The Faithful Spy

by Alex Berenson

  Tanzania had scores of plague cases every year, and its government worked hard to prevent outbreaks. Doctors who discovered a potential case were required to take blood samples to be tested at Muhimbili’s infectious disease lab, the most sophisticated in East Africa. There the samples came under the care of a quiet Pakistani technician who had moved to Tanzania to get a job at Muhimbili—on the orders of the man who called himself Omar Khadri. Khadri figured that a Pakistani Muslim would have an easier time getting hired in Tanzania than at the Centers for Disease Control. He was right.

  Thus the plague had found its way to Tarik, who at the tender age of twenty-three was the most sophisticated scientist ever to work for al Qaeda. Inshallah. God’s will. And so Tarik could not give his full attention to his studies at McGill.

  THE GRAY HOUSE was silent as Tarik unlocked the front door and stepped inside. “Fatima?” he called out. “Fatima?”

  No answer. She should have been home by now, cooking dinner. Acid rose in his stomach. His wife had been late twice in the last week. Her respect for him seemed to be vanishing by the day.

  Tarik had met Fatima in Paris during the spring of his final year at the university. She was the oldest daughter of an imam in Brussels, a petite eighteen-year-old whose hijab—the head scarf worn by pious Muslim girls—framed her big brown eyes. Tarik was smitten instantly. He was ecstatic when he found she felt the same about him, despite his pockmarked skin and thick glasses. They married four months later, just before he moved to Canada. She followed the next year. For a few months she seemed like the perfect wife, loving and supportive. She didn’t question the long hours he worked at McGill or spent in the basement. But then she began complaining that Tarik wouldn’t let her work. She was bored staying home all day, she said. In the spring, she had found a job as a secretary for a law firm downtown. He had tried to forbid her from taking it, but she’d just laughed.

  “Then divorce me,” she’d said. She knew he would never do that. She was the only woman he had ever been with. He was sometimes frightened by how much he wanted her. But her job had increased the distance between them. She hardly listened to him anymore. He couldn’t understand this other side to her. She seemed to have forgotten her place since she’d come to Canada. But maybe she had never cared for him at all. Maybe she had seen him as just a chance to escape her father.

  A month before, he had hit her for the first time, on a night when he tried to make love to her and she turned away. He had raised his fist, not intending to touch her. Then she smiled. She was mocking him, he thought. Mocking him for his weakness, for his skinny arms and caved-in chest, just like the kids in Saint-Denis had done. He might be weak, but he was still a man. She needed to remember that. He swung his fist into her belly. She cried out, just once, and he wanted to comfort her and tell her he was sorry. But he held his tongue.

  When he reached for her later that night, she gave herself to him without complaint. In fact she never mentioned what he had done. For a few days Tarik thought she had learned her lesson. But in the last couple of weeks she’d turned secretive. He’d overheard her whispering on the phone in the kitchen. When she saw him listening she hung up and pretended she hadn’t been talking at all. He raised his fist at her again, but she just shook her head, and he dropped his hand and turned away in humiliation.

  TARIK TRIED TO put Fatima out of his mind. He would talk to her when she came home. In the meantime he had to work. He unlocked the door to the basement, revealing a narrow enclosed staircase that led to another locked door. Tarik knew the twin locks might look suspicious, but he couldn’t take the chance of allowing anyone down here. Besides the plague, he had anthrax and tularemia in his refrigerators downstairs, all classified by the CDC as grade A pathogens, all delivered from Muhimbili.

  To preserve his privacy, Tarik kept his distance from the other McGill graduate students, accepting their invitations to socialize only when his absence would be conspicuous. He told classmates that his wife was a devout Muslim who didn’t go out, and he told Fatima that the other students were prejudiced and never invited him. He couldn’t stop her from meeting the neighbors, but he discouraged her from bringing anyone to the house, one reason she insisted on working. Maybe that had been a mistake; maybe he should have let her have more friends.

  Tarik put his key in the padlock at the base of the stairs. He needed to stop thinking about Fatima. Now. If he allowed himself to be distracted down here he might make a mistake, and if he made a mistake he could easily die. He breathed deeply, closed his eyes, and cleared Fatima from his mind.

  When he was sure he was ready, he opened the second door and stepped inside.

  HE HAD SPENT most of the last two years just setting up the lab. The equipment was expensive, and installing it without attracting attention was difficult, especially since he had to work alone. But this summer, just in time for the arrival of Y. pestis, he had finally gotten the space into order.

  He had divided the basement into two working areas. Most of the room was open, its floor and walls covered with double layers of clear, heavy plastic sheeting to keep out dirt and grime. Lab benches lined the walls, stacked with his precious equipment: a 1,000-power microscope, a gas spectrometer, fermenters to grow bacteria in solution. A freezer and refrigerator. Mouse cages and autoclaves and Bunsen burners and trays of slides and pipettes. In one corner he had installed a sealed safety cabinet connected through a filter into the house’s air vents. He kept goggles, gloves, gowns, and a portable respirator in a cabinet by the door, next to a small shower. Fluorescent lights overhead gave the room a bright institutional shine.

  The space was essentially a crude equivalent of a Biosafety Level 2 lab, like the one at McGill and every university in the world. BSL-2 labs handle germs and viruses that are moderately dangerous and infectious, pathogens that might give their victims a bad fever but are unlikely to kill anyone. Ironically, plague can sometimes be handled in BSL-2 labs, because Y. pestis is not a hardy germ. It grows slowly and is easily destroyed by sunlight, rain, even wind. Only in the human body does plague turn monstrous.

  But Tarik needed more than a BSL-2 lab for his experiments. He wasn’t just growing plague and anthrax; he wanted to aerosolize them, turn them into airborne particles that could be easily inhaled. For that he should have been working in a Biosafety Level 3 lab or, even better, a secure BSL-4 lab like the one at the Centers for Disease Control.

  The standards for BSL-4 labs run hundreds of pages. They must have their own air supply, double air locks that cannot be opened simultaneously, and filters to scrub the air they exhaust. Scientists must never wear their lab clothes outside the lab. They must always shower before leaving, and the shower water itself must be chemically treated. Germs can be moved only after being put inside a double set of unbreakable containers. And for really tricky projects, scientists must work in a “suit area,” a special room where they wear a full body suit with its own oxygen supply, so they will never accidentally breathe the air around them.

  Tarik understood the standards. He had seen photographs of victims of smallpox and plague, faces twisted in agony, bodies bloated in death. He respected the power of the vials in his refrigerator. And he would have preferred to run his experiments at the CDC.

  But that institution might have frowned on his work. So Tarik built his own suit area. He sealed a five-foot corner of the basement in floor-to-ceiling Plexiglas, then covered the Plexiglas with thick plastic sheeting, creating a plastic bubble whose air could not circulate into the rest of the room except through an intake and exhaust system protected by HEPA filters.

  Inside the bubble Tarik needed his own sealed air supply. Because Canada, like other industrialized countries, restricts the sale of full-body positive pressure suits, Tarik couldn’t order one. Instead he used a respirator and oxygen tanks like those worn by scuba divers. To avoid contaminating the open part of the basement, he installed a Plexiglas passage off the door to the bubble, creating a crude airlock. He always ch
anged into and out of his respirator in the airlock. Inside the bubble he had installed a stand-alone safety cabinet that held a mouse cage and a nebulizer, a machine that blew air through liquids to produce aerosol sprays. On the bubble’s plastic floor he had placed a half-size refrigerator and a cage big enough for a cat or a small dog. He hadn’t used the cage yet, but he expected to change that soon.

  The space wasn’t ideal. Tarik could work inside it for only short stretches, until his tanks ran out of oxygen. And his respirator wasn’t as reliable as a genuine BSL-4 pressure suit. Still, the bubble had worked so far. He hadn’t gotten sick, and neither had the mice in the open half of the basement, a crude but effective way to measure exposure. Too bad he couldn’t show his professors—they’d be impressed.

  TARIK FLICKED ON the overhead lights and checked to be sure the benches and beakers and agar dishes were exactly as he had left them. Down here the street and the world seemed far away. Only the faint rustling of his mice intruded on the silence. He counted them, making sure none had gone missing.

  He stripped naked and folded his clothes on a chair. Normally he worked first with less dangerous germs before entering the bubble. But tonight he wanted to be close to his “specials,” Y. pestis and Bacillus anthracis—anthrax. He opened the first door of the bubble—the door to the airlock—and stepped inside. He pulled on the shirt, underwear, and sweatpants that he used in the bubble, then slipped a white smock over his clothes. He pulled the door shut and smoothed over the plastic sheeting on the door, sealing off the bubble from the rest of the basement. He picked up his respirator, hooked up his oxygen tank, and pulled the mask over his face. He breathed deeply, making sure the oxygen was flowing smoothly, then cut back on the flow to preserve the tank. Then a cap, booties, and gloves.

  Finally he opened the inside door of the airlock and stepped into his bubble.

  In here he could have been underwater, or on the moon. Only his breathing broke the perfect silence. He slid noiselessly to the safety cabinet. A week earlier he had grown Y. pestis for the first time, placing the bacteria in petri dishes of blood agar at 28 degrees Celsius, about 82 degrees Fahrenheit. Two days later, white colonies of bacteria speckled the red agar, their edges pebbly and uneven. They looked like tiny fried eggs, the telltale shape of Y. pestis. They were ugly, Tarik admitted to himself, small and ugly. But anyone who didn’t respect them would be surprised. And he controlled their power. The thought gave him great pleasure.

  AFTER GROWING THE plague, Tarik injected it into six mice. Only one survived more than two days. Now it, too, lay on its side in the safety cabinet. Tarik put the mouse’s carcass in a glass container, then filled the container with hydrochloric acid to destroy the remains. At McGill he would have autopsied the animal to see how exactly it had died, but in here that wasn’t important. He simply wanted to prove to himself that he could grow a good, virulent strain of Y. pestis. And he had done just that.

  But Tarik knew he had taken only a small step toward his ultimate goal. Infecting people with pneumonic plague was much harder than sticking a needle in a mouse. He needed to figure out a way to spray the germ in a fine mist that could be inhaled and caught in the lungs. He would have to test different solutions, different plague concentrations, chemicals that might allow the mist to disperse more easily without killing the bacteria inside it.

  That challenge had perplexed scientists in labs much more sophisticated than this basement. Aum Shinrikyo, an apocalyptic Japanese cult, had spent millions of dollars in the 1990s trying to develop biological weapons, and had even sprayed Tokyo with botulism and anthrax. But Aum had never managed to infect anyone. Its only successful attack had come with nerve gas, which was far easier to make than biological weapons.

  Furthermore, military scientists weren’t exactly publishing reports about their experiments with plague. Tarik would have to make his own mistakes. He wished he could talk to someone about the technical difficulties. But his only confidant was Omar Khadri. Khadri was a typical nonscientist. He seemed to think that unleashing an epidemic should be as easy as growing germs in a beaker and then tossing them on subway tracks. He had been bitterly disappointed when Tarik had explained otherwise.

  “You received my present?” Khadri had asked in their last conversation, a few days after the plague arrived. Tarik was at a pay phone at a gas station in Longueuil, on the other side of the Saint Lawrence River, miles from his house.

  “Yes. Thank you, Uncle.” They always spoke French and never used names or specifics.

  “So how long will it be?”

  “I can’t say, Uncle.”

  “Your best guess then. A month? A few months?”

  “For the purpose you require, a few months at the earliest.”

  “You know I’m anxious to see your work.”

  Tarik shifted anxiously from foot to foot. He hated to disappoint Khadri. “I beg your forgiveness. But this job cannot be rushed.”

  “Will you need more money?”

  “Yes.”

  “How much?”

  “The same as January.” That was $200,000. Tarik had spent carefully, but the equipment he needed was unavoidably expensive.

  “The same?” Khadri laughed, but the sound had an edge. “You think your uncle is so rich?”

  Tarik said nothing.

  “I’ll make the arrangements,” Khadri finally said. “And how is your wife?”

  “Uncle, I don’t know what to do.”

  “Don’t let her become a distraction, my nephew.”

  How easy for you to say, Tarik thought. “Will you visit soon? I’d like to see you.”

  “I wish I could,” Khadri said. “But I’m very busy these days. You’re sure you don’t have any competitors?”

  “I’ve been very careful.”

  “Well. Nephew. In this I am in your hands.” Khadri sighed, as if he found that admission particularly painful. “Keep up your work. You know the whole family has great hopes for you. We’ll speak again soon.”

  “I won’t disappoint you, Uncle.”

  Click.

  TARIK WISHED KHADRI could see the basement now. He was certain his “uncle” would be impressed. Two days before, Tarik had moved colonies of Y. pestis from the agar dishes into beakers of brain-heart infusion broth. Now Tarik saw that the transfer had been successful. The broth inside the vials remained clear, but white rings of bacteria lined their glass walls—the sure sign of a plague colony. Unlike most germs, Y. pestis did not disperse readily in solution, preferring to remain clumped.

  Tarik poured the broth into a glass mixing dish, carefully scraping the colonies of Y. pestis off the walls of the beakers. Using a wire, he gently mixed the colonies until the bacteria were scattered through the broth. Now he would test aerosolizing the bacteria. He connected a simple rubber hose to a small electric pump. He dropped the free end of the hose into the dish and turned on the pump. A moment later bubbles began gurgling out of the broth, as if it were a primordial stew about to boil over.

  This was the most basic way to aerosolize bacteria, Tarik knew. But he wanted to see whether Y. pestis could survive being moved between the beakers and the dish, and whether this basic aerosol could cause infection. In the scientific vernacular, this was a proof-of-concept experiment. And so Tarik had put six more mice in a cage beside the mixing dish. They crawled calmly around their metal pen, oblivious to their fate.

  Tarik worked for another half hour inside the bubble, transferring plague colonies between agar dishes and beakers of broth. He had more experiments planned, and he would need much more Y. pestis. He took careful notes, recording the temperature and humidity in the cage, the number of bubbles rising from the dish every second. Simple stuff, to be sure. But most laypeople didn’t understand that a thousand hours of tedium in the lab paved the way for every breakthrough. One step at a time, and he would get where he needed to be.

  9

  THE DOORMAN TIPPED his cap as Exley walked into the Jefferson Hotel, her low heels
clacking on the lobby’s marble floor, the hotel’s air conditioning a relief from the muggy summer night.

  “Good evening, Ms. Exley.”

  “How are you, Rafael?”

  “Never better, ma’am.”

  She turned right, into the lounge, a quiet red-walled room whose dark wood tables seemed as if they should be crowded with politicians and lobbyists. Instead the space was mostly empty. The Jefferson had never matched the glamour of the Hay-Adams, and with the arrival of the Ritz-Carlton and other five-star hotels it had fallen permanently into second-tier status, a dowager whose rooms filled after the rest sold out.

  But Exley liked the hotel’s faded elegance, the bouquet of flowers in the lobby, the way the doormen knew her. Plus, the Jefferson was on Fifteenth Street, a short walk from her apartment. After a couple of drinks she could wobble home. Tonight she’d stopped in for a special treat, a meeting of the S.L. Club, five professional women who saw each other for drinks every few weeks. One was a reporter for the Post, another a lawyer at Williams & Connolly. They were all divorced or never married, all middle-aged or older. Exley hated to define herself as middle-aged. Ugh. But she was, by any reasonable standard. Soon enough she’d be closing in on menopause. Okay, maybe not that soon, but still.

  The S.L. Club had no bylaws, no fees, and no real purpose, aside from giving its five members a chance to vent about work and family and sneak a couple of cigarettes that their kids didn’t need to see. Exley had met Lynette, its informal leader, at an interminable Fourth of July party three years before.