by Jack Mars
A burst of murmuring erupted throughout the room.
Kimball raised his hand.
Brooklyn Bob broke out into a big smile. “That got your attention, huh? Well, here’s more bad news.” He looked away from the camera for a moment. He spoke in Arabic to someone else in the room with him. Then he turned back to the camera again.
“So I’ve got about one thirty-five p.m. in Washington, DC, does that sound right? Our brothers are going to deploy the Ebola in a small American city, beginning at five thirty this afternoon, your time. I’m not going to tell you the name of the city, but when the attack hits, I think you’ll know very quickly. The fun part will be watching you try to stop it.”
“What’s the trade?” Kimball said.
For a second, Brooklyn Bob seemed confused. “Trade?”
“Yes. What do you want?”
Bob raised his eyebrows, then smiled wider than ever. “Ohh… I get it. Like what do we want that you can give us, and we won’t launch the attack?”
“Right.”
He shook his head. “We don’t want anything. Not yet. See, you can’t stop this attack. The whole idea is just to show you what we can do. Later on, after… you know, whatever happens this afternoon… then we’ll all get back on the phone and talk about what we want from you.”
Susan felt a lump forming in her throat. This boy, for he was little more than a boy, and he acted very much like one, was a monster. How had this country created him, or anyone like him?
“I can tell you,” Bob went on, “that although it’s a small city, and it’s unimportant in a lot of ways, it’s also much beloved. People are gonna hate to see it go. That’s my little hint, though I doubt it will help you any.”
“How can you do this?” Susan said. The words were out of her mouth before she realized she was going to speak, and she instantly regretted it. Even so, she pushed on. “You’re going to kill innocent people, don’t you know that? Women, children, families…”
Brooklyn Bob’s grin lit up. His eyes suddenly came alive.
“There’s my girl!” he said. “I love you, Susan. You know why? I love you because you’re an innocent. Somehow you don’t know that your own people kill women and children over here every day. And you know what else I love? I love that the CIA or whoever it was didn’t manage to waste you last week. They got everybody else, but not you, right? Hot damn! I bet they’re still trying, though.”
He shook his head, seemingly at the wonder of it all. “The first woman President, and a fine-looking one at that. I wish I was there with you right now, because you know I just want to…”
“Hang it up!” Kimball shouted. “Hang up the goddamn telephone.”
The conference call speaker went dead, but the video feed was still running on Susan’s laptop. She stared at the screen as the young lunatic raised his hands in the air and did a deranged, pelvic-thrusting dirty dance while still sitting in his chair.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
1:45 p.m.
Galveston National Laboratory, campus of the University of Texas Medical Branch – Galveston, Texas
“Who is he?” Luke said.
Swann had loaded a photograph of a young man of Mediterranean descent on the laptop screen. Luke and Ed were back in their little classroom command center. The photo in question was a grainy, faraway paparazzi-type photo of a man in a swimsuit on the deck of a boat.
The four of them huddled around the computer as if it were giving off heat.
“His name is Omar bin Khalid al Saud,” Trudy said. “It sounds like a mouthful, but all it really means is Omar, son of Khalid, of the House of Saud. You’re looking at an old picture of him. He’s forty-two years old now, and he’s a member of the Saudi royal family. He’s one of the more than a thousand grandchildren of King Abdul Aziz, the founder of modern Saudi Arabia.”
“Pretty snazzy,” Luke said.
“Right, but we don’t want to get carried away. It’s not like being a British royal. There are over fifteen thousand people in the Saudi royal family. He’s one of them.”
“What’s his deal?” Luke said, willing to play along for the moment. “But give me the Omar elevator pitch,” he said, “not his memoirs.”
“He’s a billionaire,” Trudy said. “Forbes 400. He controls an investment fund called World Holdings, which invests in Western companies, often in the United States. No one knows the portfolio size of World Holdings, but it’s thought to be in the hundreds of billions. No one knows who the investors are, either, but it’s assumed there are a lot of bad actors in there.”
“So he’s a go-between,” Ed said. “Pouring dirty money for drug lords and weapons dealers into theme parks and soft drinks.”
“Bingo,” Trudy said. “Among many other investments, World Holdings owns major stakes in Disneyland Paris and Coca-Cola products.”
Luke made a circular motion with his hand. “Let’s keep this moving,” he said. “I’m sure Omar is a wonderful businessman. Why do we care?”
Now Swann chimed in. “He was here in Galveston four nights ago. Or at least his boat was. We have satellite imagery of his mega-yacht, the Cristina, at a deep water mooring outside of a place on the peninsula called Pelican Bay Marina.”
“Getting warmer,” Luke said.
“It gets better,” Trudy said. “We’ve obtained street camera footage of Aabha’s BMW turning right into the Pelican Bay Marina parking lot at approximately nine forty-three p.m. on the night of June seventh. We also have street footage of the car leaving the parking lot at ten twenty-two p.m.”
“What does the marina say?” Luke said.
“I called them,” Trudy said. “They say they don’t share information about guests, so they can’t confirm the name of anyone using a mooring there on any specific date. I didn’t ask for anything specific in case we wanted to subpoena and raid them at a later date. So they wouldn’t destroy anything. You understand.”
“I do,” Luke said. “I understand.” He turned to Swann. “Swann?”
Swann smiled. “Yeah. I took the liberty of glancing at their database. That’s how we stumbled upon Omar. A two-hundred-fifty-foot yacht owned by a Chilean shell company called Mundo, Inc. leased a deep-water anchorage for three days beginning on June fifth. It also leased a dock berth for its ship-to-shore tender. It set sail at ten thirty-eight p.m. on June seventh, about sixteen minutes after Aabha’s car left the marina. There was no destination given.”
“And Mundo, Inc?”
“Right,” Trudy said. “Mundo, Inc. is a subsidiary of a Bermuda-based company called Nexxxus Holdings, which itself is a wholly owned subsidiary of World Holdings. Which is Omar’s company.”
“So to sum it up for you,” Swann said, “a Saudi billionaire was here in Galveston on the same night the Ebola virus was stolen. Or at the very least, his yacht was here. The woman who stole the virus stopped at the same marina where the yacht was moored soon after she left the lab. And minutes after she left the marina, the yacht also left. Sounds like we found our man.”
“Where is the yacht now?” Luke said.
“We tracked its path via satellite data. It headed east from here and arrived in Port of Tampa, Florida, in the late afternoon of June eighth. It remained there several hours, where it refueled and took on food and other catering supplies. About one a.m. in the early morning of June ninth, it left Port of Tampa and motored south. About nine p.m. that night, it arrived outside the Cuban resort city of Varadero. It’s still there, in a deep-water anchorage a mile out at sea.”
“Is he there?”
“We can’t tell,” Swann said. “What we can tell is that the yacht tender is running back and forth to shore pretty continuously, bringing a steady supply of young women out to the boat.”
Luke nodded. “Okay, we’ll assume he’s there. I imagine a man like that would frown on his yacht crew partying without him.”
“Omar is legendary for his partying,” Trudy said. “And his fondness for the ladies, especially
ladies of the evening.”
“What are the chances he still has the virus on the boat with him?” Luke said.
Trudy shrugged. “Hard to say. We’d have to know the chances he ever had the virus with him in the first place. The whole thing could be a coincidence.”
“It doesn’t look like a coincidence to me,” Ed Newsam said.
“There are no such things as coincidences,” Swann said.
“Okay,” Trudy said. “If he did have the vial on board, my bet is he offloaded it in Tampa. Why would he keep it with him on a boat? He’s basically on a slow cruise to nowhere. Meanwhile, Tampa is a major port city, and a commercial shipping hub. There are more than a dozen large trucking companies based in Tampa, and dozens of smaller ones. It’s also a commercial travel hub, with flights to everywhere on Earth, and access to two major interstate highways. Drop the virus off in Tampa, and once again, it could go anywhere very quickly.”
Luke’s wheels were spinning. “But even if he did drop it off, in all likelihood, Omar will know where it was headed.”
Trudy nodded. “Yes, that’s probably true.”
“I’ll need a helicopter,” Luke said. “And a place to fly it from. Key West is probably best. It’s the closest thing we have to Cuba. Swann, what’s the fight time between here and Key West?”
Swann typed a few words on the keyboard in front of him. “They say it’s an hour and forty-three minutes, but with our plane, if we gun it I’d bet we can cut fifteen or twenty minutes from that.”
“Okay,” Luke said. “We’ll call it ninety minutes. I’m also going to need two special ops drop teams, four men on each team. Seasoned guys, no nonsense. Delta if there’s any immediately available, SEALs if not. There are probably some SEALs hanging around Key West. I also need a door gunner, and a couple of crack pilots. How soon can we pull all that together?”
“Your door gunner is standing right here,” Ed said.
Luke gestured in the air with his hand. “Of course. Good. One less thing to track down. What about the rest of it?”
Trudy frowned. “I don’t know. A few hours, I suppose. Maybe sooner.”
“All right, make it three hours, and you’ve got a deal,” Luke said. “We can get rolling right now, and we’ll meet the rest of our people at the Naval Air Station in Key West.”
“Luke, what are you planning?”
He smiled. “I’m going to pay Omar a little visit. I might even invite him back here to the United States for a little while, with a black bag over his head and zip ties on his wrists.”
She shook her head. “Omar is a Saudi national, and he’s currently in Cuban territorial waters.”
“I’m aware of that.”
“To extract him, you would have to violate Cuban airspace. You’re not going to do that, are you?”
“No,” Luke said. “I’m not going to violate Cuban airspace. I’m just going to borrow it. I’ll give it right back to them as soon as I’m done.”
Just then, Luke’s cell phone began to ring. He glanced at the number. It was from the 202 area code, Washington, DC. He looked around at his team.
“Guess who,” he said.
He pressed the green button. “Stone.”
A deep male voice came on the line. “Please hold for the President of the United States.”
He held. In a moment, she came on the line. He listened to her for a few minutes. He watched as Trudy began making calls. When the President was done speaking, he thanked her for her confidence in him. He hung up the phone.
He remembered how, when they first came to Galveston, Trudy was uncharacteristically quiet. She felt shaken because they were so far behind the ball. And Luke felt that if they could just focus their energies and begin to move in a direction, if they could just find out where Aabha went, they would be okay. He didn’t feel that way anymore. The project was barely underway, and they were already too late.
Trudy was talking into her phone. She had her official voice on, and was obviously trying to move chess pieces around despite reluctance on the other end of the line.
“Trudy,” he said. She was immersed in the conversation.
“Trudy!”
She stared at him.
“We don’t have three hours. Everything’s been moved up. We need those special ops teams, and the chopper, on the pad at Key West two hours from now.”
“Bad news?” she said.
He nodded. “Very bad.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
2:15 p.m.
The Skies over the Gulf of Mexico
The dark blue Secret Service Learjet zoomed over vast blue water.
Once again, Luke and his team used the front four passenger seats as their meeting area. They stowed their luggage, and their gear, in the seats at the back. The narrow tube of the plane was a Babel of voices, as four conversations went on at once.
“I need chatter,” Swann said into his phone. “I don’t care. It’s never completely dead. Give me anything. The slightest clue.”
“Six hours is too long,” Trudy said into her phone. “We don’t have that kind of time. Five thirty this afternoon is the drop dead date. Yes, five hundred full personal protection suits, and one hundred infrared thermometers per airplane. Yes, full means full. Suits, masks, boots, gloves, goggles, air-purifying respirators. Yes, all of it airborne, and the planes flying with overlapping radiuses. Yes, I know it’s a tall order. Why do you think I called you?”
“Seventy-Fifth Rangers are cool man, but we need to hit hard,” Ed Newsam said. “I don’t know if they’re up for what we’re going to do. Hard, you hear me? That’s how we roll. They have combat experience? No? I don’t know, man.”
Luke was on a conference call to the New White House in Washington, DC. He plugged his right ear with one finger to drown out the voices of his team, and pressed the satellite phone to his left ear. The plane was moving fast, and the phone kept dropping the call.
It sounded like chaos up at Susan Hopkins’s house. Supposedly, he was giving them a report, but there was so much background noise on her end Luke wanted to scream at them. Shut up! For the love of God, shut up already.
“My intel officer is about as good as they come in this business,” he said to the unseen gathering. “She’s come up with a number of different scenarios as to how they could deliver the virus.” He glanced at the notes Trudy had given him. “Assuming it’s aerosolized, they could use old-fashioned crop-duster airplanes. They could employ helicopters and small trucks that municipalities use to spray for mosquito infestations, especially in southern states.”
A burst of static came over the line. Luke held the phone away from his face. When he came back, he listened.
“What city do you suspect?” Susan said. “Brooklyn Bob said it was a beloved city, and it was too bad to see it go.”
Luke didn’t want to get into the wisdom of the President talking to Brooklyn Bob on the phone. If he had been there, he wouldn’t have allowed it. He would have thrown his body on top of the telephone.
“I don’t know,” Luke said. “Pick your favorite small southern city. St. Augustine, Sarasota, Key West, Miami Beach, Savannah, or Charleston. Maybe Richmond, Virginia. Myrtle Beach. Wilmington, North Carolina. Norfolk? Who knows? The problem is mosquitoes could have nothing to do with it. They never said it was a southern city, only that it was small and beloved. How about Portland, Maine? Or Boise, Idaho, or Boulder, Colorado? Burlington, Vermont. There are so many beloved little cities in this great nation of ours…”
He shook his head and smiled at the thought of well-to-do middle-aged tourists wearing khaki pants and LL Bean boots and lime green pullovers made of recycled plastic soda bottles. White kids with dreadlocks riding mountain bikes to art school. Twenty-something metrosexuals sampling craft beers. It was not Luke Stone’s life, but it was good. These were good things. People were safe, they had wide freedom to choose lifestyles… let’s keep them that way.
“Another problem,” he said, “is the terro
rists could be lying and they could attack a major city instead. Yet another problem is they could deliver the virus through air conditioning and heating systems, through letter bombs, or through people carrying hand-held aerosol sprayers into crowded public places. They could drop non-incendiary bombs that scatter the aerosol on impact. They could do the same with missiles. Our old friend Saddam Hussein used to employ those techniques on his own people on a regular basis.”
Luke stopped. The sheer litany of possibilities was demoralizing, even to him. “They could use a combination of any group of these techniques, all of the techniques, or none of them. Instead of aerosols, they could use a bodily fluid–based approach and infect prostitutes who pass the disease to their johns. Ten urban prostitutes could easily infect two hundred men in one night, not even through unprotected sex, just through physical proximity. Before the symptoms became apparent, the johns could spread out across a city or region, infecting their families or anyone else they came in contact with. By the next morning, thousands of people could be exposed. Or they could infiltrate a hospital staff somewhere, and they could contaminate the blood supply. They infiltrated a high-security BSL-4 lab. Compared to that, a city hospital is easy.”
He paused, then went on.
“They could bypass the hospitals altogether and just give Ebola-contaminated needles to heroin users. In a small city, overnight you could have two hundred Ebola bombs walking around downtown, infecting other people. They’d be coughing and sick, but at first they wouldn’t be bleeding. Hardly anyone would notice because street people are always sick.”
He sighed heavily. “Do you understand what I’m saying? There is no end to the potential attack methods. We can safely assume that our opponents are creative, which means we can assume they will try an attack that we won’t think of.”
A voice came on. He didn’t recognize it. It wasn’t Susan. It wasn’t Monk. Were they even still in the room?
“What do you suggest then?”
“Mitigation,” Luke said without hesitating. “If the attack is going to happen, then we can’t stop it. Be ready with quarantines, road closures, bus station, railway, and airport closures. Curfews, checkpoints, temporary martial law. Pick thirty or fifty small cities, as many as possible, and contact mayors, city managers, police departments, fire departments, hospitals. Put them on alert for the slightest suspicious activity or illness presentations that are out of the ordinary. Create a command center at the Pentagon or at FEMA to coordinate all activity. They have resources, and we need things to happen fast. Put hazmat suits in the sky, along with infrared thermometers, ready to be delivered to first responders anywhere within an hour. We’ve taken the liberty of beginning this process, but it has to go bigger than we can do. Also, put National Guard units on two-hour alert across the country. Get friendly governors to start mobilizing them now.”
