Levels of Power

by Mike Gilmore

London, England

  Tuesday, December 1, 2015

  8:15 a.m.

  Randy was at the table in the hotel restaurant, where breakfast was being served. BookReader sat across from each other at another table, keeping an eye on all the people moving in the restaurant. Marion Bellwood chose that moment to come in and took the chair across from Randy. He gave his two men a little head nod to acknowledge their presence. He placed his hand carefully against the side of the coffee pitcher in the center of the table. Satisfied with the results of his test, he flipped the coffee cup at his place upright and poured a full cup. After adding two packets of sweetener, he used his spoon in a slow swirling motion to blend the powdered crystals into the brew.

  Randy watched the entire process without a word. Some people needed their first sip of morning coffee without any conversation.

  Marion took his first sip and apparently was happy with the results. He took another drink and then traded the cup for the menu lying on the table. “What do you recommend here?” This must be your third or fourth morning at this hotel.”

  Randy had already finished his breakfast. “Eggs and tomatoes. The British are great gardeners, and their vegetables are wonderful. I’m not sure about you, but I’ve found eggs to be the same in every country I’ve visited.”

  Marion face changed a little to show he appreciated Randy’s comment and suggestion. When the waiter came to their table a few minutes later, Marion ordered scrambles eggs and sliced tomatoes. He requested a side of wheat toast with light butter.

  When they were alone with the exception of BookReader, he brought up the subject of the Senate. “Do you need to fly back to Washington and help with breaking this filibuster?”

  Randy was quiet as he formulated his response. “No. Not yet at least.” He waited a few moments. “I’m fully against the bill. The filibuster gives me time to see how this event in London will play out. Besides, even if the Senate insisted I return, a bill on taxes just does not rank up there with the brother of the man who tried to kill me three times. Two bullets and a knife.” Randy sipped his coffee. “No. Right now I’m more interested in how we’re going to catch these guys and stop whatever they have planned before it’s too late.”

  Bellwood set his empty coffee cup down. He picked up the pitcher and poured a refill. “What’s this ‘we’ stuff? You’re no field agent, and I’m not letting you get hurt playing some sort of Rambo.”

  Randy looked at his best friend. “What makes you think I’m willing to sit on the sidelines and just let something happen?”

  Marion pointed his right index finger at Randy. He kept his voice low, but there was no mistaking the intensity. “Listen, MP. We are not playing games over here. The British are the best at covert affairs, and their anti-terrorist training is the best in the world. You were in the meeting on Sunday and heard DC Shepard lay out their program to catch these people. We’ve got to rely on their procedures and wait for them to sniff these guys out.”

  Randy laughed quietly, pointing his right forefinger at the two security men at the next table. “You’re willing to quietly sit by and wait until the British authorities find these guys?” He did not wait for Marion’s answer. Instead, he came back with another question.

  “Tell me, old friend. How many men did you bring with you from Washington or pull in from other stations once you knew who we were chasing?”

  Bellwood stirred sweetener into his second cup of coffee. He kept his voice low. “Let’s just say the American Embassy here in London has about fifteen more cultural attachés than their normal complement.”

  Marion’s breakfast arrived, and he dug into the food. Randy let his friend eat in silence; Marion finished his food in less than ten minutes. “You’re right. The tomatoes have real flavor to them. I spent most of my foreign service time in Germany first and later the Middle East. Most of my travel in this part of the world was simply catching connecting flights at Heathrow.”

  He decided on one more cup of coffee. “All right. You do not want to sit on the sidelines. I can understand that. What do you suggest? You are the anti-terrorist expert at this table.”

  Randy drained his coffee cup and used his napkin one last time before laying it on the table. He picked up the check, glanced at the amount, and removed his credit card from his wallet.

  “I’m not going to tell you what to do with BookReader over there or their brothers, but I’m going back to Scotland Yard and go over all the evidence they collected from the back pack again.”

  Marion looked at his two men. He thought about asking for some clarification of the names Randy was calling them but decided it was not worth the time. “What do you think you can find that Scotland Yard’s experts might have missed?

  Randy shook his head. “I don’t know, but it beats sitting around here with my two bodyguards, waiting for something to happen. I’d rather be proactive.”

  Chapter 25

  London, England

  Tuesday, December 1, 2015

  9:45 a.m.

  Hossein Rahim Bonab was in the room on the second floor he used for planning their operation looking at a large paper map of London. Shir Mohammad’s near-miss capture by the American was forcing Hossein to change their timetable for the attack.

  Originally, they had planned to start their attack on the London water supply system this Friday. The plan had called for them to have the entire weekend to complete their work. They would have introduced the fine white powder infested with the cryptosporidium oocysts into the water system after the drinkable water had passed through the treatment facility. The number of water-treatment technicians they would have to dispense with would be at the lowest levels from late evening on Friday until the first shift arrived on Monday morning. By that time, his team would have mixed all the powder into the water, with enough time for the poison to move through the entire water supply system. Now he had to devise a new plan. They could not take the risk of waiting any longer and the British authorities finding them.

  The street map was open on top of a four-by-eight sheet of plywood supported by the wooden crates used to ship rugs. In addition to the city streets and the larger thoroughfares accommodating cars and trucks, he had marked the location of the pipeline for the Thames Water Ring Main.

  London’s water supply infrastructure had developed over hundreds of years. For much of London’s history, private companies provided water taken from the River Thames and the River Lea without regulations with regard to purity. A crisis occurred in the middle of the nineteenth century, with outbreaks of cholera from the polluted Tideway. Over many years, nearly a dozen private water companies were organized; some merged with others or went out of business.

  Enacted in 1852, the Metropolis Water Act made provisions for securing the supply of pure and wholesome water to the metropolis. It became compulsory for all water companies to filter their product for purity. In addition, the authorities created the Metropolitan Commission of Sewers and organized a new program to properly handle wastewater and prevent it from contaminating the source of the drinking water used throughout the great city.

  At the beginning of the twentieth century, the private water companies were nationalized by the government under a new program. The Metropolis Water Act of 1902 created the Metropolitan Water Board. The sixty-seven-member board voted to acquire nine different companies supplying water to London at the time. The board added new water-treatment facilities to increase the supply to meet the growing demand by the population. The Metropolitan Water Board, with several other local water boards, created the Thames Water Authority. Currently water was supply by four companies. Thames Water provided 76 percent of all demand. Affinity Water, Essex and Suffolk Water, and Sutton and East Surrey Water supplied the final 24 percent.

  The single largest infrastructure project in recent years was the creation of the Thames Water Ring Main, the backbone of London’s water supply. Eight
kilometers of mostly concrete pipe with a diameter of one hundred inches transferred potable water from water-treatment plants in the Thames and River Lee catchments for distribution within London.

  Thames Water Authority constructed the initial ring between 1988 and 1993. Soon after, two other extensions were completed, with additional plans for further extensions through 2025. The average daily flow was approximately 0.3 gigalitres (0.3 x 109 liters), which represented about 7 percent of the daily demand for London.

  From the southwest end of the system, the northern portion of the pipeline connected water-treatment facilities at Kempton, Mogden, Kew, Barnes, Holland Park, and Barrow Hill. The Southern line ran east through Walton, Hampton, Surbiton, Hogsmill, Raynes Park, Merton, Streatham, Brixton, and Battersea, connecting with the northern line at Barrow Hill. The two extensions connected the huge water reservoir at Honor Oak to the Water Ring Main at Brixton, and the Stoke Newington facility connected at New River Head and tied into the Main Ring at Barrow Hill. The Water Ring Main ran between 33 and 213 feet below ground level and 33 feet to 98 feet below sea level.

  Hossein traced the Thames Water Ring Main along its path on the map with his index finger. Somewhere at one of the storage or pumping stations was where they needed to dispatch the powder. The insertion location had to be after the treatment phase of the system. There were a number of treatment locations, and the water needed to remain in the main only long enough to get into the local city water lines without passing through another treatment facility. While the enhanced concentration of the cryptosporidium oocysts possessed thick protective walls and could live a long time outside of the host, passing through a water-treatment facility would degrade the pathogens or kill them off completely.

  The water-treatment plants processed water through several stages before moving into the local water lines servicing the consumers. The water arrived from underground wells, rivers, or lakes into a storage tank. The next stage was a series of filters to remove contaminants. Water from rivers and lakes might contain any number of contaminates, including the remains of dead animals, animal excrement, leaves, and sediments. The water passed first through a set of filters designed to remove large objects from the water. Subsequent filters continue to remove smaller and smaller items.

  The next set of filters normally included a sand filter, a duplication of nature’s own method for purifying water. As surface water soaks down deep into the ground, passing through layers of sand, it becomes clean once again. The sand filters acted in the same manner.

  Diatomaceous earth filters used at the next stage were similar to swimming pools filters. The final particle removal procedure was achieved through reverse osmosis water filters, where the water passed through a series of membranes.

  The final water purification stage was the chemical treatment process. A specific mixture of chlorine and fluoride provided final purification of all possible living organisms, like cryptosporidium oocysts and other pathogens, which might have somehow survived the numerous earlier stages of filtration.

  Hossein grew frustrated in his efforts to find a new plan that would work within their reduced allowed time. “Damn,” he muttered. Had he the time, he would have killed Shir Mohammad and found a replacement, but he was short on time and needed the damn fool’s help.

  He needed identify a location on the Thames Water Ring Main close to where they now were. They could not spend too much time in traffic with their cargo. He looked at the closest location to the pipeline. Battersea or Brixton were the closest, but they were pumping stations; the water would be under terrific pressure and more difficult to access.

  He moved his finger to the western stations but then stopped and pulled it back to Honor Oak. He remembered there was something special about that location. He reached to the far corner of the plywood table and picked up the three-ring binder where he stored all the collected information about the London water infrastructure. The binder was almost three inches thick, filled with the results of his research. He quickly opened the cover and flipped through the pages and brochures. He located the section on the city of Honor Oak and the information on the underground storage reservoir.

  The small community covered two boroughs: London Borough of Lewisham and London Borough of Southwark. The distance from their Newby location was almost five miles in a straight line but probably closer to seven or eight once they crossed the River Thames and followed the city streets.

  He wanted to learn all about Honor Oak and the underground water reservoir. The city had originated hundreds of years before. On May 1, 1602, Elizabeth I had picnicked with Sir Richard Bulkeley of Beaumaris by an oak tree at the summit of a hill in the Lewisham area. Shortly thereafter, the local citizens referred to the famous tree as the Oak of Honor, and the city name grew from there.

  In 1935, King George commemorated his Silver Jubilee at the summit, and later it was used by Queen Elizabeth II for her Silver and Golden Jubilees. During World War I, a gun emplacement was erected on the hill to protect the residence from zeppelin raids, added more history to the site.

  Hossein felt his heartbeat quicken slightly as he came to the part that had stuck in his memory. In 1896, the open space within the community was due to become part of a golf course, but the local people forced the cancellation of the idea. The Metropolitan Borough of Camberwell purchased the land, and the open space became a public area in 1905. The authorities built a nine-hole golf course on top of the Honor Oak Reservoir between 1901 and 1909 and called it the Aquarias Golf Club. At the time it was completed, the reservoir was the largest brick underground reservoir in the world and remains one of the largest in Europe even today. The reservoir forms part of the southern extension of the Thames Water Ring Main.

  Hossein flipped back to the information on the Thames Water Ring Main. He found the sheets devoted exclusively to the cavernous water reservoir. Now more than one hundred years old, the facility had recently undergone an upgrade. Another tidbit of information informed him that the water main lining was constructed with over nineteen million bricks. The storage capacity was equivalent to the daily supply for 800,000 people.

  Hossein sat back on the three-legged wooden stood and thought about the information. That location could poison over three-quarters of a million people. The nuclear bombs dropped by the United States on Japan during the final days of World War II killed between 150,000 and 246,000 people. His project could effectively poison nearly four times that many; a great many would subsequently die from the effects of the cryptosporidium.

  He walked over to the laptop computer on the old wooden desk and entered “Honor Oak Reservoir” into the search engine. There were several different articles about the historic site, but the picture of the main building was what drew his attention. It was located in the middle of several golf course fairways. The building, constructed of red brick, was a basic rectangle. On the long sides of the building, a rounded bump out broke the smooth lines of the structure. A marble pilaster at every corner of the building provided a structural accent. The roof was slate shingles, finished with a cupola at the top.

  The amazing part was the location. The field the building lay in was completely open on all sides for many yards. Golfers would play past the building. He noticed small square concrete boxes at various locations on the grounds. They all ran in straight lines from the building on all four sides and were spaced twenty to forty yards apart. The open field was nearly three hundred yards long by about one hundred seventy-five yards wide.

  He looked at the outer perimeter of the property. It was completely open and accessible by a number of city streets. There would be no security guards to deal with. If they arrived after sunset, they would be able to break into the building and have the entire night to access the underground storage reservoir and dump their complete supply of powder into the vital water supply.

  If they all worked together, including Shir Mohammad, they could finish their
preparations and have the trucks loaded and ready to go tomorrow night. They could take advantage of the short daylight period and be on their way by five in the afternoon.

  Chapter 26

  Washington, DC

  Tuesday, December 1, 2015

  9:00 a.m.

  Alison Warden stood in front of the White House Press Room on the raised dais, confronting the members of the press corp. The forty or fifty reporters would listen to no other news stories but the filibuster still going on in the Senate. She was ready to blast the three senators and had decided to start with her own prepared remarks before taking questions. She wanted to bring up different points from those that President Miller would be making during his own speech later that day in Memphis, Tennessee.

  She faced the reporters hungry for her comments. All were ready with notepads and digital recorders to capture every word. “The Congress of the United States has for the past three years experienced an improved public rating and has been able to complete a larger volume of important work than the previous assemblies due to the cooperation between the Miller White House and the congressional leadership. Today we are seeing a return to the old, unproductive ways that had led to the lowest approval ratings in congressional history.

  “The American public has provided all the reasons for this filibuster to come to an end. They favor the Corporate America Fair Share Bill by a wide majority. They are flooding their respective senators with e-mails and letters telling them to force a vote of cloture and allow the Senate to assign the bill to the Finance Committee.

  “The president has put together a fair and equitable program that would require large corporations to pay their fair share of taxes to support the country they live and work in. They demand protection from our police departments. They demand a fast response from our fire departments. They demand security from foreign terrorist who would destroy their way of life and the millions of dollars of profits they earn each year.