The blanket was still locked in her partly burnt hand, protecting it from the worst of the flames when the Saracen used the horses to drag her into the pit. Another hour and the quicklime would have destroyed it completely.
Worried now, and forced to acknowledge it might not be a kidnapping at all – instantly rehabilitating Keating’s reputation and career prospects – the NBC team and their supervisors greatly accelerated the workrate. Their first task was to discover exactly what they were dealing with, so they sealed the small square of blanket into an airtight bio-hazard container, secured it within another lead receptacle and sent it, first by helicopter and then on a special overnight jet, to Fort Detrick in Maryland.
Chapter Forty-three
FORT DETRICK, PART of the United States Army Medical Command, is made up of a collection of buildings and campuses set on twelve hundred high-security acres just outside the town of Frederick.
One of the largest of the campuses houses the nation’s leading biological-warfare agency – the Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, an organization so steeped in secrecy that a number of conspiracy theorists have claimed that it was the lab where the government created HIV.
If they were right, perhaps the long, low building not far from what used to be known as Anthrax Tower was also where NASA staged the moon landing. Nobody knows, because very few people, not even those with security clearances as high as mine, have ever been allowed on to the site.
It was at one of the facility’s bio-safety labs that the sealed box from Afghanistan arrived on a Sunday morning. Because nobody at the Overlook hotel knew what they were dealing with, it hadn’t been marked as top priority.
For that reason, it was placed in a queue and wasn’t opened until just after 9 p.m. By then, the only microbiologist working was a guy in his forties called Walter Drax – a petty, resentful man who was happy to work the graveyard shift because it meant he didn’t have to put up with what he called the assholes and knuckle-draggers. In his mind, the A&Ks were a large cohort, one that included most of his co-workers and certainly everyone in management – the people who, he believed, had blocked every possibility of promotion and the higher pay it provided.
Working alone under what are called Biosafety Level Four conditions, in a lab kept at negative air pressure, wearing a suit not dissimilar to the Saracen’s, his air regulator connected to an overhead supply, he unsealed the box in a special cabinet, removed the small piece of saddle cloth and prepared it for analysis.
Peering at the screen of his electron microscope, he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Heart racing, sweating hard inside the bio-safety suit, he checked it three times – even changing out the microscope and going back to his work station and consulting the relevant literature and the institute’s classified manuals – before he was convinced.
He was looking at Variola major. Instinctively, he knew that it was a very hot strain, but what really terrified him was what he saw when he looked deep into the knot of DNA at the centre of it: it had been genetically engineered. He had no doubt that it was a weaponized, military strain of the pathogen – a no-holds-barred weapon of mass destruction.
By unpicking the DNA knot and comparing the images in the manuals with what he could see through the microscope, he quickly learned that somebody had inserted a specific gene into it. There was only one reason he could think of why somebody would do that: the virus had been constructed to be vaccine-evasive.
If it worked – and Drax could see no reason why it wouldn’t – nobody in the world, not even the Nazis with their cattle cars and canisters of Zyklon-B gas, would ever have been in possession of a more efficient killer.
The normal procedure in such an event – if anything in such circumstances could ever be considered normal – was for Drax to phone his duty supervisor at home and inform him of what he had found. But Drax didn’t want to do that. He was damned if he was going to give any of the A&Ks a place in the institute’s history – that celebrityhood – that he knew the discovery of weaponized smallpox would entail.
I mean, he told himself, the whole place still talks about the guys who found the Ebola virus in a damn monkey.
Instead, he decided to make an end-run around them all and speak to his cousin. He didn’t like her much either, but she was married to a special assistant at the National Security Council – a man who Drax privately called Lip Gloss, given how smooth he was at sucking up to his superiors.
When he got him on the line, Drax – without explaining anything about the small square of saddle blanket – said he needed to speak to the highest-ranking member of the US intelligence community he could contact this late on a Sunday night. Lip Gloss laughed and said things didn’t work that way and he’d better tell him what it was all about and, anyway, what was wrong with his own superiors, and surely they had a protocol in place—
Drax wasn’t in any mood for delay. ‘Oh, sorry,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you need some directions to Shut-Up Village. There’s a secure line directly into the lab. Now do it – get somebody to call me, it’s a national emergency.’
He hung up before Lip Gloss could reply and then sat down to wait. He hadn’t felt so good in years.
It was the phrase ‘national emergency’ and the fact that Drax worked for the pre-eminent bio-defence laboratory which convinced Lip Gloss to call the Deputy Director of National Intelligence, a man whom he knew well because their teenage sons played baseball on the same team.
As a result, it was the deputy director who called Drax and listened with avalanching dismay as the technician told him about the piece of material that had arrived from Afghanistan and the different types of smallpox.
‘Given the panic something like this would cause, I wanted as few people as possible to know – I thought it best to try and go straight to the top,’ Drax told him.
The deputy director congratulated him on his foresight, told him to speak to nobody and to sit tight until he called back. The deputy director, however, had one immediate and overwhelming problem: was Drax telling the truth? Hadn’t it been a scientist in the same unit at Fort Detrick who had been suspected of manufacturing anthrax and sending it through the post to several US senators? On the other hand, while the guy he had been speaking to on the secure line certainly sounded like a nightmare, that didn’t necessarily mean he was a Fort Detrick nut-job.
He called the head of the institute, a high-ranking military officer and a well-respected scientist in his own right, swore him to secrecy, explained what he had been told and asked him – no, ordered him – to get to the lab immediately to confirm the provenance of the sample and examine Drax’s findings.
Forty minutes later, sitting in front of Drax’s electron microscope, the head of the institute called back and gave the deputy director the news the guy had been dreading. Now the machinery of government, and the sense of panic, started to go into overdrive. All that occurred while only two people at the nation’s huge bio-defence facility – the organization that should have been at the epicentre of events – had any idea what was actually happening. As far as end-runs went, it was spectacular.
For the rest of us, it was fortuitous – it meant the government at least had a chance of keeping the situation secret. If the Saracen were to learn he was being hunted, he would either go to ground immediately or accelerate his plans. Maintaining secrecy was paramount and, in that regard, the next few hours would be critical …
Chapter Forty-four
THE SECRET HELD. By midnight on that sunday night only nine people in the world – apart from the Saracen – knew the truth. A short time later, even though I had long ago surrendered my badge, I became the tenth.
The first two initiates – Drax and his boss – were at the army’s Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. The third was the Deputy Director of National Intelligence. Once he had confirmed the truth of what he had been told, he made an urgent phone call and the head of his department – the Director of National Intelligence – bec
ame the fourth.
The director, no grey bureaucrat, was steeped in the history and practice of the sprawling intelligence community: he had started his career at the National Security Agency, analysing photos of Soviet military installations taken by U2 overflights, and had then moved into covert operations with the CIA. Thanks to his dark history of targeted killings in that section and the fact that he was the most softly spoken person ever to work in Washington, he was given a nickname, which had followed him throughout his storied career. Whispering Death was what they called him.
He phoned the president, asleep in his bedroom in the family quarters on the second floor of the White House, and waited a moment while the commander-in-chief shook the sleep out of his brain and moved into the study next door. It was past 11 p.m. by then.
The president had been widowed for the past seven years and he didn’t move into the adjoining room for fear of waking anyone; he had lived a monastic life since his wife had passed and he slept alone. No, he wanted to buy himself a little time to grab a robe from the back of the door. He could tell from the time of the call and the tone of Whispering Death’s voice that something huge had happened, and he didn’t want the damned New York Times reporting that he was lying in bed in his underpants when he heard.
Sitting at his desk, the president listened as Whisperer told him that a sample of live smallpox had been recovered from an abandoned village in Afghanistan, that it wasn’t just ordinary smallpox, it appeared to have been engineered to crash through the vaccine, that the genetic analysis indicated it had been made from individual components that were readily available throughout the world, that the virus appeared to have undergone a dry-gulch clinical trial in the Hindu Kush mountains, that three innocent people were dead, and the only suspect, a person who nobody knew anything about, had escaped and undoubtedly vanished into one of the nearby Arab nations, which had a combined population of about four hundred million people. In short, they were facing a potential catastrophe.
It was in those circumstances that the president – who was very pleased he had put on his robe – became the fifth person to know the secret.
Neither he nor the Director of Intelligence had any doubt – not then or in any of the weeks that followed – that America was the target. With a sinking heart and growing anger, the president asked the director how long he thought they had before an attack was launched.
‘I don’t know,’ Whispering Death replied. ‘All I can tell you is that somebody – or some group – appears to have synthesized it and now has good reason to believe that it works. Why would they delay?’
‘I understand,’ the president said coldly, ‘but you’re the Director of National Intelligence, I need some sort of time frame – a best guess, anything.’
‘How would I know? Damn soon, that’s all I can say.’ It was a small blessing that the White House recording system extended to the president’s private study – it meant that there was now a historical record of the only time Whispering Death had ever been known to raise his voice.
He told the president he was about to call for a car and would be at the White House in twenty minutes. He rang off and sat in contemplation for a moment. In the long silence of his fear, he couldn’t help thinking that Fort Detrick had once again lived up to its nickname – Fort Doom.
Chapter Forty-five
AS THE GOVERNMENT car sped through the deserted streets towards the White House, Whispering Death sat in the secure cocoon at the back, the thick glass privacy screen raised and made a series of phone calls. The first one was to order the immediate arrest of Walter Drax. Even the most cursory glance at the guy’s human-resources file showed he was a man with too much anger, a loose cannon who could never be trusted not to talk or boast.
A few minutes later, six men in three black SUVs gained access to the institute’s campus, were met by several of the on-site security guards and walked into Drax’s lab. With pistols clearly visible under their jackets, they told the institute’s director to return to his office, flashed Drax some IDs which may or may not have been genuine FBI shields and told him he was under arrest on suspicion of espionage. Drax, looking completely flustered, told them he had no idea what they were talking about – he was a loyal American, had been all his life. They ignored him, read him his rights and, when he asked to see a lawyer, told him that would be arranged once he had been formally charged. Of course they had no intention of doing that – instead they took him to an airfield just the other side of Frederick where a waiting government jet flew them to a private airstrip in the Black Hills of South Dakota. From there, more government SUVs transported him to a remote ranch house and the bleak rooms it contained.
Ironically, in one of those strange coincidences that life sometimes throws up, it was the same house that I had been taken to after I had killed the Rider of the Blue – appropriated and put to a similar use by other members of the intelligence community after The Division was disbanded. Like myself so many years before, Drax and his secret were now lost to the world.
The second phone call Whisperer made – well, actually it was three phone calls – was to the ambassadors of Italy, Japan and Holland. He told them with deep regret that he had just learned that their nationals were dead, killed by their kidnappers when they realized troops were closing in. ‘They made a hurried attempt to bury the bodies and we are exhuming the site now,’ he said. ‘Obviously, forensic tests and formal identification will take some time.’ He told them that, for operational reasons, the information had to be kept secret and, while he didn’t say so explicitly, he gave the impression that a hot pursuit was still in progress.
His last call was to the head of the CIA. Offering no explanation, which wasn’t uncommon in the shadow world, he told him to organize to have the men in the NBC suits at the Overlook hotel informed that all tests had come back negative. Because they were no longer needed, they were to return to base immediately. Only after they had left were the CIA’s own operatives to move in, seal the pit and secure the site completely.
By the time he had finished the phone calls – plugging the most obvious means by which the secret might escape – he had entered the gates of the White House.
Chapter Forty-six
THE SURPRISING THING about James Grosvenor was that he was highly intelligent, personable and modest – in other words, a man far removed from the typical politician. Nobody had intended, least of all himself, that he would ever become the President of the United States.
He had been a businessman for nearly all his working life, the major part of it spent taking over distressed manufacturing companies and turning them around. Call him old-fashioned, but he believed in American industry, the skill of American workers and that hardworking men and women deserved a living wage and decent health care. One thing he didn’t believe in was unions – if capital conducted itself properly, there was no need for them. Needless to say, his employees repaid him with their loyalty, and their productivity rates were always among the highest in the country.
The success – and the wealth – that followed his approach allowed him to take over ever larger enterprises and gave him a media profile as a man committed to saving the nation’s industrial base. Phoenix Rising was the name given to the segment about him on 60 Minutes. Shortly after it appeared he was offered the job of Secretary of Commerce and, having enough money and happy to take on a new challenge, he accepted. For a self-made man, government administration and its endless bureaucracy was a revelation, but he was not a man for turning and he made such a success of it that when the Secretary of Health was swept aside in a corruption scandal he moved to that department.
His wife had died from breast cancer and he brought to the department a fierce commitment that hadn’t been seen for years in the musty building on Independence Avenue. He was widely seen as championing the rights of ordinary citizens – much to the anger of the powerful health-care lobby – and that only served to raise his public profile even higher. Two years later h
e was asked to take the second slot on a presidential ticket. The candidate was a woman – the first ever to stand for the highest office on behalf of a major party – and Grosvenor knew that he had been selected to balance the ticket with a strong male presence.
None of his friends expected him to accept, but he and Anne had never had any kids and he found it harder and harder to fill the hole left by her passing. His answer was to work harder and find even greater challenges. Beneath the energetic exterior, he was a sad man – a decent one too.
After two days’ careful thought he accepted but, in the private counsels of his own mind, he didn’t give himself or the candidate much chance of prevailing. Nor did the polls. The country had already elected a black president, but accepting a woman as commander-in-chief just seemed a bridge too far at that stage of the country’s evolution.
Then, while speaking at a rally in Iowa ten weeks before the election the candidate suffered a brain aneurysm. If the images of her crumpling to the stage and suffering a grand seizure weren’t bad enough, the next four days as she lingered on life support while her family kept a bedside vigil were even worse.
Throughout it all, Grosvenor maintained not only his own schedule but undertook the majority of her engagements too, virtually single-handedly keeping the campaign alive. At every opportunity he spoke of how he had handled his own wife’s illness and reminded the audience of what was really important in all their lives – good health, long life, the love of others. For once in a political campaign, it sounded genuine.
He had always been witty, a kind of twinkly, handsome man, and the polls tightened. But the real turning point came on the night the family decided to take the candidate off life support. Grosvenor was at the hospital and, after it was all over, he stepped outside a side door to get some air. Moments later, the candidate’s husband joined him, both of them thinking they were completely unobserved.