had not then known. His job had been to lie low and wait for orders when the correct opportunity arose.
And finally that opportunity had arisen. The insane political correctness and tolerance of all belief systems that had infected America like the HIV virus had made it possible. Political correctness had been the most crucial element in the sham he had just pulled off.
Americans were so afraid they might offend someone that they opened themselves up to all manner of attack.
Mussawi reached the elevator in the hallway and pressed the up button. As he waited, he thought of a passage he had read in a philosophy class years before when he’d still been an undergraduate student at Yale. It had been by Friedrich Nietzsche, an atheist who God would banish forever into the tortures of Hades. But like all nonbelievers, Nietzsche had mixed truth with blasphemy to confuse the righteous. And one of those truths came back to Mussawi now.
Mussawi could not quote the philosopher verbatim but essentially Nietzsche had said that when a nation reaches a certain level of power it begins to feel sorry for, and sympathizes with, its enemies.
Which was exactly what the United States of America was doing right now.
As the elevator doors opened and Mussawi began what would be his final exit from the nuclear storage facility, the irony of it all struck him and, now alone, he laughed out loud. For years the Americans had worried that nuclear weapons might be smuggled into their beloved country. What was about to happen, however, was just the opposite.
Mussawi was about to smuggle two nukes out of the United States. They would go to Radestan. One would be set off in the desert as a demonstration of power. The other would then be used as a bargaining chip. A big bargaining chip. His Islamic freedom-fighting brothers would threaten to detonate the other backpack nuke in downtown Ramesh if the current president did not immediately step down and turn the country over to al Qaeda.
The mole rode upward in the elevator, watching the numbers above the door light up, then go dark again as he passed each floor. The situation would never get to the point where Ramesh had to be destroyed; Emad Nosiar had assured him of that. The current government was weak, and the president would give in. There would be no need for the second bomb. No innocents would die.
Mussawi whistled the “Star Spangled Banner” softly as he walked toward his car. Nazis, Communists, Islamic terrorists—none of them could ever really bring down the United States. Not completely, anyway. But his adopted country was about to implode when it was discovered that the nukes going to Radestan had come from America.
Because Nietzsche had been right. The U.S. felt so guilty that they were successful that they tried to make up for it with political correctness.And political correctness would be the downfall of the United States.
Blue Ridge Mountains, Virginia
AARON “THE BEAR” Kurtzman grasped the arms of his wheelchair and swiveled it slightly as he picked up the telephone next to the computer. Stony Man Farm’s number-one cyber expert pressed the receiver to his ear. “Yeah, Hal?” he said into the mouthpiece.
“I’m on my way in,” Brognola advised in his familiar, deep, level voice. In the background Kurtzman could hear the rotor hum of what he knew must be a helicopter.
“I’ll be here,” Kurtzman said, then hung up the phone.
Fifteen minutes later Hal Brognola came through the door to the Farm’s Computer Room and walked up the wheelchair ramp that led to Kurtzman’s long bank of computers. Clamped between Brognola’s teeth was the stub of a well-chewed cigar—one of his trademarks.
The atmosphere at the top-secret counterterrorist facility known as Stony Man Farm was serious but familiar. Each individual who worked out of the Farm was a top expert in his or her field, and everyone else was aware of that fact. So while there was still a sort of paramilitary order to be followed, the warriors—both on the home front and in the field—were on a first-name basis with one another thanks to mutual respect.
So when Kurtzman said, “Hello, Mr. Director,” over his shoulder without looking toward Brognola or stopping his fingers, which were flying across the keyboard, it came out sounding more like a nickname than a title.
“Ah,” said Brognola as he stopped next to the wheelchair at the top of the ramp. “We’re being formal today, are we?”
“Why not?” said Kurtzman. “It might class this joint up a little now and then.” Strands of his wild, prematurely white hair had fallen over his forehead and he swept them back with one hand.
“Okay, then, Mr. Bear,” the director said, referring to Kurtzman’s nickname earned for his massive physique. “What have you got for me?”
“A lot. And not much.”
“Maybe I should address you as Mr. Dickens, then,” Brognola said. “That sounded an awful lot like, ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.’”
Kurtzman whirled the wheelchair almost 180 degrees to face the man. “There’s internet chatter like crazy among the crazies,” he said matter-of-factly. “Almost an eight hundred percent increase in what we’re used to.” He inhaled a deep breath. “So we’ve got to assume something bigger than usual is in the works.”
“But you don’t know what it is?” Brognola chomped down a little harder on the cigar stub.
Kurtzman nodded and more strands of hair bounced on top of his head. “Precisely,” he said. “Which I guess would fall under your Dickens’ quote as being in the ‘worst of times’ category. However I did pick up the word nuke encoded in one email. But for the most part, they—whoever they are—have gone to a whole new software program.”
Brognola’s eyebrows lowered. “We can thank that little weasel Edward Snowden for that,” he said. “I’d like to get my hands around his throat. He’s the reason our enemies have changed software and everything else they can.” He clamped down harder on his cigar, then changed the subject slightly. “Nuke, of course, is our abbreviation for nuclear. Do you mean—”
“Yes,” Kurtzman interrupted the big Fed. “Most everyone in the world, regardless of language, calls nuclear weapons ‘nuclear weapons.’ And they use the same shorthand version of the word—nuke—just like we do. The atom was first split by men who spoke English and so the word has become integrated, without change, into just about every culture on Earth.”
“Was the word used in any sort of context you could make out?” the director asked.
Kurtzman shook his head. “Negative. But keep in mind it’s also a word that gets kicked around all the time in cyberspace slang. It could mean our worst fears—some terrorist group has gotten its hands on a nuclear bomb and is planning to use it somewhere in the world. But that’s not necessarily the case. There’s a lot of bragging, and posturing, and bring-on-the-jihad-high-school-pep-rally-type crap thrown around between the terrorists these days, too.”
“Now I see what you mean by having a lot and having nothing,” Brognola said. “But we’ve got to always assume it could mean something disastrous.”
Kurtzman nodded. “Of course we do,” he said. “The bottom line is that I just don’t know exactly what’s going on at this point.”
The SOG director stared the computer genius straight in the eye. “You aren’t telling me you can’t decipher this
