She stared at her face in the mirror above the basin. Then she shook her head and turned away.
As she exited the fully tiled washroom, replete with mosaics of orchids, she spotted the ambassador, Rick Arpen, coming out of the men’s.
“My office,” he said to her, pointing down the hall. “We need you right now. My aide was just texting you.”
“I was—”
“Right,” he cut her off. “Let’s go.”
Something wasn’t right. By the ambassador’s urgency, it seemed he was clued into the Mancur disaster. But Arpen wasn’t supposed to be in the loop. He needed deniability when he met with the king or any of the royal’s closest advisers.
But Ruhi wasn’t the reason he’d summoned her. She understood that the moment he led her into his private conference room. All of the embassy’s top staff had assembled — and none of them was supposed to know anything about Mancur, either. All looked as tense as guy wires attached to a leaning structure. In a manner of speaking, that’s what they were.
“There’s not a single train running in the United States as of fifteen minutes ago,” Ambassador Arpen told them, taking off his wire-rimmed glasses. He held them out as he spoke. “Our enemy has announced what they call ‘The Final Countdown to Our Total Destruction.’”
“But if it’s just the trains,” a redheaded woman said, “maybe their ‘invisible invasion’ is actually failing.”
“That’s just for today,” the ambassador replied. “They made that clear minutes before the trains stopped. Not even the diesel-powered ones can run with switches and signals down. The enemy says that every day they will execute another catastrophe, each one worse than the day before.”
“Didn’t they say they were going to take down the whole grid at once, like last time?”
“Are you complaining?” Arpen said sharply. He put his glasses back on and glared at the redhead. “They said the panic in our country has been so ‘entertaining’ and so ‘instructive’ to the rest of the world, what with the widespread rioting, shooting, and so forth, that they want to ‘bleed us to death slowly.’ Today, trains. Tomorrow? We don’t know, but the FAA has canceled all flights immediately, not that there’re many takers. The CIA estimates that if the enemy focuses on taking down the major sectors sequentially, our nation could be completely shut down in seventy-two hours. But that’s not the worse news.” Arpen took a deep breath. “The president has just confirmed this to his top staff and communicated it to our embassies around the world. Here it is.”
He held up a sheet of paper. It looked, in that moment, archaic to Lana. Like a diplomatic cable of old. But also more real, more eerie an item than anything in the world of screens and cursors.
“This is top secret. You will not breathe a word of this to anyone. The terrorists have secured access to more than a thousand of our nuclear missiles. That means they have taken control of the warheads and launchpads. And they are, even as I’m talking to you, targeting our cities and those of our closest allies. Our most skilled experts have not found a means to override their commands.”
A gasp came from the redheaded woman. Others showed their horror less demonstrably, with silent shakes of the head or by looking away.
A man with a Santa Claus beard and shocked demeanor spoke up from the other end of the table: “They’ve got control of the circuitry, the computers. I get that. But can’t those missiles be monkey-wrenched, if everything else fails?”
Ambassador Arpen nodded. “Right. Except you have to gain access to them through the most sophisticated control panels in the world. Or what we thought were the most sophisticated control panels in the world. And it’s not like we can bomb those missiles with impunity. Even monkey-wrenching them has to be done with the greatest care. If we can’t get our nuclear engineers inside those silos and other installations, all bets are off in that regard.”
He turned to the rest of his staff around the table. “Look, I also have to tell you that the president has just confirmed that the enemy has taken control of vital U.S. stores of Veepox.”
Lana suppressed a gasp.
“I didn’t even know we had Veepox,” a young man said.
“Of course we have it,” Arpen retorted. “Because we can’t trust others not to have it.” The parity of pain. “There’s no good news here, people. This is asymmetrical warfare, and all the weapons are pointed at us.”
“Even the Veepox?” Lana asked.
“I don’t have confirmation of this, so I hesitate to say, but the enemy claims they are releasing it right now in an unspecified location.”
“This is madness,” the bearded man said.
A stillness followed his words. It was the most frightening silence Lana had ever heard.
The ambassador cleared his throat. “The CDC is, as you might imagine, doing everything it can to detect outbreaks and plans to confine them, but there’s no antidote for Veepox, and the CDC’s travel and communications are terribly hampered.”
Hampered? Lana thought bitterly. Try shattered.
“What about the threat to the children?” asked a young translator with a husband and two young twins in Alexandria, Virginia.
“Despite their threat to do so, there has been no word about any action directly targeting our kids,” the ambassador answered. “So that’s the one bit of good news.”
“But they haven’t been making empty threats,” the translator said.
Arpen merely shook his head.
What else can he do? Lana asked herself.
“This is unbelievable,” said a middle-aged woman in a navy pantsuit.
“It’s all too believable. It’s happening right now,” the ambassador replied.
He urged them to return to their desks. “Keep working. Do what you do best. It’s all we can do.”
Agent Candace Anders sat in her hotel room staring at her computer screen. Her orders were clear enough — and deeply disturbing: Go to Yemen immediately.
WHAT ABOUT RUHI? she texted back.
HE’S NOT GOING ANYWHERE.
SHOULDN’T I STAY IN RIYADH THEN?
NO, IF HE GIVES YOU UP, YOU NEED TO BE OUT OF THE COUNTRY.
The irony stunned her: Candace’s intelligence boss was saying that Yemen, with its widespread lawlessness, would be safer than Saudi Arabia. He was probably right. But what about Ruhi’s safety? She hated leaving him at such a moment. It felt like abandonment of the worst sort.
The communication from the Farm continued: FLY TO NAJRAN. YOU’LL BE MET BY AL JUHANI. Fahim Al Juhani was an operative long active in the region. HE’LL PROVIDE PROPER ATTIRE FOR YOUR JOURNEY AND TAKE YOU OVER THE BORDER.
Flight time was in about an hour.
Move.
Emma looked out her window, wondering aloud if the big blue bus would really come. She’d heard the cyberattackers had shut down the trains and that “More is in store,” according to the excited news anchor she’d been watching.
“They’re coming. Don’t you worry, girl,” Tanesa said. “When William Senior says there’s choir practice, it’s going to take more than some terrorists to stop him.”
“Well, you got to wonder, with everything going—”
Right then Emma stopped talking because the bus rolled up in front of her house.