Anonymous Sources (32 page)

I considered this. Then I jumped.

A large, gray cat had sprung onto Tusk's lap.

“There's a good boy. How's my baby?” Tusk stroked its ears and it began to purr.

“A cat?” I asked stupidly.

Tusk went on fluffing its fur.

“You—you bring your cat to work?”

“Oh, no. He lives here. One of the milder eccentricities around here, believe me.”

He patted his leg. “Here, Philby.” The cat stretched, gave a long yawn, and curled itself around his ankles.

“Where were we? Nearly done?” Tusk checked his watch. “Yes. Nearly done.”

I searched my mind for what else to ask. There was so much I wanted to know; very little that he was likely to comment on.

“Targets,” I blurted. “If there really were a bomb inside that crate . . . If terrorists had managed to steal one and get it into the US . . . What would they use it on?”

“You can't possibly believe I'm going to answer that.”

“An alert went out this morning from NCTC. Calling for increased vigilance and random searches of fruit trucks. There must have been some intelligence that led them to do that. What was it?”

He raised his eyebrows. “Really? You're really thinking I might answer that?”

“Listen,” I said, trying not to yell. “I get it. You're the CIA. And this
is all very sensitive and top secret and hush-hush. But if you guys think there's even a remote possibility that somebody has smuggled a nuclear
bomb
into the country, don't you have some responsibility to inform the public?”

“Inform the public? That's your job, not mine.”

“You're not exactly making it easy.”

“No. But then I help run the clandestine service.
Clan-des-tine
. You do see the difficulty? Trust me, Alexandra. There are very good reasons why I can't answer your entirely reasonable questions. Now, let me give you this.”

He peeled a Post-it note off the table in front of us. On it he wrote a number.

“My personal mobile number. I am not in the habit of giving it out. Please don't do anything foolish like entering it into your newspaper contacts database.”

I shook my head.

“Good. Perhaps we can be of use to each other at some future date. I'll see you out.”

He stood and walked me out of the conference room and around the corner, until we could glimpse the uniformed guard at the main desk. Then he waved at the guard, pointed at me, and indicated that I was to be seen out.

“Lovely to meet you, Alexandra. Best of luck.”

“Thank you,” I said stiffly, and shook his hand.

As he moved away, he spoke again in a quiet voice. “If you were a terrorist and you had just one—you're not going to waste it, are you?”

I spun to look at him but he was already headed for the turnstiles. He scanned his badge and disappeared into the building without looking back.

The cat followed him.

    

    

S
haukat Malik was lounging on the bed at the Marriott when his phone chirped to announce the arrival of a new text message.

Odd. Communications were supposed to have gone dark.

Malik pressed mute on the TV remote. He had been watching a cooking show, homemade lamb meatballs in three easy steps.

The message made the hairs on his neck prickle:

Status change. New date. We go TOMORROW, July 2. Stand by
.

But this made no sense. The date had been agreed on weeks ago. Why move it up? Malik sank back onto his pillow, confused.

Perhaps someone important had changed his travel schedule.

Or perhaps the plan had always included shifting the date at the last moment. To keep people off guard. To make sure that any leaks or betrayals would give away only outdated information.

Malik did not know how many people knew details of the operation. He did not know, for example, how many people had received the text he just had. He assumed the circle to be small, for obvious security reasons. But even Malik knew only fragments. The precise delivery mechanism had been kept from him. As had the identities of the men funding the operation. They were rich. They must be. But where they lived, and what drove them to want to dictate history in this way—such was not for him to know. This was the way the network operated. Everything was compartmentalized. You were provided the information you needed to accomplish your specific task, and only that.

Malik read the message over again, as if he could discern a hidden meaning from the sparse words. Well. Whatever the reason, if the date was now tomorrow, it was time for him to move on.

His part was done. The video was uploaded, ready for release. He had always planned to leave the night before. He had not signed up to be a martyr.

Malik pulled his suitcase from the closet and threw it on the bed. There wasn't much to pack. Clothes, sandals, his toothbrush. From the windowsill, he gently lifted the souvenirs he had purchased. Tiny white plastic models of the Capitol, the White House, and the Washington Monument. He had arranged this last one in the window so that it lined up perfectly with the real Washington Monument, just visible outside across the Potomac. The vendor had tried to sell him the Pentagon and the Supreme Court too; he wondered whether he should go back. No, probably impossible to find the man again. And he had gotten the best ones: the Capitol in particular had a paper American flag attached to its miniature dome that appealed to him enormously. He rolled them all up inside a pair of pajamas and tucked them into his case.

The phone chirped again as he stood taking a last look around the room.

This message, clearly, was intended for him alone:

One more task for you. Stand by. Details tomorrow
.

Shaukat stared at the phone in his hand. Details tomorrow? But tomorrow was . . . He began to pace nervously. What could it be? What was left to be done?

AT THAT MOMENT LUCIEN SLY
was also nervously pacing.

To be precise, he was carving laps around an office conference table, pausing every so often to pound the table in frustration. Outside the windows a steady rain beat down, pricking the gray surface of the Thames River.

Lucien had been summoned to Vauxhall Cross, MI6's fortresslike headquarters in London, as it became clear the situation was deteriorating from merely bad to outright awful.

Yesterday had brought two pieces of surreal news: first, that Nadeem Siddiqui had been reported dead. Lucien was staggered. And then, even as he raced down the M11 motorway from Cambridge to London, his bosses had called to report an even more bizarre development. An Irish tourist had been murdered on a British Airways flight to Washington. On
Alex's
British Airways flight to Washington.

He had managed to catch her on the phone earlier today. An awkward conversation, with Lucien unable to share what he knew and forced to feign surprise at Alex's breathless updates. He needed to warn her; she seemed still not to grasp that she was in real danger. But when he urged her to take greater security precautions, she had laughed him off. Of course she would. She knew him only as a rich university student with a taste for the ladies. It was unbearable.

And that was all before the latest twist. The most surreal news yet
had arrived today. The MI6 head of station in Islamabad had sent a cable, relaying that a security team at Nadeem Siddiqui's lab had searched his desk. What they had found was chilling. Maps, diagrams, photographs.

MI6's leaders were still trying to digest the new information. For now, it would not be shared with any foreign liaison partners, not even the CIA. Lucien was among the small number of people who'd been briefed. He had sat through the meeting feeling increasingly sick. Alex James had come up several times by name; Lucien's report on her was included among the PowerPoints.

Holy mother of God. Lucien whacked the conference table again and then raked his hands through his hair. He was caught.

He could not tell Alex he worked for MI6.

He could not tell MI6 he was sleeping with Alex.

Meanwhile dark forces appeared to be in motion, and he had no clue how to stop them.

Lucien had longed for action. This was not what he'd had in mind.

    

    

A
fter my encounter with Edmund Tusk, I took a taxi straight to the
Chronicle
's Washington office.

The next few hours were a blur.

Elias had convinced someone at the FBI to pass him a copy of the memo that went out this morning. It didn't say much more than Galloni had already told me, but with my being up against so many unknowns, it was comforting to have a physical document in hand.

Meanwhile Hyde had apparently spent the day alternating between shouting at the
Chronicle
's in-house lawyers up in Boston, and shouting at the national security adviser's staff. The former were balking at giving
us the green light to publish anything at all; the latter were balking at giving us a quote on the record. Both sides calmed down around 5:00 p.m., when General Carspecken consented to our using one of the more innocuous quotes from this morning's meeting—the one about everything being under control—on condition that we attribute it to an unnamed “senior administration official.”

It wasn't much, but it was enough for Elias and me to sit down at adjoining desks and hammer out a story that began like this:

WASHINGTON—They say they don't know exactly what they're looking for.

But police and other law enforcement officials up and down the East Coast stepped up security measures Thursday, in the wake of an urgent memo issued by the National Counterterrorism Center here in Washington.

The memo—a copy of which was obtained by the Chronicle—urges extra vigilance at border crossings into the country. It also calls for food-delivery trucks to be stopped and searched. Administration officials declined to comment on whether information about a specific threat had prompted the memo.

“My understanding is [the situation] is under control,” a senior administration official told the Chronicle. . . .