Bam-bam-bam.
Ruhi realized that he’d never stopped sweating, even in his air-conditioned apartment.
He heard more people gathering outside his door. They were shouting. Ruhi thought he heard pushing. He wished like hell he had a gun — two or three of them.
Then he heard what sounded like people falling or getting shoved against the door and walls. Fighting. Halpen was shouting for everyone to get out of his building. His landlord didn’t seem to be having such a good time anymore.
A punch landed on someone so hard that the noise carried right into Ruhi’s apartment. A man was screaming, “Yeah, fuck him over. Do it. Do it!”
Someone else yelled, “Kick his ass. He’s harboring the enemy.”
A huge fight broke out. Halpen was yelling for help.
Ruhi hated him but called 911, knowing he could be next. The line was busy, which came as no surprise: Emergency services were a mess.
He wished Candace would show up. Right then gunfire exploded in the lobby.
Holy shit.
Nothing hit his door, much as he could tell. He thought there were three or four shots, but they came so fast he couldn’t be sure of that, either.
For several seconds he crouched behind the bureau, worried for Candace’s sake. Had she shown up and been taken unawares? But he realized it wasn’t Candace when a guy yelled, “You shot him?” and another guy yelled, “Goddamn right I shot his ass, and I’d do it again.”
Ruhi didn’t hear anything from Halpen. All he heard were men, maybe some women, running off. The lobby was emptying. He tried 911 again. Busy.
He hit “redial” at least fifty times in the next half hour.
When he finally got a response, it wasn’t on the phone. It came as a knock on the door, polite after all the pounding.
Candace? It had to be her, but she was so late. “Who’s there?” he asked, keeping his head below the dresser.
“Ruhi Mancur?”
A guy? “Who are you?”
“Agent Simmons of the FBI. Unlock your door and step back with your hands up so we can see you clearly when we enter.”
“How do I know you’re the FBI?” The FBI! What the hell?
“Look out your window, but keep your hands up.”
“But you’re at my door.”
“Mr. Mancur, look out your window.”
Ruhi scampered across the floor to the love seat where he’d almost kissed Candace last night. Standing, with his hands up, he saw dark-suited men, armed with rifles, spread out around as much of the grounds as he could see.
An agent held up ID, though Ruhi no longer had any doubt about who had come to collect him.
He moved the bureau aside and said, “The door is unlocked. I’ll step back. I’m definitely not armed.”
“Tell us when you’re in position in front of the door with your hands raised.”
Ruhi did as directed.
“Is the bureau clear of the door?”
“Yes.”
The door exploded open an instant later. Armed men in flak jackets and helmets with clear plastic shields poured into the room.
Ruhi caught a glimpse of Halpen lying on his back in the lobby, eyes open and lifeless.
In the next second, he was forced facedown on the floor.
“You are being held pursuant to guidelines established by federal terrorism statutes, and you are also under arrest as a suspect in the murder of a man identified as Jackson Halpen.”
“What? What?” Ruhi shouted. He felt blinded by panic.
The agents dragged him to his feet and hauled him out the door.
He looked for Candace even now, but there was no sign of her. Maybe she’d come but was barred from getting close to the building.
Then he asked himself a simple yet disturbing question: How did the FBI know that he had a bureau in front of the door?
CHAPTER 8
As Ruhi Mancur was hauled from his apartment in the heart of Georgetown, even more formidable teams of FBI agents converged on NRDC headquarters in New York City and the NRDC office in Washington.
Agents in the District swept right through the building, as if they knew every detail of the layout. They did. Because Ruhi had been a “subject of interest” for many months, schematics of the NRDC offices had been drawn up. After the grid went down, all the agents assigned to his case — and there were now several dozen — were given copies of the layout to study.
A corps of agents headed directly to Ruhi’s office, commandeering the space and overseeing the methodical removal of all the office equipment that he conceivably could have used. That included computer components for NRDC copiers, along with memory chips for every other device that kept records, which included most everything in the building, short of the furniture. They spared the energy-saving thermostats on the walls.
Other agents demanded the surrender of all recording devices from NRDC personnel. That meant, of course, cell phones. When a wiry, bearded, middle-aged man demanded to know why, the curt response was, “National security.”
A young, summer-suited man made the mistake of trying to surreptitiously record the raid anyway, perhaps with visions of YouTube fame in mind. Agents grabbed him immediately and forced him against the wall for a pat-down. He was Flex-Cuffed and led away.
“What are you doing? This is an outrage,” a younger, fair-skinned woman yelled at the agents.
Coworkers tried to calm her, but she shouted, “I will not be silenced.”
Silenced? No. But arrested when she nonsensically tried to block agents from entering a conference room.
Lawyers for the environmental organization pored over the legal documents provided by the FBI team. NRDC’s legal staff studied the papers they’d been served, but the best legal minds in the environmental movement were accustomed to fighting civil actions on behalf of air, land, and water — and the people affected in those cases. They appeared to be on less confident ground parsing documents related to the arrest of their director of research. Most of them looked stunned to learn that Mancur had been swept up by the FBI as part of its investigation.
“We’re absolutely certain that you’ll find everything in order,” said the FBI’s lead counsel.
“Is this really necessary?” asked his counterpart at NRDC. The woman was in her fifties with sensibly styled short gray hair that matched her equable manner. The latter was considerably at odds with the attitude taken by the junior staffer who would not be silenced, who, in fact, was still shouting as she was dragged out of the building.
After glancing toward the departing uproar, the older woman said, “We are certainly prepared to cooperate with any legitimate investigation.”
“That’s where we might be at loggerheads,” the Bureau lawyer said. “The word ‘legitimate’ is highly subject to contention. We are not taking any chances. I’m sure you can understand why.”
It was not a plea. It was a clear allusion to the cyberattack, from which the country could not possibly recover for many months. The stock market had crashed to record lows, the U.S. dollar was at its lowest ebb in history, and martial law was unlikely to be suspended anytime soon because every day the number of “domestic disturbances” increased, setting abysmal records for what others simply called riots.
“Where have you taken Ruhi?” an NRDC field director asked. He had just burst out of the lavatory to find an office in tumult.
“We are not at liberty to comment,” said a hawk-faced FBI agent in his early thirties. He spoke with a smile that appeared plastered to his face. “We can say only that he has been taken into custody for questioning.”
“Has he seen a lawyer yet?” demanded NRDC’s counsel, who appeared to be tiring quickly of the boilerplate responses she was receiving.