Game Changer (45 page)

“Maybe I am crazy,” she said
with a heavy sigh. “Either way, we’re both going to find out soon.”
 

74

Haji A
hmad al-Bilawy
was
euphoric
, a feeling beyond
any he thought he might ever experience. He was but minutes away from plunging a
knife deep into the eye of the Great Satan. And he had just ended a call with
the President of the United States.

Davinroy had been pathetic, and al-Bilawy had strung
him along, made him squirm. By the end the president was begging, offering
anything al-Bilawy wanted to call it off, or even delay the strike for half a
day.

Al-Bilawy had taken great pleasure in teasing
Davinroy, toying with him, making him grovel, pushing him into utter embarrassment
and beyond, and finally, with ten minutes left on the clock and the United
States powerless to stop him, he had cut Davinroy off at the knees. He had
figuratively spat in his face, displayed his contempt, and made sure the
president knew that this was just the beginning. That Allah had no mercy for
the infidel, and this would be but a taste of things to come.

Al-Bilawy had a video ready to go just after midnight,
to be sent to YouTube and media outlets around the world. It would show the
strength of ISIS, the greatness of Allah, and the weakness of the United
States. It would make it clear for all the world to see who had been
responsible for this heroic deed, and how Davinroy had pleaded like a little
girl. It would be ISIS’s finest hour.

He checked the device that would detonate the bomb and
carefully entered the codes that he had committed so firmly to memory they seemed
carved into his brain. He waited eagerly to press the button, to send the world
into a new age, and the caliphate on its way to a new glory.

Six minutes to go.

He desperately wanted to jump the gun, the wait for
the ecstasy to come now seeming eternal. But he owed it to those who had sacrificed
to make this happen, who had planned this to perfection, not to deviate from
the plan by even an instant.

He had tapped into an atomic clock on his phone so he
could be as precise as possible. He would wait until the stroke of midnight in
Washington DC, the center of power of this corrupt country, and do what he now
knew he had been put on this Earth to do.

“All praise to Allah,” he said aloud in Arabic.

A triumphant smile began to spread across his face but
stopped abruptly of its own accord. Just as he realized his face was frozen, an
overwhelming smell of burnt rubber assaulted his nostrils. He turned to see
what might be causing the pungent odor when his sight stopped working. He
blinked several times, but this did nothing to relieve his sudden blindness.

His euphoria of a moment earlier turned to pure,
unreasoning terror.

This, too, was short-lived as his entire body started
convulsing and he crashed to the floor in agony. He bit down so hard on his
tongue it began pouring blood into his mouth, mixing with copious amounts of
saliva to produce a red foam that slithered down his face. He lost bladder and
bowel control at the same time and both systems voided explosively into his
pants.

His heart beat erratically and he gasped for breath
before his respiratory system shut down entirely, followed seconds later by his
heart.

During a period of only twelve seconds so many of
al-Bilawy’s systems broke down or malfunctioned that he died a horrible death
many times over. What had once been a zealot dedicated to bringing about an
apocalypse was now a dead husk lying in a pool of his own saliva, blood, urine,
and excrement.

As close as al-Bilawy had been to fulfilling his
life’s purpose, he had expired far too quickly to have any understanding of what
was happening to him, or to regret that he hadn’t chosen to detonate the
nuclear device a few minutes early after all.

75

Andrew Danson doubted he would live out the night. The
crazed woman holding him at gunpoint had made him move another ten yards away
from his gun, and she had likely broken his arm with a tire iron, although he
couldn’t be sure if the blinding pain he was feeling was simply due to blunt
force trauma brought on by her savage blow.

He had only been a cop for six months, so of course he
had drawn night duty. He hated the graveyard shift because of what it was doing
to his natural sleep rhythm, making him feel like a vampire, out all night and
sleeping all day. But more than this, he hated it because of the unrelenting
boredom. Other than having to check out the occasional false alarm generated by
a residential home security system or help out with a rare predawn auto accident
somewhere, there had been as close to zero excitement during the past half year
as it was possible to get.

Suddenly he longed for this lack of excitement.

Decades of television dramas had convinced the public that
cops always worked with partners, but this was often not the case, especially when
it came to night duty in low-crime areas. But he should have called for backup,
even before arriving on the scene. He had been a fool.

He had accepted the risk of being killed in the line
of duty, but he had always imagined if this ever did come about it would be a
result of him intervening in a bank robbery or terrorist attack.

Not like this.

Not at the hands of a crazed woman who killed people,
covered them in foil, and ranted about helicopters. People this deranged were
impossible to predict. She might let him go as she had promised or might just
as easily decide to turn his skull into a coffee mug.

The woman never took her eyes from his, her gun never
wavering as she stood guard over her foil-covered prize, a silent vigil that
had gone on now for quite some time. Her left arm hung down by her leg, a phone
loosely clutched in her hand.

Finally, she broke the long silence. “What time is
it?” she asked her phone, as though not having the strength to lift it to her
face to see for herself.

“Three minutes past midnight.”

The woman winced as though she were in pain. She shot
a glance toward the western sky, as if searching for an answer there, and
looked to be on the verge of vomiting.

“Are any restaurants in San Francisco open at this
time of night?” she asked. Her voice was strained, and it seemed to Danson she
was choking back tears.

“Hundreds. San Francisco is on Pacific Standard Time,”
pointed out the AI function of her phone, “so it is now only three minutes past
nine o’clock there.”

“Oh, right,” croaked the woman. “Call the first restaurant
on your list within city limits.”
 

Danson looked on in disbelief. Sure, why not? Maim or
kill two men, attack him, hold him at gunpoint, and then order takeout from a restaurant
three thousand miles away. No crazier than anything else she had done.

“Calling
Aaron’s
Sea and Wind Bistro
on Market Street,” announced her phone.

The call was answered after three rings. “Aaron’s Sea
and Wind Bistro,” said a man’s voice through the speaker, with the typical clamor
of a busy restaurant in the background.

The woman become weak in the knees and stumbled,
barely avoiding falling to the ground next to her foil-covered victim. “Please
tell me you’re in downtown San Francisco,” she pleaded, her voice thick with emotion.

“We are. We’re located at the north end of Market
Street.”

As Danson looked on in wonder the woman before him underwent
a complete transformation. Her mouth dropped open and she whimpered as though a
crushing weight had been lifted from her soul. While the gun remained steady in
her right hand, her phone slipped from the fingers of her left and dropped to
the pavement, while tears began streaming down her face.

Should he say something? Should he try to be
sympathetic, or try not to attract attention to himself?

While he was deciding the woman began to hum the unmistakable
tune of “The Star Spangled Banner” through her tears, just barely loud enough to
be heard. She was dazed, and sounded completely cut off from reality, humming
like a woozy fighter hit one too many times in the head.

“Gave proof through the night,” she sang faintly under
her breath, “that our flag . . . was . . . still . . . there.”

She stopped abruptly and tears began to roll down her
cheeks even faster.

How was it possible for anyone to be this messed up in
the head? wondered Officer Danson.

“Are you okay?” he said finally, hoping this wasn’t a
mistake.

She nodded, still sobbing and still holding a gun on
him. “Oh yeah,” she said exultantly. “Everything is great.”

As he was wondering what to do next, a helicopter abruptly
appeared in the distance from behind a hill, racing at breakneck speed in their
direction. In less than a minute, churning through the night air and creating
an unmistakable din, it dove like a hawk and settled abruptly fifteen yards
away in the empty parking lot.

This time it was the rookie police officer whose mouth
dropped open.

And for the first time, Andrew Danson began to wonder
if this weeping woman was insane, or if
he
was.

76

It was
just after 2:00 a.m. and the militarized 747 rolled to a stop on the runway. Matthew
Davinroy had just lived through the most brutal night of his life, and while he
had thought of himself as an atheist
—
pretending
to believe in God for political expediency
—
he
had found himself praying as midnight approached.

And
perhaps his prayers had been answered. He had dodged a bullet the size of an
asteroid. Either al-Bilawy had been bluffing or the bomb had been a dud, as he
had been told was a possibility.

Either way, all that mattered was that he had come
through this crisis intact. Had the device gone off, the impact it would have
had on his presidency, on his legacy, would have been
incalculable
.
 

Perhaps God had been looking out for him, after all.

77

It wasn’t until four in the afternoon, almost sixteen
hours after the helicopter had lifted off from the
Healthy Foods Grocery
parking lot, that Rachel
was allowed into the room in the Plum Island infirmary that housed her two
favorite men. They had been given blood and meds and had been patched up in flight,
a testament to the skills of both the pilot, who had kept the helicopter
perfectly level, and the doctor, who had hands as steady as a slab of granite.

After landing on the island they had been rushed to
beds, IVs still attached, and had received additional treatment. Regev, who had
been shot twice in the leg and who had lost even more blood than Quinn, was
still being sedated, but Rachel had been assured he would pull through and
eventually regain full use of his leg.

Quinn was weak, but now fully conscious. He had been
told the still-unconscious Regev would make a full recovery and that San
Francisco was doing fine, but he had no idea how this latter could be possible.
He couldn’t have been more eager to learn what had happened after he had
blacked out.

Rachel described how she had raced to the Healthy
Foods Grocery before Cris Coffey had finally returned her call. How he had
agreed to send a medevac but had been unable to put her through to the
president.
 

“I don’t understand,” said Quinn. “What good would
Davinroy have done at that point? And how is it that the bomb didn’t go off?”

“Not to be immodest,” she replied happily, “but you
have me to thank for that. And Avi Wortzman.”

“Doesn’t seem possible,” said Quinn, trying to make
sense of this. “I don’t see any way you could have stopped al-Bilawy.” He
paused in thought. “Unless . . . did you trick Kovonov into giving you his
location?”

“Not a chance. But I knew that al-Bilawy must have
been injected with neural nanites. I also knew that he was hiding somewhere in
the country. So I wasn’t searching for a needle in a haystack. You know,” she
added with an impish grin, “I had it pretty much narrowed down to the
continental United States.”

Quinn laughed and then immediately groaned in pain as
he realized this wasn’t a good idea in his current condition.

 
“So I thought
about my trick with the cell towers,” she continued. “How we had reached out
and touched Carmilla Acosta and Yosef Mizrahi. We had no idea where they were,
but we were still able to manipulate their nanites. I knew I could do the same with
al-Bilawy.”

“But you’d have to take over the cell grid of the
entire country. In record time. And even if you managed that, what memory could
you implant that would get him to call it off? Besides, I thought it took you half
a day to develop instructions to get the nanites to lay down even the simplest
of memories.”

“All great points,” said Rachel, beaming. “The first
part, taking over the cell infrastructure . . .” She shrugged. “Well, that’s
where Avi Wortzman came in.”

Quinn tilted his head in thought, trying to
reconstruct what must have happened. “You used the emergency number Eyal gave
us to get through to him. You must have guessed Israel had the capability to
take control, didn’t you?”

Rachel nodded. “I figured I had some pull. Israel is
racing toward a catastrophe and Eyal did tell me they think I’m pretty much
their only chance to avert it. Not that Wortzman wouldn’t have helped under any
circumstances, but he asked fewer questions than he would have otherwise. And
he did come through with flying colors.”

“Have I ever told you that you’re brilliant?”

“Actually, yes, several times. But you know, it never
really gets old.”

“You are absolutely brilliant,” said Quinn. “So what
memory did you implant? And how did you manage to come up with the required
instructions so quickly?”

Rachel shook her head. “Nothing as subtle as a memory.
You’re right, I couldn’t have programmed one in time. But there is one command
that is so simple it can be written on the head of a pin. Memories require a
complex construction of pathways, a subtle excitation of neurons. But an
epileptic seizure is nothing more than the
uncontrolled
firing of neurons. So I transmitted a command to the nanites to cause every
single neuron in al-Bilawy’s brain to fire at the same time. No finesse, no subtlety
—
a command that was as basic
as it got. But one designed to cause the ultimate seizure.”

“Which would do what, exactly?”

“Kill him in seconds. Cause a total meltdown. Al-Bilawy
would be unable to control his muscles or his autonomic nervous system. He’d go
blind, salivate uncontrollably, lose bowel and bladder function, and his heart
and respiration would shut down.” She shuddered. “It truly is a horrible way to
go.”
 

“Remind me not to piss you off,” said Quinn.
 

Rachel laughed. “If this technology is ever perfected
enough to come into use, we’ll really have to install a fail-safe so what I did
to al-Bilawy can never be repeated.”

“Wait a minute,” said Quinn, blinking in confusion.
“How is it
I’m
not dead? You sent
this command across the entire nation. Shouldn’t I have had one of these death
seizures also?”

“You
should
have,” said Rachel. “But I’ve become very fond of you. So I decided it would be
better if you took a pass on the whole,
every
neuron firing at once
thing. Which brings me to why I was driving to the
grocery store in the first place.”

“Yeah, I was getting around to asking about that. It
just seemed less important than how you managed to save San Francisco.”

“It’s how I managed to save
you
. I wrapped your head completely in aluminum foil, and even your
upper body.”

“You what?”

“First I broke into the store to get the foil, and
then I wrapped you like a mummy. I’m not sure that reflective aluminum is your
color, but it did block the signal from the cell tower so your nanites stayed
calm.”

“Aluminum foil is a real thing?” said Quinn in
astonishment. “I thought wearing foil headgear was something done by lunatics.
Delusional conspiracy theorists who thought it could keep their minds from
being taken over by outer space aliens or some other nonsense.”

“This is true. But it’s also true that nothing blocks
radio signals better. Next time you’re in a kitchen, use a landline to call
your cell until it rings. Then put a single layer of aluminum foil over your
cell phone and call again. It won’t ring this time.”

“No kidding?”

“No kidding. You’re living proof that this works.”

“I’ll be damned,” said Quinn. “So I was blacked out in
the parking lot of a grocery store covered in aluminum foil.” He grinned. “I
can’t say this is the first time that’s happened. But it’s definitely the first
time it happened when I was
sober
.”

Rachel laughed.

“Anything else I should know about?” asked Quinn.

“Well, I did attack the cop who tried to remove your
metal helmet. With a tire iron. To save your life.” Rachel shrugged. “You know,
that’s what I do,” she added, fighting to keep a straight face.

She went on to describe what had happened in the
grocery store parking lot in great detail.

“Wait a minute,” said Quinn in alarm when she had
finished. “What about Carmilla? Is she okay?”

“She’s fine. I thought of her too. You don’t have to
sleep with me to get my protection.”

“Yes, but it is the
best
way,” said Quinn with an impish grin. “So how did you save her?”

“I made sure she stayed in the MRI room while the signal
was being sent out. Radio waves can ruin the results of an MRI, so MRI rooms
are built to block them out. Microwave ovens are too, but I figured the MRI
room was the better choice. Not quite as cramped.”

“Good call,” said Quinn with a smile. “But I bet she’s
jealous she didn’t get the foil treatment,” he added wryly.

“How could she not be?”

“That was quite a night,” said Quinn.

Rachel leaned forward and kissed him gently. “Yes it
was. Glad you made it.”
 

“Thanks to you,” he said. “You saved millions of
people. It’s just too bad that the world will never know what you did.”

“I’m okay with that,” said Rachel. “I mean, it would
probably get me a few free rides on the cable cars, but I’m okay toiling in
anonymity. And the truth is,” she added more seriously, “it wasn’t just me. If
you and Eyal hadn’t managed to fight your way through a gauntlet, Kovonov’s
plan would have gone off without a hitch. And I’d either be dead or his toy
right now.”

“We have Eyal to thank for that. If not for him, I’d
be in a ditch by a river.”

“Don’t downplay your own heroism. How about you thank
Eyal, and I’ll thank you?”

“Now that sounds like a good plan,” said Quinn. “And when
I’ve recovered, I have an idea of how I’d like you to show your gratitude.”

“Does it involve a bed?”

“Lucky guess,” said Quinn with a broad grin.