In an operation this complex six hours was an acceptable response time, but acceptable was a long way from optimal. And the stakes here were Alex and the world.
“I’m going to head south, but I can drop you at the airport first,” Morgan said to the Russian.
Dobrynin got into the passenger seat and considered him. “South to find a place to wait?”
“Just south. I’ll follow Route 5 and—” Morgan said.
“You’re going to look for them?” Dobrynin asked. “By car?”
Morgan didn’t say anything.
“Even if you’re right and the prokliatiye Chechens didn’t put them on a plane, that’s still a search area of more than two hundred square miles. Do you know how many miles of road there are in an area that size?”
“No, how many?”
“I have no idea! But looking by car would take—”
“Less time than it would take sitting in a motel room doing nothing,” Morgan said. Doing nothing was not an option, not when they had made some progress, and not when his gut was screaming at him to move. “You’ve done plenty. I appreciate it, I really do. I can drop you at the airport and…” And what? Dobrynin had burned more than one bridge in Russia. Morgan suspected that he had been living in hiding. Getting on a commercial flight to America would have put him on the radar of the KGB. Going back would be stupid, and Dobrynin was many things but stupid wasn’t one of them.
Morgan couldn’t worry about that now. The Russian was an adult, and an agent. He’d just ship Dobrynin back to Zeta and let Bloch sort him out.
“It would be foolish—”
“No one’s asking you to come,” Morgan said.
“It would be foolish to go in with only your training pistol. I have my Tokarev but you’ll need a real gun if we stumble onto the Chechens.”
“I’m fine with my Walther, but we could use some additional equipment,” Morgan said.
“Something fully automatic,” Dobrynin.
“And a sniper rifle. Some flash grenades, tear gas,” Morgan mused.
“And body armor,” Dobrynin added. “But this isn’t Texas. You can’t just walk into one of your Wal-Marts and fill a shopping cart. This is San Francisco.”
“I know a guy,” Morgan said.
* * * *
“I think we have something,” Shepard’s voice said through the phone.
Bloch was looking over Jenny Morgan’s shoulder at her monitor. There were a dozen small windows open and all of them showed white buses entering or exiting the main entrance.
“All of these buses belong to the same company. They provide transportation for sports, cheerleading, the marching band, and various clubs,” Jenny said.
“Yes, we checked out all the transportation and delivery companies. There wasn’t a single vehicle big enough to transport that many people that wasn’t supposed to be there,” Bloch said.
“That’s what we thought,” Jenny said. “We compared the license plates of each vehicle and they match the company records. Each bus was supposed to be there on that day. But each bus was only supposed to be there only once.”
“What do you mean?” Bloch asked.
Jenny pointed to the one of the windows on her screen. “At 9 a.m. this bus arrived to pick up the marching band. And the plates match the bus company records. The same bus leaves promptly at ten,” she said pointing at another window which showed the bus exiting from the main entrance. “All of this is normal, but it doesn’t explain why the same bus appears half an hour later, entering the school at a time when we know for a fact that the bus was twenty miles away.”
Bloch examined the photo. The bus appeared the same as it did earlier, and the plate matched. Jenny pointed to another window. It showed the same bus leaving the main entrance at 12:30.
“A duplicate bus with duplicate plates?” Bloch asked.
“A duplicate bus, definitely,” Shepard said. “But if it were me I would just switch the plates when the bus was parked somewhere. The bus company might not notice for months.”
Shepard’s phone beeped. He checked it and said, “That’s a confirmation. The driver of the bus confirms that the plates are different, so somebody switched them. And we see the bus heading for the bio-chem building, but the cameras there were out because the terrorists didn’t want us to see them loading the students.”
Shepard pointed at another window. “Run this,” he said.
Jenny clicked the mouse and the video ran. It showed the bus in profile driving past the camera. There was nothing strange that Bloch could see.
Then she ran another one. Still nothing unusual.
“Now look at the windows carefully,” Shepard said.
She watched both videos again. This time she saw it. “The windows on the second bus are dark.”
“Exactly. Even with the curtains drawn, you can see some light coming through from the other side. It makes sense; it’s daytime. But the curtains on the second bus are completely dark inside as if the windows are covered,” Shepard said.
“How do we find it?” Bloch said.
“I’m running every database. We’ve already gotten a few hits on red light cameras. And we know the bus was on Route 5 going south. If we’re lucky, it will show up somewhere else,” he said.
Possibly, Bloch thought. But if they were headed somewhere rural there might be no traffic cameras. These terrorists may not have been geniuses but they were careful, and you didn’t have to be a genius to avoid cameras, especially if you knew the route you were taking.
“Keep looking. Pay particularly attention to out-of-service cameras on the way,” she said.
Dan Morgan had limited the search area to a single haystack instead of a whole barn. And Jenny Morgan had given them something specific to look for.
All they needed now was one more small break. If the bus surfaced, they could find the lab and recover the hostages before the terrorists did any damage. The problem was that Bloch didn’t like to count on luck; it just wasn’t reliable enough.
She patted Shepard’s shoulder and decided to count on her team instead.
“Keep at it. Call me the second you find anything,” she said.
* * * *
“You’re a…spy?” Jason asked.
“Not exactly a spy. I don’t work for the government. My employer is more like a private international security agency, but we have a lot of former military and CIA working with us,” Alex said.
“Were you tracking the terrorists?” he asked.
“No. I was sent undercover to infiltrate Dr. Spellman’s group.”
Jason held his hand up. “I’ve seen the Dr. Apocalypse video, and I thought he was just crazy.”
“Us, too. This was my first undercover assignment, and I think they gave it to me because it was supposed to be a low priority and not very dangerous. But I guess the Chechen terrorists saw that video too,” she said.
Jason was surprised but taking it fairly well. “I knew you were too good to be true. Is Alex even your real name?”
“Yes, I’m Alex Morgan and I’m twenty-one years old. I was chosen because I’m the right age and because when I was in High School I was a member of Americans for a Peaceful Society.”
Jason absorbed this and he seemed…hurt.
They had been kidnapped by armed terrorists who had already killed one of them in cold blood. Now they would be forced to make a virus that could wipe out everyone. And yet Alex could see that something else was bothering him. Remarkably, she understood it completely.
“I like you. I didn’t expect to meet anyone while I was here. It just happened,” she said.
Jason grinned. “I’d hate to think my best first date in two semesters was just a cover for an international intelligence operation.”
“Oh, it was, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t real,” she
said, returning the grin.
“And if we get out of this we can get that lunch?”
“Of course, I really do live in Boston so we’ll have some logistics to work out.”
“Are you saying that because you mean it or because you’re trying to motivate me to help you save the world?”
To that she almost laughed out loud.
“Can’t it be both?” she asked, smiling.
“Fair enough.”
Karen returned. “Alex, can I speak to you alone?” she said.
“It’s okay. I told Jason why we’re really here. Who we are,” Alex said.
Karen raised an eyebrow at that.
“I’ll do whatever I can to help,” he said.
“Do you have any training? Skills?” Karen asked him.
“Um, I’m very good at library research,” he said. Then, he added almost apologetically, “I’m an English major.”
“Can you do anything else? Can you fight? Technical training?”
“No, nothing like that,” he said.
Karen did not know how to respond to that, so she simply turned to Alex and said, “We don’t have much time so I have to be quick. I have been put in charge of the microbe lab and I have had both of you assigned to me.”
“Can you run the lab?” Alex asked.
“Of course,” Karen said. “We’ll be growing bacteria. It’s not very challenging. It is also the simplest part of the process. Dr. Spellman gave it to me because he doesn’t know me very well.”
“Are you a biologist?” Jason asked.
“No,” Karen said simply. Then, noting his obvious confusion, she added, “I’m a computer scientist, but I had some time before this assignment to study biochemistry.”
“And you’ll be running a bio lab with one student with absolutely no training in biology?”
“If it make you feel any better I don’t have any training in biology,” Alex said.
“So just to be clear, the three of us—”
“Don’t worry, Karen studied up before we got here. Trust me, she can do this.”
Jason shrugged and said, “Well if you’ve studied…”
Alex turned to Karen and said, “And you can help us keep from blowing our cover?”
“Of course, as I said we will be working on the simplest part of the lab. And you really don’t know that much less than many of the undergraduate students here,” Karen said simply.
“Great, for a minute I thought we were in trouble,” Jason said.
Dr. Spellman called to Karen. “We’ll talk more later. Right now, I have to assemble the rest of the microbe lab team and we need to set up our space.”
Then she turned back to Jason, “Can you move equipment? Carry boxes?”
“That I can do,” he said.
* * * *
Morgan pulled over when they got the call. He studied the photo of an apparently ordinary white bus. It was the same model used for some limousines and party buses—though this one was less flashy. It had enough seating to transport football players, or cheerleaders…or prisoners.
“At least now we know what we are looking for,” Dobrynin said.
That was true. When they had started driving they were looking for a well-hidden secret lab—one that would no doubt be in a remote place and look completely innocuous.
Now they were looking for a well-hidden secret lab—with a big, white bus parked around back.
It wasn’t much, but it was progress.
Morgan also felt better that they had swapped their rental for a large, black SUV and stocked it with a small arsenal. Besides the assault weapons and sniper rifles and other assorted gear, Morgan had picked up another Walther and another chest holster. Morgan’s contact didn’t have another Tokarev for Dobrynin, but the Russian had taken a liking to the chrome-plated .45 he’d confiscated from the car thieves in San Francisco.
So they were well armed and between them they had decades of training and experience. Now if only they could find their target, they might be able to do some good.
Morgan started the car and pulled back onto Route 5.
After a few minutes of silence the Russian asked, “What is the plan?”
“We’ll drive Route 5. Look for anything suspicious. We know the range of the bus is about 250 miles,” he said. That was one more small break they had received. This model bus was designed for ‘school and church’ trips, not long haul transportation.
Dobrynin simply grunted. The Russian had stopped arguing. Morgan knew that their chances of stumbling onto the terrorists were slim, but driving made him feel like he was actually doing something.
“How long?” Morgan asked.
“What?”
“How long to make the virus?” he asked.
“That would depend on the equipment—”
“We’ve established that the equipment isn’t hard to get. Based on what they could buy or throw together, how long?” Morgan asked.
“With the professor and his grad students to run things and fifteen or so lab technicians: three weeks, maybe a month,” Dobrynin said.
“A month to build a weapon that could kill everyone…” Morgan said.
“The real work was done thirty years ago. The prokliatiye Chechens are just forcing some children to follow a recipe. These terrorists build nothing, they create nothing.”
“Did you ever think that maybe you shouldn’t have created it?” Morgan said.
“Every day for thirty years,” Dobrynin said. “It was a foolish risk to make it. At the time, even the KGB didn’t even know what the objective was. We found out later and pushed to burn the project and all records. You have to understand what that took; Soviet pride was strong, and to give up a weapon that even the West didn’t have, even America didn’t have…”
“Except they didn’t give it up, did they?” Morgan said.
“Idioty,” Dobrynin said, nodding. That was a Russian word Morgan knew.
Morgan had taken his share of orders from brass who didn’t have to live with the consequences of their own decisions. And he’d watched friends die because some moron in charge had had a brilliant idea that was good for nothing other than getting people killed.
The problem was that this brilliant idea wouldn’t just kill a few hapless soldiers—or agents—this brilliant idea wouldn’t be nearly that selective.
Chapter 25
Conley greeted Amado as he left the café. Then, like clockwork, he watched Dani and her group leave the café, stopping in the lobby to chat. The scene played out exactly as it had done before, but it was the last day of the conference and this was the last time the scene would play out. Then, at lunch, Conley would have a brief window to meet up with Dani. They would then get into a cab and drive to the airport. Her new passport was in his pocket. By this time tomorrow they would be in Boston, at Zeta headquarters.
Conley found that he couldn’t relax. He kept waiting for the calm that came over him during an active mission but it would not come.
At first, he thought that might be because of his personal attachment to Dani. That was part of it, certainly. But as he watched her disappear into the conference area with the minister and his group, Conley realized that his nervousness was because of something far more tangible: noise.
Conley could hear the distant din of a protest outside. The sound was not unusual. He had heard it every day of the conference—though not on the weekends because the protestors took Saturday and Sunday off.
Typically, they didn’t start until after ten and then built momentum during the day. Protests were timed to get maximum news coverage; the news crews preferred not to start too early, and the protest organizers were happy to accommodate them. It was all very civilized.
However, today there was yelling outside, then screaming.
That was very unus
ual, and not very civilized.
Then he heard something he’d never heard during the protests: gunfire. It was in the distance but there was no question that someone was firing an automatic weapon in short bursts.
As soon as the sound registered, Conley was on his feet. He was not surprised to see that Amado was on the radio, no doubt calling in to whomever he called for this sort of thing.
Conley’s hand reached for the comforting weight of his Glock in its rear holster.
He wasn’t worried yet. The gunfire was distant and there were dozens—if not scores—of armed police and private security between the gunfire and the hotel. And even if the trouble outside made its way to the hotel, Conley had his Glock and they all had Amado.
Conley watched the older man bark something into his radio. So far as he could tell, Conley and Amado were the only ones who had noticed what had happened outside.
Then it happened again. This time it was single shots, returned by automatic gunfire. Now there were more guns involved in this fight.
And they were closer.
More gunfire and returning gunfire—this time closer still.
Conley was on his feet.
The noise from outside grew louder as the protestors got closer to the hotel, but the gunfire stopped. That was something. Maybe the police had dealt with the problem.
Then he heard din from the protest that sounded like it was right outside the front doors of the hotel. It was louder than any of other protests so far and sounded…different. It’s angrier, Conley realized. Much angrier.
There was a pause in the gunfire.
Then the sound of full auto returned by full auto. Then it stopped. Even the noise from the protest ceased…until it came back with a roar.
He could hear actual screams outside, followed by a rumble.
The rumble turned into a crashing sound and then the glass from the doors and windows at the main entrance of the hotel appeared to explode inward as two large trucks appeared from the right and left and headed toward each other in a low speed crash.
Conley understood when he saw that the trucks were garbage trucks—the closest thing to armored vehicles that you could find in the city. The trucks hit head-on at less than ten miles an hour and then came to a stop.
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