Wendell Black, MD

by Gerald Imber, M. D.

  “Seen Dr. Alison . . . Alice and Tonto, Billy Joe?”

  “Sure thing, doc. Took’em down a bit ago. In a big hurry they was. Doc asked me to say I ain’t seen her. Which is what I done. Not two minutes later a couple of scruffy-looking bulls, you know, with gold badges around their neck, came tough at me. I done what the doc asked me to. She all right?”

  “I’m sure she is fine, Billy Joe. You did the right thing. Saved us a lot of dumb talk.”

  Alison was gone again. It was becoming a habit. But this time she had Tonto, so I was confident she would surface quickly. Anyway, keeping away from Rodriguez was a good move. I plopped myself into my favorite chair with the Times, crossed my feet on the ottoman, and opened the paper full-width—a luxury and the best way to get the whole scope of the newspaper of record. But I could not relax. After glancing at the front page and the spread of pages A2 and A3, I tossed it on the carpet beside the chair, got up, and walked through the living room to the terrace door. I unlocked the dead bolt and stepped outside, and there, parading along Sixty-fourth Street, looking happy and normal, were Alison and Tonto. He was smelling around for evidence of friends, and she was perfectly willing to stand by as he peed indiscriminately on every vertical surface in sight.

  I was overjoyed to see them, with the relief that comes of thinking the worst and being proven wrong. For a few seconds I was happy to be just another neurotic New Yorker. Alison looked like she didn’t have a care in the world. How could she do it? I whistled three loud blasts, which was my “come” signal for Tonto. He became regally alert, stimulated, confused, and with no idea what was going on. He heard me, but he couldn’t find me. Alison immediately looked to the terrace and began waving. After some pointing and calling, Tonto got the idea and barked twice in my direction. Probably all I deserved. For the time being, all was well with the world.

  43

  Instead of the pure happiness I experienced at seeing Alison evade the police, I should have been concerned with her equanimity in the face of that sort of challenge. Normal people do not take episodes like this in stride.

  When she returned to the apartment, Alison seemed confident the police would not return, and she laughed about how easy it had been to slip out the back stairs and through the rear service door onto the street.

  “Lots of the tenants must take their dogs out that way. Tonto was in heaven.”

  “That’s true. All the dog walkers use it. Billy Joe knows them all. So does Tonto.” I was becoming more relaxed as well. Just another family moment, if your family is dysfunctional, pursued by police, tangentially related to murder, drug smuggling, and intelligence services, and otherwise composed of two highly trained professionals in way over their heads.

  I filled Alison in on the meeting. She was still adamant that the water supply was not the target. “Too obvious. Too hard to widely contaminate and not enough shock value.”

  “Think of the economic havoc,” I countered, taking a position I stood against at the meeting.

  “No. These people are unsophisticated. They believe in ‘boom.’ Look at every attack, successful or otherwise. Suicide bombers in the marketplace in Iraq, cafés and school buses in Israel, boom, ‘look what we did.’ Shoe bombers, underwear bombers, car bombers, and the destruction of the World Trade Center towers. Boom, boom, ‘look what we did.’ The anthrax mailings in 2002 were quiet terror. One of your crazies, not al-Qaeda. They plant bombs, blow people up, and dance around the chaos. They are fucking Neanderthals. Poisoning the New York watershed, as destructive as it might be, doesn’t have enough bang for the buck.”

  I agreed.

  “So, now what?”

  26 Federal Plaza isn’t exactly home, but I was beginning to feel fairly comfortable there. The new, bar-coded ID opened lots of doors, and simply bypassing the interrogation lightened the load at the security checkpoints. More than eleven hundred special agents are assigned to the New York City field office, which, along with Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., was overseen by a bureau assistant director instead of a special agent in charge, as in the other fifty-three field offices. Only a fraction of the special agents were performing the “gang-busting” tasks that made the bureau famous. Bank robbers were still apprehended, and organized crime confronted, but the days of Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde, and the Mafia had passed, of necessity, in favor of antiterrorism work. The bank robber Willie Sutton’s succinct answer to the question “Why do you rob banks?” was said to be “Because that’s where the money is.” Which, in a nutshell, explains the reassignment of manpower within the bureau. Terrorism. That’s where the action is.

  Worth Street and Federal Plaza is just an easy stroll from Police Plaza. But, as impossible as it seems, the area is even less hospitable to normal life than our home base. Police Plaza is separated from Chinatown by the Chatham Green housing development. The area is dotted with old churches and the tiny Chatham Square Cemetery, the burial ground of the oldest Jewish congregation in North America. It pulses with the good and bad of humanity.

  Federal Plaza, on the other hand, is all about Foley Square, the federal courts, and everything that services the courts. One could argue that it is upscale from the goings-on at Police Plaza. A look at the crisp white shirts and pressed suits in the corridors is all that is necessary to see that the scruffy New York edge has been burnished away. The federal grunts lived here. Correction, nobody lived there. But it is the home of federal law enforcement. Sterile, by the book, and I hope more efficient than we hear over at Police Plaza. Only a short walk separates them; the two buildings feel worlds apart.

  After 9/11, the high command closed the streets surrounding Police Plaza to protect the building from terrorist truck bombs, or whatever. If they were isolated and forbidding before, this was the frosting on the cake. Still, the hustle and bustle within is real, and the place has all the energy of a subway car. Which brings me back to Federal Plaza.

  It is clean. The floors are shiny, and it is quiet, which is why I am surprised to feel comfortable there. In the final analysis, it is all about the people, and this was a good bunch. It had better be. Millions of lives could depend on how good these people were at their jobs. We were all taking our responsibilities seriously.

  I had a couple of hours before we reconvened, and though I knew I should be concentrating solely on the problem, as I expected the others were, I was revved up by the surprise visit from Rodriguez and Griffin. In truth, after hearing Alison’s side of the story, I felt no more enlightened. I continued to live with the recurring thought that everyone knew more than I, particularly Alison. But I couldn’t crystallize my suspicions. Did I think Rodriguez and Griffin were correct? Was she involved with the traffickers? I couldn’t imagine that she was, but those guys were professionals, and they made no bones about their suspicions. That was an understatement. In a fairly benign way, I had questioned Alison on several occasions and I saw no benefit in challenging her and hearing yet another denial. Alison, meanwhile, was either turned on by the excitement or was playing to my weakness. Whatever the case, I responded as she sat cuddled under my left arm on the sofa and we kissed.

  “Do you want to do it here?” she whispered, opening my pants and slipping her warm hand inside. “This is what I want.”

  Before I could tear myself from her delicious, moist lips to answer, Alison had eased off the sofa onto the carpet and had my erect penis in her mouth. Everything about me wanted to close my eyes and let it happen, I was ready to explode, but I managed to disengage and led Alison into the bedroom. I wanted everything: love, sex, and release. In the end it was worth the temporary self-sacrifice. I was at peace. My mind had not yet resumed churning, and Alison began to snore lightly as we lay spent and happy on the bed. Tonto had the decency to stay in the living room.

  After a quick shower and a return to reality, I gave Alison a quick good-bye kiss and was off to Federal Plaza.

  At three p.m., we reported to the conference room. Panopolous looked even more disheveled t
han he had earlier. I couldn’t imagine how he would look after the all-nighter that we assumed was in store for us. We were in it. The time for hypothesizing had passed this morning and we were full-throttle into deployment. Panopolous had made the leap from treating the group on a need-to-know basis to what I am convinced was full disclosure, though one was always unsure what full disclosure meant to spooks.

  The first concrete step taken was the deployment of the New York National Guard to police the watershed area. Panopolous reported the deployment less than enthusiastically, as it was unlikely to have much effect in the next twenty-four hours. The seventeen-thousand-member guard had been stretched to the limit. But a small force of uniforms with blackened M4A1 automatic carbines along the Catskill or Croton watersheds would go a long way toward showing we were serious. Unfortunately, it was impossible to provide a human chain-link fence of armed soldiers protecting the collecting lakes, ancient aqueducts, and processing plants that delivered the 1.2 billion gallons of fresh, clean water that New York City consumed each day.

  An elevated terrorism advisory had been issued by e-mail to first responders and care providers on the pull side of a push-pull system. Meaning that though there still was no system for pushing information out to all concerned, individuals who had requested bulletins would receive them by e-mail, Twitter, and other social media outlets. Detailed information was not provided. The old system of color-coded alert levels had been abandoned in 2011. We were now operating on an ever-vigilant baseline with two possible bumps: first to ELEVATED, indicating a credible but unspecified threat level; and then to IMMINENT, indicating a credible and specific terrorist threat. The new DHS Counterterrorism Advisory Board would meet within half an hour of a newly uncovered threat, for interagency coordination, and within two hours a new advisory would be issued.

  This time, it didn’t exactly work that way. Most of the agencies involved had been in on the deliberations for twenty-four hours, trying to parse the presence of a threat versus the level of panic the IMMINENT threat alert would cause. In the end, the level was raised to ELEVATED, but specific details were withheld.

  I couldn’t see how that would help. Panopolous called it our “cover-your-ass mode.” That I understood. So did everyone else around the table.

  “We can’t send every mother in America searching for Cipro. At least not yet,” he added. “Of course, seeing soldiers on the Taconic Parkway ain’t exactly SOP. But standard operating procedure or not, some of the troops would be deployed by evening. General Patrick, here, will give us an update.”

  The new uniform in the room stood. A tall and fit major general in battle fatigues, Patrick was impressive but looked very young. My first thought was, “How could this kid be the adjutant general of the New York National Guard?” He looked about my age. Of course, Dwight David Eisenhower was only a year or two older when he was Supreme Allied Commander in World War II.

  Patrick might have had a trace of Boston in his voice. He was forthright and clear, and he might just as well have been addressing his troops. At least it sounded that way. All stiffness and pretense had dissolved among the rest of the core group, so this puffery, if that is what it was, was unexpected.

  “I have issued orders for the immediate mobilization of the 42nd Infantry Division of Staten Island, the 27th Infantry Battalion, including the 69th Infantry Regiment, and the 1st Battalion of the 258th Field Artillery, as well as the 105th Military Police Company and the 2nd WMD Support Team stationed at the Bronx filtration facility . . .”

  “Excuse me, general,” Panopolous interrupted. “How many troops are already at station?”

  “None, sir. The first personnel will be in place by 1800 hours today.”

  “Okay. Can you estimate our total troop complement by 0800 tomorrow?”

  “By my best reckoning, 2,412, sir, inclusive of the Weapons of Mass Destruction Support Team.”

  Panopolous slid his chair back from the table. “Twenty-four hundred troops protecting a thousand fucking miles of watershed. Amazing. That won’t cut it, general.”

  “Sorry, sir, as of 1200 hours today, that is all the manpower available for mobilization. Our troops are spread thin doing tours in Afghanistan. That is all I can offer.”

  “Sheeeit. Goddamn. Not your fault, general. Sorry. No offense meant.”

  “None taken, sir.”

  “Be seated. Be seated, general. Thank you.”

  The general was obviously unaccustomed to taking orders, and I would hate to be the aide sitting outside in his staff car. It was going to be a rotten day.

  The first flights from London were scheduled for arrival within the hour. The Customs and Border Protection, the TSA, and the Port Authority police were on high alert with an increased presence everywhere. National Guard troops were stationed in the arrivals buildings, but fierce as they looked, they had no specific training for the job at hand. Panopolous intended to monitor the situation from the office he had commandeered on the twenty-third floor, just down the corridor from the conference room. It looked like a RadioShack in there, with newly installed electronic equipment on every horizontal surface. Some of it was sitting on crates stenciled with the names of army branches and codes. The two communications officers at desks within the mess were frantically busy and didn’t welcome questions. Both were in shirtsleeves and neckties and wore antiterror crisis task force IDs.

  Standard operating procedure dictates that every passenger and all luggage entering the United States or moving between airports within the country is scanned, wanded, or physically examined. Which, of course, does not mean that nothing slips by. No scan, no flight is the rule at Heathrow, and individuals in full burka who refused scans or body searches have been turned away. That assumes everything works properly. If there is complicity with airport employees, all bets are off. Any number of events can circumvent the system. There are other, safer ways to prevent suspect individuals from boarding.

  Homeland maintains offices at major airports around the world. Their presence at Heathrow is well known and integrated into the security apparatus. By now they were on full alert, with a mission not quite as hopeless as looking for a needle in a haystack. The incidence of breast implants in the general population is not as low as one might think. In the U.S., more than 300,000 women undergo the operation every year. Over ten years that comes to 3,000,000 women in this country alone, and the operation has been around for fifty years, so maybe one in twenty to one in fifty women have breast implants. That works out to a reasonable possibility of several on each flight. Easy enough to scan—if they present themselves for scanning. And exactly how much do the scans tell us? Can a scan differentiate anthrax from silicone gel? The density of the substance determines its resistance to X-ray penetration. But you can’t Google that question for a simple answer, and backscatter detects the implant, not its contents. But if the machine could be powered up, it might do the trick. For the moment I dismissed the outrage that would engender. One step at a time.

  After daydreaming through some part of the meeting, I made my first real contribution since selling my hypothesis. I excused myself, went into the corridor, and called the chief medical examiner, where this mess was first discovered.

  For want of a protocol, Benson had stored the intact, heroin-filled, second implant with the ruptured implant and the recovered heroin powder in a sealed container within a sealed locker. Benson knew the street value of the heroin in his care. He also knew how to handle and preserve evidence.

  After a greeting and a modest interlude, I said, “We need a big favor . . .”

  “Who’s we?” Benson asked, but he wasn’t negative right out of the box.

  I explained about the anthrax threat and ad hoc group and ticked off some of the more impressive members.

  “Anthrax. Jesus. And what, pray tell, are you doing swimming with those sharks?”

  “Not much, truth be told. But I was the guy who stumbled into the whole mess, and kind of started the ball rolling.” />
  “And now they think the ball has gotten enough mass to become a biological avalanche?”

  “Maybe time bomb is a better description,” I answered. “You can imagine what the hell is going on here.”

  “Call out the troops, doctor, call out the troops.”

  “Already have. Please don’t talk about anything we just discussed. We’re kind of holding it close to the vest until we figure out what to do.”

  “How close are you?”

  “Not close at all. We really need to know the density of an anthrax-filled implant to see if it can be distinguished from a garden-variety implant by a backsplash or scatter device.” The line was silent.

  “Ben?”

  “Yeah. I’m here. I’m not familiar enough with the units in use at JFK.”

  “It’s worse,” I interrupted. “We are particularly concerned with Heathrow. I can get the specs for you.”

  “Right. But let’s take baby steps. You get all of that in order; I want to get an X-ray and MRI of the intact implant.”

  “I get it. Heroin powder side-by-side with saline- and gel-filled implants. That will give us the general idea.”

  “Righto. A word to the wise. If your level of suspicion is red alert, then stop everyone with implants. Don’t let them board. Worry about the inconvenience later.”

  “Thanks, Sherlock, I’ll pass it on to my masters.”

  Panopolous had been on that one from the first conversation. His position on everything was “Prepare for the worst.” He had already been through extensive conversations with MI5, Scotland Yard, and Homeland at Heathrow. No one with breast implants was boarding. Not at Heathrow, not at Gatwick, and, with a bit more time to make the case, not at any airport in Western Europe. Meanwhile, outside the UK, it was IMMINENT alert and screen, screen, screen. If the terrorist cell had any clue that we were on to them—and they had to—the smart move would be to wait it out. We couldn’t keep up this level of vigilance indefinitely. Symbolic moments aside, they could do whatever they planned to do anytime. Analysts at Langley were working on permutations involving important moments for the jihad, Muslim history, numerical symbols, and any other combinations that might offer a clue to some sort of timing imperative that might help pin down the date. So far, no luck.