"As I said, we don't even have a positive ID. Everything has been taken away to the lab. We're hoping that in a couple of hours we'll have more to report."
"Hoping isn't enough. You'd better be sure that you have a lot to report," Faas said impatiently. He was frustrated and snapping at his people, not that it made him feel any better.
"Have you been in contact with Agents Newman and Sutton about this?" he asked her, softening his tone.
"Yes, I spoke to Agent Sutton just before you landed."
He'd spoken to Matt a couple of hours ago. They'd located Dr. Banaz but they didn't have any information yet.
Faas noticed a news helicopter had appeared over the canyon. Two military choppers approached the newcomer and the media aircraft swung around and started back the way it came.
"What the hell are they doing here?"
"I'm afraid it's already out," Bea said, frowning. "I assumed you knew. The dead jogger took a picture of the truck and bodies with his cell phone and sent it to KPHO in Phoenix. I just heard that they showed it on the air about five minutes ago. It's just a matter of time before the national media is camped out here."
Faas squinted his eyes against the bright sun and watched the news chopper disappear behind a distant red rock butte. He had to warn the president. He'd been involved with the decision to keep the news of the disease a secret from the beginning. The shots of the site that this news crew was carrying back wouldn't help.
Creating mass hysteria had been a primary concern from the start. The president and his advisers had decided that containment, preparation for other outbreaks, and vigilance were the best course of action. Now, having appeared to have contained the disease within each outbreak location, they needed to track the microbe to its source. As far as Faas was concerned, that was exactly what Austyn Newman would accomplish.
Even in handling the potential source of the microbe, however, this president was so different from the last. President Penn's position was that the U.S.'s sometimes justifiable fears about Middle Easterners had been exploited too much for political advantage. Penn felt that immigrants here had suffered enough this past decade. There was enough hatred and prejudice as it was. They didn't need fingers pointed at them without substantial proof.
Faas understood the president's sentiments. He was an immigrant himself. His father was Danish, his mother from Curasao. An only child from a broken marriage, he was shipped off to the U.S. to live with a great-uncle when he'd been in the sixth grade.
As he'd grown up here, discrimination and prejudice had been immediate and deliberate at school, at the jobs he'd held during high school, and on the playing fields. He was black to some, white to others, a foreigner to all of them. He was smart, spoke English with an accent, worked hard, didn't break the rules, and that made him an outsider. He was everything other kids didn't want him to be. It was only when he'd gotten into the Foreign Service program at Georgetown that things had begun to change for him personally.
His youth had prepared him well for life, though. Faas's position as intelligence chief at Homeland Security dictated that he suspect everyone, and he believed that it would be inexcusable for him to overlook the forest as he searched for the poisoned tree. He had a job to do, and he would do it.
In the president's desire for secrecy at this point, however, he was entirely supportive. Faas Hanlon was the last person who wanted to be going before news cameras once an hour to tell the American public that they still didn't know anything.
They'd done a good job so far of keeping the lid on the outbreak in Maine. Sedona, a more wide-open area, would be a different story. In the canyon, where the police crews were holding back the crowds, a news van had moved in and was raising its broadcast antenna. Yes, Sedona was going to be a problem.
The cell phone vibrated in his pocket. Faas stepped away from the others and looked at the display. Well, he thought with a sigh, he wouldn't have to call the president.
John Penn was calling him.
Chapter Nine
There's nothing else." Matt frowned, his fingers flying over the keyboard as his eyes scanned the screen. 'This is all duplication. There is virtually nothing about her online, other than occasional references to her as missing."
"What about the University of Baghdad Web site?"
"Same thing. The links go to the new Web sites set up over the past three or four years. Everything took a while to rebuild after Saddam's regime fell and the civil war started. The new sites have nothing we want." He clicked over the classified intelligence Internet engines. "Look, even the archived Web presences going back the past decade show very little. These are the pages that were in existence during the years she was on the faculty."
Austyn's eyes ran over the pages. "How about the political science department Web page?" he asked.
"Just her name on the list of faculty. No pictures, no individual pages, nothing."
"Go to the last year. What shows up on the faculty list?"
"This is it." Matt clicked back to the main page of the university. There were a few pictures of the buildings and some links to the different departments, but nothing useful. "They were worrying about other things at this point."
"Like 'shock and awe.'" Austyn, looking over his partner's shoulder, frowned at the screen. "And the Brits had nothing from her time at Oxford?"
"Grades and evaluations. Not a picture, not a fingerprint, nada. We could hunt up roommates and professors, but there's nothing online."
"So what you're saying is that we're wasting our time looking for Fahimah Banaz on the net."
"You got it." Matt nodded. "She just predates the era of the 'information superhighway,' as you old guys like to call it."
"Yeah, the Dark Ages," Austyn retorted.
The younger agent got serious again. "We've got agents in Baghdad. We can send a couple of them over to the university and have them physically go through what's left of the old personnel files."
"Let's get the ball rolling on that."
"Also, we could have our field people start some discreet inquiries about Rahaf."
"If the initial queries turn up nothing, we'll have to move quickly past the 'discreet' part. We don't have time to waste if she's out there and behind this."
"If we get nothing right away, we'll offer rewards for any information about her," Matt suggested. "If she's out there, someone will know something. Offer U.S. dollars, and the locals tend to talk."
"Good."
Austyn straightened up and moved to the wire-reinforced window separating them from Dr. Banaz in the other room. He raised the blinds and looked in at the woman.
He'd had her moved after she'd torn up the other cell. Through the window, they could both see each other. This room was furnished with a cot, as well. A new tray with food and drinks had been brought in, but she had yet to touch it. Austyn had positioned two female guards inside the room with her. He wouldn't risk having her hurt herself.
She was sitting cross-legged on the floor, her back against one of the walls. Her eyes were closed. The old blanket was spread across her lap. She was back to her meditation pose. He wondered if she really did have the ability to escape her surroundings mentally. She had to. How else could she have survived and kept her sanity for all these years? If the hole in which he'd found her was any indication of the type of cells she'd been kept in, it was amazing that she hadn't tried to take her own life a hundred times.