Al Andalus

Ameer screamed in pain and sank to his knees, frantically trying to pull his hands apart. I ran at him somewhat clumsily and hit him with my shoulder, knocking him to the floor. Esther was only a moment behind me, and as he fell over she kneed him viciously in the head. She did it a second time and Ameer slumped unconscious.

"Have you got any tape?" she yelled at me. I yanked open one of the desk drawers to pull out some duct tape. In seconds we had Ameer's arms wrapped together, his fingers still pinned between the metal cubes.

After Esther had wrapped his legs together with the duct tape, she turned to me in puzzlement. "What in the hell were those cubes?" she demanded. "I've never seen anything like that."

I actually blushed. "It's kind of a nerd thing. They're neodymium magnets," I told her in an apologetic tone. "They're incredibly strong rare earth magnets. I saw them in a science catalog and bought a pair out of curiosity. But I never did anything with them because they scared me. Each one of those has a pulling force of about 140 pounds. It was the only way I could think of to keep him from setting off that damned vest."

"Omigod, no wonder he couldn't pull his hands apart. I almost feel sorry for him," she exclaimed.

"I wasn't sure it would work," I admitted, "but I felt like I had to try something." Esther said nothing; she just gave me a long, appraising look.

Just then we heard a terrific thud and the front door was kicked open. A number of men burst into the house carrying assault rifles. "FBI," one of them yelled. "Everyone down on the ground, hands in the air."

It took a while to sort things out. After the agents finally decided that the rest of us were who we said we were, they began concentrating on Ameer. First they carefully cut off the "martyr's vest" he was wearing and then disarmed it. One of the agents whistled. "This would have blown the whole house apart if he'd set it off," he marveled.

Only then did they cut the tape off of the terrorist and try to separate his hands. It took two agents to pull them apart, and the pain woke the terrorist. He made a quick grab for the trigger to his vest, only to realize that it was gone and he was helpless. For a moment he slumped back in defeat, but then he turned his head to stare at Esther and me.

"You think you have won, but you are wrong. Even if you knew what to look for you are too late to stop what will happen. My life does not matter; the caliphate will rise as before. Al Andalus!" he shouted, and then ground his teeth in a smile-like grimace. I heard a small crack and then smelled the odor of bitter almonds.

"Shit," one of the agents shouted, "he's taken poison!"

The medic who was working on Ameer's hands yelled at his partner, "Amyl nitrite - stat! Hold it under his nose and try to get him to inhale it!" But Ameer went into convulsions and within two minutes stopped breathing altogether.

"Cyanide," the medic swore. "He must have had a fake tooth. The last time I heard of anyone using one of those was back in the twentieth century."

After Ameer was loaded into a body bag and unceremoniously hauled out to the ambulance, there was only one more dramatic incident. One of the agents went over to Ginny and politely asked, "Are you Virginia Selfridge?"

When Ginny nodded, he said, "Mrs. Selfridge, you are under arrest as an accessory to murder and terrorism." With that he began to read her her Miranda rights as she gasped and protested. "No, no, I had nothing to do with all this. I had no idea that he was a terrorist," she cried, but the agent ignored her protestations and calmly handcuffed her.

She was crying again, and she turned to me with fear in her eyes. "Thomas, help me. You've got to do something. Make them understand that I wasn't a part of this. Ameer tricked me!"

I have to admit that I enjoyed the moment thoroughly. "Sorry, Ginny, I can't help you. You brought all this on yourself. Next time you need to do a better job of picking the man you're going to commit adultery with."

As the agent led my sobbing wife out the door, I turned to one of the other agents. "Are they really going to book her as an accomplice?" I asked.

"Nah," he said, "we know she's only guilty of being stupid and slutty - no offense. But we're going to put her through the wringer over the next few days to find out everything we can about Ameer, his methods, his network and anything else we can think of. I don't think the New Year is going to start off very pleasantly for her."

Satisfied, I turned and walked over to Esther. The medic was looking at the shrapnel wound in her arm. "This is going to be sore for a while," he said, "but I don't see any signs of infection and I don't think it'll give you any problems once it's fully healed." Then he gave her a wink that I wasn't supposed to see and added, "But if I were you I'd file a malpractice suit against whoever stitched you up. Those are the worst sutures I've ever seen!"

She turned, touched my hand and gave me a little smile. "I'll definitely take that under consideration," she said.

Then her demeanor changed and she stood up and went to look for the agent-in-charge. When she found him she asked him for an escort to Fort Meade. "Now that we don't have to worry about Ameer anymore, we need to tackle Al Andalus as quickly as possible, and we're going to need all the help we can get."

Apparently, the agent-in-charge had called ahead and explained what had happened because when we got to NSA headquarters in Fort Meade we were greeted like dignitaries. An armed guard took us to a high-security elevator that whisked us straight to the top floor. From there we were led to the NSA Director's office, a place I'd never been and never expected to see. In addition to the Director, we were introduced to high-ranking representatives of the FBI and the CIA. "I am so far above my pay grade I can't even see my level from here," I thought to myself.

Esther and I were asked to recount the events leading up to the present moment. Once we finished, the others added further details and new intelligence about the situation. The bottom line was that all three agencies were now convinced that a major terrorist attack, code named Al Andalus, was going to occur in the near future. Their best guess was New Year's Eve, and the most likely target was somewhere in Israel, although there were other possible targets as well. Moreover, everyone agreed that the computer virus we'd been investigating played a critical role. But after that, there was no agreement on anything and the group began to argue.

At one point, the CIA representative beckoned to Esther and the two of them left the director's office. When they returned, Esther had a strange look on her face. She leaned over and whispered, "I've just had an interesting phone call. We got the head of Mossad out of bed! I've been ordered to stay with you and assist you in way I can."

Before I could respond, the NSA Director turned to me. "Mr. Selfridge, I'm told that you are very good at solving puzzles like this. I'm also told that you've already been working on the Al Andalus virus for some time. Finally, we know that the Islamic State was so concerned about what you might uncover that they assigned two of their top agents to stop you. For all those reasons, I'm going to ask you to put together a team to break this code and thwart its purpose. Whatever resources from the NSA you need are yours for the asking."

He paused and nodded at Esther. "I've also been informed that my counterpart in Tel Aviv would like Ms. Freeman to be part of your team as well. Is that correct, Ms. Freeman?" When Esther nodded, the Director stood up. "There's a great deal more that the rest of us have to do, but I think it would be best if you two get back to that virus as quickly as possible."

He must have hit some sort of signal because a man came through the door and escorted us to a work area on a lower floor. He pointed at the computer terminals and encrypted telephone stations and invited us to make ourselves at home. "I'll be outside the door if you need anyone or anything," he told us.

The room we'd been given was not an ordinary conference room. On the walls was an array of television screens, each labeled with a city around the world and each with a live news feed from that city. Below each screen was a clock displaying the local time. "Look," Esther pointed, "it's 5:30 in the afternoon of the 30th here," she said, "but in Israel New Year's Eve has already started. If the attack is planned for midnight, we don't have much time."

I sat down at a terminal and called up the work I'd already done on the virus. The code scrolled out in front of me, line after line, page after page. I tried different applications on it, hoping to make sense of it, but none of my cracking tools worked. I immersed myself in the work and lost all sense of time. Someone brought sandwiches and I nibbled on one without ever knowing what kind it was. My eyes began to burn and I laid my head down to rest them for a minute.

December 31

I awoke to Esther's hand shaking my shoulder. I looked at her in confusion, but all she did was point at the clock for Tel Aviv. It read 1:00 p.m., December 31st. In confusion I looked at the other screens and saw that it was 6:00 a.m. here in Washington. Suddenly from one of the TV monitors came the sound of explosions, but when I looked around frantically I saw that they were coming from the feed from New Zealand, not Israel, and they were fireworks, not the sounds of combat.

Comprehension slowly came, and I looked at Esther apprehensively. "It's midnight in Auckland - New Year's Eve has already arrived there. Time is running out."

I looked down at the computer monitor, but the code displayed there didn't look any more comprehensible than it had last night. It seemed obvious to me that the virus was written to infect a proprietary operating system, but I knew that there were thousands if not millions of such systems in use around the world. The only person likely to recognize the system code was someone who worked on it regularly. We were going to have to try something different.

I turned to Esther and said, "Maybe the way to attack this puzzle is to leave the code alone for a while and try to figure out what the bad guys want to achieve. If we can guess their objective, maybe that will give us a clue on how to attack the code.

"Let's start with the basics. Bad guys often use viruses to steal account numbers, passwords or other confidential data. Stealing a bunch of state secrets might create big problems, but I can't see how that would help ISIS all that much. Besides, from what I've read, that kind of espionage is only really effective if the enemy doesn't know you have penetrated their security."

She nodded in agreement. "Our people think the same thing. We believe ISIS wants some grand stroke, something on the scale of 9-11."

"Okay, let's say that they were able to knock down the tallest building in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv. How would that help them re-establish the caliphate?" I asked.

"If they bombed the Knesset or caused some similar disaster," she said, "it would certainly send shock waves throughout the nation. But that wouldn't do anything to weaken the Israeli military, and ISIS has to know that we'd retaliate with everything we have. Surely those people wouldn't want that."

"I agree," I said. "Another Mideast war would be disruptive, but so far none of them have turned out very well for the Arabs," I said. "If I were them, my goal would be a knock-out blow, something that would take Israel out of the equation completely. Put yourself in their shoes: what could do that?"

Esther and I played "what-ifs" for a few minutes, then her face paled. "If I were ISIS, I know what my target would be: Dimona."

"The nuclear site in the Negev desert?" I asked.

"Exactly," she said. "If they could manage to destroy it they could turn the State of Israel into another Chernobyl."

That scenario was horrifying to me, but Esther seemed to regain her composure. "I can't tell you the details," she said, "but that place is as heavily defended as any location in Israel and possibly the world. There's no way they could even get near it, much less destroy it."

Just then the live feed from Sydney showed fireworks bursting over the iconic opera house as the Earth continued its inevitable march toward a new year. I started to look away, but then I stared again at the scene. The soaring fireworks gave me the answer. "The Patriots," I yelled. "The virus is targeted at the Patriot missiles!"

I rushed to the door of our room and found our liaison outside. "We need someone from whoever manufactures the Patriot missile system," I yelled. "Get them here fast - fly them in if you have to."

While we waited, Esther got on the phone and called Tel Aviv. Most of her conversation was in Hebrew so I didn't understand what she was saying, but the conversation got pretty heated at times.

Afterwards, I asked her what was going on. "The damned Israeli Defense Force is convinced that their system hasn't been breached and there's nothing wrong with Yaholom."

"What's Yaholom?" I asked.

"That's our name for the Patriot system," she said. "They think we're chasing phantoms."

I went online and tried to find information about the Patriot system. As I was scanning various links, the door opened and a young man wearing a jacket with a Raytheon logo came into the room. "We make the Patriot system," he said breezily. "Whatcha got?" I quickly explained our hypothesis and showed him to the computer terminal and the virus we had found. He looked at it for a few minutes and the bored expression on his face disappeared. Quickly he pulled a laptop out of his carryall and began checking lines of code.

After a few minutes he looked up at us and said, "Oh, shit."

"What is it?" Esther demanded.

"This is bad, real bad," he said. He pointed at his laptop. "This is the operating system for the Patriot's AN/MPQ-65 radar tracking system." He pointed at the computer terminal I'd been using. "That virus you have has been written to alter the intercept data the radar uploads to the missile. It's not a big change, but at the speed and distance needed for an intercept, it will cause the Patriot to completely miss its intended target."

I turned to Esther. "Get back to the IDF and tell them we have confirmation that the virus targets the Patriots. Then get them to check the operating systems again to see if they've been infected."

I turned back to the Raytheon tech. "Don't go anywhere - we're going to need you." Then I got on the phone and called the Director's office. They put me straight through. "Sir, we now have confirmation that the virus attacks the Patriot missile system. We don't know for sure, but we think the target is Israel, possibly the Dimona nuclear site. Yes sir, our next priority is to try to figure out how to stop it."

Esther had also been on the phone, and when I hung up she was looking at me with an angry expression. "That'll teach those idiots to pay attention," she said. "They've already found signs of the Al Andalus virus in one of the Patriot installations and they're checking the others now."

The Raytheon tech piped up, "Oh, they'll find it for sure. All the systems are designed to talk to one another. That way they create an 'umbrella' of defense. If one of them is infected, you can bet they all are."

Esther and I stared at each other. "So how do we fix it?" I asked him.

"Well, I've never heard of one of our systems having a virus, but theoretically it ought to be pretty simple to fix. All you'd have to do is swap out the AN/MPQ on each of the missile batteries with a new one."

"Can't you just install a new operating system?" I asked.

"These systems aren't like a Mac or a PC," he said. "The hardware and software are integrated, you've got subsystems running all through the unit, and they all work together. The only way to be sure you've got a clean system is a swap-out."

"Okay, how long does that take?" I asked.

"Oh, anywhere from eight to twelve hours."

"That's going to cut it very close," Esther said.

"Of course, that doesn't count delivery time," the tech went on.

"Delivery from where?" I asked uneasily.

"From our plant in Andover, Massachusetts," he said.

I slumped back into my chair and looked despairingly at Esther. "That isn't going to work," I said. I turned back to the guy from Raytheon. "You and I are going to have to try to figure out something else," I said.

We worked on the problem for hours. I tried to educate him on how viruses worked and he tried to teach me about the Patriot system. Nothing came of it.

More software engineers from Raytheon showed up, and I began shuttling among them, trying to come up with a way to extract or nullify the virus. The problem was that their system was proprietary, specific to Patriot unit. None of their programmers had ever encountered a virus aimed at their system and they had no way to attack the problem. The easy, obvious answer for them was to swap out the units. Not only would that take way too long, but the whole system would have to be shut down during the transfer, leaving what they were protecting undefended. In effect, we'd be doing the work of the virus for ISIS.

The first engineer began to get frustrated. "Look," he said, "if you're worried about a missile attack, your best bet is to destroy the missiles on the ground before they ever get launched. Wipe out the immediate threat and you can swap out the Patriot tracking system at your leisure."

Esther stood up and got in his face. "In Gulf War 1 back in 1991, the Iraqis fired Scud missiles at Israel to try to draw us into the war and split up the coalition. The coalition air force diverted dozens of planes to Scud-hunting duty, trying to find and destroy the missiles before they could be fired. For the most part they failed because the missiles were on camouflaged trucks well hidden in the desert. That was over 20 years ago, when the missiles were big and bulky. The latest missiles are smaller, harder to find and easier to fire. So quit stalling and get back to work!"

"Yes, ma'am," he gulped and turned back to his monitor while I tried to hide my smile. The situation was tense, but I couldn't help but be impressed at what a force of nature Esther could be.

Just then she grabbed my arm and pointed at the screen with the live feed from Tel Aviv. "It's midnight!" she gasped. Everyone in the room stopped and watched nervously to see what might happen. Esther leaned over and whispered, "The IDF is on full alert, and I've been told that your military is also in a high state of readiness."

But the scenes from Tel Aviv revealed nothing more than the normal New Year's Eve celebrations. Esther told me with relief that Dimona reported no activity at all. After that, the Raytheon guys wanted to go home but we wouldn't let them leave. "There's too much at stake," Esther said, and the little group reluctantly went back to their work.

After awhile, one of them raised his head and asked, "Does anybody know what's so special about 1.492?"

I looked at him with a puzzled expression. "Nothing that I can think of - why do you ask?"

"Because that's the deviation the virus adds in to the targeting data to divert the missiles," he said. "It just seems like such a precise number, I wondered if it had any significance."

One of the other techs jumped in. "1-4-9-2? I know that stands for." Then to our surprise he began to sing-song the childhood rhyme: "In fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue . . ."

Everybody in the room laughed except for Esther, who got a strange look on her face. Quickly she went to one of the computers and did some quick checking. "That's it!" she yelled. We all looked at her in confusion, so she quickly explained. "Everybody knows that King Ferdinand of Spain and Queen Isabella commissioned Christopher Columbus's expedition in 1492. But most of us in the west have forgotten the other major event in 1492. That was also the year that the last emir surrendered Granada to Queen Isabella, bringing an end to Al Andalus."