Frances looked out the window toward the vice president’s residence. “Maybe he’s not going to hire an airplane. Maybe he has his own.”
“The Gulfstream is out, and the Bureau says that his Bell Ranger is still tied down at his Kalispell ranch.”
“I mean a crop duster.”
“Somebody would have flown it out here,” Hughes said, then he gave Frances a smile. “That’s a new angle. I’ll check to see if any new airplanes have arrived at any of those airports in the last few days. But you and William saw no sign of such an airplane out there, did you?”
“No. And airplanes are tough items to hide. But it’s worth a try.”
“That it is.”
PHILADELPHIA
Bernhard Metzler had agonized about his decision on the train all the way from New York, and he was no closer to knowing what to do than he had been two days ago as he walked into the Federal Building on Seventh and Arch Streets a few minutes before eleven. But he was here, carried almost as if against his will, to do the right thing.
He took the elevator to the third floor, walked into the FBI office and stepped up to the receptionist, an older woman, who looked up.
“I want to report a terrorist attack that’s probably going to happen in New York pretty soon,” Metzler said. “A lot of people are going to get killed unless the Bureau does something damned quick.”
The woman’s eyes never left Metzler’s as she snatched her phone and called Special Agent in Charge Michael Hood. The heads-up on the biological threat had been sent to every Bureau office in the world, and this was possibly the break they were hoping for. The lengthy confidential directive had forbidden any publicity whatsoever, which hamstrung their investigation. As the clock continued to count down, everyone was getting desperate.
Hood and two agents, their hands inside their jackets, came from the offices in back.
“What’s your name, sir?” Hood demanded.
“Bernhard Metzler. I know something about the guys you’re probably looking for. It’s about a hemorraghic virus, right? And unless I miss my guess these nut cases have already threatened somebody with it. Am I right, or what?”
“How do you know about this?”
Metzler smirked sarcastically. “I’m the one who loaded it into the big air bottles, and pumped a little of the shit into a two-hundred-fifty-milliliter sample bottle.” He shook his head. “Did I come to the wrong place, or do you guys want to talk to me? Maybe we can save a few lives here. I can be the hero for a change.”
One of the agents came over. “Spread ’em,” he said. He quickly frisked Metzler for a weapon. “He’s clean.”
“We certainly do want to talk to you, Mr. Metzler,” Hood said.
“Dr. Metzler.”
WASHINGTON, D.C.
At 11:45 A.M. the first flash traffic on Bernhard Metzler came into the FBI’s Special Investigative Division, under the heading “Extremely Confidential.”
At that same moment a computer in Tom Hughes’s office warbled a warning tone. One of The Room’s special intercept programs was getting the same message. The moment he realized what was happening, he picked up the phone and called Bill Lane.
NEW YORK
Lane was on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway heading back to La Guardia when Hughes called him with the news about Metzler. “If Speyer has an informer inside the Bureau he knows about it now, and he’ll have the man killed. Call the White House and have them order the Philly SAC to move Metzler to a safe house, right now.”
“Are you going down there?” Hughes asked.
“I’m about fifteen minutes from the airport. As soon as you find out where they’ve taken him, let me know. And let the SAC know that I’m on my way.”
“Did you get anything from the Akai Maru?”
“Speyer, Gloria and Baumann were aboard all right. They got off in Miami, and the package was taken up here, just like we figured,” Lane said. “Any luck on the safehouse?”
“Nothing yet. And no mystery phone calls to Mann.”
“Keep on it, Tommy.”
12
PHILADELPHIA
Bill Lane was delayed a half-hour at LaGuardia so that by the time he touched down at Philadelphia’s Northeast Airport and taxied to the government hangar, Frances was waiting for him with a car. He was vexed and he let it show.
“Don’t pout, dear, you’ll trip over your lower lip,” she told him. “My jet has a fax machine and yours doesn’t, so Tommy sent me what he’s managed to dig up on our professor.”
Frances had directions to the FBI safe house, so she rode shotgun while Lane drove the plain gray Ford van with government plates.
“Has Tommy come up with anything yet on where Speyer is hunkering down?”
“He’s still working on it, but he’s not going to make much progress unless we catch a break. Maybe Metzler is just the ticket.”
“Don’t count on it too heavily, Frannie. If Metzler knew anything that could interfere with Speyer’s plans, they would have killed him.”
“Maybe they tried and he got away. That’s why he came to the FBI.”
“That’s possible. Maybe he is our only real lead.”
They took U.S. 63 down to I-95 and headed south. The Bureau’s safe house was actually in New Jersey, across the river from Philadelphia near Camden. Traffic was heavy but moved well.
“What’d we come up with on him?” Lane asked.
“He’s apparently quite bright, but the lad is a chronic complainer,” Frannie said. “He’s been an associate professor of molecular biology at New York University for the past five years and that’s as far as he’s going to go because he doesn’t know when to keep his mouth shut. He was born in 1970 in Milwaukee, second generation German with ties to the former East Germany. His parents used to send care packages to relatives behind the Wall. University of Wisconsin, then Heidelberg for his master’s and back to Wisconsin for his Ph.D. He did one year of postdoc work at Columbia and then moved over to NYU. He’s up for tenure but he probably won’t get that either and he knows it.”
“So he’s a bitter man,” Lane said.
“It would seem so.”
“Money and revenge. Pretty powerful motivations. What else?”
“We don’t know what he told the Bureau except that he’s the one who loaded the virus into a pair of air bottles filled with nitrogen and the sample bottle which was sent to the White House. So we have no idea how Speyer found him, or what kind of a deal they struck.”
“Evidently he thinks that Speyer is going to release the virus in New York City, which is why he got out.”
“A little misdirection.”
“Good move on Speyer’s part,” Lane said. “He would view it as insurance in case Metzler did exactly what he’s done.”
“Speyer may be a bastard, but nobody’s accusing him of being stupid,” Frances said. “So far he hasn’t made many mistakes, and the clock is still running.”
“It’s compartmentalization. The old Russian cell system in which only one person knows the entire plan. Each cell knows one bit, but nothing more. Metzler is a one-man cell. He’ll know something all right, but not the entire plan.”
“Might be that he knows something, or saw something, or heard something that doesn’t seem important to him, but that might help us.”
Lane glanced at his wife, a glimmer of another idea coming to him from what she just said. Maybe there was someone else out there who could help them.
WEST FRIENDSHIP, MARYLAND
The country house was situated on the northeast corner of fifty acres of woods twenty miles west of Baltimore and thirty north of Washington. Speyer bought it three years ago about the same time he’d picked up the New York brownstone after he’d completed his operational planning. Like the Kalispell ranch, this place afforded him almost complete privacy for his men.
He was watching CNN for news about the virus threat when Baumann came in from making his rounds. It was 3:00 P.M. “Our perimeter is sec
ure, and the landing area has been prepared.”
“There’s been nothing on the news, so they’re taking us seriously after all.” Speyer lowered the volume and went to the sideboard where he poured them each a cognac. “It won’t be long now and we’ll be home free. How many of the men will stay with us afterwards?”
The question caught Baumann momentarily off guard, but he recovered nicely. He’d been with Speyer for a long time. He knew when to tell the truth and when to lie. “Maybe half, if you really mean to retire to Cuba.”
“That’s about what I thought. What if I don’t retire?”
“Maybe about the same number. Half of them want to finish this mission and get back to their families. The other half will want a new assignment.”
“There’s plenty to do.”
“But not for us,” Baumann said. “This is the big one. Your identity will come out eventually.”
Speyer shrugged. “It wouldn’t be difficult. A little plastic surgery, alter my fingerprints.”
“DNA doesn’t lie.”
“That’s true. But in order for them to match my DNA they would have to get a sample from me, which I would make very difficult for them.”
Baumann thoughtfully sipped his cognac. “Are you thinking about another mission, Captain?”
“Nothing immediately.”
“It would depend on what happens in the next forty-eight hours,” Baumann suggested. “If the government pays us the ten billion, then we can pack up and leave as planned. But if they don’t we’ll have to go to stage red. If we’re forced to go that far the situation will be much different. Money is one thing, but the murder of several hundred thousand civilians is something totally different.”
“It would earn us respect, Ernst,” Speyer said.
Baumann’s eyes narrowed. “It would earn us more than that, Herr Kapitän. We would become the most hunted men on earth.”
Speyer laughed and dismissed Baumann’s objections with a wave. “The U.S. Navy went after Gaddafi and missed, and the entire U.S. military went after Saddam Hussein and missed again. I’m not overly concerned.”
He offered another cognac but Baumann shook his head. He was clearly troubled.
“You think that I am wrong?”
Baumann put his glass down. “Permission to speak freely, sir?”
Speyer didn’t want to be bothered with petty objections at this stage of the mission, but he nodded. Baumann was a good man, if a bit overcautious.
“State-sponsored acts of terrorism, or even wars are one thing, but killing American civilians in such large numbers on their home ground is something else.”
“They haven’t gotten bin Laden yet, and there’s a five million dollar bounty on his head.”
“He never killed tens of thousands—”
“That will be enough, Sergeant,” Speyer said sharply. “I want the men assembled in the dining room in one hour.” He looked at his watch. “At sixteen hundred.”
It was clear that Baumann wanted to say something else, but he nodded curtly, and left.
Gloria hadn’t bothered to unpack. They wouldn’t be here for very long, and she was starting to get worried that Helmut was about to do something very stupid and dangerous. She watched from the front bedroom window as Baumann marched toward the horse arena across the paddock where the men were billeted. He looked resigned.
“I want you to make us dinner tonight,” Speyer said from the doorway.
“Get your own goddamned dinner,” she replied without turning away from the window.
Speyer came across the room, grabbed her arm just above the elbow, and yanked her nearly off her feet. “The truck will arrive in a couple of hours, and there’ll be twelve hungry men plus Ernst and myself. We’ll have potato dumplings, würst, lentil soup, spaetzle, and brown bread plus beer.”
His tone of voice was calm, but there was something in his eyes that she hadn’t seen before. Not anger, or even hate. Maybe indifference, and it frightened her all of a sudden. She nodded. “I’m sorry.”
Speyer changed out of the slacks and shirt he was wearing into khaki trousers, a short-sleeved safari shirt, and boots. He always wore the quasi-military uniform when he wanted to emphasize the military command structure of his organization. Gloria had always thought he was being theatrical.
“How much longer are we going to be cooped up here, Helmut?” Gloria asked.
Speyer pulled on a shoulder holster and Glock 17. “Two days, and then you can go back to being a movie star.” Something in the way he said it was hurtful, and she knew that he’d meant it that way.
The truck had not arrived yet, but it wouldn’t be seriously overdue until midnight, so Speyer was not overly concerned yet. In fact, everything had gone according to the mission timetable so far.
Eight men plus Baumann assembled in the dining room got to their feet and snapped to attention when Speyer walked in. “As you were, gentlemen,” he said. They sat down as he took his place at the head of the long table.
“Hoffmann and Schneider are on guard duty,” Baumann reported.
“Very well. Has there been any interest from the neighbors, the townspeople, or the local authorities?”
“None.”
“Let’s keep it that way. You’re all restricted to the compound for the mission duration which I estimate to be forty-eight hours, plus or minus four. Has transportation been converted and secured?”
“Yes, sir,” Sergeant Fredrichs said. “The new registrations are valid, the tanks are full, and PM routines have been completed.” They had two Toyota minivans and three SUVs, all purchased through legitimate sources. They’d been used to transport the men across country under one set of licenses which had now been changed. Once the ag plane took off, the men would head immediately to Baltimore where they were booked on commercial flights to Montreal, Mexico City, and Paris. Even before the first of the virus was released, if the mission developed to that point, they would be in the air and heading out of the country.
Until then, their primary function was guarding the compound and the airstrip and, when the ag plane arrived, defending it with their lives if need be until it was away.
“I want weapons and surveillance systems checks completed no later than twenty hundred hours, and that will include our perimeter point defense system.”
“Yes, sir,” Baumann replied.
“I want a final check on travel documents and identification papers by oh-eight hundred. Nobody is going to get arrested on the way out. You have all worked too hard to blow it at the end. Three days from now we’ll be doing some serious R & R on a tropical beach.”
The men around the table grinned. Most of their missions had been in East Germany, a long ways from any tropical beach. And they had spent the winter training at the Kalispell compound.
“What are the chances of an incursion by hostiles within the next forty-eight hours, Herr Kapitän?” one of the men asked.
“Very low, if we continue to maintain a low profile,” Speyer said. “But not zero.” He looked at each of them. “If it comes to that, you will be released from your duties once our mission strike aircraft is airborne. At that point you will be on your own until you reach one of the emergency rendezvous points. If you manage to get that far, you will be picked up by friendlies.”
“Any further question?” Baumann asked. When no one responded, he dismissed them.
CAMDEN
The FBI’s safe house was actually a room in a Motel 6 on I-676. The place was run-down, but under reconstruction, the smell of fresh paint and plaster dust thick in the air. There were a few semis parked in back, and by tonight the place would be filled with truckers. There was a Denny’s next door, a 7-Eleven across the frontage road, a package liquor store nearby, and a large truck stop a quarter mile away. The interstate on/off ramps were under repairs, too, and along with the constant traffic the area was a confused, dusty mess. Anonymity in the midst of chaos.
Lane and Frannie were met on the second floor
landing by two FBI special agents who checked their identification. They were expected.
The Philadelphia SAC Michael Hood was waiting in 207; Metzler was in 208. Hood did not look happy. He was mystified by what the White House chief of staff had told him.
“Now maybe we can get this mystery cleared up,” Hood said once the introductions were made. He was a tall man, with a solid football player’s build, and a wide, pleasant face.
He reminded Frannie of a Labrador retriever: honest and friendly.
“There’s no time for the long version, so I’ll give it to you straight out,” Lane said. “You know, of course, the threat we’re facing. To complicate matters, we believe that there’s a mole in the FBI. Someone highly placed who may be feeding this terrorist information.”
“We’ll skip over the part about my skepticism. If you’re right, it means someone may be on the way here to silence our informant.”
“That’s why you were asked to move him,” Lane said.
“How much time do we have, can you tell me that much?”
“Fifty hours.”
“Then we’d better get to it,” Hood said. He had Metzler brought over. The molecular biologist gave Frances an interested once-over, and then smirked at Lane.
“Who the hell are you, then, another government man here to waste time?” He was frightened and indignant because of it.
“We’re the ones who’re going to save your life for cooperating with us,” Lane said pleasantly. “You were moved to this shithole because the people who hired you are not happy. They’ve sent someone to kill you.”
Metzler glanced nervously at Hood and the other two special agents. “I turned myself in because the crazy bastards already tried to kill me once. And the shit they’ve got could kill hundreds of thousands, probably millions of people.”
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