“He was when I met him. I wouldn’t have expected this.”
He smiled and pointed to the receptionist watching them from behind the stainless steel and chrome desk. The receptionist, a pretty young woman with black-framed glasses, fixed them with her megawatt smile. “Welcome to EOS, how may I help you have a spectacular day?”
“We have an appointment with Dean Palmer,” Eric said.
The receptionist’s megawatt smile dimmed. “I’m afraid Mr. Palmer doesn’t accept appointments.”
Eric nodded to Valerie. She pulled her badge from her jacket and flashed it to the woman. “The CIA begs to differ. We do have an appointment.”
The receptionist’s smile faltered. She tapped furiously on her keyboard, then looked up with narrowed eyes, her smile gone. “Simon and Wise, for Mr. Palmer.” She passed them a pair of lanyards and pointed to the elevators. “Swipe these on the reader. Keep them on at all times.”
They took the badges, put them on, then made their way to the elevator. The receptionist watched them as they stepped in the elevator and swiped their badges. The reader beeped, the doors shut, and the elevator began to rise.
“Kind of weird,” Eric said.
“The man’s worth ten billion dollars,” Valerie said. “He probably receives a dozen threats a day. Did you notice the guard?”
“The suit wandering around in front of the windows? Former military. I could tell by the walk.”
“That would be my guess,” she said.
“How did you get this appointment?”
“I called in a favor with his personal secretary. I worked with her setting his schedule during the Red Team exercises.”
The elevator stopped on the twenty-ninth floor. When the doors opened, they found themselves alone in an unfinished area with bare concrete floors. The walls were concrete and steel, and the windows were visible from one end of the building to the other.
The vast expanse was littered with folding wood tables that formed a giant maze. Most were covered in desktop and laptop computers, wires neatly cabled and running to racks of switches and routers near the elevators.
In the midst of the mess, a short portly man with a reddish-brown beard greeted them with a raised hand. “Val. Over here.”
Eric turned to Valerie and raised an eyebrow, but she shook her head. They made their way through the mess until they reached the relatively calm center.
Dean Palmer wasn’t what Eric expected. He was dressed in worn jeans and a stained gray sweatshirt. “I’m Dean,” the man said, extending his hand.
Eric shook it. “I’m Eric Wise. I believe you know Valerie.”
The man grinned, an infectiously warm smile that lit up his face. “I remember. I was surprised to hear from you. What’s so urgent?”
Valerie looked around the floor. “We wanted to talk to you about something, but maybe we should go to your office?”
Palmer laughed, and it shook his ample belly. “This is my office. My executives sit on the top floor, but I kept this for myself.” He pointed to the computers on the desks. “It looks cluttered, but I’ve got workstations dedicated to all my interests. Moving around helps me think.”
Eric smiled at the man’s infectious humor. “What kind of executive doesn’t stake out an office on the top floor?”
“The kind that hates being an executive,” Palmer said. He pointed to an empty table. “Have a seat.”
They approached the table and Palmer handed them folding metal chairs. Eric opened his and sat next to Valerie. Palmer sat across from them, leaning against the table. “So, the CIA wants to speak to me. That can’t be good.”
It was Valerie’s turn to smile. “We just have a few questions about the Red Team exercises.”
Palmer’s smile faded. “Well, I don’t know how much I can help. I mean, you were there. You know what we did. Heck, you probably know more about it than I do.”
“This is about what you did after,” Valerie said. “Your last Red Team exercise was in 2005. Do you remember?”
Palmer frowned. “Of course. That one got… intense.”
Valerie placed her hand on the table. “We covered bioterror threats that year,” she said. “You had some strong opinions.”
“Yes,” Palmer said. “It hit pretty close to home. The entire purpose of EOS is to make the world a better place. Being asked to imagine ways to kill people? It made me uncomfortable.”
“The Red Team that year had a varied skill set, but you were the only biologist,” she said.
“That’s right,” Palmer agreed.
“The final report had the terrorists unleashing weaponized anthrax in an airport.”
“Yeah. It was one of several scenarios, but we pegged it most likely. We wrote up a twenty-point plan on how an airport could be used to infect a large population—”
“But that wasn’t your first idea,” Eric said. “You had another?”
Palmer leaned back in his chair and nodded thoughtfully. “Yeah, I had some other ideas—”
“Ideas you kept working on after the exercise ended?” Eric asked.
Palmer’s eyes widened. “How do you know that?”
Valerie leaned in. “You took notes, didn’t you. Wrote some of them down?”
“Yes. How do you know that?”
Eric cleared his throat. “You were hacked.”
Palmer sighed heavily, staring down at the floor. “How could you — how did… yes, we were hacked. Almost two years ago. They ransacked our files for a month before we discovered it. They hacked our firewall and rooted our servers. We locked everything down and upgraded our firewalls as soon as we discovered it, but they had a month.”
It confirmed everything Eric feared. “Your documents were stolen.”
Palmer squinted at him. “You found the hackers?”
“Who do you think was behind it?” Valerie asked.
“I don’t have a clue,” Palmer said. “It was sophisticated. A lot of people thought industrial espionage, but my experience has been that it’s rare.”
Eric nodded. “We suspect it was nation-state hacking. We read your document.”
“How did you get a copy?” Palmer asked.
Eric turned to Valerie. He had briefed her on the Gulfstream before they arrived, and raised an eyebrow, waiting for her to take the lead.
She nodded and turned back to Palmer. “We acquired a cache of documents that were stolen from companies here in the United States. Your document was… interesting.”
“You read it?”
Eric sat back in the metal chair. “I did, but I didn’t understand much of it. I’d like to hear it in your own words.”
Palmer sighed heavily. “I’ve been fascinated by the Chimera. You know, the head of a lion, the body of a goat, and the tail of a snake?”
Eric snapped his fingers. “I must have missed that in school.”
“Hah,” Palmer said. “Well, it doesn’t matter, really, except the idea of combining things always stuck with me. So, after I started EOS, I wondered if I could combine elements, say the virulence of smallpox with another virus that attacks the nervous system. Something entirely new could be made, something never seen in nature. It spun around in my head, and I’d almost forgotten about it, until the first Red Team exercise. One of the guys on my team was Ralph Forrester, a CIA guy, and he said the Soviets worked on the same basic thing back in the 80’s.”
Valerie sat up straight. “I remember Forrester. He was an analyst who specialized in Soviet biowarfare.”
“That’s right,” Palmer said. “He told me stories, well, rumors really, that came out of the Soviet Union before the Wall came down. Anyway, if you think about it, the possibilities are endless. Not for military use, mind you, but think if we could combine viruses to combat cancer? Something like the flu, but re-purposed to trigger an immune response. That’s much the way the BCG bacterium works. It stimulates the body to kill cancer cells in the bladder.”