So far no one had offered Riah an explanation.
At last Cyrus typed on his keyboard and a photo appeared on the projector screen.
Three people: a Middle Eastern woman in her late thirties standing beside a dark-skinned, attractive girl in her teens, and the bearded man who’d strapped on the suicide vest in the video. Riah was surprised that a fundamentalist Muslim suicide bomber would allow his wife and daughter to be photographed without their burkas’ veils covering their faces.
Is it a fake?
“Malik was married,” Cyrus explained. “He had a wife and a fourteen-year-old daughter. If he’d backed out, not gone through with it, they would have been punished.”
Riah had heard enough about the culture and beliefs of Islamic fundamentalist society to know that “punished” in this case probably meant publicly shamed, or quite possibly raped or even killed.
“What do you mean if he’d backed out?”
“This way,” Undersecretary of Defense Williamson said, not answering her question, “by all accounts it looks to the other members of his group that it was an accident.”
“What does that mean: this way it looks like it was an accident?”
“We let him do it.”
Still no direct answers. “You let him do what? Detonate the vest?”
Cyrus said, “Riah, your research, your work with the twins, helped save innocent lives, protected Malik’s wife and daughter from retribution had he failed to go through with his mission, and it helped eliminate a terrorist threat and take care of three members of an al-Qaeda cell.”
“I research ways to decipher neural activity related to linguistic patterns. How did my research do any of that?”
“Dr. Colette,” Daniel offered, “this man was planning to kill himself and possibly hundreds of innocent people at a mosque. People who had assembled to worship God.”
“But you’re saying this wasn’t an accident? That somehow you let him do it. Does that mean you influenced him to do it?”
“He was planning to do it already.”
Riah wasn’t rattled by the fact that no one was giving her a straight answer, but she was becoming more and more curious about why that was the case. “You’re telling me that you somehow convinced this man to kill himself?” She looked at the twins. “But how?”
It took Darren a long time to answer.
“The circumstances concerning his death are one of the reasons we wanted you here. We need you to help us put them into context.”
Okay, so that was finally an answer, but it was certainly not the one she’d expected.
“How can I do that?”
The twins rose almost in unison. Daniel said, “We’ll meet you tomorrow morning at 9:15 in the R&D facility, room 27B. We’ll explain everything then.”
Based on the concern Cyrus and the twins had shown earlier for Dr. Tanbyrn’s condition, Riah had expected that the topic of the fire at the center in Oregon would come up again, but now it appeared that everyone was ready to leave. All of this was fascinating and intriguing to her. She agreed to meet with the twins in the morning, if only to find out what they were using her research for: “I’ll be there. I’ll see you at 9:15.”
And that was that.
They headed toward the door, Oriana mentioned to Cyrus that she would tell her oversight committee to extend the funding, and then she excused herself as well.
The meeting had ended in the same shroud of questions that had pervaded it.
Cyrus escorted Riah past Caitlyn Vaughn at the reception desk and down the elevator. “About last night, coming over to your apartment… the sleepover. Does the offer still stand?”
Riah understood that his question was a test, a way of feeling out how needy she was, how dependent on him, and she decided to show him that she was not the dependent one in their relationship. “I’ll have to think about that.”
She paused, then turned to him, looked deep into his eyes, and trailed her finger across his cheek. “Say hi to Helen tonight for me, will you? Tell that thoughtful wife of yours that coffee tomorrow afternoon sounds like a wonderful idea.”
“She invited you out for coffee?”
“Good night, Cyrus.”
Then Riah left for her car.
Let him chew on that for a while.
If she’d been a person capable of feeling pleasure, she would have smiled. As it was, she tried one on to see how it felt, but it didn’t make her feel anything at all.
I’m not really a fan of commercial airlines, and thankfully, my stage shows over the last decade have done well enough to give me the freedom to be able to bypass those long security lines and groping TSA employees.
It didn’t take me long to book the charter plane.
Both Xavier and Charlene know that money isn’t really an issue for me, so neither of them bats an eye when I tell them the price tag — just under six thousand dollars per hour. Plus landing fees, fuel, and overnight expenses. “It’s really not that bad, actually.”
“What does that work out to per peanut?” Xavier asks.
“Hors d’oeuvres,” I correct him. “And lobster bisque. Only the best for my friends.”
Excusing myself from them for a minute, I find the restroom, then on my way back down the hall, I call Fionna to see if she recorded the video. “I did. I’ll get you a copy. Sorry I lost the connection to the laptop after it was finished. Someone on their cybersecurity team must have stumbled onto the breach. But don’t worry, I got out before anyone would’ve been able to find out who was there.”
I tell her about our plans to go to Philadelphia.
“How can you be sure that Dr. Colette will even be there?”
Good point. “Um …”
“Hang on a second.”
Momentarily she gets back into their system and confirms that Dr. Colette’s schedule includes some meetings in the morning there in Philly.
“So,” Fionna says, “have the charter plane swing by and pick me up.”
“What do you mean?”
“Pick me up. Here in Chicago.”
“Are you serious?”
“Sure. I’m already up to my neck in this with you, Jevin, and it’ll be easier if I can work things from the inside.”
“From the inside of what?”
“With RixoTray. It looks like I have some rather troubling news to give them — their cybersecurity isn’t nearly as good as it needs to be. In fact, the CEO’s personal computer is at high risk of a security breach.”
There was no arguing with that.
She goes on, “That’s something I should discuss with him in person. If I’m with you, I can guarantee you a meeting with Arlington. Besides, you’re flying from Oregon to Pennsylvania. You’ll practically go right over my house. I’m not sure, but I’d guess a charter plane will need to refuel on a flight across the country.”
“Actually, these planes are equipped to—”
“You know as well as I do”—she refuses to give up—“that you’ll make more progress if I’m there. I can do a few things from here to try and access that iPad, but from what I’ve seen, the security on it is reasonably good. It might take me awhile remotely, but I guarantee that if I had it in front of me, I could hash that password in two minutes or less.”
Even though I have complete confidence in her ability to work something like this from an off-site location, I have to admit that it would be good to have her there with us in Philadelphia, especially when it came to getting us an audience with Dr. Arlington.
Stopping by Chicago won’t really add that much time to the trip. You could still make it to Philadelphia by morning.