‘Hold it!’
Two of the guards and a policeman entered the hallway frowning, their guns drawn. They were not too happy about all the excitement. Albert and Orville threw themselves into the lift. They could hear the sound of feet running on the carpet and saw a hand reaching in to try to stop the lift. It missed by a few inches.
The door closed with a scratching noise. Outside they could make out the muffled voices of the guards.
‘How do you open this thing?’ the policeman said.
‘They won’t get far. This lift needs a special key to operate it. Nobody can make it go without it.’
‘Activate the emergency system you told me about.’
‘Yes, sir. Right away. It’ll be like shooting fish in a barrel.’
Orville felt his heart pounding as he turned to Albert.
‘Fuck, they’re going to get us!’
The priest was smiling.
‘What the hell’s the matter with you? Think of something,’ Orville hissed.
‘I already have. When we went into Kayn Tower’s computer system this morning, it was impossible to get to the electronic key in their system that makes the lift doors open.’
‘Fucking impossible,’ agreed Orville, who didn’t like being beaten by anything, but on this occasion had run into the mother of all firewalls.
‘You may be a great spy and you certainly know a few tricks . . . but you lack the one thing that is essential in a great hacker: lateral thinking,’ Albert said. He crossed his arms behind his head, as if he were relaxing in his living room. ‘When the doors are locked, you use the windows. Or in this case you change the sequence that determines the lift’s position, and the order of the floors. A simple step that wasn’t blocked. Now the Kayn computer thinks that the lift’s on the thirty-ninth floor instead of the thirty-eighth.’
‘So?’ said Orville, slightly annoyed by the priest’s bragging, but also curious.
‘Well, my friend, in this kind of situation all the emergency systems in this city make the lifts go down to the last available floor and then open the door.’
At that very moment, after a brief shudder, the lift started going up. They could hear the shocked guards yelling outside.
‘Up is down and down is up,’ Orville said, clapping his hands in the middle of a cloud of mint disinfectant. ‘You’re a genius.’
75
THE EXCAVATION
AL MUDAWWARA DESERT, JORDAN
Thursday, 20 July 2006. 6:43 a.m.
Fowler wasn’t ready to risk Andrea’s life again. Using the satellite phone without any precautions was insane.
It made no sense for someone with his experience to make the same error twice. This would be the third time.
The first had been the previous night. The priest had raised his eyes from his prayer book as the excavation team came out of the cave carrying the half-dead body of Professor Forrester. Andrea came running over to him and told him what had happened. The reporter said they were certain that a gold box lay hidden inside the cave, and Fowler no longer had any doubts. Taking advantage of the general excitement caused by the news, he had called Albert, who explained that he was going to try one last time to get information on the terrorist group and Huqan around midnight in New York, a couple of hours after dawn in Jordan. The call lasted exactly thirteen seconds.
The second one had taken place earlier that morning, when Fowler had jumped the gun and called. That call lasted six seconds. He doubted the scanner had time to work out where the signal came from.
The third call would take place in six and a half minutes’ time.
Albert, for God’s sake, don’t fail me.
76
KAYN TOWER
NEW YORK
Wednesday, 19 July 2006. 11:45 p.m.
‘How do you think they’ll get in?’ Orville asked.
‘I guess they’ll bring a SWAT team and abseil down from the roof, probably shoot out the glass windows and all that shit.’
‘A SWAT team for a couple of unarmed burglars? Don’t you think that’s like using a tank to go after a couple of mice.’
‘Look at it this way, Orville: two strangers have broken into the private offices of a paranoid multimillionaire. You should be happy they’re not going to drop a bomb on us. Now let me concentrate. To be the only one who has access to this floor, Russell must have a very secure computer.’
‘Don’t tell me that after everything we’ve been through to get here you can’t get into his computer!’
‘I didn’t say that. I’m just saying it will take me at least ten more seconds.’
Albert wiped the sweat from his forehead then let his hands fly over the keyboard. Not even the best hacker in the world can get into a computer if it’s not linked to a server. That had been their problem from the beginning. They had tried everything to locate Russell’s computer within the Kayn network. It was impossible because in terms of systems, the computers on this floor didn’t belong to Kayn Tower. To his surprise, Albert found out that not only Russell but also Kayn used computers that were connected to the Internet and each other using 3G cards, two of the hundreds of thousands that were operating in New York City at the time. Without that crucial bit of information, Albert could have spent decades searching the Internet for two invisible computers.
They must pay more than five hundred dollars a day for their broadband usage not to mention the calls, Albert thought. I suppose that’s nothing when you’re worth millions. Especially when you can keep people like us at bay using such a simple trick.
‘I think I’ve got it,’ said the priest as the screen changed from a black background to the bright blue of the system’s start-up. ‘Any luck finding that disk?’
Orville had gone through the drawers and the only cupboard in Russell’s neat and elegant office, pulling out files and dumping them on the carpet. He was now tugging paintings off the wall in a frenzy, looking for a safe, and slicing through the bottom of chairs with a silver letter opener.
‘Looks like there’s nothing to find,’ Orville said, pushing one of Russell’s chairs over with his foot so that he could sit next to Albert. The bandages on his hands were once again covered in blood and his round face was pale.
‘Paranoid son of a bitch. They only communicated with each other. No external e-mails. Russell must use another computer to run the business.’
‘He must have taken it to Jordan.’
‘I need your help. What do we look for?’
A minute later, after keying in all the passwords he could think of, Orville gave up.
‘It’s useless. There’s nothing. And if there was, he’s already erased it.’
‘That gives me an idea. Wait,’ said Albert, taking from his pocket a USB flash drive no bigger than a stick of chewing gum, and connecting it to the CPU of the computer so that it would interface with the hard drive. ‘The little program in this baby will let you retrieve information from erased sections on the hard drive. We can go from there.’
‘Terrific. Look for Netcatch.’
‘Right!’
With a little buzz, a list of fourteen files appeared in the program’s search window. Albert opened all of them at once.
‘They’re html files. Saved websites.’
‘Do you recognise anything?’
‘Yes, I saved them myself. They’re what I call server conversations. Terrorists never send each other e-mails when they’re planning an attack. Any idiot knows that e-mail can go through twenty or thirty servers before reaching its destination, so you never know who’s watching your communication. What they do is give everyone in the cell the same password to a free account and they write whatever they need to pass on as a draft e-mail message. It’s like you’re writing to yourself except that it’s a whole cell of terrorists communicating with each other. The e-mail is never sent. It never goes anywhere because each one of the terrorists is using the same account and—’
Orville stood paralysed in front of the screen,
so stunned that for a moment he forgot to breathe. The unthinkable, what he had never imagined, suddenly became obvious before his very eyes.
‘This isn’t right,’ he said.
‘What is it, Orville?’
‘I . . . hack through thousands and thousands of accounts every week. When we copy files from a web server, we only keep the text. If we didn’t, the images would quickly fill up our hard drives. The result is ugly, but you can still read it.’
Orville pointed a bandaged finger at the computer screen, where a conversation between terrorists on the e-mail account Maktoob.com could be seen with coloured buttons and images that would not have been the case had this been one of the files he had hacked into and saved.
‘Somebody went into Maktoob.com from the browser in this computer, Albert. Even though they erased it after they finished, the images remained in the memory cache. And to get into Maktoob . . .’
Albert understood even before Orville could finish.
‘Whoever was here had to know the password.’
Orville agreed.
‘It’s Russell, Albert. Russell is Huqan.’
At that moment shots rang out, shattering the large window.
77
THE EXCAVATION
AL MUDAWWARA DESERT, JORDAN
Thursday, 20 July 2006. 6:49 a.m.
Fowler looked carefully at his watch. Nine seconds ahead of the agreed time, the unexpected happened.
Albert was calling.
The priest had gone to the canyon entrance to make his call. There was a blind spot there that the soldier watching from the southern end of the cliff couldn’t see. The moment he turned on the phone, the call came. Fowler knew straight away that something was wrong.
‘Albert, what’s happened?’
On the other end of the line he heard a number of voices yelling. Fowler tried to understand what was going on.
‘Throw down the phone!’
‘Officer, I have to make this call!’ Albert’s voice sounded far away, as if he didn’t have the phone next to his ear. ‘It’s really important. It’s a question of national security.’
‘I told you to drop the fucking phone.’
‘I’m going to lower my arm slowly and talk. If you see me do something suspicious, then shoot me.’
‘This is my last warning. Drop it!’
‘Anthony,’ Albert’s voice was steady and clear. He’d finally put the earpiece in. ‘Can you hear me?’
‘Yes, Albert.’
‘Russell is Huqan. Confirmed. Be careful—’
The connection was cut off. Fowler felt a wave of shock wash over his body. He turned around to run towards the camp, then everything went black.
78
INSIDE THE DINING TENT, FIFTY-THREE SECONDS BEFORE
Andrea and Harel stopped at the entrance to the mess tent when they saw David Pappas running towards them. Pappas was carrying a bloody T-shirt and he seemed to be disoriented.
‘Doctor, Doctor!’
‘What the hell’s going on, David?’ answered Harel. She had been in the same bad mood ever since the water incident had made proper coffee a thing of the past.
‘It’s the professor. He’s in bad shape.’
David had volunteered to stay with Forrester while Andrea and Doc went to breakfast. The only thing that had delayed the demolition of the wall to get to the Ark was Forrester’s condition, although Russell had wanted to go ahead with the job the previous night. David had refused to open the cavity until the professor had had a chance to recover and could join them. Andrea, whose opinion of Pappas had gone from bad to worse over the past few hours, suspected that he was simply waiting for Forrester to be completely out of the way.
‘OK.’ Doc sighed. ‘You go ahead, Andrea. It doesn’t make sense for both of us to miss breakfast.’ She began jogging back towards the infirmary.
The reporter took a quick peek inside the mess tent. Zayit and Peterke waved back at her. Andrea liked the mute cook and his assistant but the only people sitting at the tables at that moment were two of the soldiers, Alois Gottlieb and Louis Maloney, who were eating from their trays. Andrea was surprised there were only two of them, because the soldiers normally had breakfast together, leaving only one lookout posted on the southern ridge for half an hour. In fact, breakfast was the only time she ever saw the soldiers together in one place.
Since she didn’t care for their company, Andrea had decided she would go back and see if she could help Harel.
Even though my medical knowledge is so limited I’d probably put a hospital gown on backwards.
Then Doc turned around and yelled: ‘Do me a favour, and bring me a large coffee, OK?’
Andrea put one foot inside the mess tent, trying to work out the best route to avoid the sweaty soldiers, who were leaning over their food like apes, when she almost banged into Nuri Zayit. The cook must have seen the doctor running back to the infirmary because he handed Andrea a tray with two cups of instant coffee and a plate of toast.
‘Instant coffee dissolved in milk, is that right, Nuri?’
The mute smiled and shrugged his shoulders to say it wasn’t his fault.
‘I know. Perhaps tonight we’ll see water springing from a rock and all that biblical stuff. Anyway, thank you.’
Slowly, making sure she didn’t spill the coffee because she knew she wasn’t the most coordinated person in the world, even though she would never admit it out loud, she headed for the infirmary. Nuri waved to her from the entrance to the mess tent, still smiling.
And then it happened.
Andrea felt as if a giant hand were lifting her up from the ground and throwing her six and a half feet into the air before flinging her back down. She felt a sharp pain in her left arm and a terrible burning on her chest and her back. She turned just in time to see thousands of small pieces of burning cloth falling from the sky. A column of black smoke was all that was left of what, two seconds ago, had been the mess tent. Up high the smoke seemed to mix with another much blacker smoke. Andrea couldn’t work out where it was coming from. Carefully, she touched her chest and realised that her shirt was covered in a hot sticky liquid.
Doc came running over.
‘Are you all right? Oh God, are you OK, darling?’
Andrea was aware that Harel was shouting even though she sounded far away due to the whistling in Andrea’s ears. She felt the doctor checking her neck and arms.
‘My chest.’
‘You’re OK. It’s only coffee.’
Andrea stood up carefully and saw that she had spilled the coffee over herself. Her right hand was still clutching the tray, while her left arm had banged against a rock. She moved her fingers, afraid that she had suffered more injuries. Luckily nothing was broken but her whole left side felt as if it were paralyzed.
While a few members of the expedition tried to put out the fire using buckets of sand, Harel concentrated on taking care of Andrea’s wounds. The reporter had cuts and scratches to the left side of her body. Her hair and the skin on her back had been slightly burned and there was a constant buzzing in her ears.
‘The buzzing will disappear in three to four hours,’ Harel said as she put her stethoscope back into her trouser pocket.
‘I’m sorry . . .’ Andrea said, almost shouting without realising it. She was crying.
‘You have nothing to be sorry for.’
‘He . . . Nuri . . . brought the coffee out to me. If I had gone inside to get it, I’d be dead right now. I could’ve asked him to come out and smoke a cigarette with me. I could’ve saved his life in return.’
Harel pointed to the surroundings. Both the mess tent and a fuel truck had been blown up - two separate explosions at the same time. Four people had been turned to nothing but ash.
‘The only one who should feel anything is the son of a bitch who did this.’
‘Don’t worry about it, lady, we have him,’ Torres said.
He and Jackson were dragging a person in handcuffs by th
e feet. They deposited him in the middle of the area by the tents while the other expedition members looked on in shock, unable to believe what they were seeing.
79
THE EXCAVATION
AL MUDAWWARA DESERT, JORDAN
Thursday, 20 July 2006. 6:49 a.m.
Fowler put his hand up to his forehead. It was bleeding. The explosion from the truck had thrown him to the ground and he had hit his head against something. He had tried to get up and head back towards the camp with the satellite phone still in his hand. In the middle of his hazy vision and the thick cloud of smoke, he saw two soldiers approaching with their guns aimed at him.
‘It was you, you son of a bitch!’
‘Look, he still has the phone in his hand.’
‘That’s what you used to set off the explosions, wasn’t it, you bastard?’
The butt of a rifle hit his head. He fell to the ground but didn’t feel the kicks or the other blows to his body. He had lost consciousness long before that.
‘This is ridiculous,’ Russell screamed, joining the group that had crowded around Father Fowler: Dekker, Torres, Jackson and Alryk Gottlieb on the soldiers’ side; Eichberg, Hanley and Pappas from what was left of the civilians.
With Harel’s help, Andrea was trying to stand up and go over to the group of threatening faces that were black with soot.
‘It’s not ridiculous, sir,’ said Dekker, throwing down Fowler’s satellite phone. ‘He was carrying this when we found him near the fuel truck. Thanks to the scanner, we know he made a brief phone call this morning, so we were already suspicious of him. Instead of going to breakfast, we took our positions and watched him. Luckily.’