Covert Action

by Dick Couch

  “Yes, what is it? What do you want?” After the words were out of her mouth, she suddenly realized that they were inappropriate.

  He stared at her for a long moment. There was nothing menacing or threatening about his manner, just an infectious aura of strength and serenity.

  “Please, miss, excuse this interruption, but I believe the incident to which you are referring happened just the other night when we took Mr. LeMaster and Mr. Owens as prisoners on a training exercise. Is that correct?”

  “Well, yes, it is, and they were hurt.” He now had her full attention. “Do I know you?”

  For the first time, he smiled. “I have not had the pleasure, miss. I am Tomba, and the Africans are my responsibility. There are fourteen of us. If we were a traditional military unit, I would be their sergeant. May I know your name?”

  “Yes, of course. I’m Janet Brisco, the IFOR operations officer.”

  “Ah, yes, Miss Brisco,” he said, nodding solemnly. “I have heard a great deal about you. Now I understand your concern for Mr. LeMaster and Mr. Owens.”

  She seemed unaware that his hand was now on her elbow as he guided her away from AKR to a nearby table. He held a chair for her, then seated himself across the table. Garrett and AKR shot each other surprised glances. Both held their breath. Tomba was like some compassionate teacher who had just entered the principal’s office to stick up for them. Neither of them moved a muscle.

  “You must understand, Miss Brisco, that so much of this is all very new to us. By that, I mean the fighting with the support of technicians like Mr. LeMaster and Mr. Owens. We are warriors, and we know war. My men have fought for their tribes, for their lands, for water, for the British or the French or the Portuguese, and some of us, for the Communists. Or sometimes for the tribe that the Communists decided to provide with arms and ammunition. We mustered in ranks, often thousands of us. Orders were given, and we were marched off to do the fighting, often to be betrayed. Most of us have fought purely for money; we were what you call soldiers of fortune.

  “But this is different. We now fight for the chance to return to Africa, with dignity and on our own terms. Of course, we accept Mr. Fagan’s generous wages, and that still makes us mercenaries. So be it. But I believe that there is honor here, that the cause for which we offer our guns and perhaps our lives will be a just one.” He paused a moment to frame his words, but his gaze never wavered; she sat motionless. “With the money we earn, my men will be able to go home, perhaps even purchase a portion of what were once their tribal lands. You see, Miss Brisco, what they want is the dignity and peace that are due an old warrior who leaves the field. I tell you all this because Nkosi Akheem tells me that you too are a warrior, so you know about honor.”

  Tomba again paused for a long moment, then gave her a soft smile. “There are things we do as a part of our trade—stalking, tracking, patrolling, walking long distances with heavy kit. As professional soldiers we do these things very well. But your ways are different. You use electronics, small radios, computers, and binoculars that allow you to see at night. And you have people who are not in the field who control us, who tell us what to do and when to do it. That has been hard for us to understand. But when those same people come out at night and help us train, and willingly let themselves be taken hostage to improve our training, that is important to us—very important. We did not intentionally hurt Mr. LeMaster and Mr. Owens. Truthfully, we did not understand how frail they were. But they freely chose to be with us, and we now know they are brave and good men. We don’t trust the computers, but we now trust them. They are warriors, like us; they just fight with different weapons. They have earned our respect, and for my men, respect, is everything.” He was again silent for a moment. “I am sorry for their pain. I am sorry for yours. Will you forgive us?”

  In a most un-Brisco-like gesture, she reached across the table and put her hand on Tomba’s. Then she stood up, and he rose, as well.

  “Tomba, I did not have all the facts. You have nothing to apologize for, but perhaps you will forgive me for losing my temper.” He inclined his head politely. “Thank you for your explanation of the matter. And now I need to get back to my office.” She paused in front of Garrett and AKR and gave them a cold look. “In Steven’s office in half an hour. We need to think about getting an advance party in place.”

  It was a run day for Elvis Rosenblatt, as opposed to a lifting day. So he was on the streets of Atlanta, pounding out his six miles on a seven-and-a-half-minute-mile pace. He glanced at his heart monitor, noticing that it hovered comfortably at 148 beats per minute. Rosenblatt’s objective was not so much cardiovascular fitness as it was to burn excess fat, and for that, his optimum heart rate was 148. Most of Rosenblatt’s nonwork waking hours were devoted to burning fat and building lean. He’d much rather be in the gym lifting, but this was a necessary part of his training regime. Several years ago he had gone the full distance in Atlanta’s famous Peachtree Marathon, and not done too badly, but it cured him of long-distance running as a goal. So three times a week he pounded out his six miles. As much as he had come to dislike the running, it was efficient. Nothing burned calories and fat in as short a time as running on a heart monitor. There would come a time when he could take himself down to a seven-fifteen-mile pace at 148 beats, but he was not there yet. He had just made the turnoff at Tenth Street into the Charles Allen entrance to Piedmont Park when a dark sedan began to pace him along the park drive. It followed him a short distance, then accelerated ahead to where the path crossed the drive. A uniformed security guard emerged from the front passenger seat.

  “Dr. Rosenblatt? Excuse me, sir.”

  Rosenblatt stopped and immediately touched his wrist stopwatch. Whatever this was, he did not want to lose count of his time over distance.

  “Yeah, what is it?”

  “Uh, sir, do you have any ID for positive identification?”

  “Do I what? You got it right, the name is Rosenblatt. You’re gonna have to take my word for it, or meet me at my car down at the park entrance.” He held out his arms to indicate he had nothing on him. It was a chilly day, but he ran in a T-shirt and shorts; cold weather burned more calories. “What’s with you guys, anyway?”

  “Sorry, sir. We’re from the Center, and we were told to find you. We just wanted to be sure. Here you go, sir. Just press the green send button.”

  Rosenblatt snatched the cell phone and took a few steps away from the sedan. He refused to wear a pager or carry a cell phone when he was taking his workouts. That issue had come to a head a few years ago when he was ordered to at least carry a pager. “You can fire me if you want, but I’m not wearing a goddamn pager.” He hadn’t been fired; a man like Elvis Rosenblatt, for all his quirks, was not easy to replace, but this was not the first time they had sent a car to find him when he was working out. It was answered on the first ring.

  “Yeah, Tina, this is Elvis. Sure, I’ll hold…. Lou, this better be an Ebola outbreak in Manhattan. I’m right in the middle of my goddamn workout.” He listened for a full minute. “So what do they want us to do about it?…Oh, so they want to brief me. I thought I was the guy who did the briefings…. Right now—this afternoon; you’re shitting me…. Oh, yeah, they’re right here.” Rosenblatt looked up to see a second sedan pulling up behind the first. “I guess I’ll see you in a few minutes.”

  Rosenblatt tossed a set of car keys to a surprised security guard who had just emerged from the passenger side of the second sedan. Rosenblatt climbed into the rear seat of the first. “That’s a brand-new BMW,” he said to the driver as they sped off. “Tell the guy not to lug the engine.” The second man up front got on the radio and relayed the message to the second car.

  Dr. Elvis Rosenblatt had two passions in life. One was physical fitness, and the other was the detection and containment of contagious disease. He had been at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, or CDC, since he graduated from Johns Hopkins, and he was an authority on viral diseases. Dr
. Rosenblatt was also good with bacteriological contaminants and genetic disorders, but viruses were his thing. He endearingly referred to them as bugs. The war on terror had provided him the job security of an emergency-room doctor in Baghdad. He was compulsive and a little weird, too weird to live with, if you were to ask his ex-wife, but he knew his bugs, perhaps better than anyone else at the CDC.

  Rosenblatt grew up in Detroit, a skinny kid with acne, below average in every major adolescent category except school. Then the summer before he began junior high, two things happened to him. His dad, who was a science fiction buff, brought home a copy of War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells. He had few friends, so he spent much of his time reading and rereading the book over that summer. The idea that microbes could fell giant Martian fighting machines was incredible. So he began to study microorganisms and realized at a very young age what microbiologists the world over knew; in the world of living things, if you can see it with the naked eye, it doesn’t count for very much. It was what you couldn’t see that was fascinating and important. He also discovered weight lifting. By the time he entered high school, his room was filled with scientific journals and bodybuilding equipment and magazines. There are two important dates in the life of Elvis Rosenblatt—the day he graduated from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine magna cum laude, with an emphasis in viral pathology, and the day Arnold Schwarzenegger was sworn in as governor of California.

  A guard at the CDC gate waved the car through. Rosenblatt was dropped at the rear entrance, close to the fitness facility. Security knew him by sight, and he was immediately motioned through the door. Five minutes later he was toweling himself off in front of his locker and hurriedly dressing. In his late thirties, Rosenblatt had been at the CDC for twelve years and still thought of himself as fresh out of med school. Dressed in blue jeans and a crisp oxford-cloth shirt, and preferring clear-plastic-framed glasses over contacts, he was handsome in a Buddy Holly sort of way. This better be good, he told himself as he quickly combed his hair; in another forty minutes I could have been back here and have completed my workout. He slipped into the stairwell and began to take the steps two at a time. Most employees at the CDC used the elevators; Rosenblatt always took the stairs. He paused at the top landing window to check out the parking lot just in time to observe the security guard pulling his BMW into one of the VIP slots.

  The head of the Viral Epidemiological Department at the CDC was Dr. Louis Alexander. He was a talented virologist, but his real skill was ego management. Elvis Rosenblatt was not the only hotshot, self-centered epidemiologist on staff. Rosenblatt cruised through the outer office and into Alexander’s without knocking.

  “So what’s going on, Lou? What was so important that you had to send the Mounties out after me?”

  Alexander thought it was probably a poor time to bring up the issue of the pager, so he plunged ahead. “I have an FBI agent down in the conference room who has come to us with a rather unique problem. It seems a few people in high office have a concern. I was sent a rather cryptic message from the Bureau’s executive director. He wanted us to receive this agent and hear what he had to say.”

  “The FBI, huh. So there must be an imminent threat of a domestic biological terrorist attack. But why drag me in here? I’m not the only guy who is working this problem.”

  “No, no, you’re not,” Alexander agreed, “but you are one of the few virologists on staff with a final top-secret clearance that is endorsed for SI—sensitive information. Uh, I didn’t know that until the agent arrived. When it was learned that the matter was of that classification, well, I could do nothing but send for you. And there was a second request. They asked that the staffer who would be read into this problem not only have an SI clearance, but also be physically fit.” Alexander quickly rolled his palms open. “Don’t ask me why. I was directed to put my best man on this, someone with both qualifications.” His instructions didn’t specifically call for his best man, but Alexander felt Rosenblatt would enjoy hearing it.

  “Aw, for Christ’s sake, Lou, what’s with the physically fit crap? These are bugs. You don’t wrestle them; you study them under an electron microscope. You examine the bugs and the symptoms of those infected. Lou, you should have told those pencil-necks in D.C. to kiss your ass.”

  Alexander just shrugged. Rosenblatt’s reaction was totally what he expected. So he played his ace.

  “This request came from the FBI, but it was routed through the National Security Council with a copy to the Surgeon General. From the context of the message, it seems that none of them know exactly what they’re dealing with, but from our end there is not a lot of wiggle room. Go and meet with the nice FBI agent and let me know, in unclassified terms, how we here at CDC can be of service. Those are the CDC director’s instructions to me; those are my instructions to you. It would appear that this is a potentially critical issue, and no one in this building will be told about it but you.”

  “Shit,” Rosenblatt mumbled and left Alexander’s office.

  He found Judy Burks pacing in the conference room, and she was not happy. Agent Burks had been sent to do a job without really knowing the whole story. That was the problem with compartmentalized information. You were only told what was needed to accomplish your part of a given mission. The more sensitive things were, the more compartmentalized they were. Judy could only assume this disease business in Africa was turning into a major flap, but no one had really said as much. She had been told to hop on the next plane to Atlanta and brief some medical disease snooper about what might or might not be going on in Zimbabwe. It was something that could have easily been done by the Atlanta Field Office, but because it could potentially involve Guardian Services and IFOR, they wanted her to do it. It had come down from the top and, as far as she knew, the only Bureau people who knew about IFOR were the Director, possibly the Executive Director, and herself. She had raced for the airport and barely made the flight with seconds to spare. Along the way she was asked to show her shield four times to local cops and security guards and had almost missed her flight. Judy Burks lived for any chance to display her shield in one hand, wield her Glock 23 .40 caliber in the other, and shout, “FBI! Get your hands up.” But to have to produce her credentials on demand for some local cop or Pinkerton nitwit—accompanied by, “You don’t look old enough to be an FBI agent”—really pissed her off, especially when she was running for a plane.

  Then she arrived at the CDC and immediately found herself in a confrontation with a security guard about handing over her piece before they would let her in the door. She was close to drawing down on the guy when a senior-level CDC administrator intervened. She was then escorted to a conference room, with her Glock, and asked to wait until they located the individual she had traveled all this way to see. After close to an hour, Rosenblatt walked in.

  He paused inside the door and looked around. “Uh, where’s the FBI agent?” he demanded.

  Judy Burks stared at him. I really don’t need this crap from some frat-rat wannabe, she thought.

  “You’re looking at her, pal.”

  “You. You’re an FBI agent?”

  “I don’t see anyone else in this room,” she said, holding her arms out in an open gesture and feeling like Robert De Niro or Tony Soprano in a mobster scene. “Do you see anyone else in this room?”

  “Ah, do you mind if I have a look at—”

  “Not at all, pal.” She tossed her shield on the table in a theatrical gesture, only to have it slide across the polished table and fall to the floor. She started to retrieve it, but Rosenblatt held up his hand.

  “Let me get it.”

  He retrieved the shield and studied it for a long moment. “You sound like you’ve had a hard day, Agent Burks.”

  “You don’t know the half of it.”

  “I think I know where you’re coming from. Please, have a seat, and maybe we can get this over with.”

  They sat across from each other, and he handed her a key ring with several picture IDs attache
d to it. They detailed his status as a CDC employee and his various security clearances. She studied each one, front and back.

  “Elvis?”

  “Yeah, well, my parents were a little conflicted when I was born. It’s part of belonging to a synagogue in Motown. They chanted Barry Manilow jingles during the service.”

  “No fooling?”

  Rosenblatt rolled his eyes. “What is so important that a Bureau agent needs to speak with me personally?”

  Judy Burks studied him a moment and came to a decision. “Okay, I’m going to dispense with the security lecture—loose lips sink ships and all that crap. You’re a smart medical doctor; you know the deal. The information I’m going to talk about is classified, but the medical part is not really all that classified. It is pretty scary, though. We have a problem that involves a potential threat of bioterrorism. There is also a nongovernmental organization that may become involved with this problem. Their activities, and even their existence, carries the very highest security classification. The reason a lowly agent like myself is here is that I am the government liaison officer for this organization. Not many in or out of government know about this unnamed secret organization; I just happen to be one of them. The reason that I have traveled here to see you, as you can imagine, is that we need an expert on bioterror. The problem, or potential problem, is in Africa. At least for now.”

  “Africa?” Now she did have his attention. More than a few of the biological nightmares envisioned by the CDC came from Africa.

  “That’s right, Dr. Rosenblatt. Do you prefer Elvis or Dr. Rosenblatt? Or Dr. Elvis?” They both smiled.

  For the next half hour, Judy Burks read Dr. Elvis Rosenblatt into what they knew about the situation in Zimbabwe. He listened carefully but asked no questions.