by Leon, Judith
Nova answered. “No. And I wouldn’t trust anything he says anyway.”
“Then we will keep on this gear. Provenza says that the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta is fairly certain that the Reston strain most likely involved in this mess can only live outside a host for ten or twenty minutes. In twenty minutes, if we left it empty, the house would probably be safe. But if Hassan is either infected or the carrier, this place is fatal at present for the unprotected. And for now, I’m considering myself unprotected.” His tone changed from commander to worried man. “May I ask, I almost fear to ask, where is Principessa?”
“She’s okay, Cesare. I left her in the SISMI van.”
“I do thank you, love. Really I do.”
Joe held up the videotape. “He had this on him.”
“Then we must play it at once.” Cesare lifted the tape from Joe’s hand and turned to the VCR and TV.
The six SISMI guys had apparently already done a thorough job of searching everything in the living room. All except their team leader, Alonza, shambled into the bedrooms and bathroom.
Cesare said, “While you were in pursuit, we interviewed the neighbors. It seems that six to eight men have been living here, and they left together around three-thirty this afternoon.”
Nova pressed the buttons on the VCR. After a few seconds of white static, the face of a young man appeared on the screen. A date and time stamp indicated that the tape had been made yesterday, Saturday.
“My name is Ali Yassan,” he said in Arabic. She watched in horrified fascination as this young boy—maybe fifteen or sixteen—explained to his family and friends that the next day he would begin a journey of vengeance against the decadent West, specifically the Italians who persisted in siding with the Great Satan, the United States of America. He would be famous. He explained that he would be well guarded as he made this journey.
They stopped the tape at regular intervals to let her translate into English. Ali proudly said that the money that would come to his family would help them buy a new home. How painfully obvious the look in his face was to Nova, as he smiled at his loved ones, that this money for his family was his great concern. Much more important than the words of glory he was reciting. And finally, he said that his family should not grieve even though, in the end, the journey would take his own life.
“Allahu Akbar,” he said, his tone triumphant, his eyes bright with youth. “God is great,” she translated. These were the first words a Muslim child hears upon entering this world, the father making the call to prayer in the child’s ears as the welcome-to-this-world message. The same call heard wherever there are Muslims, five times a day. The last words his family would ever hear from him.
Nova felt sick. She stood and went into the kitchen and, loath to use any utensils anyone in this house had used, cupped her palm to take a long drink from the tap. So this was the face of the carrier, not the coward of middle age, al Hassan.
She walked back into the living room and to Hassan. In Italian, she said to him, “I cannot tell you how much I loathe you old men who send young men to die and to kill others.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about, woman.”
She turned away. She checked her watch, now showing six-thirty. “Looks like you and your guys can take off all that gear,” she said to Alonza in English. “I’d bet Mr. Creep here took the same vaccine Joe and I and Cesare have taken and he took it hours ago. He’s not the carrier, and he’s also not infected.”
“I agree,” Cesare said.
Joe said, “It’s half past six. My guess is that this Ali Yassan probably injected early this morning, as well. In which case, he’d be fully lethal right now. The question is, where is he?”
Alonza strode to the dining room table where the SISMI team had spread out items found in the house in neat order for cataloguing. “Take a look at this,” he said.
She, Joe, and Cesare joined him. He held a crumpled brochure, now smoothed out again, that looked as if it had been retrieved from a wastebasket, an advertisement for a rock concert starring the dark, edgy, duster-coat-wearing rock band Doomsday. It was to be held in Rome, outside the Coliseum, this very evening. Time, 20:00. Eight o’clock.
“Well, well,” she said.
Joe added, “I can’t imagine a much better, or more symbolic, opportunity to infect as many Italians and spread the disease any faster than attending a rock concert by a group like Doomsday.”
Terrorists like Al Qaeda loved symbolism. The tragic attack on the Spanish train had come on 3/11, two years and six months exactly after the infamous 9/11 attacks in America. They would love the symbolism of a rock band with a name like Doomsday, and had probably picked the Coliseum event precisely because of the band’s ominous name.
Cesare pointed to several badly copied white sheets. “Look at the train schedules. See, this one has a pencil mark beside Rome. I would say that they are making for the city by train. Let’s see. If they left the house at three-thirty, they might have been in Naples to catch the direct Eurostar for Rome at five-thirty or six. Not sooner than that. But in any event, they may possibly already be in Rome.”
Nova could not stop the thought of all the people that Ali Yassan had already doomed as he traveled to Naples, and then to the capital. “You have to tell Provenza, right now, to quarantine all of Italy,” she said to Cesare. “Panic or not, you guys can’t let this goddamn germ escape this peninsula.”
She strode back into the kitchen and punched in Star’s number. Mercifully, Star answered.
“It’s me. Nova. I’ve left you message after message.”
“We just got back from dinner at the Isthmus. I haven’t picked up my messages yet.”
“Star, where—exactly where—in Italy, is Maggie? Don’t I remember you saying that they were going north? Portofino?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t want to alarm you excessively. But I am in Italy now. I’m on a tour and we have a tour member who is…who is a government insider. And he tells me that something really bad is going to happen here soon. I can’t say just what at the moment. You just have to trust me, okay? You have to call the Robertsons and tell them to cut short their trip immediately.”
“What in the world are you talking about?”
“Listen to me, Star. I don’t mean they should cancel their trip tomorrow. I mean you must call them as soon as we stop speaking. And you must tell them to go immediately to the nearest airport and buy tickets, no matter what the cost, and leave Italy. Frankly, they should not stop to pack.”
A dead, eerie silence fell between them.
Finally, from half a world away, “You are scaring me shitless, Nova.”
“I’m sorry. It’s important that you must believe I know what I’m asking, and that it’s every bit as important as I say it is. Do you believe me?”
“You’ve seldom been wrong, except about men.” Star chuckled, not very strongly.
“Will you do what I ask and then call me back when you have reached them? I don’t want to spend time talking. Time is too valuable.”
“I will do exactly as you say. It may take some heavy-duty convincing.”
“Convince them, Star. You must.”
“I’ll do what you say, love.”
“Then I’m hanging up. I love you. And I adore Maggie.”
She hung up.
When she entered the living room, Cesare looked at her with narrowed eyes. “Who did you call?” he asked. “You know that this information is classified.”
Joe said, “Did you reach her?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
“I want to know what’s going on,” Cesare said, his lips drawn into thin lines, his eyes snapping anger.
“Okay, I called my sister in California to tell her to make my niece fly out of Italy ASAP.”
Cesare’s face softened immediately. “You have a niece here. I’m sorry. I have an entire family here. And I called them while you and Joe were off catching the creep, as you c
all him. We say no more.”
Alonza joined them from the bedroom. He’d taken off the HAZMAT suit.
“Provenza informs me that this is our status as of now,” Cesare said. “The Centers for Disease Control immediately got in gear when they learned that the likely bug was Reston Ebola, and they already have a vaccine against the Reston strain on its way to us. Twenty or thirty doses. But it’s like the Salk versus the Sabine vaccines for polio. There can be more than one way to induce immunity to these things, so the vaccine may not be the same as what we’ve taken. CDC has a limited quantity, but something is probably better than nothing. The first batches should arrive late this afternoon. But the unfortunate truth is that a vaccine is going to come too late to be of much help. This thing is loose now. It’s tragic there is no antidote, no antibiotic pill or injection that would cure the disease. What we have to do is stop the carrier and contain the spread.
“Our biggest problem perhaps is that we’re not certain it really is the Reston strain. Or, for that matter, that it’s Ebola. We’re going on the words an informant overheard outside a window. Until we analyze the samples that Nova gave me, that seems the logical choice. The informant said Ebola and he said ‘Rexton.’ Reston is airborne. It all fits.
“The virus had to have gotten into their hands some time ago. We may never learn where it came from, although CDC is running down possible sources for a Reston leak.
“For now, everyone but us who contacts this carrier has either got to wear a HAZMAT suit or be willing to commit suicide. So we—you and Joe and I, Nova—are going to be taken to Rome by helicopter. We are to find and then apprehend, or even better, kill this Ali Yassan.” He turned to Alonza. “Let’s get to the van. You can drive us to the airport.”
Chapter 31
On the helicopter trip into Rome Nova obsessed about Maggie, expecting to hear from Star at any moment. She found herself several times nervously fingering her gold studs. If Star didn’t call, it meant that she had not yet reached the Robertsons and Maggie. The silence kept Nova’s gut tightly twisted.
Cesare seemed jittery as well. With deep tenderness, he’d entrusted Principessa to a Positano cop with instructions to take the little Lhasa apso to the contessa for safekeeping until he returned. He kept twisting one or another of his four rings.
The helicopter swung over the great city that had been the center of the world for nearly two millennia, first as Imperial Rome and later as the Holy Roman Empire. The spectacular view of brightly lit monuments even penetrated her fog of worry: St. Peter’s Basilica, the Castel Sant’Angelo, The Spanish Steps, the Vittorio Emmanuele Monument, and only, blocks from it, she could see their goal, the Coliseum.
To mark the site of the concert, two searchlights shot beams of dazzling white light into the sky from the piazza just outside the Coliseum, next to the Arch of Constantine.
The helicopter landed on the top of an office building not far from the Vittorio Emmanuele, probably the closest landing pad to the Coliseum. She knew this area of Rome intimately. On her last trip to Italy, she’d spent two weeks in the Eternal City and her hotel had been in this district between the Coliseum and the Central Train Station. Her feet had pounded these streets as she researched their nooks and crannies for many pleasurable hours.
Provenza, the Sicilian who reminded her of an Olympic wrestler, met them. Though still nattily dressed, bags under his eyes suggested lack of sleep and plenty of worry. His dark brown hair looked messed, and his sharp, unpleasant body odor hit her like a brick to the face.
They ran inside the building and down one floor into the spacious hallway of what were probably top-floor offices of someone highly important. Joe handed over the videotape. Provenza said, “We’ll have Yassan’s face on every news broadcast within the hour. I will e-mail one to both of your cell phones.”
She asked, “What will the public be hearing?”
Provenza shook his head. “They are going to be told that this man is highly dangerous. That he is not to be approached under any circumstances, but that his presence should be reported immediately to the nearest authorities.”
Cesare said, “So no one is being told he’s sick?”
“Not now. Not yet. Everyone still thinks they can avoid panic, or at least they want to try to avoid panic as long as possible.”
“What about quarantine?” Nova asked. “The minute you stop travel, people are going to panic. It’s unavoidable. But a quarantine is essential.”
“All flights in and out of southern Italy have been cancelled. The explanation is that something dire went wrong with the air traffic control system in this part of the country and flights will be resumed when it’s fixed. We are also quietly shutting down any sailings.”
In truth, she thought they should cancel all flights throughout the peninsula. But maybe if the north was still open, Maggie could get out. “How long will flights be allowed in the north?”
“Two more hours. Roughly the time it might take Yassin or someone he has contacted to reach the northern regions. Fortunately it’s night. There’s not much traffic of any kind now and it will rapidly drop off even more after twenty-two hundred. The border in the north has been shut down and people there are being detained—to keep them from talking with the media.”
“If it were me,” she said, “I’d be honest and tell these people what they’re facing, and tell them to go into their homes for the next ten or twenty days and not come out.”
“Well,” Provenza said dryly, “it isn’t up to you. Or to me.”
Joe said, “There’s no way to keep this bottled up very long.”
An elevator arrived and the four of them stepped in. Provenza hit the button for the ground floor. “I quite agree. But how the politicians decide to handle the public isn’t our problem. Our problem is to find and stop this bastard. And although it’s not what I would do, the decision as to how to proceed is a political one, and the decision is for us to keep HAZMAT teams, SISMI, special ops or whatever, from public view as much as possible.”
They arrived at the ground floor. Provenza led the way through the lobby, still explaining. “We have a SISMI HAZMAT-equipped van outside. It will take you to the Coliseum. The two men are wearing suits and have been instructed to stay inside. They will drive you wherever you need to go, but that’s their limit.”
Joe said, “Did you get me the XMSatTV player?” He’d called during the trip up from Positano and asked for Provenza to get him one of the palm-sized satellite TV players.
Provenza pulled it out of his suit pocket and handed it over. Joe punched and BBC News came up on the tiny screen.
“Why do you want it?” Provenza asked.
Joe slipped the player into his jacket pocket. “I want to know what the public is being told in real time, and I don’t want to have to call you to find out.”
At the door leading out, Provenza stopped again. “Now here’s how it’s going down. We’re not stopping the concert because no one can be certain that’s where these men are headed. The decision is again political, not practical. We have three take-out teams—shooter and spotter—already in place in buildings overlooking the piazza there. We also are still letting people into the concert area after the usual search, but no one is going to be able to leave. They will be quarantined. Between them, the take-out teams cover virtually the whole area. They only need to get a fix on the target to hit him. They’re instructed to shoot to kill. You’ll be in touch with them—headsets for each of you are in the van. Your job is to infiltrate the crowd and act as additional spotters. When they take out the target, two of you should protect the crowd from the body while the third gets a HAZMAT suit from the van. Wrestle the body into the HAZMAT body bag, and get it out of there with dispatch.”
“Understood,” Joe said. Nova nodded, as did Cesare.
Provenza opened the door and they strode to the van.
Joe opened the driver’s door. “You guys get in back,” he said to the SISMI men. “You look scary as hell
.” To Nova, he said, “You want to drive? I’d like to watch the TV.”
“Fine. I know these streets.”
The two SISMI men moved into the back of the van and Cesare joined them.
Provenza had also provided special IDs to get them past any security personnel plus small, high-powered binoculars, shoulder holsters and Glock automatics. She and Joe flipped their jackets open, indicating they already had their weapons. Cesare took one. Nova slipped a couple of extra ammo clips into the khaki jacket pocket. Joe was also wearing a dark brown jacket that did a good job of hiding bulges.
Seeing Cesare wearing a shoulder holster under his elegant white Armani silk jacket would have made her laugh if things weren’t so dire. She just shook her head.
She threaded the van through narrow streets until they reached the Vittorio Emanuele and the broad Via dei Fori Imperiali. She called back to one of the SISMI men, “There isn’t going to be any place to park. I’m going to stop the van at the next corner. One of you come up here and drive it off. Keep circling tightly in the area. We’ll page when we want you to pick us up.”
They hopped out and as the van took off, she tried her special ops headphone: “Ground One to Team Alpha. Do you read?” she said in Italian to establish that she was connected with the take-out teams.
“This is Alpha Team leader. We read you fine, Ground One,” came the reply, also in Italian. They would stick to Italian, and she could hear clearly, even over the din of the warm-up band.
She checked out the other two take-out teams, Beta and Gamma. She was firmly connected to them, to Joe and to Cesare.
A crowd of mostly young, tattooed, nose-ringed, black leather-clad revelers packed the street leading to the concert site. For the occasion, the street had been blocked off to traffic. She, Joe and Cesare joined the throng, the whole mass moving nearly shoulder to shoulder.
There is no way we can find Yassin in this mob.
She checked her watch. Seven thirty-five. If Ahmad al Hassan had told Ya Lin the truth, she, Joe and Cesare were now fully immune.
