Biowar (36 page)

He wasn’t in Vietnam. And Telach wasn’t a second lieutenant trying to make her bones.

Still. They trusted their technology too much.

And something else. He cared for Lia in a way that made him reckless.

Dean backed off the gas, slowing to take the turn through the intersection. A block later, he found the street blocked with traffic. It was a struggle not to go up on the sidewalk and whip through.

Yacoub seemed to be on very friendly terms with the people at the police station. The loyalties of the police were not in question—all were card-carrying Ba’athists, fervent followers of the Nazi-like prima donna running the country. Lia soon found herself sitting in a small room, flanked by a Syrian who obviously had a thing for garlic. Yacoub disappeared; Lia studied the picture of the Syrian President on the wall, wondering how he would look with devil horns.

“We’re with you,” said Telach in her ear. “Let’s see how far this goes.”

Just peachy, thought Lia.

A few minutes later, the door opened. A man in an army uniform came in and sat down. He gave her a grim look, introduced himself as Lieutenant Abbas, and asked in heavily accented French for her passport.

Lia took it from her pocket and threw it on the desk. The lieutenant scowled but picked it up.

“Welcome to our country,” he said in English.

“Oui.”

“I don’t speak French very well,” he said.
“Anglais?”

“
Oui
,” she said, with the sneer only a Frenchman would use. “I can speak it if I must.”

The lieutenant smiled sympathetically. “We all do things we don’t like.”

“
Oui
.”

“Which way now?” he asked when the traffic opened up.

“Take your next right,” said Rockman. “She’s in the police station.”

“Damn.”

“No, Charlie, it’s fine. We can hear what’s going on. Please—don’t attract attention to yourself.”

“Yeah, I know,” said Charlie. “Okay.”

“A French arms dealer in my city,” said the Syrian. “Why is that?”

“I like the beach,” answered Lia.

“The beach is thirty miles from here.”

“I was misinformed.”

“You are French? Or Vietnamese?”

“Does it matter?”

“Your passport says French.”

“Then I’m French.” Lia’s back story indicated that her parents had fled Vietnam shortly before its fall to the Communists, but that she had a wide range of contacts there. A small file on the Interpol network—compromised by the Syrians, though they did not appear to have real-time access to it—duplicated the back story.

“Are you here as a buyer or a seller?” asked the lieutenant.

“A trader,” said Lia.

The Syrian shook his head. “A buyer or a seller?”

“A buyer,” decided Lia.

“Very unlike the French, to buy when they can sell.”

“What I’m trying to buy isn’t available in my home country. It came through Austria.”

There was a slight twitch on the Syrian’s face.

“Perhaps, if you are very good, someone will contact you,” he said.

“Great.” Lia got up. The guard behind her started to grab for her, to push her back into her seat.

On another day, another mission, Lia might have accepted the gesture in stride. Today, however, she was too tired, too worn, to hold her reactions in check—she threw the man over her shoulder onto the lieutenant’s desk.

Then she figured, What the hell.

Lia vaulted over the side of the desk and confronted the lieutenant directly—with her custom-made Kahr pistol in his neck.

“Let’s just decide right now that I’m very, very good.
Comprende?”

He managed to smile before she flattened his windpipe with the butt of her fist.

“
Comprende
was a bit over the top,” said Rockman as she walked down the front steps onto the street.

“I got jet lag. What can I tell you? And tell Charlie Dean he stands out like a sore thumb in that bazaar over there. If he’s going to back me up he’s going to have to work on his act.”

76

At first, Karr thought the woman had misunderstood or the translation had been bad. He had the translator rephrase and repeat the question twice.

She had treated men with a similar disease four or five weeks before; an entire village had been infected.

And a white man, an American, had come into her village about three weeks ago.

“All right,” Karr said. “Where exactly is this place?”

It was a guerrilla camp, not a village, though the description was not that far wrong. Karr counted eight buildings on the sat picture, and the analysts believed there were at least two more in the bushes.

They also believed the camp was abandoned. It was the one they’d ID’ed earlier affiliated with the Crescent Tigers.

“If they got the disease, that would account for the fact that they abandoned the camp and have almost completely disappeared,” said Chafetz. “Except for maybe five or six people, including the ones who followed you in Bangkok.”

Abandoned or not, they weren’t taking chances. Rubens convinced whomever he needed to convince that this was important, and besides the Thai Army unit that had accompanied Karr to the old woman’s village, a company of U.S. Army Rangers took control of the area. Heavily armed gunships led the way, and after the perimeter was secured a specially equipped NBC unit rappelled into the central part of the village, checking it before clearing the rest of the unit inside. All these precautions spooked the Thai soldiers, and Karr had a hard time talking the pilot into dropping him off. As it was, he barely dropped into a hover as he skirted into the landing area, a clearing just below the main area of the camp.

“You’d better stay back,” said one of the soldiers as Tommy walked up the hill. “Hasn’t been cleared yet.”

“It’s all right,” said Karr. He held up his hand spectrometer. Unlike the bulky gear the unit attached to the Rangers carried, Karr’s handheld “sniffer” could sort chemical and biological compounds. It was also sensitive enough to detect extremely minute amounts of material at a safe distance. Most of the work was actually being done back in Crypto City; his unit was essentially a very sophisticated nose communicating its tickles via his com system. The data stream was so thick he couldn’t even talk to the Art Room while it was being used.

Karr got a
bing,
an audible alert piped from the units when a detection was made. He stopped, moved to his right. Another
bing.

He pushed the button on the wand to stop the transmission.

“That burial spot we told you about,” Chafetz said. “Why don’t you take some readings?”

“Why not?”

Karr walked to the right, past a series of tree trunks that had been felled as part of defenses. The Art Room had ID’ed a minefield and booby-trapped area about a hundred yards farther in the jungle. The area just above that had been cleared and dug recently; Karr knelt down, examining it. The dirt had been packed down for a few weeks but not much more than that. He took pictures and chemical samples, then moved back toward the village area, where the men in the special suits were still conducting their methodical inspection.

Two of the buildings had been destroyed by explosive charges strong enough to obliterate their roofs and most of their sides. Karr went to them first; the sniffer confirmed that there had been people killed inside them, though by now the ruins had been fairly well picked over. Karr poked around carefully, looking for some part of the bomb or igniter, but found none.

“We’re still looking for labs,” said Chafetz. “Nothing the Rangers have been in fit.”

“What about that burial site?”

“Not getting the right chemical hits. Look up at that knoll to the west, beyond the large building with the thatched roof.”

“They all have thatched roofs,” he told the runner, though he knew what she meant.

One of the Rangers in a chemical-protection suit tried to block his way, but Karr just waved him off.

“I already got it,” Karr told the specialist. “I’m fine. Trust me.”

Before he went to the knoll, Karr walked into the building. Dried blood was splattered on the walls and tables that lined the open hall, and there were smears along the floor. He took pictures and looked through the building. The kitchen area looked so neat he was tempted to turn on the stove and make himself some tea.

A small radio unit lay next to the wall in the outer vestibule. It was an igniter, the sort used in a commercial construction operation to detonate rock-blasting explosives by remote control. Karr picked it up and held it in his hand as he went to the knoll.

“Definitely bodies buried there. Burned, most likely,” said Chafetz.

“Lab equipment?”

“Have the Rangers bring over that radar unit and we’ll take a better look. Doesn’t seem like it, though.”

“Yeah, okay. In the meantime I have some pictures to send you. And information on a command detonator, looks commercial.”

“Serial numbers?”

“Yup.”

“Good deal.”

Karr uploaded the data, then went and found the head of the Ranger unit. As the soldiers hauled their gear up, Karr took a breather, walking back to the middle of the camp and sitting down on a rock at the side of what had probably been an assembly area. He reached into his pocket for his small flask of water, took a long swig, then another.

Camp gets sick but doesn’t make the bug.

Then it gets blown up.

The survivors track him.

Oh,
he said to himself.

Oh.

A lanky captain appeared before him, hands on hips.

“Mr. Karr?”

“Tommy.” The NSA op rose and shook the captain’s hand.

“Good to put a face with the voice,” said the Ranger captain. “What else do you need?”

“Two cemetery sites that we’ll want to secure, those buildings that were blown up, and that long building with the tables in it, the mess area. Forensics team will be here a few hours.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I need a favor.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You think one of the helicopters could take me back to Bangkok? Seems I have some unfinished business there.”

77

At 3:00 A.M., even Washington, D.C., seemed like a ghost town, deserted and eerie. The streetlights seemed to glow brown instead of yellow, and the blinking traffic lights did more to create the fog than cut through it. Rubens and his entourage—his car was sandwiched between two vans packed with an NSA Black Suit security team—raced through the streets, veering up Pennsylvania Avenue. They were going not to the West Wing but the White House itself, summoned by Marcke for an in-person update.

One of the night staff had forwarded a copy of the executive branch’s daily news summary of headline stories appearing in the morning papers and on the morning news shows. “Killer Epidemic” led all the major papers. An unnamed CDC official—undoubtedly Lester—was booked on all three networks.

Crisis makes the man, Rubens thought to himself as they drove. It was an idea he firmly believed. Indeed, he had lived it, welcoming the challenges that came with responsibility. William Rubens had thrived on crisis and had reason to believe that he handled grave stresses well. And yet some crises were too much for any man. Some problems were beyond solution; a tidal wave was best not confronted but merely survived.

In politics, those who succeeded generally chose the latter path. The best way to Secretary of State surely led in that direction—go along, go along, get past this, stay away from that. Survive.

No, Rubens decided, he was not a man who settled for survival. Nor was that what was needed now. The threat would be conquered, or he would be conquered by it.

Rubens left his security team outside and went up the stairs, his feet shuffling against the stones and then gliding across the carpet. The President was waiting with George Hadash in the Blue Room. The large room in the center of the first floor of the house was more often used by tourists than the President, but the staff had brought in some coffee urns and arranged the chairs in a semicircle. Rubens might have thought he was back at school, sitting in one of Hadash’s informal seminars on the intersection between diplomacy and technology.

“The secretaries of state and defense are on their way,” said the President, who took a cup of coffee and sat on one of the chairs. “Health, CDC, Ms. Marshall—they’re coming as well. But I want you to give me the full story first, Billy. What’s the situation?”

“Man-made disease sold to a syndicate run by Radoslaw Dlugsko, a Polish weapons trafficker who among other things operates a front company called UKD. We’ve tracked three probable sales. One was to a Swedish company. We’ve compromised their computers and done a physical check on the shipment. We believe the bacteria in question wasn’t involved, but to be safe I’d recommend alerting their authorities. We’re in the process of completing the same procedure on an operation in Syria. We hope to have further data on that very shortly. But in the meantime, we have the last shipment tracked to a facility in Russia. According to our information, it’s to be shipped to a military base within six hours.”

“Where exactly?”

“Chechnya.”

“Chechnya?”

“Yes. Two weeks ago, the Third Battalion of the Second Armored Division/Special moved to that base. That unit is trained to deal with NBC warfare.”

“They’re planning to use it in an operation?” asked Marcke.

“I don’t have intelligence on that,” admitted Rubens. “But we cannot take the chance.”

“Do you think the Russians would indiscriminately use biological weapons?” asked Marcke.

“They may feel that, because of the way the disease is spread, it’s not indiscriminate. It’s liquid contact on the skin. It can be passed by person to person apparently through saliva contact—but we’re still working on the exact mechanics.”

“Go over the outbreak in America,” said Hadash. “Now, before the others get here.”

“At last count, there were fifty-three confirmed cases. We have a test. And we have a cure.”

“A cure?” said Hadash.