Wendell Black, MD

by Gerald Imber, M. D.

  I waited for Philos. The conversation in the SUV was not audible from where I stood outside the front passenger seat. Philos had gone to his phone twice during the five minutes of questioning, which was carried out almost entirely by the agent in the front seat. I couldn’t tell whether he was initiating calls or answering, but each conversation was quick. The first ended abruptly after Philos had the last word . . . the last sentence. He spent the second call listening. I wondered from how high up the chain of command that call had originated.

  I began to think ahead. I had to think about containment. Assuming the coffin carried the biological bomb. How much anthrax were we looking at? Caskets are eighty-four inches long, twenty-eight inches wide, and twenty-three inches high—or about twenty-eight cubic feet in volume. That could hold a cataclysmic volume of anthrax spores. Too horrible to contemplate. Properly dispersed, that volume was enough to rapidly eliminate the population of a great city. New York City. I wasn’t sure there was that much anthrax in the world or if it could be secretly produced outside of a professional laboratory.

  Casket arrangements vary from country to country. An inner casket for burial, dressed in a fancy show box removed before interment or cremation, was a popular British option, and this box was coming from London. What I cared about was how far from the anthrax we would be. How insulated from danger were we? I didn’t know the answers, but I was beginning to think of the questions.

  Philos opened the left rear door of the SUV and angled his long legs out. All eyes were on him. He motioned two agents to him. They were the guys in suits. I edged closer. Out of earshot of the others, Philos spoke.

  “Nobody knows anything. This guy”—he motioned with his head toward the driver of the SUV—”knows nothing. He has been driving for Frank Campbell’s for six years. His dispatcher identified him. He is supposed to pick up the body of an eighty-one-year-old woman named”—Philos stopped and scrolled through his messages, then looked up—“Goodman, Ellen. Ellen Goodman. She died”—he looked at his message again—“almost forty-eight hours ago at the Connaught Hotel in London, and her family hired Campbell’s to make travel arrangements. No one has seen the body. If there is a body. So we have to get this damned thing open ASAP.”

  I raised my hand to interrupt. I realized I didn’t know Philos’s first name, and I was uncomfortable saying “Excuse me, Assistant Director Philos, may I speak,” so I simply raised my hand a bit for attention and said, “You can’t do that.”

  All eyes were now on me, and I wondered which Philos was going to respond.

  “You don’t have to tell me that, doctor. I know the rules,” he said calmly and evenly. “We can’t pop the lid without permission, Patriot Act or not. But we can wall this thing off so nobody can get to it before we get to open it.”

  “I didn’t mean that,” I responded. “I think the first order of business is to protect everyone from anthrax exposure, including, actually, especially us. Who knows how much can leak out of that box? I doubt that it is anything close to airtight.” Philos raised his eyebrows. Everyone in our circle waited for me to continue, so I did.

  51

  I laid out my plan. It was simple. Two steps. First: We wrap the casket, the whole thing, in thick sheets of plastic and heat-seal the edges. That would isolate the casket and its contents. While arrangements were being made to procure the proper equipment, we would use one of those commercial plastic suitcase-wrapping machines to add a layer of isolation. I had no idea how well sealed that system would be, but it was better than nothing until the real thing came along. Second: We run the wrapped casket through the baggage X-ray machine. Not the backscatter screener—the real thing, the heavy-duty machine used on baggage. That should tell us a lot. At the very least, we would see if there was a body in the casket and any opaque foreign substances packed around it. Maybe, if the exposure wasn’t fixed, we could manipulate it for greater penetration and see what was inside the body. Failing that, we transport the casket to a nearby hospital and X-ray it there.

  Philos agreed. “And we better talk to those guys,” he said, looking over at the red hazmat truck and the small army of people in full-body, white, hazardous material suits and breathing devices. He took another brief call. “Let’s wait here another minute or two,” he said. We stood in place. The two baggage men had been taken to interrogation, and the driver was alone in the SUV with the casket. If he was worried about breathing anthrax-contaminated air, he didn’t show it. He had rolled down the window and had lit a cigarette. With his elbow on the sill and his head in his palm, he stared out and smoked. A stillness had descended on the tarmac. There was none of the usual noise associated with the coming and going of aircraft.

  “Quiet,” I said.

  “Airport is in shutdown. Nothing in or out,” Philos responded without looking my way. That explained Philos’s calls. He had not been idle. As if on cue, the whoosh of helicopter rotors filled the air. I spun around, trying to locate the sound, as a very obvious and very large marine VH-60N Night Hawk became outlined in silhouette by the low sun, in the process of setting down not a hundred yards west of us. The noise and turbulent air made conversation difficult, and the moment was thrilling. The big machine was quick to settle in and begin to shut down. It was the same model designated Marine One when transporting the president, and it had been the mainstay of VIP transportation for years. The three-man crew got ready for disembarkation. When the stairs folded down beneath the rotors, Constantine Panopolous, undersecretary for Homeland Security, emerged. Panopolous held the handrail on his right and virtually tumbled down the steps. His light gray suit was impossibly disheveled, and as usual, his collar was opened and his necktie pulled down a few inches. Philos was by his side before I realized he had moved. The two men shook hands vigorously, and Panopolous even laughed about something Philos had bent down and whispered into his ear. They were an unlikely-looking pair; tall, fine-tuned, tightly wound Philos, and the unkempt, tough little dynamo that was his boss, but there was an obvious bond. Panopolous had not always been an office guy, and I had wondered when and where they had been together, and how far he would allow himself to be separated from the operation on the ground. The answer to the second question was not surprising. Specifically, the Night Hawk had a cruising speed of 150 mph. The Wall Street Heliport on Pier Six in the East River was eleven nautical miles west of Kennedy Airport. The eight-minute flight took about as long as the lights-and-siren ride from Federal Plaza to Pier Six. Panopolous had been launched twenty minutes ago, just as all this fuss began. Not very far from the action at all.

  Philos waved Gilliam over from the sidelines and sent him to collect me.

  “Good going, doctor,” Panopolous said, extending his hand. “Now let’s hope you are right.” Of course, I had thought of that. Once I had everyone committed, I thought of nothing else. But better a red face than a dead crowd.

  “Thank you, Mr. Undersecretary.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s fucking sake! Call me Connie. Mr. Undersecretary, Jesus.” He was shaking his head pleasantly. It was obviously an old routine.

  “I might be right. At least this was the only unexplained event in a day and a half of surveillance.”

  “Surveillance is about patience. A day and a half is just the warm-up.”

  “Right. What I meant was we are on a compressed schedule of twenty-four to seventy-two hours, and this was the first event. Better to react and apologize than not react and lose the patient.”

  “What patient?” he asked.

  “Sorry, doctor talk. In the old days the rule was for surgeons to operate at the first suspicion of appendicitis. If 50 percent of the appendices you removed weren’t normal, you weren’t doing your job.”

  “Good for business.”

  “Yeah, but the point was if you waited and you were wrong, what should have been a minor operation becomes a major catastrophe. Now the diagnosis is made by scans, taking the doctoring, or the guessing, out of the equation.”

  �
�Nice analogy. I hope you are right. Let’s get the box scanned.”

  Philos gave orders to Gilliam, who gathered some of his men around him and delegated tasks. This took far more time than it took to instruct him. Then Philos, Panopolous, and I walked over to the hazmat team. Having seen everyone casually approaching the site, they had removed their headgear and breathing devices. A lieutenant stepped forward to meet us. He was a man in his early forties, just under six feet tall, with a rugged face framing a large, sharp nose, which made him look stern. The Martian costume added to the impression.

  Panopolous introduced himself, then Philos and me. The lieutenant was impressed. He stood at attention.

  “Yes, sir. I am Lieutenant James Rizzo, New York City Fire Department.” He went through the same drill for Philos and me. The guy was clearly ex-military and serious. It was a serious job.

  “At ease, lieutenant,” Panopolous ordered. Then Philos filled the lieutenant in on our situation. It was determined that the hazmat team would transport the casket to wrapping and X-ray. “And Dr. Black will be with you. Can you suit him up?”

  “Yes, sir,” Lieutenant Rizzo answered smartly. I didn’t think it was so damned smart, and I had no intention of wearing all that silly getup. After a minor negotiation, it was agreed that I was qualified by training to act as on-scene incident commander, as required by code. In that position, I could be slightly removed from immediate exposure, unless—or until—it was deemed necessary for me to don a Level A protective suit with SCBA, what the hazmat people called the self-contained breathing apparatus, intrinsic to a Level A protective suit. The SCBA makes the entire getup seamlessly isolated from environmental bio-pathogens. Wearing the suit is a big decision. It is extremely difficult to work in Level A suits. They are heavy and hot, and the air supply provides for an uncomfortable twenty minutes of bottled and filtered air. It is no picnic. These guys are well trained and in great shape. I am neither. I was reasonably familiar with the gear. We used similar equipment in the air force; and in both the hospital and NYPD, hazardous material and re-breathing training was mandatory. But this getup was for a moon landing, and it would take a lot to get me to use it. For starters, the re-breathing apparatus alone would be fine, so long as I wasn’t handling the hazardous material. I knew enough to give anthrax a wide berth. I could probably handle it safely in the lab, and I had Cipro on board, since the possibility of coming face-to-face with the nasty little buggers had become real. I was covered, and I wasn’t worried for myself.

  Clearing the passenger terminal was impractical if at all avoidable. The ensuing panic would spread through the city in minutes. I argued for restraint. Philos considered the conservative position to be evacuation, which was probably correct, but we had time for that. Right now we could seal the casket from behind the scene. The closed SUV was another layer of protection for everyone but the driver, and he seemed to take everything in stride, even as he was about to be hustled off to detention.

  “Isolate the driver, and start everyone who has been in contact with the casket on Cipro immediately,” I said to Philos, before our own driver, in a Level A protective suit, was installed at the wheel of the SUV. For starters, we had the hundred tablets that I had brought from home that morning. That could provide blood-level protection for a dozen people with casual contact. All bets were off for overwhelming respiratory inhalation. Right now we were dealing with casual contact, but if the source was liberated, it would be hard to tell where casual ended and inhalation began.

  The idea of sending men into the terminal to explain to a low-level civilian employee the need to commandeer his bag-wrapping machine would be beyond imagination. But as it turned out, Philos’s people simply flashed badges, had hands on pistols, pushed the machine onto the arms of a forklift, and ran it out behind the terminal with the wrap operator in tow. No explanations. They kept it on the lift and moved close to an electrical connection, still out in the open air. The operator was suited and gloved and was almost too panicked to move. Instantly upon seeing the Level A suit, he had begun to shake, and his shirt became transparent with perspiration. When the ambulance doors of the SUV were opened and he saw the casket, he began speaking very quickly in a language I took to be unintelligible Hindi. Then he turned to leave. Two agents took his arms as he attempted to stumble away. It didn’t take long for the poor man to gain control of himself and grasp what he was being asked to do. The casket was fed into the wrap machine and the entire box was done up like a mummy. I doubted the need for further wrapping and heat-sealing, but it was my idea, and I had learned that indecision and waffling were destructive to the mission. I wanted to remain on top of this.

  Getting the casket through the X-ray machine was easier than I had imagined, though it required several passes. Ultimately, three sequential frames covered all the ground necessary. It was like creating a bizarre triptych. There was, in fact, a body in the casket. A slight female with osteoporotic long bones and no evidence of breast implants. Nor was there any evidence of foreign substances packed in with her, a fact verified by the TSA supervisor assisting the search. My first thought was relief that there were no implants, because I hadn’t followed up on the relative density of silicone gel versus anthrax powder in an image. I was so absorbed by my oversight and relieved at not having been found out that the meaning of the false alarm had initially escaped me.

  I studied the X-ray images as the casket was passed through the machine yet again and stopped the belt every foot until the situation became obvious.

  “We’re good, everybody. Nothing here.” My anxiety was met by nothing but relief.

  “Good job, doc,” someone said. The hazmat suits were being unzipped before the exchange was complete. I called Panopolous. He answered on the first ring and seemed truly relieved.

  We were returning to the SUV with the plastic-wrapped casket when the Night Hawk lifted up over us. Panopolous was off site.

  The letdown among the Homeland people was palpable, and I shared it. Either Philos or Panopolous had immediately lifted the traffic freeze, and jumbo jets were already taxiing out to line up for takeoff sequence. Alison was in the Homeland area when I returned.

  “Where have you been? You missed all the action.”

  “I know. I was watching the terminal. I wanted to see what was going on in the crowd waiting for arrivals.”

  “Smart. Anything?”

  “No. Nothing but annoyance. The sound suppression in the terminal is so good that they didn’t register the absence of engine noise. Nothing was posted, so I don’t think they were aware of the freeze. Nothing to report.”

  “Did you just get back? I was looking for you out there. Might have needed a consultation,” I said. Then I gave her the short version. Apparently, she had heard much of it in the buzz around the room.

  “So actually, we have gotten nowhere,” I added.

  “Not so,” she replied. “Now every airport employee knows we are on high alert. It will be interesting to see if they abort.”

  “Abort? Aren’t you giving them too much credit? They are on a mission. Doing God’s will. They won’t abort.”

  “No, they will not, not in that sense,” Alison agreed. “But they may push the timetable back, which makes it far more difficult to intercept the operation.”

  That was food for thought. Still, my sense was that the process was in motion, and nothing could alter the sequence.

  52

  The 20:10 ETA for VS009 would be the last Virgin arrival of the day. It was bracketed by Delta, BA, Continental, and American flights, all originating at Heathrow. But I was fixed on Virgin. It was the airline of choice for the drug runners, and if we were correct about someone being on the inside, then they would have to stay with what they knew. The Homeland team was all over every flight, not only Virgin Atlantic. You had to respect them for that. They were diligent and alert, and it had been a long day. I was beat and more than a little self-conscious about leading the charge to nowhere. Things quieted down,
and I became less the center of attention as arrivals resumed and scrutiny continued. That was some relief.

  Philos assigned a team to match up three sets of passenger numbers: the number checked in at LHR, the number of occupied seats before takeoff, and the number of disembarking passengers. The first two were readily available, as every airline controlled those numbers as well as identification of checked-in passengers against checked luggage. If one hundred passengers checked luggage onto a flight, and only ninety-nine boarded, they knew it. If one hundred passengers checked in and only ninety-nine seats were occupied, they were supposed to know that as well. But once the aircraft landed, the danger of in-flight incident was past, and there was no procedure in place to count heads. Philos put a team on it.

  Philos was a professional. More often than not, leads went nowhere. That was the cost of doing business. Clean up and move on to the next one. He gave no evidence of holding my actions against me or of any loss of confidence. It said a lot about my ego that my mood went to black over being wrong, when nobody even looked at me cross-eyed. I was pretty much sick of the airport, and it was nearly three hours until the last Virgin flight of the evening.

  I paced the baggage area for a while, but the hideous, sickly pastel paint, the industrial floors, the sounds, and the smell had become oppressive. I was looking for any reason to call it a day. Alison had gone out on another walkabout, and there was no one to commiserate with, not that I would have been honest about either the self-doubt or the growling of the black dog. I headed back into Homeland headquarters and stood under the screens a few steps apart from the others when the big arm of the man in the tan suit draped across my shoulder. Deuce was back.