“Dr. Paul Stewart.”
“Very good. It always helps a survivor of meningitis to remember my name.” The Buddy Holly clone from the CDC continued to check the pulse of his patient. “Of course, you survived NM-13. Amazing.”
“How about Yousef al-Qadi?”
“He did not make it. Intelligence reported that he made it back to his cave, cold and miserable.”
“Any others?”
“My guess would be one or two. If they had someone in their family tree that survived the black plague they had a chance.” Stewart had on reading glasses and was looking at the chart that had recorded Parker’s vital statistics.
“I remember your telling me about that. Any eastern Europeans with inherited super-immunity.”
“That’s it. Were there any Europeans there?” Stewart looked up over his glasses.
“I knew of only one.” Parker pulled the pillow up under his head. “But he should be dead. Any others?”
“It seems that the people stayed in their cave. We should not see any kind of major outbreak.”
“How about our team?”
“Well, you should not have been contagious after getting that first IV, so they should be uninfected. But we’re treating them aggressively as a precaution.”
Parker looked around the Gulfstream. He was apparently in a medical suite in the rear of the aircraft. The oval windows were all dark with closed shades.
“Do you want to get some more sleep?”
“How long have I been out?” Parker felt stiff, as if every muscle had been strained to its limit.
“You been down for about thirty-six hours.” Stewart looked at his watch. “I didn’t want to put you back up at altitude while your blood pressure was all over the place.”
“Thanks.” Parker didn’t know how close he had come to lights-out.
“Besides, frankly, I didn’t want you and your buddies back in the States until I knew we had this under control.” Stewart’s CDC side was taking over.
“You didn’t want to unleash NM-13?” Parker sat up on the side of the bed, got his bearings. As he sat there, he realized what Stewart was saying. If the disease wasn’t stopped for both him and his crew, they would have never left the country. “Okay.”
“Where’s Scott?”
Stewart shrugged. “A few are up front, but they’re all down for the count.”
Parker glanced forward and saw the several sofa-like chairs folded out flat with odd-shaped bundles under gray-and-blue blankets. Although daylight crept in through the window shades, the cabin looked like a dormitory after an all-nighter.
The orange juice had an odd taste, which was, for the first time in several days, sweet and rich. Parker tasted the pulp. Following the fever, his senses seemed to be returning to normal.
“Here, take these. I want you to stay on some extra antibiotics for a few days.” Stewart handed him what looked like large white horse tablets.
“Okay.” He swallowed the tablets with another gulp of the orange juice. “Thanks.”
“No. I think I need to thank you, Colonel.” Stewart’s voice was sober. “They told me enough that I understand the nuclear weapon was recovered because of you.”
“How about the one in Chicago?”
“They shut down half of Canada. All along the Lake Huron area. It’s all over CNN.” Stewart held Parker’s wrist as he spoke checking the pulse. “Some crazy young woman. You can see it up front.”
Parker smiled, looking through the doorway to the television screen in the front cabin. The graphics told everything.
Terrorist Cell Seized by FBI and Canadian Mounties with Seaplane Bomb.
No mention of the true nature of the bomb.
Six cell members killed in shoot-out. Pilot was Pakistani Woman.
What the news didn’t say — and what Parker would only learn later — was that the girl never made it to takeoff. The airplane was loaded and she had begun her taxi out into the lake for takeoff, but a bullet from the Canadian Mounty reaction team caught her in the chest. The airplane’s wing dipped, and it taxied across the water into the shoreline. The team found her dead, surrounded by maps and photographs of the South Haven Lighthouse. The cabin was full of blocks of explosives and, in the center, there was a small nuclear core.
Her dream remained a dream.
She had a look on her face, with her eyes fixed, open, big, brown, as if she had made the final turn to the target. Next to her, on her lap, was a small, odd round bundle of socks tied tightly together by loops of plastic bags. The Canadians were, at first, not sure of it, and carefully removed it wary of what it contained. Later, it was determined that the small round ball was harmless. It closely resembled the homemade “footballs” used by children in rock-and-dirt soccer pitches near the ghetto of Danish Abad.
They stopped it.
“What about Hernandez?”
“Who?”
“Never mind. Where are we going?”
“London.”
CHAPTER 77
“We have a new name that has surfaced,” said a mid-level special agent who had arrived late for the meeting and just joined the group around the table.
“Who?” The director, like everyone in his operation center, now starting a third day without sleep.
“A Chechen.”
That caught Tom Pope’s attention. They’d had virtually no Chechens on their watch lists until Boston. The Chechens hated Russia, not America. Now, the world’s lists were all being revised. For good reason.
“Abu Umarov.” The agent went on to say that the Bureau’s G-cell in the Strategic Information and Operation Center had picked up the name in randomly monitored cell traffic.
“I know that name. Wasn’t he connected to Yousef?” Pope could afford to be direct. His stock had gone sky-high within the Bureau. CNN was running with the lead story that the two stolen nuclear weapons had been retrieved in a lightning raid in Pakistan, but the world never knew how close it came to Chicago being vaporized. “I thought they were all dead in that valley.”
“Excuse me, sir.” At that moment, Garland Sebeck stood at the door to the conference room. He looked much like someone who was holding on to a secret.
“Mr. Director, may I go talk to my assistant?” Tom Pope rolled his chair back.
“Sure, go ahead, but let me know what you find out.”
Tom Pope walked out into the hallway. He still had his coffee mug in hand. He used the mug to point to a smaller secretary’s office across the way, its occupant missing for the moment. Pope closed the door behind Sebeck.
“There’s something.” Sebeck had a red folder marked TOP SECRET. “This is from one of our field agents stationed in Guam.”
As Pope read the report, he thought of something. “You remember Chantilly?”
“Sure, your IT buddy.” Sebeck had jibed his boss on more than one occasion about Pope’s “pet geek.”
“Did you see that last report he e-mailed yesterday?”
“The traffic from that computer at Langley?”
“There was one e-mail to a BlackBerry in New York. It mentioned two names.”
Sebeck smiled.
“Yeah, the names Scott and Parker.”
“Scott was that Brit on the conference call.”
“Yes, he was.”
“Let’s get Chantilly to trace the BlackBerry. My guess is that it connects back to Langley.”
“That shouldn’t be a problem.”
“There were some independents. I saw an intel report several years ago. Killers for hire. The suspicion was that they were CIA-connected.”
“Let me guess?”
“Robert Tranthan.”
“Yes.”
“And we need to ask Mr. Scott how we can find Parker.” Tom Pope looked back at the red folder, flipping the sheet within. The report recorded a detailed interview. “I knew it.” As Pope continued to read, his face started turning red. “I goddamn knew it!”