by Brad Thor
While the blame wasn’t his to take for spoiling their vacation, he took it anyway. Harvath wasn’t quite sure what he had said to her, but it had gone a long way toward easing her disappointment over their trip.
Had she been upset? Absolutely. It was why she hadn’t replied to his text. But by the time Harvath had arrived home, all she wanted to do was put her arms around him.
When he tried to speak, she wouldn’t let him. They kissed and tumbled into bed.
Afterward, he drifted off to sleep exhausted. When he awoke, he opened his eyes and looked at her, hoping she was awake, but she wasn’t.
That was okay. It would keep.
Now, as he poured his coffee, he heard the sound of bare feet crossing the worn, wooden planks of his kitchen floor. He smiled.
Lara wrapped her arms around him and kissed his back. “Jet lag?” she asked.
“There’s a lot going on,” he replied, hugging her back. Turning, he kissed her. “It’s going to be a rough day.”
“Anything I can do?”
He shook his head. “You already did it. You’re here.”
It felt so damn good holding her there in his kitchen. It was something he could get used to, something he could learn to look forward to.
Lowering his forehead until it touched hers, he interlaced his fingers in the small of her back and closed his eyes. In all the craziness, it was an exquisite moment of peace. Maybe this was what it was all about. Maybe life was about nothing more than moments.
“Not a bad way to start the day,” she murmured.
“I know how we can make it even better,” he replied, lowering his hands.
Pressing herself even tighter against him, she kissed her way over to his ear and whispered, “Tell me.”
God, she was beautiful. And so sexy. He loved everything about her. She was tall, with amazing gold-flecked, green eyes and long brown hair that had kept its summer highlights. She was even still tan, something she attributed to the Brazilian DNA she received from her parents.
She so resembled one of the women from Victoria’s Secret that his buddies jokingly referred to her as the “underwear model.” It was a guy thing and actually an incredible compliment. They were jealous as hell of him. Not just because of how gorgeous Lara was, but also because of how happy the two of them were together— even if it was divided between Boston and D.C.
For Harvath, though, the way he felt about her went beyond her looks and how attracted he was to her. He loved how smart she was. She was off-the-charts brilliant. She also treated him better than anyone he had ever known.
Standing there in his kitchen, holding her, he realized that he loved her and wanted to tell her.
Gently, he pushed her back a step and looked into her eyes.
“What is it?” she asked.
He opened his lips to tell her, and his cell phone went off. He knew who it was by the ringtone.
The Old Man had been relegated to the classic ringing of an old school telephone, while Nicholas had chosen his own ringtone on Harvath’s phone—“Atomic Dog” by George Clinton.
Their mutual love of funk music had been one of the first things they had learned about each other as their friendship evolved.
Glancing at his phone on the counter, he saw the wild picture of George Clinton that Nicholas used as his avatar. He hated breaking away from Lara, but he had to.
“It’s okay,” she said, reading his thoughts. “Answer it. I’ll start breakfast.”
He gave her a quick kiss as he reached over and picked up the phone.
“What’s up?” he asked as he connected the call and lifted the phone to his ear.
“A third case has just been reported,” Nicholas replied.
“Where?”
“Detroit.”
“Same symptoms?” he asked.
“Unfortunately.”
“Do we know anything about the patient?”
Nicholas clicked a couple of keys on his end and read the information. “Male. Thirty-seven years old.”
“Name?”
“I was afraid you were going to ask that. Abdulraham Mafid Marzook.”
That made three. “I’m guessing we can rule out Dutch Reformed again,” said Harvath.
Nicholas let out a short laugh. Graveyard humor had always been part of their relationship. Without it, both men would have gone crazy a long time ago.
“Barring pictures of them riding bikes with wooden shoes, I’m going to say that’s a safe bet. Even safer when you see what else I found. Are you near your computer?”
Lara poured a cup of coffee and handed it to him. Harvath mouthed “thank you” and walked over to the table where he sat down in front of his laptop.
“Okay, I’m at my computer. What did you find?”
“Check these out,” Nicholas replied as he pressed send on the encrypted email. “Open them in order.”
When the email arrived seconds later, Harvath did as instructed. The first attachment showed the passport applications and photos of the three deceased patients: Shukri Abu Odeh, Mousa Abulqader Elashi, and Abdulraham Mafid Marzook. The following attachments contained passenger flight manifests, U.S. Customs and Border Protection entry information, and three U.S. Customs Declaration Forms.
“What am I looking for?”
“I can’t find anything connecting the three of them. No phone calls, no emails, no social media overlap, nothing. But in the last two weeks, all three of them travelled to the same place,” Nicholas replied.
“Together or separately?”
“Separately.”
Harvath scanned the Declaration forms and finally found it. “Saudi Arabia.”
“Correct. And based on the flight manifests, they went in and out of King Abdulaziz International Airport in Jeddah.”
Harvath went back through and looked at everything again.
As he did, Nicholas asked. “What do you think? Typhoid Mohammeds? Could the Saudis actually be part of this whole thing?”
The Saudis funded a lot of terrorism. Fifteen of the 9/11 hijackers had been from the Kingdom. They didn’t have clean hands by any means, but the fact that Odeh, Elashi, and Marzook had done nothing to hide their travel bothered him. The Saudi Intelligence services wouldn’t have left such an obvious trail. It had to be something else. Then it hit him.
“Jeddah wasn’t their final destination,” he said.
“Where do you think they went?”
Harvath pulled up a web site he used to help calculate dates in the Muslim calendar and said, “They, along with more than two million other people, went to Mecca for the Hajj.”
CHAPTER 35
* * *
It’s referred to as the fifth pillar of Islam. Every Muslim who is physically and financially able is obligated to make at least one pilgrimage to Mecca in their lifetime,” said Harvath.
On his end, Nicholas was scrolling through the pictures of it he had pulled up. “I don’t think I have ever seen crowds this big.”
“It’s the largest gathering of people in the world. Last year, there were two-point-one million people there.”
“It’s the ultimate petri dish.”
Harvath agreed. “Especially when you have millions of hands trying to touch or kiss the Ka’aba and drink from the sacred well of Zamzam.”
“Is the Ka’aba that outdoor, box-shaped structure I see people walking in circles around?
“That’s it. When Muslims pray toward Mecca, technically it’s toward the Ka’aba, which is located in the center of Islam’s most sacred mosque, the Al-Masjid al-Haram. Muslims believe the Ka’aba was built by Abraham, and it’s considered their holiest site.”
“It looks like a crowd control nightmare,” Nicholas stated.
“It is. In fact, thousands of people have died at the Hajj. There have
been fires, riots, bombings, stampedes, structural failures because of overcrowding, you name it.”
“What about disease?”
“Plenty of it, and none of it good,” Harvath replied. “There have been outbreaks of meningitis and cholera, as well as things like Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, also known as MERS. It normally doesn’t get caught until the Hajj participants return to their home countries, and then the illnesses flare there.”
“Don’t they screen them as they come into Saudi Arabia?”
“They try, but people can be asymptomatic when they arrive. They also require specific vaccinations as a condition of entry, but for many pilgrims forged immunization records are easier and cheaper to get than the actual vaccinations. It’s a public health nightmare. The Saudis know it and so do we.”
“Then what’s being done about it?” Nicholas asked.
“I just told you.”
“Global public health is based on the honor system, backed up by supposedly vigilant border guards and passport-stampers?”
“Pretty much.”
“We’re screwed.”
Harvath agreed. “That’s one of the problems of modern air travel. An infected person can get on a plane anywhere in the world and be anywhere else within twenty-four hours.”
“Do you think that’s what this is? Damien and his Plenary Panel cooked up this illness and somehow got it into Mecca? They spread it through the Hajj and then the infected get on planes back to their home countries to start a global pandemic?”
“It’d be a clever way to do it,” said Harvath, as he clicked over to another site to look at something.
“If this is African Hemorrhagic Fever, how did they get it in to Saudi Arabia? You can’t even get near Mecca unless you are Muslim.”
“If I had the resources Damien does, and I was putting this operation together, I’d do it via Zakat.”
“What’s Zakat?” Nicholas replied.
“It’s like an Islamic income tax, or a mandatory form of alms-giving. Allegedly, it’s used in part to help poor Muslims and can even be applied to paying their costs for attending the Hajj.
“Because of how many people want to participate, Saudi Arabia sets quotas for each country. Not only is Congo extremely poor, but it has a very small Muslim population. If I were Damien, I would take advantage of both of those factors.”
“Meaning, you’d fund a group of Muslims from Congo to go to Mecca?”
“Exactly,” Harvath replied. “I would quietly work my diplomatic connections to get the amount of visas I needed and then put the word out in the Congolese Muslim community that a wealthy Muslim benefactor had established a fund to underwrite their pilgrimage to Mecca.”
“Where does African Hemorrhagic Fever enter in?”
Harvath scrolled down on a web site with information about the Hajj. “The Saudi government publishes a list of required vaccines for pilgrims. Yellow fever, polio, things like that. Whether or not my Congolese Muslims had been vaccinated, I would send my own team in, tell them the list had been updated and that they needed an additional immunization.
“And after making sure their travel and medical documents were in order,” Nicholas added, “all you would have to do is just send them on their way.”
“You’d want to do more than that. I’d maximize the spread of the disease by breaking them up at different hotels and attaching them to different tour groups once they arrived in Mecca. But at that point, it would all come down to how communicable the disease was.”
“Then what? Do the Congolese Muslims crash and bleed out in Saudi Arabia? Isn’t that the kind of thing the Saudis would be on the lookout for?”
It was, and Harvath remembered what Leonce had told them about the sick man who had arrived at the Matumaini Clinic and how a nurse believed he could be Muslim because she thought she had overheard him moan the word “Allah.”
No loose ends.
“You’re right,” Harvath replied. “Just because the fuse was lit, it doesn’t mean Damien was off the hook. No bomb maker—even one who has cooked up a plague bomb—would want pieces of it traced to their source. If I were Damien, I’d want those pilgrims back before the Saudis knew what had happened.”
“Which means you wouldn’t leave their return up to commercial air travel. Too many things could go wrong. He probably would have chartered a flight for them.”
“Good point. See what you can find—visas, all of it. And while you’re at it, see what kind of CCTV footage you can get your hands on. The Saudis monitor everything, particularly during the Hajj.”
“Anything else?”
“If Damien did take them back to Congo, I’m betting they were taken to the Ngoa facility. The staff would be able to quietly get rid of the bodies and public health authorities would be none the wiser.”
“But wasn’t the Matumaini Clinic in touch with the WHO representative in Kinshasa?” Nicholas asked.
“They were. Whoever that rep in Kinshasa is, he’s a part of this. He either tipped Damien or the Ngoa lab about their missing patient. That’s probably why he asked for a picture to be emailed. I assume somebody wanted confirmation before Damien sent Hendrik and his men in to kill everyone.”
“If that’s all he needed, why did he ask for blood and tissue samples?”
“Probably,” said Harvath, “because that’s what they normally do. He was smart enough to not break with protocol. If he ever gets called on the carpet, it looks like he followed every step to the letter.”
That made him think of something, and he made a mental note.
While he was doing that, Nicholas brought up a new question, something that had been weighing on him as well.
“We know Damien wants to drastically reduce the earth’s population,” the little man said. “We also know that he’s a eugenicist who believes that certain races and bloodlines are unfit and should be snuffed out.”
“Correct.”
“So if a guy like that launches a global pandemic, how does he control who gets it?”
It was an important question, especially now that the genie appeared to be out of the bottle, but it wasn’t the right question.
When disease was used as a weapon, the intent was for it to go anywhere and everywhere. No place was to be off-limits or safe. The only people meant to survive were the ones who had launched it and whatever subgroup they felt was worthy of living.
To answer Nicholas’s question, Harvath replied, “He doesn’t control who gets it. What he controls is who doesn’t get it.”
“So there’s some sort of an antidote?”
“Or a vaccine.”
“But based on the ‘Outcome Conference’ document that Mordechai told you about,” Nicholas said, pushing back, “the Plenary Panel’s goal is to skin the earth’s population from over seven point two billion down to five hundred million. That’s a ninety-three percent drop. How do you do that?
“I mean, we’ve got a pretty good idea of how they want to get the six and a half billion–plus people infected, but how do you save the others? How do you not only give an antidote or a vaccine to five hundred million people, but the right five hundred million, the ones you want to see survive? And on top of that, how do you do that without them knowing what the hell is going on?”
They were terrifying questions, none of which Harvath had answers for. He couldn’t even begin to fathom how the world wouldn’t collapse with a die-off of over six point five billion people. There’d be nobody to bury the bodies, much less maintain civil order.
Even the Black Death, said to have been the most devastating pandemic in history and estimated to have claimed up to fifty percent of Europe’s population, was no comparison to this. Weaponized African Hemorrhagic Fever would not only blow it away, it would take the lead for worst calamity ever on earth, second only to the extinction of the dinosaurs.<
br />
If there was one thing Harvath knew, it was that Mother Nature moved fast, while science moved very, very slowly. If they couldn’t get out in front of this virus, billions of people were going to die.
Looking up from his computer, he wasn’t thinking about himself. He was thinking about Lara and protecting her, as well as her little boy and her parents back up in Boston.
There was also his own mother out in California, as well as others he had always promised he would never let anything happen to.
The magnitude of the task pissed him off. Not because he had to figure how to take care of so many people so important to him, but because he had been put in this position in the first place by an insane, agenda-driven asshole like Pierre Damien.
Harvath knew that there was a special place in hell for a man like Damien; he just hoped the President would let him send him there.
As Nicholas went through the rest of his checklist, Harvath’s mind was going in multiple directions. He had been taught to think in layers, to make plans for contingencies—if not that, then this. What are my routes of attack and avenues of escape?
He found himself needing not only to focus on his work, but also on the people he cared about. It was the very position he had always said he never wanted to be in. Yet, here he was.
While the SEAL mottos about perseverance and never giving up floated to the forefront of his mind, so did another saying. You can’t always choose the situation you find yourself in, but you can choose how you react to it.
His mother had said it to him a million times growing up. She said it so often it drove him crazy to hear it. But he had never forgotten it, its wisdom timeless and invaluable.
“Scot?” Nicholas said, trying to regain Harvath’s attention.
“I’m sorry, what did you say?”
“I asked how the hell Damien planned on immunizing five hundred million people. And then when you didn’t answer, I said that if anyone could get it out of him, it’d be you.”
“Only if the President sees this the way we do.”
