Mind Virus

by Charles Kowalski

  Abu Hakim was quiet for a long time. His expression of fear had changed to the despondency of a man resigned to choosing the lesser of two evils.

  When he spoke again, he said: “I was told that I could make some good money just by giving them a ride and asking no questions.”

  “Can you describe them?”

  “Three of them were young men. They were carrying machine guns. The fourth was maybe a little older, but I’m not sure. I didn’t see his face.”

  “The whole way, you never got a look at his face?”

  “He was wearing sunglasses, and a kaffiyeh wrapped all the way around his head. Also gloves. White cotton gloves.”

  “What did he sound like? Could you describe his voice?”

  Abu Hakim shook his head. “He didn’t speak. It was the guard, riding up front with me, who gave me directions.”

  “Is there anything else you can tell me about him? Anything distinctive about the way he moved? How he smelled? Anything you can remember.”

  Fox thought he was grasping at straws, but the word “smell” seemed to jog Abu Hakim’s memory. “Yes. He smelled like some kind of lotion.”

  “Lotion?”

  “He applied it on the way. He took off his gloves and undid his kaffiyeh long enough to smear it on his hands and face. I still didn’t get a good look at his face in the mirror—he was looking down, and I had to keep my eyes on the road—but I remember that.”

  Fox’s mind began to race. The kaffiyeh and sunglasses might simply have been to keep his identity a secret, but the gloves and the lotion suggested another possibility: abnormally sensitive skin.

  And there was one card in the “Most Wanted” deck with that affliction: Saif al-Jaffari, a.k.a. “Germ Jaffari,” once a leader in Saddam Hussein’s biological weapons project, now a prominent figure in al-Queda in Iraq and a close lieutenant of Zuhairi’s. He was known to have a wide range of allergies, including hypersensitivity to sunlight and dust, caused by repeated vaccinations against anthrax, tularemia, smallpox, and the devil only knew what else.

  Jaffari was a native son of Mosul, but had made himself anathema in his old hometown by helping Saddam Hussein crush the Kurdish uprisings twenty years ago, so returning to the northern provinces meant taking his life in his hands. What errand could be so important that he would incur such a risk to himself, rather than delegating it to some lackey?

  “Where did you take them?”

  “From Mosul to Zakho and back.”

  Zakho was a border town, the kind of place that existed primarily for people to pass through on their way to and from Turkey. The only reason Fox could see for his being there was to meet someone coming across from the Turkish side. A short meeting—he had made the round trip in half a day—but important enough for Jaffari to attend to it personally.

  “What did he do in Zakho?”

  “I don’t know. I was just waiting in the car, like he told me.”

  “Where did you drop him off?”

  “At a hotel. I think it was the Hotel Bazaaz.”

  “Was he carrying anything?”

  “Yes, a briefcase. When he came back, he was carrying a smaller case, made of metal.”

  A briefcase full of cash, exchanged for a small metal case full of…what?

  “What happened after that?”

  “I drove them back to Mosul. Then they paid me and sent me home.”

  “Who was waiting for you when you arrived at the farmhouse?”

  “Just Abu Rahim.”

  The farmhouse had been empty when Special Forces arrived. Most likely, Jaffari had sent Abu Hakim ahead as a decoy, and left soon after him in Abu Rahim’s car.

  “Did Abu Rahim drive? Was his car there?”

  “Yes.”

  “What kind of car is it? Can you describe it?”

  “It’s a Toyota Corona. White.”

  Of course, it would have to be the most common kind of car in Iraq. “What else can you tell me about it? Does it have any distinguishing features?”

  He looked down and to his right for a moment. “No, nothing else.”

  Most people, if they were right-handed, would look up and to their left when searching their visual memory. Down and to the right was the “internal dialogue” direction. Abu Hakim had something in mind, but he was debating: “Should I tell him or not?”

  “Abu Hakim,” Fox said, “I promise you, your friend will come to no harm. He took a job for a little extra money, without knowing who he was working for, just like you. That’s no crime. But the man riding with him is very important to us. Now, when I asked you about the car just now, something came into your mind that you chose not to tell me. That was a poor decision. I’ll ask you one more time: What is the distinguishing mark on that car?”

  Abu Hakim stared in astonishment. Fox held his gaze, keeping his face impassive. If Abu Hakim wanted to believe his interrogator had supernatural mind-reading powers, Fox was perfectly willing to let him.

  His voice finally came out in a near whisper, as though he was afraid his friend might hear him:

  “The passenger’s side mirror is missing.”

  ...

  When Fox got back to the gator pit, he saw that one of the civilian interpreters, the one they called MJ, was back at his desk. His full name was Muhannad Jibrail, but when the soldiers gave him his nickname, he took the joke and ran with it, affecting a black fedora and aviator sunglasses. With his naturally fair skin, and curly hair grown long, he needed only a sequined white glove for the resemblance to the self-proclaimed King of Pop to be complete.

  “MJ,” he said, “I need you to contact the border patrol at the Ibrahim Khalil crossing, and get a list of everyone who entered from Turkey yesterday. We also need last night’s guest list from the Hotel Bazaaz in Zakho. Highlight any names that appear on both lists.”

  “Consider it done, Cap.”

  While he was working on that, Fox took out a map, ruler, and compass, and tried to determine the routes Jaffari might have taken and how far he could have gone. If he had left Mosul at the same time as Abu Hakim—which would have been around 1400—and taken the highway toward Baghdad, he would be nearing Samarra now.

  After a while, MJ handed Fox a faxed list with three names highlighted. Two were Italian: Andrea Dellisanti and Chiara Peretti. They appeared together on both lists, and “Andrea” in Italian was a man’s name. Fox wrote them off as a backpacking couple who had taken a quick hop across the border for Iraqi entry stamps and bragging rights.

  The third name was Venera Goridze.

  Fox searched for her name in all the classified databases he had access to. Goridze, Venera (née Tsiklauri). Born in a small town near Tbilisi, present-day Republic of Georgia. Graduated from the Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology in Moscow. During the Soviet era, she had worked as a researcher for Vector, the State Research Institute for Virology and Technology, in Siberia. She had also been a supervisor at a vaccine plant in Zagorsk, near Moscow.

  He ran another search for the town. Famous since the fourteenth century as home to one of the holiest monasteries for the Russian Orthodox faith, it had taken on a darker shade of notoriety fifteen years ago, when an outbreak of viral encephalitis infected three hundred people. Two hundred had died. Among those that lived, some went into a coma, while others were afflicted with permanent paralysis or brain damage.

  Most of the victims lived close to what was ostensibly a veterinary vaccine plant, run by the Ministry of Agriculture. The accident brought to light that it was really a research and production facility for Biopreparat, the Soviet Union’s vast and top-secret biological weapons program.

  The official explanation, which Moscow still insisted on, was that it had been a particularly bad outbreak of Russian spring-summer encephalitis, carried by milk from infected cows. And just to lend an extra touch of authenticity to the cover story, the government had ordered the managers of several nearby pasteurizing plants thrown into prison.

  Venera Goridze
had been working there at the time.

  Fox glanced across the room. Stephanie Vasily was at her desk. “Steph, could I ask your help with something?”

  “Sure, Robin.” She stood up and made her way to his desk, with the lithe, catlike movements characteristic of her.

  The daughter of a Russian defector who may have been involved in some shady weapons work himself, Stephanie was the most knowledgeable person Fox knew about biological weapons. They had arrived in Iraq at the same time, and had soon become friends, perhaps because he was one of the few who never subjected her to bawdy remarks or clumsy pick-up attempts.

  “I’ve just been reading about the Zagorsk outbreak. What can you tell me about that virus?”

  Her green eyes brightened. “Interesting character, that one. Fascinating.” One thing that always unnerved Fox about her was the way she spoke of the deadliest viruses with a touch of affection, like a toxicologist who has come to treat the poisonous snakes in the laboratory like pets. “It’s what’s known as a chimera virus, a genetically engineered hybrid of smallpox and an amplified version of Venezuelan equine encephalitis. It hits the brain and the nervous system, much harder than the natural type, and stays stable longer in the air.”

  “Is the Zagorsk plant still in operation?”

  “Not anymore. All of Biopreparat was shut down when the Soviet Union collapsed. Or so they said.”

  “Let me guess: Leaving many researchers out of a job? Some of whom mightn’t have been above selling a few souvenirs from their former workplace for a bit of hard currency?”

  “You got it. And considering that ‘security’ at old Soviet bio plants usually means one rusty padlock and maybe one fat old guard, it wouldn’t be difficult.”

  And if Venera Goridze had returned to her home of Georgia after losing her job with Biopreparat, it would be a fairly easy overland journey from there across eastern Turkey to the Iraqi border.

  “If you were Jaffari, and you got your hands on a sample of Zagorsk, what would you do with it? How would you get the biggest bang for your buck?”

  “Let’s see…” She raised her eyes to the vaulted ceiling and thought for a while. But before she could reply, they felt a slight tremor, and heard the muffled thud of an incoming mortar shell in the distance. Mortar attacks were a part of daily life on the base, and the soldiers generally reacted to them the way Californians did to earthquakes. You got used to them after a while, but you still automatically checked your escape routes, and you could never quite get free of the adrenaline jolt and the thought of Is this the one?

  Fox and Stephanie exchanged a wide-eyed glance. American installations were constantly being bombarded by mortars. Recently, the Green Zone in Baghdad and some of the main military bases had been equipped with the CRAM system—Counter Rocket, Artillery and Mortar—which could intercept an incoming shell with a barrage of bullets well before it struck the mark. But if the enemy had filled the shell with a biological agent that could be dispersed in aerosol form, it would fall out better than they could devise.

  Fox voiced their shared thought. “Fill a mortar shell with the virus…”

  “Lob it into the Green Zone…”

  “And either it reaches its target, or the CRAM guns blow it apart in mid-air…”

  “Either way, you get the hottest shower you’ve ever had in your life. And if you could manage to time your attack right before a major transfer of troops, then you have hundreds of soldiers on planes heading back to the States, bringing home an extra souvenir that they won’t even know about until symptoms start appearing.”

  It made ghastly sense. If you were planning to disperse a virus in the United States, why bother with elaborate attempts to smuggle it across the sea, when you had a plentiful supply of walking incubators ready to climb aboard a plane and unwittingly do the job for you?

  “Can Zagorsk be transmitted from person to person?”

  “That’s what it was designed for. We aren’t sure exactly how infectious it is, but many of the people infected in the Zagorsk outbreak weren’t living in the hot zone themselves. They were family members, or else doctors and nurses who treated infected patients.”

  The Connect-the-Dots Illustrations for Dante’s Inferno.

  Fox took a deep breath, and tried to overcome his rising panic and think logically. “Now, if you were starting from a small sample, you would have to reproduce it at scale and put it into weapons, right? What would you need for that job?”

  “You would want to do it at a high-containment facility—biosafety level three at least, four if you had the means. Ideally, you would want a viral reactor, but those are hard to come by, and the sale would raise all kinds of red flags.”

  “Suppose you were a terrorist cell, operating with the support of al-Qaeda. Money can be had, but you wouldn’t have the connections to get fancy equipment like that. You would need to stay under the radar.”

  She thought for a moment. “Eggs.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Ordinary chicken eggs. All you would need to do is inject them with a tiny amount of the virus, and warm them in a thermostatic oven for a couple of days. Then mix the yolks with a stabilizing agent, and voilà, you’ve got your weapon.”

  “And to put it into artillery shells?”

  “That you could do with equipment from a Coke bottling plant.”

  “Do we know anywhere in Iraq where this has been tried?”

  She leaned over to look at the map on his desk. “We know of several sites linked with Saddam’s bio program, but most of them were destroyed after the first Gulf War.” She drew a circle on the map with her finger. “They’re concentrated in the area around Baghdad, mostly south of the city. The main sites were Salman Pak, here, and al-Hakam, right here. Both of them were bombed, but some of the equipment is still unaccounted for.”

  She tapped another spot on the map, just southwest of Baghdad. “The al-Daura veterinary vaccine plant would be around here. UNSCOM suspected they might be tinkering with anthrax and viral agents there, but there was no solid proof, so it didn’t get bombed. So my bet would be either there, or…”

  “Or?”

  “Or some other site we don’t know about.”

  Fox called across the room: “MJ!”

  “Sir!”

  “This might sound like a strange request, but I need you to get in touch with the Ministry of Agriculture. See if anyone has recently been making unaccountably large orders for eggs.”

  “I’ll get right on it, Cap.”

  Fox sighed, leaned back in his chair, and rubbed his temples. Stephanie reached out a hand, and her strong fingers massaged the back of his neck. “Well, Robin, look at it this way. The Commander in Chief will be very happy with you. You’ve discovered weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. That should definitely be good for a commendation.”

  “Right,” Fox said dryly. “And if I could somehow arrange to have them postmarked before the invasion, I might have a shot at the Medal of Honor.”

  4

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  SATURDAY, MARCH 28

  The coroner’s report confirmed that Thom had died of cyanide poisoning. The news claimed the top spot on all the networks, and even the BBC gave it airtime, right after a fire in the chapel of Windsor Castle. Thom’s name had clearly been known far beyond the Oberlin College campus.

  The president of USAtheists called a press conference. “The murder of Thom DiDio is a tragedy and an outrage. Whether he was killed because of what he believed, or because of whom he loved, is irrelevant. What matters is that the world has lost a great intellect and a great humanitarian, and his blood is on the hands of religious fanatics.”

  Fox flinched at the incendiary last line. That’s not how Thom would talk. But if the man needed to lash out, Fox could scarcely blame him.

  He and Emily had worked with the FBI to help create a composite sketch, which was now being broadcast regularly on television. But so far, it had yet to yield any leads.


  “Any progress with Harpo?” Fox asked once he was back in the incident room at FBI headquarters.

  Adler shook his head. “We kept him under observation last night. Gave him a box of books, as you suggested, but he didn’t read any.”

  “What did he do?”

  “Just lay on his bed.”

  “The whole time? You never saw him perform salat?”

  “Sorry?”

  “Say his prayers facing Mecca?”

  “Well, he’s been in a cell without windows. He has no way of knowing what time it is, or which way Mecca is.”

  “John, even at Gitmo, we showed the detainees at least that much courtesy. We gave them copies of the Qur’an, a qibla sign to point the way to Mecca, and even played a recording of the adhaan at the proper times.”

  Adler shrugged. “If you want, you can take it up with the FBI; this is their turf. Now, the technician has him all hooked up, and they’re waiting for you in the interview room.”

  The room held Harpo, Kato, Malika, the technician, Fox, and the extra guard he had requested. The polygraph apparatus, the projector, and a tripod-mounted video camera were crammed into the little space that remained. There was barely room to take a deep breath.

  Fox kept a close eye on Harpo, and the readout from the polygraph. Harpo’s breathing was very steady and regular, three seconds in, five seconds out. Fox suspected that he had been trained in ways to “beat the box,” to fool a lie detector.

  “Do you speak English?”

  Fox watched the readout. It showed no variation in his blood pressure, heart rate, or galvanic skin response, either then or when Malika tried him in Russian and Chechen.

  “Are there six people in this room?” This was a control question, to show what his vital signs looked like at baseline, after he was over his initial nervousness.