She tries the window into the laundry room. Locked.
“Jebi ga,” she hisses, feeling a trickle of panic. She holds her sidearm by the suppressor, leans in toward the window—
“Ularning vertolyotlari bor!” Hamid, the team 2 leader, shouts into her earbud. She doesn’t speak Uzbek, but she has a feeling—
“They have helicopter! They—”
The explosion is even louder this time, a massive eruption from the direction of the lake, pummeling her eardrum through the earbud as well, causing her a moment of imbalance.
It is unfamiliar, the fear blossoming inside her, raising her temperature, fluttering through her stomach. Not since Sarajevo has she truly felt afraid of anything or anyone. She hadn’t realized she was still capable of it.
She flicks the gun’s handle against the window, shattering the glass. She reaches in and unlocks the latch, waits for any reaction to the breaking glass from inside, her standard precaution. Five seconds. Ten seconds. No sound.
She pushes open the window and slides into the laundry room feetfirst.
Chapter
105
What?” I ask. “Tell me what’s happening.”
“It’s a…” Devin shakes his head. “Nina put a circuit breaker in.”
“A what?”
“A—she put a stopper in and installed a password override.”
“What the hell is going on, people?”
Augie touches my arm. “Apparently,” he says, his voice panicky, “Nina installed a mechanism that suspended the virus after it began to activate. As Devin said, it began to overwrite a small amount of data, to demonstrate its power to do so, but now it is suspended, giving us the opportunity to provide a password to stop it.”
“We didn’t replicate that when we reconstructed the virus,” says Casey. “We didn’t know it was there.”
“What about the viruses on the other computers and devices around the country?” I ask. “It’s talking to them, you said. Are they stopping, too?”
Casey speaks urgently into her headset. “Jared, we have a circuit breaker suspending the virus—are you getting that? You should be getting that…”
I stare at her, waiting.
Twenty seconds have never passed more slowly.
Her face lights up, her hand out like a stop sign. “Yes,” she says. “Yes! The virus on the Pentagon server must have sent out a ‘suspend’ command throughout the distributive system.”
“So…the virus is suspended everywhere?”
“Yes, sir. We have new life.”
“Let me see this password-override circuit-breaker thing.” I move Augie aside and look at the computer screen.
Enter Keyword: _________________ 28:47
“The clock,” I note. “It’s counting down from, what, thirty minutes.”
28:41…28:33…28:28…
“So the virus is in suspension for twenty-eight minutes and change?”
“Yes,” says Augie. “We have twenty-eight minutes remaining to enter the keyword. Or the virus activates in full. Across the entire system of devices.”
“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” I say, gripping my hair. “No, this is good, this is good, we’re still in the game. One last chance. Okay, a keyword.” I turn to Casey. “Don’t we have software that can decode passwords?”
“Well…yes, but not that we can install and operate in twenty-eight minutes, especially with this virus. It would take hours, more likely days or weeks—”
“Okay, then we have to guess. We have to guess.”
Simple, Nina had said in her text message, when she said she could explain how to stop the virus. You don’t need to be an expert, she said.
Simple. Simple if you know the keyword.
“What the hell is the keyword?” I turn to Augie. “She never mentioned anything?”
“I did not know of this at all,” he says. “I can only guess it was her way of protecting me, keeping our knowledge separate—”
“But maybe she said something to you. Like, in hindsight, she was giving you a clue? Think, Augie, think.”
“I…” Augie puts his hand on his forehead. “I…”
I try to think of anything Nina might have said to me in the Oval Office. She talked about the country burning, about being a package deal with Augie. She gave me a ticket to the Nationals game. The helicopter in Dubai…
It could be anything.
“Type ‘Suliman,’” I tell Devin.
He types in the word and hits Enter. The word disappears.
Enter Keyword: __________________ 27:46
“Use all caps,” says Casey. “It might be case-sensitive.”
Devin does. Nothing.
“All lowercase.”
“Nope.”
“Type his whole name, Suliman Cindoruk,” I say.
Devin types it. No response.
“Jesus, how are we supposed to do this?” I say.
Simple, Nina said in the text message.
I pat my pockets. I look around the room. “Where’s my phone? Where the hell’s my phone?”
“Try ‘Nina,’” says Augie.
“Nope. Not in all caps, either,” says Devin after trying both. “Not in all lowercase.”
“Try ‘Nina Shinkuba,’ all the different ways.”
“How do you spell Shinkuba?”
Everyone looks at Augie, who shrugs. “I never knew her last name until you told me,” he says to me.
I never saw it written. Liz gave me the information. I need to call her. I pat my pockets again, look around the room. “Where’s my phone?”
“Probably s-h-i-n-k-u-b-a,” says Casey.
Devin tries it a number of ways:
Nina Shinkuba nina shinkuba NINA SHINKUBA NINASHINKUBA ninashinkuba
No luck. I look at the timer:
26:35
“Where the hell is my phone?” I say again. “Has anyone—”
Then I remember. I left my phone in the war room. I set it down while Devin was about to activate the virus. When Alex got word of the attack outside and hustled us into the communications room, I forgot it.
“I’ll be right back,” I say.
Alex, still on his radio, still monitoring things outside, sees my movement and rushes to block the door.
“No, sir! We’re in lockdown. We don’t have the all clear.”
“My phone, Alex. I need it—”
“No, sir, Mr. President.”
I grab his shirt, surprising him. “I’m giving you a direct order, Agent. That phone is more important than my life.”
“Then I’ll get it,” he says.
He reaches into his pocket.
“Then go, Alex! Go!”
“One moment, sir,” he says, removing something from his pocket.
“Keep trying!” I yell to my team. “Try Augie’s name! Augie Koslenko!”
Chapter
106
Bach, sitting atop the stackable washer and dryer, pushes herself off and drops quietly to the floor of the dark room. She looks through the doorway. As she’d been told, the basement is not some maze of rooms but rather one long hallway with several rooms on each side and a staircase in the middle of the hallway on her left.
Behind her, from the open window, she hears something outside: the thump of a vessel landing, the commotion of commands being shouted, feet stomping the ground, men fanning out.
The helicopter again. Marines arriving, maybe Special Forces.
Footfalls. They are running. Running toward the open window— She squats down, raising her weapon.
The men rush past and stop. One of them stops right near the window.
What are they—
Then she hears a voice: “West team, in position!”
West team.
This is the west side of the cabin. The west team. There are presumably north, south, and east teams, too.
They have surrounded the perimeter.
In just that instant, she thinks of her mother, Delilah, and what she endured during those nightly visits from the soldiers, what she did for her children every night, placing her son and daughter in a room far away from the bedroom, inside the closet, cocooning them with the headphones she placed on their ears so they would listen to the Passacaglia or the Concerto for Two Violins, not the sounds emanating from the bedroom. “Listen only to the music,” she told Bach and her brother.
Bach steels herself and steps out of the room, into the threshold of the first room on the left. The war room, they call it.
She peeks in. A large white screen displaying the words:
Enter Keyword: __________________ 26:54