by Marc Cameron
Alone now, Quinn stood in the shade of the date palm for a long while, making notes in a small Moleskine notebook while he studied the building in front of him, considering his options. Everyone took notes on a college campus, so passersby didn’t give him a second look.
The northernmost set of stables was connected to the main building by a covered walkway of arched stucco, to provide shade between the barn and Farooq’s lab. The horses would, at the very least, give Quinn some plausible excuse for being in the area.
Ten minutes later, he found himself alone as he loafed outside the paddocks. He leaned against the pipe fencing and rested the sole of his dusty shoe on the bottom rail. He didn’t have to pretend to admire a dapple gray mare with an almost feline arch to her graceful neck while he scanned the area for surveillance equipment. He spotted two cameras immediately, one tucked under the eaves of the main barn, the other on a post beside the covered walkway leading to the main building that he was sure held Farooq’s lab. He saw no cameras around the building itself, but felt sure they were there. A place that manufactured biotoxins capable of killing jumbo jets full of people would be bristling with security, even in a country as insulated as the Saudi Kingdom.
In fact, Quinn was counting on it.
When no guards approached him by the paddocks, he decided to explore the barns. In the shade and relative comfort of the alleyway, Quinn found a red Farmall tractor. It was old, flaking with rust, and had been repainted with several cans of spray paint. A quick check behind the tractor revealed a storage closet with another small acetylene cutting torch and several sacks of grass seed. Bags of fertilizer-their main ingredient ammonium nitrate-were stacked head high against the back wall. Quinn grinned at that, thinking of the iodine crystals in the pocket of his dishdasha. Al-Hofuf was situated on the Al-Ahsa oasis, the largest in the world. Though the King Faisal campus itself was dry and dusty, lush fields sprawled for acres to the north and east. The sweet scent of timothy hay and ripening wheat hung heavy on the superheated air.
Jericho had his head in the doorway of the storage room when the first guard approached him from behind.
“I do not know you,” the man challenged, ordering Quinn to back out of the room. He was young, no older than thirty, and wore a wrinkled white shirt and khaki pants instead of the traditional thobe. “What is your business here?”
“I have come to purchase a horse for my farm near Kuwait City,” Quinn said, the Arabic rolling off his tongue like a native. He reached into the pocket of his dishdasha. “I have a letter of introduction from Mr. Othman.”
“Stop!” The guard raised a stubby revolver that looked as if it hadn’t been fired or cleaned for some years. Still, Quinn saw no reason to test it-for the moment.
“Please forgive me if I have done something wrong.” He let his eyes play up and down the shadowed barn, acting frightened to put the young guard at ease. He was certain the man wasn’t alone. See one; think two — the mantra had kept him alive more than once over the years.
Moments later another guard stepped from the shadows of a nearby stall, proving Quinn’s suspicions correct. This was the senior of the two, pushing fifty with salt-and-pepper hair, a bulbous, sneering nose and deep-set eyes that challenged and accused everything before them. He wore the same uniform of his partner but appeared to have little of his patience.
“Your name?” he shouted in a tight-throated squawk. Flecks of spit popped from chapped lips at each word. This man had a pistol of his own, a black semiauto Jericho recognized as a Beretta nine millimeter. It looked to be in much more functional condition than the revolver. “Tell me your name!”
If he was to be shot, this would be the one to shoot him. Quinn had no doubt about that. But his demeanor was jumpy, weak. An overly loud voice said he was unsure of himself. That made him at once dangerous and vulnerable. In any battle situation, Quinn subconsciously sorted adversaries in order of possible lethality and weakness-a kind of target progression. The yelling spitter had just earned the number-one spot.
“I am from Kuwait City,” Quinn stammered in halting Arabic, hoping it made him sound more frightened than foreign. “My name is Al Dashti. I have a letter from Mr. Othman to look at your horses-”
“I know of no Othman,” the spitter said.
The younger guard looked at his partner. “Ramzi Othman,” he said. “He sees to the stables for the university.”
Quinn nodded. “As I said.” He pointed to his pocket. “I have a letter.”
“Shut up. You are not in the university stables. You are on private property. We have nothing to do with any Othman or the school. We have no horses to sell to anyone from Kuwait and have no need of any letter.”
“Very well.” Quinn began to lower his hands. “I apologize for my stupidity and will be on my way.”
The older guard motioned with his shiny Beretta, shoving it forward to make a point. “Keep your hands raised.” A radio at his side broke squelch. He looked at his partner. “Answer that,” he said, apparently not trusting the younger man or his rusty revolver to cover the intruder.
The young guard took the radio from his own belt and checked in. “ Shako mako?” It was the Arabic equivalent of What’s up?
“Apologize and bring him inside,” a disembodied voice said. “I would like to see his letter.”
The guards looked at each other and shrugged. They started to put away their weapons, but the radios squawked again. “Apologize, but do not trust him!”
The older guard frowned at the chiding. He pointed his pistol toward the sunlit opening at the end of the barn’s alley. Quinn smiled faintly to himself. Guns or no guns, these men had solved his number-one problem. They were taking him past any security systems and inside the building-right where he wanted to be.
CHAPTER 27
Past the double steel doors, a lone security guard kept watch at a simple wooden desk. He was middle-aged with a neatly trimmed goatee and dressed in the same khaki pants and open-collared white shirt as the two others. Quinn could see no weapon, but assumed he had one tucked away somewhere.
The desk guard glanced up from a crumpled copy of an Al Jazeera newspaper and acknowledged the other men with a grunt. Dark eyes played over Quinn with unconcealed disgust. As Saudis, it was a good bet these men all harbored decades-old tribal grudges against Kuwaitis. Fortunately, they didn’t know who Quinn really was. Their grudges against Irish American Apaches were sure to run even deeper.
Fluorescent lights threw a strident glare on the waxed white tile of the hallway. Twenty feet beyond the guard was another set of heavy doors, ornately carved from fine, polished wood. They had no handles and appeared to swing freely.
Other than these and the way he’d come in, the only other exit off the wide hallway was a gray metal door to the left, just past the desk guard. To find out what was on the other side of the blank wall to the right, Quinn would have to make it through the double wooden doors.
“In there.” The older, jumpy guard prodded Quinn over the kidney with the muzzle of his pistol, shoving him toward the left.
Quinn took a deep breath to keep from smiling. This one was truly an amateur. No real operator would get close enough to touch him with a weapon.
The professional arrived a moment later as Quinn’s captors prodded him into the vacant concrete-block room. Quinn recognized him for what he was immediately-not the top boss, but someone with the authority to make decisions on the spot. He was mature, but not old-maybe in his late thirties-with the confident air that made him keep his chin tilted slightly toward the ceiling and hung a constant half grin on his angular face. His dazzling white cotton robe blended with the whitewashed walls. A red checked ghutra only half hid a thick head of curly black hair. A gold Rolex Explorer hung from his bronze wrist.
The man looked down his nose at Quinn with the kind of bored indifference he might reserve for a stray dog.
“Hello, Mr. Al Dashi-”
“Al Dashti,” Quinn corrected.
“Yes,” the man said. “Of course, Mr. Al Dashti. I am Dr. Suleiman, the chief veterinarian here.” He held out a manicured right hand, all but snapping his fingers. “Please, the letter of which you spoke.”
Quinn reached in the fold of his dishdasha, wishing he had the Masamune blade Mrs. Miyagi had given him. Whatever was going on in this lab, the chief veterinarian had to be up to his neck in it. He handed over the letter.
Suleiman read it, then paused a moment, letting his eyes slide up and down Quinn. He handed back the letter, then turned without asking a single question. At the door, he paused to speak for a moment in hushed tones to the two guards. The expressions of both men tensed. The jumpy one’s shoulders bobbed noticeably at Dr. Suleiman’s words. His hand slid almost imperceptibly toward the butt of his pistol.
Quinn’s eyes shot around the room, taking quick stock of his situation. The heavy door, whitewashed walls, sealed concrete floor with a drain set in a depressed center-a length of hose coiled on a wall hook like a black snake.
He was in a killing cell.
Quinn was already in motion as Dr. Suleiman stepped from the room into the hallway, timing his first strike with the snick of the door snapping shut. He’d crumpled the introduction letter into a tight ball and tossed it at the older guard’s face. The paper was worthless as a weapon, but the man didn’t know that. He flinched instinctively jerking his gun hand up to ward off the incoming missile.
Quinn used this split-second diversion to drive the flat of his hand into the younger guard’s face, shattering his nose and slamming the back of his head against the concrete wall with a sickening thwack. He slid to the ground leaving a pink smear of blood behind him. Swelling at the back of his brain would soon stop his heart for good.
As the jumpy guard regained his composure and brought the pistol back to bear, Quinn ran at him with the weight of his entire body. He wrenched the man’s wrist and the gun along with it inward toward the startled Saudi’s soft belly. Tendons stretched past the breaking point; fragile wrist bones snapped with a sickening pop. His finger convulsed on the trigger. The guard’s eyes flew wide as the cold reality of what had happened washed across his face.
“Killed…” He coughed, a tinge of blood coating his cracked lips. “Killed by… a stinking… Kuwaiti…”
The man died before Quinn could set him straight.
His two immediate threats neutralized, Quinn stuffed the old revolver in the folds of his dishdasha with his cell phone. The other pocket contained the glass jar of iodine crystals. He had to keep from breaking the glass jar at all costs. He checked the Beretta for ammunition. The magazine still held ten rounds. Years of habit and mistrust of machines made him press-check the slide to be certain there was a cartridge in the chamber. Neither guard carried any reloads. That left him with seventeen rounds including the six iffy shots in the rusty wheel gun.
Quinn stood at the door for a moment, hand on the knob, concentrating to slow his breathing. He would have to make every shot count. The two men now dead on the floor had been the easy ones. Now he had to deal with the guard at the table, unknown other personnel, and Suleiman, the real professional of the group-and he’d have to do it all on camera.
CHAPTER 28
Langley Air Force Base Virgina
Megan Mahoney had never considered herself a worrywart. Working nose to nose with deadly diseases took ice-cold nerves not to mention a certain amount of stoic detachment-but, lately, it seemed that worrying was all she ever did. Gory images of four hundred Ebola-infected airline passengers haunted her dreams. Nagging thoughts of a virus capable of wiping out half the continent kept her stomach in knots, and she found herself eating nothing but junk food. Justin, for all his idiotic flirtation, didn’t deserve to be stuck in the Slammer. But he was, and now the poor kid sat with nothing to do but wait and wonder if the tiny needle stick had been enough to infect him with an unknown strain of hemorrhagic fever-enough to kill him.
The Ebola blood variant had jumped almost immediately from one macaque to another breathing the same air. Both had crashed in a matter of hours. It had been two days since she’d had to put down C-45 and injected C-06 with the virus strain contained in the optic jelly. Though the monkey’s blood teamed with spaghettilike filovirus it had yet to show a single symptom. Tests on C-12, the macaque she’d put in the adjoining cage, breathing the same air as C-06, remained virus free.
Science was, more often that not, a waiting game, but when she considered what would happen if an Ebola variant escaped into the U.S. population, she wanted to pull her hair out for lack of something positive to do.
Then a man named Winfield Palmer had called. He said he was the Director of National Intelligence and asked if he could please pile a little more on her worry plate.
Now, deep in the lush forests of Northern Virginia, behind layers of electronic and physical security, Mahoney leaned forward in a soft leather office chair, her face bathed in a yellow-green glow from a series of flat-screen monitors.
Beside her, dwarfing a similar chair, a giant of a man with a Louisiana accent had welcomed her to the team like a big brother. He wore faded jeans and a tight black T-shirt that bunched above enormous biceps. His high-and-tight haircut and stern demeanor said he would have been more comfortable in uniform. His name was Jacques Thibodaux and he fidgeted as if he was ready to bounce off the walls.
A pimple-faced Air Force staff sergeant named Guttman sat, big ears pinched between a set of cheap headphones, looking outward from the blinking panel. His fingers worked a game controller connected to a separate laptop computer on his knees.
“Nothing yet?” Thibodaux asked
Staff Sergeant Guttmann was a prodigy, one of four Air Force enlisted personnel handpicked for their extraordinary hand-eye coordination and almost superhuman computer gaming skills to pioneer the advancement of a very specific unmanned aerial vehicle, or UAV. Above his head, in ornate golden script was a three-foot blue banner with the motto of his secret unit, Detachment Seven of the Fifty-third Test and Evaluation Group: HIC SUNT DRACONES
Here there be dragons. It was the inscription on medieval maps for sections of uncharted sea.
“No contact from your friend, sir,” Guttmann said. His voice cracked as he spoke, making Mahoney wonder just how old he really was. “I did, however, just take out a Nazi field marshal and two of his zombie underlings using a World War II-era grease gun with extreme skill.”
Mahoney wrinkled her nose. These military types were so hard to understand. She shot a look at the Cajun. “Zombies?”
Thibodaux shook his head, muttering under his breath. “This damned multitaskin’ generation. While he should be tending to the business of looking out for Jericho, he’s playin’ Call of Duty-a computer game with Nazis of the living dead or some such thing. My boys love it.”
“What’s not to love?” Guttman smiled. “Who wouldn’t get a kick out of killing Nazi zombies? A bunch of guys in my squadron play all the-”
“You know, Guttman,” Thibodaux said, rubbing his jaw with a hand the size of a pie pan. “I got a friend out there, all by his lonesome self in parts unknown, facing some real-life shit that would make your zombie games look like a Scooby-Doo cartoon. You might consider showing some attention to your duties at hand.”
Guttman, flustered, snapped his personal laptop shut without another word. He glanced at Mahoney, blushing like a schoolboy taken to task in front of a pretty girl.
Thibodaux rose quickly from his chair and strode to the large wall map of the Middle East. He tapped the tiny red dot with a forefinger the size of a sausage between Riyadh and the Persian Gulf. Al-Hofuf, Saudi Arabia.
“Can your bird use its cameras to zoom in or something so we can see how he is? I don’t know… infrared maybe, like on those Tom Clancy movies.”
Guttman sighed, seemingly relieved Thibodaux had decided not to chop his head off. “Sorry, sir. No can do. If Damo was a conventional drone buzzing over a third world country with little in th
e way of defense we’d be able to get some images. Saudi Arabia would shoot one of those down in a heartbeat. But she doesn’t work that way. She floats around up there in stealth mode, out of the picture and out of radar contact-until we need her.”
Damo was a new and highly classified UAV. Far beyond the Predator and Reaper drones being used to run recon missions blasting away at insurgent compounds from Kirkuk to the wild and wooly Frontier Provinces of Pakistan, Damo was not supposed to be anything but a few sketches on a Northrop Grumman engineer’s drawing board. Three generations past the officially still experimental X47B Pegasus, the U.S. Navy’s aircraft carrier launch-capable Unmanned Combat Air System, Guttman’s UCAS, was more properly known as the AX7 Damocles. Particularly useful for its ability to loiter unnoticed above an enemy for long periods of time, Damocles could be suspended overhead, ready to strike like the mythic sword hanging by a horse hair. In reality, it had been in operation for well over a year, based out of Eglin Air Force Base in Florida.
Though most UAVs were piloted by officers, the AX7 was launched from the back of a Boeing 747-out of sight of snooping eyes and video cameras-and then controlled by a new generation of gamers from the enlisted ranks whose proficiency test scores had been off the charts. In the hands of a skilled computer dweeb with the right equipment, Damocles could be controlled from anywhere in the world.
Staff Sergeant Guttman was the king of computer dweebs. He checked the systems monitor, touching the screen with a plastic stylus, then made a note on his clipboard.
“I don’t know what your friend is out there looking for. That’s way above my pay grade, but I can only bring Damo down and into the open if I get the order from that phone.” He nodded toward a black handset on the stainless counter beside his joystick and stylus. “If I get the order, Damo is armed with four Tomahawks. But until that phone rings, I can’t…”
Thibodaux raised his big hand. “We get it, kid. Why don’t you just chill and kill some more Nazi zombies…”