The Florentine Deception (34 page)

Dammit.

I had to try the lid, even if it meant they might hear me. I wiped the layer of sweat from my forehead, took a few deep breaths, and positioned my body for an attack on the trunk's hatch.

Over and over I slammed my palms up through the suffocating darkness against the trunk's lid. The lock felt like it was starting to give, ever so slowly, but I couldn't keep it up. The temperature had risen noticeably in just the past few minutes, and whether it was the heat or the dwindling oxygen, I was starting to get dizzy. I had to stop or I'd pass out.

Shit. That was the last thing I needed.

I laid my head down on what felt like a clump of oily rags. I'd rest a minute. Slow my breathing. Let … let the dizziness pass. Just for a minute. Because if I were still here when they got back, I was dead. They'd torture me for the password, and then they'd … and they'd kill me … and I wasn't … I …

I slipped into unconsciousness.

Chapter 56

I awoke confused and sore on the dusty linoleum floor of a small, drably furnished bedroom—a children's room, at least at one time. Flaking hand-painted clouds and biplanes ornamented the scuffed, gray-hued walls. A cot with a rumpled army surplus blanket lay in one corner, a shabby children's dresser next to it, and opposite them, a door and a sliding mirrored closet. A lone window, boarded from the inside, covered the wall nearest my feet. After gaining my bearings I tried to shift my arms, which had been bound behind my back, to alleviate the stress on my shoulders. The exercise was futile; I instantly recoiled in pain—savagely tightened plastic cable ties, the kind police use to incapacitate protesters, sliced into the flesh of my wrists. I looked down at my ankles. They too were fastened, with no less than three of the nasty bindings. The bastards weren't taking any chances.

I lay still on the filthy floor, listening and staring intently at the dim sliver of light beneath the door for any sign of movement. None came. After several minutes of waiting, I shimmied my rear along the floor and inched my body backward, using my bound feet, until my back rested against the wall. Drawing my feet in close, I pushed my heels against the floor, extended my legs, and gently slid my body up the wall.

Once I'd gained my feet, I hopped over to the door, then shuffled in place until my hands contacted the knob. It was locked, as expected. Undeterred, I worked my way over to the dresser, backed myself up to it, and pulled the drawer open a few inches.

I hit pay dirt. Among other items, the top drawer contained a Zippo lighter, a flat-head screwdriver, and a bunch of pens. I bent forward, extending my bound arms back to pull the drawer open farther just as I heard footsteps in the hall.

“Let's get this over with,” said Khalimmy.

Shit. Hands caught in the cookie jar. I jerked backward in an attempt to shut the drawer, lost my balance and slammed shoulder-first onto the dusty linoleum floor.

The lock clicked and the door edged open a few seconds later.

“How do you like the accommodations?” asked Khalimmy.

I rolled onto my stomach and gritted my teeth to stifle the searing pain.

“Not feeling too talkative, I guess. Unfortunately, I've got a few questions for you.” He prodded me with his foot. “Would you rather answer lying there on your face, or on the cot?”

“C-cot,” I stammered through the pain.

Khalimmy grabbed my left arm and tugged me upright, then escorted me over to the cot, his pistol trained on my chest.

“Better?”

“Better,” I replied, noticing for the first time the bloodied bandage on his right ear.

“I must give you some credit,” he said, observing my gaze. “I never expected you to pull the trigger.”

Silently, I shook my head in anger. If only I'd aimed a few more inches to the right.

“Good. All right, Alex. I'll make this simple. I'm going to need the password for the video. The last time you stalled, two people died.” He scratched his graying, stubbled chin wearily. “I have no qualms torturing you for it. But understand one thing, I will get that password.”

As if on command, Khalimmy's partner walked up to the door with a spool of nylon cord, a rusty pair of pruning shears, and a ball peen hammer.

“Over there,” he said, motioning casually at the drawer with his gun. His eyes didn't leave my face.

The man dropped the tools into the drawer and mumbled something in what must have been Arabic. Khalimmy replied, and the stocky man walked over to the cot, grabbed the mass of cable ties securing my ankles and yanked my legs toward the edge of the cot, then knotted my legs to the cot's aluminum frame with the cord. He then looped the cord several times around my neck and knotted it around the other end of the frame. I was, for all intents and purposes, immobilized.

“Thank you, Sami,” said Khalimmy, then he asked something in Arabic. The man responded in kind, then left the room.

“You were sloppy,” he said. “Sami tells me that you didn't properly wipe the Florentine files from your computer when you deleted them. He thinks he might be able to recover them.”

“So you don't need the password after all,” I said.

“No. I didn't say that. I'm not going to take any more chances, Alex.” He walked over to the drawer, laid the gun down, and picked up the shears. “I am not going to wait while Sami plays Steve Jobs. You're going to tell me now, and get this over with. If you don't give me the password, or you give me the wrong password, I will inflict enormous pain on you.”

Khalimmy walked over to the cot and kneeled next to my head. “I'm sure many things are going through your mind right now, so what do you say I give you thirty seconds to think it over. To give you some incentive, I intend to start with your nose.”

He waved the shears inches from my face, then stood up, walked over to the closet, and dragged out a large roll of plastic sheeting.

“This kind of thing can get messy,” he said as he lifted his shirtsleeves and stared at his watch.

Capitulate now, or suffer immeasurably and then capitulate? The choice was easy.

“I'll give you the password.”

“Good. You won't regret it.” Khalimmy pulled a small spiral notepad from his slacks and a pen from his shirt pocket, then stared at me expectantly.

“Seven, six, nine, five, four, two.”

“Thank you, Alex.” Khalimmy jotted down the digits, then slipped the pen back into his pocket. He had just reached the door when Sami yelled something incomprehensible. Khalimmy yelled back, then rotated in the doorway, a large grin exposing his yellowing teeth.

“Sami just finished recovering all of your deleted files. We didn't need the password after all. In any case, you just saved yourself a great deal of unnecessary suffering, Alex.”

Several hours later, Khalimmy returned with a paper plate of Chinese takeout and plastic fork.

“No monkey business, please.”

He placed the plate on the dresser, loosened the cord binding my neck, and used the shears to cut through the plastic ties around my wrists. Fighting extreme stiffness in my shoulders, I brought my arms forward and accepted the sagging plate of food. It was cold and congealed into a takeout-box-shaped clump, but edible. Khalimmy leaned up against the dresser and stared pensively at the wall as I ate.

“The beginning of the end …” he mumbled to himself.

“What?” I asked, looking up from the plate.

Khalimmy straightened, his eyes focused, and he studied me.

“This will be the beginning of the end for America and Israel,” he said after a moment. “A suitcase nuclear bomb can kill thousands, maybe tens of thousands of infidels, but this is ultimately insignificant. The sting of a hornet to a bear. Bin Laden never recognized this, and this was his fatal flaw. He measured success based on the count of bodies.

“But the reality, one that few in my world are able to appreciate, is that west's strength is built upon a flimsy house of cards. Your banks, hospitals, stock markets, your electricity and traffic grids, your military—everything is computerized. Everything. You are dependent on computers as much as any organism is dependent on oxygen. Take away this oxygen and the organism dies. It will asphyxiate and collapse.

“The challenge, of course, was how to destroy your hundreds of millions of computers without being discovered and blocked in the process. Our academics suggested that we use a sophisticated computer virus.” He snorted condescendingly. “Fools. Even the fucking Israeli pigs, with their trillions of stolen wealth, were able to impact only a tiny fraction of our uranium enrichment with their
advanced
Stuxnet virus.” Khalimmy scratched his chin. “But then we learned of the Florentine, and its remarkable potential.” He shook his head. “You must give credit to the Russians. They are godless and corrupt, but they are also brutally clever.”

Sami called from some other part of the house. Khalimmy stepped out into the hall for a few minutes, then returned.

“Allah is smiling upon our efforts. Sami has almost finished preparing a test payload for dispersal with Florentine.”

“A test payload?” I asked.

“A benign payload, Alex. We must make sure the cryptographic keys from Lister's flash drive are valid, and that the distribution system is functioning properly,” he responded matter-of-factly. “Allah willing, within a few days, we will be safely back in Iran, and your people will be looting and killing each other.”

I finished the food and laid the soggy paper plate on the floor next to the cot.

Khalimmy stifled a yawn, backed up to the door, and yelled something in Farsi. Sami responded gruffly, and then lumbered in a moment later with a handful of the vicious plastic cable ties. While Khalimmy aimed his pistol at my head, Sami affixed the restraints around my wrists, dumped me roughly back onto the cot, and then attached my leg cuffs to the cot's aluminum frame.

“Sweet dreams, Alex,” he said, then the two of them left.

Chapter 57

I awoke from a fitful sleep with an unbearable stiffness in my neck, the taste of morning breath, and an uncomfortably full bladder. Aiming to relieve the pressure on both, I fought my foot restraints and twisted my body as far as I could manage. All night my mind had fixated, both willingly and later involuntarily, on Khalimmy's plan.

It was simple yet potentially devastating: all Khalimmy had to do was create a destructive payload and specify the targeting parameters, and the Florentine would do the rest; the Russians had solved all the intractable distribution issues.

Creating a destructive payload, likely a disk-scrambling program, would take a competent programmer literally an hour or two. Identifying which computers to target was also an unnervingly simple task—when the payload arrived upon a computer, it could easily check the computer's time-zone setting to identify its location. If it matched one of Khalimmy's five targeted time zones—Pacific, Mountain, Central, Eastern, or Jerusalem—whammo, the payload would trigger. Or if that didn't work, I was certain they'd identified a dozen other ways to accurately recognize and target American- and Israeli-owned computers.

Such an attack would certainly be devastating and painful. It would take large swaths of infrastructure, banks, businesses, and the Internet off-line. But big businesses and government agencies made continuous backups of their most critical data and files, and as hard as Khalimmy tried, my bank account would still have all of its money, my prescriptions would still be filled, and my power would be back on within a few days or weeks of the attack. It would be painful, but we would persevere.

I turned my thoughts to a more important subject: how I was going to stay alive, and if possible, stop the attack. I shifted my body again and had begun contemplating escape plans when Khalimmy cracked the door open, checked that I was still on the cot, and then walked inside, a sickening look of delight on his face.

“Good morning, Alex,” he said. “Would you like some food, maybe use the restroom?”

“Yes to both, restroom first.”

“You'll be happy to know,” he said while he cut the restraints from the cot, grabbed my triceps, and roughly hoisted me onto my feet, “we have successfully tested the Florentine distribution mechanism. Last night at two a.m., Sami uploaded a software payload that simply beeps twice at four p.m. Greenwich Mean Time, or eight a.m. Pacific, on computers bearing either of two serial numbers—those of two of our laptops. This morning at eight a.m., after Sami manually ran Windows Update on the computers, both beeped just as planned.”

“Congratulations,” I said sardonically. Khalimmy ignored my sarcasm and led me to the bathroom, cut the cable ties binding my wrists and sat me on the toilet, waiting guardedly just outside the open door.

“After one more test, our wait will be over, as will your captivity.”

“One more test?” I asked.

“We have to make sure our final payload works when distributed through the Florentine. We wouldn't want anything unforeseen to go wrong.”

“What could go wrong with deleting files or formatting the hard drive? Any teenager can write that kind of attack in a matter of minutes.”

“This is true, Alex. But our attack doesn't simply delete files or format hard drives.” I could hear pride in his voice and had an intense desire to kick the door into his face with my bound feet.

“What does it do?” I asked, genuinely surprised.
Is he bluffing?

“Come,” he said gruffly once I'd finished. After I'd zipped up, he manhandled me into the kitchen and sat me in front of a dilapidated card table. A microwave-style burrito still in its wrapping sat on a paper plate in front of me. “Eat.” He pointed, eyeing me warily from the kitchen sink. “Our engineers have created a very special payload,” he continued, “which I'm sure, of all people, you will appreciate. It annihilates the flash firmware on each motherboard by writing a random stream of garbage over the existing instructions.”