by Cindy Dees
It was morning back in the States. A secretary took her call with a melodious, “Good morning, this is Doctors Unlimited. How my I direct your call?”
“I need to speak with André Fortinay. This is Piper Roth.”
“Oh, hi, Piper. How’s Africa?” the woman responded.
“Hot. And getting hotter by the second.”
The receptionist must have heard the tension in her voice because she said quickly, “Let me ring you through. Just a sec, sweetie.”
“Hello, Miss Roth. What can I do for you?” Her boss, the head of Doctors Unlimited, was originally from France and a faint hint of his Parisian roots lingered in his vowels.
“I need you to run down a guy named Mike McCloud. Find out who he works for. He claims to be military intelligence.”
“I have no need to run him down. He is Katie’s McCloud’s brother, and he is, indeed, with Naval Intelligence.”
Of course. McCloud. She should have associated the name with her colleague, Katie McCloud, at Doctors Unlimited. Katie was a translator of some kind and worked exclusively with one of the organization’s doctors: a genius of a guy named Alex Peters.
“Assuming the man calling himself McCloud is actually the real Michael McCloud,” André commented.
Good point. “I don’t have a picture of my McCloud,” she admitted. “He’s tall. About six-foot-two. Built like an athlete. Brown hair sun bleached almost blond. Hazel eyes. Good looking guy.”
“That sounds like Michael.”
“How about you send me a picture of the real Mike McCloud?”
“Let me give his sister a call. I’m sure she has one she could send me.”
“Thanks.”
“How’s the rest of your project coming over there? Immunizing lots of kids?”
“It’s an uphill battle to convince the religious conservatives to let me do it, but I’m making progress. The local women have turned out to be surprisingly supportive.”
“Keep plugging away. It’s important work you’re doing.”
Which was to say, she still was a go to track down the PHP guys and find out what they were up to. Which meant getting back her freaking evidence. She was grateful for the lack of a secure phone connection so she couldn’t confess to André what a screw-up she’d turned out to be on her first op to an international hot spot.
Please God, let Mike be the real McCloud. She was so hosed if he wasn’t. Not to mention, her shot at figuring out what the PHP guys were up to would be lost.
Piper waited impatiently for the picture of McCloud to come through on her email, nearly a full hour of nail-biting nerves. At long last, her phone dinged an incoming message. Please be him. She hit the mail button and Mike’s face, smiling and more gorgeous than ought to be legal leaped onto her screen. It was him, all right.
Her fury roared back full force. Lt. Commander Michael McCloud, U.S. Naval intelligence, had stolen her evidence. He was totally a dead man.
Nine
Mike rolled over as his phone buzzed him reluctantly awake. God, it felt good to be home in his own bed. The traffic sounds of Washington D.C. outside his window soothed him like nothing else. They were sounds of America. Of safety. Of beer and pizza and football—played with an oblong leather ball, thank you very much.
“Yeah?” he mumbled sleepily into the receiver. Christ. How long had he been out? Jet lag usually wasn’t bad heading from east to west, but the non-stop flight home from Djibouti to D.C. had kicked his ass.
“Hey, M&M. Rise and shine. The Old Man wants to see you in his office. Now.”
M&M. His SEAL handle and unofficial nickname among his old buddies. And the “Old Man” was the moniker reserved for unit commanders. He was abruptly quite a bit more awake. “Any idea why the admiral wants to see me?” There were no secrets in the military. Biggest gossip mill on the planet was a military unit.
“Word has it he’s pretty unhappy that you lost your target.”
Mike swore. An ass-reaming awaited him, then. He sighed. “I’ll be in as soon as I can drag myself out of bed and get dressed.”
“Oh, and we’re getting the preliminary data off your flash drive. The brass are shitting cows as we speak.”
Someday, he’d love to see an admiral actually squat down and expel a calf from his or her body. “Kay.” He ran a hand over his face. “I’ll be there in an hour.”
“Make it a half-hour. After the Old Man is done with you, everyone, and I mean everyone, is going to want to talk to you.”
Great. An ass-reaming followed by a tactical, nuclear brain-picking. Debriefings from desk-jockey, intel analysts with no field experience made him flat crazy.
He rolled out of bed and forced himself to race through showering, shaving, and dressing. He picked a freshly dry-cleaned and pressed pair of khakis and black polo shirt. He supposed he could dig out an actual uniform and button himself into it, but civvies were an authorized uniform for him, and they’d fucking woke him up on his first day home. A day he was supposed to get off to rest and recuperate.
He drove downtown and paused to take a deep breath and reinforce his poker face before stepping into the admiral’s, office.
The butt chewing went about like he expected. His boss was rip-snorting mad that Mike had lost the Scientist. The admiral understood that a fellow American intel operative had been inside a burning house, but Mike should have let her die and kept eyes on the Scientist.
Intellectually, Mike got it. But something deep in his gut rebelled at the notion of letting Piper die, no matter if it would have been in the line of duty. A quiet little alarm bell started to ring in the back of his mind. Since when did he choose a girl over the mission?
He was the job. Always. He never did long-term relationships. At least, not the kind with real emotions. What the hell had she done to him? He had no time to consider it further; the shouting admiral in front of him effectively distracted him.
His boss finished the mother of all ass chewings with, “At least you brought out actionable intel.” The way the admiral said it made it clear that the evidence Mike had brought out of the burning house was the only thing that had saved his career from a hard flush down the toilet.
“Are we clear on what’s expected of you in the future, Commander McCloud?”
“Yes, sir. Crystal clear.”
“All right, then. You’re due in the virtual meeting room for debriefing in ten minutes. Get down there and help them find the Scientist that you lost.”
Translation: fix the mess you made…or else.
Message received, loud and clear. Disgusted with himself for screwing up so royally, and furthermore for letting a woman mess him up so completely, Mike stepped into a big conference room decked out with the latest electronic bells and whistles. It was tucked into an innocuous office amid all the other innocuous offices in the building.
He looked around at the assembled group and allowed himself a moment of being impressed. Top analysts from Naval Intelligence, plus hot thinkers from DIA, CIA, NSA, and a couple of other alphabet agencies were here. Wow. They’d called in the big guns on this one. What had been on that thumb drive, anyway?
Guess Piper hadn’t been nuts, after all, to insist on waiting for the data to load before they bugged out of that burning building. He might have felt bad about lifting the evidence from her room back in Djibouti, except a) she owed him one after nearly destroying his career with her stunt, and b) she wasn’t read in on the Scientist, and he didn’t have permission to brief her on who the guy was and what he was potentially up to.
For all he knew, she barely had the minimum security clearance to be in Sudan, at all. She was technically a one each, aid worker only qualified to administer immunizations and vitamin shots, for God’s sake. It took a hell of a lot higher clearance than some glorified grain passer had to be privy to the terrorist shit he was trying to track and stop.
“Commander McCloud, thank you for joining us.” His boss’s boss, an Army general sporting a bunch of s
tars on his shoulders, continued pleasantly, “We’d like to discuss the information you brought us last night.” The general gestured at a chair partway down the long conference table.
Everyone looked at him expectantly as he sank into the indicated chair, and he had no idea what they were waiting for him to say. He muttered, “Any chance the cyber-beings in charge around here can produce a cup of coffee for me?”
In about ten seconds, an assistant to someone set a steaming mug of black, caffeine alertness in front of him. He sipped it appreciatively. The tiny cups of espresso-on-steroids they drank in North Africa packed a punch but got old after a while. He looked up. They were still staring.
“What, umm, exactly, was on the thumb drive?” he ventured to ask.
One of the analysts answered, “Scientific data. The research notes of a brilliant mind, detailing the development of an engineered virus.”
A flash in his head of dead girls piled in body bags sent a wave of nausea coursing through him. Jesus. He shouldn’t drink coffee on an empty stomach. He reached for one of the stale donuts on a platter in front of him.
The entire wall at the end of the room lit up with what looked like lines of computer code. They might as well be in Latin for all he understood them. He would take the analysts at their word that those were the Scientist’s research notes.
“Where did you find this stuff?” a youngish man asked from the other end of the table. “How recent is it?”
“Miss Roth and I found it—“he checked his watch and did the math in his head, “forty-six hours ago in a basement lab in South Sudan. I witnessed a man I believe to be the Scientist and a little girl departing the house in question. They appeared to have packed bags and be leaving on a trip of some kind. And given that the house burned down shortly after his departure, I conclude that they did not intend to return.”
The youngish guy swore. “The Scientist could be anywhere by now. You should have gotten this information back to us faster.”
“So sorry,” Mike retorted sarcastically. “I was busy not burning to death, avoiding being shot by gunmen, and getting across the Sudan border zone alive. Silly me for not stopping the whole evading death thing long enough to fire the files off to you experts.”
The civilian analyst glared and Mike glared back. CIA shithead.
Mike’s boss, the admiral, broke up the glaring match smoothly. “Tell us anything you can about this lab you found and your sighting of the Scientist.”
“I got a tip that the guy I’d been looking for had headed south out of K-town.” He glanced down the table at the CIA twink and added in a tone as dry as dust, “That’s short for Khartoum.” The guy rolled his eyes and Mike allowed himself a tight smile before continuing, “My informant gave me a description of where to find the Scientist and his patients.”
“Who was your informant?” one of the military guys asked. The man held a pen posed over a pad of paper preparatory to taking methodical notes. Mike had been debriefed by him before. The man would question him into the ground and chase down every last detail Mike could dredge out of his memory. The guy was as boring as hell, but a great debriefer.
“A local. Named Mala. Her information always was good.”
The CIA boy analyst interjected impatiently, “What was the condition of the Scientist’s patients? Did you examine any of them in person?”
“They were in a pile of body bags in the basement. I did not examine them, but in my completely amateur estimation, they were fucking dead.”
“Mike,” The Army general intervened. “This thing is highly time sensitive. The information you brought us indicates that the Scientist has completed development of a potentially lethal virus appropriate for a biological attack. We need to figure out if he finished his work and what his next move will be if he did. We thought it would be faster if all the involved agencies debriefed you together. If you could start at the beginning and tell us everything, that would expedite matters.”
“Yes, sir.” He set aside his irritation and walked them all through his observation mission in Sudan. He left out the juicier details of his encounters with Piper, of course.
The group interrupted with frequent questions, and he schooled himself to patience as they wrung him out like a wet washcloth for every bit of intel he could produce.
Mike was surprised after he’d made a casual mention of Piper’s courage and outstanding marksmanship, though, when a guy with a French accent down the table claimed her as his employee. So. She did work for Doctors Unlimited, for real. Good to know. His baby sister and her fiancé worked for that bunch, too. From them, Mike knew it to be a CIA front. Although not all of the D.U. employees were on the CIA payroll or even trained by the CIA. Often, D.U.’s regular aid workers passively gathered intel that the organization’s director passed quietly to the CIA.
But, given the way Piper could handle a rifle and the explosiveness of the targets she’d been tracking, he would bet she was one of the workers in the know.
When he got to the part about photographing the bodies, he pulled out his cell phone. “That reminds me. Piper had me take pictures of them with my cell phone. They won’t be high quality, but maybe you guys can pull something useful from them.” He passed his phone to a tech who scuttled forward to take it and left the room quickly.
Finally, he wound down and the rapid fire questions ceased. His voice was hoarse and his brain exhausted. He’d been through some grueling debriefs in his day, but this one had been a bitch. Everyone was so damned tense that he didn’t need them to spell out just how dangerous this virus was.
The fact that he’d seen the Scientist load three big coolers in his vehicle made it a no-brainer to conclude that guy had not only perfected his virus but created a lot of it. A lethal biological weapon was apparently floating around, somewhere, just waiting to be loosed on some unsuspecting population.
While they waited for the photographs to be recovered, enhanced, and printed, the general filled him in a little. “Until last year’s big Ebola outbreak, previous outbreaks had always been confined to relatively small populations and tended to cluster in small, isolated villages. A few dozen cases of the disease at a time were the norm. This provided the Ebola virus extremely few opportunities to mutate.” The general paused to see that Mike was following.
He nodded, and the man continued, “But with this latest outbreak, thousands of cases of the disease gave the virus plenty of opportunity to mutate.”
Mike leaned forward, alarmed. “Did the notes say how it changed?”
The Army man nodded grimly. “It changed enough that the Scientist was able to cross-breed the latest strain of Ebola virus with another hemorrhagic virus, Lassa Fever.”
“Why cross it with something else? Isn’t Lassa a lot less dangerous than Ebola? If the guy’s looking to make a weapon, why go down in lethality and not up?”
One of the analysts down the table fielded his question. “From his notes, it appears that the Scientist was able to graft all the lethality of Ebola onto a hybrid virus along with all the spread vectors of Lassa.”
Mike opened his mouth to ask what that meant, but the tech who’d taken his phone slipped back into the room just then. The guy said without having to be asked, “We were able to enhance the images. Not only did we get the bodies, but the other images you shot, the ones of the Scientist, came out very nicely. We pulled a usable face to run through the facial recognition software.” He paused dramatically for a moment, then announced, “We got an I.D. We’ve got the Scientist.”
A familiar face flashed up on the jumbo screen, and Mike confirmed, “That’s the guy I saw moving the coolers.”
The tech continued, “Name’s Yusef Abahdi. Palestinian expat. Wife was killed a little over a year ago in a bus explosion on the West Bank. Abahdi left Israel with his young daughter soon afterward and disappeared from the grid. Until this photograph two days ago.”
An analyst he didn’t know, an attractive woman down the table, piped up. �
��Tell us more about the child, Mr. McCloud.”
Mike frowned. “Scrawny little thing. Six or seven, maybe. Slept in a cot in her father’s room. But then, that bedroom had the only air-conditioner upstairs. They were undoubtedly sharing it. Abahdi seemed affectionate with her. Handled her gently when he put her in the vehicle. Buckled her seatbelt for her. Assuming that’s his kid, I’d say he’s a loving father.”
A tech, still staring at the laptop he’d just been typing at furiously, supplied, “Her name is Salima. She’s his daughter with his dead wife. Just turned eight years old.”
“Have we picked up a trail on him?” the general asked the typist.
“Not yet, sir.”
Mike snorted mentally. An optimistic answer. The tech was assuming it was only a matter of time until the Feds found him. In his experience, guys as smart as this Abahdi character weren’t that easy to find if they didn’t want to be. Case in point, Osama bin Laden. It took ten years to find that bastard. If Mike were king, he would follow the money trail to find the Scientist.
The CIA shithead spoke up again. “Our operative is back in town and has given us her report.”
A sick, sinking certainty that the guy was talking about Piper landed heavily in his gut. He winced. He’d hoped to avoid seeing her again until she had some time to cool off. She was going to be right tweaked that he’d swiped her evidence. But if she was already back in town, she would undoubtedly be fired up to find him and confront him over his liberation of her collected evidence.
He might feel guiltier about the theft if she hadn’t hosed his career by dashing into that damned burning house, or if he hadn’t just endured a hardcore chewing out from his boss over choosing her instead of the Scientist.
But hey, during the debrief he’d given her credit for collecting the evidence and for insisting on staying inside a burning building until she got what she needed. She had come out of the debrief smelling like a rose, compliments of him. Not that she would see it that way, if he knew her.
The shithead continued, “She has already been debriefed in house and as soon as her report is compiled, we’ll share it with all of you.”
