“We’re not supposed to believe in breeding over here, Dave,” Tom Davis observed.
“Numbers is numbers, Mr. Davis. Some people have a good nose, some don’t. He doesn’t yet, not really, but he’s sure heading that way.” Cunningham had helped start the Justice Department’s Special Accounting Unit, which specialized in tracking terrorist money. Everyone needed money to operate, and money always left a trail somewhere, but it was often found after the fact more easily than before. Good for investigations, but not as good for active defense.
“Thanks, Dave,” Hendley said in dismissal. “Keep us posted, if you would.”
“Yes, sir.” Cunningham gathered his papers and made his way out.
“You know, he’d be a little more effective if he had a personality,” Davis said fifteen seconds after the door closed.
“Nobody’s perfect, Tom. He’s the best guy they ever had at Justice for this sort of thing. I bet when he fishes, there’s nothing left in the lake after he leaves.”
“No argument here, Gerry.”
“So, this Sali gent might be a banker for the bad guys?”
“It looks like a possibility. Langley and Fort Meade are still in a dither over the current situation,” Hendley went on.
“I’ve seen the paperwork. It’s a whole lot of paper for not much hard data.” In the business of intelligence analysis, you got into the speculation phase too rapidly, the point when experienced analysts started applying fear to existing data, following it to God knew where, trying to read the minds of people who didn’t speak all that much, even to each other. Might there be people out there with anthrax or smallpox in little bottles in their shaving kits? How the hell could you tell? That had been done once to America, but when you got down to it everything had been done once to America, and while it had given the country the confidence that her people could deal with damned near anything, it had also given Americans the realization that bad things could indeed happen here and that those responsible might not always be identifiable. The new President did not convey any assurance that we’d be able to stop or punish such people. That was a major problem in and of itself.
“You know, we’re a victim of our own success,” the former senator said quietly. “We’ve managed to handle every nation-state that ever crossed us, but these invisible bastards who work for their vision of God are harder to identify and track. God is omnipresent. So are His perverted agents.”
“Gerry, my boy, if it was easy, we wouldn’t be here.”
“Tom, thank God I can always count on you for moral support.”
“We live in an imperfect world, you know. There isn’t always enough rain to make the corn grow, and, if there is, sometimes the rivers flood. My father taught me that.”
“I always meant to ask you—how the hell did your family ever end up in goddamned Nebraska?”
“My great-grandfather was a soldier—cavalryman, Ninth Cavalry, black regiment. He didn’t feel like moving back to Georgia when his hitch ran out. He’d spent some time at Fort Crook outside of Omaha, and the dumbass didn’t mind the winters. So, he bought a spread near Seneca and farmed corn. That’s how history started for us Davises.”
“Wasn’t any Ku Klux Klan in Nebraska?”
“No, they stayed in Indiana. Smaller farms there, anyway. My great-grandfather shot himself some buffalo when he got started. There’s the biggest damned head over the fireplace at home. Damned thing still smells. Dad and my brother mainly hunt longhorn antelope now, the ‘speed-goat,’ they call it at home. Never got to like the taste.”
“What’s your nose say on this new intel, Tom?” Hendley asked.
“I’m not planning to go to New York anytime soon, buddy.”
EAST OF Knoxville, the road divided. I-40 went east. I- 81 went north, and the rented Ford took the latter through the mountains explored by Daniel Boone when the western frontier of America had scarcely stretched out of sight of the Atlantic Ocean. A road sign showed the exit for the home of someone named Davy Crockett. Whoever that was, Abdullah thought, driving downhill through a pretty mountain pass. Finally, at a town named Bristol, they were in Virginia, their final major territorial boundary. About six more hours, he calculated. The land here, in the sunlight, was lush in its greenness, with horse and dairy farms on both sides of the road. Even churches, usually white-painted wooden buildings with crosses atop the steeples. Christians. The country was clearly dominated by them.
Unbelievers.
Enemies.
Targets.
They had their guns in the trunk to deal with them. First, I-81 north to I-64. They’d long since memorized their routing. The other three teams were surely in place now. Des Moines, Colorado Springs, and Sacramento. Each a city large enough to have at least one good shopping mall. Two were provincial capitals. None were major cities, however. All were what they called “Middle America,” where the “good” people lived, where the “ordinary,” “hardworking” Americans made their homes, where they felt safe, far from the great centers of power—and corruption. Few, if any, Jews to be found in those cities. Oh, maybe a few. Jews like to run jewelry stores. Maybe even in the shopping malls. That would be an added bonus, but only something to be scooped up if it accidentally offered itself. Their real objective was to kill ordinary Americans, the ones who considered themselves safe in the womb of ordinary America. They would soon learn that safety in this world was an illusion. They’d learn that the thunderbolt of Allah reached everywhere.
“SO, THIS is it?” Tom Davis asked.
“Yes, it is,” Dr. Pasternak replied. “Be careful. It’s fully loaded. The red tag, you see. The blue one is not charged.”
“What does it deliver?”
“Succinylcholine, a muscle relaxant, essentially a synthetic and more potent form of curare. It shuts down all the muscles, including the diaphragm. You can’t breath, speak, or move. You’re fully awake. It’ll be a miserable death,” the physician added in a cold, distant voice.
“Why is that?” Hendley asked.
“You can’t breathe. Your heart rapidly goes into anoxia, essentially a massive induced heart attack. It won’t feel very good at all.”
“Then what?”
“Well, the onset of symptoms would take about sixty seconds. Thirty seconds more for the full effects of the drug to present themselves. The victim would collapse then, say, ninety seconds after the injection. Breathing stops completely about the same time. The heart is starved for oxygen. It will try to beat, but it’s not delivering any oxygen to the body, or to itself. Heart tissue will die in about two or three minutes—and will be extremely painful as it does so. Unconsciousness will happen at about the three-minute mark unless the victim had been exercising beforehand—in that case, the brain will be highly infused with oxygen. Ordinarily, the brain has about three minutes’ worth of oxygen in it to function without additional oxygen infusion, but at about the three-minute mark—after onset of symptoms, that is; four and a half minutes after being stuck—the victim will lose consciousness. Complete brain death will take another three minutes or so. After that, the succinylcholine will metabolize in the body, even after death. Not entirely, but enough so that only a really sharp pathologist will pick it up on a toxicology scan, and then only if he’s prepped to look for it. The only real trick is to get your test subject in the buttocks.”
“Why there?” Davis asked.
“The drug works just fine with an IM—intramuscular—injection. When people are posted, it’s always faceup so that you can see and remove the organs. They rarely turn the body over. Now, this injection system does leave a mark, but it’s hard to spot under the best of circumstances, and then only if you’re looking at the right area. Even drug addicts—that will be one of the things they check for—don’t inject themselves in the rump. It will appear to be an unexplained heart attack. Those happen every day. Rare, but not at all unknown. Tachycardia can make it happen, for example. The injector pen is a modified insulin pen like the kind T
ype I diabetics use. Your mechanics did a great job of disguising it. You can even write with it, but if you rotate the barrel, it swaps out the pen part for the insulin part. A gas charge in the back of the barrel injects the transfer agent. The victim will probably notice it, like a bee sting but less painful, but inside a minute and a half, he won’t be telling anybody about it. His most likely reaction will be a minor ‘Ouch’ and then rub the spot—if that much. Like a mosquito bite on the neck. You might slap at it, but you don’t call the police.”
Davis held the safe “blue” pen. It was a little bulky, like a third-grader might use on his first official introduction to a ballpoint pen after using thick-barrel pencils and crayons for a couple of years. So, as you approached your subject, you took it out of your coat pocket, and swung it in a reverse stabbing motion, and just kept going. Your backup hitter would watch the subject fall to the sidewalk, maybe even stop to render assistance, then watch the bastard die, and get up and go on his way—well, maybe call an ambulance so that his body could get sent to the hospital and be properly dismantled under medical supervision.
“Tom?”
“I like it, Gerry,” Davis replied. “Doc, how confident are you about this stuff dissipating after the subject goes down for the count?”
“Confident,” Dr. Pasternak answered, and both of his hosts remembered that he was professor of anesthesiology at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. He probably knew his stuff. Besides, they’d trusted him enough to let him in on the secrets of The Campus. It was a little late to stop trusting him now. “It’s just basic biochemistry. Succinylcholine is made up of two acetylcholine molecules. Esterases in the body break the chemical down into acetylcholine fairly rapidly, so it is very likely to be undetectable, even by someone up at Columbia-Presbyterian. The only hard part: to have it done covertly. If you could bring him into a doctor’s office, for example, it would just be a matter of infusing potassium chloride. That would put the heart into fibrillation. When cells die, they give off potassium anyway, and so the relative increase would not be noticed, but the IV mark would be hard to hide. There are a lot of ways to do this. I just had to pick one that is applied relatively conveniently by fairly unskilled people. As a practical matter, a really good pathologist might not be able to determine the exact cause of death—and he would know that he didn’t know, and that would bother him—but that’s only if the body is examined by a really talented guy. Not too many of them around. I mean, the best guy up at Columbia is Rich Richards. He really hates not knowing something. He’s a real intellectual, a problem solver, and genius biochemist in addition to being a superb physician. I asked him about this, and he told me it would be extremely difficult to detect even if he had a heads-up on what to look for. Ordinarily, extraneous factors come into play, the specific biochemistry of the victim’s body, what he’s had to eat or drink, ambient temperature would be a huge factor. On a cold winter day, outside, the esterases might not be able to break down the succinylcholine because of a diminution of chemical processes.”
“So, don’t do a guy in Moscow in January?” Hendley asked. This deep science stuff was troublesome for him, but Pasternak knew his stuff.
The professor smiled. Cruelly. “Correct. Also Minneapolis.”
“Miserable death?” Davis asked.
He nodded. “Decidedly unpleasant.”
“Reversible?”
Pasternak shook his head. “Once the succinylcholine is in the bloodstream, there’s nothing you can do about it... well, theoretically you could put the guy on a ventilator and breathe for him until the drug metabolizes—I’ve seen that done with Pavulon in an OR—but that would be a stretch. Theoretically possible to survive, but very, very unlikely. People have survived being shot right between the eyes, gentlemen, but it’s not exactly common.”
“How hard do you have to hit your target?” Davis asked.
“Not very, just a good poke. Enough to penetrate his clothing. A thick coat might be a problem because of the length of the needle. But ordinary business wear, no problem.”
“Is anyone immune to the drug?” Hendley asked.
“Not to this one, no. That would be one in a billion.”
“No chance he’d make noise?”
“As I explained, it’s like a bee sting at most—more than a mosquito, but not enough to make a man cry out in pain. At most, you’d expect for the victim to be puzzled, maybe to turn around and see what caused it, but your agent will be walking away normally, not running. Under those conditions, without a target to yell at, and since the initial discomfort is transitory, the most likely reaction is to rub the spot and walk on . . . for about, oh, ten yards or so.”
“So, rapid-acting, lethal, and undetectable, right?”
“All of the above,” Dr. Pasternak agreed.
“How do you reload it?” Davis required. Damn, how has CIA not developed something this good? he wondered. Or KGB, for that matter.
“You unscrew the barrel, like this”—he demonstrated—“and take it apart. You use an ordinary syringe to inject a new supply of the drug, and swap out the gas charge. These little gas capsules are the only hard part to manufacture. You toss the used one into a trash can or the gutter—they’re only four millimeters long and two millimeters wide—and reinsert the fresh one. When you screw in the replacement, a little spike in the back of the barrel punctures it and recharges the system. The gas capsules are coated with sticky stuff to make them harder to drop.” And just that fast, the blue one was “hot” except for the absence of succinylcholine. “You want to be careful with the syringe, of course, but you’d have to be pretty stupid to stick yourself. If you cover your man as a diabetic, you can explain away the presence of syringes. There’s an ID card to get insulin refills that works just about anywhere in the world, and diabetes has no outward symptoms.”
“Damn, Doc,” Tom Davis observed. “Anything else you could deliver this way?”
“Botulism toxin is similarly lethal. It’s a neurotoxin; it blocks nerve transmissions, and it causes death by asphyxia, also fairly rapidly, but it’s readily detectable in the blood during a post-, and kind of hard to explain away. It’s available fairly readily around the world, but in microgram doses, because of its use in cosmetic surgery.”
“Docs shoot women in the face with that, don’t they?”
“Only the dumb ones,” Pasternak replied. “It takes wrinkles away, sure, but since it kills the nerves in the face, it also takes away your ability to smile much. That’s not my field, exactly. There are a lot of toxic and lethal chemicals. It’s the combination of rapid action and difficult detectability that made this a problem. Another quick way to kill someone is to use a small knife at the back of the skull, where the spinal cord enters the base of the brain. The trick is getting right behind your victim and then hitting a fairly small target with the knife, and not having the knife jam between the vertebrae—at that range, why not a silenced .22 pistol? It’s fast enough, but it leaves something behind. This method can easily be misdiagnosed as a heart attack. It’s just about perfect,” the physician concluded, in a voice sufficiently cold as to sprinkle snow on the carpet.
“Richard,” Hendley said, “you have earned your fee on this one.”
The professor of anesthesiology stood, checking his watch. “No fee, Senator. This one’s for my little brother. Let me know if you need me for anything else. I have a train to catch back to New York.”
“Jesus,” Tom Davis said, after he left. “I always knew docs had to have evil thoughts.”
Hendley picked up a package on his desk. There were a total of ten “pens” in it, with computer-printed instructions for this use, a plastic bag full of gas capsules, and twenty large vials of succinylcholine, plus a bunch of throwaway syringes. “He and his brother must have been pretty close.”
“Know him?” Davis asked.
“Yeah, I did. Good guy, wife and three kids. Name was Bernard, Harvard Business School graduate, smart gu
y, very astute trader. Worked on the ninety-seventh floor of Tower One. Left a lot of money behind—anyway, his family’s well taken care of. That’s something.”
“Rich is a nice guy to have on our side,” Davis thought aloud, suppressing the shiver that came along with the opinion.
“That he is,” Gerry agreed.
THE DRIVE ought to have been pleasant. The weather was fair and clear, the road not at all crowded and mostly straight northeast. But it was not pleasant. Mustafa kept getting “How far now?” and “Are we there yet?” from Rafi and Zuhayr in the backseat, to the point that more than once he considered pulling the car over and strangling them. Maybe it was hard sitting in the backseat, but he had to drive this Goddamned car!!! Tension. He was feeling it, and they probably were, too, and so he took a deep breath and commanded himself to be calm. The end of their journey was hardly four hours away, and what was that compared to their transcontinental trek? Certainly it was farther than the Holy Prophet ever walked or rode from Mecca to Medina and back—but he stopped that thought at once. He had no standing to compare himself with Mohammed, did he? No, you do not. One thing he was sure of. On getting to his destination, he was going to bathe and sleep just as long as he could. Four hours to rest was what he kept saying to himself, as Abdullah slept in the right-front seat.
THE CAMPUS had its own cafeteria, whose food was catered from a variety of outside sources. Today it was from a Baltimore deli called Atman’s whose corned beef was pretty good, if not quite New York class—saying that might result in a fistfight, he thought, as he picked up a corned beef on a kaiser roll. What to drink? If he was having a New York lunch, then cream soda, but Utz, the local potato chips, of course, because they’d even had them in the White House—at his father’s insistence. They probably had something from Boston there now. It was not exactly a renowned restaurant town, but every city has at least one good eatery, even Washington, D.C.