by Steven James
“Okay,” Dr. Ferrier said.
“We’ll talk more after you’ve seen the footage. I think it’s best if you simply watch it for yourself.”
“Remember the worms,” Kennedy whispered to me.
Then DeYoung signaled to him, he tapped the space bar, and the video began.
47
The footage lingered briefly on that cement wall, then panned right to include the cage, which I now realized was constructed in a cube. It didn’t appear large enough for an adult to actually stand in.
A woman lay inside the cage, curled in a fetal position, her clothes crumpled and stained.
Her back was to the camera so I couldn’t see her face, but given DeYoung’s questions regarding Maria, it wasn’t too difficult to postulate who the woman was.
Beyond the cage, the room’s far wall contained a wide window to an observation area. Blurred figures stood behind the tinted glass. Unrecognizable faces. Ghostly images.
A voice-over came on speaking Arabic, a language I could only identify but not understand.
However, a moment later an English voice offered what I expected was the translation: “We are ready to move forward as we’ve discussed. This is one of the infidels who works for the United States government. This is a demonstration of what we have succeeded in accomplishing and a promise of what is to come.”
I couldn’t tell if the speaker was the person filming or not, but he was obviously close to the camera’s microphone. It was clear now that Maria wasn’t alone in the room. The people behind the glass were just observers. Someone else near the camera said, “When will she wake up?”
“It shouldn’t be long now,” another voice said. Male. A light Middle Eastern accent, but the English sounded natural, perhaps someone who’d been raised in or studied in the States.
A digital date and time marker was running in the lower right-hand corner of the screen, and flicked to approximately five minutes later, indicating that the film had been edited.
She stirred, then turned.
Yes.
Maria.
Her disheveled hair covered half of her face. The part that was visible was savagely swollen and bruised.
She’d been beaten.
Beaten badly.
The person filming her walked closer until he—or she—was only a few meters away.
More Arabic.
No translation this time.
There was no way this was going to end well.
A dog’s water dish and food bowl sat inside the cage beside Maria.
Defiantly, she snatched up the food bowl and threw its contents at the person with the camera, an act that clearly couldn’t harm anyone, but also, just as clearly, communicated her resolve not to be intimidated.
“Maria,” the man said, “if you help me, I will help you.”
“I’m not helping you with anything. No matter what you do to me.”
“I’m afraid it’s already been done.”
He exited. Whoever was holding the camera stabilized it, setting it perhaps on some sort of stand.
Although the video was approximately fourteen minutes long, the time marker showed her rapid decline over what would have been the following five days.
It started with sores that made me think of chickenpox. They first appeared on her arms and face. Over time, they darkened and became firm, and, based on how she scratched at them, they must have itched terribly as they hardened.
As time passed, she occasionally spoke to a man in a biohazard suit who returned sporadically to watch her or refill the bowls with water or food. He wore a self-contained breathing unit, a full face mask, and a positive pressure air respirator that allowed him to have filtered air rather than breathe what was in the room.
She must have become more and more disoriented and incoherent, because her shirt was soaked with sweat when she took it off for no apparent reason and threw it toward the observation room. Her abdomen was also covered with the rash and ulcers. It felt a bit intrusive to see her crouching there in her bra, but even more so to see the intimacy of her suffering.
Toward the end, she was hemorrhaging from her nose and eyes and I couldn’t even imagine how much pain she was in. Eventually, at about the ten-minute mark, I learned the reason I’d been brought in to watch this.
Maria mentioned my name.
She faced the camera, at this point barely even distinguishable as the woman I knew. “Agent Bowers.” Her voice was raspy and coarse, but also somehow liquidy and wet. “The Russian women who don’t speak. Follow them. Listen to what the ladies say.”
I figured the people filming this must have guessed that she was simply delusional, and that’s why they didn’t edit it out. If it was a code of some kind, its meaning eluded me.
DeYoung paused the video at that point. “Do you know what she’s referring to, Pat?”
Dr. Ferrier answered before I could. “Probably human trafficking. Or maybe it’s something related to the human rights of women in Muslim countries.”
“No.” I shook my head. “I don’t think so. The women who don’t speak—I think it has to do with the mannequins.”
“Mannequins?” she said.
“Blake’s. The silent ladies.” I explained to them about the frequent appearances of female mannequins located in the places where he worked. “I spoke with Maria about this a couple of weeks ago in relationship to the investigation into Blake’s whereabouts.”
“Did anyone else know about that conversation?” DeYoung asked.
“No.”
“Why Russian women?” Dr. Ferrier asked, “And what does it mean to follow them or listen to them?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “But we need to take a closer look at the mannequins we found in Dr. Kuznetsov’s house. See if we can find out where they were made or shipped from—if it’s Russia.”
DeYoung started the video again.
Watching Maria’s suffering was profoundly troubling.
As the sores spread and the hemorrhaging increased, she became weaker and weaker, and eventually, when her suffering was the most severe, she begged the man in the biosuit to shoot her.
Rather than a gun, however, he retrieved a scimitar that had been left somewhere out of view of the camera.
“Stick your hands through the bars,” he said in rough, whispery English. He must have been using some sort of mic for us to hear his words under that air mask.
“What?” she said.
“Your hands. If you want this to be over, I will help you. If you wish to die quickly, slide them through the bars.”
Trembling, she complied.
He laid a board on the floor outside the cage.
Oh no.
“Lower them to the wood.”
Though I wanted to turn away, I knew I needed to watch this all the way through to the end.
She knelt and placed her palms upright on the wood, in a pose that might have been that of a supplicant before her god.
Her spirit was broken. That was perhaps the hardest thing of all to see.
The man raised the sword, then whispered, “Die in your rage,” a phrase I’d seen tweeted by jihadists after terror attacks, a Qur’anic saying that Islamic extremists sometimes used to mock and celebrate the death of the innocent.
Swiftly, definitively, he brought the sword down, severing both of her hands at the wrist.
48
Amid a wash of blood, Maria collapsed backward, even as her severed hands remained on the board outside the cage, creating a viscerally disturbing image that I knew I would never be able to unsee.
Blood spurted from the two stumps at the ends of her arms.
Arterial bleeding. She did not try to stop it.
Death would come swiftly.
And for her, that would be a form of mercy.
> Maria shivered as she died, almost as if she were freezing to death rather than bleeding out.
The camera zoomed in on her and didn’t pan away until she lay still, slumped against the bars of the cage. At last, it pivoted from her body, lingered on her hands, and then rotated to focus on a flag bearing the symbol of The Brigade of the Prophet’s Sword, before the screen faded to black.
For a long moment, no one spoke.
Finally, I said, “Is that disease what I think it is? Is that smallpox?”
Dr. Ferrier replied, “To establish its etiology, we would need to confirm the presence of nucleic material of the variola virus in a clinical specimen.”
“Clearly, we would need to do tests, Kate,” said Dr. Qiao, somewhat impatiently. “Based on what you can see, what would you say?”
“If the time markers on the bottom of the screen are accurate and haven’t been altered, it’s not smallpox. No strain of the virus progresses that quickly after the symptoms first precipitate themselves.”
“At least not in its natural form,” I said. “But if it were genetically altered?”
Dr. Ferrier asked DeYoung to slide the video back to the seven-minute mark.
After he’d reset it, she told him to press play.
As we watched Maria’s anguish again, Dr. Ferrier said, “With the manifestations on the skin, it appears to be an acute vesicular or pustular rash. But there are any number of those. It could be varicella, herpes simplex, or Erythema multiforme. Maybe an enteroviral infection or even contact dermatitis.”
Dr. Qiao scoffed. “You know as well as I do, Kate, that it isn’t any of those.”
“It might be impetigo—”
“It’s a strain of smallpox we haven’t seen before,” he said unequivocally.
I didn’t know what their history was with each other, but obviously they were not on the same page regarding what we could and could not assume in a situation like this.
“Alright, listen,” I interjected. “I understand that we can’t test it or confirm anything definitively right now. Let’s just work from the hypothesis that it is smallpox. What would that mean? What are the implications?”
Dr. Qiao spoke up. “It’s one of the most deadly and contagious diseases the world has ever seen. In the twentieth century alone, smallpox killed over three hundred million people. The last confirmed naturally occurring smallpox death was in 1977 in Somalia. Since the disease was eradicated worldwide, the general population hasn’t been vaccinated against it. Not since 1980.”
Dr. Ferrier took over, almost as if they were tag-teaming the explanation. “Today, since it doesn’t naturally occur anymore, even one instance of it is considered an outbreak. There is no effective treatment. There’s no known cure. It’s fatal about thirty-five percent of the time. However, some strains will have a ninety-eight to one hundred percent fatality rate.”
“In 1980,” Dr. Qiao concluded, “all of the world’s remaining smallpox samples were taken to the CDC and the Russian equivalent in Moscow. Do you want the official reason or the real reason why it was those two countries?”
“Official first,” Kennedy said.
“Because the U.S. and Russia could provide the most secure places to house the samples until the decision could be made about whether or not to destroy them all for good.”
“And the real reason?”
“Balance of power. There wouldn’t be just one superpower that would have the ability to study and perhaps weaponize it.”
Kennedy processed that. “Okay. Let’s say both countries did. From what you know, does this look like a strain we would have produced or they would have?”
We all directed our attention to Dr. Qiao, who was slow in replying. “This isn’t anything our country has developed.”
“Well, in any case, we have enough vaccine stored in our warehouses to vaccinate the entire U.S. population,” Dr. Ferrier reassured us.
“But we don’t know if the vaccine would be effective against this strain, right?” I said.
She fumbled for a reply, and finally gave a qualified answer: “It’s possible that it might not be as effective as we would hope. Unlikely, but possible.”
“Let’s get back to the genetic modification possibility. If someone were altering the virus to be used as a bioweapon, what changes would they make to it?”
“I’ll let Dr. Qiao answer that,” she said stiffly.
He thought for a moment. “You would want a fine-particle aerosol delivery system that would transmit and deposit the virus into the nasal, oral, or pharyngeal mucosal membranes. An inhaler, nose or throat spray, anything along those lines. You’re trying to get it into the alveoli of the lungs. Once it’s there . . .” He shook his head. “Well, you just saw what’ll happen.”
Assistant Director DeYoung clarified, “I think Patrick was wondering what specific changes you would make in how the virus is spread.”
“If you were genetically modifying it, you’d want to keep the person vertical and infectious before they become bedridden and incapacitated. Ideally, make it transmissible before the symptoms appear. The longer the carriers are walking around without knowing they’re contagious, the more the disease will spread. Second, increase its virulence. Third, if possible, make it contagious not just through aerosol means, but also through dermal contact.”
“Excuse me,” Dr. Ferrier interjected. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. First of all, we don’t know who developed this. We don’t know where this event occurred. And we haven’t even been able to examine a laboratory specimen. Also, this video could be a fake.”
“No,” I said. “No one else knew about our conversation regarding the silent ladies. It’s not fake.”
DeYoung glanced at his vibrating phone. “That’s the Director. I need to bring this to a close. Here’s what we know: Blake is free, on the run. We have a dead germ warfare specialist from the Cold War who’s somehow tied to him, and now we have the threat of a smallpox outbreak related to a known terrorist group. Patrick, I want you to figure out what her message means. Kennedy, I’ll keep you informed about any progress we make at this end. Kate and Chung, you two work up a timeline and an interagency response plan. We need quarantine and social distancing recommendations. I’ll have my team try to identify where this video was filmed and we’ll see if NSA can track down the digital fingerprints of the receiver. Are there any more questions at this time?”
“Do you want me to return to New York City?” I asked.
“No. Stay there. We don’t have enough information yet to justify bringing you back. However, be ready to board a flight if I need you to. Don’t share what you’ve seen with anyone there in Detroit. We can’t risk a panic.”
“Understood.”
Kennedy spoke up. “Has this been posted anywhere online?”
“Not that we can tell,” DeYoung replied. “But believe me, we’re looking everywhere we can for it.”
The Bureau’s Cyber Division has been working on a new program called Bloodhound, which can search for images or videos online and delete them wherever they appear. Even if someone has downloaded the video, Bloodhound can sniff it out on their hard drive and remove it. The program cycles through sixteen thousand times per second. We knew that even though civil liberties and privacy advocacy groups would eventually be bringing lawsuits against the Bureau, for now, in a few limited cases involving national security, we’d been using Bloodhound under the radar.
I assumed that my friend Angela Knight would be sending her hound out to search for the video online—on both the Internet and the Dark Web.
“By the way, Pat,” De Young said to me, “I’m reading Hawkins in on this. I’ll keep you briefed.”
And with that, he ended the video conference.
++++
Ali woke up from the nap feeling somewhat groggy, but refreshed enough to tackle
the second half of his drive.
After his prayers.
He took a minute to stretch his legs, and then carried his prayer mat across the lawn to a quiet, shady, deserted picnic area about fifty meters from the parking lot.
A formidable-looking young man about Ali’s age watched him from where he and three friends stood beside a vending machine.
Using a compass app on his phone, Ali oriented himself to Mecca. Then he laid out the mat and began his afternoon prayers.
Today, despite his best efforts, his thoughts strayed from focusing on the Mercy of Allah and drifted toward this trip to Dearborn, to the meeting he would be having tomorrow with Fayed, to the number of hours left before he would be contagious.
To how many people would be infected within the next seven days.
And to the incalculable masses that would be dead within seven more.
He begged Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful, for a pure mind and the courage to make the right choices, and for forgiveness for being distracted even now, when he should have been focused on the One he was pledging his devotion to rather than being concerned at all about himself.
49
Even though Tessa’s hair was only shoulder length, it got tangled a lot and when she didn’t stay on top of things, it ended up looking like a mop dipped in India ink flopping around on top of her head, which was just plain annoying.
She yanked at the brush. It hurt. So she yanked harder.
Seriously? Her mom leaves without telling her where she’s going—to see a friend, whoever that might be?
“I’ll call you when I get there,” her mom said right before she left.
“I can’t believe you’re not telling me what’s going on.”
“It’s just something I need to take care of.”
Tessa stared at her. “This doesn’t have to do with my dad, does it?”
“Your dad?”