“Two weeks later I had this scar, this gift from my brother. Without him, I wouldn’t be here.”
She paused again, as she wiped her tears with her forearm. “A year went by and both of us had grown strong again, bound together not just by blood, but by flesh as well. Then, on a warm afternoon, Kafir left school early one day. Call it fate or coincidence or simply bad luck, but as he walked past a synagogue a car parked in front of it exploded, taking half the building and my brother along with it.”
“My God,” Jack said.
“No,” Sara told him. “Not God. Not Allah. This was simply the work of men, men like my father whose hatred was so strong that it took the life of an innocent young boy. A boy who had more potential, more nobility, in his small body than any of them would ever understand.”
Jack held her as she sobbed. Her tears were warm and dear against his chest. As much as their lovemaking, that gift of trust was precious.
“Did they find the bombers?” he asked.
Sara collected herself. “No. And that is the sickness of it. It could have been anyone. Rogue Muslims of the same branch or a different branch… Not knowing who had attacked him made me realize that their hatred was my hatred. It didn’t matter who held it. It was wrong.”
“That was a pretty big thought for a teenager to grasp.”
“It wasn’t just a ‘thought,’ Jack. It was a vision — from Allah. What you Christians call an epiphany. I could not shake it.
“My mother had a breakdown and had to be hospitalized. My father was inconsolable, and within the year I knew I had to get away from there.” She paused. “So I moved to London and vowed that I would do whatever I could to keep another Kafir from being lost to the world.”
She was silent then. Jack could feel the emotion draining away, her shoulders relaxing. He wanted to respond, to find the perfect words to soothe her.
But before he could speak, they heard a loud, steady beep coming from the living room.
Faisal’s laptop.
They had to scramble to get dressed before the beeping woke Faisal. They just made it to the living room when he stumbled in and plopped in front of his laptop, punching a key to cut the notifier and examine the results.
It didn’t look as though their lovemaking had bothered him. Jack and Sara shared a secret smile.
That felt good, too.
“There’s another level of encryption,” Faisal said. He was still half asleep and yawning, staring at the computer screen with bleary eyes. “Whoever sent these e-mails didn’t want people like us getting nosy.”
“So Alain was right,” Sara said to Jack. “This could be significant information.”
There were five open e-mails stacked on the screen, each sent to tdl@alliedharborassoc. net, and each with a single line of text. The lines, however, were a jumble of letters and numbers that made no sense: EFDH3054383 gjvaf Nhthfg gjragl Gjragl Uhaqerq UEF uggc://ovg. yl/umfLZ3
Jack looked from the hash to Faisal. “I thought that program was supposed to translate all this stuff.”
“That was the second level of encryption,” Faisal said. “The difficult one. But not to worry, these all look like simple ROT-13 cyphers.”
Jack was clueless. “What’s that?”
“It’s a rudimentary form of code based on the old Caesar cypher. A lot of gamers use it to hide cheat codes and spoilers on Internet forums. They’re extremely easy to crack, which is why the sender used that second level of encryption.”
“So how does it work?” Jack asked.
“You replace each letter by the one located thirteen letters after it in the alphabet. For example, an A becomes an N. I have the lookup table here.”
He punched a key and a small window popped up, showing: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz NOPQRSTUVWXYZABCDEFGHIJKLM nopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklm
“Decryption is a fairly mindless task at this point,” he went on. “The numbers will remain the same. All we need do is transpose the letters and we’ll know what these messages say.”
Faisal had already gone to work, using another computer application to quickly translate the lines. When it was done, he stacked the decryptions on the screen: RSQU3054383 twins August twenty Twenty Hundred HRS http://bit.ly/hzsYM3
Nobody spoke for a long moment. Jack felt his heart begin to race. “I think we’ve just hit pay dirt,” he said to Sara. “You realize what this is, don’t you?”
“I’m not sure what the first two lines are all about,” Sara said, “but that last one’s an Internet address. So I’m guessing these are the date, time, and target of an attack.”
Jack nodded. “The first one looks like a serial number of some kind. Or maybe the ISO number for a shipping container.”
“Could be a shipment from Chilikov, if Haddad was successful.”
“That’s what I was thinking,” Jack said. “But what about this ‘twins’ line? You think it’s a reference to the twin towers? A reminder of their last big hit?”
“The infidels will soon see destruction that will make 9/11 seem like child’s play.”
“It could be that,” Sara said. “It could also be two prongs of an attack, two cells, matching automobiles being used for smuggling-anything. But whatever it means, August twentieth is only three days from now. Saturday night.”
Jack gestured to Faisal. “Can you paste that URL into a browser? I want to see what they have in mind.” He added as an afterthought, “Please?”
Faisal did as he was asked. When he clicked the address, Google Maps came to life on screen, showing a satellite image of San Francisco. Flagged in the middle of it by a big letter A, was one of the city’s best-known landmarks.
The California Palace of the Legion of Honor.
Jack’s mind suddenly flashed on that afternoon at Pagliaci’s, when Danny Pescatori gave Tony a VIP invitation to the museum gala. He’d forgotten about it until now.
And it was scheduled for this Saturday night.
“My God,” he said, his heart kicking up a notch as the realization sank in like a depth charge to the brain. “They’re going after the President.”
PART THREE
30
San Francisco, California
Talia “Tally” Griffin was convinced that this time she’d struck gold.
After years of dating all the wrong guys, winding up in relationships that went absolutely nowhere, she was certain that she had finally found her Prince Charming.
His name was Victor Massri.
Tall. Handsome. With deep, dark eyes, smooth brown skin, and that exotic, wispy little black goatee.
Tally didn’t normally go for men with beards, but Victor was the exception to the rule, and from the right angle he reminded her of Johnny Depp.
He was Egyptian, he’d told her, born and raised in London, and ever since they’d started corresponding online-through the SF Singles Hotline dating service-she knew she’d found someone very special.
Until this moment, the only contact they’d had were e-mails and text messages, a few photos they’d exchanged, and several prolonged phone calls, but seeing him walk out of that airline terminal flashing those beautiful white teeth was everything she’d hoped for, and more.
He greeted her with a platonic hug. She wanted more but she also didn’t want to scare him. The man was not one of her local jerks, he was foreign. She didn’t know what his customs were.
“Just the one suitcase?” she asked.
“I always travel light,” he told her, tossing the bag into the backseat.