Breathe

by Mike Brogan

  “So, how is Doctor Nell, my former Aberdeen colleague doing?” Schlumpf asked.

  “She is doing what we’ve requested. But if her product fails, she will face serious consequences.”

  “If it fails,” Schlumpf said, “don’t pay her.”

  “Not that simple.”

  “Why not?”

  “Just because.”

  Schlumpf said nothing.

  “If she fails, you will also face consequences.”

  ”Me?” Schlumpf said, leaning back. “How the hell can you hold me responsible if she fails?”

  “You recommended her.”

  “That’s bullshit! I suggested six people. Your people evaluated them. Your people chose her! Not me! Remember?”

  Shadid said nothing.

  Mason Schlumpf gulped his martini down and signaled the waitress for another.

  “Did you test her work?”

  Shadid had refused to tell him what she worked on.

  “Yes.”

  “And . . .?”

  “It was successful.”

  “So what the fuck? Release her from her contract when she’s finished. End of story.”

  “That’s what we’ve told her.”

  “That’s what you told me!”

  Shadid shrugged, leaned back and sipped more Diet Coke.

  Schlumpf now realized that Shadid had probably been lying all along. Lying was like breathing to these people. Which meant they might have forced Nell to make something illegal or even worse, lethal. Which meant they might harm her if she didn’t do what they asked. And even if she did.

  And then . . . they might come after me.

  Schlumpf’s armpits felt damp.

  “Where’s the rest of my fee?” Schlumpf demanded, gulping down his martini.

  Shadid reached down, picked up a gleaming alligator-leather briefcase and handed it to him.

  Schlumpf clicked it open, reached inside, and fanned the thick stacks of hundreds. After rough-counting the stacks, he was satisfied it was all there, and clicked the case shut.

  “You must never mention our relationship to anyone,” Shadid said. “Even after.”

  “After what?”

  Shadid paused. “After our product is in the ah . . . marketplace.”

  “Which product?”

  “You’ll know soon enough. If you talk to anyone about it, then you will not like what happens to you and Ms. Sexy Lexy.”

  There it was. An all-out threat.

  Schlumpf understood now. They were planning some kind of disaster and he’d unwittingly helped them. His throat was chalk-dry.

  The waitress walked over, leaned forward, placed Schlumpf’s martini on the table, and her bare breast on Shadid’s shoulder.

  Shadid turned beet-red. “Such godless depravity! Our business is completed, Mr. Schlumpf. Good bye.” He stood and stormed out of the bar.

  Schlumpf sat back and worried about Shadid’s “product in the marketplace.” What the hell was it? The more he thought about it, the more he felt the product might even be a serious weapon, maybe even mass destruction, an MWD. He grew terrified at what he’d unintentionally helped Shadid do. Tomorrow, he’d use a library computer to alert authorities anonymously.

  Two martinis later, Schlumpf stood and stumbled out the rear exit of the bar and headed toward his new Jaguar. Hot, humid air swept in off the Baltimore harbor. He noticed the parking lot was much darker now that the big overhead light had burned out.

  As he walked, he smelled lemony men’s cologne.

  He heard footsteps moving close behind him.

  He started to turn - when a steel wire whipped around his neck and jerked back hard.

  Schlumpf dropped the briefcase to get his fingers under the wire. But it was too tight. Warm blood slid down his neck onto his $250 monogrammed shirt. Blood spattered onto the fender of his shiny Jaguar.

  He couldn’t breathe! He was losing consciousness.

  Another man picked up the briefcase. The man turned and faced him.

  Shadid.

  He walked up to Schlumpf, paused a moment, then plunged a long, curved dagger deep into Schlumpf’s lower abdomen, ripped up and sideways hard.

  The last thing Mason Schlumpf saw in life . . . was his intestines spilling out onto the parking lot.

  THIRTY NINE

  Hasham Habib felt proud as he waved the first gray delivery truck into the shipping dock of his assembly facility. Within two minutes, all trucks had parked inside. Hasham ordered the facility manager to close the shipping dock doors.

  The drivers got out and walked over to Hasham. He embraced each man, then turned to the lead driver.

  “Were you followed?”

  “No.”

  “Unload the trucks and store the cargo.”

  Within minutes, the drivers had removed the heavy stainless steel canisters of blended VX from the cabin lab, placed them in large cabinets near the assembly area, then locked the cabinets.

  Hasham was most pleased. Everything was going smoothly . . . just like his plans. He permitted himself a smile.

  He walked around, rechecking all equipment. When he was certain everything was in order, he went to his office, locked the door and sat at his desk. He lit a long Cohiba, took a deep drag, and paused a moment to savor the cigar’s robust aroma.

  Time to update the moneyman.

  Hasham unlocked a drawer, took out his burner phone, and punched in the only number it ever called. Seven thousand miles away in Yemen, Bassam Maahdi answered.

  “Hello, Mr. Smith,” Bassam Maahdi said.

  “Hello to you, Mr. Jones,” Hasham said. “How’s your weather today?”

  “Beautiful. And yours?”

  Hasham saw the thick black rain clouds overhead, but said, “Sunny with blue skies.”

  “Excellent. I trust your medical supplies have arrived?”

  “Yes. They just arrived at our distribution facility,” Hasham said.

  “Good. So tell me, how many ah . . . patients do you estimate will benefit from our medicine?”

  Hasham looked at the computer screen and scrolled down to his estimated Phase One Kill-Rate total. “Approximately 270,000 in Phase One.”

  “And Phase Two?”

  “Another 220,000.”

  “My, my - that’s much better than I expected. Incredibly good news. We’ll make medical . . . history.”

  “Indeed.”

  “When will they benefit from it?”

  “Over the next forty-eight hours.”

  “More magnificent news.”

  “Quite.”

  “So . . . approximately a half million sick people will ah . . . be helped by our product.”

  “That is correct.”

  Long pause. “Congratulations, Mr. Smith.”

  “Thank you . . .” Hasham said.

  “But tell me, do our, ah, competitors suspect our new medicine is coming?”

  Hasham paused. “No. They have no idea at all.”

  “So they’ll be surprised?”

  “Shocked is the word.”

  “Shocked indeed! Excellent work, Mr. Smith. I will so inform our generous associates.”

  “Most kind of you, Mr. Jones.”

  Hasham wanted the generous associates well informed since their hands turned the money spigots.

  Hasham and Maahdi hung up.

  * * *

  So did Bobby Kamal in Fort Meade, Maryland. He replayed their conversation. The Yemen phone number had again triggered a red-flag alert on his NSA monitoring system.

  Kamal still wondered why these two obvious Arab-speakers spoke English.

  And why use such obvious aliases – Smith and Jones - to discuss medical supplies? It made no sense.

  And why no mention of the product’s brand name, or which medical condition it treated, or whether it required a prescription or was an over-the-counter product, or where it would be sold, or which health plans accepted it, or what marketing or promotional activities were planne
d? Why no mention of these issues so critical to the success of any new medicine?

  Maybe, Kamal suspected - because their medicine is not medicine.

  And how could they be so certain nearly five hundred thousand patients would receive their medicine within two days? And how could the competition not know about the new product? The profitrich drug companies paid enormous fees to corporate moles who told them exactly what their competitors were making. These same drug companies also paid huge bribes to FDA employees to reveal which drugs the FDA would and would not approve.

  So what game are Smith and Jones really playing?

  Counterfeit medicines? Sold on the Internet? Fake Avistan for cancer patients? Fake Exelon for Alzheimer’s patients? Fake half-strength drugs cost less, but sometimes cost lives. Were Smith and Brown selling fake drugs to retirees who can’t afford America’s criminally high drug prices?

  Possibly.

  But Bobby Kamal’s gut told him these two men were not exporting Yemen-manufactured medications to America. Yemen’s exports were fish and produce.

  Yemen’s best-known exports came with two legs: jihadists. The capital, Sana’a, a city of two million, had the highest per capita concentration of Al Qaeda, ISIS, and Houthis jihadists in the world.

  Kamal feared the worst. Based on the nearly 500,000 people these two men mentioned, they were very likely talking about a weapon of mass destruction . . . a WMD like a bio or chemical weapon maybe. Or God forbid, a suitcase nuke . . .

  Kamal turned back to his computer and tried to zero in on Mr. Smith’s location in New York. Two minutes later, he’d tracked his location to the area in or around the southeast corner of the Adirondack Park.

  Mr. Smith had said his park weather was “sunny with blue skies,” yet AccuWeather showed that the Adirondack Park area was socked in with thick rain clouds all day.

  “Sunny with blue skies” probably meant, “our plans are going well.”

  To get a more precise location for Mr. Smith, Kamal tried a new phone tracking software developed by his tech-genius college buddy, Dave Cousineau. Fifteen minutes later, Dave’s software fixed Mr. Smith’s location within twelve miles of Mayfield.

  FORTY

  Behind the cabin, Donovan felt his phone vibrate in his pocket. He checked - it was Maccabee.

  “How’s it going?” she asked.

  “Things are heating up,” he said, touching his singed-off eyebrows. He didn’t want to mention the cabin explosion, since she had enough to worry about. “Any luck with Doctor Dubin?”

  “He just called back.”

  “I hope he got your test results this time?”

  “He did.” Her voice seemed tight.

  “So . . .?”

  She took a deep, slow breath, as though not wanting to tell him more. If she didn’t want to tell him, he didn’t want to hear.

  “So . . . the results were not so good,” she said.

  He slumped against a tree.

  “I have stage three endometriosis . . . bad enough to lower my chances for getting pregnant.”

  He felt his stomach sink.

  “And he wants to check out a cyst on my ovary.”

  Donovan couldn’t speak.

  “He said the vast majority of cysts are benign.”

  Which means the rest are trouble, he sensed. “So I guess getting pregnant is . . .”

  “ . . . less likely. But he says new surgeries, plus laparoscopy and precise timing procedures increase the chances of getting pregnant.”

  “So we’ll try those.”

  “We will.”

  “What time are you seeing Dr. Dubin?”

  “In a couple of hours. I’ll call later and let you know what he says.”

  “Okay. . .”

  “Oh, by the way,” she said, “I got a strange call a few minutes ago,”

  “Strange?”

  “Yeah. An air conditioning service guy called. He’s coming over to fix a Freon leak from our AC unit. Apparently our pipe is dripping into the apartment below us.”

  Donovan went on full alert. “Mac – all the building’s AC Freon units are in the basement. And the Freon won’t be added for two more months!”

  She said nothing.

  “When’s he coming over?”

  “He said “. . . any minute now.”

  “Mac - get out of the apartment now!”

  “What?”

  “Leave the apartment right now!”

  “But - ”

  “ - just grab your stuff and leave! Go to Mrs. Hansen’s apartment on Three. She’s always there.”

  “What’s with the paranoia? What’s going on?”

  “This service guy is probably linked to the terrorists I’m chasing. They’re targeting family members.”

  She said nothing.

  “Please leave now and call me wherever you go.”

  “Hang on . . .”

  “What?”

  She put the phone down and he heard her talking to Johnny, the lobby guard, on the apartment’s two-way phone.

  “Johnny said the AC service man is heading up to see me.”

  “Leave the apartment now!”

  FORTY ONE

  Dr. Nell Northam’s gray-haired rescuers in the Taurus turned out to be middle-aged jihadists working for Hasham.

  After they removed their wigs, revealing black hair, the man flex-cuffed and blindfolded Nell and pushed her down in the back seat. The bulky woman sat beside her, gripping a small black handgun.

  The man drove at normal highway speeds, making several turns. The woman kept saying, “Clear,” telling the driver no one was following.

  Soon, they drove into stop-and-go traffic. She heard horns, truck brakes, a church bell, a truck beeping as it backed up, town noises. The car stopped and a garage door rattled open. They drove in and the door thudded down behind them. The driver cut off her flex-cuffs, pulled her out of the back seat and removed her blindfold.

  She was in an enormous garage.

  She saw four of the big gray delivery trucks with VX canisters from the cabin. Were the canisters still in the trucks?

  Nell sensed someone behind her. Turning, she saw Hasham a few feet away. He walked toward her, looking angry, and slapped her face hard. The blow knocked her back so hard her ear started ringing.

  “That’s for killing Aarif!”

  “Because he tried to kill me - ”

  “You disobeyed me.” His eyes were crazed.

  “No - I helped you blend your weapon and it worked.”

  Hasham’s face was crimson. He and a tall bearded man led her from the garage down a hall through a much larger room that looked like some kind of assembly area.

  She wondered if this was where they would weaponize the blended VX into the secret delivery system Hasham bragged about.

  But she saw none of the expected VX delivery paraphernalia. No air dispersal equipment. No water delivery devices or other dispersal methodologies. Hasham apparently told the truth when he bragged that his delivery was unique. And if it was unique, Homeland Security authorities would not be prepared to defend against it.

  She looked out a window and saw a tall red brick warehouse next to an abandoned gray concrete-wall building. She was apparently in some kind of warehouse district. But where? Which town? The drive took maybe fifteen minutes from where they picked her up near the cabin. But where was the cabin? She had no idea.

  Hasham and the bearded man marched her over to a twelve-byfourteen-foot room, pushed her inside, and locked the door from the outside. She looked around. She was in a janitor’s storage room. When they walked away, she tried the handle. It was locked in place. The door could only be unlocked from the outside.

  She was trapped.

  She looked around. Mops, brooms, big drums and vats filled with what looked like industrial cleaners.

  She flipped the light switch. A bulb hanging from the ceiling gave off as much light as a birthday candle. She searched for a tool to use for self-defense. She f
ound none. Just cleaning compounds, half empty paint cans, stir-sticks, and sandpaper. She looked up and saw faint daylight through a small glass-block window at the ceiling.

  The window seemed too high to get up to . . . too hard to break without a tool . . . too small to crawl through.

  Beside her, a flash of light caught her eye. The light spilled through a tiny slit in the wall’s wood panels. She squinted through the slit and saw an office. Beyond the office, she saw floor-to-ceiling cabinets filled with the steel canisters of blended VX.

  She heard Hasham speaking as he walked into the office.

  Quickly, she reached up and turned off her light so he wouldn’t see light through the slit. He sat at his desktop computer and opened it to what looked like an online Arab newspaper. Beyond him, she saw the large assembly area. She scanned the room for some hint of what the machines assembled. She saw no clue. Still, she sensed the assembly area held the secret to Hasham’s unique VX delivery system. If so, she might find a way to thwart it.

  But, she reminded herself - although Hasham said his system is unique, he might be lying. He might use a proven VX delivery system. The necessary delivery equipment might be stored in another part of the warehouse.

  She flashed back to the Kurdish village of Halabja where Saddam Hussein’s aircraft sprayed VX, sarin, and tabun gases onto the innocent villagers. She visited the village shrine years later and saw photos of the horrific massacre: five thousand men women and children killed, their bodies twisted in death, their mouths crusted with green bloody vomit.

  She saw faces distorted in excruciating agony as their lungs screamed for air, and pain ripped through their bodies, and their hearts exploded, until mercifully death gave them peace.

  She wept as she looked at the carnage. Mothers clutching their small children and infants, faces frozen in pain.

  And soon she would weep for thousands of Americans who would die a similar death.

  Unless she did something.

  FORTY TWO

  “Is Maccabee at home?” Donovan asked the CIA agent. “No sir!”

  “Did you check Mrs. Hansen’s on Three?”

  “Mrs. Hansen’s in Savannah.”

  “Did the lobby guard see Maccabee leave?”

  “No. He just came on duty.”