by Mark Gilleo
Syed spoke through the mask, his words intermittent with the muffled wheezing of air through the mask. “Those machines. Do you think Abu can operate them properly?”
Ariana nodded. They had been in the room for over nine hours and Ariana struggled with boredom. Syed and Karim had grown accustomed to the room, the silence, the downtime. Ariana was still on the steep section of the learning curve. “We did a trial run with coffee beans. The output was good. The machines themselves aren’t difficult to operate. I set the machines to the required specs, which should remove further variables in the equation. All Abu has to do is run the machines. Whether or not he follows the procedures, well, that’s a different story.”
“What are his chances?”
Ariana tilted her head slightly to the side.
“Fifty-fifty.”
“You said the risk was low.”
“If he follows instructions, he may make it.”
Silence, and breathing, followed.
“You should have told him,” Syed said.
“He knows what he signed up for. We all do,” Karim answered, joining the conversation.
“Let’s say you inhaled a lethal dose of the processed powder. How long would you have to live?” Syed asked.
Ariana answered, speaking slower than usual though her words were completely audible. “An educated guess is forty-eight hours. There really isn’t much research on the subject, for obvious reasons. I think most of the knowledge we have comes from testing animals.”
“How does it kill?”
“At the cellular level. Ricin acts as a ribosome-inactivating protein.”
“Which means?”
“It breaks down the ribosomes in proteins, until protein synthesis ceases.”
“Is there a less technical explanation?”
“Ricin poisoning is very complicated. It prevents the cells in the body from making proteins, and that will kill the cell and eventually the person. It causes clumping and breakdown of the red blood cells, hemorrhaging in the digestive tract, damage to vital organs. Within eight hours of inhalation, symptoms would start to appear. The symptoms would be different, depending on the method of ingestion, but for inhalation it would start with respiratory distress, coughing, tightness in the chest. Nausea, sweating, and fever would follow. Seizures and hallucinations might occur. Within two or three days the kidneys, liver, and spleen would stop working.”
“And there’s no treatment?”
“There is treatment, but no cure. Medicine can treat the symptoms, and ricin is not one hundred percent fatal. A person can recover on their own. Ricin in various forms is actually used medicinally. In particular, it is used in treating some forms of cancers and in bone marrow transplants.”
“So it may not be lethal?”
“A few people may get lucky.”
Syed considered the thought. “I guess that’s the difference between a mass killing and an assassination. I’m trained to kill, and given the right weapon no one is getting lucky.”
Ariana looked at the soldier sitting on an army cot. “Don’t worry; there will be enough for you to kill as many as you want.”
No one spoke for a minute and then Syed began anew. “I don’t understand why we are using ricin. There will be no violent images, no destruction. We need a spectacle of violence to attract the next generation of fighters. To show the world that we are serious.”
“Ricin is what we have.”
“But a nuclear bomb is what we need.”
“It is planned,” Karim said. “But highly enriched uranium is hard to come by. We are relying on a small supply stream from southern Russia, passed through north Ossetia and Georgia. The Russian nuclear stockpile is for sale … if you have enough money and ask for small quantities. Large requests make everyone a little nervous. Too nervous. You may remember last year a Georgian man walked into a restaurant with three ounces of HEU in a plastic bag. Unfortunately, he sold it to an agent of the CIA.”
“How can you carry it in a plastic bag?” Syed asked.
Ariana answered. “You can touch highly enriched uranium without protection. Unlike plutonium which is very deadly.”
“How much uranium is needed for a bomb?”
“It takes over a hundred pounds of HEU to produce a bomb equivalent to the one dropped on Hiroshima. Ounce by ounce we will make it. We almost had six pounds of HEU in one transaction, but it was intercepted by Czech security,” Karim said.
“It would be nice to have it now.”
“Yes, it would,” Karim answered.
Another moment of silence passed before the loquaciousness reappeared.
Karim started. “We have other efforts underway. We have men scouring the caves on the border between Kenya and Uganda. The Kitum cave on Mount Elgon is particularly hopeful. Wild elephants have been known to frequent the Kitum cave to lick its walls, which are laden with salt. It is also one of the known locations for the Ebola and Marburg virus. On two separate occasions the virus has been traced to this single cave.”
“How do you capture the virus? You would need specialized equipment. Specialized medicine. Doctors.”
“We are not trying to capture the virus. We are trying to contract the virus. We have a network of men who are prepared to contract the virus, travel to another location, and then spread the virus to the next person in the chain. We could have infected men in London, New York, Washington, and Paris in less than a week.”
“That still lacks a certain mass appeal. The faithful are not as moved by sick bodies in bed as they are by body pieces in the street.”
“Consider yourself a pioneer,” Karim said.
A long silence followed and Ariana spoke. “There is something else to consider about our plan.”
“What is that?” Karim asked.
“We need more men.”
Chapter 50
The quad in the middle of campus was quiet. The benches along the crisscrossing sidewalks were empty, the graffiti of white Greek letters standing out against the dark wood of the seatbacks. The guerilla advertising on unofficially designated benches was overlooked by university police. Limited “sanctioned vandalism” it was called. To give the campus some character.
Washington D.C. may have been suffering through a cold spell, but Boston was in the freezer next to the gamey meat. The local news was having fun with rumors of polar bear sightings in Boston Commons, America’s oldest public park. The frozen Charles River acted as a wind tunnel to the campus of MIT, pushing gusts from the hills in the distance into downtown Cambridge. Unassailable, the winds tore through the largest conglomeration of scholastic intelligence in the free world before continuing on to pelt urban Bean Town.
Old universities ooze knowledge. They perspire with culture. They drip history. They breathe civility. Walk the halls of Princeton or Yale or Harvard or Oxford, and the average person feels smarter. Knowledge hangs in the air, hundreds of years of education forming some unidentifiable aura of cerebral worthiness.
The 430,000 square foot Stata Center on Vassar Street on the MIT campus was different. Stainless steel walls, interspersed with modern brown brick siding, jutted from the building at odd angles giving the feeling that the building was growing from the Earth haphazardly, like unkempt grass. Ninety degree angles were rare in the behemoth building whose construction was partially funded by Bill Gates. The only central recurring theme in the architecture was the lack of one. The madness of the first several floors of the building housed everything from artificial intelligence to linguistics. The towers on either side stretched upwards in swooping curves. Classrooms with inward sloping walls gave some students vertigo. George Jetson would have been right at home.
Clark and Lisa walked the hallway and stopped near the elevators to Tower D, the bulletin boards still covered with colorful fall semester notices and advertisements pinned to the corkboard. Cars for sale. Houses for rent. Roommates wanted. Guitar lessons available. Happy Hour with a band called Randy Dick, in honor of the
singer and drummer.
Clark looked around at the glass interior walls and the team of intellects that worked like bees in a translucent hive. “It’s not what I expected,” Clark said to Lisa as they waited for the elevator.
“What did you expect?”
“History. Oil paintings on the wall. Wooden staircases. This place lacks a certain je ne sais quoi, which I believe is French for ‘really old stuff.’”
“For someone so smart, you say some pretty stupid things.”
“Just going for the laugh.”
“I’m not sure we have time to be laughing.”
The elevator opened in the basement of Tower D and the architectural feeling Clark had been searching for became an even more distant hope. He looked at the signage on the wall and followed the arrow towards Robotics Research.
“No wonder we lost the robotics competition. Virginia Tech is practicing robotics in stone buildings with walls that perspire and these guys are developing robots in Buck Rogers’ apartment.”
Clark knocked on the open doorframe under the Robotics Research sign. A girl in jeans and an MIT sweatshirt turned towards the door.
“Hi. I’m Clark Hayden and I’m looking for Mayank Malhotra.”
“Mayank?”
“Yes. I called ahead; he should be expecting me.”
The girl got up from her seat and shook hands with Clark and Lisa. “I’m Tara Patel. Mayank’s this way.”
The girl went through a pair of swinging doors, the type hospital staffers open with the end of a gurney, and led Clark and Lisa down a hall lined with shelves of electronic equipment and boxes. She turned left at the end of the hall, went through another set of doors, and the eight-foot ceiling of the passageway opened to thirty feet. A miniature car with a blinking light on top zoomed by on the floor in front of Tara’s feet.
“Welcome to the most expensive playroom on the East Coast. Wait here and I’ll find Mayank.”
A remote control helicopter came into view and hovered in the air a few yards in front of Clark. A small flash of light emitted from the helicopter before it disappeared into the far corner of the room.
Tara returned and passed Clark and Lisa on her way to the door. “He’s on his way,” she said, smiling as she walked through the double swinging doors.
As promised, Mayank arrived a moment later with a remote control device in his hand, the antenna extended.
“Clark, good to see you again.”
“Thanks for seeing me.”
“I’m wondering if I should pat you down or blindfold you. For all I know you are here on a university robotics intelligence mission.”
“I wish I were.”
Clark introduced Mayank to Lisa.
“Did Clark tell you we met in Tokyo? We competed with each other in the World Robotics Championship.”
“Yes, he mentioned it. It’s some place you have here.”
A yellow flag at the end of the antenna on the remote control had a number written on it. Lisa asked “What’s the number for?”
“Frequency,” Clark answered. “You can’t have different toys running on the same frequency. It makes control a little difficult.”
“Bad things happen,” Mayank said, elaborating with his free hand slamming into the side of the controller to indicate a crash. He put the remote control on a chest-high table near the door. “Let’s go somewhere we can talk.”
Clark and Lisa followed Mayank back to an office with three glass walls and no windows.
“It is quite a building,” Lisa added.
“We are part of CSAIL, the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. We have a bit to work with.”
“That would be an understatement.”
“So, Clark, what’s going on? You said on the phone you were in Boston and it was important.”
Clark gave the Reader’s Digest condensed version of the story. He started with the missing family who claimed to have returned home suddenly, touched on two dead neighbors in the last several weeks, a house fire, a car mechanic in search of a new employee to replace his dead one, a visit from the FBI after his mom called the CIA, and the beans of death he pulled off a farm in Virginia.
Mayank Malhotra looked at Clark with a little concern. “And the IRS is involved, how?” he asked, looking at Lisa. Lisa smiled and Mayank felt a little blood flow south.
“She’s investigating my parents for tax evasion.”
“Was investigating,” Lisa clarified.
“Right, was investigating.”
“Now we are seeing each other.”
“Given those two alternatives, I would say you have chosen wisely,” Mayank answered.
“She’s helping me poke around a little,” Clark added, trying to ignore the joke he left hanging out there, over the plate like a slow pitch softball.
“And you think your neighbor is an MIT graduate, why?”
“Paul Cannon,” Clark answered.
“The NASA scientist?”
“The same.”
“I don’t see the connection.”
“Neither would have I,” Clark started. “But we think this woman, my neighbor, stole the identity of a Wellesley student in 1998. The student went missing out near the University of Massachusetts. Her car was found burned out. Her body was never found.”
“Just like Paul Cannon.”
“Exactly.”
“Sounds like a hunch.”
“It’s more than a hunch, it’s the culmination of a series of hunches. A cacophony of hunches, bells, whistles, and sirens that have been going off in my head for the last month. All I need is to confirm something.”
“The girl’s identity,” Lisa chimed in.
“And then what?”
“Then I’ll find her.”
“How are you going to do that?”
“I don’t know just yet.”
“Maybe I’ve seen too many movies, but if you have two dead neighbors, maybe you won’t need to find her. Maybe she will find you.”
“Let’s see what we’ve got,” Mayank said, turning towards his computer. “We have any guesses on the girl’s name?”
“No.”
“Then how do we know we are looking for the right person?”
“We don’t know her name, but we believe she is Pakistani. We think she graduated sometime between 1996 and 2000.”
“That’s not much to go on.”
“How about Paul Cannon? Can you tell us when he graduated?”
“You really think they’re connected?”
“It’s my theory.”
“I hope you’re wrong. MIT is a small community. And one that is very well-connected through research, alumni, internships, email, websites, blogs, etc. I hope it’s nothing insidious between our MIT brethren.”
“I read that Paul Cannon graduated from MIT in 1998. Maybe we can start with that year.” Clark pulled out the hand-drawn picture of Ariana Amin done by Mr. Stanley. “And this is a rough picture of what she looks like.”
“Did you do that?”
“No, why?”
“Looks more like a portrait than a police sketch.”
“I’ll let the artist know.”
Mayank turned his attention back to the computer. “This database has every graduate from the university since its inception,” Mayank explained as he typed, an action he augmented with the occasional click of the mouse.
“Of course the data from the old days is just a list of vitals: name, permanent address, grades. It wasn’t until 1996 that we really started doing cool things with the student data.”
“The advent of the Internet,” Clark said.
“That’s right. 1996 was the advent of the Web browser anyway. Of course, MIT had the internet from before Al Gore. But with the internet, came a formal university intranet, or rather an institutional wide interest in its intranet. And with that, the underground programmers came to the surface and everyone’s job got a little easier around here.”
Mayank conti
nued to explain. “We can search by name, social security number, student ID number, year of graduation, field of study.”
“Can you search by sex?”
“You know … I don’t know.” Mayank pecked around for a minute. “Not a searchable criterion. But women make up less than ten percent of the student body. In 1998, the number was even smaller. It shouldn’t take long.”
“It has taken forever to get this far,” Clark said under his breath.
Mayank Malhotra typed into the keyboard and then clicked with his mouse. “Here we are. Paul Cannon, graduated in 1998 with a Ph.D. in alternate energy propulsion.”
“Can we search for students in that program and related programs?”
“Let’s start with related programs. That sounds like a specialty Ph.D., even by MIT standards.” Mayank clicked a few more boxes and a list of names appeared on the screen in blue.
“Do any of them look familiar?”
All three looked down the list. Names from every corner of the globe, and a few from off the radar, populated the screen. Taiwan, Bangladesh, Moldova, Australia, Uruguay, Germany. It was the cream of the crop, the topping on the best intellectual sundae the world had to offer. A global alliance of brainpower.
“Try the third one from the bottom,” Clark said.
“Not sure if that is a man or a woman,” Mayank said. “Could be either.” He clicked on the link and a picture popped into the upper left hand corner of the screen. The man with the turban and moustache was neither the right sex nor the right religion.
Two more clicks, two more misses. Mayank scrolled down and read the next name on the list.
“Safia Hafeez. Definitely a woman’s name.”
Mayank clicked the link and a picture appeared on the screen. No one spoke. Clark and Lisa leaned over Mayank’s shoulder, getting closer to the screen.
“Is that her?” Lisa asked.
All three looked at the picture on the screen and the hand drawing on the desk.
Clark leaned toward the monitor. “Hello, Safia.”
“Are you sure?” Lisa asked.