As he pulled back, his eyes opened into a smile. “You look hot and starved.” He caught himself. “I did not mean ‘hot’ like …”
“Of course, you didn’t,” she laughed and followed him to the table. It felt good to laugh, to have a man look at you and tell you he liked what he saw. She relaxed and
tried to clear her mind of every horrible event of the past days.
He had already ordered chicken satay. They sat, and Zehra launched into the food, surprised at how hungry she was until she remembered she’d missed lunch.
While they ate, Mustafa asked dozens of questions. The waiter brought an order of vegetable curry and Pad Woon Sen, a noodle dish with shrimp that Mustafa had ordered previously for her. For a moment, this bothered her, but his formality was sweet, thoughtful. She let it slide.
Suddenly, BJ’s words echoed in her head. Was Mustafa more interested than normal? Was he simply curious about her work? When she met people and told them what she did, they usually reacted with fascination. Maybe Mustafa was like them.
“You seem so interested in this trial. Is there a reason?” she asked.
His eyes dropped to the table for an instant and flicked back to her. “I am interested in anything you do. There are few Muslim women in my country who are like you.”
Impressed, Zehra still pushed on. “But I’m wondering why.”
“Why? There is nothing special. It is you.”
Her thoughts twisted. Was BJ correct or was he too critical? To stall for time, she leaned over her plate and twirled some noodles around her chopsticks. When she looked up, her body shuddered. Mustafa’s expression had changed to something Zehra’d never seen before. The look slipped away quickly, but it left her shaken. She leaned back in her chair.
His voice resumed the pleasant tone of before. “All right, if you insist. Let us talk about me for a while.” He told her of his volunteer work at three mosques with younger people.
“As I have told you, Islamic scientists used to be the best in the world, many centuries ago. One of my missions in life is to resurrect that leadership. I work with younger Muslims to encourage them to go into the sciences. No one else does that for them.”
“What do you do?”
“Science fairs are coming up tomorrow at many of the schools. In cooperation with my company, the schools let us scientists help the kids with their projects.” He lifted his shoulders. “This is how I can help them.”
“How wonderful.”
His head tilted up. “Maybe you would be interested in visiting with them.”
“When?”
“Tomorrow, Friday afternoon.” He stopped. “I forgot. You are probably too busy for that. On the other hand, it may be interesting for you. I could pick you up.”
Zehra paused. The work required for the trial grew larger, but in the back of her mind small suspicions, like the new weeds in her pots at home, poked their way out. She had to find out the truth about him. Zehra smiled. “Sure, I’d love to come.”
But before she went, she’d call BJ with the details just in case.
Thirty-Five
When Paul returned to the FBI office in downtown Minneapolis, he could feel humid hints of a coming storm. As he walked into the lobby, a similar sense of tension struck him. It wasn’t so much the level of noise or activity as it was the lack of both.
Conway’s voice had a panicky edge to it and this time, he hadn’t yelled at Paul. Something was wrong.
He hurried to the conference room to find Conway pacing back and forth. Several people Paul didn’t recognize surrounded Conway. Paul was surprised to see Joan Cortez, standing in the corner.
He walked up to her and said quietly, “What are you doing here?”
She didn’t look him in the eye. “We’ve been pulled in, too. You better listen.”
Nervous conversations rose from pods of people around the table until Conway cleared his throat. “Listen up, everybody.” In a second, the crowd went silent. Paul could feel the electricity in the air.
“Folks,” Conway began, “this is Dr. Stanley Samson from the USAMRIID.”
“The what?” asked someone from the back.
A man who looked like a college professor stood up next to Conway. Short white hair bristled over his scalp. He wore a button-down shirt with a striped tie. He carried a coffee cup with stained brown edges from all the coffee it had held. Immense wire-rimmed glasses hid a small face with blue eyes. He moved slowly in contrast to Conway.
“I’m Dr. Samson from the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Disease.” He lifted his eyes to look around the room. “Haven’t heard of us, huh?” He grinned. “Just call us RID.”
Dr. Samson lifted a thin arm and waved it toward a group of drab looking people who stood to the side of the conference table. “My team. We don’t have much time, so I’ll cut the crap and make this short. We’ve been in existence since 1969. Our mission is to research biological threats to the military and develop strategies for medical defense against the threats that require containment. Of course, our work usually includes the defense of the civilian population, also.”
Conway, always needing attention, stepped forward. “You’d be surprised to learn they have over 200 scientists working in their labs at Ft. Detrick, in Maryland. We got involved in the wake of nine-eleven. Remember, there were several anthrax threats in the form of mailings to senators and people in Washington?”
When heads nodded, Dr. Samson continued, “As a result, we evaluated over 30,000 samples. We initiated Operation Noble Eagle, which required our country to expand its capacity for threat agent identification by tenfold.” Dr. Samson’s face lit-up. “And we did it.”
Valentini spoke, “Is this about an anthrax scare? I haven’t heard anything.”
Dr. Samson furrowed his eyebrows and shook his head back and forth. “Not so simple, I’m afraid to say.” He sipped coffee.
Paul felt his insides squeeze tighter. Something bad was coming.
Looking around him, Dr. Samson said, “Don’t repeat this, but we were taken by surprise, frankly. Until the message came from our Russian counterparts at Vector, we would never have guessed …”
“Vector?” Conway asked.
“Sorry. I’ll back up, but we don’t have much time so keep your questions short,” the doctor said. He shifted from one leg to the other and looked down into his coffee cup.
When he looked up, he spoke quickly. “Smallpox was eradicated from the planet in 1979 according to the World Health Organization. However, two repositories were established to contain the smallpox virus, called by its scientific name Variola, for future research purposes. One is located in Atlanta at the Center for Disease Control and the other is in eastern Russia. It’s called Vector.”
Paul glanced at the people around him. No one moved or sat down.
Dr. Samson continued, “Vector was chosen because the Soviets had established a top-secret biological warfare research lab there during the Cold War. It was only natural to continue to use the facilities. President Richard Nixon officially halted all biological warfare research in this country in 1969. The Soviets agreed to halt theirs also.” He pursed his lips and shook his head. “They lied. In fact, as late at the 1980s, they were actively assembling biological weapons.
“Once the communists fell, our government moved into Vector and set up joint research projects, mostly to monitor their work. In fact, the complex is under military guard and has a security system built by the Bechtel Group and paid for by our government. Today, Vector stills conducts research as we do in our labs in Atlanta and Ft. Detrick.”
Conway asked, “I thought you said only Atlanta has the small pox virus?”
“That’s correct. We just do research. Atlanta and Vector are the only places on earth where the virus is kept in deep freeze storage. By the nineties, we learned the old Soviet Union had a culture collection of extremely virulent Variola strains and they were manufacturing it by the ton.”