Michael Savage - Abuse of Power

“What’s this?” he said, before he realized the words were out of his mouth.

She stiffened against him now and he knew he’d made a mistake. She rolled away from him and stared at the dark ceiling, as all of his efforts to make her forget vanished in that instant.

She seemed to go away for a while, lost in a memory, then said, “You asked what happened to me. What made me join Brendan and the others.”

“I’m sorry, Sara. Really. You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”

She turned toward him and ran her hand along the side of his face. “I do want to tell you. I want you to know everything there is to know about me.”

He studied her. “I’m listening.”

It took her a moment to gather herself. “When I was a young girl in Yemen, I was just like Abdal al-Fida. A true believer. I think that’s why it was so easy for me to convince him that we were kindred spirits. I knew that fervor, that hatred. It was a hatred that had been nurtured in me by my own father.” She paused. “But I was female, and sickly, and when my brother Kafir was born all of my father’s hopes for a great soldier of Allah landed on him.

“But Kafir was an unusual child. Intelligent, very wise for his age. And he was a disappointment to my father because he didn’t share our passion. He was always questioning us. Why did we believe the things we did, when a careful reading of the Koran showed that it clearly preached peace?”

Tears filled her eyes now. “My father beat him, but Kafir never gave in. Never compromised his own beliefs. And I found myself coming to admire him for it.

“When I turned seventeen,” she continued, “I got very sick. One of my kidneys failed and the other required regular dialysis, and it was clear to the doctors that I needed a transplant. Neither my father nor my mother were a match, and the thought of going to a thirteen-year-old boy seemed wrong somehow. But Kafir volunteeredinsisted on taking the test-and when the results came back it turned out that he was the perfect donor.

“Two weeks later I had this scar, this gift from my brother. Without him, I wouldn’t be here.”

She paused again, as she wiped her tears with her forearm. “A year went by and both of us had grown strong again, bound together not just by blood, but by flesh as well. Then, on a warm afternoon, Kafir left school early one day. Call it fate or coincidence or simply bad luck, but as he walked past a synagogue a car parked in front of it exploded, taking half the building and my brother along with it.”

“My God,” Jack said.

“No,” Sara told him. “Not God. Not Allah. This was simply the work of men, men like my father whose hatred was so strong that it took the life of an innocent young boy. A boy who had more potential, more nobility, in his small body than any of them would ever understand.”

Jack held her as she sobbed. Her tears were warm and dear against his chest. As much as their lovemaking, that gift of trust was precious.

“Did they find the bombers?” he asked.

Sara collected herself. “No. And that is the sickness of it. It could have been anyone. Rogue Muslims of the same branch or a different branch… Not knowing who had attacked him made me realize that their hatred was my hatred. It didn’t matter who held it. It was wrong.”

“That was a pretty big thought for a teenager to grasp.”

“It wasn’t just a ‘thought,’ Jack. It was a vision — from Allah. What you Christians call an epiphany. I could not shake it.

“My mother had a breakdown and had to be hospitalized. My father was inconsolable, and within the year I knew I had to get away from there.” She paused. “So I moved to London and vowed that I would do whatever I could to keep another Kafir from being lost to the world.”

She was silent then. Jack could feel the emotion draining away, her shoulders relaxing. He wanted to respond, to find the perfect words to soothe her.

But before he could speak, they heard a loud, steady beep coming from the living room.

Faisal’s laptop.

They had to scramble to get dressed before the beeping woke Faisal. They just made it to the living room when he stumbled in and plopped in front of his laptop, punching a key to cut the notifier and examine the results.

It didn’t look as though their lovemaking had bothered him. Jack and Sara shared a secret smile.

That felt good, too.

“There’s another level of encryption,” Faisal said. He was still half asleep and yawning, staring at the computer screen with bleary eyes. “Whoever sent these e-mails didn’t want people like us getting nosy.”

“So Alain was right,” Sara said to Jack. “This could be significant information.”

There were five open e-mails stacked on the screen, each sent to tdl@alliedharborassoc. net, and each with a single line of text. The lines, however, were a jumble of letters and numbers that made no sense: EFDH3054383 gjvaf Nhthfg gjragl Gjragl Uhaqerq UEF uggc://ovg. yl/umfLZ3

Jack looked from the hash to Faisal. “I thought that program was supposed to translate all this stuff.”

“That was the second level of encryption,” Faisal said. “The difficult one. But not to worry, these all look like simple ROT-13 cyphers.”

Jack was clueless. “What’s that?”

“It’s a rudimentary form of code based on the old Caesar cypher. A lot of gamers use it to hide cheat codes and spoilers on Internet forums. They’re extremely easy to crack, which is why the sender used that second level of encryption.”

“So how does it work?” Jack asked.

“You replace each letter by the one located thirteen letters after it in the alphabet. For example, an A becomes an N. I have the lookup table here.”

He punched a key and a small window popped up, showing: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz NOPQRSTUVWXYZABCDEFGHIJKLM nopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklm

“Decryption is a fairly mindless task at this point,” he went on. “The numbers will remain the same. All we need do is transpose the letters and we’ll know what these messages say.”

Faisal had already gone to work, using another computer application to quickly translate the lines. When it was done, he stacked the decryptions on the screen: RSQU3054383 twins August twenty Twenty Hundred HRS http://bit.ly/hzsYM3

Nobody spoke for a long moment. Jack felt his heart begin to race. “I think we’ve just hit pay dirt,” he said to Sara. “You realize what this is, don’t you?”

“I’m not sure what the first two lines are all about,” Sara said, “but that last one’s an Internet address. So I’m guessing these are the date, time, and target of an attack.”

Jack nodded. “The first one looks like a serial number of some kind. Or maybe the ISO number for a shipping container.”

“Could be a shipment from Chilikov, if Haddad was successful.”

“That’s what I was thinking,” Jack said. “But what about this ‘twins’ line? You think it’s a reference to the twin towers? A reminder of their last big hit?”

“The infidels will soon see destruction that will make 9/11 seem like child’s play.”

“It could be that,” Sara said. “It could also be two prongs of an attack, two cells, matching automobiles being used for smuggling-anything. But whatever it means, August twentieth is only three days from now. Saturday night.”

Jack gestured to Faisal. “Can you paste that URL into a browser? I want to see what they have in mind.” He added as an afterthought, “Please?”

Faisal did as he was asked. When he clicked the address, Google Maps came to life on screen, showing a satellite image of San Francisco. Flagged in the middle of it by a big letter A, was one of the city’s best-known landmarks.