But the lights went right off, then came on and off repeatedly. She heard the air conditioner groan from the sudden surges and losses of power.
It lasted for at least sixty seconds before the power stayed on for more than a few seconds. Lana gasped, realizing that she’d been holding her breath.
Then the screen went dark.
At the very moment she squeezed her eyes shut in anguish, the power returned once again, and her screen glowed with these words: “Any time now.”
“What’s that mean, Mom?”
Lana paused before telling Emma the truth: “It means they really want to hurt us.”
Then she offered her daughter the kind of solace that often turns out to be a lie: “But we’re going to stop them, Emma. You’ll see.”
CHAPTER 7
Ruhi had been appalled to see his name — and a photograph lifted from the NRDC website — all over the Internet and news channels. He feared that his big smile would look arrogant and suspicious to a nation suffering from the worst attack in its history.
For the first time since the major renovation of NRDC office, he loathed the glass walls. He’d always appreciated how they allowed the offices to bathe in natural light — and lower the nonprofit’s carbon imprint. But now it left him feeling like he was in the proverbial fishbowl.
Sure, a number of colleagues had come by to offer him words of support, but others were clearly hoping to keep their distance and do all they could to avoid being named as a key member of a “fifth column.”
That accusation came from an octogenarian pundit on one of the cable networks.
“And what would we expect?” the craggy old beast asked his viewers. “He works for an outfit that has done more to undermine the American way of life than any other group I can think of.”
“Really?” Ruhi talked back to the YouTube posting. More than Al Qaeda? More than the old Soviet Union?
And there was another “more,” Ruhi realized: The creep’s video had more than 1,110,000 viewers — so far.
“A Saudi!” the crepe-skinned hatemonger intoned ominously. “And I’m sure I don’t need to remind you of what the Saudis did to us not so long ago.”
Hyperbole and invective — cruel and vicious — were clearly the order of the day.
But didn’t he and Candace talk about how much Americans pulled together in a time of crisis? No, that’s what you said, he reminded himself. She pointed out that everyone still had electric power on 9/11. They weren’t sitting around in the dark, or trying to use the cover of night to rape and plunder. And they surely weren’t worrying that they would be thrust back into riots and the deepest darkness at any moment. They weren’t directly affected.
How can anyone even think that I would do something like that to America? he wondered as he listened to the pundit’s rant online — and the frothing comments of his many fans.
I’ve lived here since I was nine. They treat me like the biggest saboteur in world history.
Ruhi could have howled in frustration.
Then, around three o’clock, a convenient leak from the Justice Department revealed that he had traveled extensively in the Middle East and South Asia, especially as an adult. He was said to have held numerous meetings with Islamists and other radicals. That led in minutes to rumors that he had trained at an Al Qaeda camp in Tajikistan.
Tajikistan? He knew it was one of the five “Stans” of the old Soviet Union, but Ruhi had to look it up on a map to locate it exactly. And he supposedly had trained there? How could anyone believe that?
Moreover, Ruhi didn’t even know how to shoot a gun. And what meetings with radical Muslims? He felt positively allergic to them. He’d talked to energy experts, not people who made a career of chopping off the heads of “infidels” and posting videos of the crimes on YouTube, cheek-to-jowl — in the “cloud”—with the craggy old beast’s crazy accusations.
The only questionable actions he ever took overseas were to have a few perfunctory meetings in Pakistan with solar energy experts so he could deduct the travel on his taxes. But Islamists? Radicals?
Give me a break.
But there were no breaks coming his way. Only a tsunami of telephone calls from the Post, Washington Times, New York Times, Guardian, Telegraph, Mirror, Globe and Mail, CBS, CNN, FOX, and more than a hundred other news outlets around the world. He’d lost count. Could be two hundred by now. He hadn’t even thought that many journalists still had jobs. Wasn’t the news business contracting? Not fast enough, was his dismal view this afternoon. He’d had hours of this. How was he supposed to work?
“Defend yourself,” a Washington Times reporter demanded. “Or can’t you do that?”
How am I supposed to defend myself? Or account for every minute of trips I took abroad twelve, fourteen years ago?
“Does this explain your strident opposition to the development of the Alberta oil sands?” a Canadian reporter demanded, as if Ruhi would lay the entire country to waste to stop a single pipeline.
But he knew people who would. He couldn’t kid himself about that. The fringe elements of the environmental movement saw climate change as such a threat that they would gladly shut down the U.S. to stop more greenhouse gases from getting pumped into the atmosphere.
But the unknown enemy wasn’t even making climate-change demands. That’ll be the day. Why would they? Mohammed would somehow take care of those earthly concerns. Just like Jesus would turn carbon dioxide back into fossil fuels—à la water into wine — for the fundamentalists in America.
People, including reporters, were going crazy, and he’d had it. He’d endured this crap for most of the day.
He walked out of his office, past a wall of plants growing right there in the building, and bolted out to the street, hoping to catch the Metro that ran past NRDC office — and had been a key factor in building at that location. He suddenly longed for the unencumbered days when he had immersed himself in such purely rational decision making.
There appeared little clear thinking in the air right now, and all the finger-pointing — at him — made Ruhi both highly visible and clearly too vulnerable to stand on a crowded street waiting for light rail. He started walking — fast.
He wore his Ray-Bans as a matter of course, and was pleased to don them today. But with TV screens and the Web filled with photographs of him, the shades didn’t feel sufficient to hide his identity, so he snapped up a cheap fedora from an Ethiopian street vendor. But he still caught glances coming his way. No one accosted him, though, so he figured every guy from the Middle East was probably getting the same going-over. He took heart in thinking that even now he might be more anonymous than he feared.
He made it halfway home before a friendly-sounding man yelled, “Hey, Ruhi, are you doing okay?”
Before he could catch himself, he turned. A guy in his early twenties took his picture with a phone and stood five feet away brazenly working his screen, undoubtedly uploading the photo: “Ruhi Mancur in his latest disguise.”
He wanted to knock the camera out of the shooter’s hand and stomp it, but that would just draw additional attention and dozens of even more damning photos.
That was when Ruhi started running. He would have preferred to be in his trainers, rather than thick-soled and brilliantly shined brogues; his light running shorts and sleeveless shirt, instead of a Brooks Brothers blazer and chinos. But at least he was moving.
He thought of the old movie Marathon Man, and felt like the young, lean Dustin Hoffman trapped by accusations that he could not answer. He longed to escape his grim circumstances and see Candace, to assure her that he wasn’t guilty of any complicity in these horrible crimes against America. Surely, she would believe him.