LITMIR.BIZ

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pulled out from the curb and rolled quietly down the street. There was no other traffic.

      A tickle of excitement – it was almost fear – went through Jamal’s body as he watched the police. They had no reason to harass him. He wasn’t breaking any laws. He was a well-dressed man in a dark suit and Italian leather shoes, with a clean-shaven face. He could be a businessman, or the owner of these low-rise tenement buildings all around him. He wasn’t the type for the police to randomly stop and search. Even so, Jamal had fallen into the hands of the authorities before – not here in Belgium, but in other places. His experiences were unpleasant, to put it mildly. He had once spent twelve hours listening to himself scream in agony.

      He shook his head to clear the dark thoughts, finished his cigarette in three deep inhales, ignored the garbage can, and pitched the butt on the ground. He turned back down the alley. He passed a round red sign with a horizontal white stripe – DO NOT ENTER. The street was too narrow for car traffic. If the police suddenly decided they wanted to pursue him, they’d be forced to do so on foot. Either that, or circle around several blocks. By the time they returned, he’d be gone.

      After fifty meters, he turned quickly and unlocked the entrance to a particularly dilapidated building. He climbed a narrow stairwell three stories until it dead-ended at a thick, steel-reinforced door. The stairs were old, made of wood and crazily warped. The whole stairwell seemed to twist this way and that like taffy, giving it the feeling of a carnival funhouse.

      Jamal made a fist and hammered on the heavy door, his knocks coming in a careful sequence:

      BANG-BANG. BANG-BANG.

      He paused a few seconds.

      BANG.

      A gun-hole slid open and an eye appeared there. The man on the other side grunted as he verified who it was. Jamal listened to the guard turn keys in locks, then remove the steel t-bar wedged into the floor at the bottom of the door. The police would have a very hard time entering this apartment, if their suspicion ever fell upon it.

      “As salaam alaikum,” Jamal said as he entered.

      “Wa alailkum salaam,” the man who opened the door said. He was a tall, burly man. He wore a grimy sleeveless T-shirt, work pants, and boots. A thick unkempt beard covered his face, meeting the mass of curly black hair on his scalp. His eyes were dull. He was everything the thin man was not.

      “How do they seem?” Jamal said in French.

      The big man shrugged. “Good, I think.”

      Jamal passed through a beaded curtain, down a short hallway, and entered a small room – what would have been the living room if a family were occupying this place. The dingy room was crowded with young men, most wearing T-shirts, jerseys from their favorite European football teams, track pants, and sneakers. It was hot and humid in the room, perhaps from the proximity of all the bodies in a small space. It smelled like wet socks mingled with body odor in there.

      In the center of the room, on a wide wooden table, sat a bullet-shaped device made of silver metal. It was about a meter long and less than half a meter wide. Jamal had spent time in Germany and Austria, and the device reminded him of a small beer keg. In fact, except for its weight – it was quite light – it was a very close replica of an American W80 nuclear warhead.

      Two young men were at the table while the others circled around and watched. One stood in front of a small laptop computer mounted inside a steel suitcase. The suitcase had a panel which ran alongside the laptop – there were two switches, two LED lights (one red and one green), and a dial built into the panel. A wire ran from the case to another panel along the side of the warhead. The entire device – the suitcase and the laptop inside it – were known as a UC 1583 controller. It was a device designed for one task only – to communicate with a nuclear weapon.

      The second man was bent over a white envelope on the table. He wore an expensive digital microscope affixed to his eye, and slowly scanned the envelope, looking for what he knew must be there – a tiny dot, no larger than the period at the end of a sentence, in which there was embedded the code that would arm and activate the warhead.

      Jamal moved closer to watch.

      The young man with the microscope slowly scanned the envelope. Every few seconds, he covered the microscope with his hand and took a larger scale view with his uncovered eye, looking for ink spots, blemishes, any dots that were likely suspects. Then he dove back in with the microscope.

      “Wait,” he whispered under his breath. “Wait…”

      “Come on,” his partner said, an air of impatience in his voice. They were being judged not just for accuracy, but for time. When their moment came, they would be forced to act very quickly.

      “Got it.”

      Now it was the partner who was on the spot. From memory, the young man typed in a sequence that enabled the laptop to accept an arming code. His hands shook as he did so. He was nervous enough that he botched the sequence on the first attempt, canceled, and started over.

      “Okay,” he said. “Give it to me.”

      Very slowly and clearly, the man with the microscope read a sequence of twelve numbers. The other man typed each number as it was spoken. After twelve, the first man said “Done.”

      Now the man at the laptop went through another short sequence, flipped the two switches, and turned the dial. The green LED light on the panel popped on.

      The young man smiled and turned to his instructor.

      “Armed and ready to launch,” he said. “God willing.”

      Jamal also smiled. He was an observer here – he had come to see how the recruits were progressing. They were true believers, preparing for what was likely a suicide mission. If the codes were entered incorrectly, the warheads might simply shut themselves down – they might also self-destruct, dispersing a deadly cloud of radiation and killing everyone in the vicinity.

      No one was sure what would happen in the event of an incorrect code. It was all hearsay and speculation. The Americans kept those secrets closely held. But it didn’t matter. These young men were willing to die, and that’s probably what they would do. Regardless of the codes, when the USA discovered that their precious nuclear weapons had been stolen, they weren’t going to respond kindly. No. The giant beast would lash out, its tentacles flying, destroying everything in its path.

      Jamal nodded and recited a silent prayer of thanks. It had been quite a task pulling together this project. They had the mujahideen necessary – but then, young men willing to die for their faith were easy to acquire.

      The other elements were more challenging. They would soon have the launch platforms and the missiles – Jamal would see to that himself. The codes had been promised, and he was certain they would receive them as described. Then all they would need were the warheads themselves.

      And soon, if it was Allah’s will, they would have those as well.

      CHAPTER THREE

      October 19

      1:15 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time

      Fairfax County, Virginia – Suburbs of Washington, DC

      Luke had hired a chopper to take himself and Gunner out of the canyon. He had finagled a new flight for them, and driven like the devil to make it to Phoenix in time to catch the plane. All the while, he had fended off Gunner’s questions about why they had left so abruptly.

      “Your mom just wants you home, Monster. She misses you, and she doesn’t like you skipping all this school.”

      In the passenger seat, the highway zooming by his window, Luke could see Gunner’s antennae twitching like crazy. He was a smart kid. He was already learning to catch people lying. Luke hated —hated!– that he had to be one of the first people Gunner would catch.

      “I thought you worked all that out with Mom before we left.”

      “I did,” Luke said with a shrug. “But it got unworked out. Listen, we’ll all talk about it when we get there, okay?”

      “Okay,

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