When Warhaftig and Johnson approached his desk, he told them what he had discovered, displaying the hidden files on his computer. Warhaftig grew excited, but Johnson continued to scowl.
“Tell the Lab what you’ve found,” he said. “And ask them to check it again. I’ll be in my office.”
After hearing about the technique Decker had leveraged to uncover the files, Warhaftig was even more impressed by the young cryptanalyst’s abilities. Decker continued to eyeball Jerry Johnson in his office. He could clearly see the SAC behind his desk despite the tinted glass. Johnson was staring at his telephone. He was waiting for the new report.
This time they didn’t call. The head of the Lab himself, Dr. Hansotia, came up to Decker’s floor. He was a short fat Indian man, with gray hair and inch-thick glasses that made his eyes appear abnormally huge. He was mortified by the Lab’s initial oversight but couldn’t say enough about Decker. Although Johnson remained skeptical, everyone else was now convinced the clues were not only real, but potentially vital to the case. Johnson shuffled back into his office and reported the findings to his boss, Assistant Director in Charge (ADIC) of the New York office, who — in turn — reported it to the Director himself in Washington, D.C.
Half an hour later, Johnson came out of his office and began to hand out new assignments. The manpower shortage was over. Four Radiation Detection Units would henceforth be assigned to the Empire State Building. Another team would work with FEMA to see if the evacuation procedures for New York outlined in the hidden file had been made public at any time, or if the agency had experienced any loss of data from their systems in the last few months. Another six teams would continue searching for Singh, Moussa and bin Basra. And Decker was to track down the tsunami lead, despite the fact that no one thought it was particularly important. Warhaftig protested but Decker told the SAC he didn’t mind. While the lead appeared off-pattern, more speculative even, Decker was intrigued. The words from the fourth wallpaper — On the ocean like mountains — still resonated in his head.
“See me when you get back,” said Warhaftig. “I may have another assignment for you.
SECTION III
Musalla
Chapter 20
Ziad crawled along the ground, toward the barbed wire fence that marked the ingress to the no man’s land between Lebanon and Israel. He pulled out a pair of wire cutters, turned over onto his back, and sliced the bottom strand. It howled as it retracted, vanishing into the night. Then he cut the second wire. When the opening was big enough, he removed the knapsack on his back, slipped it around his left foot, and worked his way under the fence. Far above him he could see stars. There was little ambient light in the Shibaa region; it was mostly farmland. The town of Aval Bet Maacha was a fair distance to the west. And there was no moon.
As he inched his way under the fence, Ziad remembered a night he had once shared with El Aqrab some years before in Kazakhstan. They had been on an evening training exercise in the mountains, and they had stopped for a bite to eat on a promontory overlooking a narrow valley. The winter sky had been full of stars — so close, so bright — and El Aqrab had told him that the ancient Romans believed the Milky Way was Juno’s breast milk spilled across the heavens. Ziad had laughed at that but El Aqrab had thought the image beautiful. He was a strange man. He found beauty in the oddest things. And then he began to name the stars in the constellation of Orion: Betelgeuse, Bellatrix, Rigel, Saiph. So many of the stars, he told Ziad, had been named by Arabs, the first astronomers. So much had been brought into the world by the followers of Islam. Including nothingness.
“What does that mean?” Ziad asked.
“The Arabic number zero.” El Aqrab paused and looked about. Then he continued in a whisper, as if the night itself might snatch the words away. “It was conceived in a little village in north India, carried across the tip of the Red Sea, across the Saudi peninsula on camel back, the great Sahara, and finally into Spain by the Almoravids. They carried nothingness across the wastelands, and it changed the world forever.”
Ziad had never forgotten those words. They seemed to sum up El Aqrab who, in the end, was like the number zero himself: empty, yet overfilled; a water bag distended by void. Much like his protégé, Hammel.
Ziad rolled over onto his stomach. He lifted the knapsack toward his chest. He started to put it on again, when his hand touched something hard and stiff and, suddenly, that sound — like wind whistling through a wadi. Then, it stopped. A moment later, a rocket leapt into the air, and the night sky split apart with light. The trip flare hovered high above him, hanging from a tiny parachute, the smoke made visible by a brilliant luminescent glaze.
Ziad reached down for his weapon, but it was already too late. He heard the sound of machinegun fire spit somewhere just ahead, saw the ground before him gradually unravel — like a poorly sewn seam — and felt the sharp wasp sting of bullets in his shoulder, back and legs. He tried to roll away, but they had found him and there was nowhere left to roll, or run, or hide. Besides, he couldn’t even move. He looked up at the sky, at the Arabian stars, and thought of nothingness.
IDF Captain Solomon Snow aimed his flashlight at the twisted carnage by the fence. There was little left of the guerrilla’s face. He pushed at the corpse with his boot, and the body flopped onto its back. The terrorist had been lying on his knapsack. Captain Snow squatted down and opened it with care. Although it was riddled with bullets, you could never be too vigilant. If the terrorist were a Hezbollah suicide bomber, there might be some triggering mechanism within.
He peeled back the bloody flap, slowly, carefully. The light from his flashlight quivered back at him. There was something metallic inside. He held his breath and removed what appeared to be a large stainless steel attaché case. He slipped it onto the grass. The hinges had been hit. He lifted the top off delicately but it crumbled in his hands. It was some kind of electronic device, he thought, some sort of sophisticated communications or jamming instrument. He saw the bulbous protrusion on the right side of the casing and his heart came to a stop.
He knew what this was! He’d studied illustrations of nuclear devices in his early training days and, while not identical, this instrument looked similar enough to make his fingers freeze. Then, he noticed the bulbous section was cracked, almost in half. And more salient, it was empty. Impotent. Unarmed.
Captain Snow breathed a deep sigh of relief, looked up at the limpid stars, and started to pray.
Chapter 21
On the island of Lanzarote, a hundred miles off the Moroccan coast, the Algerian mule Hammel watched as the Venieri bulldozer was hoisted by boom out of the forward hold of the freighter El Affroun. He had been waiting for this moment. The rest of the cargo scheduled for unloading — from generators and electronics, to razor blades and beef — had already been lowered down onto the docks over the previous hour. In most cases, the cargo was stowed in large containers and it was easy going. But the Venieri Terne Articolate 114 HP bulldozer was freestanding. So they had wrapped steel cables around her belly and lifted her by boom — via a pair of booms, to be precise — out of the forward hold.