“Barring pictures of them riding bikes with wooden shoes, I’m going to say that’s a safe bet. Even safer when you see what else I found. Are you near your computer?”
Lara poured a cup of coffee and handed it to him. Harvath mouthed “thank you” and walked over to the table where he sat down in front of his laptop.
“Okay, I’m at my computer. What did you find?”
“Check these out,” Nicholas replied as he pressed send on the encrypted email. “Open them in order.”
When the email arrived seconds later, Harvath did as instructed. The first attachment showed the passport applications and photos of the three deceased patients: Shukri Abu Odeh, Mousa Abulqader Elashi, and Abdulraham Mafid Marzook. The following attachments contained passenger flight manifests, U.S. Customs and Border Protection entry information, and three U.S. Customs Declaration Forms.
“What am I looking for?”
“I can’t find anything connecting the three of them. No phone calls, no emails, no social media overlap, nothing. But in the last two weeks, all three of them travelled to the same place,” Nicholas replied.
“Together or separately?”
“Separately.”
Harvath scanned the Declaration forms and finally found it. “Saudi Arabia.”
“Correct. And based on the flight manifests, they went in and out of King Abdulaziz International Airport in Jeddah.”
Harvath went back through and looked at everything again.
As he did, Nicholas asked. “What do you think? Typhoid Mohammeds? Could the Saudis actually be part of this whole thing?”
The Saudis funded a lot of terrorism. Fifteen of the 9/11 hijackers had been from the Kingdom. They didn’t have clean hands by any means, but the fact that Odeh, Elashi, and Marzook had done nothing to hide their travel bothered him. The Saudi Intelligence services wouldn’t have left such an obvious trail. It had to be something else. Then it hit him.
“Jeddah wasn’t their final destination,” he said.
“Where do you think they went?”
Harvath pulled up a web site he used to help calculate dates in the Muslim calendar and said, “They, along with more than two million other people, went to Mecca for the Hajj.”
CHAPTER 35
It’s referred to as the fifth pillar of Islam. Every Muslim who is physically and financially able is obligated to make at least one pilgrimage to Mecca in their lifetime,” said Harvath.
On his end, Nicholas was scrolling through the pictures of it he had pulled up. “I don’t think I have ever seen crowds this big.”
“It’s the largest gathering of people in the world. Last year, there were two-point-one million people there.”
“It’s the ultimate petri dish.”
Harvath agreed. “Especially when you have millions of hands trying to touch or kiss the Ka’aba and drink from the sacred well of Zamzam.”
“Is the Ka’aba that outdoor, box-shaped structure I see people walking in circles around?
“That’s it. When Muslims pray toward Mecca, technically it’s toward the Ka’aba, which is located in the center of Islam’s most sacred mosque, the Al-Masjid al-Haram. Muslims believe the Ka’aba was built by Abraham, and it’s considered their holiest site.”
“It looks like a crowd control nightmare,” Nicholas stated.
“It is. In fact, thousands of people have died at the Hajj. There have been fires, riots, bombings, stampedes, structural failures because of overcrowding, you name it.”
“What about disease?”
“Plenty of it, and none of it good,” Harvath replied. “There have been outbreaks of meningitis and cholera, as well as things like Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, also known as MERS. It normally doesn’t get caught until the Hajj participants return to their home countries, and then the illnesses flare there.”
“Don’t they screen them as they come into Saudi Arabia?”
“They try, but people can be asymptomatic when they arrive. They also require specific vaccinations as a condition of entry, but for many pilgrims forged immunization records are easier and cheaper to get than the actual vaccinations. It’s a public health nightmare. The Saudis know it and so do we.”
“Then what’s being done about it?” Nicholas asked.
“I just told you.”
“Global public health is based on the honor system, backed up by supposedly vigilant border guards and passport-stampers?”
“Pretty much.”
“We’re screwed.”
Harvath agreed. “That’s one of the problems of modern air travel. An infected person can get on a plane anywhere in the world and be anywhere else within twenty-four hours.”
“Do you think that’s what this is? Damien and his Plenary Panel cooked up this illness and somehow got it into Mecca? They spread it through the Hajj and then the infected get on planes back to their home countries to start a global pandemic?”
“It’d be a clever way to do it,” said Harvath, as he clicked over to another site to look at something.
“If this is African Hemorrhagic Fever, how did they get it in to Saudi Arabia? You can’t even get near Mecca unless you are Muslim.”
“If I had the resources Damien does, and I was putting this operation together, I’d do it via Zakat.”
“What’s Zakat?” Nicholas replied.
“It’s like an Islamic income tax, or a mandatory form of alms-giving. Allegedly, it’s used in part to help poor Muslims and can even be applied to paying their costs for attending the Hajj.
“Because of how many people want to participate, Saudi Arabia sets quotas for each country. Not only is Congo extremely poor, but it has a very small Muslim population. If I were Damien, I would take advantage of both of those factors.”
“Meaning, you’d fund a group of Muslims from Congo to go to Mecca?”
“Exactly,” Harvath replied. “I would quietly work my diplomatic connections to get the amount of visas I needed and then put the word out in the Congolese Muslim community that a wealthy Muslim benefactor had established a fund to underwrite their pilgrimage to Mecca.”
“Where does African Hemorrhagic Fever enter in?”
Harvath scrolled down on a web site with information about the Hajj. “The Saudi government publishes a list of required vaccines for pilgrims. Yellow fever, polio, things like that. Whether or not my Congolese Muslims had been vaccinated, I would send my own team in, tell them the list had been updated and that they needed an additional immunization.
“And after making sure their travel and medical documents were in order,” Nicholas added, “all you would have to do is just send them on their way.”
“You’d want to do more than that. I’d maximize the spread of the disease by breaking them up at different hotels and attaching them to different tour groups once they arrived in Mecca. But at that point, it would all come down to how communicable the disease was.”
“Then what? Do the Congolese Muslims crash and bleed out in Saudi Arabia? Isn’t that the kind of thing the Saudis would be on the lookout for?”
It was, and Harvath remembered what Leonce had told them about the sick man who had arrived at the Matumaini Clinic and how a nurse believed he could be Muslim because she thought she had overheard him moan the word “Allah.”
No loose ends.
“You’re right,” Harvath replied. “Just because the fuse was lit, it doesn’t mean Damien was off the hook. No bomb maker — even one who has cooked up a plague bomb — would want pieces of it traced to their source. If I were Damien, I’d want those pilgrims back before the Saudis knew what had happened.”
“Which means you wouldn’t leave their return up to commercial air travel. Too many things could go wrong. He probably would have chartered a flight for them.”