Any Means Necessary. Jack Mars

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      “Two.”

      “Don’t you dare!”

      “Three.”

      Ed broke Nassar’s pinky at the second knuckle. He did it quickly, with very little effort. Luke heard the crunch, just before Nassar screamed. The pinky bent out sideways. There was something almost obscene about the angle.

      Luke put his hand under Nassar’s chin and tilted his head up. Nassar’s teeth were gritted. His face was flushed and his breath came in gasps. But his eyes were hard.

      “That was just the pinky,” Luke said. “The next one is the thumb. Thumbs hurt a lot more than pinkies. Thumbs are more important, too.”

      “You are animals. I will tell you nothing.”

      Luke glanced at Ed. Ed’s face was hard. He shrugged and broke the thumb. This time it made a loud cracking sound.

      Luke stood up and let the man shriek for a moment. The sound was ear-splitting. He could hear it echoing through the apartment, like something from a horror movie. Maybe they should find a hand towel in the kitchen to use as a gag.

      He paced the room. He didn’t enjoy this sort of thing. It was torture, he understood that. But the man’s fingers would heal. If a dirty bomb went off on a subway train, many people would die. The survivors would get sick. No one would ever heal. Weighing the two, the man’s fingers and dead people on a train, the decision was easy.

      Nassar was crying now. Clear mucus ran from one of his nostrils. He was breathing crazily. It sounded like huh-huh-huh-huh.

      “Look at me,” Luke said.

      The man did as he was told. His eyes were no longer hard.

      “I see the thumb got your attention. So we’ll take the left thumb next. After that, we’ll start on the teeth. Ed?”

      Ed moved around to the man’s left.

      “Kahlil Gibran,” Nassar gasped.

      “What’s that? I didn’t hear you.”

      “Kahlil underscore Gibran. It’s the password.”

      “Like the author?” Luke said.

      “Yes.”

      “And what is it to work with love?” Ed said, quoting Gibran.

      Luke smiled. “It is to weave the cloth with threads drawn from your own heart, even as if your beloved were to wear that cloth. We have that on our kitchen wall at home. I love that stuff. I guess we’re just three incurable romantics here.”

      Luke went to the computer and ran his finger across the touchpad. The password box came up. He typed in the words.

      Kahlil_Gibran

      The desktop screen appeared. The wallpaper was a photo of snow-capped mountains, with yellow and green meadows in the foreground.

      “Looks like we’re in business. Thanks, Ali.”

      Luke slipped an external hard drive he had gotten from Swann out of the thigh pocket of his cargo pants. He plugged it into a USB port. The external drive had huge capacity. It should easily swallow this man’s entire computer. They could worry later about breaking any encryption.

      He started the file transfer. On the screen, an empty horizontal bar appeared. On the left hand side, the bar began to fill up with the color green. Three percent green, four percent, five. Beneath the bar, a blizzard of file names appeared and disappeared as each one was copied to the destination drive.

      Eight percent. Nine percent.

      Outside in the main room, there was a sudden commotion. The front doors banged open. “Police!” someone screamed. “Drop your weapons! On the ground!”

      They moved through the apartment, knocking things over, blasting through doors. It sounded like there were a lot of them. They would be here any second.

      “Police! Down! Down! Get down!”

      Luke glanced at the horizontal bar. It seemed to be stuck on twelve percent.

      Nassar stared up at Luke. His eyes were heavily lidded. Tears streamed from them. His lips trembled. His face was red, and his almost naked body had broken out in sweat. He did not look vindicated or triumphant in any way.

      Chapter 13

      7:05 a.m.

      Baltimore, Maryland – South of the Fort McHenry Tunnel

      Eldrick Thomas woke from a dream.

      In the dream, he was in a small cabin high in the mountains. The air was clean and cold. He knew he was dreaming because he had never been in a cabin before. There was a stone fireplace with a fire going. The fire was warm and he held his hands to the flames. In the next room he could hear his grandmother’s voice. She was singing an old church hymn. She had a beautiful voice.

      He opened his eyes to daylight.

      He was in a lot of pain. He touched his chest. It was tacky with blood, but the gunshots hadn’t killed him. He was sick from radioactivity. He remembered that. He glanced around. He was lying in some mud and was surrounded by thick bushes. To his left was a large body of water, a river or a harbor of some sort. He could hear a highway somewhere close.

      Ezatullah had chased him here. But that was… a long time ago. Ezatullah was probably gone by now.

      “Come on, man,” he croaked. “You gotta move.”

      It would be easy to just stay here. But if he did that, he was going to die. He didn’t want to die. He didn’t want to be a jihadi anymore. He just wanted to live. Even if he spent the rest of his life in prison, that would be all right. Prison was okay. He had been in prison a lot. It wasn’t as bad as people claimed.

      He tried to stand, but he couldn’t feel his legs. They were just gone. He rolled onto his stomach. Pain seared through him like a jolt of electricity. He went away to a dark place. Time passed. After a while, he returned. He was still here.

      He started to crawl, his hands gripping the dirt and the mud and pulling him along. He dragged himself up a long hill, the hill he had fallen down last night, the hill that had probably saved his life. He was crying from the pain, but he kept going. He didn’t give a shit about pain, he was just trying to make it up this hill.

      A long time passed. He was lying face down in the mud. The bushes were a little less dense here. He looked around. He was above the river now. The hole in the fence was directly in front of him. He crawled toward it.

      He got caught on the bottom of the fence while pulling himself through. The pain made him scream.

      Two old black men were sitting on white buckets not far away. Eldrick saw them with surreal clarity. He had never seen anyone so clearly before. They had fishing rods, tackle boxes, and a big white bucket. They had a big blue cooler on wheels. They had white paper bags and Styrofoam breakfast platters from McDonald’s. Behind them СКАЧАТЬ