Dead.
Colby dead, gone in a rain of bullets sprayed through the windshield of his car.
Larry, dead, victim of a sniper's well-placed bullet. Charlie morosely wondered how long it would take for people to realize that it was a bullet and not a simple misstep. If he had still been alive, Larry would have been irate over bystanders' inability to clearly observe what had occurred in front of them. Precision, he would say. That is paramount to good science. How can you accurately portray the heavens if you cannot accurately describe what you see?
And soon Charlie himself would be dead. He idly wondered how the terrorists would do it. A simple bullet to the back of the head? Maybe a knife? Whatever it would be, Charlie hoped it would be painless. When it came right down to it, he decided, he really wasn't all that brave. Not that he had any choice over the matter.
Even looking over what he was doing, he still couldn't acknowledge any bravery on his part. Charlie was a dead man walking, therefore his actions now didn't reflect heroism. Just simple logic. Save whoever could be saved. Charlie couldn't be saved. But perhaps he could save Amita, and his father, and the rest of the people who would be killed in a nuclear explosion here in the L.A. basin. And maybe even a bunch of other nameless, faceless people who would get caught up in the inevitable fallout, as well as the rest of the world trying to avoid World War III.
My, aren't we being grandiose? Preventing WWW III. Charlie snorted. Better settle for just Amita and Dad.
He was ready. This time, as Scarface walked in, there were no histrionics, no pleading for people's lives. Just a calmness that accepted whatever the rest of his short life would bring.
"You have decoded the message?"
"It's here." Charlie indicated the computer. Words, in English, decorated the screen.
Scarface looked at the message, noting the location of the nuclear material. "Good. Shut it off." He flipped open his cell. "Abdu? You have her in your sights?" Glance at Charlie. The mathematician kept his face stolid. "Keep watching her. If you do not hear from me in two hours, kill her. Understand?" He shut the phone down. "You will come with me, professor. If you are lying, the woman will die."
"Clean," Colby reported grimly. "The suspect's car outside your dad's place was stripped of anything resembling a clue. I mean, outside Charlie's place. Whatever. There was nothing there to lead us anywhere." He frowned, well aware of what that meant. "Maybe Forensics'll come up with something, with a little more time."
"We don't have a little more time." Despair had been nibbling around Don's edges. Now it was crashing in with all the delicacy of a tidal wave. "Megan called in from the hospital. Larry is still babbling under anesthesia, and David says that they located the sniper's nest in the Snailor Building right where Larry predicted it would be. Score one for the physics professor." The humor fell flat. "Amita can't identify the guy who talked to her and wiped her computer. There's nothing that will lead us to the terrorists." And Charlie, he wanted to cry out.
"Try calling that NSA guy," Colby suggested. "Maybe they've come up with something. Maybe they've cracked the code."
"Maybe." Don was willing to try anything. Then—"Wait."
"Don?"
There was one more lead, a lead that they hadn't followed up yet. A lead that they had been heading for when they'd gotten side-tracked by his father's phone call. "Get everyone together, Colby," Don directed coldly. "There's one more thing to try."
"Don?"
"Get everyone together. We never checked out the address of the car rental guy."
The place looked totally unremarkable, just exactly what Don would have expected from a cell of terrorists trying to remain unnoticed. It was a small house with the grass neatly trimmed but the weeding not yet gotten to. There were no cars in the drive but the mail had been taken in. It looked like a place where someone lived and was, in general, too busy to keep up with. In other words: normal. Certainly nothing like a grungy warehouse hide-out for desperate criminals.
At least from the front. David called in from the back: "One of the windows is boarded over from the outside, Don. Recent job, fast and sloppy. I can't see in."
Very suspicious. "No chances, David."
"I can't hear anything either, Don. I don't think anyone's home."
"Damn," Don breathed. It wasn't what he wanted to hear. He wanted to hear the sound of his brother's voice, wanted evidence that this was the cell of terrorists and that he would have the legal right to smash the door down and apprehend every single one of them that didn't resist arrest. A scream for help would warrant breaking in the door. Without it? A warrant would take hours, maybe days.
He didn't have days. Don came to a career-wrecking decision. "You didn't see this, Megan," he said quietly. He reached into his pocket for a set of small tools and went for the lock on the door.
Megan stared him in the eye. "You're right, Don. I didn't see anything." When Don was finished, she stopped him with a gentle hand on his wrist. "Oh, look." Deadpan. "Someone left the door unlocked. How lucky for us."
"Yeah."
Megan wasn't finished. "I think I heard something in the back. Someone calling for help, perhaps?"
Don grunted. He had a good team. "I think I heard it, too. A sound like that, we're legally obligated to investigate. Since two of us heard it. I hope we're not mistaken. That it was actually a cat somewhere in the neighborhood instead of the kidnap victim that we're looking for." He pushed open the door.
The place was empty but not entirely unlived-in. There were a couple of large pillows on the floor, dirty dishes in the sink, but nothing more: no chairs, no tables, no lamps. The place looked lived in from the outside, but 'lived-in' on the inside had an entirely different meaning for the inhabitants. It was a place to crash while waiting for something else. This was a temporary abode, furnished in Early Modern Cheap.
"Don," David called, "in here."
It was the back bedroom, the one with the window boarded up that David had reported. It was almost as empty as the other rooms, except for a small table and a single folding chair. The table held a laptop plugged into the wall.
"Over here." Colby pointed to a dark spot in the corner. He sniffed, rubbing his finger. "Wet. I think it's blood." Charlie's blood, hung ominously in the air. "Not too much of it." He may still be alive.
"Forensics," Don said, keeping his emotions in check. He didn't even have to order it; Colby knew to call without being told. "They can dust the keyboard for prints."
"They may have kept him here, making him work on the code," David offered.
"In which case, since they've left, they probably got the results out of him." Don squashed the man's hopes.
Not Megan's. "There's no body left behind," she pointed out. "That means that they still have him. They're keeping him around for something." There's still hope, Don.
But David grabbed onto something else. "Don…the computer's hibernating."
"What?"
"Hibernating." David jiggled the mouse, clicked at it. Something inside whirred. "It was never shut down all the way. You think Charlie left us a message?"
He ought to have made David leave the keyboard alone, waited for Forensics to come and dust for prints. Not a chance: the computer screen lit up, and a message started wiggling its way across the panel like a banner, electronic candles sending up silent fireworks.
"Happy Birthday, Don," Colby read. "Don, is this some sort of sick joke? Were the terrorists expecting you to find this dump?"
"Not the terrorists." Don tried not to feel hopeful. He'd had too many hopes dashed today. "And it's not my birthday," he acknowledged. But this was clearly a clue. A message from Charlie? He tapped a key on the keyboard.
The computer responded by asking for a password.
"It's gonna take three days to figure out what the password is to this laptop," Colby moaned. "I can really learn to hate codes."
"No, it isn't." Don was never so certain of anything in his life. He tapped in the digits to his birthday into the waiting box, then pressed the enter key. The screen dissolved into darkness for several long moments. Then words popped up, bold and white against the black screen. "Got it!"
Don, if you're reading this, then perhaps it isn't too late. The location of where the enriched uranium is hidden is at the bottom of this message. I'm going to assume that my kidnappers are on their way there. Hopefully they haven't killed me yet. Even if they have, don't worry. They won't live to harm anyone else.
The story: one of their own people got greedy and stole the uranium from the rest, hoping to sell it to the highest bidder. The highest bidder, in this case, turned out to be a mole connected with the CIA who was trying to recover the uranium instead of allowing it to be blown up. Instructions on how to find the cache were encoded by Ned Ames at the request of the thief, which is how Ned—and I—got involved. Ned went stateside to try and warn the proper people. Because it was a CIA mole, Ned wasn't certain who he could trust, and it got even more twisty from there.
There's a kicker, and it's a big one: the thief also set up a booby trap to protect the uranium from being stolen back from him, a standard little bomb with just enough firepower to effectively kill off anyone trying to recover the uranium who isn't supposed to, or, at least, that's what the code says.. The instructions on how to defuse the bomb are also included in the message as Ned wrote them, and I've added them below the location. If you don't get this message in time, and I suspect that you won't, don't worry. The terrorists don't know about the bomb. That's the one thing I didn't decode for them. Only for you.
Tell Dad I love him. Charlie.
There was a location, and a blueprint for a bomb, just as Charlie had promised.
"Start copying this down," Don demanded harshly, "and fast. There's no printer to print it out on."
"Got it." Colby sketched the details of the bomb within a few lines. "Not a bad one, Don. I can handle it if I have to. No fail-safes. It's your basic, trigger it off blow 'em up type of bomb."
"The address is out in the desert," Megan said. "It's a few hours from here. If we can hurry, we might be able to get there first."
"A chopper," Don decided. "They have to take the highways, and it'll be rush hour soon." He looked around at his team. There wasn't much time. "Let's move."