by Rick Acker
“I’m going in.” She ended the call before Frank could object.
Slinging her rifle across her back, she took out her pistol and ran out from behind the car where she had been crouching. Gunfire erupted from inside as she ran toward the building. She squeezed off several shots and dove behind a row of mailboxes.
It had been a risk, but worth it. She had covered about thirty yards and had a better angle for shooting into the door. Also, the three-inch gap separating each box from its neighbor provided just enough room for a rifle barrel. Elena holstered her pistol and slipped her sniper rifle between two boxes. She rested the stock on her thumb, providing a steady brace as she looked through the scope. She saw the two file cabinets and an indistinct shape behind them. It moved slightly and she saw that it was a man holding a gun. She fired. The figure collapsed and the gun fell to the floor between the two cabinets.
Elena cautiously poked her head from behind the mailboxes and surveyed the scene inside the doorway. Nothing moved, so she got up and ran toward the building again. The seconds it took to cross the narrow street and weedy lawn seemed an eternity. She reached the door and flattened herself against the wall to the right of it.
Heart pounding, she pulled out her Glock, took a deep breath, and turned into the doorway. She stepped awkwardly to get around the two bodies lying in the entrance. She momentarily lost her balance and nearly tripped. If the lobby had held any living Chechens, she’d be dead.
Fortunately, it didn’t. She regained her footing, crossed the lobby to another doorway, and peeked around the corner. The door opened into a long hallway. A man at the other end of the hall turned and saw her at the same instant she saw him. She pulled her head back just as he fired a shot. A cloud of plaster exploded from the wall a few inches from the doorway. Running steps retreated into the building.
Gambling that she wasn’t stepping into an ambush, Elena ran through the doorway and down the hall, following the sound of the steps. She reached the door at the other end and saw the man’s back disappearing into another doorway.
“Freeze! FBI!” she yelled, but he ignored her and raced down a flight of stairs.
“Help!” a man’s voice called from somewhere in the distance. “Down here!” The voice was weak and hoarse, but she recognized it at once—Sergei!
The sound of gunfire jolted Sergei more or less awake. Thirst and the aftereffects of a concussion slowed his thoughts. A growing fever also fogged his mind, and at first he thought he was dreaming or hallucinating. But as the shots and yells grew closer and louder, he realized what must be happening.
He heard sounds behind him and twisted his head around in time to see a gun-wielding man come running down the stairs that led to Sergei’s prison. It was the same one who had threatened and pistol-whipped him earlier.
They’re going to kill me before I can be rescued. “Help! Down here!” he croaked as loudly as he could.
But the man ignored Sergei. He stepped to the side of the doorway at the bottom of the stairs and pressed himself against the wall, his gun at eye level and pointed toward the staircase, poised to blow the head off of whoever came down next.
I’m bait, Sergei realized, kicking himself for shouting.
A woman’s feet appeared on the stairs, cautiously and silently picking their way past nearly invisible booby-trap trip wires. As more of the woman’s body appeared, Sergei realized that it was Elena.
“Look out!” Sergei yelled. “Bottom of the stairs on the right!”
The man whipped his gun around and aimed it at Sergei. The detective jerked his body sideways, tipping the chair over. A flash and explosion went off simultaneously behind him, and a bullet whizzed past his right shoulder as he fell. The man fired again and the bullet ricocheted off the steel frame of the chair back. But Sergei didn’t notice—he had struck his head on the concrete floor and was unconscious again.
Elena jumped down the remaining stairs while the Chechen was shooting at Sergei. She landed nimbly with her gun aimed at his chest. “Freeze!” she ordered.
He swung the gun back toward her.
Bang!
The man staggered backward, looking down in shock at the bullet hole in his chest. His eyes rolled back in his head and he collapsed, dead before he hit the floor.
Elena ran over to Sergei, who lay motionless on the floor. Fearing the worst, she checked his pulse and breathing and looked for wounds. Relief poured through her when she found that he was still alive and hadn’t been shot. His skin was hot to the touch, however, and angry red streaks spread out from the long burns on his back. And he still hadn’t woken up.
“Sergei!” she cried, cradling his head in her hands. “Can you hear me? Sergei!”
He opened his eyes and looked at her blearily. “Elena?” he groaned through dry, cracked lips. “What happened? Did you get him?”
“Yeah, I got him.”
“Did you get the other ones? I think . . .” His mind wandered for a few seconds, then he focused again with a visible effort. “Two. Yeah, I think there were two more. Did you get ’em?”
“I got ’em.”
He smiled weakly. “Gotta love a woman who can shoot.” Then he passed out again.
As soon as Ben hung up the phone after talking to Chris Reid, he dialed Dr. Ivanovsky’s home number—but he punched in the numbers too quickly and made a mistake. He hung up and tried again, but no one picked up. It finally occurred to him that maybe his client really was planning to meet him at ten o’clock. Maybe he had already destroyed whatever was in that box and both their lives could go back to normal.
Ben looked at his watch: 10:01.
He jogged back to his office, praying that he’d find Dr. Ivanovsky in the lobby, drinking too-sweet tea and rereading Judge Harris’s order for the 146th time. He’d probably also have a page of handwritten questions to ask Ben. Actually, probably two pages. Ben relaxed a little and grinned as he pictured the scene. It would be typical Ivanovsky.
But Dr. Ivanovsky wasn’t in the lobby.
Ben turned to Susan, about to ask her if she’d seen his client, but she spoke first. “Ben, Irina Ivanovsky is on the phone. Do you want to talk to her?”
He paused for a heartbeat. Why is Irina calling? “Put her through.”
The phone rang as he walked into his office and picked it up. “Hello. Ben Corbin.”
“Mr. Corbin, Mikhail—he said I call you,” she began in an uncertain, trembling voice. “He said if bad thing happen to him, I call you.”
Ben stiffened, every muscle in his body tense. “Bad thing? What happened?”
She started to cry. “Police said they see Mikhail’s car by the road. Mikhail is inside. He is—they shoot him many times.” She sobbed again.
“The police shot him?”
“No. They shoot him before police come. He is very afraid for many weeks. He said nothing to me, but I am a wife and I see. Now I am so afraid.” Her grief overwhelmed her and she said nothing coherent for a time. “I am sorry. Mikhail is . . . I do not know what happens to me if he dies. I must go to hospital now. He is in University Chicago Hospital.”
The line went dead and Ben slowly hung up the receiver. As he thought through what he had just heard, fear descended on him like a cold and poisonous mist.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
COUNCILS OF WAR
Elbek set the small, tightly sealed jar on the table in front of him. It was filled about halfway with a whitish-brown powder so fine that it flowed like thick smoke if the jar was moved. Each particle was incredibly tiny—less than five microns across—and had been painstakingly designed not to clump or stick to other particles. Ordinary dust motes were huge objects by comparison—floating boulders and logs one hundred microns wide or larger. They would irritate the nose or throat and be coughed out. But the powder in the jar would float unnoticed into the tiniest openings in the lungs. There, it would stic
k to the wall of the lung and begin to breed.
There was enough powder in the jar to start an epidemic that would rage through a city in a few weeks, killing virtually all whom it infected—or so Dr. Umarov had said. He had also said that he could use this powder as seed stock to grow hundreds of pounds of the disease. Elbek would be meeting with the doctor in a few minutes to discuss the status of their preparations, but for now he sat alone at the table with his prize and his thoughts.
Strange that something I have never seen could trigger so many memories.
He remembered the joy of his men when he told them that they were giving up the fight against the Russians, but beginning a much greater war. They were weary of war, of course, but they were much wearier of defeat. Now their general gave them the chance for victory—a small chance, but a real one—and they would follow him into the very gates of hell.
They abandoned their caves and learned the life of border smugglers from Elbek and Hamzat. Their ranks grew as Elbek quietly recruited the best Chechen and Ingush fighters he knew, particularly other disaffected Spetsnaz veterans.
Smuggling not only paid the bills, it allowed Elbek and his men to hear news from the underground arms market. They heard many rumors of anthrax, bubonic plague, smallpox, Marburg, and other bioweapons for sale. None of them had panned out. Either the rumors were false, the germs were too weak for Elbek’s purposes, or they had been outbid. Until one day a source in Moscow told him there might be a very interesting weapon for sale in America.
The lights went out and the click and whir of an old-fashioned movie projector started at the back of the room. All eyes turned to the screen. It showed a silent black-and-white image of the inside of a huge metal chamber. It was empty except for twelve rhesus monkeys huddled together on the floor and a sphere mounted on a brace at the top.
The sphere exploded, releasing a pale cloud that spread out ominously over the monkeys. Several of the animals became quite agitated as the cloud slowly descended on them, clinging to each other or racing around looking for a way out. Their mouths moved constantly as they soundlessly screamed and gibbered. The smoky fog thinned as it settled on the floor of the chamber, then vanished altogether, leaving the monkeys seemingly unharmed.
The scene suddenly shifted to a row of cages attended by figures wearing what appeared to be spacesuits. “This is forty-eight hours later,” announced a voice at the back of the room.
The camera slowly panned along the lines of cages, which each held a monkey. The monkeys were mostly sitting or lying in their cages, though some of them still moved about. Their eyes appeared to be black, and dark lesions showed through their fur. Most of them had dark, wet spots under their noses and on their hindquarters.
The scene jumped again, showing a wide stainless-steel table. “This is seventy-two hours after they were exposed.”
The camera slowly scanned along the table, showing twelve dark, inert lumps. Each one lay in a puddle of blackish liquid.
The film ended suddenly and the lights came back on, revealing eight men and women with ashen faces. They sat around a conference table, silent as the film they had just seen. A ninth man walked briskly to the front of the room as the movie screen disappeared into the ceiling.
“We found this film in storage this morning,” he said as he reached the lectern at the end of the conference table. “Fortunately, our A/V people still had the equipment to run it. We now believe that it shows experiments performed in a secret facility on an island in the Aral Sea sometime in early 1985.”
“We’ve known about this thing since 1985?” interrupted the representative from Homeland Security, a short bulldog of a man with thick, close-cropped gray hair. “Why didn’t we do anything?”
The first speaker, Bill Alexander of the CIA, pressed his lips together in frustration. “We didn’t take it seriously. The intelligence consensus at the time was that the Soviet Union did not have an active biological weapons program, though some of us disputed that.”
“Including you,” said a woman from the Pentagon.
He smiled. “Including me. You have a long memory, Mary. Even I would have doubted the authenticity of this particular piece of intelligence. The source was not reliable, and not even the greatest pessimists thought that the Soviets had the ability to genetically engineer something like this.
“The gentleman who sold us this film was named Alexei Zinoviev. He claimed that he could obtain a sample of the organism itself and possibly other materials for a price—which he wanted in advance, of course. We told him to bring us the germ first. Then we could talk about the price.
“Mr. Zinoviev disappeared for six months. Then one day he called his handler to arrange a meeting in West Berlin. He claimed he had something ‘very big,’ but he wouldn’t say more. We had agents waiting to meet him at the agreed rendezvous, but he never arrived. Instead, he called us from Chicago and told us to meet him on a bridge there. We sent people as quickly as we could, but by the time we got there he was dead. The police were just fishing him out of the Chicago River.”
“KGB?” asked the man from Homeland Security.
“It’s certainly possible,” acknowledged Deputy Director Alexander, “but they would have been a long way from home. Also, we knew that this gentleman had enemies in Chicago. In any event, he had nothing related to biological weapons on his person or in his hotel room, so we dropped the matter. The analyst who had originally reviewed this film retired, the Cold War ended, and this file was sent into storage.
“Then two weeks ago, a liaison officer from the FBI requested information on Mr. Zinoviev. Once the file was retrieved from the warehouse, it was brought to my attention. I questioned the liaison, who informed me that a former FBI agent in Chicago had called asking for this information.”
“We’ve pulled in this ex-FBI guy for questioning, right?” asked the man from Homeland Security.
“Tom, you know more about that than I do at this point,” said Alexander, looking at an athletic Hispanic man of about fifty, who was the FBI representative at the council.
The FBI man nodded. “I just got off the phone with a squad leader in our Chicago office before I came to this meeting. They’d actually been looking for the former agent since he disappeared two days ago. They found him this morning. He’d been kidnapped, interrogated, and tortured by a group of Chechens. He’s in the intensive-care unit at a local hospital, but we’ll talk to him as soon as we can.” He looked at the man from Homeland Security. “It looks like we weren’t the only ones who wanted to ask him questions.
“There’s more bad news,” he continued. “The agent who found and rescued this guy said that he’d been hired by a lawyer representing a retired Russian germ-warfare expert named Mikhail Ivanovsky. Ivanovsky was suing Zinoviev’s brother for possession of something that Zinoviev left in a safe-deposit box in Chicago before he died. According to the court file, the case ended this morning with a judgment giving the box to Mr. Ivanovsky. He’s already been to the bank and emptied the box. Then he disappeared. We just found him ten minutes ago. He’s currently undergoing surgery for multiple bullet wounds.”
No one spoke for several seconds as they digested this information and its ramifications. “Has anyone talked to Zinoviev’s brother?” asked the woman from the Pentagon.
“He died about three weeks ago.”
“It seems like the only person who isn’t dead or in the hospital is the lawyer for the germ-warfare expert,” said Bill Alexander. “I assume we’re looking for him.”
Elbek’s only regret was that Hamzat could not be here for this moment. He had died of pneumonia last January. Yet he had died a happy man, having lived to see the founding of the Vainakh Guard and its growth into a formidable shadow army. But he had not seen Allah’s sword of victory delivered into their hands. His eyes had not beheld the key that would unlock the cage that had held all Muslims for centuries.
&nb
sp; And now that key sat on the table in front of Elbek. There was much work still to do, but all the pieces were finally in place. It was merely a question of staying hidden until they were ready to strike.
Dr. Umarov walked in. He was a disaffected Uzbek who, despite his youthful appearance, had spent more than twenty years operating a smallpox-production line in Siberia before being summarily laid off when Boris Yeltsin terminated Russia’s bioweapons-manufacturing program. “I hope I have not kept you waiting, General.”
“Not at all. I arrived early.” Elbek held up the vial. “So tell me, Doctor. What exactly can we do with this little jar?”
“Hi, Ben,” Elena said. “I got your message, and we need to talk to you right away. Your phone line may not be safe. Can you come in?”
“On my way,” said Ben. He grabbed his coat, told Susan and Noelle where he was going, and left the office. A cold, wind-whipped rain struck him as he stepped out of the building, but he didn’t even consider going back for his umbrella. He had just spent three hours in his office tensely waiting to talk to someone from the FBI. He was not going to wait any longer, whatever the weather.
The FBI offices were in the Dirksen Building, only a few blocks from Ben’s office. He walked down Dearborn Street at a pace that was nearly a jog, weaving through the crowd of pedestrians returning from lunch. Questions about the upcoming meeting crowded everything else out of his mind.
The Dirksen Building, a massive federal-office-and-courthouse structure, mirrored the architectural style of the Daley Center—grim glass-and-steel exterior, narrow windows, and a cold, stone-floored lobby.
