could replace them, nothing, not ever. Standing there, out of the sun, in the shadow of the pines, his eyes swept over the smooth granite, stared at the gold-leaf paint in the cold-chiselled words and numbers that inscribed his pain.

Here lie the bodies of Annie Collins,

born 1960, died November 19th 2000,

and Sean Collins, born June 1981, died October 12th, 2000.

Beloved wife and son of John Collins.

'Until we're together again, I'll miss you, always.'

He still missed them. Of course, he had dreams and he had photographs. But his dreams were sometimes disturbed, and photographs were always so inadequate, never captured the real truth; the soul behind the image, the beauty behind the smile, the happiness behind the laughter. They had never captured the real Annie that he had known since they had met in high school when he was sixteen: warm hearted, fun loving, sensual, a good, kind friend, a loving mother. Or the real Sean behind the photograph taken on his third birthday. Not a sullen crying child, unhappy because one of the other children had seized one of his presents, but a beautiful, blond-haired little boy with a lopsided smile, always ready to make mischief, who loved to run to his father's arms, be held and tickled, smothered in kisses. And the other photographs, the ones of Sean in his naval uniform, looking like a man, though not yet a man, just a shy, uncertain youth trying to forge his manhood, find his way into the adult world.

It was Sean's death, and the manner of it, which had troubled him most. Collins had learned from one of the naval medics who attended the dead and injured that after the explosion Sean was still alive and conscious, even though his body had been shattered by the blast. Death had come not in seconds but in a gradual diminution of his senses as he slowly, agonisingly, bled to death. Every time Collins visualised that image of his son, his beautiful boy, in such horrendous pain, it broke his heart, cut him to pieces.

He knew that the loss of a child at any stage of life was unnatural, so wrong that purpose was difficult to reclaim. It compressed the heart into a small stone, turned the mind into a graveyard. Collins knew that the experience had carved his face and painted a dull sheen of desolation over his eyes. He had read somewhere that after the death of a child parents often reported a disturbing inability to care about the suffering of others. Music that had once stirred the heart no longer moved you, and you became numb, unaffected. It had been that way with him. After Sean's death, and then Annie's, the hardness of his own heart had truly frightened him.

And for a long time afterwards, haunted by absence, he had come here, visiting the cemetery at all hours of day and night, to lie down on the ground beside them, stretch himself out on the cold earth, feel it seep into his bones as it seeped into theirs, as if by lying beside them he could somehow connect to them again. People visiting the cemetery who saw him then must have thought he was crazy. And for a time he was. He had seen a therapist. The counselling had not helped. His doctor had recommended anti-anxiety medication. He rejected the prescription. He had wanted to feel the pain. It was all he had, all that allowed him vividly to recall the happiness of his past life. And now, though his dreams still reclaimed him briefly, especially on anniversaries, they came less often.

Nikki had been responsible for that. Nikki, with her soft touch and her caring eyes and maternal instinct, had been a rock, had helped bring him out of himself, bring him into the world again. With her, he had found a reconnection to life that had eluded him for so long. And being around Daniel had made him feel what it was like to be a father again, and he cherished that feeling. But Nikki's offer was too much, too soon, something he knew he wasn't ready for, and he didn't know how else to tell her, except by being honest. To move on, to make another life for himself, to let go completely of his wife and son was too much right now, almost like forsaking them.

I miss you, Annie. I miss you, Sean.

For a fleeting moment an image flashed before his eyes: the grainy photograph he kept hidden in his desk, of the cold, hard face of the man who had helped take his son's life. The terrorist who had helped mastermind and execute the Cole bombing and had escaped the FBI's intensive international efforts to apprehend those responsible.

Mohamed Rashid.

The name came to Collins' lips with such hatred, such vehemence, that he trembled, felt his rage marrow deep. The kind of anger that made him fear his own potential for human savagery, know the ease with which he might embrace vengeance, and with reason call it justice. A molten anger, which despite the passage of time was still so overwhelming it nearly broke his self-control, took him almost to the verge of tears.

He fought the rage. Forced the image of Mohamed Rashid from his mind.

It wasn't the time or place. On this of all days, he didn't want his anger to intrude, wanted simply to remember the sacredness of his memories of his wife and son.

When he had finished talking, when he had finished his whispered words to the dead, he took a deep breath, touched the stone, felt its glacial coldness seep into his fingers, exhaled, and slowly let the stone go.

Then he turned and walked down the hill, slowly back towards the gates behind which Nikki waited.

Washington, DC 1.28 p.m.

Seven miles away Mohamed Rashid was stepping out of the subway from the Gallery Place metro station, in Washington's Chinatown. He walked for two blocks towards the busy shopping area on Gallery Row. He found the phone booth he had chosen, on a quiet side street round the corner from a Borders bookstore. Wearing soft leather gloves, he stepped into the booth, removed his metal-banded wristwatch and placed it on top of the call-box, the face towards him. As the second hand swept round, he fiddled with his gold earring as he made sure no one had stopped outside, waiting to use the booth. To his relief no one had. Preparing himself, he cleared his throat, then put a coin in the slot and dialled the number from memory. There were half a dozen rings before the call was answered by a polite female voice and the coin clanked home. 'The White House. How may I help you?'

Rashid cupped the receiver in both his hands, holding it close to his mouth, and paused a moment before speaking, still keeping his eye on the watch's sweeping second hand. 'Can you hear me clearly?'

'Yes, sir, I can hear you. How may I help you?'

'By listening carefully. Because I will not repeat what I have to say. This is an important message for your President.'

There was a noticeable hesitation at the other end. 'I — I hear you, sir.'

'Good. Don't interrupt. Just listen, and take note.'

Rashid guessed that at that very moment the female switchboard operator was frantically signalling to her supervisor that she had a potentially threatening or abusive call, alerting the attention of the Secret Service, but that didn't matter to him right now. He delivered the message slowly, carefully enunciating what he had to say, but all the time observing the watch dial, making sure that he did not exceed his allotted time. When he had finished, he abruptly hung up the receiver.

A drop of sweat dripped from his brow on to the arm of his windcheater. He checked the time. Forty-six seconds had elapsed from the moment he had got through to the White House switchboard. Not that it really mattered all that much, but he had kept his call so brief to ensure that it couldn't be traced. He slipped on his watch, stepped out of the booth, and walked south-east for three blocks, until the streets became busier and dirtier and he found himself on 14th. The street was filled with cheap bars, fast-food restaurants, and prostitutes loitering on street corners. As Rashid walked past, a girl said, 'Like a date, honey? You'll have the best time of your life.'

Mohamed Rashid ignored the request and strolled on, catching a distant glimpse between streets of the soaring marble columns of Capitol Hill, and the massive granite fronts of US government buildings. He thought: How I hate this country. Hate it with a crushing intensity. Its streets, its people, its incredible arrogance, its corrupt power.

A power he would soon destroy.

A block away, he found the bar he'd been told about, a seedy, run-down place with a flashing Budweiser neon light in the window. When he stepped inside he found himself in a dark cavern that stank of stale beer and marijuana smoke. No more than six customers, all watching a blaring TV set above the bar, showing a basketball game.

One customer, a small black man wearing a black leather jacket and a blue baseball cap — the man Rashid was seeking — sat nursing a beer near the wall phone. Rashid approached him, and the man said, 'Hey, brother, how you doing?'

His eyes looked glazed, as if he'd been sampling too much of his own merchandise.

'I need some pills,' Rashid said quietly.

'Don't we all, brother.' The man's eyes narrowed, suddenly no longer looking glazed as they studied his potential customer, his well-practised streetwise instinct for danger telling him in an instant that this one wasn't a threat. 'What you need?'

'Amphetamines.'

'Crystal meth do?'

Rashid nodded. The black man smiled, but the deal with the stranger was far from done. 'You come back here, say, in ten minutes, maybe I might know where you can get some, understand what I'm saying?'

Rashid nodded again, knowing how the game was to be played. 'Ten minutes. I will come back.'

'You do that.'

Rashid left, stepped out onto the street again. In the days ahead, with the tension, stress and sleeplessness he'd endure, he would have need of the drug to keep him awake and alert. He would return to the bar in ten minutes, but now he had one more thing to do. A block farther down, he found another phone booth and stepped inside. This time he used a twenty-dollar phone card and dialled an overseas number in Montmartre, Paris.

Washington, DC Sunday, 11 November 1 p.m.

As the clock swept past one o'clock, there was a growing air of panic in the White House situation room. The President had entered the chamber at exactly three minutes before one. The members of the Security Council immediately got to their feet when he appeared, but with a wave of his hand he indicated that they remain in their seats.

'Ladies and gentlemen, we now have three other expert opinions on the vial contents and I have to tell you that they confirm the awesome human devastation a device loaded with such a chemical could cause were it detonated in Washington.' The President looked at Douglas Stevens. 'Doug, perhaps you'd hand out the draft report of the experts' analyses.'

'Yes, sir.' Stevens took several photocopied, stapled sheets from his briefcase and handed them around the table.

'You'll also see that our experts suggest that a likely source for the nerve gas could be Russia, which is a leader in the field of chemical warfare, way ahead of the US, or any other country. Does anyone have any questions?'

Heads went down to study the transcript, and after several minutes the Defence Secretary, John Feldmeyer, looked up. 'If the source is Russia, what are we going to do about it, Mr President?'

'I'm going to make a personal call to President Kuzmin to discuss the matter.'

Mitch Gains, a barrel-chested former Boston judge and one of President Booth's advisers, spoke up. 'You're going to tell him about the threat to Washington?'

'I see no other way, Mitch. We may need his cooperation to find out where al-Qaeda got the gas. We've all heard of rogue Russian scientists working for terrorist organisations in return for a big pay cheque, and the Russian mafia supplying terrorists with the materials for weapons of mass destruction for the same reasons. That may be the case here. Naturally, I'll insist on Kuzmin's absolute discretion, and that he makes sure any investigations he orders are kept top secret.'

'What about the issue of the prisoners in Russian jails, sir?' Bob Rapp, a bearded Californian — and a much-respected onetime journalist who was one of the President's key special advisers addressed him. A veteran journalist in his early fifties, he was a tall, sober-faced man who rarely smiled.

'Naturally, I'll also be bringing that up with Kuzmin. But if it does go to the wire, it may be a question of us having to use leverage to convince the Russians, Germans, Israelis and British to help us. Exactly what leverage we may have to use is another matter.'

'With due respect, Mr President,' Rapp replied, 'you have enormous power at your disposal, both military and financial, to influence these other states. You can use that power to its ultimate to ensure that all the remaining prisoners are released.'

'Bob, let's just hope it doesn't ever go that far. And let's get this thing in perspective — the question of the prisoners is the least of our concerns right now.' President Booth turned to another of the generals present, the Army Chief of Staff. 'General Croft, as a former head of army communications, I believe you can explain how a terrorist like Hasim might remotely trigger this chemical weapon of his. Be it a bomb, or whatever.'

'Yes, sir.' The general readied some notes in front of him before looking up. 'My experts tell me there are really only two ways, by radio wave or by telephone. But I believe there is, in fact, a third option, which I'll come back to in a moment. First, let's consider radio. Basically what happens is that the terrorist attaches his bomb to a radio receiver. In this case, let's say he's placed both the receiver and the bomb somewhere in Washington. Then the terrorist can walk away and either himself or one of his buddies can set off the bomb remotely, pretty much from anywhere in the world. All that's needed to detonate the device is a transmitter tuned to the same frequency as the receiver, and a little bit of simple electronic circuitry. To stop the bomb going off inadvertantly the signal will be modulated with another frequency. But simply what would happen is this: the terrorist transmits his signal from somewhere a distance away, and the receiver picks it up. It would then make a circuit inside the receiver, which in turn energies a relay of some kind, and detonates the bomb. For a long distance, he'd have to use short-wave transmission, which bounces off the ionosphere. For a shorter distance, VHF.'

'How many frequencies could he possibly use for something like this?'

'Hard to say, sir. It depends on the transmitter's power, where it's situated, and how far a distance you need to send the signal.'

'Could we jam all the possible frequencies?'

'Impossible, sir. We wouldn't have the transmitter capacity to block such a broad spectrum of radio waves. And besides, even if we did, we'd be shooting ourselves in the foot.'

'Explain.'

'Because we'd end up incapacitating our own frequencies, those vital to the police and FBI, even the fire departments and emergency services. There'd be chaos on the airwaves, or more likely there would be no airwaves at all.'

'What about the telephone system?'

'Again, it's pretty simple. You attach the bell wires of a telephone to a digital decoder box. When an incoming call is detected, the decoder comes alive and sits there waiting for another signal to activate it. When the digital activating code comes in over the phone line, and the decoder verifies it's the right one — that is, they match — then it triggers the bomb. It also means a wrong number can't set it off. All a terrorist has to do is dial the number in Washington, or wherever the device is, and when it answers, he transmits his code over the line. The code could be aural like the fast digital codes you hear when you punch a number on a phone keypad — or something in a higher frequency range that can't be heard. Either way, it's simple stuff technically, but deadly effective.'

'Could Washington's phone communications be totally sealed off from the outside world?'

'Again, that's impossible, Mr President. Besides, there's another possibility, a combination of both methods I've outlined. The phone in question could be a cellphone, which uses a satellite. But again, if we tried to shut down all cellphone communications, we could be shooting ourselves in the foot. The same applies with ordinary land-line telephone communications. All 911 and military phone traffic in and out of DC would be affected. You may not be aware of it, sir, but ninety-eight per cent of all Department of Defence and emergency response communications are transmitted down public phone lines.'

The President sighed. 'It's at times like this you realise how vulnerable we all are in this technological age of ours.'

'That's a fact, Mr President.'

'You mentioned a third method.'

'Again, it could be part of a combination. A suicide volunteer baby-sits the device until he gets a verbal call to detonate. And in the case of Islamic fanatics, that's entirely feasible.'

'So we're pretty much at the mercy of Hasim's method, whichever he uses?'

'It looks that way, sir. Hasim would probably go for a combination of both methods, radio and telephone. Or he could also simply control the operation entirely by himself, using a satellite radio link — with the bomb hooked up to a satellite dish receiver, instead of using a telephone line or a conventional radio transmission over the airwaves. That's a possibility too. It's the sort of communication we know he uses frequently.'

'Surely we can control those links?' Paul Burton, the Assistant to the President on National Security Affairs, suggested.

'To an extent. We can definitely control any non-terrestrial communications under our influence — by that I mean US military and commercial satellites. We could probably even get the co-operation of our European allies and perhaps the Japanese to allow us to monitor their satellite signals traffic, or agree to shut them down altogether. But the Russians and the Chinese have satellites, too, most of them for military use, that are totally independent of us. There's no way they'd allow us to control their sat-com signals. We could try to jam them electronically to shut them down, sure, but if we do that we'd be wading into dangerous waters. And there's still no guarantee we'd stop Hasim.'

The President sighed again. 'It seems we're stuck up a creek.'

There was a deep silence, and then the man from Mississippi and adviser to the President on economic policy, Charles Rivermount, said, 'Be that as it may, Mr President, we still haven't got a valid excuse for our search.'

'I'm about to come to that. The Vice-President has come up with a suggestion. Alex, would you care to explain?'

Alex Havers put down the copy of the experts' report he had been mulling over. 'All FBI agents and Secret Service agents directly involved will be told the truth. There's no other way we can carry out the search effectively, and with such a direct threat to the President's life by Hasim's stipulation that he remain in the White House the Secret Service will obviously have to be on board. However, anyone else, and by that I mean the police, the National Guard, the military — apart from their specialist chemical units, which we'll need — or whoever else we bring in to help with the search, we simply tell them that we're looking for a number of barrels of potentially hazardous chemicals that went missing. By that I mean chloric acid. It's an industrial chemical used in the etching process. It can also cause serious pollution, severe skin burns if anyone's physically exposed to it, and even death if the fumes are inhaled. If need be, and the army's brought in at a later stage, we could admit the consignment went missing from an army base, which gives us good cause to involve the military. But that's only if our backs are absolutely to the wall. Instructions will be given to everyone involved not to talk to the press for any reason. And that includes all of us here, gentlemen. No matter how well we know the reporter — and we all know reporters — no one breathes a word.'

One of the generals raised a dubious eyebrow. 'You really think that can work, Mr Vice-President?'

'Right now, it's about the best excuse we can come up with. And it's simple enough to be effective. Unless anyone can think of anything better? And in this case, I'd be more than happy to submit to any superior advice or opinion.'

There was nervous laughter and then the men around the table fell silent again. The President said, 'OK, it's what we go with for now. If anyone in the press starts asking questions, we know what to tell them. But if we do this right, that problem shouldn't arise. I want the search under way immediately. Doug, it'll be your job to liaise with the Police Commissioner, after I speak with him personally. It's obvious he'll have to know the truth if this is to work, as will a number of key officials. Are you confident we can rely on his discretion?'

'Absolutely, Mr President.'

'Now, have any of you any questions, or anything to report? Yes, General Horton?'

'Don't you think the military ought to be involved in the search right away, sir? The extra manpower could help, move things along a lot faster.'

'I think the less uniforms seen on the streets for now, the better. But if the situation changes, obviously we may have to draft in the army and National Guard.'

'Mr President, I have a question.'

It was Rivermount. 'Yes, Charlie?'

'What if we rattle Hasim's chain by trying to find this nerve gas? What if these terrorists notice extra police activity on the streets, figure out what we're after, and decide to explode their device? Or if we stumble on their hideout during the search and cause them to set it off deliberately, or by accident?'

'There's no answer to that, is there? Except that we've got to try.'

The President's phone flashed. He grabbed the receiver, listened and said, 'Send it in at once.'

The door opened and an aide appeared, handed the President a sealed envelope and retreated. The President opened the envelope, read the slip of paper inside, looked up. 'It seems al-Qaeda may have another message for us. There was a phone call to the White House switchboard a couple of minutes ago. The caller claimed there was another package left at a specified location near Washington. A team of Secret Service and FBI are on their way there as we speak.'