Dana Stabenow - Prepared For Rage

There were over a thousand switches, buttons, and circuit breakers in the shuttle's cockpit, but Kenai often thought it was easier to put the shuttle on orbit than it was to flush its toilet. You had to strap yourself in with thigh clamps to what was essentially a vacuum cleaner and for number two use a sight with crosshairs to zero in on the appropriate orifice. She had planned for a male colleague waiting in the wings to handle this portion of the Arabian Knight's indoctrination into waste management training but she waited until her charge had run through his vocabulary of what she was sure was first-class Arabic invective before calling him in. She had to wear a diaper on orbit herself, so her sympathy was less than sincere, but she stepped out, and then waited for a while before going back in without knocking. More swearing, and the Arabian Knight zipped up with shaking hands and fought his way out of the thigh clamps before storming off.

Kenai raised an eyebrow. "So?"

"He got it. More or less."

"He'd better have, or the first time the Arabian Knight turns a turd loose on the flight deck in zero gee Robertson will put him and the turd into orbit without benefit of spacesuit."

"Any chance you can flush him out with the rest of the urine?"

"I wish."

There was a far more serious problem the next day, in the form of an anonymous threat from some skinhead hate group none of them had ever heard of before, claiming it was a crime against the Almighty to transport

a device owned and to be operated by the heathen, and that God's Army stood ready to attack.

"For Christ's sake," Rick said.

"Exactly," Mike said.

"Just tell me we're not letting this force us into a hold," Kenai said, her jaw very tight.

"No hold," Joel said. "The FBI doesn't regard the, uh, Smoky Mountain Whites as a credible threat."

" 'Smoky Mountain Whites'?"

"That's what they're calling themselves. Evidently they're from Kentucky."

"Whatever," Kenai said, and she and Laurel left to run yet another simulation of the Eratosthenes deployment. Eratosthenes, designed to take up where the Hubble Space Telescope left off, purred through it like a kitten. "If ever mankind built a perfect machine," Laurel said, "Eratosthenes is it."

"Shh," Kenai said, "it'll hear you."

Laura gave the shiny foil exterior of the telescope a fond pat. "She already knows."

WASHINGTON, D.C.

In spite of Yaqub's complete and total meltdown in the interrogation room at Gitmo and his subsequent fervent desire to omit no detail of his work with Isa, no matter how small, he could tell them very little that was useful. Back in his Washington office, Patrick found this frustrating in the extreme.

"He knows Isa only by the alias he used in Germany, Dandin Gandhi, and by another alias in England, Tabari Yabrud," Bob said. "The first names are common first names, and the second are names of Asian and Middle Eastern martyrs, major and minor."

"At this point," Patrick said, cradling the phone between his shoulder and his ear so he could type the names into his Isa database, "kinda not giving a shit what he called himself then. Kinda wanting to know what name he's using now and, oh yeah, where he is now, and what he's doing next."

"Isa told them that the plan was to take out Seatac, San Francisco International, and LAX." "How?"

"He would furnish them with credentials and they would get jobs as baggage handlers. Some of the cell are engineers, big surprise, and two are chemists. He had plans for homemade bombs made out of-" "Let me guess. Diesel fuel and fertilizer."

"Some of them, yeah," Bob said. He sounded tired. "Isa had plans for a lot of different devices, most of them to be assembled by the cell members when they arrived on scene." "What was the play-by-play?"

"For them to fly to Canada, which they did separately. Isa transferred enough funds into everyone's bank accounts to make this possible. We've got people checking on that, but Isa's some kind of Internet wizard, you know that. We'll never be able to trace any of those funds back."

"But we'll try," Patrick said, sitting back from the computer to page through an intelligence report. Three American Muslims had been arrested for praying on an airplane about to back away from a gate in Minneapolis. He couldn't find a great deal to get excited about there, every time he got on a plane anymore he prayed he'd be able to walk again after hours spent in what had to be the most uncomfortable seats ever designed for the human body. He turned the page.

"Yes, we'll try," Bob said. "When they arrived in Vancouver, they were instructed to proceed by public transportation to Lytton, a small town in the mountains north of Vancouver. There, they were to be picked up and taken to a camp even further in country, Sadiq says he doesn't know where." "Do you believe him?"

"I actually kinda do. He really is a sad sack of a terrorist, Patrick. Isa must really be desperate." The two of them contemplated the thought of a desperate Isa in silence for a moment, and then Bob added, "You might want to alert our friends north of the border."

Patrick had already sent off an email. "Will do. Did you tell Sadiq we found Isa's email instructions in Brittany 's jewelry box?"

"Yeah. He was astonished, he thought he'd hidden them so well. Now he thinks we're some kinda psychic."

"Good." There hadn't been much of use to them in the little slip of paper, but if it made Yaqub fear them, that worked for Patrick. "Why was he getting on a plane for Mexico City?"

"He says Isa emailed him that the LAX plan had been aborted due to some security breach and to get on a plane for Mexico City."

The next report in the intelligence folder was of a young woman found in the back of a Ford sedan with her neck broken, in the parking garage at Miami International Airport. Other than that the young woman was a Muslim American, it seemed unfortunate but unrelated to any of his concerns. "Last-minute orders and absolute obedience to same," he said to Bob. "That sounds a lot more like him than that whole planning session in York."

He could almost hear Bob shrug. Bob's job was to interrogate, not to interpret. "I don't think Yaqub's even close to a true believer. He thought about Isa's email for a while before he complied."

"What pushed him over?"

"He says that even if Isa couldn't find him he could probably find Yussuf, since Yussuf is apparently more of a true believer than Yaqub. He was Yussuf's friend, he said. He couldn't let him down."

"Honor among terrorists. Who'd a thunk it?" Patrick turned to the next report, and then he turned back to the one on the murder in the airport garage.

The body showed signs of recent and consensual sex. The ME thought she had been a virgin. She'd had no identification, but her mother had been making increasingly frantic calls to the hospitals and the police from the first morning of her disappearance, and had identified the body within hours of its discovery. Her mother had-

Patrick sat up, his attention caught. Her mother, a Mrs. Haddad Man-sour, had said that she suspected her lodger, a Mr. Daoud Sadat, of the crime. Mr. Sadat, she said, had been renting their spare room for six months, and she feared that he and her daughter had grown quite close.

Even more interesting, her description of him, precisely detailed, was very similar to the doctored photo on Adam Bayzani's passport.

A man, a Muslim terrorist who called himself Isa, or Jesus, a way of mocking the nations pursuing him.

He'd assumed the name Gandhi in Germany. After Mahatma Gandhi, perhaps? It seemed likely, even probable, especially if he then took as an alias the name of another good man, a man whose inspired leadership and vision for peace in the Middle East was a legend among all peoples, if anathema to some. "I will go to Jerusalem," Anwar Sadat had famously said. He had, and Muslim extremists had assassinated him for his vision.