"When are my clients going to be charged?" Jackson asked for the third time.

"If he tells us why he erased the hard drives on his computers, we might just let him go." Stealey looked from Jackson to his client.

Al-Adel looked at her in disgust. "You will stop at nothing to persecute me and my people. What have you done to my computers?"

McMahon shook his head scoffingly at the accusation.

"What are you laughing at, you racist?" Al-Adel stared at McMahon. "You people are nothing but fascists and thugs. You planted that gun on Ali, and you have ruined my computers. I have known him for years. He has never owned a gun and would never buy one. Your people planted that weapon on him, and you know it."

McMahon looked at the terrorist and said, "Ahmed, you and I both know who the liar is, so let's dispense with the theatrics and move on. Now where were you going to take that container?" The federal agent picked up his pen as if he assumed the prisoner would actually answer the question.

Jackson's arm shot out. "Don't answer that question. For the last time, when is my client going to be charged?" The lawyer looked at Stealey. "You'd better say tomorrow."

"There are certain special circumstances surrounding this case." Stealey smiled, knowing there was no way Jackson knew the truth about his clients. Because if he did, he'd already be on a plane headed back to Atlanta. "I'm expecting the arraignment to take place on Tuesday at the earliest."

"You can't do that! That's seven days away!" Jackson bellowed in his deep voice.

"Actually I can. There are national security issues at stake here."

"And there's also the law. I swear, if my clients aren't formally charged before a federal judge by tomorrow at the latest, you are going to have a huge media disaster on your hands."

Stealey knew she had the ultimate ace in the hole. A twenty-kiloton nuclear warhead. There weren't many jurors who would be sympathetic once they found out al-Adel was arrested while in the process of trying to pick up a nuclear bomb.

"Tell me, Ahmed," Stealey said, "where were you planning on taking that trailer?"

"This is over." Jackson waved his hands in the air. "Don't say another word," he warned his client.

"You haven't told him what was in the trailer, have you?" McMahon looked right at al-Adel.

"My client doesn't know what was in that trailer, and this interview is over."

McMahon wanted to give the self-righteous little al-Adel something to think about. He picked up his file and stood. "The CIA wants to question you, Ahmed. Don't be surprised if you get woken in the middle of the night and transferred to a different location."

Jackson was out of his chair like a shot. "You just threatened my client with torture! That's it. I don't want anyone else talking to my client. You people are done, and when I tell the media, let alone a judge, what this idiot just said, heads are going to roll."

McMahon ignored Jackson and kept his gaze fixed on al-Adel. Satisfyingly, he saw genuine fear in the terrorist's eyes at last. In that moment he could tell the Saudi was not a man who could handle pain.

He turned his attention to Jackson and offered him a grim smile. "And when you find out the truth about your client, you are going to wish that the two of us had never crossed paths."

Fifty-One

The G-V landed at Andrews Air Force Base just before midnight on Wednesday evening. The sleek jet taxied to a remote part of the base and into a simple gray metal hanger. As soon as the tail was clear, the doors closed. A few seconds later the stairs to the executive jet folded down revealing an extremely tired and unshaven Mitch Rapp. The CIA operative was still dressed in his combat fatigues and holster. With a bag under each arm, he exited the plane and walked across the smooth concrete floor. Four men passed him without comment and boarded the plane to retrieve the two prisoners he'd brought back. Rapp kept his bloodshot eyes fixed on Bobby Akram, the CIA's top interrogator. Once again, he was dressed in a dark suit and red tie.

Rapp had spoken to him at least four times on the long flight home from Afghanistan. The focus of the calls was to develop a strategy for squeezing every last bit of information from the two captured terrorists. Akram was an incredibly thorough person who was adamant that the best way to elicit valuable information from prisoners was to start the interrogation with a well researched and thought out plan. Akram wanted to know, in advance, every conceivable detail about the subjects he was to question. Establishing the appearance of omnipotence was crucial to setting the stage for success.

"Mitch, I hope you don't take this the wrong way, but you look like shit."

Rapp walked right past Akram, to his waiting vehicle. "I feel like shit."

Akram walked over to Rapp's car. "I thought you were going to sleep on the plane."

"I couldn't." Rapp popped the trunk and threw in his two bags. "Every time I got close, that damn Abdullah would start moaning for more morphine, or CTC would call and want something. How's it going with the two guys they picked up in Charleston?"

"I wouldn't know. I haven't seen them."

"Why?" asked Rapp.

"The Feds have them in custody, and so far they haven't offered us access."

Rapp slammed the trunk shut. "What?"

Akram could tell he was really pissed off. "Don't worry about it right now. Irene says she'll bring you up to speed in the morning. You're supposed to be at the White House at nine a.m. for a briefing." Akram folded his hands in front of him. "Until then, she wants you to go home and get some sleep."

Rapp laughed in a mocking manner.

"She said you'd do that."

"Do what?"

"Laugh at the thought of anyone ordering you to go home and sleep. Irene said it stems from your deep-seated problem with authority. I told her I understood completely, and we agreed that if you argued I'm supposed to order you to go to Langley and help with the translations, at which point she predicted that you would curse at me some, and then go home and sleep."

Rapp laughed sincerely this time. Kennedy knew him too well. "All right...you guys are real funny. I get the picture."

The first prisoner came off the plane. It was Ahmed Khalili, the young computer man from Karachi. He had a hood over his head, but this time it was clean-nothing like the filthy burlap sack that he had sported in Afghanistan. Rapp and Akram had talked at length about Khalili. Either he was going to be extremely helpful, or he had completely deceived them to this point. He'd talked freely throughout most of the flight. Rapp had recorded everything, and then every few hours he would send the information back to Langley via an encrypted burst transmission.

Khalili's revelations were helping to peel back the layers of communication within al-Qaeda, revealing the way they used the internet to contact cells in America. They were getting much smarter, having learned the hard way about the power of American spy satellites. They still used high-end encryption software and placed messages within known websites to be retrieved by their disciples abroad, but for every two real messages, a fake one was sent to confuse the Americans. To frustrate the listeners and watchers even further, they'd also begun a campaign of disinformation, flooding sites that they knew were monitored with messages claiming that an attack was imminent. Khalili told of times they sat in cafes in Karachi watching CNN and laughed with hilarity as the terror alert in America was raised in the wake of one of their frenzied message-sending campaigns. These feints were classic guerilla tactics, designed to water American security forces down. Al-Qaeda was no longer one-dimensional. In order to survive