And Into the Fire Page 6

  “They’ll hang him by the hocks over a slow-burning fire and hook electrodes to his genitals. When they’ve wrung him dry, they’ll drop him in a hole, fill it with cement, and weld the trapdoor shut.”

  “You got eighteen years with the Agency—two more and you have your pension,” Jules said. “Then no more of this shit. Focus on that. Focus on what’s important.”

  “This is important,” Elena said.

  “Can you tell the president things have gone to hell and your guy’s gone to ground?”

  “He’ll repeat that I have no source, only ‘intuition.’”

  “God is he stupid,” Jules said.

  “I’ve known dumpsters that weren’t as dumb as him.”

  “The CIA director, Conrad, can you turn to him?”

  “You gotta be kidding.”

  Jules nodded knowingly. “He’s got a thing for you.”

  “All he does is stare at my tits.”

  “That’s only ’cause he’s afraid to grab your ass.”

  “I’d kick his ass so hard he’d choke on his colon.”

  “He got drunk at a Christmas party and told a reporter you have the face of an angel, the soul of a cash register, and a body that would make the Pope throw Mother Teresa out a Vatican window.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Le reporter, c’est moi.”

  “Some crew I’m working with,” Elena said, shaking her head.

  “Some crew indeed. But that doesn’t mean you’re out of options, does it?”

  “I contacted a guy last night.”

  * * *

  She had contacted a guy. It took her half the night—sitting on her bed, staring at the computer, contriving a hundred different reasons not to do it.

  In the end, however, she had no choice.

  He said he’d always be there if she needed him, and she’d sworn she’d never call the chit in.

  But she did it: she punched in his code, then his call numbers.…

  * * *

  “I figured you’d have something going down,” Jules said.

  “Given that clown I’m dealing with, I better have an ace to play.”

  “What can I do to help?”

  “You wrote an article on the Hudson River Nuclear Power Station, the HRNPS, a year or two ago?”

  “About how poorly protected it was,” Jules said.

  “Do a piece on how terrorists—using the attack on the Pakistani nuclear power plant as a paradigm—could hit the HRNPS and burn it to the ground.”

  “But without tanks and chain guns,” Jules said.

  “Exactly,” Elena said.

  “I researched that plant so thoroughly I could write the piece tonight,” Jules said. “It’ll almost write itself.”

  “ISIS claims they want an all-out global war with the West, fought in the Mideast,” Elena said. “What better way to start one than to incinerate U.S. nuclear sites and set off terrorist nukes in U.S. cities?”

  “Think the article would help?” Jules asked.

  “The idiots I work with are immune to reason,” Elena said. “Maybe if you inflame the public opinion, they’ll listen.”

  “Consider it done—but right now I’m starting to wonder about the clowns in here.”

  “They’re a little low down even for us.”

  “Don’t look, but that pimp dude over there can’t take his eyes off you.”

  “Time to shake and bake.”

  Throwing back their drinks, they waved for the waitress, who was nowhere in sight. However, the pimp dude was, and he was coming over to them, giving them a cold shoulder-pumping stroll. He had a long, black leather trench coat, matching leather pants, a long black ponytail, and boots that featured jingling silver rowels. He wore sunglasses and favored an ebony walking stick with a brass tiger’s head for a handle. The tiger’s jaws were wide open as if in midgrowl.

  “You some fine-looking ladies,” he said. He fixed his gaze on Elena. “And, ah baby, I know you feelin’ me. I seen you walkin’ in here, swingin’ your thang like it was a diamond mine, all the time it sayin’ to me, ‘You gotta teach me, Doctor D., how to turn this fine, funky butt into mucho bucks. Gimme a chance to make sumthin’ of myself, to star in your stable, to be the star I know I can be!’”

  Elena was just getting up. “Hit it, Clarence Thomas. We’re out of here.”

  He gave Elena a long slow smile, but then grabbed a fistful of her hair, giving it a hard yank. Ignoring the pain, Elena gripped his lower forearm with her left hand and got his hand in her right fist. He pulled even harder on her hair, and the agony was excruciating. Still, she slipped her left forearm under his wrist. Taking hold of her right elbow and cross-hawking his hand, she bent it back. Instead of giving up, though, he snaked an ivory-handled stiletto out of his boot with his other hand. Seeing the blade flash out of the handle, Elena reflexively broke his wrist—the sound sharp as a rifle crack. Howling in agony, he collapsed to the floor. Jules quickly relieved him of his shank, stuffing it in her purse.

  “Time to rock on out of here,” Jules said, dropping three fifties on the table.

  The women headed for the front door, the stunned crowd parting before them.

  2

  “I’d say he’s a man not unfamiliar with violence.”

  —Jules Meredith

  Hasad sat at his Islamabad apartment desk. Elena’s e-mail from the night before was on his computer.

  She had finally written him back.

  The e-mail evoked memories of her, Jules, and the nine months he’d spent at a university in Texas—the only period in a lifetime of unremitting violence and inexorable death that he’d experienced something resembling love.

  The memories came flooding back.…

  * * *

  He’d first met Elena fifteen years ago when he’d spent two semesters at a large Texas university. Even then, his ISI Pakistani handlers planned to eventually use him on undercover ops in the U.S., and they wanted him to speak English with an American accent. Unfortunately, however, his college experience wasn’t all fun and games. The first few months, he was friendless. The school had never been ethnically enlightened, but to make matters worse, he had started classes a few days after 9/11. He frequently overheard ugly remarks regarding his Arab heritage.

  So his first several weeks had been lonely and dull. His English wasn’t that good, and he was struggling to understand American customs and idioms.

  His loneliness, however, was about to come to an end. He was taking a Great Books class, and the first six weeks they focused on the ancient Greeks. Homer’s Odyssey, Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, and Aeschylus’ Agamemnon obsessed him. So did a pretty young freshman named Elena Moreno. Observing his rapt fascination with these ancient authors, she intuited that he was struggling with his English. She liked his soft eyes, quiet voice, and quick smile. That he was always well dressed and clean shaven and his short hair immaculately trimmed also impressed her. She decided to help him. Soon she and her friend, Jules Meredith, were studying with him every night at the library, walking him through the more difficult passages. Afterward, they would go to a bar called Red’s for pitchers of beer.

  His command of the English language improved rapidly, and his obsession with the ancient Greeks would last a lifetime.

  Elena and Jules lived in an apartment complex on the edge of town, where, on the weekends, the college football players partied. On Friday and Saturday nights, the football players would rampage through the complex, sometimes kicking down the front doors to get in. Stealing whatever beer and liquor they wanted, they occasionally groped and mauled the women. The men who resisted them were unceremoniously gang-stomped. The alumni in those days were so powerful they could usually hush it up.

  One weekend night, a couple of the players—led by a 350-pound, six-foot-seven-inch tackle—broke through the locked door of Elena and Jules’s apartment. When Hasad blocked them from entering the kitchen, where the women kept their beer, t
he tackle had called him a “camel-fucker” and knocked him down. Hasad bore the abuse stoically, his face empty of expression.

  Then the tackle and a tall, three-hundred-pound center spotted Jules and Elena. The women fought them off. Elena raked one across the face and Jules kicked her assailant in the groin, all of which only infuriated them. They dragged the women into the bedroom.

  The two women kept their flashlights and batteries in a chest of drawers in the vestibule. Hasad took off his shoes and socks. Putting three D batteries in each sock, he entered the bedroom.

  A third football player was standing in the doorway, waiting his turn to rape the women. His back was to Hasad, who swung a sock full of D’s at the back of the man’s head. Hitting him off a pivot, getting every ounce of his two hundred pounds behind the blow, he fractured the man’s skull and dropped him to the floor, unconscious.

  The tackle was mauling Elena on the first twin bed. Cracking the man’s skull, Hasad then rolled him over, straightened out his arm, and pulverized his elbow.

  The man’s screams drew the center off Jules. Shouting at Hasad that he would “fucking kill him,” he swung his legs off the bed, at which point Hasad shattered his right kneecap—before the man’s foot could even hit the floor. As the man grabbed his knee and screamed, Hasad hit a second time, smashing the metacarpal bones in his hand. A blow to the temple silenced his screams.

  The men’s injuries were so severe that they lost their football scholarships as well as their almost certain NFL bonuses and contracts. Elena and Jules pursued them legally, and though the men never did time, their sexual assault charges became part of their permanent college record.

  Hasad was attracted to both women, but he was drifting toward Elena. Something about him bothered Jules, and he sensed it. She had observed him once while he was shaving in their bathroom with his shirt off. The two women had known he was muscular. Under his shirt, Elena and Jules could discern the block-like shoulders, the thick biceps and distended pecs. But with the shirt off, Jules now saw his body was also a complex of intricately turned-out cicatrices. They were almost too numerous, too encyclopedic to absorb at a glance. A few stood out though. One ancient, healed-over bullet hole had punctured his upper chest just below the clavicle and exited the posterior shoulder in a big, ugly, rather spectacular reddish-pink starburst. One barely turned-away knife thrust had left a long, jagged, alabaster trail of keloid traversing his torso from his right shoulder to his left hip. A matrix of scar tissue above his right eye showed how close he’d come to losing half his vision. On his back, he bore the broad white stripes of what he later described to the women as “an Afghani hellhole-prison.”

  Elena, however, had also wandered into the bathroom a moment after Jules, and when she observed the old wounds, she was not dismayed at all. Crossing her arms on her chest, she said, “Hasad, how the hell did you get all that?”

  He said nothing and focused instead on his shave.

  “Care to guess?” Elena asked Jules.

  “I’d say he’s a man not unfamiliar with violence,” Jules observed.

  “Yeah,” Elena added, “and one who’s had more than a nodding acquaintance with death.”

  Ignoring them both, Hasad continued shaving.

  Both women were right, of course. He had seen more than his share of violent death—so much so that no PTSD study could ever convey how deeply the violence had marked him. Nor was his past open to discussion. The two friends quickly learned it was a locked box without combination or key.

  Still, he had risked his life for them, and he was exciting. They went with him to target ranges and martial arts dojos where he taught them the finer points of small arms and hand-to-hand combat. The three of them gradually became closer, but still he would never discuss his past or how he came to know so much about the profession of arms.

  Elena respected his privacy, sensed that there were things in his life that might not stand scrutiny. Nonetheless, he knew she was curious. His last night in America, she, Jules, and Hasad stayed up until dawn. He told them of his life in Iraq and Pakistan, his childhood, what he had done, and what he would do on return. He told them of the bombs he’d built, planted, detonated; his years as a sniper and an assassin; the jobs he’d been sent on and the men he’d killed.

  Elena later found an envelope under some underwear in a dresser drawer. It contained a cryptic poem he had written to her.

  But then he’d written her other cryptic poems as well.

  It was part of his charm.

  The golden vessel.

  The rainbow’s run.

  Oh, glittering jewel

  In my lotus heart.

  Ithaca, Athena,

  My Odyssey’s end.

  I am there.

  Now.

  For all tomorrows.

  The following year, Elena changed her major from English to Arab studies, acquiring an in-depth knowledge of that region and its religions. In the course of her education, she also discovered she had a gift for languages and became amazingly fluent in Arabic, Farsi, and Urdu.

  Jules always believed that Hasad had inspired her friend’s obsessive interest in the Mideast, which, along with her passion for martial arts, had prompted her decision to seek a career at the CIA.

  That career had soared.

  * * *

  Afterward, Hasad returned to Pakistan and did not maintain contact with Elena and Jules. Given his life, close friendship—let alone love—was a luxury he could not afford. People died around Hasad. He did not want to see the only two people that he’d ever cared for become casualties of his irredeemable wars.

  Still, he wanted Elena to be able to find him if she needed him. Over the years, he sent her terse, abstruse notes—always under a pseudonym and on a different clandestine server.

  Each e-mail contained his new address.

  Elena had respected his privacy and never approached him.

  Until last night.

  She e-mailed him, and her message had hit a nerve. Through Pakistan’s ISI grapevine, he knew she was in the CIA, and so he was even more concerned for her safety.

  Her message was simple:

  I’m frightened. Something is going terribly wrong. One of my men is missing, and I fear we’re under attack. Am I crazy? What should I do?

  Now he was even more worried about her—particularly given his latest job for the ISI and ISIS, the nuclear bomb-fuel heist he’d just pulled off. He was having second thoughts about it. Previously, he hadn’t worried—partly because he believed the people he’d trained and commanded were too mind-numbingly dumb to execute multiple nuclear commando strikes. Even after he had provided them with the nuclear bomb-fuel on a silver platter, he didn’t think they could assemble two Hiroshima-style bombs, transport them to their targets, and set them off.

  He had been wrong. He had arrogantly believed that only someone as capable as himself could carry out the attacks, so he had helped that coven of psychopaths develop two nukes. But now Pakistan’s ISI was not only helping to carry it out, they were dragging him back into it. They even wanted him to go to HRNPS to direct the attack on that New York nuclear power plant and then visit another site where he was to personally set off one of their nukes.

  There was a time he wouldn’t have cared. All he had ever questioned was the amount of his remuneration—was it enough? He’d never considered the consequences or the morality of his actions. In his world, such concerns were as useless as prayer, as meaningless as the Martian moons. He’d lived his life on the straight razor’s edge and the hair trigger’s trembling touch. He’d had no time for fine moral distinctions. He hadn’t felt the pull of conscience in so long he doubted now that he’d ever had one. Perhaps, as his sister once told him, he had no soul to lose.

  Perhaps.

  But then he got the message from the Moreno woman, and suddenly he was awash in emotions he hadn’t felt in decades, in feelings he’d forgotten he had ever known, something approximating … love.

&nbs
p; He stared at his computer and her e-mail. He had to answer her. He had to advise her.

  He suddenly knew there was a way he could help Elena, punish those who had so horribly betrayed him, and perhaps even mitigate the nuclear horror to come.

  Hasad began typing a response to his old friend.

  3

  The blast … would … render an area the size of Pennsylvania uninhabitable.

  It was 3:37 A.M. and Elena was in bed with her laptop reading Jules’s piece on melting down the Hudson River Nuclear Power Station. Jules knew her stuff. The piece was a virtual instruction guide on how to destroy a nuclear power plant. Jules had falsified a few details so the article could not be used for those purposes, but it was still scary enough to fry your hair.

  I recently wrote a column on the Saudis’ well-known financing of terrorist organizations, such as the TTP, which is currently launching assaults on Pakistan’s nuclear facilities. Why couldn’t such groups launch similar attacks on U.S. nuclear sites? The terrorists wouldn’t find it that difficult to melt down a nuclear power plant. First of all, our nuclear power plants are ill-secured. The U.S. military does not protect U.S. nuclear sites. Instead, privatized rent-a-cops with dubious training and expertise guard these facilities. Nor does the government force them to defend U.S. nuclear plants against sophisticated, well-armed, 9/11-style terrorist groups numbering a dozen or more men. U.S. rent-a-cops only train to protect our sites against three or four poorly armed, ill-organized men.

  Compared to attacking Pakistan’s nuclear sites, attacking U.S. nuclear plants would be a day at the beach. An eighty-two-year-old nun with a heart condition, Sister Megan Rice, proved this when she breached the fence of the Y-12 National Security Complex with bolt cutters and wandered around in the open, utterly undetected, for several hours. Furthermore, the terrorists wouldn’t have to come in disguised as nuns but as lab techs and security guards, even possessing counterfeit IDs. That’s the modus operandi for the nuclear terrorists who attack Pakistan’s nuclear sites.

  Nor is melting down the plant technologically difficult. Fukushima proved that. The tsunami didn’t have to destroy the reactors to destroy the facility. It did something simpler and more insidious. It wiped out the cooling system. After that, the coolant boiled away the spent fuel and the HEU reactor fuel caught fire.