Her head turned. She stared at the screen. He had her. Rahaf or Fahimah. He was connecting, penetrating the thick veil of indifference that she had used to protect herself… or her sister… for so long. She was responding.
"Sedona, Arizona. Five people are dead," he said, paging slowly through the pictures. He watched the expression on her face. The green eyes were glued to the screen. 'This happened today, only a few hours ago."
From the clenching of the muscles along her jawbone, he knew she was trying to hide her feelings, but it was an impossible task. The green eyes were expressive, and patches of color crept up her neck and into her sallow cheeks. She was clearly disturbed by the images.
"Do you know how far Arizona is from Maine?" he asked.
He expected no answer, but he waited a moment, anyway.
"Your sister would know that," he said.
"Some three thousand miles," she whispered. "I've been to both places."
Her answer caught him by surprise. They knew that Fahimah had never been to America, not as a student or a tourist. No visa had ever been issued to her. Rahaf could have been to both places. Nice try, he thought. The information was basic enough that an educated person could have come up with the answer. At the same time, if going along with her playing the role of Rahaf was the way to get her to cooperate, then he'd play along.
"The two outbreaks are three thousand miles apart," he said with a nod. "So far, we have found no possibility of contact between the two groups of victims "
She'd leaned her head back against the wall. Her eyes slowly closed. He wasn't sure if she was listening to anything he was saying or not. He wasn't used to being shut down like this. He thought they'd started a dialogue, albeit with his side a little more vocal than hers. He slapped the top of the laptop down.
"Back to meditating?" he asked thinly.
Getting no immediate answer from her, he decided to let her have it. "I'm not here to interrogate you, Dr. Banaz. I don't have any agenda other than what I told you. For most of your life, you've claimed to be a scientist. Well, that's what I am. It's what I do. I prevent bad things from happening. I try to stop the spread of illnesses that can hurt people. And I've read enough of your files to know that your facility was never tied in to any of the mass poisoning of Kurds or the Iranians during the Iran-Iraq War."
He laid the laptop aside. She was listening.
"Rahaf Banaz was involved with many humanitarian causes in New York. I'd like to think she hasn't changed, that we have a lot in common. I believe that it was Saddam's government and the estrangement between our governments that colored our view of what you were doing."
He let that sink in a moment before continuing.
"But we have a problem that could become an international disaster. It involves all of us, you and me included. You've seen the pictures. They're real. They…"
"I wasn't meditating," she interrupted him.
He had to reel in the rest of his lecture. He turned to look at her. She was staring at the window to the adjoining room. Austyn was happy to see that no one was standing there. He didn't want anything distracting her.
"I was thinking," she told him.
He waited for her to say more, but she was silent. "Are you thinking about helping me?"
She gave a hesitant nod. "Yes, I'll help you."
"I'm very relieved."
"I don't have any quick answers for you." She gathered her knees against her chest and pulled the blanket around her shoulders. "I've been a prisoner for too long. My work seems almost a dream to me now."
"We will change that," he said encouragingly. "We can show you all the laboratory results we have relevant to the victims. Naturally, we don't have the DNA sequence of the microbe from today's incident yet, but you can start looking at what we have from the Maine outbreak."
Minutes of silence dragged by. Austyn didn't care if she felt the need to rehearse her words a few times in her head first. The important thing was that this was the most she'd communicated with anyone since her capture.
"I was never told what was recovered from my lab after the bombing."
"Very little."
Her green eyes told him that she didn't believe him.
"We wouldn't be here asking for your help if any documentation had survived." He was telling the truth. "There were test samples that were collected, but all the files had been destroyed."
Austyn could have sworn that a satisfied expression crossed her pale features. Of course!
"But you knew that," he said. "You destroyed them yourself."
She didn't deny it. And this also explained how she'd survived the bombing. She'd been found in an office in the basement of the building, where she must have been shredding files. The section of the facility that housed the labs had been demolished by the bombing. Only a refrigerated safe in one corner of the labs had survived the devastation. It had contained a single vial of the microbe.
"Did anyone else live through the bombing?" she asked.
It was sad that all these years in prison and she'd never been able to ask these questions. Fahimah or Rahaf. Whichever sister she was, she'd been in that building. If she was Rahaf, she knew the people who worked there.
"No. You were the only one," he told her.
She showed no grief, but she looked away. Austyn saw Adams cross the window again. Fahimah's eyes flickered toward the glass.
"You are correct," she said. "I don't like fish tanks."
"You don't have to stay here," he told her. "Name the place, the facility. We'll take you wherever you want to work. Time is very important, though. We have labs available in this region or in Europe. We'll find as many people as you need to work with you. Some of the researchers in those facilities, you might even know."
He wasn't sure if this last bit of information was positive or negative, considering he still couldn't decide who she really was. She didn't look alarmed, however.
She rested her chin on the blanket covering her knees. She was silent again for a very long time. It was hard for Austyn not to push, not to encourage her to make a decision. Patience wasn't his middle name, but he had to allow her to set the pace. Whatever he'd done so far was working.
"There's not enough time to start everything fresh. To run new tests and wait for results," she said.
"I agree. That's why we're here. We have people in the U.S. working on this, but we don't have much hope for a quick solution there."
"You want an antidote… a serum to stop the microbe."
"We don't think standard antibiotics will work quickly enough."
"They won't," she said, a faraway look coming into her eyes. She seemed to be thinking about something else.
"What can you tell us?"
She continued to gaze into space for a moment.
"What I destroyed in the lab in Diyala wasn't all of my research," she said finally. "I have files."
She was lying now. Something in her voice… in her face… told him. Austyn was no fool. She had no reason to tell him the truth, and it would make perfect sense for her to send them on a wild-goose chase. Put out the decoy and go the other way. It worked for Osama bin Laden. It was the standard operating procedure in every peace negotiation in the Middle East, and had been for the past fifty years. Austyn could see it would be the same with the Banaz files. He could feel it coming.