“Are we?” Holland snapped.
“Are we what?”
“Are we dying? Is anyone sick?”
“Apparently it’s just a matter of time,” the man replied.
There were nearly twenty faces before him, anger masking fear.
Holland got on the PA and tried to quell the rumor, but the simmering feelings of distrust and betrayal continued beneath the surface, driven by the helplessness they all were feeling.
WASHINGTON, D.C.—4:10 P.M. (2110Z)
Rusty Sanders replaced the receiver of the pay phone and returned to the parking lot of a fast food restaurant just south of Capitol Hill where Sherry was waiting for him in the Blazer. It had taken nearly twenty minutes to reach the head of the pathology team from Fort Detrick that was performing the field autopsy on Professor Helms.
“I finally got to him. The news reports are false. Someone in Public Affairs at Keflavík made the mistake of guessing out loud to a reporter,” he reported to Sherry. “He said they hadn’t officially released anything to anyone before my call, and are under strict orders to say nothing publicly. They’ve been rechecking their results.”
“And?”
Rusty shook his head. “There is substantial evidence of a coronary thrombosis, but there is virtually no evidence of an active viral infection.”
“Really?”
“Really. But remember what Roth pointed out, and he was right. That means that as far as our pathology abilities go, we know for certain a virus didn’t kill Helms, but we have no way of proving as yet that Helms wasn’t infected by, or carrying, that virus.”
“But if he wasn’t showing any signs?”
Rusty sighed. “This is confusing as hell. Even if he was exposed, and even if he actually had the virus in his bloodstream, unless it was growing rapidly and shedding through the lungs, he wouldn’t have been especially contagious, and he certainly couldn’t have infected the whole aircraft. But before I left this morning, I talked to the flight attendant who helped him on board in Frankfurt, and she said he was coughing deeply. Yet that’s not consistent with the autopsy findings. There was no fluid in the lungs, and nothing to explain the coughing. It could still be just a heart attack, in other words. Maybe he’d sat next to a smoker somewhere on his way to the airport. The autopsy shows no inflammation in places a virus would normally affect, nothing! Bottom line is, we still have no solid proof of infection.”
“So, even though this doesn’t prove it, it could support the theory that he wasn’t infected?”
Rusty nodded as he put the Blazer in gear and looked at his watch.
“We’ve got to get to Roth. Now. The aircraft will reach those intercept coordinates in little more than an hour!”
TWENTY-ONE
ABOARD GULFSTREAM IJSVA—SATURDAY, DECEMBER 23—10:10 P.M. (2110Z)
Yuri Steblinko rechecked the coordinates of the Gulfstream’s inertial navigation system with those of the global positioning satellite system. The target area was dead ahead, as planned. The flight management computer had been programmed to follow a racetrack orbit at right angles to the oncoming airliner’s flight path, and it began carrying out his instructions now, issuing a silent stream of digital orders to the obedient autopilot. He had nearly reversed course a few minutes before to check for contrails—the sudden condensation of impacted, supercooled water at high altitude, which formed thick vapor trails that could hang in the stratosphere for a half hour.
But tonight the Gulfstream’s contrails were nearly invisible. Like an airborne spider, he would be spinning an invisible, ethereal web of transparent ice crystals in the night sky as he waited to ensnare his unsuspecting victim.
The Gulfstream reduced its own engine power and began whispering along in a holding pattern at forty-three thousand feet.
He’d tracked the 747’s position reports through the air traffic control system’s satellite radio link, and had waited expectantly for the last one. It had brought good news: The 747-400 would cruise beneath him at precisely 2223Z.
Yuri checked his watch. It was 2144Z.
A full moon hanging just above the western horizon bathed the cockpit in soft light, competing with the subdued glow of the instruments electronically painted on the liquid crystal displays before him. A solid cloud cover hovered miles below just over the surface of the Atlantic, but the air above was crystal clear. With the Gulfstream’s position lights and strobes turned off, the business jet was a fleeting ghost floating through an endless starfield. The possibility of the airliner’s crew spotting him was essentially nil.
They, however, would be clearly visible, the moonlight reflecting beautifully off the wings and fuselage of the 747 as it soared beneath him.
There would be no excuse, he reminded himself, for missing such a target.
Yuri turned down the volume of the satellite receiver. He would need no more position reports from the 747, since the rest of Quantum’s flight plan to Mauritania was irrelevant. They would never arrive.
A sudden flash of hunger flared up in his consciousness. With the autopilot doing its job keeping the Gulfstream IV in the preprogrammed orbit, he could leave the cockpit for a few minutes to raid the small refrigerator.
He hadn’t realized how thoroughly Nicolai Sakara had stocked the galley. Yuri opened cabinet after cabinet of an incredibly expensive larder, which included decades-old Cuban cigars, liquor, food, wine, and a special blend of the prince’s favorite Arabica coffee. Yuri made a pot of the exquisite coffee, added real cream from the refrigerator, found a box of biscuits, and returned to the captain’s seat, where he sipped the coffee slowly and appreciatively. Yuri opened the biscuits and began munching them absently. With little to do for the next forty minutes but wait, he let his thoughts drift to Anya and the reason he was occupying the cockpit of a stolen jet in the first place.
The thought of the two of them making love endlessly on some distant beach was idyllic. He would find such a home, even if it was a shack on a tropical beach on some long-forgotten island in the Pacific. Anya loved the sun, and she wore it well. Her perfectly proportioned body glowed even more sensuously in the embrace of a light tan.
In the previous hours of monotonous flight he had worked hard to keep from focusing on the enormity of what he was about to do. But occasionally, as now, images of a 747 in flames almost broke through the professional barriers in his mind.
There was a time, not so long ago, when he would have thought of nothing but the technical aspects of the job at hand. He would have been devoid of emotion—the ends of being a good officer justifying the means.
But things were different now. With the end of the Soviet Union had come the end of blind purpose, the end of the blanket justification for any action, no matter how deadly or outrageous. What he was doing now, he realized, was for himself and Anya, not for country or party or any other cause. Pure selfishness.
Ah, but Anya is a good enough cause! he thought, the happy flash of realization instantly quenched by a darker truth: he didn’t want to do such things anymore. This was his last mission, the last “action.”
The image of a 747 in flames taking over two hundred fifty people to their deaths in a long, agonizing spiral toward the ocean crept back in his mind. Such had been the end of KAL 007, but this time it would be his atrocity—his responsibility. Even if these people were already condemned, he regretted the terrible anxiety and confusion those last few seconds would bring them.
Yuri Steblinko shook the image away, and instead forced himself to picture Anya in an outrageously tiny bikini in front of their beach-house-to-be. A lifetime of comfort, insulated from the shortages and sorrows of the former U.S.S.R., for one last mission.
This is an act of mercy! he reminded himself for the hundredth time.
He must stay focused on Anya. Not her sensuous body, but Anya his love, who had never left him, even in terrible times.
Anya deserved the best.
ABOARD FLIGHT 66
The sudden illnes
s downstairs caught James Holland completely off-guard. The little girl, an unaccompanied minor, had been sleeping in the first class cabin when she suddenly awoke, nauseated, chilled, and burning with fever. Barb Rollins, the Swiss physician, and two passengers had taken charge immediately, and the captain had been summoned. Her temperature was 103.5. With the little girl wrapped in blankets and cared for by so many, Holland returned to the cockpit and dispatched Robb to get a few hours’ rest before crossing over the coast of Africa.
Neither of them discussed what had just happened.
Quite obviously, it was beginning.
THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, D.C.
Dr. Rusty Sanders had gambled that the President’s physician, an old friend from medical school, would be reachable on Saturday, and willing to race from his home in Georgetown to escort him into the nation’s best-known residence, particularly when he hinted at an urgent CIA purpose.
He was right.
Dr. Irwin Seward was waiting at the East Wing entrance to the White House when Rusty arrived. Sherry Ellis dropped him off one block away. She would wait by a prearranged pay phone for Rusty to either call or return. Rusty had insisted. She worked for Roth, and she should not be directly involved in what he had to do.
Rusty knew that Irwin Seward was relying on trust in vouching for him to the Secret Service. After all, Rusty thought, we’ve already proven the CIA can generate renegades who shouldn’t necessarily be near the first family.
“I really appreciate this, Irwin,” Rusty told him as they followed one of the senior White House guards into the main structure. “I’ll have to explain the details later.”
“Just don’t get me in trouble,” Seward replied. “Once we get you handed off downstairs to the Situation Room, I’m out of here.”
Rusty grinned. “Golf game?”
Irwin Seward smiled and shook his head. “No, a better pastime. Sailing. I’ve got a cute lady in a fantastic bikini waiting for me and I can’t wait to get it off her.”
“Irwin! You’re married, and it’s December!” Rusty chided.
Irwin Seward grinned. “Yup, but the female in question is my wife, and the boat’s cabin is heated.”
They said goodbye at the door to the basement nerve center, and Rusty entered to find that Jonathan Roth had been alerted and was waiting for him.
“Dr. Sanders.” He acknowledged Rusty with a nod but no handshake. “Let’s go in the conference room here and close the door, Doctor. I trust this is truly urgent? Normally we conduct our business through channels at Langley.”
Rusty ignored the rebuke.
“The President is due back in thirty minutes,” Roth continued, “so we have a little time.”
“No, sir, I don’t think we do,” Rusty told him.
They sat at the conference table and Rusty pushed the computer diskette across the surface to Jonathan Roth.
“Sir, I took this out of Langley because I was afraid the information would be otherwise destroyed. I could be wrong, but I think there’s an extremely dangerous renegade operation going on within the Company.”
Roth’s eyebrows raised. “Tell me, Doctor. What do you have? What’s your proof?”
Rusty told of his suspicions about the Cairo warning message, which Roth had already seen, and outlined the computer trap he had set for any erasures in the Langley conference room that had served as their crisis command post.
“I must say, I wondered myself about the speed of the response from the Cairo station,” Roth said, drumming his fingers on the table. “If the warning was, as you suspect, manufactured by one of our people at Langley, it would make more sense—and would, of course, be completely false—as far as a valid warning was concerned. But whoever might have inserted that warning in the system might have actually been passing on a truly valid report from the field in unorthodox fashion.”
Rusty nodded, pleased Roth was following his reasoning.
“Yes, sir. I considered that. No matter how it originated, the substance could still be accurate. Aqbah could indeed be trying to bring down that seven-forty-seven, and in fact, I’m convinced they are.”
Roth looked him squarely in the eye. “Why? What evidence do you have? We’ve picked up nothing in the way of supporting intelligence other than the warning message.”
Rusty pointed to the computer diskette. “It’s on the diskette, sir. There’s a message in Arabic sent to an unknown addressee from Langley. The message pinpoints a location from Flight Sixty-six’s flight plan out over the Atlantic and the time of expected passage. That time comes up less than an hour from now. If it’s what I think it is, someone is waiting out there to destroy that seven-forty-seven.”
“That’s quite a theory, Doctor. And if you’re wrong?”
Rusty shrugged. “Well, then we just look a bit silly asking the captain to divert, or sending fighters if we’ve got any close at hand. Actually, I don’t think anyone can reach him in time.”
“So you want us to alter the flight’s course to stay away from that location?” Roth asked. “What’s there to prevent the potential attacker from watching the course change on radar and pursuing the seven-forty-seven anyway?”
“Nothing, sir, except distance and time, and we’re running out of both.”
Roth looked at the table and drummed his fingers some more.
“Sir,” Rusty continued, “the same renegades have already made a move on me, trying to get this diskette.” He recounted the raid on his apartment, and the threats over the phone, as Roth pulled over a pad of paper and made notes.
“Bottom line, Director?” Rusty said. “I think our renegade group is helping Aqbah directly. I think they’re going way the hell outside the rules to try to aid what could be a self-destructive act for Aqbah. And since the autopsy on the professor in Iceland has come back negative for active viral illness, if we don’t stop Aqbah, our assistance makes us complicit to mass murder—murder aided and abetted by the CIA, and I’m sure never authorized by any finding signed by the President.”
Roth bit his lip and exhaled sharply.
“About the autopsy. We agreed, did we not, Doctor, that a negative finding did not mean the virus wasn’t present? I mean, the professor was definitely exposed. We agreed on that.”
Rusty nodded. “Yes, sir, we did. But the autopsy results add credence to my strong feeling that these people are not necessarily doomed. Regardless of what the flight attendant saw in terms of the professor seeming to be ill when he came on in Frankfurt, he may still have died of a simple heart attack, and not a virus. And even if he was carrying the virus, he may not have been infectious. We just don’t know.”
Roth looked slightly taken aback. He picked up the diskette and tapped the table with it. “So the Arabic message with the coordinates and the time and the transponder code is all here? Did you make any other copies?”
Rusty shook his head no.
“Well then. I agree we have to move very fast, and I’ll take care of it. I’ll contact the aircraft immediately.” He stood up. “Excellent work. Now, since we don’t know who’s gone into business for himself, you go tuck yourself away somewhere out of the area. Not a safe house—well, you wouldn’t know about those anyway. That’s not your section, Doctor. Find a hole to crawl into. A hotel, for instance. Then call this number.” He leaned over and scribbled a telephone number, then straightened up and handed it to Rusty. “That’s a direct line in here. Ask for me. Speak only to me—at least until we’ve gotten to the bottom of this. Do not leave a message for anyone else, is that clear?”
“Yes, sir,” Rusty assured him.
Roth escorted him to the door and the hallway and asked a White House aide to take him back to the East Wing entrance.
Rusty found Sherry waiting in the Blazer beside the telephone booth. She had her face buried in a Washington Post, but her eyes had followed his approach from two blocks away. He slipped behind the wheel of the Blazer and pulled into traffic, driving for half a block before whipping the
car to the curb and slamming on the brakes.
Sherry looked at him with raised eyebrows. “Rusty, what is it?”
“My God, Sherry! Oh my God!”
“What is it? Speak to me!”
Rusty was staring wide-eyed to the east as Sherry tried to get a response.
“Dr. Sanders, hello-o? Are you in there?”
He nodded, finally, as he took a deep breath and pointed back toward the White House, then looked at her with a horrified expression.
“Sherry, Jonathan Roth mentioned the transponder code for Flight Sixty-six as I left him.”
“Okay. So?”
“When he was wrapping up a few minutes ago, he said, ‘So this diskette contains the coordinates, the time of passage, and the transponder code, right?’ And I nodded yes.”
“And?”
“Sherry, he hadn’t looked at the diskette’s contents yet! I didn’t give him the paper printout, and I know for an absolute certainty that I never mentioned transponder code being in that Arabic message.”
“I’m not following this, Rusty,” she said.
He turned to her, his eyes wide.
“The only people besides myself who knew that the diskette included the transponder code were the ones that sent the Arabic message to Aqbah! Sherry, Jonathan Roth could not have spoken those words without being in on it somehow!”
Sherry recoiled against the passenger door with an incredulous expression. “WHAT? I thought we’d gotten past that. You saw Roth’s computer files. There was nothing there.”
“That was before I found the Arabic message, which came from one of the computers in the conference room! But that helps prove my point. If it wasn’t on Roth’s computer, yet he knew of something on that Arabic message which I hadn’t mentioned, then he has to be involved!”
Sherry looked stunned. She examined his eyes, her mouth slightly open. She licked her lips and looked away, and spoke at last.
“Oh, my Lord! I never thought …” her voice trailed off.
“Sherry, he was going to call the aircraft immediately and get the captain to divert.”
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