Prepared For Rage

Rick Robertson rarely swore, in public or in private. "Yes, sir," Kenai said, and departed at speed. She hunted down the Arabian Knight, who was chatting on his cell phone. She removed it from his hand, ended his call, and tossed it in a nearby trash can, where it landed with a promising thud.

The Arabian Knight erupted, in Arabic.

"Shut up," Kenai said.

He kept talking.

Kenai stepped up and got right into his face. "Shut up," she said, and this time he did. "I'm going to show you how to flush the toilet on the shuttle," she said, "and this time you're going to have the procedure down before you leave, I don't care if we're here all night."

She towed him behind her like a mother towing a recalcitrant child. His face was congested with fury and he spit what sounded like serious insults at her all the way there. They passed many NASA employees who had never seen quite that expression on Kenai's face before but were quick in clearing a path for it, especially when they saw who she had in tow. The Arabian Knight was no longer a shared joke, he was a potential hazard to the successful completion of the mission. In two years they would be retiring the shuttle, they'd already lost two, and no one wanted to lose a third between now and then, especially not due to some arrogant little prick of a part-timer who had been granted a ride-along because his daddy would sign the check to launch the satellite in the cargo bay.

There were over a thousand switches, buttons, and circuit breakers in the shuttle's cockpit, but Kenai often thought it was easier to put the shuttle on orbit than it was to flush its toilet. You had to strap yourself in with thigh clamps to what was essentially a vacuum cleaner and for number two use a sight with crosshairs to zero in on the appropriate orifice. She had pla

Kenai raised an eyebrow. "So?"

"He got it. More or less."

"He'd better have, or the first time the Arabian Knight turns a turd loose on the flight deck in zero gee Robertson will put him and the turd into orbit without benefit of spacesuit."

"Any chance you can flush him out with the rest of the urine?"

"I wish."

There was a far more serious problem the next day, in the form of an anonymous threat from some skinhead hate group none of them had ever heard of before, claiming it was a crime against the Almighty to transport

a device owned and to be operated by the heathen, and that God's Army stood ready to attack.

"For Christ's sake," Rick said.

"Exactly," Mike said.

"Just tell me we're not letting this force us into a hold," Kenai said, her jaw very tight.

"No hold," Joel said. "The FBI doesn't regard the, uh, Smoky Mountain Whites as a credible threat."

" 'Smoky Mountain Whites'?"

"That's what they're calling themselves. Evidently they're from Kentucky."

"Whatever," Kenai said, and she and Laurel left to run yet another simulation of the Eratosthenes deployment. Eratosthenes, designed to take up where the Hubble Space Telescope left off, purred through it like a kitten. "If ever mankind built a perfect machine," Laurel said, "Eratosthenes is it."

"Shh," Kenai said, "it'll hear you."

Laura gave the shiny foil exterior of the telescope a fond pat. "She already knows."

WASHINGTON, D.C.

In spite of Yaqub's complete and total meltdown in the interrogation room at Gitmo and his subsequent fervent desire to omit no detail of his work with Isa, no matter how small, he could tell them very little that was useful. Back in his Washington office, Patrick found this frustrating in the extreme.

"He knows Isa only by the alias he used in Germany, Dandin Gandhi, and by another alias in England, Tabari Yabrud," Bob said. "The first names are common first names, and the second are names of Asian and Middle Eastern martyrs, major and minor."

"At this point," Patrick said, cradling the phone between his shoulder and his ear so he could type the names into his Isa database, "kinda not giving a shit what he called himself then. Kinda wanting to know what name he's using now and, oh yeah, where he is now, and what he's doing next."

"Isa told them that the plan was to take out Seatac, San Francisco International, and LAX." "How?"

"He would furnish them with credentials and they would get jobs as baggage handlers. Some of the cell are engineers, big surprise, and two are chemists. He had plans for homemade bombs made out of-" "Let me guess. Diesel fuel and fertilizer."

"Some of them, yeah," Bob said. He sounded tired. "Isa had plans for a lot of different devices, most of them to be assembled by the cell members when they arrived on scene." "What was the play-by-play?"

"For them to fly to Canada, which they did separately. Isa transferred enough funds into everyone's bank accounts to make this possible. We've got people checking on that, but Isa's some kind of Internet wizard, you know that. We'll never be able to trace any of those funds back."

"But we'll try," Patrick said, sitting back from the computer to page through an intelligence report. Three American Muslims had been arrested for praying on an airplane about to back away from a gate in Mi

"Yes, we'll try," Bob said. "When they arrived in Vancouver, they were instructed to proceed by public transportation to Lytton, a small town in the mountains north of Vancouver. There, they were to be picked up and taken to a camp even further in country, Sadiq says he doesn't know where." "Do you believe him?"

"I actually kinda do. He really is a sad sack of a terrorist, Patrick. Isa must really be desperate." The two of them contemplated the thought of a desperate Isa in silence for a moment, and then Bob added, "You might want to alert our friends north of the border."

Patrick had already sent off an email. "Will do. Did you tell Sadiq we found Isa's email instructions in Brittany 's jewelry box?"

"Yeah. He was astonished, he thought he'd hidden them so well. Now he thinks we're some kinda psychic."

"Good." There hadn't been much of use to them in the little slip of paper, but if it made Yaqub fear them, that worked for Patrick. "Why was he getting on a plane for Mexico City?"

"He says Isa emailed him that the LAX plan had been aborted due to some security breach and to get on a plane for Mexico City."

The next report in the intelligence folder was of a young woman found in the back of a Ford sedan with her neck broken, in the parking garage at Miami International Airport. Other than that the young woman was a Muslim American, it seemed unfortunate but unrelated to any of his concerns. "Last-minute orders and absolute obedience to same," he said to Bob. "That sounds a lot more like him than that whole pla

He could almost hear Bob shrug. Bob's job was to interrogate, not to interpret. "I don't think Yaqub's even close to a true believer. He thought about Isa's email for a while before he complied."