Overkill (75 page)

They photographed each of them, several times, full face and profile, even Ibrahim, who nobody, not even his own mother, would recognize. They worked quickly, aware that the noise they had
created in assaulting the house would certainly have been heard by someone, and that quite possibly the gendarmes were already en route to the village. Confrontation with French law-enforcement
officers would not be a problem, because one call by Richter to Lacomte should sort it out, but he and Ross had agreed that a swift and silent exit from the scene was by far the best option.

Twenty-eight minutes after Richter had shot Abbas in the stomach, the three vehicles began the descent down the hill into St Médard.

The Walnut Room, the Kremlin, Krasnaya ploshchad, Moscow

‘This is appalling,’ the Russian President said, unconsciously echoing the words the British Prime Minister had used just minutes earlier and almost two
thousand miles away. ‘You are absolutely certain of the facts?’

‘Yes, Comrade President,’ Yuri Baratov said, his familiar smile for once completely absent. ‘A low-yield nuclear weapon was detonated in the American south-central region
approximately one hour ago. Our initial estimate based on technical analysis and seismograph data suggests that ground zero was Abilene in Texas and this has been confirmed by the American news
media. CNN, in particular.’

The President rubbed his chin thoughtfully. ‘I am not familiar with American centres of population. What size city is Abilene?’

‘The population of the city is around one hundred and twenty thousand,’ Baratov said, ‘and about a further one hundred and seventy thousand people live in the surrounding
area.’

‘And the weapon? What size device was used?’

‘Again, Comrade President, we do not yet have accurate data, but we believe the weapon to be very low-yield, probably thirty kilotons or less.’

‘So what sort of damage are we talking about? What casualties?’

Yuri Baratov spread his hands in a gesture of hopelessness. ‘We can’t begin to estimate it. The worst-case scenario would place the weapon in or near the centre of the city. That
could produce a death toll of anything from one hundred thousand to two hundred thousand people. That’s most of the population, but by American standards it’s a small city. If the
weapon was detonated some distance outside the city, perhaps half of those figures.’

‘So many?’ the President murmured, his voice shaking with emotion. ‘But you said it was a low-yield weapon.’

‘That is what we believe,’ Baratov replied. ‘But you must remember, Comrade President, that the weapon the Americans dropped on Hiroshima only had a yield of twenty kilotons,
and that killed about one hundred thousand people.’

‘And the question the Americans will want us to answer, no doubt, is why a Russian nuclear weapon was detonated in an American city. And I too want that question answered. There is no
possibility that this was some kind of a terrorist attack, and nothing to do with that idiot Trushenko’s
Podstava
, I suppose?’

Baratov shook his head. ‘I have already talked with General Sokolov, and he has confirmed that Abilene was one of the cities targeted by Trushenko, though he does not know either the
calculated yield of the weapon or where it was located. But I do not believe in coincidence. This weapon was certainly one of the
Podstava
devices.’

‘Which of course raises yet another question,’ the President growled. ‘Modin and Bykov have just been placed under armed guard at the Embassy in London. Sokolov is here in
Moscow in a cell in the Lubyanka and Trushenko is dead, killed in the Ukraine, so who fired the weapon?’

Again Baratov spread his hands wide. ‘I have no idea,’ he said.

‘Well, one thing is quite certain,’ the President said, getting to his feet. ‘I will have to go and talk to the Americans. Immediately.’

Vic-Fézensac, Midi-Pyrénées, France

‘There’s a phone box – stop the car,’ Richter called, and Dekker obediently hauled the Espace into the side of the road. Richter had been checking
his mobile phone for the last eight minutes, ever since the idea had come to him, but the signal strength had stayed obstinately at zero. The box in Vic-Fézensac was the first public
telephone he’d seen on the road since they’d left St Médard. He jumped out of the Espace, ran back to the phone box and lifted the receiver, feeding Euros into the slot as he did
so. The phone rang only twice before Baker answered.

‘It’s Richter. The Arab who was calling himself “The Prophet”. It’s just occurred to me that perhaps his backdoor code could be the same, but in a different
language. His screen name or whatever you call it was Yiddish, not Farsi or Pashto, which we would have expected of an Arab. Maybe he ransacked the languages of the world, using obscure words in
dialects spoken by only a handful of people. He seemed to think the name “The Prophet” was some kind of a joke, so it’s possible he thought it was so funny he used it twice, if
you see what I mean.’

‘Yes, maybe,’ Baker said doubtfully. ‘I’ve already tried accessing the system using “Dernowi”, but that didn’t work. I’ll run the word
“prophet” through the dictionary program and see what it comes up with. I’ll call you.’

‘Right,’ Richter said. ‘You’d better make that your first priority – the Arab said that somebody else knew the backdoor code to the Krutaya mainframe, and I
don’t think he was joking about that. Oh, and ask somebody there to get Lacomte to re-activate the mobile phone cells down here as soon as he can.’

‘Right. Is that it?’

‘No. Is Simpson there? I need to brief him on what we got out of the Arab. Some of what he said will certainly interest him, and I’m sure the Americans will be fascinated.’

Buraydah, Saudi Arabia

Sadoun Khamil was still sitting in front of the television set, but his smile had vanished and he was puzzled. The screen now showed long-distance television pictures of
the ruins of Abilene, taken from a news chopper that was keeping some miles back from the devastation, presumably because of the danger from the fallout. That wasn’t what was puzzling him. By
now, he had expected there to be news of other detonations, from all across the United States, but it was beginning to look as if the Abilene weapon was an isolated incident.

He would, he decided, wait only a further hour, and then he would have to contact al-Qaeda. In the meantime, he strode across to his computer to compose an urgent email, sent direct and this
time in clear, to Hassan Abbas.

The Walnut Room, the Kremlin, Krasnaya ploshchad, Moscow

‘An Arab?’ Yuri Baratov could not keep the incredulity out of his voice. ‘Why would some fucking raghead have access to a Russian weapons
computer?’

‘According to the American President, because the fucking ragheads, as you describe them, actually paid for it to be built. If the Americans are to be believed,’ the Russian
President continued, ‘the Arabs – and by that the President actually means the al-Qaeda group – conceived the
Podstava
operation, behind which their own plan was hidden,
and they also paid for the construction and placement of all the weapons, here in Europe as well as in America. That bastard Trushenko was the recipient of the funds, and no doubt he had a nice
little nest-egg salted away somewhere. Your people can no doubt find out exactly where he chose and recover the funds for us.’

Baratov nodded, then shook his head. ‘I still don’t believe it,’ he said.

‘Well, the Americans do, and so do the British, who actually stopped the al-Qaeda operation. The Arabs’ intention, according to the President, was to detonate over two hundred
nuclear weapons in America at the same moment. This, they believed, would be certain to initiate a massive retaliatory attack on us, and to which we would respond with whatever weapons we had left.
In a little over twenty-four hours both Russia and America would have been effectively destroyed. The only good thing, if you can call it that, is that Trushenko and the others involved apparently
had no idea what the Arabs actually had planned.’

Baratov was noticeably pale in the face, and his voice shook slightly as he replied. ‘But why? Why would the Arabs do that?’

‘Again according to the Americans, because that would provide the Arab world with the opportunity to arise as the new world leaders, to bring the word of Mohammed to the godless East, and
the far-too Christian West.’

‘And now?’ Baratov asked. ‘What will the Americans do about the bomb that detonated in Texas?’

‘Nothing,’ The Russian President said, with a smile of relief. ‘At least, no military action, though we will certainly have to make financial and other reparations – it
was, after all, a Russian weapon. That, I have assured the President, we will be more than happy to do.’

Hammersmith, London

Fifty-three minutes after he’d received the call from Richter, and thirty-eight minutes after the dictionary program had delivered the results of its worldwide
language search, Baker leaned back from the screen of his computer. ‘Well, I’ll be buggered,’ he muttered.

He had just tried yet again to log on to the Krutaya mainframe, and the word he had tried this time from the printout in front of him produced results. The screen display showed two lines of
text, but only one of them was comprehensible to Baker. The first line read, in English, ‘Welcome, Prophet. I await your commands.’

The reason Baker couldn’t read the second line was because it was written in Dari, the Afghan dialect of Farsi, which is spoken by about one third of the population of Afghanistan, and is
used as a kind of lingua franca between speakers of different languages in that country. Baker was well versed in all the major computer languages, but was barely literate in English and he had no
knowledge whatsoever of any other spoken language. In fact, the second line was only a repeat of the first, with the addition of a single word – ‘
Inshallah
’.

Baker grabbed the phone and dialled Richter’s mobile, which rang instantly. Obviously Lacomte had got the cells working again.

‘Richter.’

‘It’s Baker. I’m in.’

‘Thank God for that. What was the backdoor code?’

‘You were right. I ran the dictionary program, and this was about the thirtieth word I tried. It’s “manalagna”.’

‘What?’

Baker spelt it phonetically. ‘Just like all the others it means “The Prophet”, and the language is Ilongo, from the Philippines.’

‘OK,’ Richter said. ‘Start disabling the weapons, and be quick about it, just in case this other Arab bastard tries to get in to finish off what Dernowi started. But
don’t,’ he added, ‘disable the London weapon – we’ve still got plans for that.’

Buraydah, Saudi Arabia

The hour was up, and still there had been neither word from Hassan Abbas nor any further weapon detonations in America. Khamil had even tried to telephone Abbas using both
the landline number and his mobile phone; the former had resulted in a ‘number unobtainable’ message, while the mobile was apparently switched off. Four years of planning, Khamil
realized, and the operation had gone wrong in a spectacular fashion at the eleventh hour. But there was one thing he could do to retrieve it. He was not a computer expert, but he was competent, and
Abbas had shown him the Weapon Control program on the Russian mainframe computer. He could read enough Cyrillic script to decipher the various options, he had a copy of the firing authorization
codes and, most importantly, he knew the backdoor code. If Abbas had been killed or captured, he could do it instead.
El Sikkiyn
would be implemented a little late, but it would be
implemented.

Khamil crossed to his laptop computer and touched the space bar to remove the screen saver. He pulled a small notebook from his pocket, opened Internet Explorer and typed in the name of the
Arizona sex site. When the site had loaded, Khamil moved swiftly to the link that generated the 404 error, and clicked the ‘Refresh’ button several times.

The screen went blank apart from the flashing cursor. Khamil referred again to his book, then carefully typed in ‘manalagna’ and watched the screen. The welcome message in English
and Dari that he was expecting did not appear, and he stared, puzzled, at a message in Cyrillic lettering for some moments. Then he opened a drawer on his desk, extracted a small Russian-English
dictionary and laboriously began to translate the message.

Four minutes later, he sat back, his face ashen. Now there could be no doubt, no doubt at all, that his gamble had failed. The message read simply: ‘Duplicate log-on attempt. This user is
already registered on the system. Please check your username and password and try again.’

Hammersmith, London

At eleven thirty that morning Richter climbed wearily up the stairs, walked into Simpson’s office and sat down. He’d flown back from Toulouse in the HS-146 and
there had been a car at Northolt to meet him. Simpson looked at him and closed the file he had been reading.

‘Is it done?’ he asked.

‘Yes, it’s done,’ Richter replied. ‘Baker got in using Dernowi’s backdoor code and disarmed all the American bombs, and all the strategic neutron bombs apart from
the London weapon.’

‘Is that a permanent disarming procedure?’ Simpson asked.

Richter nodded. ‘I think so. According to Professor Dewar, the weapon includes a circuit to physically burn out the actuating coils in the trigger unit, and he presumed that the circuit
was included as part of the abort routine. If he’s right, then the only way to arm the weapon again is to fit an entire new trigger assembly. That,’ Richter added, ‘is the case
with the neutron bomb that he examined in France. We obviously haven’t had a chance to examine any of the weapons placed in America, so I don’t know if the abort sequence works the same
way on those.’

‘That’s something the Americans can sort out,’ Simpson said. ‘They’ve had the details of the weapon locations since last night. And the London device?’

‘That was the last thing I asked Baker to do,’ Richter said. ‘We’ve locked out all the other users from the Russian computer, and as things stand the only people that can
access it are us. No doubt they will try and get back into the system any time now.