by Doug Raber
“What about the people who didn’t go to New Mexico?”
“Everybody in COTPER who stayed in Atlanta was told that a highly classified training exercise is under way, and it is not to be discussed with anybody. We’ll also assign someone to keep an eye on Rasmussen and Torlander. They’re the only two CDC people who have been fully briefed—on the smallpox, I mean—not on our operation. Officially, we’ll be providing liaisons for support, but our guys understand that they might need to intervene in a hurry if either Rasmussen or Torlander starts to go off the reservation.”
He cleared his throat and continued, “Okay. All this will still leave us with three people who can keep pushing on the historical records. Those three can also provide relief to the others to cover meals and stuff.”
Edwards took on a serious tone. “You’re doing a good job on the logistics, Bob. But the fact is, it’s all just beating around the bush. The real question has to do with actual intelligence. We agree that the smallpox almost certainly didn’t originate inside the U.S. That means we’re looking for a foreign source. And officially, that would mean it has to be Russia. It doesn’t mean the Russians launched this attack, just that the virus somehow originated with them.”
“That’s true sir. Our intelligence files indicate that there were at least two biological facilities outside Russia, in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. But we can’t be sure yet about smallpox virus at those places. We need to wait for confirming information from some of our agents and other sources.”
“What about Iran?”
“Right. We’ve got the reports you mentioned about Soviet materials winding up in Iran. Back in 2001, Putin made a big deal of saying that all smallpox stores, first in the Soviet Union and then in Russia, were safe. And he specifically said that Russia had not provided any assistance to Iran for the development of WMD. But we also know from that business with Project Sapphire* that Iran tried to get access to enriched uranium back in 1993. So if they were trying to get Russian uranium from Kazakhstan, it’s hard to believe they didn’t try to get other stuff, too. They would have been trying to get smallpox samples from the old Soviet biological weapons facility in Kazakhstan at the same time. It seems to me that it everything points to Iran.”
“I concur, Colonel. But keep digging. I’ll be a lot happier when you provide me with some hard evidence from our own investigation to verify our suspicions. That will make our case against Iran a whole lot stronger when it gets debated at the National Security Council.”
* * *
Chapter 9
Sarah
We have argued that the Fourth Amendment would not apply to military operations the President ordered within the United States to deter and prevent acts of terrorism.
—Department of Defense Directive, 2005‡
Day 26: Airport
Shortly before two o’clock, Sarah left her apartment and crossed the hallway to the elevators. Instead of going to the lobby, Sarah pushed P2, which took her to the lower level of the parking garage beneath her apartment building. There she exited and turned toward the far wall, away from the cars. Lining the wall were a series of storage lockers, cages, actually, made from chain link fencing. She came to the one she was looking for. She took her keys out of her pocket, opened locker, and pulled out her Cannondale bicycle. It was the “Bad Boy” model, one that she’d picked out because it was highly rated, lightweight, and tough. Plus, she admitted to herself, the name had sold her.
She checked the tires, put on her helmet and gloves, and took a pair of tinted protective goggles from her handlebar bag. She walked the bike up the ramp to the exit door and put the small entry card that was attached to her key ring next to the sensor. As the door went up, she realized that the entry card was yet one more opportunity for someone to track her. She rode several short blocks toward Key Bridge. If anyone were watching, they would assume she was headed across Key Bridge into Georgetown. But as soon as she had crossed Lee Highway, she made a hard right turn onto a bicycle path on the Virginia side of the Potomac River.
Almost immediately, the trail crossed a small pedestrian bridge over the George Washington Parkway and connected to the Mount Vernon trail. Sarah loved the trail, which ran alongside the Potomac for almost 20 miles, all the way to George Washington’s historic home. But today, she was only going to ride about three miles. Her destination was Reagan National Airport, and she reached the north end of the runway in 15 minutes.
It was a place that nearly every biker and runner paused to watch the planes take off or land. The runway always operated in just a single direction that depended on wind conditions, and both takeoffs and landings were a thrill to watch as the planes passed directly overhead. Sometimes they seemed almost close enough to reach up and touch. Today, however, Sarah dispensed with the tradition and kept on riding.
In less than a half mile, she neared the terminal buildings. The bike path continued over a small bridge across the airport exit, but Sarah veered off into a small parking lot. At the end of the main terminal, she locked her bike to a lamppost.
Striding around the end of the building, Sarah was immediately surrounded by travelers, suitcases in tow, surging toward the waiting line for taxicabs. Walking against the tide, she entered the baggage claim area and took an escalator up to the departure level. Scanning the concourse, she saw what she was looking for—a kiosk with a large advertisement for cell phones. Perfect.
She waited by the arrivals board until another customer finished browsing, and she approached the kiosk looking as frustrated and upset as she could.
The clerk noticed her. “Hi, can I help you?”
“Somebody stole my bag just before my flight left Chicago, and I lost everything. My wallet, my ID, my credit cards—everything! All I have left is some cash, so I’m hoping I could buy some kind of phone to call the people I’m staying with.”
Sarah saw the look on the clerk’s face, and she knew she had succeeded in getting his sympathy. “Man, that really sucks. We’re not supposed to sell any of these phones without proper identification, but I guess this is sort of an exception. If you’ll just give me all your information, I’ll write down that you showed me your driver’s license.”
“Thanks. That’s really nice of you. Do you have something that’s not too expensive?”
The clerk suggested a model that had 30 prepaid minutes and cost $25.
“That sounds perfect.” At least for that one response, Sarah couldn’t have been more honest if she’d tried.
She gave the clerk she was “Jennifer James,” a combination of the names of two kids she’d gone to elementary school with, and she made up a street address in Chicago. When he asked her for a contact phone number, she made up a number with the 312 area code.
Five minutes later, she was walking away feeling like the cat that had swallowed the canary. The clerk in the kiosk seemed pleased as well. Apparently he took her improved mood as evidence that he’d been a Good Samaritan.
She walked back to her bike, she rode slowly back out of the airport onto the bike path. This time, when she reached the area at the north end of the runway, she pulled over to the side of the path and looked up just as a plane was taking off. The power was awesome—all those tons of metal vaulting up into the sky with a mighty roar. After a few moments, she resumed pedaling back toward Arlington. The entire way home, she focused on her next step. Another bit of deception.
* * *
Day 26: Just Good Friends
“Hey Sarah, come on in.” Eric Murphy was surprised. He walked over to the coffee table and picked up the remote in order to mute the football game he had been watching. “Half-time,” he explained. “Can I get you a beer or something?” Eric had lived in the building even longer than Sarah, and they were casual friends.
“No thanks Eric. I actually need to ask a favor. I have to make a run down to Richmond this evening, and there’s this guy I’m trying to avoid.”
“Somebody threatening you?”
; “No, nothing like that. More like a puppy dog who hasn’t quite figured out that the interest doesn’t go both ways. But I thought I saw him down the street when I came back from the store, and I just don’t want to ‘accidentally’ run into him. Anyway, I was wondering if I could borrow your car. So if that creep really is looking for me, he won’t see me drive out in my car. I’ll leave you my keys, and you can use my car if you need to go anywhere.”
“No problem with lending you my car, but I’m worried about this guy. It sounds like he’s stalking you.” Eric hesitated as he fished his keys out of his pocket and removed the Chevy key from his key ring.
“I hear you, but I don’t think he’s dangerous. I’ll keep an eye out for him for a few days, and if he’s still hanging around I’ll ask the cops to pay him a visit.”
“Okay, I’ll trust your judgment on this one.” He handed her the key. “Anyway, I just filled the tank last week. It’s been running pretty good, so a trip to Richmond shouldn’t be a problem.”
Sarah put her car key on the coffee table. “Thanks Eric. I really appreciate this. It’s good to have a friend you can trust.” With yet another lie, she felt a pang of conscience.
“Are you really going to do this as a round trip this evening? That’s a lot of driving.”
“If I’m tired, I can stay over. Do you need the car back before tomorrow afternoon?”
Murphy laughed. “The only place I’ll need to go is to work, and that’s only a block from Metro. Just promise you’ll be careful. And I mean careful for yourself, not the car.”
“I will. Thanks Eric, you’re a good friend.”
Sarah got up and walked toward the door. “If you’re not around when I get back, I’ll ask the security guard to put them in your mailbox. I have an extra key, so I’ll still be able to use my car, even if I don’t see you for a couple of days.”
“Okay, have a safe trip.” Eric turned back to the TV. The second half of the football game had started.
* * *
Day 26: Off the Grid
Sarah put on a canvas field coat that Jake had left in the closet the last time he’d visited. It was too big for her but fit her purposes completely. She added a baseball cap, tucked her hair under it, and looked at herself in the mirror. In the fading light of late afternoon, the clothing might allow her to pass for a man. And it wouldn’t be her car, in any case.
She exited the garage and started driving west. An hour later, she crossed the Blue Ridge, soon finding herself on smaller highways that took her into the countryside of West Virginia.
The roads became narrower and more winding, eventually giving way to a dirt road that signaled she was only a mile from her destination. It was well past sunset now, and Sarah was relieved that she’d made the trip previously. Finally, she reached her parents’ place, Situated on a steep hill above the South Branch of the Potomac River. She couldn’t see much in the darkness. The house was isolated and, even though it was less than 100 miles from Washington. The combination of rivers and mountains made the location difficult to reach.
Sarah pulled the car up to the log house, went around to the side of the building, and retrieved the key from its hiding place. She turned on the gas fireplace to get some heat and found a container of chili in the freezer for her dinner.
She climbed the stairs to her dad’s office area. He called the loft his “crow’s nest.” She sat in her father’s desk chair, swiveling it toward the file-cabinet safe. The combination lock worked just as she had remembered. Opening the upper drawer, she looked through the labels on the various files. Most seemed to be business records.
In the lower drawer, she saw a file labeled “Sarah.” Inside were several 9 x 12 manila envelopes. She started with the top envelope, which said “college,” and examined the contents of the envelope. It was mostly some old correspondence from William & Mary about the tuition bills that her parents had paid.
The second envelope was labeled “sarah-boo.” She smiled, thinking about the childhood nickname her father had used. She opened the flap and tilted the envelope. She was stunned when a passport slid out. Why in hell did he take my passport?
She picked up the passport and opened it. Sure enough, it was hers. There she was in the standard passport photo, and right next to her picture was her name, Sarah. But it wasn’t Sarah Lockford, it was Sarah Wallingford.
“Son of a bitch!” she said aloud. “What in hell is going on?”
Thinking back to the phone conversation with her father, Sarah realized that he had been trying very carefully to tell her about this other passport without actually saying the words, and without saying aloud that it was out in West Virginia. Someone overhearing their conversation would have thought he was simply referring to her own apartment and the same passport she’d had for five years. She looked again at the Wallingford passport. The date of birth was January 12, 1980. Almost the same as hers, but not quite. Sarah had been born on October 12, 1980. This passport merely interchanged the digits specifying the month—from one-zero for October, to zero-one for January.
Sarah reached for the telephone to call her father, but she stopped and put the phone back into the cradle. What he didn’t say in their last conversation may have been more important than what he actually said.
His secrecy on the phone meant that she couldn’t possibly call him to ask. She couldn’t even call him at all. That whole conversation had been his way of saying, “You’re on your own Sarah. I’ve done what I could.”
Sarah thought back to her childhood, and the jumbled, random thoughts flying around inside her head began to undergo a weird sort of self-assembly. The house in McLean was just down the road from the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency. Her dad worked up the road, a couple of miles in the other direction, in Tyson’s Corner. But did he really? Was that the only office he ever went to? She never actually saw him go to work. She only saw him when he left in the morning and came home at night. He’d always said that his office was too boring for a kid.
He’d frequently been on trips to Eastern Europe and developing countries. Were they really sales trips for electronics? Or had all of it been a cover story? How on earth did he learn how to get hold of a fake passport?
As this revelation crystallized among Sarah’s swirling emotions, she thought of another explanation for the fake passport. Several years earlier, she’d gone with him on a trip to Europe. That’s when she’d first obtained her own passport, the one that was in her dresser in Arlington. The fake passport was issued at about the same time, or at least that’s what the date said. And she was sure the photograph was the same as the one in her real passport. He must have used a copy of that photo to make the fake passport.
She remembered that after the main part of their trip through Germany, they had traveled briefly into Georgia and the Ukraine. Maybe he was worried that something could go wrong there. It was back when Russian troops went into Georgia. Whatever the explanation, Sarah realized that her dad’s expertise was more than just selling electronics. He’d used it to help her obtain a new identity, so she just needed to take it and run with it.
Why didn’t he tell me he’s a CIA agent? Doesn’t he trust me? I wonder if Mom knows about this.
Sarah turned her attention back to the desk, looking at the other envelopes that had been in the folder labeled “Sarah.” The next one was marked “high school,” and it was exactly what it purported to be. There was some correspondence, a few report cards, and a clipping from the school paper about the time her cross-country team had placed second in the state finals.
The fourth envelope was labeled “resources,” and it was stuffed with what felt like a sheaf of printed pages. But what Sarah pulled from the envelope was a very different kind of paper. She was holding a clear plastic sleeve, similar to those she had used in college to protect her lab reports. But this wasn’t a report. The sleeve was filled with money!
There were six bundles of bills, each about a half-inch thick. She pulle
d out one of the two packets closest to the opening of the sleeve and riffled through it. They were all $10 bills. She did the same with each of the other packets, removing them one at a time and examining them. Three of the packets consisted of $20 bills, and the last two were made up of were 50s and 100s.
Sarah slid the bills out of the band that was holding the stack of $10 bills and began to count. The first time through she lost track of the count at 58. She tried it again and got to 89. Realizing that her nerves were getting to her, she counted out piles of 10 that she could easily verify. There were 10 piles. My God, that’s a thousand dollars, in just this first bundle. Then she thought she must have done that multiplication incorrectly, that there couldn’t be that much money in such a small package. So she counted through one of the 10 separate stacks: 10, 20, 30 … and realized each of them did indeed contain $100, which made a total of $1,000 in the original bundle.
And that’s just the $10 bills. She reached for a pencil and added up the values of the individual stacks. Twenty-two thousand dollars—in cash! Sarah took a few deep breaths in an effort to calm herself. She also noticed that the bills didn’t seem to be new. They didn’t stick together, and they just seemed slightly used. She slid several of the $100 bills out of their packet and looked at the serial numbers. They were random. Her father had made plans for going off the grid long before Sarah even thought of it.
Sarah went back to the envelope that had held the sleeve with all the bills. She turned it upside down and gave it a gentle shake to be sure there was nothing else inside. Something fell on the desk. A credit card. It was a Visa card, but she noticed that it looked different from her own credit card. At the top, it said “all-access.”
