“Force them into a now-or-never posture. Make them rash and sloppy. I hope they’re right.”
“Amen. And for what it’s worth, I agree.”
“That’s a bad sign. What do you think would be a more likely target than the watershed?”
“Are they sure it’s anthrax?”
I hesitated for a second. “Yeah, they are, but it was pretty much based on what I told them. So guess who may end up being the goat of the century?”
“Oh, man. That makes me laugh. Rodriguez and the other jerk would love that. They still buy this as drugs. Rodriguez called me right after you did, around six. He was still trying to get a line on you and Alison. He is really on your case.”
“What case? Is he that fucking dumb? How in the world can he still suspect me when Homeland, the commissioner, and the bureau credential me?”
“Nobody’s perfect.”
“Good night, Deuce.” I smiled at the jokes, but the Rodriguez business still disturbed me.
By the time our short phone conversation ended, I was close to home. It was Sunday night again, and New York City was like anyplace else in the world. The streets were deserted, and traffic flowed swiftly and painlessly. It seemed as though I barely had time to close my eyes when the cab stopped in front of my apartment building. I paid the driver, saluted the doorman, and stepped through the open elevator door. Upstairs, I waited to hear Tonto before putting my key in the lock, but I heard no shaking, pawing, or sniffing. Unusual. A bit unsettled, I worked both locks as quickly as possible and swung the door open. Tonto was unconscious on the sofa with a smiling Alison happily scratching his head.
40
Coming home to find Alison and Tonto in the living room would have been a heartwarming family scene if it hadn’t been so bizarrely out of place. I was too dumbstruck to speak, so I just stood in the entry and stared. Alison broke the silence.
“Shhh, don’t wake him up,” she said, the picture of maternal happiness. Astounding.
“When did you get here?” I asked, probably with an appropriate edge in my voice.
“Can’t you do better than that? If you don’t want to kiss me, at least say hello.” She was dressed in jeans, a black T-shirt, and a thin, dark blue cardigan, and looked great. She always looked great. I walked into the room noisily enough for Tonto to raise his head from Alison’s lap and look at me. He wasn’t about to move. Smart dog. His sleek, black tail wagged twice in greeting, flopping against the cushion with a smacking sound.
“Hello, Alison,” I said grudgingly, knowing I was losing the battle. I walked to where she was sitting, put my left hand on the back of her head, and kissed her lightly on the lips. She tasted faintly of strawberry lip gloss, which, I assumed, she had recently applied. The truth was, I really wanted to take her right there. One kiss, the minute my tongue found hers, she would be wet, and it would all spin out of control. I made my way to the comfortable club chair near the arm of the sofa, sat heavily, leaned forward, and asked, “Where have you been? Everybody but the pope has been looking for you.” I left out that she had skipped out on me as well, the city was on crisis alert, and she was somewhere near the center of it all.
“Yes, I know. Sorry. I had some things to clear up. Professional things, you know.”
“No, I don’t know.” I answered loudly enough for Tonto to take the hint and scamper away. “And you apparently were not doing your professional things for your British secret intelligence services. The folks at MI6 deny you are on assignment. In fact, your MI6 people have been looking for you. And Rodriguez is on search-and-destroy. Obviously, this is more complicated than you let on, so let’s try the whole truth. It seems like it’s always the same issue with you.”
I was no longer tired, and I wasn’t in a forgiving mood. We were racing against the clock to put the puzzle together, and Alison probably held a few of the critical pieces. She had me figured out perfectly and didn’t attempt any diversionary tactics. She asked for a drink. I poured out two generous measures of Jameson’s, handed one to her, returned to my seat, and prepared to listen. What follows is a summary of Alison’s tale. Forget about the false starts and attempts at trying to extract information about how much I knew, or how tight the noose around her neck had become. I was not forthcoming. Still, after a bit, I fell into the rhythm of her view of things.
“Alison, the more you bullshit us and play hide-and-seek, the more they see you for this. They’re getting closer. I promise, they’re getting closer.”
She sipped her drink and didn’t speak. I waited.
“How do they see this going down?” she asked.
“Alison, tell me your story.” I wasn’t about to volunteer any more information.
“It isn’t all that complicated, love,” she said without smiling. “I think you get my problem with the Firm. We had an honest difference of opinion, and I am doing what I feel I must. It really is as simple as that.” When her pause became silence, I said, “That’s not enough, Alison. Start from the beginning.”
She took what seemed like an exaggerated deep breath, exhaled, looked away from me for a few seconds, and spoke.
“I have been a low-level operative with the intelligence service for years. Very low-level. For a doctor with good scientific credentials, good manners, and a nice appearance, it was easy to find my way into interesting scientific circles in Europe, the Middle East, and the States, wherever I was posted. I already told you all that.”
“You were specifically sent to infiltrate what?”
“No, no, nothing like that. Mostly, I went where my interests took me. They didn’t play much of a role in the choices. My job was simply to make influential friends who might come in handy along the way. From time to time a few crumbs fell from the table, which I collected and reported. Early on, I managed to confirm some work being done on an important biotech project in Iran. That kind of made my bones. But my time was spent becoming a plastic surgeon. I worked and socialized and kept my eyes and ears open, but mostly it wasn’t out of the ordinary. Months went by without contact from Vauxhall Cross, and finally I contacted them about resigning. The financial support was helpful, but by this point I could do well without it. We had had talks the last time I visited home.”
“When was that?”
“Maybe six months ago. Last winter.”
“And?”
“And nothing was decided. There, as here, resigning means different things to different people. If one were called upon for an assignment even after ceasing to draw salary, few would decline. No decision was made, and I stayed in the service. But then Farzan confided his suspicions to me, and it got interesting.”
“And when was that?”
“About three months ago.”
“Three months ago. I had no clue,” I said. Alison didn’t act surprised or contrite.
“It was about drugs. It wasn’t part of our life.”
“Why would Farzan talk to you about that? It makes no sense.”
“Farzan knew about my connection to the Firm, and he asked me to bring his suspicions to the proper authorities.” I left that alone and allowed her to go on. “My superiors didn’t believe that sort of investigation was within the scope of our franchise and suggested the Metropolitan Police. I was busy. I had no interest in functioning as a messenger and no interest in being endlessly detained by their inquiries, so I let the issue drop.”
“What did Farzan say?”
“I didn’t tell him. Then all this happened so quickly, and poor Farzan was killed. I . . .”
That was a conversation-stopper. I said nothing and waited for Alison to regain her composure.
“You know the rest. I began to see this as a far more dangerous issue. I contacted Vauxhall repeatedly. They stonewalled me. I couldn’t get them to open their eyes, so I made some contact here. That bounced back, and they called me in. I turned a deaf ear, which was not at all appreciated. All of which makes me a bit of an outcast. Worse than that, a rogue agent.”
&n
bsp; A rogue agent, meaning she had disobeyed orders and was no longer credentialed.
She and Farzan had been in closer contact than I had been led to believe, but I didn’t bother weighing what that meant. He was dead, bad shit was happening, and I couldn’t sweat the small stuff.
“I was frightened. I tried to piece together what Farzan’s murder and Tahani’s disappearance meant. The long and short of it was they were unimpressed or unwilling to help. Or maybe unwilling to confide in me that something bigger and more crucial to British interests was happening and the powers that be did not want it derailed by my interference. That was not unheard of, but I couldn’t ignore it.”
Finding her apartment inexpertly tossed had made the wild shooting on Forty-ninth Street a more obvious message from someone to lay off, so she checked out of one hotel and into another. Not quite certain of my allegiance, she continued making fruitless calls. Finally, unable to enlist official help of any kind, she decided to take a chance with me.
I assumed she meant I would be able to square things with the authorities. But she had no such idea. Her brilliant conclusion was that we would go it alone, which was not going to happen.
There wasn’t much new insight until Alison said, “I think they have contacts working at Heathrow and JFK, which would explain how they were able to finesse security and exit the airport unseen.”
“But what makes you think that?”
“It’s just too easy for them to repeat the process. You have to believe most people would think once is enough. Change locations. Maybe even change styles for each run.”
“True, but how do you know they are running the same play?”
Alison shook her head as if I were too dumb to know my fingers were on my hands. “Because of what Farzan and Tahani said. They have a system of recruiting indentured Asians working in Arab countries and shipping them off to London with the promise of surgery. They have a routine. Same mules, same doctors, and they must have the same operatives at each airport. Think about when you fly. How many Muslim workers are at the airports?”
“Alison, Muslim doesn’t mean terrorist. There used to be mostly Italians, and after that Latinos . . .”
“Right,” she interrupted, “before that there were a lot of Italians, and the Italian Mafia controlled the crime at the airports, and guess what, most of the complicit workers were Italian. Does that make me a bigot?”
“That was different.”
“It was not. Who do you think the mafiosi could relate to and bend to their will, the Irish? Give me a break. In this case fundamentalists find other fundamentalists, terrorists find almost terrorists, or wannabe terrorists. It’s obvious.”
I guess it was. From there, our discussion became more concrete.
An hour later, Alison was asleep on my arm. We had undressed and fallen into bed and to sleep without so much as a good-night kiss. About three, all the coffee and Diet Coke caught up with me. My right arm was numb from the pressure of Alison’s head, and I slipped it free without difficulty. Alison was comatose. Standing over the toilet, I resolved to call Deuce and alert him to the reappearance of the mystery woman, and let the chips fall where they may. I finished up and pulled the old blanket off the back of the chair by the window and stretched out on the sofa. I felt disloyal contemplating dropping a dime on Alison, and I was still annoyed at her behavior. It was more comfortable alone.
When I awoke, it was fully light and looked to be about seven. My neck was too stiff to turn, and my legs felt like they were permanently fixed in the semi-fetal position. With Alison still deeply asleep, I congratulated myself on my resolve to keep my distance, though she had missed the whole episode. I shaved and showered, and while I dressed, the coffee was dripping through. I poured the thick, hot stuff into my old mug, added the usual Skim Plus, and sipped at it standing in front of my desk scanning the morning’s Times on the laptop. Then I did what I should have done last night and texted Deuce and told him Alison was with me, and filled him in on her theory. I took Tonto for a twenty-minute walk, even though he would be picked up shortly, deposited him in the apartment, and took off for FBI headquarters. On the way, I called my office and told Mrs. Black that I would be out for a few days. Apparently, she was more plugged in than I, and said, “Do your duty for our country, Dr. Black.”
41
The meeting of my subcommittee was like a study group in medical school. We were the reserve nerds. We all knew the basics of anthrax bioterror. The drug of choice for prophylaxis and treatment is Ciprofloxacin—Cipro—and the availability of large quantities of it had been greatly facilitated by the rash of attacks in 2001. The stores of the drug could be quickly mobilized by state health authorities, but none of us knew the actual extent of the supply or whether the expired drug was regularly rotated out and replaced. The state health commissioner was a little embarrassed by that and texted the appropriate subordinates for answers. We established a triage paradigm, which, like all medical triage plans, established sorting centers to separate the salvageable from the hopeless. Primary trauma centers would be alerted. State medical personnel would be alerted. Amazingly, there was no seriously high-tech medical bioterror alert system in New York State. Once, under Governor George Pataki, in the years after 9/11, an attempt at an Internet-based alert system for all doctors was begun. It was a good idea but got lost in influence-wrangling with the medical societies. Individual hospitals then instituted systems to alert staff, and that would have to do.
The tasks to be performed could easily be handled by the staff of my federal and state colleagues. Mostly, they had protocol in place. Anthrax was an old story that had already been told. It was no surprise that I was left with little to do but offer the following summary: “We know how we will respond to an anthrax attack, but we don’t know where and for whom.”
My cell phone had vibrated three times during the meeting. I elected to ignore the calls, giving my full attention to the problem at hand. Sitting on a bench in the sun at the end of the sterile, green corridor giving on to endless conference rooms, I keyed up my voice mail. All three messages were from Alison. The first, personal and endearing, made me want to kick myself for letting my annoyance get between us last night. The other two were obviously immediate response to thoughts about the mechanics of imminent terror strikes. Neither were revelations, and both were directed at the likelihood of inside conspirators at both ends of the flight. I saved all three messages and walked down the sun-lit corridor to the meeting.
The conference room looked like Monday morning. Wastebaskets were empty, fresh pads and pencils were in military formation on the table, and the sideboard was stocked with water bottles, soda cans, ice buckets, and vacuum pump carafes of coffee, decaf, and hot water. A pile of pastries and cookies sat undisturbed beside the coffee.
Polo shirts, chinos, and blue jeans were gone. Suits and ties had the day. Everyone in the cast appeared a lot more serious, or at least a lot more grown up. Constantine Panopolous looked like he had already put in a full day. His necktie was pulled three or four inches below his unbuttoned shirt collar, and the jacket of his gray suit was draped over the back of his chair. He was still bouncing pens, but he wasn’t talking.
Most of the faces were the same, and we greeted one another and chatted like old friends. There was even some laughter. Panopolous called us to order and all conversations stopped. In Harriet English’s place sat Edgar Humphreys, the director of the FBI. That was impressive. Harriet sat along the wall behind him, though the quick demotion in rank didn’t show on her face. Humphreys was a tall man. I’m guessing nearly six-seven. Thin as a distance runner, he had long, skinny fingers, a beak nose, a perfect row of white teeth, and deeply lined gray eyes under a thick wave of mostly white hair. The collar of his blue button-down shirt was tight around his neck, and he wore a muted, red-and-blue-striped bow tie. He was well put together and confident.
I can’t remember exactly when Humphreys was not a fixture in Washington. He had been in his cur
rent position through two administrations, and he was deputy director before that. Humphreys regarded his politics as his own business. If not always liked, he was universally respected. Under most imaginable circumstances, leadership of the group would automatically have been ceded to him, but he graciously looked to Panopolous, which reflected either the will of the president, or good manners, or a prearrangement—or all three.
“Folks, let’s start by introducing Director Humphreys, who has cleared a busy schedule to be with us.” He nodded toward Humphreys, who seemed reluctant to smile but ultimately found some common ground between what was expected in a social situation and appropriate solemnity. Panopolous went on. “Our people have been in contact with sister intelligence services around the world. I’m sorry to say there isn’t much to pass on. Here’s what little we learned. Despite an increasingly contentious relationship with the ISI, General Kahn has given us assurances that the Pakistani Intelligence Service is not aware of information pertaining to an impending attack upon the United States. I have to believe he understands how seriously we would consider being misled. The general also offered the opinion that homegrown English-Pakistani nationals have no known affiliation with Iranian operatives in Britain. He denies all knowledge of involvement with al-Qaeda of the Arabian Peninsula. The close relationship between al-Qaeda in Pakistan and radical elements in Great Britain is well known, a fact that the general did not deny. But according to the general, no information from his assets with the cells indicates any link to the current issue. All of which means absolutely nothing to me. Remember, these are the same guys who had no idea where Bin Laden was hiding.
“On the other end, our friends on King Saul Boulevard think the link is definitely AQAP, Yemen, with financing from the Saudis, not Iran. The Israelis have a sixty-year head start on us in dealing with these birds. Their intel has kept them alive. Our humint is challenged at best, so we have to take them seriously. So here we are.
Wendell Black, MD Page 19