by Tim Curran
Evans kept talking and she nodded behind the plastic bubble of her helmet. She had known him for years. He was a brilliantly gifted molecular biologist and a darling of S5 (and as such, a protégé of the Old Man’s). But when this was done, he was going to be removed as were the entire staff that had worked on BioGenesis. All trails would end here.
The demonstration at an end, Elizabeth went through decon, then back up to her office. After a time, she picked up her sat phone and rang up The Collective. This was a call she had to make and one she was putting off.
“Well? We’ve been waiting to hear from you,” the voice on the other end said. “We were beginning to worry. We don’t like to worry.”
“No, of course not. I apologize.”
“And how is our good friend at the NSA?”
They wanted to know about her meeting with Gordon Parks last night. She would tell them what they wanted to hear, just as he had. It was part of the game.
“He’s committed.”
“But?”
She sighed. “He seems too eager to discuss things that are sensitive by nature.”
“I see. Is there a question of his loyalty?”
“No, I don’t think so. He just has a big mouth.”
“I see. And you’re uncomfortable with that?”
“Aren’t you?” she asked.
“I’ll ask the questions, Elizabeth.”
“Yes. Sorry.”
There was an uncomfortable silence from the other end that made her sweat. She was dealing with one of the most powerful individuals in the world. A word from him and she disappeared. He had started civil wars, eliminated political rivals, sacked economies, and destroyed nations at a whim. You didn’t fuck with power like that.
“It’s his loyalty that concerns me.”
“He’s loyal. I’m sure of it.”
“Would you stake your life on that?”
“I’m as sure as I can be without climbing inside his head and reading his mind.”
“Well, hopefully, that won’t be necessary. Good day, Elizabeth.”
She set the phone on her desk and only then did she begin to shake with fear.
AFGHANISTAN: NANGAHAR PROVINCE
4:22 P.M. KABUL TIME
Dead men.
Dead men all in a row.
Tommy Quillan stood there smoking an American cigarette, wearing French DPM camouflage, holding a British commando knife, and drinking Austrian beer. And all this in some stinking, bombed-out town in a hellzone that had once been part of Jalalabad.
He laughed under his breath. Don’t tell me the world isn’t coming together into one seamless global fucking community.
He was standing in a rubble-strewn building with a trio of Northern Alliance intelligence specialists, all CIA-trained, who were led by a Pashai commander named Colonel Abu Rashid. Crowding outside was Quillan’s bloodthirsty garrison of Uzbek mercenaries. Before them, tied securely to the legs of a stout table were two al-Qaeda fighters. Beaten, bloody, mumbling incessantly to their god, they were dressed in the typical hodgepodge uniform of the Middle Eastern Islamic extremist: worn fatigues, faces covered in red-checked shemaghs. Their beards were long and filthy, matted with leaves and sticks. Neither man had probably seen running water in many weeks and smelled like it.
The two fighters had been captured during a series of raids on al-Qaeda safe houses in Jalalabad that Quillan himself had directed after receiving a tip from his underground network via MI6. Some sixty extremists were killed in a pitched battle that lasted two hours
His raiders discovered a great cache of documents on U.S. military weapons, tactics, and strengths. Many of them were directly from the U.S. Printing Office. All that was to be expected, but what made him particularly curious were the documents related to biochemistry, microbiology, and biological warfare that contained detailed information on the various types of available bioagents, the vectors used to spread them, and the estimated casualty numbers to a large urban population center. There was also a DVD in the cache that looked to have been shot at Darunta, the former al-Qaeda training camp outside Jalalabad. It showed men in containment suits performing experiments on laboratory animals.
Quillan believed these to be Iranian videos and it only further hinted at something nobody wanted to discuss: al-Qaeda’s increasing interest in germ warfare.
All of this was relayed back to the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center and from the CTC to the Defense Department, DIA, DHS, and all the other alphabet soup agencies of the United States security services. Supposedly.
Colonel Rashid wanted to kill their prisoners outright. He’d already consulted his blue prayer beads and knew it was what Allah wished.
His junior officer, Captain Aget, wanted to let the Uzbekis mutilate them.
Quillan appreciated the zeal of both men, but he was in charge and until that changed, he would decide who was killed or mutilated. There were things he wanted to learn from these two, even if they were only rumors. For in any war, even a rumor contained a seed of truth.
“They are infidels,” Colonel Rashid said as if that explained it all. “To let them live would be a crime.”
“Of course.”
“We should kill them now,” Captain Aget concurred. “Outside, there are dozens of men who would be honored to slit the throats of these animals. I myself would gladly do it.”
Quillan grinned.
He looked down at the al-Qaeda fighters. They were known for their brutality. With this in mind, there was no need of a trial here. That they had to die and painfully was a foregone conclusion. They would respect nothing less and Quillan would not disappoint them. He knew if he didn’t waste these two, the Uzbeks would waste him. The fever of revenge ran very deep here. And Quillan didn’t blame them a bit. The al-Qaeda extremists were monsters. He himself had seen what they did to women and children, to infants, even. They had no respect for human life and Quillan could appreciate that because he had none himself.
But he needed information.
It was why he was there.
He was a contract mercenary specialist currently under the employ of the CIA. He had worked for no one else in the past twelve years and as long as the checks were deposited in a timely manner in his off-shore account, he never would. Having honed his skills with the British 22 SAS Regiment in places like Oman, Central America, Iraq, and Northern Ireland, he came at a high price but he guaranteed results. And, thus far, the Company had been pleased with his work. Ever since taking up his rather peculiar profession, he had lived entirely in the shadows, completely off the grid: he owned no property, paid no taxes, had no checks or credit cards in his name, no cellphones registered to him. He was in no database—save his file with the Regiment which was a dozen years out of date now—and had no family.
Men like him did not exist. They were summoned like demons out of the cold and darkness for particularly delicate assignments, wet work, and various clandestine ops that were easily deniable.
He had originally been sent to Afghanistan to train and equip counterterrorist pursuit teams that would hunt down and kill remaining al-Qaeda cells in the area that had not fled south. Flush them out, put them down. Standard CT ops.
Now the Company wanted him to track down Sheikh Sa’ad who supposedly was in possession of some sort of bioweapon.
Quillan was very familiar with Sheikh Sa’ad and looked forward to disrupting his network and interrogating him if they could take him alive. They had pretty good intel that Sheikh Sa’ad was in Nangahar province. He had been seen by many witnesses traveling in a small convoy of olive-drab military-style trucks, surrounded by soldiers in fatigues who were all armed with AKs and SKS rifles, just begging for a drone strike. He was seen in Jalalabad outside a mosque, then addressing a small gathering outside the Institute for Islamic Studies. The soldiers were hardcore al-Qaeda.
He was here…or had been.
He was very close, Quillan knew, so close he could smell the dogshit kebabs on his breath.
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The problem, as always, was interrogation. It took forever. Quillan’s Farsi and Pashai were weak and he had to rely on Colonel Rashid to translate and quite often the meaning of things were lost because Rahid’s English skills were rudimentary at best. He spoke his native Pashai and Pashtun rapid-fire, but his Farsi and English came unbelievably, almost tortuously, slow. Captain Aget, on the other hand, spoke excellent English, Farsi, Arabic, and Dari, as well as Pashai. But Rashid would not let him translate; Rashid himself was in command and to let a junior officer take charge would have been an insult to him. When one was in the Pashtun heartland, one had to play by the rules…as much as that pissed Quillan off.
He stripped the shemaghs off the prisoner’s faces, then turned to the colonel. “Ask them where the al-Qaeda base camp is in Lowgar province and who is commanding it.”
Rashid did so. Both men just stared blankly at him.
Quillan expected as much. You could say what you wanted about these boys, but they sure as hell knew how to keep a secret. He flicked his cigarette out the door. Half-smoked, two Uzbeks dove for it, fighting over it like starving dogs over a joint of meat. They were a rugged lot, but fiercely loyal. They wore no true uniforms, just whatever they found lying about or what they could strip off the bodies of dead soldiers. Both wore sneakers and camo pants stained with blood and dirt. One wore a MOLSON sweatshirt, the other a Russian tunic with the previous owner’s bloodstains prominently displayed.
“Tell them I have no interest in them,” Quillan said. “I seek Sheikh Sa’ad al Khalafari, the Egyptian. If they tell me where to find him, they’ll live to praise Allah another day.”
Colonel Rashid tried again and got the same blank, stony stare.
Quillan laughed. You stupid fucking ragheads. I can make this quick or it can take all day.
He lit another cigarette to calm himself. He looked around, knowing that the ancient dark stains on the walls were the blood of Spanish journalists who had been captured by the Taliban and executed in this very room. The men with them—progressive Afghans—had shaved off their beards in violation of Taliban law so their ears and noses were cut off as punishment.
Both of the terrorists were injured. One had been knee-capped by shrapnel, the other took a volley of slugs to the belly. The one with the gut wound was bleeding badly. He wouldn’t make it much longer.
The one on the left with the mangled leg began to squirm.
Rashid cleared his throat. “He wish a doctor.”
“Tell him I wish to know where Sheikh Sa’ad is,” Quillan said.
Rashid did, but the man kept shaking his head.
Quillan sighed, wondering why everything had to be done the hard way, and pulled a bayonet out of his pack. Without a word he went over to the one that was gutshot and slid the bayonet into the wound. The man came alive, twisting and writhing and screaming. Quillan twisted the bayonet back and forth until more and more blood gushed forth.
“Ask him!” he snapped.
Rashid did, but the fighter had passed out.
Quillan left the bayonet in his belly. He pressed the muzzle of a nickel-plated Colt .38 automatic to the man’s head and pulled the trigger. The gun barked three times and the extremist’s head exploded, spraying gore over the walls.
He turned to Rashid. “Tell him he will die next,” he said, indicating the other prisoner with the mangled leg. “But not so quickly.”
The other man still shook his head, though tears ran down his face as he prayed to a god that had now abandoned him.
Quillan pulled out his knife and cut the man’s pant leg away from the gaping wound. He inserted the tip of the blade into the gash and drew it back at an arc, freeing a four-inch strip of skin in the process.
The prisoner screamed and Quillan punched him in the face.
“Tell him I’ll skin him like a fucking rabbit if he doesn’t talk.”
The man shook his head, spitting in Quillan’s face and screaming insults at him.
The Uzbek mercenaries were pressing in the doorway now.
They had seen Quillan work before and they didn’t want to miss out.
Quillan didn’t let them down. He cut the prisoner’s clothes off and sheared a flap of skin from his belly. He took off his left nipple, then his right. Within a few minutes, the man’s torso was raw, bleeding, and skinless.
He was also beyond speech.
He cried and moaned and trembled.
The knife moved in Quillan’s practiced grip, the blade flashed dirty light.
“I’m gonna skin your manhood off, son. What do you think of that?”
The prisoner continued babbling prayers.
In Quillan’s experienced hands, it took over two hours for him to die.
CHICAGO, RIVER NORTH:
THE WAREHOUSE, 8:05 A.M.
Well over three hours after they’d made the snatch at the VA hospital, Cave was still pissed off. “You’re both pretty fucking pathetic, you know that? With your histories, your experience, I can’t believe you let something like this happen.” He paced up and down like a drill instructor. “Two freaking hours of surveillance and you didn’t notice the woman in the truck? Jesus H. Lovely Christ. You two are really something. Where was your OpSec?”
Neither of them could answer because their operational security was shit and they knew it.
“She must have been slumped over, dozing or something,” McKenna said.
“Uh-huh. It didn’t occur to you that a sick man might have someone waiting for him?”
Cave stared them both down, his face livid, his hands balled into fists. Finally, he exhaled and dug a cigarette out of his shirt pocket. He lit it with a stick match struck off his boot.
“We fucked up,” Stein told him. “What more can we say, sir? We simply fucked up and that’s it.”
“And do you know why?” Cave asked him.
Stein nodded slowly. “Yes, I do.”
“Great. I can’t wait to hear your assessment.”
Stein ignored the sarcasm. “We’ve gotten... complacent. We’ve gotten lazy. I mean, that bit with the parasite aside, this entire thing has been pretty dull by our usual standards,” he explained, choosing his words carefully, enunciating “parasite” like a child pronouncing a new word. “Let’s face reality, sir, we’re killing innocent people here—”
“Infected hosts,” Cave corrected.
“—not armed enemy combatants. We’ve run up against no opposition. Any dipshit with a gun could do what we’re doing. It’s child’s play. We’re being used as fucking hitmen. So, if we’re starting to make mistakes, I think it’s understandable, don’t you? There’s nothing in this to keep our edge, to challenge us. It only makes us sick to our stomachs.”
“Point taken, Stein,” Cave said. “But hear me now, gentlemen, and hear me good: this is heavy shit here and if you make mistakes you’re not only putting yourself at risk, you’re putting the whole city, the whole damn country at risk. Do you follow me?”
McKenna nodded, saying, “If we botch a hit here, a snatch, whatever, then we stand a chance of spreading this shit farther than it already is?”
“Bingo, McKenna. Right on the money.” He looked at Stein. “Not bad for a guy who looks like he just went ten rounds with a pepper shaker.”
Stein chortled.
“With all due respect, fuck the both of you,” McKenna said. How the hell was he to know the woman had pepper spray?
Cave laughed himself now. “You guys get a few hours’ sleep. Then we have to go back out again.” The smile faded from his face. “I spent an hour with the Old Man straightening out your mess. I’m not going to go through that again. Do you understand?”
They nodded.
“Sir?” Stein said.
“Yeah?”
“Tell me the truth. Are we winning this war or are the worms?”
Cave left without answering.
“There’s your answer,” McKenna said, rolling over in his bunk and covering his head with a pillo
w. In a few minutes, he was snoring.
Sleep didn’t come so easy for Stein.
He’d never been in a situation like this before. Never been a player in a game that just might spell the end of the human race. He was starting to seriously think about bailing out of this one. Even if they wasted all those fucking worms, he didn’t see his chances of survival as good. This project was just too big. He had a nasty feeling that McKenna and he were going to get whacked when this was done or not done.
He didn’t like the look in the Old Man’s eyes.
There was something very fatal about it.
Under the Old Man’s directive, the worms were to be referred to as parasites. People infected with them were now hosts. Killing them was known as eradicating diseased vectors. And the job the teams were doing was to be called contagion control.
It was all a load of bullshit.
Politically correct psychobabble. Perception management taken to the extreme. There wasn’t much Stein liked about the Old Man. In fact, there wasn’t a damn thing. And especially his cold gray eyes. They were dead, clinical. He looked at everyone like a new species of bug he wanted to dissect.
Stein just wondered when McKenna and he would become vectors that needed eradication.
CHICAGO, NORTH SHORE:
KENILWORTH 8:17 A.M.
Gabe Hebberman was slicing smoked ham and arranging the deli-thin slices on a platter atop the butcher block table that ran through the middle of his vault-like kitchen. He’d already sliced pastrami, hard salami, Swiss and Muenster cheeses. There were jars of pickles, olives, relishes, peppers, mayo and hot mustard. A loaf of bread sat nearby awaiting his attention.
Although it was breakfast time, Gabe preferred a good sandwich.
He snatched a slice of ham and chewed it up. “You know,” he said, “it’s a helluva thing for a Jew to say, but I love a good ham sandwich.”
Harry looked at Shawna and grimaced. “Gabe has a way of speaking about food metaphorically.”
Shawna just sat there, looking tired, vulnerable.
“Such a face,” Gabe said. “You’d think this was Shiva here or something. Where’s the casket?”
