Oath of Office (a Luke Stone Thriller—Book #2)

by Jack Mars

  “Exactly. And even worse, this virus can pass from person to person through tiny droplets in the air, and the illness usually presents with a violent cough. So no exposure to blood, vomit, or excrement is necessary, another radical departure from the original.”

  “Anything else?” Luke said. He felt like he had already heard enough.

  “Yes. The absolute worst part, as far as I’m concerned. The virus is highly virulent and very deadly. The lethality of the hemorrhagic illness it brings on is estimated at about ninety-four percent without medical intervention. This is the rate at which it killed off a colony of three hundred rhesus monkeys at a secure research facility in San Antonio two months ago. The virus was deliberately introduced into the colony, and within forty-eight hours, two hundred eighty-two of the monkeys were dead. More than half died within the first six hours. Of the eighteen who survived, three never contracted the illness, and fifteen recovered on their own over the next few weeks.

  “The disease presents a nightmare scenario in which organs fail, blood vessels collapse, and the victim becomes completely debilitated and basically bleeds out, often in spectacular fashion. We’re talking about blood from the mouth, the ears, the eyes, the anus, and vagina, basically any bodily orifice, sometimes including the pores of the skin.”

  Swann raised his hands. “Okay. You said ninety-four percent died without medical intervention. What would the kill rate be if there was a medical intervention?”

  Trudy shook her head. “No one knows. The virus is so contagious, so fast-acting, and so lethal that medical intervention may not be possible. As far as we know, nearly every unprotected person who comes into contact with the virus will become sick. The only effective way to stop an outbreak might be to quarantine a population until the disease runs its course.”

  “With the people trapped inside the quarantine zone left to die?” Ed Newsam said.

  “Yes, in most cases. And it’s a horrible death.”

  A long moment passed. Luke shook his head. This was a far cry from the tone the facility director had used with the President the evening before. The guy had clearly been trying to downplay the severity of the breach, even with the President of the United States in the room.

  Luke looked up from his thoughts. Everyone on the plane was staring at him.

  “We have to get that vial back,” he said.

  CHAPTER NINE

  9:55 a.m.

  Galveston National Laboratory, campus of the University of Texas Medical Branch – Galveston, Texas

  “We’re too far behind,” Trudy said.

  Her voice trembled the slightest amount. She said it abruptly, with no prompting from anyone. Trudy had become uncharacteristically quiet on the second half of the flight down here. While Swann and Newsam traded tall tales, she had sat with her head against the window, typing notes into her tablet.

  Now, Luke watched her. She and Swann were unpacking laptop computers and setting them up on a long table. Luke’s team was in an old classroom. The room was on the seventh floor, on the other side of the building from the BSL-4 lab, and down at the end of a long hallway. It was quiet up here. There was nobody around.

  This was their operations center. The room looked like it hadn’t been used in years.

  Luke ran a finger along the windowsill. It was coated with a fine layer of dust. The lab heads wanted to seem like they were cooperating, but this was less than robust cooperation. Luke got the feeling they were tucked away back here because no one wanted them snooping around the facility. Well, it wasn’t going to matter what the lab people wanted.

  He glanced out the window at the sunny, sticky South Texas morning.

  “Tell me,” he said.

  She didn’t even look at him. “I’ve been running numbers and scenarios. The situation is very, very bad, worse than I even thought at first. This crime took place four days ago. It might as well have been a year.”

  “I’m listening,” he said.

  “Well, there’s no reason to assume the vial is still in the hands of the person who stole it. In fact, I’d say the chances are ninety-nine percent that it isn’t. It probably passed hands, and got on an airplane the same night it was stolen, or very early the next morning. So we’re looking at a possible operations radius that includes the entire world. The vial could be anywhere on Earth by now.”

  Luke hadn’t allowed himself to think about it in that way. He wasn’t ready to search the whole world. At this moment, he was more concerned about Trudy than the Ebola. He had seen a lot of breakdowns in his time as a soldier and an operative, and Trudy was beginning to look like a candidate for one. He couldn’t say he blamed her. It had been a hell of a past week.

  The government had nearly been toppled, and people were wondering what she knew, and when. Don Morris, her boss until very recently, and the man with whom she’d been having an affair, was in federal prison as a co-conspirator. She was under a lot of stress. Everyone had their breaking point.

  “Okay,” he said. “We’re going to take this one step at a time. We’re still crawling right now.”

  She shook her head. “You don’t get it. The Ebola is already weaponized. All that’s required now is to multiply it, which is a pretty straightforward affair. College students could do it. You could set up a lab, in Syria say, or in the tribal areas of Pakistan, or in northern Nigeria, outside the reach of any law or state. If you make enough of the stuff, then we’re talking about the potential for multiple attacks, again and again, with one of the most dangerous substances known to man.”

  Luke thought about what she was saying for a long moment. “Wouldn’t it take a lot of money and expertise to build a lab like that? I mean, look at this place.” He gestured ironically at the empty, low-tech classroom. “It must have cost a billion dollars.”

  She shook her head emphatically. “It doesn’t matter what we spend on facilities. This is the United States. You can do the same thing only faster, and on the cheap, especially if the people handling the virus are true believers. You’re not concerned with safety. You’re building to the barest minimum standards. You don’t care if your people get sick. Also, this theft was obviously planned months, if not years, in advance. They could have built the lab two years ago, waiting for this day.”

  Luke felt that familiar sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. It was an old friend by now. Trudy was right. Of course she was. They were far behind. He would call the President today and tell her they needed more resources. Hell, they needed a gigantic manhunt. They needed Navy SEAL and Delta Force operators banging down doors and busting through walls.

  And that would come. But first he needed to steer this conversation back onto a productive course. There were things they could do, right here and right now, and they needed to start doing them. The thief wasn’t so far ahead that they couldn’t catch up.

  “The first thing we need to do is figure out where the woman went,” he said to the room. “Can we do that?”

  Trudy shook her head. “Let’s just say the possibilities are unlimited. I mean, it’s the ultimate needle in a haystack.”

  “Why?” Luke said. He knew why, but he needed to hear it. It would help him clarify his own thoughts.

  Trudy shrugged. “She could have gone anywhere, by any means. She could be recovering from facial surgery by now, with a dye job, and a whole new identity. She had too many options available for us to calculate. First off, she disappeared in Texas, a state with thirty million people, and a dozen major highways. We’re not far from Houston, where there are two major airports. Then there’s San Antonio, Austin, and Dallas, all major hubs of transportation. Not to mention she could have gone right out of Galveston, by air or by sea.”

  Ed Newsam grunted. He leaned against a blank white wall, his crutches next to him. “If I’m carrying precious cargo, no way I’m flying out with regular folks at a public airport. Too risky. One chance in a hundred they spot a little vial like that during the security check, but what if they do? You went
to all that trouble to steal the prize, only to lose it the next day at the airport? Unh-uh.”

  “Sure,” Trudy said. “But that’s assuming she didn’t drive her car out to the West Texas hill country. What if she did? What if she drove out into the middle of nowhere, away from any traffic or security cameras, and someone picked her up? Then what?”

  “All right,” Luke said.

  He raised a hand as if to say STOP. Even so, he liked where this was going. His people were thinking, their minds were sparking off each other, reaching out across time and space, making connections. This was how they were going to track down that woman.

  “Let’s dial this back to the beginning,” he said. “Don’t assume anything, right? This is a secure facility. That means there are video cameras in the parking lot. Maybe they were working that night, maybe they weren’t. But there’s also going to be traffic cams on the roads leading over to the highway, and security cameras on entryways to businesses, in alleyways, and in parking lots. She’s going to be picked up as a peripheral image on a lot of footage.”

  “True enough,” Trudy said.

  “So we start from the moment she left the grounds. We have that time, right?”

  Trudy nodded. “We have the security guard’s testimony. Also, if it wasn’t down, the electronic key system will have data on her ID passing out of the building.”

  “Perfect,” Luke said. “What was she driving again?”

  Trudy glanced at her tablet. “A blue BMW Z4 convertible. Texas plates.”

  “Great. It’s a distinctive car. It doesn’t look like everything else. Find that car on camera, then follow it out from here in an ever-expanding arc. See where she went. Did she stop anywhere? If you think about it, it’s not really a needle in a haystack. We know what time she left, and from where. We’re right on the coast—we know she didn’t drive south into the Gulf of Mexico, and there really aren’t many places to go west or east. That’s going to narrow the amount of surveillance footage we need.”

  “This is also a sensitive area,” Swann said. He had three laptops lined up across the table. He opened them each in turn. In his left hand he held a loop of yellow cabling.

  “You’ve got a ton of shipping here, you’ve got oil refineries, you’ve got this biological facility, and it’s all on this little strip of land. It wouldn’t surprise me if there are satellites watching this peninsula twenty-four hours a day. Our satellites, Russian satellites, Saudi satellites, Iranians, Israelis, Chinese, various corporate and black satellites. I’ll bet you five dollars there’s plenty of interest in what goes on here.”

  “Can you access that stuff?” Luke said.

  Swann smiled.

  “Okay,” Luke said. “If you can get four-day-old satellite data off of corporate or Chinese servers, you’re the man.”

  “I am the man,” Swann said. “Watching you, watching me, that’s the game we’re all playing.”

  Luke nodded. “Good. My bet is that Ed is right. She didn’t go out of a major airport. Too much scrutiny. So pay particular attention for gaps in the video footage. Try to sync it with the satellite data. Does she disappear from video for a while? If so, where is she? Is she near a small private airport, or even an old airfield? Is she near a marina? There’s nothing but open ocean here. She could have gone out by boat.”

  “What if she pulled into the parking lot of a little league field and just handed the vial to someone?” Trudy said.

  “We try to pinpoint that moment. If Swann can get satellite data, maybe we see the two cars parked side by side. Then we have two cars to follow. Listen, I’m not saying it’s easy. I’m just saying it’s necessary. If there’s too much information to sift through, hire it out like we’ve done before. I don’t care. Personally, I think she stops somewhere, and if so, I want to see her do it.”

  “And if she didn’t?”

  “If she didn’t stop, then we follow her as far as we can out to the hill country. We at least try to confirm that she really did jump in her car and drive two or three hundred miles with a vial of weaponized Ebola in her glove box. I don’t think she did, but I’m open to being wrong about it.”

  A young man in a white lab coat and glasses stood in the open doorway. He appeared there all of a sudden, as if he had come carefully down the hallway without making a sound. He cleared his throat.

  “Agent Stone? The director is ready to see you, sir.”

  Luke looked at Trudy and Swann.

  “Are we a go?”

  They nodded. “We’re a go,” Swann said.

  “Then go, kids, go. Get me that BMW. Once we have that, we have a beachhead. We’ll fight for territory from there. In the meantime, Ed and I are going downstairs to work over this director.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  “I need to go inside the lab,” Luke said.

  The balding man with the pronounced paunch shook his head just slightly. He leaned back in his chair. He was Wesley Drinan, Ph.D., Director of the Galveston National Laboratory. He wore a long white lab coat, instead of the suit from the day before. The coat had various stains on it. He had a pair of safety goggles on a cord draped around his neck. Drinan had returned to his natural environment.

  Even so, he did not seem relaxed. He seemed sick. His face was red and a fine sheen of sweat gave a glossy look to his forehead. His eyes were bloodshot and tired. His skin was off-white, like a color you might paint the finished basement.

  Doing a quick round-trip to Washington to answer questions from the President didn’t seem to agree with him.

  “Mr. Stone, I’m afraid that’s impossible,” Drinan said. “You don’t have the training required to go in there. In any event, the lab is closed until we conclude our investigation.”

  Luke and Ed were sitting in Drinan’s office, across the desk from him. The office was large and sunny, with a huge brown desk near one wall. There were two windows behind the desk that looked out on the green lawns and concrete walkways of the campus.

  Sitting catty-corner to the desk was Drinan’s deputy director, a slightly round middle-aged woman with red hair and red glasses to match. Luke hadn’t even bothered to catch her name. His focus was Drinan.

  Luke had taken a dislike to Director Drinan. If Trudy was right, then Drinan had downplayed the severity of this situation in front of the President and her team yesterday. Luke didn’t like that. He didn’t like Drinan’s officious, self-important personality. Right now, he was looking for something he could like about Wesley Drinan, and he wasn’t finding anything.

  “You can call me Agent Stone,” Luke said. “And the truth is your girl Aabha didn’t have the training to go in there either. But that didn’t seem to stop her.”

  Drinan shook his head again, more emphatically this time. “On the contrary. Aabha Rushdie was…” Drinan caught himself speaking about her in the past tense. “Aabha is an accomplished young scientist. She was a remarkable student, and as a professional, she has mastered every facet of…”

  “Aabha Rushdie died in 1990,” Ed Newsam said.

  Ed was slumped deep into his chair in his typical laconic style, his crutches leaning alongside his body. In contrast to the director, Ed seemed very relaxed. He seemed almost ready to take a nap. He shrugged, as if to soften the harsh abruptness of his statement.

  “So I’ve been told,” Ed added.

  Drinan looked from Ed, to Luke, then to his deputy director. If anything, his face became a darker shade of red. He turned back to Luke.

  “What does your…”

  “Partner,” Luke said.

  “What does your partner mean by that?”

  Luke shrugged. “We have access to the best intel available. You know how your job is to study and safeguard diseases? Our job is to conduct investigations. We do a very good job. The woman who worked here, and who called herself Aabha Rushdie, was a fake. She was a plant of some kind. A spy, if you like. She may have been working for Pakistani intelligence. That would be the best-case scenario. It’s kind o
f a long shot, but it’s the one we’re hoping for. She may also have been working for Sunni Muslim extremists. Unfortunately for everyone, that’s much more likely. If that was indeed the case, then by now, a violent terrorist organization probably has their hands on your weaponized Ebola virus.”

  Drinan stared at Luke, his mouth hanging open a small amount.

  “The real Aabha Rushdie was a little girl who died in a car crash in India in 1990. The woman you knew was using Aabha Rushdie as a cover story.”

  As Luke watched, Drinan’s face darkened to a dangerous shade of red, a red bordering on purple. He looked like a bottle of cheap wine. Luke was no doctor, but Drinan sure looked like a man with a stroke in his future.

  For the past five minutes or so, Luke had watched how the overhead light reflected off Drinan’s gold wedding band. Occasionally, the stubby fingers of Drinan’s right hand would find the ring and give it a little twist around his ring finger. The ring was on Drinan’s mind, whether he knew it or not.

  “Aabha was your mistress,” Luke said. He didn’t know he was thinking it until the words were out of his mouth. All the same, it wasn’t a question. Aabha did whatever was necessary to penetrate this facility completely. Of course she did. Her handlers wouldn’t have it any other way. You don’t insert an operative into a situation like this and go halfsies with it.

  Next to Drinan, the deputy director gasped. Her mouth hung open. She turned and stared at Drinan.

  “Wesley?” she said.

  Luke raised a hand to quiet her. He directed his words to Drinan. “You’ve been worried about Aabha these past few days. Your blood pressure is sky high. You’re not sleeping because you’ve been terrified for her safety. You’re also afraid of being found out. These are the reasons you’ve downplayed the seriousness of this breach, and conducted this bogus internal investigation. You were buying time while looking for Aabha. You were hoping this whole thing was a mistake.”

  Drinan hung his head. A long moment passed. When Drinan finally spoke, his voice was small.