Pandemic Page 23

  “Mohammed said that those who are not for Islam are against it.” The Sheikh shrugged unapologetically.

  “So death to all the nonbelievers?” Eleish scoffed.

  “I wish I could make you understand.” Hassan’s face assumed another sad, missing-toothed smile. “Are you too blind to see the threat?”

  Eleish threw up his free hand. “What threat?”

  “Ever since the Turks dispensed with the Caliphate ...” Hassan said obliquely and then sighed. “In many ways, Islam is like me. Old and weak. Incapable of protecting itself.” He pointed a finger at his own chest. “But inside, it is strong and pure. Do you understand, my brother? The heart and soul of Islam is good but the body ails. And the infidels ... those Western heathens, the Americans ... are the opposite. Their body is fierce and mighty, but their soul is crippled and the heart very weak.”

  Eleish listened to the crafty old cleric, aware of his manipulative sermonizing but engrossed by the delivery.

  “And the strongest of hearts might not be enough to save us. The Americans are camped at the gates of the Tigris and within a stone’s throw of Mecca.” He pointed at the wall as if Mecca were just on the other side. “The lands that practice the laws of the Shari’ah have fallen, one after the other, under the weight of the American bombs. If we do nothing to stop them, they will eradicate Islam in their lust for oil. Very soon, we will be powerless to stop them.” He exhaled slowly. “Hazzir Kabaal is fighting to save Islam. He is fighting the holiest of Jihads with the only weapons available to him.” His voice warbled. “And you should drop to your knees and pray to God for his success.”

  Eleish shook his head. “You are a deluded old man.”

  Fadi, who had silently watched the discussion, took an aggressive step forward, but the Sheikh stopped him with a bony hand laid on his chest. Hassan turned back to Eleish. “Listen to me, brother—”

  “No.” Eleish walked forward until he was three feet away from the Sheikh. “I have no more time to listen to you.” He leveled the gun at the Sheikh’s head. “Where is Hazzir Kabaal?”

  Hassan laughed softly. “Do you honestly believe I am afraid of death?”

  Eleish shook his head slowly. “No, I don’t.” He swung his gun over until it pointed at Fadi’s head.

  “What are you doing?” the Sheikh demanded shrilly.

  “I will give you one last chance, and then I’m going to kill your son.”

  Hassan’s expression creased into a fleeting cringe, long enough for Eleish to know he was right. “Fadi is not—” Hassan started to say calmly.

  Eleish cut him off with a snap of his fingers. “I will kill your son on the count of three, if you do not tell me where I can find Hazzir Kabaal.” Eleish shoved the muzzle against Fadi’s forehead. “One ... two ...”

  Hassan’s eyes widened and his hands shook wildly.

  “Don’t tell him anything, Father!” Fadi implored. “Let me be martyred!”

  Eleish shrugged. “So be it. Three.” He slowly began to squeeze the trigger.

  “No!” Hassan squeaked. “Somalia. He is in Somalia.”

  Fadi’s head stayed immobile but his eyes shot over to the direction of the Sheikh. “No, Father!”

  “Where in Somalia?” Eleish demanded, not releasing his finger from the trigger.

  “I do not know,” the Sheikh cried. “He has a camp there—a base—but I am too old to travel there.”

  Eleish’s gaze skipped from father to son. “But you know, don’t you?” Eleish said.

  Fadi sneered in response.

  “Do you want to see your father die?” Eleish asked.

  Fadi grinned malevolently. “If it means protecting the Jihad, I would see my whole family die.” He glanced at his father with an expression of sheer contempt.

  The old man’s face flushed with shame and his chin dropped to his chest.

  Eleish knew there was nothing more he would learn from either of them.

  After leaving the mosque, Achmed Eleish sat in his car and smoked five cigarettes in a row, trying to quell the tremor in his hands. For a moment, he considered continuing his solo pursuit of Kabaal all the way to Somalia, but he dismissed the idea as foolhardy.

  In a cloud of smoke, Eleish weighed his next step carefully. In the end, he knew to whom he had to turn. Even though the captain of the Cairo Police detectives was only in his early sixties, the little man had seemed old to Eleish for all twenty years he had known him. Captain Riyad Wazir was a throwback. Never seen in anything but a neatly pressed uniform with spit-polished shoes, Wazir always toed the official line and his preoccupation with procedure and bureaucracy bordered on obsessive. But Eleish would have gladly trusted his life in Wazir’s hands, because the captain’s ethics were as meticulous as his paperwork.

  Once the thump in his chest had settled, Eleish reached for his cell phone. He dialed the direct line to the captain’s office, but after five rings he was transferred back to the main switchboard. Eleish glanced at his watch, which read 7:00 P.M., meaning that Wazir must have left for the day. He asked the operator to transfer him to the detectives’ desk, knowing there would be at least one detective on duty.

  “Cairo Police,” the disinterested voice said on the other end of the line.

  Eleish was dismayed to hear the voice of his least favorite colleague, Constable Qasim Ramsi. For a moment, he considered hanging up on the crooked officer. “Listen, Qasim, it’s me, Eleish,” he said. “Do you know the Al-Futuh Mosque?”

  “Of course.”

  “If you send officers there you will find Sheikh Hassan and his son Fadi handcuffed to a toilet in the bathroom of the madrasa behind the mosque,” Eleish said.

  Ramsi whistled into Eleish’s earpiece. “Holy Mohammed! Have you lost your mind? You handcuffed the Sheikh to a toilet?” His voice squeaked at the end. “You will be destroyed,” he said almost jovially.

  “I cannot explain over the phone,” Eleish said. “The Sheikh and his son are involved in a terrorist conspiracy to destabilize the government. And more. Just make sure they are picked up!”

  Eleish hung up before Ramsi had a chance to reply. Satisfied that his hands were still enough to drive, he started his car and pulled out of the spot.

  He had intended to drive directly to the office, but as his home was on the way he decided to stop in to shower and change before going into headquarters to file his report. He tuned the radio to an Egyptian pop station. He tapped his steering wheel to the beat of the music as his hyper-vigilance gave way to a pleasantly contented mood.

  Eleish parked in front of his twenty-seven-story apartment building. Alone, he rode the elevator to the nineteenth floor. He unlocked both deadbolts—knowing how bad property crime was in Egypt, he had insisted on the second deadbolt—and walked into his living room. He dropped his keys, phone, and gun on the kitchen countertop.

  The apartment felt empty without the women, but after his visit to the Al-Futuh Mosque, he was confident that they would only be parted for a matter of days or weeks. However long it took to find Kabaal.

  Abiding by his wife’s strict edict not to smoke in the apartment, he slid open the sliding door and stepped outside onto his balcony in the warm Cairo dusk before lighting up another cigarette. This time he only allowed himself one smoke as he stared out on his beloved city of a thousand minarets, which was never more beautiful than at dusk.

  Returning to the living room, he left the door open to circulate the air through his apartment. He walked out of the living room and into his bedroom where he sat down at the desk across from the bed. He booted up the desktop computer (an unexpectedly generous present from his daughters on his fiftieth birthday last year) and waited. Once the main screen appeared, he clicked on the icon to initiate his e-mail program. He knew how long it would take the modem to establish a connection on the overburdened server, so he rose from the desk and headed for the shower.

  He enjoyed a long hot shower, trying to scrub away the memories of the conversation i
n the mosque and the Sheikh’s assertions that Islam was at imminent risk. Such hateful fear-mongering stoked the growing flames of Islamism and drove the people who followed the Hazzir Kabaals of the world, but Eleish couldn’t help wonder whether a kernel of truth existed in the argument.

  Turning off the tap, Eleish reached for a towel. He stopped when he heard a soft thud. His heart skipped a beat. He listened. Nothing. He grabbed the towel and dried himself. He stepped out of the shower, put on his robe, and then stood inside his bathroom, listening. He waited a full minute without hearing another noise.

  He stepped back into his living room. He had just sat down at his desk when he heard a bang, followed by three loud thumps.

  His palms moistened. His heart smashed against his rib cage. The noise came from his front door.

  His gun! For an agonizing moment, he wavered, but decided he had a higher priority to address. He reached for the mouse and clicked on the “new mail” icon and then frantically one-fingered typed the captain’s e-mail address in the “send to” box.

  Thud! Thud! The noises came from the door.

  In the “message text” box, he typed wildly in note form. “Vancouver. Virus carrier = Sharifa Sha’rawi.”

  Eleish heard a series of sharp cracks, as someone emptied a round of gunfire into the door.

  He typed: “Hazzir Kabaal = leader. Major Abdul Sabri?”

  A creaking noise indicated the door hinges were beginning to give way.

  He kept typing. “Al-Futuh Mosque. Sheikh Hassan.”

  Crash! More wood splintered.

  “Base in Somalia,” he typed. He grabbed the mouse, but his shaking hand overshot the “send” key twice before finally making contact. As soon as the musical tone confirmed that the e-mail had been sent, Eleish reached down and yanked the plug out from the back of the computer.

  He leaped to his feet and ran for the kitchen.

  Eleish made it to the living room just as his door toppled backward into the room. He froze in his tracks five feet from the countertop and his weapon. Someone else’s gun pointed at his head.

  A hulking man casually stepped over the smashed door and into the apartment. Eleish instantly recognized him as Major Abdul Sabri.

  From ten feet away, Sabri cocked his head at Eleish. “Sergeant, I’ve been looking all over for you,” he said softly.

  “You could have just called.” The joke seemed to Eleish like something one of his literary detective heroes might have said, but it drew no response from Sabri.

  “Sergeant, you and I have things to discuss,” Sabri said inexpressively.

  The sweat dripped down Eleish’s neck and onto the collar of his bathrobe. His mind raced in time with his pounding heart. Without looking over at the counter, he tried to calculate how best to lunge for his gun. “Okay, we will talk,” Eleish said. “But can I put some clothes on first?”

  Sabri shook his head slowly from side to side. “And, Sergeant, there’s really no point in going for your gun. You’ll be dead before you reach it.”

  Eleish had a flashback to the photo of his burnt and beaten informer, Bishr Gamal, whose ear had been hacked off. He doubted he could withstand that kind of torture without talking. He swallowed hard. “Wouldn’t you prefer me alive?” he asked.

  “Prefer, yes,” Sabri said. “Required, no.”

  Suddenly Eleish’s path cleared before him. A tranquil calm enveloped him. An absolute peacefulness he had never before experienced. He smiled widely at Sabri. “Allah is most great,” he spoke the words from the call to prayer.

  Sabri’s eyes narrowed and he raised his weapon to eye level.

  Eleish didn’t lunge for his gun. Instead, he spun and ran for the open balcony door.

  “Stop!” yelled Sabri.

  Eleish heard a bang and felt a searing pain in his left shoulder and his arm fell limp at his side. But the bullet wound didn’t slow him as he reached the balcony in one stride and hurled himself over the railing.

  “Allah is most great!” he repeated as he felt the air rush by his head.

  CHAPTER 27

  CIA HEADQUARTERS, LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

  Since Rand Delorme uncovered Dr. Ping Wu’s e-mailed confession, his coworkers at Carnivore accused the young agent of having undergone a personality transplant. Once only distinguished for his frosted highlights, black bowling shoes, and rebellious attitude, Delorme was now known for logging the longest hours and clearing the most intercepted e-mails. The day before, his supervisor had written in his monthly evaluation that Rand was “a man on a mission.” And he was. To Delorme, each new e-mail Carnivore earmarked for human review was another potential opportunity to foil terrorism.

  With the extra bodies covering Carnivore, the agents had caught up entirely on the backlog. Less than half an hour after it was sent, Achmed Eleish’s e-mail popped up on Delorme’s screen. Carnivore had graded it as “highly suspicious,” so Delorme approached it with more circumspection than he otherwise might have.

  Delorme reviewed the “To” and “From” rows. Both the sender and the receiver had the same domain, CairoPol.com, which he learned with a quick Internet search belonged to the Cairo Police Department. Delorme looked at the path and was surprised to see that the e-mail never reached its recipient. He wondered if the sender had mistyped the second letter, spelling “RWszir” instead of “RWazir.” Whatever the reason, the e-mail had bounced back to “AEleish” as “undeliverable.”

  Savoring the contents like the last chapter of a favorite mystery, Delorme turned to the body of text. His pulse quickened with the very first word, “Vancouver.” By the time he had read the brief series of cryptic notes about a virus carrier and a base in Somalia, he trembled with excitement.

  Rand Delorme didn’t know exactly what the message meant, but he was convinced beyond a doubt that he had just hit the motherlode of e-mail intercepts.

  Smiling, he reached for the phone.

  HARBOURVIEW HOTEL, VANCOUVER, CANADA

  Four days of quarantine had passed without incident for Savard and Haldane. Noah had checked his temperature after waking, but he knew he hadn’t spiked a fever. While he had always considered his chances slim, by day four he was certain he hadn’t caught the Gansu Flu from the now-deceased Dr. Jake Maguchi. The realization that he was free of risk brought an unexpected wave of relief.

  However, sitting at his laptop computer and staring at the camera clipped on top, butterflies still fluttered in his stomach. Two videoconferences awaited him. The second was with the President and the senior members of the National Security Council, but it was the first call that provoked the most anxious anticipation.

  Noah felt sad and guilty about having to miss Chloe’s birthday party, but in four introspective days of quarantine he had come to realize that there would likely be many missed milestones in his daughter’s life. He had heard from friends, who alternated custody of the kids with ex-spouses on holidays like Christmas and Thanksgiving, that special occasions were the most difficult times to be separated from their children.

  Noah had little doubt that many lonely times awaited him, but things had changed in the past days. The anger had drained from his system, replaced by resignation. Realizing how weary he was of fighting for his wife’s affection, he felt ready to step away. He had begun to envision a life without Anna. He even considered where to live, realizing that it would have to be in the Glen Echo Heights district, so that school and friends would not be an issue for Chloe as she shuttled back and forth between homes.

  A musical tone rang out from his computer. He clicked on the icon and the video window box popped open with his wife’s and daughter’s images framed inside. The video feed was of the low-resolution, jumpy home Internet-camera variety—a far cry from the high-quality videoconferences he had sat through over the past days—but Haldane didn’t care. He was thrilled to see his daughter’s face again.

  Chloe sat on Anna’s lap in a chair in their home office. A sea of multicolored, helium-filled balloons
filled the backdrop and Chloe held a bouquet in her hand. Haldane was tickled to see Chloe wearing the Snow White princess dress he had ordered online for her.

  “Happy birthday, Chlo!” he said.

  “Daddy. Daddy! My balloons!” she said and tugged at the bouquet in her hand.

  Haldane beamed. “And your dress. You look so pretty!”

  “All my friends are princesses,” Chloe said, referring to the theme of her party. Then her forehead furrowed into a concerned frown. “Daddy, what if someone else is Snow White?”

  “You’ll always be the most special Snow White. The fairest of them all.” Haldane winked and then nodded solemnly. “But don’t tell the others. It will be our secret, okay?”

  “Secret!” Chloe bounced up and down on her mother’s lap. “Daddy, are you going to play the hide-and-seek game with me and my friends?”

  Haldane felt a little jab in his chest. “Chlo, I am too far away. I can’t make the party. You knew that, didn’t you?”

  Chloe gave a little shrug that squeezed Haldane’s heart. The gesture came straight out of her mother’s chromosomes. “I guess.”

  Anna rubbed Chloe’s shoulder. “Daddy will be home soon and then you’ll have another party, remember?”

  Chloe nodded, but the disappointment stuck to her face.

  “Why don’t you go downstairs and see if Nana needs help with your cake?” Anna suggested to her.

  The mention of her cake was enough to wipe the dejection off Chloe’s face. She hopped off Anna’s lap and started to run out of the frame, but she turned back to Noah with a big wave. “Bye, Daddy!”

  “Happy birthday, Chloe. I love you!” Haldane said and then she was gone.