“All right, we know who Sam Zehaden is, but why is he intent on killing millions of people in the country he’s called home for almost forty years?”
“There was an incident about eleven years ago that seemed to change him. Three of his uncles and one aunt were in the wrong place at the wrong time. They were in a restaurant in Shiraz, a moderate-size city in central Iran, when the place was blown to bits by a smart bomb.”
“What?” Rothery said. “What the hell happened?”
“The rear of the restaurant was being used as a meeting place for an al-Qaeda faction. The Israelis had good intel that there was to be a high-level meeting on that day at that time, and they hit the building with one perfectly placed bomb. Totally destroyed the restaurant, killing six staff, twelve diners, and an unknown number of terrorists. But it would appear the damage was done. Sam Zehaden blamed the United States, his own country, for sanctioning the Israeli attack.”
“Is there any proof he turned?” Allenby asked.
“He began traveling to Iran on a regular basis. He was seen in the vicinity of known al-Qaeda members and started sending money back to Iran. Prior to his relatives’ deaths, he had been quite visible in the community, supporting the local children’s hospital and numerous other charities, but after the incident he dropped out of sight. Went off the radar.”
“That’s all good stuff, but why do you think the lab is in that building?” Rothery asked.
“We had a call from a citizen about the HEPA filters. She’s a nurse in a local hospital and knows what constitutes necessary filtration. She figures that in its current state, that particular bay is at about a BioLevel Four status. That and the timing. The filtration systems were moved in the last week in August. My biological experts have calculated the amount of time needed to produce a quantity of virus that could constitute a major threat at about three weeks. Today is September nineteenth, J. D. The timing is perfect.”
“How reliable is your source?” Rothery asked.
“First class,” Simms said. “We can’t identify her at this time. That was part of the deal. She’s scared shitless that if Zehaden is indeed al-Qaeda, someone will come looking for her after the fact. We guaranteed her anonymity, but it didn’t help. She wants her name kept out of it.”
“One more question, Craig,” Rothery said.“How does the CIA know so much about Sam Zehaden? He lives inside our borders, a place your powers as an agency do not extend to.”
“We picked up on this guy when he started to visit Iran on a regular basis. It was prudent to follow up on his activities, even if that meant keeping a file open on him while he was at home.”
Rothery nodded. He turned to Jim Allenby. “What do you think, Jim? This is going to be your operation. You think it warrants action?”
Allenby was silent, weighing the facts. Finally, he said, “The upside definitely outweighs the downside. If we miss, we haven’t really lost anything. We’re just doing our job. But if we get lucky, we’re saviors. If this warehouse is the lab, we’ve ended an extremely serious crisis before the terrorists could strike. Not only will that bolster the confidence of the average American, it will send a firm message to other terrorist cells. I think we should move on it, J. D.”
“Okay,” Rothery said. “Do you want to coordinate it, Jim?”
“Sure, but I’ll want some SWAT backup as well. I’ll contact the Orlando PD and set it up. I’ll have everything in place for early tomorrow morning.”
“Tony, you okay with this?” Rothery asked the NSA man, who to this juncture had been quiet.
“I think it looks good.”
Rothery leaned back from the table with the maps and crossed his arms on his chest. “All right, gentlemen. You’ve got the green light. Let’s shut this operation down. And let’s keep our fingers crossed that this is it.”
56
Things just kept getting better.
At two o’clock on Monday, September 19, less than two hours after the viral task force had met, J. D. Rothery received a call from Tony Warner at the National Security Agency. The news was beyond belief. “One of the pharmaceutical giants has discovered a drug that inhibits the virus from attaching to host cells. And while searching for the inhibitors, they uncovered a drug that appears to inhibit viral genome replication,” Warner said.
“What the hell does that mean?” Rothery asked Warner.
Tony Warner was so excited that he couldn’t keep his voice from quivering as he spoke. “They’ve decoded the virus, J. D. They have a drug that targets the synthesis of viral polymerases. Even once the virus is in the body, this drug can immediately stop its progress. They’ve got the cure.”
“How sure are you of this?” J. D. asked, his breath coming quicker now. Jesus, tell me they’re positive they’ve nailed this thing.
“Ninety-nine-point-nine percent, J.D. The CEO and his leading researcher are ready to fly up to D.C. and meet with you. Initial tests are absolutely definitive. Their drug stopped the virus from encoding. And without genome replication, the virus is dead in the water.”
“Fantastic,” Rothery said, wiping his brow, surprised at the wetness on his hand. “Get them up here now.”
“Yeah, boss.”
“By the way, Tony, who did it? Which company?”
“Veritas Pharmaceutical. The guy you’ll be meeting with is Bruce Andrews-he’s the CEO. His lead researcher on this is Dr. Chiang Wai.”
“Tony, you are the man.”
“I’m the man, J. D.,” Warner said, and hung up.
Rothery stood on wobbly legs and walked to the window. Was this really happening? Were they cutting the threat off at the knees? If Jim Allenby and the SWAT team were successful in locating and shutting down the lab in Orlando and Veritas had the cure to the disease, they were out of the woods. What had appeared to be the mother of all terrorist threats was about to fizzle out. He leaned against the windowsill as he felt his knees buckle. God almighty, the American people had lived through enough of this crap, and they didn’t need any more. And maybe that’s who was behind the sudden surge of luck. Maybe there was a God and He was watching. Maybe He was sick of the horror these radicals inflicted on innocent people and He decided that enough was enough. Perhaps the answers had come from a higher place than the White House or the Pentagon this time. Maybe they had come from Him.
Andrews and Wai arrived at ten minutes to seven in the evening and were ushered directly into the Under Secretary’s office. Craig Simms and Tony Warner were present. Jim Allenby was in Orlando, coordinating the raid set for seven o’clock the next morning. Allenby had insisted on having the proper containment equipment on hand when the raid went down, and that equipment took time to assemble. The three remaining members of the Viral Task Force, as the press had dubbed them, were waiting for Andrews and Wai, and all three rose and shook hands when the researchers arrived. They retook their seats and Rothery directed his first question to Bruce Andrews.
“How sure are you that you’ve got this thing beat?” he asked.
“We were at about ninety-five percent last night, Mr. Under Secretary,” Andrews replied. “But today we’re at a hundred percent. We are positive we have a drug that will stop the virus once it’s in the body.” Andrews accepted the coffee that was being distributed and continued. “Would you like me to explain? My English is probably a bit better than Dr. Wai’s.”
“Please,” Rothery said.
“When we were given the sample of the virus, we immediately attacked the problem by looking at the viral inhibitor. We got lucky. Really lucky. We used a computer model based on the virus and cross-correlated that to the fusion-peptide exposed when the gp41 protein binds and its cellular receptors mutate. It took a few hundred thousand models to get the one we wanted, but where we got lucky was that we started out on the right track. And with the supercomputers we have at Veritas, the modeling was done in one one-millionth of the time it would have taken by conventional methods.”