Emma’s eyes opened slowly.
“Emma!” Lana exclaimed loudly again.
“She’s been real sleepy,” Irene said.
Lana, growing furious, ignored the warbly voice.
“Emma. Emma, darling, it’s me, Mom.”
Her daughter opened her eyes. Thankfully, they bore no resemblance to Irene’s teensy-weensy black pupils.
“Here, let me try,” Irene managed with a slur so thick that her tongue might have been caught in an eggbeater. “She can be a hard one to wake up.”
“No!” Lana pointed a finger right into Irene’s face. “She’s awake. Don’t you even come close to her. Just get your stuff and get the hell out of here. You stole her painkillers, didn’t you?”
“It’s not what it looks like,” Irene said, raising her hand as one does to swear an oath, which was what the addled caregiver apparently had in mind. “I swear to God…”
Her voice trailed off, as if she’d forgotten what she was swearing to. Then Irene rose, but made it only a few feet before sitting heavily on a coffee table.
“We’ve had some challenges here,” she mumbled, “in case you hadn’t noticed. But why would you? You’ve been gallivanting all over the place.” She turned “gallivanting” into a ten-syllable word.
“Your only challenge, Irene, is to get out of here before I have you arrested. Here, sit up,” she said to Emma, who allowed her mother to help her.
“Actually, Mom,” said Emma, eyeing the tipsy Irene, “I think she’s been taking a lot of those pills. You’d better get someone over here for her.”
Lana realized that Emma was right. She speed-dialed Jensen, who brought Audrey on for a three-way call.
“I’m sorry,” Audrey said. “It sounds like a relapse…”
Relapse?
“She’s been completely clean for three years. I’ll come get her. She’ll get help.”
By the time Lana got off the phone, she felt more pity than anger toward Irene. The heavy-lidded caregiver had moved to the recliner, where she lay, eyes glazed, mumbling, “Cable, cable,” as she worked the remote.
Ruhi paced in front of Holmes and Agent Anders. He hadn’t asked for permission to get up, which the deputy director saw as another healthy sign that the detainee was reclaiming his dignity. Traversing the breadth of the room had been Ruhi’s immediate response to hearing that releasing him from government custody would be easy, but getting him out of the crosshairs of his fellow citizens would be much more treacherous.
He stopped pacing and looked directly at Holmes. “Wait a second, you put me in those crosshairs. You can get me out by announcing that I’m innocent. Case closed.”
“We don’t think you understand the anger that’s out there,” Holmes responded. “More than a hundred thousand of your fellow citizens have been killed. And the number of casualties grows higher every day, because emergency services simply can’t keep up with the aftermath of the attack. Even as we’re sitting here, they’re finding more bodies in crashed train cars and burned buildings. People are too scared to get on a plane, and who can blame them when they could start falling out of the sky any second? For all intents and purposes, our country, Ruhi, our country, is at a standstill. And everyone knows that our enemy — the one we can’t even identify to make a serious declaration of war — has vowed that it will get infinitely worse. So, yes, we could tell them that you’re not guilty, but do you really think, given the chaos and anger and disbelief alive in the land, that you’d still be safe?”
Ruhi stared at him. Holmes knew that he’d struck a chord. And he hadn’t exaggerated the threats to the Saudi-born man one bit.
“Let me tell you a sad fact, Ruhi. So far, more than a thousand Middle Easterners have been killed on the streets of this country for no reason other than their appearance. We had four strung up on light poles in Dearborn last night. And we don’t even have a single fact to link this to Muslim extremists yet. And it’s not just men getting killed. Women and children are, too. A mother in a head scarf was one of the three in South Carolina.”
What Holmes didn’t add was that the thousand dead was just an estimate. But then again, you’d have to be an optimist to think that unleashing that kind of fury wouldn’t add to the death toll in the near future. And Holmes was not an optimist. He’d seen too much of the world to fall prey to Pollyannaish appeals.
“Ruhi, I don’t want anything to happen to you,” Candace said. “I’ll be by your side, no matter what you decide. But if you try to go back to your old life right now, it’s going to be dicey out there. I can’t guarantee that I can save you again.”
The unstated part of her comment, as Holmes and Anders both knew, was that she could die trying to save him next time. And if he cared about her, he might want to hear how he could spare both himself and the agent the harrowing dangers of an America none of them now recognized.
Holmes quickly picked up where he’d left off: “There’s a lot of blind anger out there, Ruhi. So, yes, we want you to help us. And if you do help us, even if you don’t succeed in what we want you to do, you’ll always be protected by a grateful government, and so will your descendants. It’s really that critical.” Holmes paused, not for effect but because as his final words came to him, goose bumps rose on his back: “If you’re successful in the assignment that we have for you, it could turn out to be the most important victory ever achieved by a single American. And when all is said and done, you are an American. Please don’t forget that.”
“Did you forget that? From the moment you arrested me?”
“Never. Not for a moment, Ruhi.” Holmes paused, then asked, “Are you game? Do you want to hear what we’re thinking?”
No answer.
Holmes watched Ruhi’s gaze settle on Candace again. They stared intently at each other. The deputy director felt like a voyeur in the presence of naked emotion. He looked away, trying to give them space. He knew right then that Anders felt more deeply for the Saudi than he’d realized. And it seemed clear that Ruhi felt equally strongly about her.
Talk about dicey.
Putting passion into play was a dangerous decision, and Holmes knew that under any other circumstance he’d never countenance such a move. But all the rules of warfare had been broken, and love — or whatever powerful attraction he sensed in the room — was a small violation when weighed against the murderous dictates of hate.
CHAPTER 12
Holmes took more than an hour to outline his proposal to Ruhi. Agent Candace Anders sat next to the deputy director the entire time. The large, white-haired man made a persuasive presentation, and as he seemed to be reaching his conclusion, Holmes leaned forward to look Ruhi straight in the eye. It startled Ruhi to realize that no more than ninety minutes ago a large attack dog had loomed even closer, and that the distinguished-looking man talking calmly to him undoubtedly had played a role in generating the excruciating fear that he’d experienced in the bowels of that building.
“I’m not going to pull any punches, Ruhi. What we’re asking you to do is dangerous, potentially brutal, and will demand considerable courage. Time is extremely tight. Only this morning I was informed that CIA analysts found evidence of ‘trapdoors’ in nuclear missiles, nuclear power plants, and in nuclear-armed submarines.”
“Hold on,” Ruhi said. “What’s a trapdoor?”
“Bugs that will let whoever hacked the missiles, power plants, and submarines get right back into them whenever they want, maybe even take control of them.”
“Nuclear missiles?” Ruhi could scarcely accept that the nation’s most powerful weapons were vulnerable to outside programmers. But before the cyberattack, who would have believed unseen and unknown enemies could have been crippled the U.S. so easily? Only the experts who had warned the president repeatedly, but Ruhi knew nothing about those top-secret briefings.