by Flynn Vince
“How’ve you been, Andraž?”
“Good, Mitch. Mr. Losa would like a word with you after he’s finished.”
“Why?”
He just shrugged and started back the way he’d come.
The discussion between the two cartel leaders went on for another fifteen minutes before Esparza spun and began stalking back in their direction. Losa, on the other hand, stayed put and turned his gaze toward Rapp.
Screw it. Why not?
He started forward and Esparza waved him off. “We’re leaving.”
Rapp ignored him and passed by without speaking. When he got close to Losa the man offered a hand and he took it.
“Andraž recognized you,” he said in lightly accented English. “I heard about your problems in America but I’m surprised to see you here. Can I assume that the drugs you stole belonged to Carlos?”
“Yeah,” Rapp said, glancing back to see Esparza glaring at him and questioning Rossi in a low voice.
“And what exactly is your interest in all this?”
“I don’t understand the question.”
“I think you do.”
Clearly Losa wasn’t buying the legend Rapp had created to explain his sudden entry into the narcotics business.
When he stayed silent on the subject, Losa just smiled. “Even if everything you’ve done recently is a smoke screen, I believe that Christine Barnett’s animosity toward you is real. You’re going to have a hard time going back.”
“Are you coming to a point?”
The man pulled out a business card and slipped it into Rapp’s shirt pocket. “When you’ve killed Carlos—and I assume that will be in the next week or two—call me. I think you’d find working for my organization very rewarding.”
Rapp nodded and turned, but then paused when Losa spoke again. “And if your friend Irene Kennedy finds herself needing to make a quick exit from the United States, my offer extends to her as well.”
Rapp walked back to the Humvee thinking that maybe Coleman and Claudia were right. In the private sector all you had to do was stand around while people threw money at you.
“What the fuck was that all about?” Esparza said.
“He figures I’m going to kill you in the next couple of weeks and wants to give me a job after I do.” Rapp slid into the passenger seat. “Now let’s get the hell out of here before someone changes his mind and starts shooting.”
CHAPTER 38
NORTH OF HARGEISA
SOMALIA
SAYID Halabi embraced the last person in line and stepped back as all six filed away. Allah had provided a rare overcast night, blinding any U.S. surveillance that might be overhead and extinguishing the stars. He was standing at the edge of the hazy ring of light created by a bonfire some fifty yards away. The light breeze swept the smoke toward him, bringing with it the sensation of warmth and scent of charred wood.
Near the fire a young girl lay on a cot, deathly still between violent coughing fits. From a safe distance, a man filmed the towering flames that framed her. He followed the embers swirling through the air for a moment and then focused on the six martyrs approaching the girl. Each wiped a hand across her face, smearing their fingers with saliva, blood, and phlegm, and then rubbing it into their eyes and noses.
When it was done, two of the men threw the cot and its dying occupant into the fire. Her screams filled the air for a moment before going silent forever.
Gabriel Bertrand looked on from beneath the tree he was chained to, watching in horror as the girl’s body writhed and blackened. Finally, he turned toward the people stripping off their clothing and cleaning themselves with powerful disinfectants. Halabi didn’t want them to leave a trail of disease that Western authorities could follow to him in Somalia. But more than that, he wanted the infection to appear in America as though it had come from nowhere. As though it was a punishment from God’s own hand.
Tears reflected on the Frenchman’s swollen cheeks and he began to sob. Whether he wept over his own fate or that of the world was impossible to know. Of course, he had broken easily. The removal of one of his fingernails had gained his cooperation and a few minor burns near his groin had ensured that it would be enthusiastic.
Halabi now had an optimized plan for spreading YARS throughout the West while sparing the Middle East to the degree possible. Individual targets had been identified, protocols had been refined, and timetables had been developed. Using software downloaded from the Internet, they had run a number of simulations based on different variables.
Even if nearly everything went wrong during deployment and the West’s reaction was more robust than anticipated, the death toll would be no less than ten million, centered on major cities in America and Europe. If everything went to plan, though, the outcome would be very different. The disease would run out of control, creating a pandemic that would fundamentally change human existence for generations.
The computer application that they were relying on had originally been designed to research the spread of the Spanish flu. Comparing that disease with YARS was a fascinating exercise, as was comparing the world it devastated to the one that existed today.
The very name “Spanish flu” was just another lie foisted on the world by America. The truth was that the disease had first taken hold in Kansas City military outposts. It killed more U.S. troops during World War I than combat, spreading easily in the cramped conditions that prevailed on ships, battlegrounds, and bases.
The initial reaction of the medical community had been slowed by its focus on the war, but when the scope of the threat was recognized, the country had pulled together. Surgical masks were worn in public to slow the spread of the disease. Stores were prohibited from having sales to prevent the congregation of people in confined spaces. Some cities demanded that passengers’ health be certified before they boarded trains.
There was no denying that the United States and its citizens had been strong in the early twentieth century—accustomed to death and hardship, led by competent politicians, and informed by an honest press.
So much had changed in the last century. The American people were now inexplicably suspicious of modern medicine and susceptible to nonsensical conspiracy theories. They were selfish and self-absorbed, willing to prioritize their own trivial desires over the lives of their countrymen. Their medical system, designed less to heal people than to generate profits, would quickly collapse as it was flooded by desperate patients and abandoned by personnel fearful of being infected.
And during all this, America’s politicians and media would use the burgeoning epidemic to augment their own power and wealth. That is, until the magnitude of the crisis became clear. Then they would flee.
The sound of a truck engine pulled him from his contemplation and he turned. His people, disinfected and wearing clean clothing, climbed into the vehicle and set off into the darkness. Halabi bowed respectfully in their direction, acknowledging their sacrifice and the enormity of the journey ahead of them. After the long drive to Mogadishu, they would board a private jet that would take them to Mexico. From there they would be smuggled across the northern border.
And then everything would change.
As he stared into the darkness beyond the fire, he recalled the black-and-white images he’d seen of the Spanish flu epidemic. The most striking, as always, were those that contained children. Like the little ones of the Middle East, they stared out from the photograph with a mix of ignorance, hope, and misplaced trust in the adults around them.
On a blurred portrait taken in a hospital ward, someone had scrawled a nursery rhyme created by minds too young to understand the collapse of their world but desperate to somehow acknowledge it.
I had a little bird,
Its name was Enza.
I opened the window,
And in-flu-enza.
CHAPTER 39
SOUTHERN MEXICO
RAPP paused to check his reflection in the glass door before exiting onto the terrace.
The set of clippers provided by María only had one setting so his previously long hair was now a uniform three eighths of an inch. The beard was completely gone, leaving smooth, slightly pale skin in its wake. A pair of aviator sunglasses hid his eyes and the sun damage around them.
Combined with clothing loose enough to obscure his muscular physique, it was a pretty effective disguise. Esparza and his people had been warned not to use his name around the Arab who was about to arrive. There was a good chance Rapp had killed someone he knew at some point.
An SUV appeared to the west as Rapp came up behind Esparza and Rossi, who were already waiting. Their impeccable clothing and expectant expressions once again demonstrated the importance of this deal to them.
The vehicle pulled up and a man carrying a large courier bag immediately stepped out. Rapp remained outwardly serene but his heart rate notched higher.
He and Muhammad Attia had never been face-to-face but Rapp knew everything about him. His height and weight. His U.S. passport number. Even the name of his first girlfriend in high school. Attia’s family had immigrated to America as refugees when he was still a toddler and done well for themselves, providing their son a life of middle-class security.
What had turned him against his adopted country was something that the Agency’s psychologists speculated on endlessly. As far as Rapp was concerned, all that mattered was that he was a smart, fanatical son of a bitch who could blend effortlessly into American society. A man that Rapp had spent a lot of time trying to hunt down and kill.
Resisting the urge to jam a thumb into his eye socket, Rapp instead gave him a stilted greeted that would camouflage his real ability with the Arabic language. Westerners with native-level fluency were unusual enough that they tended to generate questions.
“I speak English,” Attia replied.
Esparza smiled and offered his hand. “That’s excellent. I’m Carlos. This is my assistant Vicente.”
Attia shook hands a bit reluctantly, more interested in scanning his operating environment just as Rapp had been when he’d arrived.
Esparza pointed at Rapp. “Don’t just stand there. Take his bag.”
The cartel leader had been expecting all communication to have to be translated and was clearly enjoying being in a stronger position than expected. His curt order was intended as a reminder. You work for me.
Attia held the satchel out as Esparza put a friendly hand on his back. “Come. We have lunch prepared. I’m certain you’re going to enjoy it.” He glanced back at Rapp as they started toward a dining table decorated with fresh-cut flowers. “Take that to his room. And then you’re dismissed.”
Instead of going to Attia’s room, Rapp ducked into his own and locked the door. A quick search of the courier bag turned up what he was looking for: a duct-taped package about the size of a building brick.
He laid it in the bottom of the bathtub before digging a box of scrounged supplies from beneath the vanity. The sunglasses, a pair of kitchen gloves, and a scarf tied over his nose and mouth was the best he was going to do for protection. Better than nothing, but he imagined that it would get a disgusted face palm from Gary Statham.
Using a pocketknife, he carefully peeled back the tape to expose a shrinkwrapped core. The color and consistency of its contents were exactly like the pictures he’d seen of the intercepted anthrax. Lady Luck was with him. Or not, depending on whether he started coughing up blood in the next few weeks.
He filled the bathtub and worked beneath the surface, slitting the plastic and emptying it into the water. When it looked pretty well cleaned out, he drained the tub and washed both it and the bag with a bottle of high-end tequila that was the most reliable disinfectant he’d been able to turn up. It took another ten minutes to mix a decent facsimile of the anthrax with stuff raided from the kitchen.
He was forced to replace the shrink-wrap cellophane from María’s personal stash, but the original tape was salvageable with the help of a little superglue. It likely had hidden markings and their absence would be noticed by men down the supply chain.
Finally, Rapp patted the package with a bath towel and used a blow dryer to eradicate any remaining moisture. The finished product wasn’t bad. Someone would have to be paying serious attention to attribute the damage to anything more than normal wear and tear.
He put it back in the bottom of the bag and then carefully replaced the clothes and other items in the order they’d been removed. Now all he needed to do was take it to Attia’s room, trace him back to wherever he came from, find Halabi, kill him, and wipe out his operation. Preferably before Attia’s contacts in the United States noticed they were trying to destroy the great Satan with a mixture of flour, cornstarch, and dried mustard.
What could possibly go wrong?
CHAPTER 40
CENTRAL IOWA
USA
“I WANT you all to look around,” Christine Barnett said, gazing out over the crowd. “Let what you see really sink in.”
As was their custom, they did as they were told. Almost two hundred people, mostly men wearing work clothes despite being unemployed, craned their necks to examine their surroundings.
The building was cavernous and filthy. Disused machines stood silent and rusted. Spotlights had been brought in and were focused on the stage, leaving her audience illuminated only by what sunlight could filter through broken windows.
America was booming economically. The stock market was rallying, unemployment was under four percent, and corporate profits were near record highs. But none of that mattered as long as there were a few crumbling factories and pockets of forgotten citizens like the ones before her. Their confused, angry faces made all those statistics meaningless. And more important, it made Joshua Alexander’s affirmations of his administration’s success look callous and out of touch.
When attention turned back to her, she leaned closer to the microphone. “We have the world’s biggest economy. We have the most powerful military in history. We invented pretty much everything worth having. Cars. Electric light. Personal computers. Smartphones. The Internet. We push the world forward. We keep it safe. How did this happen? How did we allow this to happen?”
The inevitable applause started and she stepped back to gaze benevolently over the crowd. Of course, the answers to her question were well known. Mechanization had made many factory jobs obsolete. Others had inevitably—and, in truth, irretrievably—flowed overseas.
The world was changing at an ever-increasing rate and that was a trend that couldn’t be stopped. These people were the ones who had been left behind. The ones who steadfastly refused to leave the dead cities they had been born in. The ones who saw themselves as America’s backbone but who survived on government aid and disability checks. Drug addicts, drunks, and halfwits incapable of performing anything but the simplest of tasks.
Ironically, it was those self-destructive traits that made them so useful. Their inflated sense of worth and victimization was easy to manipulate. When asked what exactly it was they wanted, they either didn’t know or weren’t willing to make the sacrifices necessary to get it. What they did know—with burning certainty—was what they hated: the world that had stolen everything from them.
“You didn’t lose your way of life,” Barnett said. “It was taken from you. The incompetence and corruption in Washington has gotten so bad that an honest hardworking person can’t succeed in this country. That’s not the America I know. It’s not the America we grew up in. The country I remember was one where being honest and hardworking guaranteed success. It guaranteed that you could provide for your families and that your children could expect to do even better.”
She waited for another wave of applause to die down.
“Instead, we spend trillions sending our brave men and women to fight and die overseas. For what? To spread peace and democracy? The people in those countries don’t want peace and democracy. And even if they did, why is this our job? Why aren’t we using that money and our incredible mil
itary to fix the problems we have here? Why are we building bridges and power grids in Afghanistan while we watch ours fall apart? They told us these wars and all this nation building was going to keep us safe, but trillions of dollars later, it’s done the opposite. Now we have a madman threatening us with a biological attack. And what’s this administration’s response? To keep doing the same things that haven’t worked in the past.”
She pulled the microphone off its stand and began pacing across the stage. “America’s the strongest country in the history of the world. But even it can’t take this kind of incompetence year after year. Nothing’s unbreakable. So now it’s up to us. This is a democracy. It’s our responsibility to turn this around. To protect our country and change it back into one where good, hardworking people aren’t taken advantage of. They’re rewarded.”
• • •
“You were on fire today,” Kevin Gray said as Barnett slid into the back of the limo across from him. “Reactions look good.”
“Are we going to get decent television coverage?”
“I’m pushing, but political speeches in Iowa aren’t exactly ratings grabbers. One of the British royals just announced she’s pregnant and President Alexander’s out there stumping hard for your opponent. His rally in Texas was quite a bit more successful than we’d anticipated. After almost eight years, he can still pack ’em in.”
“We’ve got to choke him off, Kevin. He’s the past. We have to own the media on this. I don’t want to see that man’s face or hear his redneck drawl on any outlet in America.”
“Alexander was the clear star of the show, Senator. But that’s a good thing. You’re not running against him. Col—” He caught himself before uttering the name of the man who was now almost certain to be her opponent in the general election. She’d forbidden the speaking of it out loud in her presence. “Your opponent looked like a sidekick.”