He slipped it into his pocket and replaced the lid on the safe after dumping the black case and the rubber gloves in the hole. He jammed the piece of wood in place and slid the drain cover into its slot. Then he picked his way back across the piles of junk and up the stairs. The street was totally deserted, the hour late. He walked a block or two until he hit Cary Street, where he found a cab waiting outside one of the bars. He got in the backseat and asked the driver to head for the Jefferson Hotel.
He retrieved the hard drive from his pocket and stared at it.
What was on the silicon chip inside this piece of plastic? Was it worth Albert Rousseau’s life? Was it the evidence he needed to bring Veritas to justice? Right now, he had no answers. Tomorrow. Tomorrow he would know.
39
The last of the reports were filtering into the Department of Homeland Security on Sunday morning when J. D. Rothery closed his door and addressed the representatives of the other federal agencies. He consulted the latest figures, updated at 0600, twenty minutes earlier.
“Good news and bad news, gentlemen,” he said, setting the paper on his desk.“We have field reports back on twenty-five of the twenty-seven raids, and so far we’re batting a thousand. Our teams have penetrated each lab and effectively shut them down. Casualties are minimal so far: three dead and seven wounded. The three dead are all British SAS forces. They were assigned the lab in Beirut and had completed their mission when the vehicle transporting them back to the beach was hit by an RPG.” All men in the room knew what damage a rocketpropelled grenade could do to an unarmored car or SUV “We’re still waiting on reports from our teams in Tehran and Cairo.”
“That sounds like the good news, J. D.,” Tony Warner said. “What’s the bad news?”
Rothery consulted the sheaf of papers on his desk. “We’ve got sarin, ricin, cholera, Q fever, and anthrax. But so far we do not have a lab that was producing our virus.”
“Jesus Christ,” Craig Simms said.“I can’t begin to tell you how this has hurt our operations, J. D. It’s going to take the CIA years to regain these intelligence-gathering points.” His face was deep crimson.
“We knew going in that the operation might not produce the results we wanted. This is not a total surprise. And keep in mind we just shut down two dozen labs that were producing chemical weapons. This is not a bad thing.”
Simms was not easily placated. “The CIA operates under a microscope. Getting these covert teams and agents into place took years. And now the entire operation is shut down. In one day. And without the results we were looking for. If you ask me, this exercise was a total disaster.”
Jim Allenby came to Rothery’s defense. “The labs were on line and producing chemicals outlawed under international law. And these guys were ready to use them when the time came. Now the local authorities have the locations of all the labs and they’ll shut them down for us. Plus we removed a lot of al-Qaeda operatives in one swoop. Even though we didn’t find the source of the virus, this was not a waste of time, Craig.”
“How many al-Qaeda guys did we kill?” Warner asked.
Rothery glanced at one of the columns on the top page. “Eighty-seven.”
“Jim’s right, Craig. That’s a lot of bad guys out of the way. I don’t see this as a total snafu.”
“You didn’t spend years putting the network in place,” Simms shot back.
There was a knock on the door, and Rothery’s personal assistant entered with two sheets of paper. She walked across the room, handed them to her boss, and left without a word. Rothery perused the printouts, his face darkening as he read the reports.
“The Israelis sent a Mossad team into Cairo. They gained entry and overpowered the enemy operatives inside the building, but they couldn’t get out. Last report they radioed out was they were holding off up to one hundred bad guys. Satellite intel shows the building being overrun one hour and eight minutes ago. We’ve got to assume the entire team is dead.”
“Shit,” Allenby said. “This is not good.”
“There’s more,” Rothery said grimly. “One of our teams, Delta Force, was dropped into Tehran. They shut down the lab, wired it with explosives, and blew it. But three of the six team members were killed on extraction. They managed to get their bodies on the chopper, so there’s no direct proof we were responsible.”
Silence engulfed the room. The Mossad team in Cairo would have been at least five men. That plus the three British commandos and now the three Delta Force casualties put the total number of dead at eleven. Plus the Egyptians would have no trouble identifying the Mossad team, and that meant they were about to be embroiled in an international incident. The Egyptians were not going to take kindly to Israeli commandos attacking targets in their capital city. What had appeared initially to be a reasonable success now had all the markings of disaster.
“Did either of the teams report back on what the labs were producing?” Tony Warner asked.
Rothery nodded his head slightly. “Shigella and tularemia. No virus.”
“What a mess,” Craig Simms said.
No one disagreed.
40
The valet handed Jennifer Pearce a tag and hustled her car out of the parking lane. She pocketed the number and cruised through the front door of the Jefferson Hotel. She skipped up the thirty-six steps of the grand staircase and spied Gordon Buchanan at one of the tables in Palm Court. He rose to greet her as she arrived.
“How was your night?” she asked. “I can’t imagine anyone having a good sleep in a dump like this.”
He grinned. “It’s okay, but it’s not your place. Nice scenery, but not very intimate.” They sat, and she unhooked her laptop carrying case from her shoulder and let it drop on the seat bench beside her.
“Well, I’ll take that as a compliment,” she said, ordering a tea when the waitress came around. “So what’s so important that I barely had time for a shower this morning?”
He looked sheepish. “I wasn’t exactly truthful with you last night,” he said.“I got some liquid nitrogen from that locksmith I called yesterday and went back to Rousseau’s town house last night.”
“You cracked the safe?” she asked, wide-eyed.
“Yeah. It wasn’t that hard, actually. It just took a few hours. Patience was the key. Anyway, this is what I found in the safe.” He retrieved the Sony Micro Vault from his pocket and handed it to her.
“We use these all the time to transfer data between BioTech Five and White Oak. It’s like a portable hard drive.” She pulled the two ends apart and checked the USB connection. “Do you know what’s on it?”
“No. That’s why I asked you to bring your laptop,” he said, motioning to the case beside her. “I thought we could have a look together. If it’s technical, I wouldn’t know what I was looking at anyway.”
“Sure,” she said, unzipping the case and setting the laptop on the table. She powered it up and slipped the tiny solid-state storage unit into one of the USB ports. Windows recognized the new hardware and a screen popped up on her monitor, showing all the files Albert Rousseau had burned on the disc. There were seven in total, and Jennifer began opening them, looking carefully at the contents of each before going on to the next. She sipped her tea, at one point asking for a refill of hot water, and had just about finished the second cup when she closed the last file and sat back in her seat.
“Well, you’ve got the proof you need to go after Veritas,” she said, allowing a small smile to creep over her face. “It’s all there, Gordon.”