by Doug Raber
Greg had grabbed the Alice pack, and he was coming around the back of the SUV when he saw Jack lean on the door to steady himself. “Looks like you could use some help, friend. Let us give you a hand.” He and Danielle took positions next to Jack, draping his arms over their shoulders. Initially, it was only to steady him, but halfway up the hill, they needed to support him. The last few feet, they were virtually dragging him.
The cabin was ice cold. They got Jack into an old armchair next to the wood stove. “It’s probably still burning. I just banked the fire before I went to get food. There’s firewood over in the corner. A lot more stacked up out back.”
Danielle wrapped Jack in a blanket, while Greg stoked the fire. Soon, it was warm and comfortable, at least near the stove where Jack was sitting. “Are you sure you’re going to be okay here by yourself? You aren’t looking all that well right now.” Danielle sensed that she couldn’t push too hard. There was something about Jack, a stubborn streak, maybe, or perhaps just a cultural difference that wouldn’t allow him to accept too much help from a woman.
During the drive to the cabin, Danielle had told Jack a little about her interest in Navajo arts and crafts. She misunderstood his grunt as a sign of approval and smiled when he finally said something. “You come see me next time you’re in New Mexico.”
In view of Jack’s condition, Danielle didn’t ask him for a phone number or address. Instead, she handed him one of her business cards. “Send me a note, or give me a call. Let me know how to contact you, and I’ll stop by on my next visit. But right now, you should get some rest. Can we do anything else? Maybe fix you some food?”
“No, it’s okay. Really. Thank you very much. I appreciate your help. Been a real mess if I’d tried walking all the way out here. Be okay now. Probably sleep for a while. Then I’ll feel a whole lot better. Couple of my buddies are meeting me up here this afternoon. To do some hunting. There’s some pretty good game out here. My rifle is over in the corner. Probably not supposed to have it. It’s military style—some folks call it an assault rifle. Another souvenir from Iraq. But nobody cares anymore. It doesn’t matter.”
Greg and Danielle walked back down the path to the Jeep. “Do you think he’ll be okay, Greg? He doesn’t look so good. And he doesn’t sound so good either. Part of the time he seemed to be rambling a little. And when we helped him up to the cabin, we almost had to carry him. I though he felt warm, like he was running a fever.”
“Yeah. I thought so, too. Probably the flu. And some kind of a rash. I sure hope we don’t get it. But he really seemed like he wanted to be alone now. And his friends are coming this afternoon. When I put more wood on the fire, I set the vents so it would burn slowly. It should last most of the day, so even if he falls asleep for a while, he’ll be warm enough. If he needs to get to a doctor or something, his friends will take care of him. I’m glad they’re on the way.”
* * *
Day 20: Parting Ways
An hour after they left Jack at his cabin, Greg and Danielle approached the Arizona state line. As they traversed the Navajo Reservation, the scenery of the high desert was different from anything that Greg had ever seen, and ahead, in the distance, they could see the Carrizo Mountains. Off to the south, Danielle pointed to the remarkable formation jutting up from the flat plane of the desert. “Look over there. That’s Shiprock.”
“I thought we just passed through Shiprock.”
“Yeah, the town. But this is what the town is named for. Apparently people in the last century thought it looked like a big sailing ship.”
“It looks big. Maybe a couple of hundred feet high.”
“More like a couple of thousand. We’re too far away to get the perspective, but it’s really huge. You’ll just have to come out here again sometime.”
He noticed she didn’t say, “we.” A relief, but it stung a little.
Greg recovered quickly. “It looks steep. Must be a real favorite of the rock climbers.”
“It used to be. Shiprock is a sacred place. So you’re not allowed to climb it anymore.”
“You’re a good person, Danielle. I like how you stopped to help that man before. A lot of people would have just kept on driving. I probably would have, too. Maybe it’s different out here. Back home, you couldn’t stop and pick up someone on the side of the road. All you hear about are robberies, knifings, shootings. Maybe it’s just better out here.”
“In some ways, I think it is. Maybe that’s why I’ve gravitated to the Southwest. And why the Native American arts are so attractive to me.”
“This whole weekend has been incredible for me. Going back home again is going to be a real change. I don’t even know if I …”
“Don’t go there, Greg. We met by accident on Friday. We were attracted to each other. You’re a good-looking guy, and we were both lonely. So we had a fantastic weekend together. And it’s over. So now we’re both going back to our original paths. Separate paths.”
She looked over at him to be sure he was listening. “It’s like Vegas, Greg. You know, that old line about what happens there stays there? I’ll always remember this weekend, but when we get to Flagstaff in a couple of hours, we’ll say goodbye. I’ll drive on to Phoenix, and it’ll be over. It will all have been good, but it will be over.”
Greg started to object. But he knew she was right.
* * *
Chapter 14
Intelligence
The 2011 plot to assassinate the Saudi Ambassador to the United States shows that some Iranian Officials—probably including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei—have changed their calculus and are now more willing to conduct an attack in the United States…
—Director of National Intelligence, 2012‡
Day 25: Looking for Links
“The Vice President will see you now, sir.”
With authorization granted, Under Secretary Robinson Edwards stood up from the chair in the small waiting area where he had been cooling his heels for 15 minutes. How in hell does he expect me to get my job done, if I’m sitting on my ass watching his receptionist play solitaire on her computer? Clenching his jaw, he forced a smile and entered the inner office.
“Sit down, Edwards. What do you have for me?”
“First off, we’re making progress on the origin of this outbreak. We’ve got good data now on all the different possibilities for domestic terrorism. We know for sure it wasn’t the CDC labs in Atlanta. Every sample of smallpox virus under their control is accounted for. We’ve got a team down there, and we’ve checked out every time a smallpox sample was accessed during the past 20 years. They’re clean. Just to be safe, we’re doing additional background checks on the half-dozen scientists who had access to those samples. But it’s not going anywhere.”
“What about other labs? There were other places that had access after 2001.”
“There are four other highly secure labs at different locations around the country. They all have safety ratings that would let them work with smallpox, but that doesn’t mean they’ve ever had samples of the stuff. They’re all checking out clean. We’re doing extra investigation at Fort Detrick, even though we’re sure they’re clean too. We can’t look like we weren’t careful, especially after the anthrax snafu there.”
“So you’re confirming, or as good as confirming, that we can rule out domestic terrorism for this New Mexico thing?”
“Yes, Mr. Vice President. It wasn’t domestic.”
“What about the Russians? If this were 25 years ago, we’d be at DEFCON-1. They’re the only ones with known stores of smallpox virus.”
“We remain confident that this has nothing to do with the Russians. Not with their current government. We’ve made inquiries on four fronts. First, we went directly to some of their top military officers. General Radisson flew over to Brussels yesterday for the NATO meeting. We knew that some of the Russian brass were going to be there, and he knows one of them pretty well, Vladimir Koznetzkii. He arranged a private conversation with Koznetzkii
this morning, that was about eight hours ago. He asked if there had been any rumblings about restarting their biological weapons programs. Radisson reported back that Koznetzkii was shocked, that he was adamant that there was no such development. Radisson said he thinks this was accurate.”
“I still am reluctant to trust them.”
“We have other sources within the Russian military, and we put inquiries to two of them. One of them, a reliable source inside their Defense Ministry, has responded already. We asked if there was any indication that the old bioweapons programs might be reactivated. His answer was an absolute negative. He’s heard nothing. Same response by our senior military attaché over in Moscow.
“You said four fronts. You’ve only described three.”
“The fourth is the expatriate community, the guys who bailed out when it was still the Soviet Union. Most of them still have a lot of enemies back there, so there’s no love lost and no reason to think they’d support an attack against the U.S. We think the expats are the best sources we have. If there were any signs that the Russians were up to something, the expats would know about it. But they confirmed everything we heard from the other three sources. There’s no question, sir. The Russians are clean. At least on this one.”
“So we’re talking about a Middle-Eastern terrorist group. Goddamn it, Edwards! They’ve attacked our shores once again? And the President hasn’t done a fucking thing about it. Our country can’t afford another September 11. That attack almost crushed the Bush Administration. I’m not going to let a bunch of fucking ragheads take us down. This time, they’re going to pay for what they’ve done.”
The Vice President leaned in toward Edwards. His voice was quiet. “Was it Al Qaeda?”
“We don’t believe so. We think this was a different group, maybe an offshoot. Directly linked to the Iranians.”
Edwards noticed Richards’ sharp intake of breath. The Vice President slowly exhaled through clenched teeth. “Those motherfuckers will be sorry this time. I want everything you have.”
“We don’t have much yet in the way of specifics. We’re waiting to hear from our sources, including one agent in place. He’s in Tehran. There’s been a whole lot of chatter about efforts to mount a major biological weapons capability. Way too much noise in my opinion. We’ve got another source—we call him ‘Energizer,’ because he never stops giving us good stuff, just keeps going and going. He’s absolutely insistent that Tehran has been working with the smallpox virus since late 2011. He even pointed to the location of the bioweapons lab. He says it’s hidden inside the Research Center of their Reference Laboratories.”*
Edwards was convincing himself as well as the Vice President. “It’s a perfect cover. They’ve even publicly listed bioterrorism as one of their areas of expertise. Here’s an article on brucellosis* written by one of their scientists. It’s been weaponized before, so if they’re working with brucellosis, they sure as shit could be working with smallpox.”
“It’s pretty goddamn clever. If anybody gets suspicious, they just say they’re working on ways to prevent epidemics. They’re sneaky bastards, all right. What else?”
“Here’s another one. Iran partnered with a European company to bring in botulinum toxin. They say it’s for cosmetic use, like Botox, but they’re doing some kind of clinical trials inside Iran. They’re hiding behind Botox to look legitimate, while hiding the biological warfare aspects. See what I’m getting at?”
“Keep going, Edwards.”
“There are public claims that Iran has an offensive biological weapons program. Let me read you an exact quote. It’s from the State Department.”*
The United States judges, based on available evidence, that Iran has an offensive biological weapons program in violation of the BWC. Iran is technically capable of producing at least rudimentary biological warheads for a variety of delivery systems, including missiles.
“We’ve gone soft, Edwards. Why the hell didn’t we take action on Iran a long time ago? People ask for a smoking gun, and I’m seeing a whole fucking arsenal with smoke pouring out. You have any more?”
“We got a report that Iran brought in scientists from the former Soviet Union several years ago to work on things like smallpox and the plague.* We were never able to confirm the earlier reports that Iran actually had smallpox, but this attack in New Mexico might be the proof.”
“I don’t need anything that might be the proof Edwards. I want real proof. I want information that will convince those assholes on the National Security Council when we meet again on Monday. I don’t want the President to have any excuse for just sitting there with his thumb up his ass. Don’t let me down.”
* * *
Day 26: Where’s Sarah?
“What you have learned, Parsons?” Zaborsky was meeting with Donald Parsons, his senior field agent. Parsons was a civilian, but before signing on at DIA three years earlier, he had put in 10 years in the Army. By that time, it was clear that there would be no further promotions, and he was mustered out at the rank of Staff Sergeant.
“Nothing conclusive, Colonel. We’re following up on a lead from the team in Atlanta. We’ve got a record of all the incoming telephone calls to the scientists who were sent out to New Mexico. There are a couple that caught our attention. One was a call taken by Andrea Mason. She’s acting as receptionist down in CDC’s bioterrorism offices. A call came in for a Dr. Overman, Jake Overman, who’s leading the scientific team in Farmington. Andrea got suspicious when the caller wouldn’t leave her name or phone number. We had the number from caller ID. When we checked it out, that’s when we found out it came from the Washington Post.”
“It was a reporter? Shit! Who was it?”
“We weren’t sure at first. The Post uses a switching system that assigns outgoing calls to whatever line is open. So all calls show the main number. But it put us on alert. The caller told Mason she would call Overman on his cell, but the CDC team was instructed not to bring cell phones to New Mexico. That gave us an opening. With your previous authorization, we went to the Overman’s cell phone provider and asked for his phone records for the last week. It’s amazing how cooperative they are when you bring up national security. Overman only had a half-dozen incoming calls that day, and we just looked for any that had come from the D.C. region. It turns out there was only one. The name is Sarah Lockford. We confirmed that she works for the Post. She’s a reporter, all right.”
“Does she know what’s happening? Has she gotten past our security to reach Overman?”
“Absolutely not, sir. All the e-mail traffic to the CDC Farmington team has been rerouted to a secure server here at DOD, and I’m the only one with access to it. For the most part, it’s harmless, but we’re sitting on it in any case. I’ve released a few messages from their coworkers in Atlanta. Otherwise, we’re just letting them stay blocked. One of those messages was one from the Lockford woman. It didn’t say anything, just that she wanted to talk to him. That was when we decided to take a closer look at her.”
“What did you find out? I don’t like this, Parsons.”
“Well, she’s definitely nosy. She’s written a couple of articles on government misconduct in the medical field. So it makes sense that she’d be talking to a scientist from CDC. But she may know too much already. Just knowing that Overman works in terrorism response might make her too curious about why he’s gone. So we did some more checking. On Friday, I went over to the newspaper, and I talked with her boss.”
“That was stupid! Now they know that we’re interested.”
“No sir, Colonel Zaborsky. I sort of hinted that I was from the FBI. You know people never look real close at our federal badges. And her boss didn’t even ask for my photo ID, so it was even easier. Even if she asked, I would have shown her the fake ID I have for the Federal Investigative Services. People hear that, they just think FBI. So if they ever go looking for Special Agent Joseph Silver, they won’t find him. Not here, and not at the FBI.”
“All right �
� did you learn anything?”
“Not from the boss, except that Lockford was out of town for the weekend. So we put a couple of guys out to watch her apartment. And we also managed to get the cooperation of the phone company. They’re giving us daily updates on the phone numbers she’s called or that have called her. Next thing we found was that she’d called a guy at Emory University. That’s in Atlanta, right near CDC. Guy’s name is Evans, and it turns out he’s another scientist who studies infectious diseases. That’s maybe just a coincidence.”
“No such thing as a coincidence, Parsons. Have you questioned this guy, Evans? Or listened to his phone?”
“Not yet. So far, it’s just suspicions, so we’d never get a warrant for an actual tap. But we do know Lockford went to Florida. Flew through Atlanta, but only to change planes. So she didn’t meet Evans. We had a team watching his house for a while. Here’s something, though. He shares the house with Overman.”
“With Overman? They’re a couple??”
“No sir. Overman just rents out his guest room. The other guy just moved to Atlanta and needed a place to live. We’re pretty sure that Lockford is Overman’s girlfriend, or at least she used to be. But we did check it out his preferences, just to be sure.”
“And …?”
“Seems like he’s been screwing one of the secretaries at CDC on and off for the last year. So he isn’t a queer. The secretary started blabbing to Andrea, told her that Overman was a real pussy hound. Anyway, the head of security at Emory used to work here in DIA, and he told Evans to stop talking with the reporter. Made up some story to keep Evans from getting suspicious.”
“Then where do we stand? Is this taken care of? The reporter, I mean?”
“Not yet, Colonel. We confirmed that she’d gone to Florida. The Transportation Security Administration people were real cooperative when we said we needed to check the passenger lists. Then we made a quick visit to her apartment.”