Or have I missed something about Augie?
“Get up.” I grab his arm and force him to his feet. “This is no time for scared, Augie. Let’s you and I have a talk in the cabin.”
Chapter
74
Bach finally reaches the perch she’s seeking high up in the white pines, her arms and back feeling the strain of climbing upward with a sizable bag and rifle on her back. In her earbuds, she listens to Wilhelm Friedemann Herzog performing his playful rendition of the Violin Concerto in E Major three years ago in Budapest.
Through the pines, she has a clear view of the cabin in the distance and the grounds to the south.
The branches next to the trunk of the tree are thick enough to hold her. She straddles a branch and places her case in front of her. She opens it with her thumbprint and removes Anna Magdalena, assembling it in less than two minutes, looking out over the trees as she does so.
She sees sentries patrolling the grounds, men with weapons.
A black tent.
Four men climbing the stairs to the porch, moving quickly— She adjusts the scope feverishly. She has no time to create a platform and mount the rifle and get into position, instead bringing it to her shoulder and looking through the scope. Not ideal, and she will only have one chance at a shot before blowing her cover, blowing everything up, so she can’t make a mistake— She works forward to back as they approach the door to the cabin.
A large dark-haired man, earpiece.
Shorter, lighter man, earpiece.
The president, passing between the men, disappearing into the cabin.
Followed by a short man, frail, tangled dark hair— Is that him?
Is it him?
Yes.
One second to decide.
Take the shot?
Chapter
75
I take Augie by the arm and pull him into the cabin. Alex and Jacobson, behind us, step in and close the cabin door.
I move Augie into the living room and put him on the couch. “Get him some water,” I tell Alex.
Augie sits on the couch, still looking dazed and distraught. “This is not…what she wanted,” he whispers. “She would not…want this.”
Alex returns with a cup of water. I put out my hand. “Give it to me,” I say.
I walk over to Augie and throw the water in his face, dousing his hair and shirt. He gasps in surprise, shakes his head, sits up straight.
I lean down over him. “Are you being straight with me, kid? There’s a lot riding on you.”
“I…I…” He looks up at me, different from before, scared not just of the circumstances but also of me.
“Alex,” I say. “Show me the footage from the war room.”
“Yes, sir.” From his pocket, Alex removes his phone and clicks on it before handing it to me. It’s the real-time feed from the security camera inside the war room, showing Casey on the phone, Devin on a computer, the other tech geniuses working on laptops and drawing on the whiteboard.
“Look at that, Augie. Are any of those people giving up? No. They’re terrified, every one of them, but they’re not giving up. Hell, you’re the one who located the virus. You just did what my best people couldn’t do for two weeks.”
He closes his eyes and nods. “I’m sorry.”
I kick his shoes, jarring him. “Look at me, Augie. Look at me!”
He does.
“Tell me about Nina. You said this isn’t what she wanted. What do you mean? She didn’t want to destroy America?”
Augie, eyes down, shakes his head. “Nina was tired of running. She said she’d been running for so long.”
“From the Georgian government?”
“Yes. Georgian intelligence had been chasing her. They almost killed her once in Uzbekistan.”
“Okay, well—so she was tired of running. What did she want? To live in America?”
My phone buzzes in my pocket. I pull it out. It’s Liz Greenfield. I decline the call and stuff it back in my pocket.
“She wanted to go home,” says Augie.
“To the Georgian republic? Where she’s wanted for war crimes?”
“She was hoping you would…assist in that regard.”
“She wanted me to intervene. She wanted me to ask Georgia to grant her amnesty. As a favor to the United States.”
Augie nods. “And would you not expect Georgia to do such a thing under the circumstances? If America was in peril, and one of its allies—especially one that could use America as a friend, with the Russians on its border—do you not think Georgia would have granted you that favor?”
They probably would have. If I pressed hard enough, if I explained the situation thoroughly enough—yes, we would have figured something out.
“So I want to be sure I have this straight,” I say. “Nina helped Suliman Cindoruk build this virus.”
“Yes.”
“But she never wanted to destroy America with it?”
He pauses. “You must understand Suli,” he says. “The way he operates. Nina built a magnificent virus. A devastating stealth wiper virus. I worked, as you might say, on the other side of the business.”
“You were the hacker.”
“Yes. My job was to infiltrate American systems and spread the virus as far and wide as possible. But our positions were…segregated, you would say.”
I think I’m getting it now. “She built a brilliant virus but didn’t know, exactly, to what use it would be put. And you spread the virus through American servers but didn’t know, exactly, what it was you were spreading.”
“What you are saying, yes.” He nods. He seems to be calming down now. “I do not mean to portray either of us as innocents. Nina knew the destructive nature of her virus, obviously. But she had no idea how far and wide it was going to be distributed. She did not know it was going to be spread throughout the United States to destroy the lives of hundreds of millions of people. And I…” He looks away. “Suli told me it was an advanced form of spyware I was disseminating. That he would sell it to the highest bidder to finance our other jobs.” He shrugs. “When we realized what we had done, we could not sit idly by.”
“So Nina came here to stop the virus,” I say. “In exchange for my help getting her amnesty.”
He nods again. “We hoped you would agree. But we couldn’t predict your response. The Sons of Jihad has been responsible for the deaths of Americans in the past. And the United States is hardly what we would consider an ally. So she insisted on meeting you first, alone.”
“To see how I would respond.”
“To see if you would let her leave the White House. As opposed to arresting her, torturing her, whatever else you might do.”
That sounds right. It felt like a test at the time.
“I objected to her going to the White House alone,” he says. “But she would not be deterred. By the time we met in the States, she clearly had a plan in mind.”
“Wait.” I touch his arm. “By the time you met in the States? What does that mean? You weren’t together all along?”
“Oh, no,” he says. “No, no. The day we sent the peekaboo to your Pentagon server?”
Saturday, April 28. I’ll never forget when I first heard about it. I was in Brussels, on the first leg of my European trip. I got the call in the presidential suite. I’d never heard my defense secretary so rattled.
“That was the day Nina and I left Suliman in Algeria. We split up, though. We thought it was safer that way. She came to the United States through Canada. I came through Mexico. Our plan was to meet on Wednesday in Baltimore, Maryland.”
“Wednesday—this past Wednesday? Three days ago?”
“Yes. Wednesday, at noon, by the statue of Edgar Allan Poe at the University of Baltimore. Close enough to Washington but not too close, a logical place for people of our age to fit in and a fixed point we both could find.”
“And that’s when Nina told you the plan.”
“Yes. By then she was certain she had a plan in place. She would visit the White House on Friday night, alone, to test your reaction. Then you would meet me at the baseball stadium—another test, to see if you would even appear. And if you did, I would make my own judgment as to whether we could trust you. When you appeared at the stadium, I knew you had passed Nina’s test.”