Lethal Code Read online

  What was notable, Lana thought, was that neither Holmes nor anyone else at the table was rushing to speculate about the perpetrators of the attack, though numerous suspects came immediately to her mind and, undoubtedly, to theirs as well.

  “It’s going to get worse,” Tenon added with another nervous tug on his beard.

  That wasn’t news in nearby Washington, D.C. Smoke was already drifting over the White House.

  CHAPTER 3

  RUHI MANCUR DIDN’T SEE the smoke rising above the city, much less the plumes drifting over the Capitol. Not yet, anyway. His eyes were on a smooth footpath that meandered alongside the slowly flowing Potomac River, his favorite part of the morning’s eight-mile run.

  He heard sirens, but that wasn’t unusual in Washington. Neither was it unusual for him to ignore them. When he hit the trails, he paid little attention to anything but the American pop of his immigrant youth. His parents had brought him to D.C. from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, when he was seven, and he loved listening to his iPod. Right now it was filling his head with the exuberance of Cindy Lauper’s “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.” He never tired of her anthem, always recalling her crazy dresses and hair, and the brightly colored bangles and bodices that made her look like an exotic tropical species with a rich plumage all her own. Living under the House of Saud, he’d never seen anything remotely like Lauper, that’s for sure. For him, the pop star had always personified the irrepressibly relaxed wonder of America.

  But right now her music helped him ignore the world as he put his body through its rigors. He was a broad-shouldered veteran of fourteen marathons, and Lauper had made many of those miles bearable. So even on a bad day, the frenetic interference of the nation’s capital was a poor opponent of Ruhi’s amply armed iPod. And a brisk Monday-morning run was an altogether marvelous way to start his week, before going to work at the Natural Resources Defense Council, NRDC. He liked to think that the organization got some “mileage” out of the irony that he hailed from a country in which oil accounted for ninety-five percent of its exports and seventy percent of its profits. Very much the lapsed Saudi.

  But as Ruhi headed back to Georgetown, the sirens and alarms grew uncomfortably loud and vastly more numerous until they bled over one another and forced him to recognize that they were going off all at once. It was like cell phones in a crisis, which, from all appearances—a rush of ambulances, fire trucks, police cars—was taking place.

  That’s when he paused and emerged from his endorphin fog. Traffic lights were not working—and they hadn’t been since he’d turned from the river. He’d been darting across streets on automatic pilot. But now he recognized a change in the city’s pulse. Cars were doing a fair amount of darting as well, slowing down and then blowing through dark intersections. Their scurrying reminded him of the city’s rats when headlights lit them up. But admittedly, he wasn’t a big fan of the country’s automobile culture, which was strike two against him as an expat Saudi, because his countrymen had long adored American muscle cars.

  Moreover, he spied an urgency in the drivers’ faces that made him wary of sprinting across any more streets. Better to dodge and feint and take nothing for granted. As an urban runner—fleet-footed, but calm in demeanor—he was accustomed to the mindless quirks of motorists, but the gunning of engines and screeching of brakes was all out of proportion to the simple power outage that he observed. In short, he sensed a palpable panic beyond the measure of ordinary turmoil.

  Everywhere he looked—cars, cabs, pedestrians—people appeared on edge. Nothing had power. No cheery welcome or open signs blazed in shop windows. And there was no Internet, either, to judge by the frustrated reactions of people staring dumbfounded at their suddenly not-so-smart phones.

  Ruhi had left his at home, as he generally did for his daily run.

  He turned down M Street, one of Georgetown’s main thoroughfares, and headed home, passing a Starbucks where the green-apron brigade was busy apologizing profusely as it ushered customers out the door—sans java.

  Not far from his apartment, Ruhi ran right past the location of Alexander Graham Bell’s first switching office more than one hundred years ago. That irony did not elude him, either.

  As he bounded up the granite steps of an old, distinguished townhouse, long ago converted into a tony fourplex, he had to step aside for Candace Anders. She’d moved into one of the upstairs units last month—and shot right to the top of Ruhi’s list of desirable neighbors. That was saying a lot about Candace’s blond, ponytailed appeal, because Ruhi’s leafy street had lots of eye candy of the female persuasion.

  “Do you know what’s going on?” Ruhi asked Candace, as casually as if they had shared much more than passing nods on those steps.

  “It’s definitely a power outage,” she said, which, of course, added little to what Ruhi already knew.

  But he had gleaned a fair amount about Candace from the Web, once he learned that she was a recent hire of her conservative Indiana congressman. That made her one of “them,” in Ruhi’s world: a climate-change denier and tool of Big Oil and Big Coal. It was hard not to peg them quickly when you were the director of research for the NRDC. Ruhi knew the congressional roll call as well as the sergeants-at-arms of the House and Senate.

  Before he could riff on power outages and the nation’s insatiable appetite for energy, Candace went on:

  “It may actually be a lot more than a glitch in the grid. Somebody running by said the blackout is all across the country.”

  “Really?” That stunned Ruhi. It would be a first, according to everything he had read about power outages in his adopted country, which was voluminous. “A total blackout?”

  “That’s what I heard—” She sounded like she’d cut herself off.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Well, there was a rumor flying around the Capitol that a cyberattack had been launched by jihadists.”

  “Oh, no,” he groaned. As a dark-skinned Middle Easterner who had endured his share of open hostility in his adopted country after 9/11, he was mindful of what that rumor could mean.

  “It’s not confirmed.”

  “But it was the first one to come up, I’ll bet,” he replied.

  She didn’t disagree.

  He hoped to God his countrymen hadn’t done anything now. They’d had a notorious role in the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. The last thing he wanted to hear was that more religious zealots had claimed the mantle of Mohammed to serve their own earthly needs. He just wished he could convey his harsh judgment of extremists to a dark-suited guy in a Lincoln Navigator who was giving him the stink eye as he drove by.

  He and Candace paused at the top of the steps to look down the street. Neither said a word for several seconds. He wanted to see if she’d continue the discussion. In truth, he figured Candace probably held deep suspicions about Muslims, even lapsed ones like him. That was strike three, in the view of most Saudis.

  A man in a pinstripe suit swore loudly as he hurried past them, working his phone with both thumbs. Then he looked around and declared, “Nothing’s working,” before jamming the device into his pocket.

  “I can’t get online, either,” Candace said. She looked at Ruhi expectantly. “You?”

  “I don’t have it with me.”

  “That’s a first for this town. I’m not saying it’s jihadists, but it does smack of a cyberattack.”

  “What makes you say that?” It hadn’t occurred to Ruhi, but the possibility sure grabbed his attention. He knew plenty about energy consumption and distribution in the U.S., and if this was, indeed, a nationwide problem, cyberattack made grim sense.

  “I guess it could be a Martian invasion,” she said, “but short of aliens, nothing else explains it.”

  “Bombs would. A tightly coordinated widespread attack might.”

  “We’d know about the attacks,” she replied. “We’d have instant reports, instead of an instant loss of power.”

  “If that’s the case, we’re in serious trouble,” he replied. “This could go on and on. Do you know about ‘just-in-time delivery’?”

  She shook her head.

  “It’s a wonkish kind of thing.”

  Happy to have her attention, he explained that the U.S. was highly dependent on centralized power plants that replaced broken parts—even the most vital ones—on the so-called just-in-time delivery principle.

  “It’s just the opposite of ‘in stock,’” he went on. “It means that if a cyberattack on a power plant forces a big turbine to spin so fast that it tears itself apart, it could take six months before anybody can build the replacement and put it in place. You can thank deregulation for that.” Starting with your boss, he almost added.

  Candace shook her head and lifted her eyebrows, which Ruhi found an endearing way to disagree with him. In fact, it made him wish that he’d left out the jab about deregulation.

  “If it is a cyberattack,” she said, “we’d better start thinking about China. Or blowback for our cyberattacks on Iran. I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if they’d decided to retaliate massively and anonymously.”

  He was surprised to hear those words coming from a staffer for a congressman who’d supported every war the U.S. had engaged in for the past four decades.

  “Have you had a chance to tell your boss that?” he asked mischievously.

  “No! I like my job.”

  She smiled, and it occurred to him that he might be cultivating a source on a conservative congressman’s staff.

  Or she’s cultivating you.

  Jarred from their conversation by a boisterous crowd of about fifteen young men—late teens, early twenties—racing around the corner. They spotted him immediately and yelled “raghead.”

  Oh, shit. That’s also
when he spotted huge funnels of smoke rising into the sky from the heart of the nation’s capital.

  “What’s going—”

  Ruhi interrupted Candace by taking her arm and hurrying her to the door of the converted townhouse. Locked, of course.

  The young men were stampeding now, perhaps spurred by his own rush to get inside. He looked back and found them only two townhouses away, fury contorting their faces. They had closed the gap to within a hundred feet. He heard Candace swear under her breath as he fidgeted with his key. He looked again.

  Fifty feet.

  He knew he was going to get severely beaten, at best. He didn’t even want to consider what might happen to an ingénue from the drought-stricken cornfields of the Midwest who was audacious enough to consort with a “raghead.”

  Twenty-five feet.

  He managed to work the key into the old lock, but it was catching on something.

  “Come on!” she whispered.

  He hated that lock. He jiggled it frantically . . .

  Ten feet.

  . . . and the lock slid open.

  She rushed inside. He followed a breath behind, slamming the door and locking it just as the thick wood thundered from pounding fists and boots. Unseen hands grabbed the handle and tried to force it open. He thought he heard a gunshot.

  “My place,” she shouted. “Upstairs.”

  They raced past Ruhi’s first-level apartment and up the broad stairs that rose from the grand old entryway. He heard the door rattling behind them and looked back as an elderly neighbor stepped out of her downstairs apartment.

  “Go back inside,” Ruhi stopped to yell. He gestured wildly at the front door. “And lock up!”

  “What?” she said, slowly inserting her hearing aid.

  A loud crash turned their attention to the front door. The mob had split the top part right down the middle. Two gunshots plowed into the handle and lock. Ruhi was sure about the shots this time, but the door still didn’t give.

  A face appeared in the opening. Ruhi felt like the easiest target in all of D.C. The guy’s gaze followed Candace rounding the top of the stairs. Ruhi was glad the man wasn’t the shooter.

  “Go back inside,” Ruhi screamed at the older woman as he resumed his sprint up the stairs. But she had figured out the threat on her own and was hobbling into her apartment.

  Ruhi was sure he was dead if the mob broke down the door. This was much more anger than the worst animosity that he had experienced after 9/11. And the guy who had his face in the opening had glimpsed where he was headed.

  “This way,” Candace yelled as he reached the top of the stairs.

  He ran into her apartment. She threw a bolt lock into place in less than a second. Then she raced to what looked like a jewelry box and pulled out a 9-millimeter Beretta, matte black and wholly menacing. While he watched, she popped the clip, checked the load, and jammed it back in. Then she shocked him further by pulling two spare clips from the “jewelry” box.

  “Over here,” she said, setting up behind an antique oak armoire.

  She was rapidly turning Ruhi’s gallant notions of rescuing her on their head. He couldn’t have been more grateful. Guns? He wasn’t raised with guns. But he was fortunate, he realized, to have ended up next to a farm girl who appeared more than competent with semiautomatic weaponry. Maybe that’s what they did on dates out there in farm country—went shooting. Who knows? Rural America could have been Pluto, as far as he was concerned.

  “The first time someone touches that door,” Candace vowed, “I’m putting a bullet through the top of it. They do it again, I’m lowering my aim. These babies penetrate.”

  She reminded him of those Korean grocers in Los Angeles, back in the ’92 riots, who had saved their stores by fighting off mobs of looters with carbines. Ruhi had been a kid, but he remembered the video like it was yesterday.

  “I thought you just got here from Indiana,” he said. She looked and sounded like she’d been running a crew where times were tough and gunplay plentiful. Which, as it turned out, was true:

  “From Indiana via guard duty at the embassy in Kabul.”

  “No kidding?”

  She nodded, but her eyes were on the door because someone was smashing the hallway fire extinguisher through the top panel, and gunshots plowed into the lock. But you needed more than a couple of bullets to knock out a strong bolt.

  As soon as the red canister reappeared, she fired, as promised, into the lintel. But a half second later, someone bashed an even bigger hole with the extinguisher, and a hand came through the opening, searching blindly for the handle. They heard hellacious shouting and swearing in the hallway and pounding on the door.

  Candace shook her head and rested her shooting hand on the edge of the armoire.

  What?

  Ruhi was sure she’d lost her nerve. He reached for the gun, figuring one of them needed to pull the trigger.

  “No!” Candace snapped.

  “Sorry.” He backed off.

  “Stop,” she yelled toward the door, “or I’ll shoot you.”

  The threat didn’t discourage the guy—or he failed to hear her amid the pandemonium. He tried the handle, and then groped blindly for the lock. A second later, he found it.

  Candace squinted and fired twice. The first bullet grazed his arm; the second tore through the back of his hand and buried itself in a thick horizontal board in the middle of the door.

  The guy’s screams and profanities filled the room. He tried to jerk his arm out of the opening, catching his sleeve on a jagged edge of shattered panel long enough for Ruhi and Candace to get a good look at the wound. It was a couple of inches below his wrist. Then his hand disappeared and they heard the mob thundering down the stairs, shouts and threats receding as they raced away.

  Candace immediately rushed to the side of the door, holding her pistol in both hands with the muzzle pointed to the ceiling. She wheeled and aimed through the opening. Ruhi braced himself for the worst. She held her fire.

  “You’re not going out there, are you?” he asked.

  Candace shook her head. “Not right now.” She never moved her eyes from the opening when she spoke. Her soft countenance had vanished, replaced by a rigid, determined look. Now Ruhi had no difficulty imaging her performing guard duty in Kabul. Or leading a platoon in Afghanistan’s notorious Korangel Valley, for that matter.

  Who is she?

  “Is there any way I can help?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “But I can’t spend the night in this place. Look at that.”

  Candace nodded at the ruined door. Blood splatters darkened the area near the handle. Big drips spotted the hardwood floor.

  “You’re more than welcome to stay in my place.”

  She gave Ruhi a skeptical look that he had seen on the faces of other women.

  “I don’t mean that,” he protested. “I’ll sleep on my couch.”

  “I’ll consider it,” she replied.

  But she was still staring at the hallway, as if she didn’t believe it was actually empty.

  “Get off me,” Emma mumbled. “Get off me.”

  It felt like Payton’s mouth was pressing down on her—again. On the sidewalk! And there were sirens, but when she opened her eyes it wasn’t Payton at all. It was blurry, but she was pretty sure an African American guy was giving her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Except he wasn’t using his lips, not directly. He had some plastic thing over them.

  Whoa. What’s going on?

  “What are you doing?” she managed as the plastic thingy fell away.

  “You’re going to be all right, young lady.” Now the guy was picking her up and moving quickly with her in his arms.

  All right?

  That’s when the pain returned—with a vengeance. Her eyes and the insides of her nose and mouth felt burned. So did her lungs.

  Just as she took inventory of her agony, she was flopped onto a gurney with folding legs and shoved like a pizza into the oven of the ambulance.

  A sweaty white guy dripped on her as he placed an oxygen mask over her mouth and nose, and offered the same solace as the African American: “You’re going to be all right.” Drip-drip. Except he added, “Hang in there.”