From her bag, she removes the cord of rope with a noose on one end. She throws it up over the lowest-hanging branch, a good four meters above ground—about thirteen feet high. It takes her three tries to get the noose end over the branch. Then she raises up the other side of the rope as the noose side lowers down to her.
Once she has it in her hand, she slides the straight end of the rope through the noose. Then she pulls down on the straight end slowly, careful to avoid any snags, as the noose end slowly rises again. On the branch, the two sides come together in a knot.
She puts on the backpack again, and the rifle, and grips the rope. She’ll need to do this fast. It’s a lot of weight to put on the branch, so the less time it takes, the better.
She takes a breath. Her nausea has subsided, but she is bone-tired, weary and shaky. She fantasizes about sleep, about stretching out her legs and closing her eyes.
Her team may have had a point about her going it alone. They wanted to deploy a force of ten or twelve in the woods. That would have been fine with her, but the risk was too great. She couldn’t know how heavy the patrols of the woods would be. It was hard enough for her to make it to her spot alone without incident. Multiply one person by twelve, and that’s a dozen different opportunities for detection. It would only take one mistake, one person who was too loud or clumsy, and the entire operation would be blown.
She looks around one more time, seeing nothing, hearing nothing.
She climbs the rope, inching upward, her arms straining, one hand over the other, legs scissored over the rope.
She’s just reaching for the branch when she hears it.
A noise, in the distance. Not the sound of small animals scurrying away. Not the low growl or angry bark of a predator.
Human voices, coming her way.
It’s a burst of laughter she first hears, then animated chatter, muted by distance.
Does she drop down and remove her sidearm? The rope would still be visible, dangling from a branch.
The voices get closer. More laughter.
She removes her feet from the rope and puts them taut against the tree to steady herself, feeling the strain of the branch. If she holds completely still, they may never see her. Movement draws the eye more than anything else, more than color or sound.
Still, if the tree branch snaps, the noise will be unmistakable.
She holds still, no small chore when suspended in the air, her arms straining, sweat dripping into her eyes.
She sees them now, two of them, through the trees to the west, semiautomatic weapons in their hands, their voices growing louder.
Her right hand lets go of the rope, moving to the grip of her sidearm.
She can’t dangle here forever. The branch won’t hold. And sooner or later, the one arm holding her up will give out, too.
She manages to pull her sidearm free.
They draw closer, not specifically walking in her direction—more of a southeasterly direction—but getting near. If she can see them, they can see her.
Trying to obscure the movement of the weapon, she holds it close to her side. She’ll have to take out both of them before they can rattle off a single round, before they can reach their radios.
And then she’ll have to figure out what happens next.
Chapter
70
I check my watch: nearly 3:00 p.m. The virus could go off any minute, but no later than nine hours from now.
And my people found the virus.
“So—that’s great, right?” I say to Devin and Casey. “You found it!”
“Yes, sir, great is the right word.” Casey pushes her glasses up against the bridge of her nose. “Thanks to Augie. We never would’ve located it ourselves. We tried for two weeks. We tried everything. We even did manual searches, we ran customized—”
“But now you found it.”
“Yes.” She nods. “So that’s step 1.”
“What’s step 2?”
“Neutralizing it. It’s not like we can just hit a Delete button and make it go away. And if we do it wrong, well—it’s like a bomb. If you don’t disable it properly, it goes off.”
“Right, okay,” I say. “So…”
Devin says, “So we’re trying to re-create the virus on the other computers.”
“Can Augie do that?”
“Augie was the hacker, sir, remember. Nina was the code writer. Actually, if anyone’s been most helpful, it’s the Russians.”
I cast a glance around me and lower my voice. “Are they really helping or just appearing to help? They could be taking you down the wrong road.”
“We’ve been on guard for that,” says Casey. “But it doesn’t seem like they’re misleading us. They’ve told us things we’ve never known about what they do. It seems like their orders were to do everything possible to help us.”
I nod. That’s certainly what I was aiming for. I can’t know if it’s true.
“But they didn’t write this code, either,” she adds. “This virus Nina created—Augie says she created it three years ago. It’s more advanced than anything we’ve ever seen. It’s quite amazing.”
“We can give her a posthumous award for best cyberterrorist ever when this is over, okay? Tell me what’s going to happen. You’re going to re-create the virus and then learn how to neutralize it. Like a simulated war game?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And you have all the supplies you need?”
“I think we have enough laptops here, sir. And there are thousands at the Pentagon for the rest of the threat-response team.”
I had a hundred computers shipped here for this very purpose. We have another five hundred under Marine guard at the airport, not three miles away.
“And water, coffee, food—all that?” The last thing I need is for these experts to falter physically. They have enough pressure on them mentally. “Cigarettes?” I say, waving my hand at the stench.
“Yeah, we’re fine. The Russians and Germans smoke up a storm.”
“It’s totally polluted down there.” Devin makes a face. “At least we got them to agree to smoke in the laundry room. There they can open a window.”
“They—there’s a window?”
“Yeah, in the laundry—”
“Secret Service locked all the windows,” I say, realizing, of course, that it doesn’t stop someone from unlocking them from the inside.
I head down the stairs to the basement, Devin and Casey following me.
“Mr. President?” Alex calls out, following me down the stairs as well.
I hit the bottom of the stairs and turn to their war room, moving quickly, feeling a ringing in my ears along with my doctor’s words of warning.
The war room is filled with desks and laptops, dozens more off to the side, and a large whiteboard. Other than the security camera in the corner of the room, it looks like an ordinary classroom. Six people are here—two each from Russia, Germany, and Israel, chatting while they open laptops and bang away on keyboards.
No Augie.
“Check the laundry room, Alex,” I say. I hear him move behind me. I hear his words, too, from two rooms away.
“Why is this window open?”
It only takes Alex a minute to sweep the entire basement, including the room I’ve taken over as the communications room. I already know the answer before he tells me.
“He’s gone, Mr. President. Augie is gone.”
Chapter
71
The two members of the security patrol are dark and burly, crew-cut and square-jawed and wide-bodied. Whatever they’re saying to each other in German, as they march toward her, must be humorous. They’ll stop laughing if either of them, moving southeast, turns his head to the left.
Her head only inches from the branch above her, suspended in air by one hand on a rope, Bach feels her strength failing. She blinks away the sweat in her eyes as her arm begins to tremble furiously. And she can hear the branch, with all her weight on one isolated part, start to give way, a steady creaking.
Her bag and clothes may be camouflaged, her face and neck may be painted pine green to match the tree foliage, but if that branch even begins to crack, the game is over.