47
Secretary James Johnston — Correction, he thought wryly, ex-Secretary — hailed a cab outside Walter Reed only minutes before Aaron Pilcher entered the E.R. The cab driver was, to his surprise, a young white guy who spoke English. He looked like a college student with shaggy brown hair and an equally shaggy beard, but he couldn’t have been any older than twenty-five.
“Where to?”
Johnston was about to give the driver his address in Fall’s Church and have him take him home to his wife. He was now a disgraced bureaucrat during one of the worst days in American history, if not the worst day. What was there to do now? Go home, lick his wounds and contact a literary agent to see if some publisher would be interested in his memoir?
Did I spent a career in the Army learning to throw in the towel in the face of defeat? Is that what all those years were about? Including his tours in Panama, Iraq, Haiti and Serbia? Is that what he had learned as a Ranger, in the Army’s Special Forces?
He thought of Derek Stillwater, still out there somewhere.
“Hey, pal, you awake?”
“Leave nobody behind,” Johnston said.
The cab driver turned to look at him. “Maybe you’d better get out.”
Johnston shook his head. “Sorry. Just thinking.” It was the code of the Army Rangers — leave nobody behind. Derek was still out there, fighting the battle, even the war. I won’t leave him behind.
He supplied an address in Georgetown. As they drove, he noted that the state of emergency hadn’t shut down the city. On the contrary, even though there was an unusually high level of police and military activity on the roads, it looked like Washington was waking up and getting ready to go to work. He wondered, now that somebody else was in charge, if they would lock down the city — close the trains, subways, airports. What would the FBI and Secret Service do? Maybe the people with that authority were dead.
It didn’t look like they were putting a ring around the city, trying to hold their enemies inside. Maybe because it was too late. Maybe The Fallen Angels — and Sam Dalton — were already out of the city, maybe even out of the country.
The cab pulled up in front of a redbrick townhouse and Johnston noted with satisfaction that lights were burning. He paid the driver and gave him a generous tip. He buzzed the front door.
After a moment the door opened and an elderly man who looked almost eighty years old stood in the threshold. In a heavily accented voice he said, “So, James… I wondered if I would hear from you.”
“I need your help.”
“Ah,” he said. “Come in, come in.”
Johnston followed him into the main floor, an elegantly decorated living room done in Early American.
“So, James… “
Johnston faced Ernst Vogel. “You’re up, so you know.”
“Ja. I know. Hell in a handbasket. Are you still working?”
“The President asked for my resignation.”
“Foolish. A political decision, I would think?”
“Yes.”
“A massive terrorist crisis and he thinks like a politician,” Vogel said with a sad shake of his head. “Not a man for a crisis, I don’t think.”
“Just the ways of Washington. But… I think I can still do something…” Johnston looked in the old man’s faded blue eyes. “I think we can still do something.”
“Ja,” Vogel said. “Perhaps. Perhaps. Come upstairs, then. Tell me what you are thinking.”
Vogel’s office was upstairs. It was crammed with computers, large-screen monitors and cable lines. Vogel sat down in front of one of the keyboards and turned his chair to face another, which he gestured for Johnston to sit in. Vogel, in the 1960s and ‘70s, had been at the leading edge of East Germany’s cryptography efforts. In 1976 he defected, slipping out of East Berlin in a secret container built into the gas tank of a delivery truck. By 1979 he was consulting to the Pentagon and the National Security Agency. Johnston had gotten to know the old man in the ‘80s during a lengthy tour of duty in the Pentagon. An odd friendship had grown out of their working together on computerized simulations of military and terrorist attacks.
Johnston said, “You’ve been following the day’s news? The terrorist attack on U.S. Immuno and the attack on the White House?”
“Ja. Natürlich. Are they related, these two?”
That question gave Johnston pause. Were they related? He hesitated. “What is the media saying?”
“Well, at the press conference, the new FBI director, let us see, Director McIvoy, said they had not found any proof that they were connected.”
Johnston frowned, wondering if that was how the FBI was proceeding. Perhaps it was true. Maybe Dalton had been uninvolved with The Fallen Angels, but had merely taken advantage of the chaos of the attack and the nine o’clock staff meeting to make his own mark on history.
But he didn’t believe it. He thought they were related.
Thinking aloud, Johnston said, “The Bureau will be taking Dalton’s background apart. That’s old ground. Nothing for us there, I don’t think. Stillwater—”
”Who is Stillwater?”
“My agent, a specialist in biological and chemical warfare. He was tracking the U.S. Immuno attack and went off chasing a theory of this that someone from his past, a Richard Coffee, was the head of the group. I’ve lost touch with him, but he may have been on to something.”
“Let us assume for a moment,” Vogel said softly, “that they are two prongs of a lengthy attack, nicht wahr? What would that mean?”
“Mean?”
“This biological agent they stole… the media is not saying what it is, exactly. Only that it is very dangerous, an experimental biological warfare agent.”
“It is a virus that is highly infectious and completely fatal.”
“So… they steal this virus. To do what with it?”
“Use it? Sell it? Bargain with it?”
Vogel peered at Johnston with his clear blue eyes and shook his head. “If these incidents are separate — this germ and this attack on the President — then perhaps they will sell it or blackmail someone with it. But if the incidents are connected…” He shook his head even more vigorously. “My friend, if the incidents are connected, killing the President and throwing the government into turmoil, then they will plan to use this… germ. How will they do that? How much did they steal?”
“About a dozen test tubes of the stuff… not even that much. They were cryovials, about the size of your little finger. Jammed full of viruses, but nonetheless…”
“So they must grow more.”
“Well… “ Johnston wished Derek was here to answer these questions; or anyone who was a microbiologist. “I think so,” he said. “I mean, they could do a lot of damage with twelve little vials, but yes, I would think if they wanted to do something big and… world-stopping, they would need more of it than a dozen small vials. Ultimately, anyway.”
“So,” Vogel smiled. “They would need a laboratory. A high-level laboratory, perhaps?”
“Yes,” Johnston said. “If they had any sense… not a given… they would need something approximating a Level IV containment facility.”
Vogel turned to his computer and ran a computer search. Most of the listings he found were published by the CDC and provided definitions of the differences between the four biological containment levels. Each level, I, II, III and IV, built on the previous level. Vogel read while Johnston looked over his shoulder. “What are we looking for?” Johnston said.
“Something unique to Level IV,” Vogel said. “Of course, my question would be, if The Fallen Angels were kind of sloppy or suicidal, would they stop short at Level III?”