Resurrection Day (34 page)

Karla stood at the kitchen window, staring out at darkening grey clouds and the drizzling rain. The weather didn't help her mood, and she turned away, sat at the table, her hand on her forehead, her mind a welter of confused thoughts. Nikolai was still resting. Five minutes ago, when she'd felt his brow, it was burning, so she'd taken some ice cubes from the refrigerator, wrapped them in a tea towel, and tried to reduce his temperature. When she went back into the kitchen to wring out the wet towel, the anguish suddenly hit her. She felt as if she were trapped in the middle of a nightmare, and she was filled with a terrible sense of dread. She knew that from now on she was a marked woman. The Americans would learn her identity after what had happened. They would find her, no matter how it turned out, no matter where she went — she would be hunted down, imprisoned, or even killed. What would happen to Josef then? He'd already lost a father. Who would care for him? She loved her son with such intensity that the thought of him being left completely alone in the world, locked in a tiny cell for the next thirty years, caused her heart-wrenching agony. She wanted to cry, forced herself to hold back her tears.

For a few moments she entertained an insane thought: what if she called the police, gave herself up and told them everything? But if she did, she'd be condemning Nikolai to death, just as she'd be condemning Josef, and the mere thought of both those consequences filled her with such despair that it brought her close to breaking point. She couldn't betray Nikolai any more than she could her own son. She had loved him once, deeply. She had always kept that part of her life in Moscow secret, even from her husband. She had made an effort to forget Nikolai when she returned to Lebanon to marry, and after Josef had been born, and as the years had passed, she had somehow managed to bury those cherished memories of the time they had spent in Moscow together in the back of her mind, but she had never forgotten him. How could she?

She had kept her secret hidden for a long time, but every time she looked at Josef's face, heard his voice, she was reminded of it. Her son had been conceived the last night she and Nikolai had spent together in Moscow. Two weeks later, after she returned to Tyr, she had married Michael. Her husband never knew, and she could never have brought herself to tell him. And so she had lived with the lie — Michael believing, until the day he died, that Josef was his son — and kept it hidden in the darkest chambers of her heart. But she knew that Josef's conception wasn't an accident of passion. In truth, she had wanted Nikolai so much that having his child was the only way she could hold on to part of him. She had wanted to have his child, willed it to happen. And when she saw him again that day in Tyr, standing at her door, though so many years had passed and so much had changed, it had all come flooding back. It wasn't the same as Moscow — it could never be that — but she knew the tenderness was still there, and the shared spark they found in each other's company, and that a part of her cared deeply for him, always would. But could she tell him her secret? And what would it achieve after all these years?

She pushed the thought away, tried to concentrate on her dilemma. She knew she was faced with really only one option: to carry on, and play her part. It was the only chance that Josef would live and that he'd be set free. And even then it was a slim chance. But could she really do it? Could she help kill half a million people for the sake of her own son's life? Her mind was tortured, and whatever it was that had kept her going went out of her then. Her shoulders sagged, and there was only anguish in her dark eyes as she slumped forward and buried her face in her hands, harsh sobs racking her body.

My darling Josef, what have I done?

She heard a sound behind her, turned. Nikolai stood in the doorway. He lurched against the door frame, pale as death. She saw to her horror that he was bleeding again, crimson liquid dripping through his fingers where he was clutching his wound. 'Nikolai ... !' As she rushed towards him, he collapsed.

Washington, DC 2.50 p.m.

'Mr President, you're looking marvellous! Absolutely terrific! Haven't seen you looking so good in a long time.' A beaming Al Brown bounded towards the President to grasp his hand, the praise flowing even as he crossed the room. 'You'll have to tell me what the secret is. Maybe I need to spend some time on that ranch of yours?'

The President shook the mayor's hand. Brown, now that he was up close, realised he'd definitely overdone the ass-licking. The President was lacklustre, red eyed from lack of sleep, as if he were under enormous stress. Distracted, he ushered Brown towards a black leather sofa.

'Take a seat, Al. Good to see you.'

The private room was next to the Oval Office. Informal and intimate, it was where the President sometimes liked to greet close friends or familiar visitors. A pair of polished Texas steer horns adorned a sideboard in the corner, and on the walls were photographs from the President's stint in the Texas Air National Guard, shots of him in uniform in the cockpit of an F-102 fighter, and with his family and friends. A steward brought them coffee and departed.

'Thanks for coming so promptly, Al.'

'My pleasure, Mr President.' Brown unbuttoned his jacket, reclined on the sofa. Relaxed and upbeat, his excitement undiminished, he smiled broadly. 'So, are we finally going to get your support on the half-billion dollars the District needs?'

The President's face tightened as he put down his coffee cup with a nervous rattle. 'The question of my support isn't why I wanted to see you, Al. I'm afraid it's something far more serious.'

Brown's disappointment was instant. His smile vanished, his eyebrows twitched with puzzlement. He set down his cup. 'Maybe you better explain, Mr President?'

'We've got a very disturbing crisis on our hands, Al. And it involves DC. Maybe the worst problem the capital's ever had to face.' Deep worry lines were etched on the President's brow, anxiety suffused his voice.

Brown shrugged, offered a broad grin to comfort the stressed man opposite. 'Hey, Washington's had its share of crises before, Mr President. It's always had to deal with one problem after another. But it's come through them all and survived. It'll come through this one, for sure.'

The President's eyes glazed with emotion as he stared back at Brown. 'You're wrong, Al. I'm afraid this is one problem the capital might not survive.'

Maryland 3.55 p.m.

At Fort Meade, between Baltimore and Washington, Major Chet Kilgore was having a lousy day. A former air force pilot with over three thousand hours in command of C-5 transporters, five years ago he'd found a new career with the NSA, the National Security Agency. After a week's leave in Florida he was on his first day back at work, and it hadn't been a good one. To start with, two of the computer terminals on his watch had gone down with power supply problems, then a power glitch had hit his part of the building at lunch-time when a circuit breaker popped, requiring a system reboot. To make matters worse, his back was acting up — four badly slipped discs in his lower spine that he'd cracked in an auto accident and which frequently gave him hell, the reason why he'd had to quit flying in the first place. For the last half an hour he'd had to lie on the hard floor in his office to get some minor relief. He'd taken two Motrin pills, but the pain was only just starting to ease.

'Sir? You got a minute?'

'What's the matter, Joe?' Sergeant Joe Romero turned from the word-processing program that was running on his desktop computer as Kilgore tottered over. 'Sir, that brief we had about any unusual transmissions out of the Washington area.'

'What about it?'

'I registered a burst-transmission intercept about half an hour ago.'

'Civilian traffic?'

'If it is, I haven't seen one like this before.'

'You got a clean snatch?'

'I think so, sir. I passed it on to Captain Donaldson to have it run through our computers. I gave him a call a couple of minutes ago. First indications are it's highly encrypted and he thinks it's going to be a tough bitch to crack.'

'Did you get a fix?'

'It was way too fast, sir. I can't even be sure where the hell it came from — Washington or Timbuktu. The burst was no longer than about two seconds.'

'Sounds interesting. OK, put a marker on the frequency, we'll pass it along, and if it turns up again we might get a fix.'

FBI Headquarters Washington, DC 4.05 p.m.

The meeting at the Hoover building had been called by Matthew Cage, the FBI's Assistant Director. A tall man in his late forties, with handsome features, he had a shock of steel-grey hair. Three people were present: Cage himself, Tom Murphy and George Canning, the head of the Washington field office. The Assistant Director, seated at the head of the table, was famed in the Bureau for his icy calm. Even in the gravest crises, the man was a rock of self-control. But after he had listened patiently to Murphy's briefing on what had happened at the Wentworth apartment block, Cage was livid.

'I can't believe the suspects just vanished into thin air.'

'Sir, we had choppers in the air within five minutes of Agent Morgan's call,' Murphy answered. 'Within twenty minutes, we had roadblocks in place up to a mile away, and over a hundred agents in the vicinity. Within forty-five we'd scoured every street, every alley, every public building. Our search is still ongoing. We're expanding it block by block, house by house. My men did the very best they could, I want to emphasise that.'

'But so far there's been nothing?' Cage countered. 'No clues? No idea even in which direction the three suspects were headed?'

'No, sir.'

'Christ, Tom. We've got the biggest manhunt in the country's history under way — millions of dollars' worth of resources and manpower — and we let our quarry slip through the net. What do you think the Director's going to say? Or the President?'

'Sir, the call on the apartment block was a very long shot. A complete fluke. The guy from the storage facility wasn't in the least sure it was Rashid he spotted in the Honda that day. My men didn't expect trouble. But when it happened, they did everything they were supposed to — they gave it their best, put their lives on the line.'

'Long shot or not, we blew it, and it's a fiasco.' Cage, exasperated, tossed down the pen he'd been using to jot notes. His despondency pervaded the room. 'So where the hell are we now?'

'One of the terrorists set off a couple of incendiary devices in Rashid's apartment before they escaped. I believe it was a precaution on their part, to make it difficult for us to find any evidence. Fortunately, the fire department managed to get the blaze under control before it spread to the rest of the block, but the apartment was pretty badly damaged. My men are attempting to sift through what's left of it, sir, to see if they can turn up any clues, but it's going to take time.'

'How about the neighbours?'

'The neighbours hardly knew Rashid, even by sight. He kept to himself. The caretaker spotted him no more than a couple of times a week, and when he went out he'd usually take his car. He signed a year's lease three months ago. We're checking with the bank and landlord.'

'What about Gorev and the woman?'

'The caretaker spotted them enter the block twice in the past two days, and thinks maybe he saw the woman a couple of times before that in the last two months. The neighbours we've questioned say they never saw either Gorev or the woman before. And the few who witnessed the shooting from their windows couldn't tell us anything we didn't already know.'

'Do we have any idea who the woman is?'

'We're working on it, sir, and the address on her driver's licence is being visited by one of our teams as we speak. Oddly enough, Major Kursk suggested that he had the feeling he had either met or seen her somewhere before, perhaps in Moscow many years ago, in the company of Gorev. But he's not sure. Though if we can pull her prints from the car or the apartment, that may help us get a fix on her.'

'But we still don't know how they managed to escape?'

'No, sir, we don't. Within fifteen minutes of Morgan's call our choppers had spotted and tagged half a dozen vehicles similar to the navy blue Explorer, all within a five-mile radius of the apartment block. They were followed to their respective destinations by our ground units and observed, before each of the drivers and their passengers were checked out and questioned, and the Explorers thoroughly searched. But they all turned up clean nothing suspicious about any one of them, or the vehicles. And every single passenger could account for their movements at the time of the shooting.'

'You think the three may still be hiding out in the area?'

'It's a possibility. We've sealed off all the streets within a mile radius of the Wentworth block. We're checking every vehicle and pedestrian going in and out of the radius, at the same time conducting a search within the perimeter. We're doing it slowly and methodically. If Rashid and the woman thought about renting storage only two miles away — assuming they intended to use it to store their device — then it's just as likely they may have rented somewhere else in the vicinity for the same purpose. We're questioning the owners of storage facilities, warehouses and depots in the area. But it's a sensitive operation, sir, and we're being cautious in the extreme. The problem is, if the three are still in the locality, and we locate them, we can't go in guns blazing. They might trigger the device.'

'But do you think they're still in there?' Cage persisted.

'You want my gut feeling? They escaped pretty quickly after the shooting, switched vehicles, and they've gone to ground. They're professionals. They'll have thought this through. Rashid's been in DC almost two months, the woman maybe for the same length of time, if the caretaker's anything to go by. They'll have organised safe houses, most likely a number of them, for use in an emergency.'

'Which means we're back at square one.' Cage was dejected. 'Isn't there some way we can speed up the investigation?'

'The word's already out on the street that we're looking for Arabs. I'd suggest we have our agents and the police revisit their informants. Show them photographs of Rashid and Gorev. Say they're wanted in connection with a serious crime and that they're armed and highly dangerous. We don't have to go into any more detail than that.'

Cage turned to George Canning, the head of the Washington field office. 'Have any of the informants turned up anything so far?'

'No, sir.'

'Would it help if we spread more money around? Put more pressure on them? Maybe both?'

'Most of these guys, if you come down hard on them, they shut up,' Canning answered. 'Then you're nowhere. And we've already spread a lot of money around. We put out any more and every criminal and crackhead in the country is going to be heading for DC, knocking down our door, sticking their paws out. The whole thing could get out of hand, turn into a farce.'

'OK, but do as Tom says. Beat the bushes harder. Have your men put the word out about Rashid, Gorev and the woman. Show their photographs. And make it clear these people aren't to be tangled with under any circumstances. This isn't a bounty hunt. It's information we're after.'

'Yes, sir.'

Cage addressed Murphy again. 'When Major Kursk confronted Gorev, did he get even the slightest feeling that he might listen to him?'

'No, sir, he didn't. The opposite, in fact.'

'Yet Gorev could have killed him but didn't.'

'I guess.'

'At least that implies Gorev may have a certain amount of respect or feeling for the man, if you can believe it. That if we got into a situation like this again, or we find Gorev, then Kursk just might be able to talk to him.'

'I really wouldn't like to count on it, sir. You ask me, it's a miracle the major didn't end up in the morgue.'

'Did Kursk give a reason for preventing Collins and Morgan from opening fire?'

'He claimed Gorev threatened to turn the city into a graveyard if he or the others were harmed. Kursk says he didn't want to risk them setting off the device.'

'You believe him? Or do you think he had another motive?'

'I guess we just have to take his word. But if what Kursk said is true, then maybe he did the right thing.'

'Keep an eye on him. If there's any doubt, I want him off the team. And to hell with President Kuzmin.'

Canning spoke up. 'Sir, there's another angle to consider here. Once al-Qaeda learn what's happened, they might feel their operation is under threat. It may ratchet things up a notch, and not in our favour. Maybe Abu Hasim's going to fear that this might not pan out the way he intends. He might even be tempted to cut his losses, say to hell with us, and just set off the device.'

'I'm well aware of that frightening possibility.' Cage's face displayed an uncharacteristic look of raw fear. 'I've got a meeting in five minutes with the Director before he reports to the President. I don't have to tell you they're both unhappy as hell. As far as they're concerned, this has turned out a complete disaster.'

'We did our very best, sir. We're still doing our very best,' Murphy offered. 'Most of my men, their lives are here in DC. It's where their families are, their friends and colleagues. They know damned well the enemy's at the gates, and that they're looking down the barrels of a shotgun. They know how big the stakes are. This isn't just an inanimate city under siege. It's their own lives, everyone close to them, everything they hold dear.'

Cage stood, acknowledged the answer with a crisp nod. 'Then let's all get back to work. The moment anything turns up, I want to know.'

FBI Headquarters Washington, DC 4.45 p.m.