‘Beijing will be the green Olympics and the high-tech Olympics,’ the young and attractive marketing executive concluded. ‘We want to show the world that these games are environmentally friendly.’ Not for nothing had the cluster of venues nearby been named the ‘Olympic Green’ and the goal of high technology had been specifically designed to demonstrate China’s new-found prowess. It was a goal that was not lost on Richard Halliwell.
‘And finally, this is the peoples’ Olympics, Dr Halliwell. The people in China have very positive attitudes.’
Richard Halliwell smiled and focused his laser-like brain on his own plans for the Beijing Olympics as the briefing on security got into full swing.
‘Are you worried about terrorists disrupting the Games?’ Halliwell asked blandly.
‘We have the best security of any games,’ General Ho replied. ‘How do you say it in your country, Richard… Beijing will be locked down tighter than Fort Knox,’ the general laughed. ‘Especially the Athletes Village and the venues so you need not worry, Richard, your athletes will be perfectly safe here.’
The official doing the security brief unsuccessfully tried to hide his surprise at his general’s frank disclosure. He knew well that the police, the Peoples’ Liberation Army and counter-terrorism units would total more than 20,000 and thousands of hidden cameras were being installed to monitor every move in the ancient and modern city. For months the official line had been that Beijing would not be turned into a fortress. On the wall behind the briefer, the slogan for the Beijing Olympics
‘One World, One Dream’ was displayed prominently. The slogan embodied a vision of 1.3 billion people reaching out and sharing in the global community, hand in hand with the rest of the world, creating a bright and peaceful future.
‘Thank you so much for such an informative briefing,’ Halliwell said, nodding slightly to the briefing staff, ‘and for your gift.’ Halliwell held up the gold plaque that BOCOG reserved for powerful dignitaries and Heads of State. ‘And this is for you in appreciation, General Ho,’ Halliwell said as he handed over a gold plaque with the Halliwell logo. The envelope containing 10,000 Halliwell shares remained in his briefcase. He would present that when the General and he were alone.
As Ho Feng led the way to a private luncheon that would feature the General’s favourite dish of bear bile soup, Halliwell was, as always, deep in thought. As he expected, the venues would be closely guarded but the city’s hotels were far more vulnerable. Tomorrow he would work on the distribution system for the virus. Despite the Chinese government’s efforts to portray the new China as a beacon for the twenty-first century, corruption was endemic and money always talked. The hired Triad thugs would not have the faintest idea what they were pumping into the air conditioning systems until it was too late.
‘You must come and visit Atlanta, Feng. I would like to return some of your hospitality,’ Halliwell said. Good guanxi was something to be nurtured.
CHAPTER 13
DETROIT INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT, WAYNE COUNTY
K adeer’s chief operations planner in the United States, Amon al-Falid, walked past the fountain in the McNamara terminal of Wayne County’s new Detroit International Airport and continued on through the changing lights of the tunnel that connected with concourse A. The handler of a sniffer dog gave him a long look as they passed, even though the German shepherd took no notice. Perhaps the dog had not yet been trained to check out people of ‘Middle Eastern appearance’, al-Falid thought bitterly.
He had chosen Detroit as a departure point to add another layer of deception, but before he had even reached the customs barrier, two US Customs and Border Protection officers suddenly appeared at his side, the big blue ‘Department of Homeland Security’ flashes prominent on their sleeves. al-Falid turned to face them. The older of the two must have been nearly 18 stone, he reflected, the officer’s stomach hanging over his heavy, black pistol belt, scalloping the buttons on his dark blue uniform. The other officer was a young woman al-Falid judged to be about twenty-five, and from the bars on her shoulders, she was the senior of the two. al-Falid fought to keep his anger in check at the sight of the infidel flaunting her sexuality. Her blonde hair hung over her shoulders and her lips were covered with a purple gloss. An outline of the customs officer’s breasts and nipples strained against the flimsy blue material of her uniform. al-Falid took a deep breath. The Imams in Australia had been right, he thought, yet they had been roundly criticised for sermons about scantily clad women.
‘Mr al-Falid?’ the young woman asked briskly.
‘Yes.’
‘You will come with us – now,’ she demanded.
Amon al-Falid forced himself to remain calm. Even though he was inwardly incensed that he was being ordered about by a woman, he had trained himself for situations such as this. Now that the US Customs and Border Control had swept up the old Customs, Immigration, Plant and Animal Health into one powerful organisation, al-Falid had found himself being subjected to more and more interrogations and strip searches, even on domestic travel. He knew that computer crosschecks now linked more than twenty different federal agencies, including the FBI and the CIA databases, but he reassured himself that in the tens of thousands of movements that occurred each day, his Egyptian passport had yet to be linked to his United States passport. Nor had the infidel given any indication they had any inkling of his membership of al Qaeda.
‘You were born in Egypt?’ the young woman asked, looking first at al-Falid, and then at the photo in his passport. The photo showed a man with a swarthy complexion, the lower part of his face covered with a short black beard and a neatly trimmed moustache. He had a hooked nose, black hair and full lips. Behind the large black-rimmed spectacles, his eyes were dark and alert.
‘As you can see, Cairo 1954,’ al-Falid replied evenly. al-Falid had long ago decided that the best way to deal with one of the infidel’s interrogations was to answer all of their inane questions firmly but politely.
The customs officer placed al-Falid’s passport under a microscope to check it for any sign of forgery. The microscope and the nearby computer looked strangely out of place in the starkly furnished and windowless interrogation room with its grey, bare walls. The interrogator’s obese colleague was leaning against the opposite wall. A third officer, thin and wearing thick glasses suddenly entered the room and extracted al-Falid’s laptop from its black leather case. He plugged it into the wall socket, switched it on and pushed it towards al-Falid.
‘Activate it,’ he demanded. al-Falid shrugged and began to type in his codeword. His face was inscrutable. al-Falid had the ability to break into all but the most sophisticated of computer databases and wiping the internet searches that might incriminate him from his laptop had been child’s play. He’d kept all his research results on the weak points of the various target cities on his computer in his office behind firewalls. al-Falid had constructed them to be as safe as any bank and much safer than any notes on paper. He watched as the customs officer scrutinised a mind-numbing array of sites on the architecture of the Silk Road.
‘What is your reason for travelling to Pakistan,’ the female officer asked.
‘I’m on a sabbatical from Michigan State University. I have an interest in Asian history, especially the early architecture of Pakistan,’ al-Falid said as he faced his interrogator. Keep calm, and keep your answers short and accurate, he told himself. Short, but not too short. Give out the absolute minimum of information without appearing to hold anything back.
‘Why did you leave Egypt,’ she asked suddenly. al-Falid recognised the question for what it was. It was a question out of left field that was designed to throw him off balance and elicit any sign of nerves. He was ready for it.
‘I came here to study for my doctorate at Harvard University,’ he replied calmly. ‘When I completed it the university sponsored me for a green card and I was lucky enough to be accepted,’ he said. ‘Lucky enough to be accepted’ was al-Falid’s first lie of the interview but
it was a well-practised one. Momentarily his thoughts flashed back to a time when he’d been taunted by American students at the university. A time when Khalid Kadeer had befriended him as he’d walked past one of the student bars. A group of Harvard footballers, joined by their scantily dressed cheerleaders, had taken over the tables on one of the balconies and called out to him.
‘Hey towel head!! Why don’t you let your hair out of your towel and come and have a drink!’ The footballers were celebrating their win and their loud laughter encouraged the verbal barbs of their quarterback, one of the more arrogant of their number.
‘I’m talking to you, dickhead!’ the Harvard quarterback yelled after him, as al-Falid kept walking.
‘Why don’t you go back to your stinking camels and your sandpits, you arrogant asshole!’ another one yelled.
‘No wonder you prefer vestal virgins! You wouldn’t know what to fucking do with it!’ yelled another. The cheerleaders broke into a fit of the giggles.
‘Ignore them. Like many Westerners, they’re threatened by difference. They have shallow minds and think that theirs is the only society worth living in.’ al-Falid turned to find a tall man beside him. The man was slightly older than al-Falid and was dressed in western clothes but wore an elegant handwoven cap, the culture of which he didn’t recognise. ‘I’m Khalid Kadeer. I’m doing a doctorate in microbiology. There is a quiet coffee shop around the corner that sells green tea.’
Had it not been for the friendship and support of the brilliant Uighur microbiologist, al-Falid was certain he would have returned home to Cairo without completing his MBA. Kadeer had convinced him that one day the infidels and the Chinese would pay for their ignorance and for their contempt of Islam. The need for ‘sleeper cells’ to deliver warnings had been one example of Kadeer’s vision for the future, and al-Falid had given thanks to Allah, the Most Kind and the Most Merciful, that such a need had finally come to reality. Although as he put the master freedom fighter’s complex plans in place, al-Falid also found himself at odds with his mentor. Even after the humiliation at the hands of the West and the Han Chinese, Khalid Kadeer still seemed ready to forgive. If only the West and the Han Chinese would give Islam the respect it deserved. For al-Falid, forgiveness didn’t come into it. al-Falid was convinced that there was only one true path, the path of Islam, and the great Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, had laid out that path very clearly. The United States, Britain, Australia and all other western countries would be taken over by Islam and operate under strict Sharia law. Eventually the one true religion would take over the world with a wondrous encompassment of pan-Islam, the way Allah, the Most Kind, the Most Merciful had always intended.
‘What places are you going to visit in Pakistan, exactly?’ The customs officer’s exasperation at al-Falid’s calm responses was beginning to show. She pushed her hair over her shoulder with a contemptuous flick.
‘I will be spending some time studying sixteenth and seventeenth century architecture in Islamabad,’ al-Falid replied, fighting to hide his disgust at a woman doing the job of a man, ‘After that, provided the authorities will give me a permit, I hope to spend some time in the North-West Frontier Province as I have a great interest in the area and I’m writing a book on architecture and the Silk Road.’ al-Falid reminded himself that there was no need to mention the specifics of Peshawar, although he still needed to be prudent. al-Falid knew that the results of the interrogation would be fed into the CIA’s computers and if they followed him in Pakistan, he wanted his trip to look as close to the way he had described it as possible. Except for his planned visit to Darra Adam Khel, the mountain village where you could buy anything from an AK-47 to a stinger missile. It would be very necessary, al-Falid reminded himself, to make sure he wasn’t being tailed when he visited Darra Adam Khel.
CHAPTER 14
CIA HEADQUARTERS, LANGLEY, VIRGINIA
C urtis O’Connor read through the summary of airport interrogations, signed off on the file and threw it into his out tray. In the last 24 hours, Customs and Border Protection had plucked no fewer than 141 people out of queues waiting to board aircraft and passenger liners. The interrogations had not been entirely random with most being American citizens of Muslim background or of Middle Eastern appearance. The results were no different from any other day. Three people had been detained for visa irregularities, and a petty thief wanted by police in Las Vegas for assaulting a prostitute had been arrested but nothing of substance had caught O’Connor’s attention. Based on their destinations he marked five citizens for routine surveillance – two in Syria, one in Jordan, one in Indonesia and an academic who was writing a book on the architecture of the Silk Road and who was trying to get into the North-West Frontier near Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan. The war on terror was taking its toll, increasing the demand for surveillance. Out in the field CIA agents were struggling to cope.
In a basement of the US embassy in the Diplomatic Enclave in Islamabad, Washington’s relentless demands for information on Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts had been flooding in on a daily basis. The White House was also fending off mounting complaints in the US media that the Taliban were avoiding capture in Afghanistan by slipping across the border into Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province. The Administration had assigned too few troops to Afghanistan, repeating the mistake ten times over in Iraq, but the White House had dismissed the criticisms and, despite the lack of resources, Esposito was pushing for something concrete the President could use to rebut his critics. In Islamabad the pressure was beginning to tell. Rob Regan, a big man with close-cropped grey hair was the CIA’s Chief of Station and he had been pulling some appalling hours. He read the latest ‘Top-Secret’ cable from Washington with disbelief.
‘Fuck me!’ he muttered.
‘No thanks,’ Tony Carmello, his younger, dark-haired and ever cheerful deputy said. ‘Washington?’ he asked.
‘Got it in one. We’re up to our armpits in alligators here and now they want us to mount a surveillance operation on some obscure academic who’s writing a book on Islamic architecture and the Silk Road. Another riveting bestseller. I don’t think those dickheads back in Washington would know if a Foggy Bottom bus was up their ass,’ Regan grumbled.
‘Well, not until the people got off,’ his deputy said with a grin, ‘and in the Secretary of Defense’s office you’d have to ring the bell.’ Neither of the CIA men could understand why the politicians and generals in the Pentagon had gone into two wars in the region without enough troops or equipment to do the job, and now the whole of the Middle East was in danger of going up in flames.
‘Who’ve we got spare?’
‘Only the new guy.’
‘Crawford? I don’t think he’s started to shave yet. He’s only been here five minutes.’
Regan’s deputy shrugged. ‘Bit wet behind the ears but he’s all we’ve got left. He has to learn sometime.’
O’Connor leaned back in his chair, thinking about what would be happening out in the field. In many ways he envied agents. Fieldwork had always been his forte and he longed to be back there.
The CIA’s most experienced counter-terrorism officer had no way of knowing, but he would get the opportunity much sooner than he expected, and in a part of the world that was as inhospitable and dangerous as it got.
CHAPTER 15
UNITED STATES ARMY MEDICAL RESEARCH INSTITUTE FOR INFECTIOUS
DISEASES, FORT DETRICK, MARYLAND
D r Kate Braithwaite flung her backpack into a corner of her small, ramshackle office in USAMRIID, and flopped down behind a desk that was almost totally covered with files and papers. The wall behind her had floor-to-ceiling bookcases that were crammed with books and file boxes that detailed some of the most deadly pathogens known to man. Weary from the early morning flight, Kate ran her hand through her unruly curls and leaned back in her battered leather swivel chair with a sigh. Her jeans were spotlessly clean but faded, as was her favourite cream-coloured sweatshirt with ‘Sydney U
niversity’ written across the front.
The US Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases, or USAMRIID, had been set up by President Nixon in 1969 to protect America’s armed forces from biological attack. The Fort Detrick campus was nestled in the distant shadow of Catoctin Mountain and the Appalachians on the outskirts of Frederick, Maryland. With the whole country on edge since September 11, USAMRIID’s role had widened and Fort Detrick was under heavy guard. Even so, Kate was pleased to be back albeit only for a short while. The encounter with Maverick and the other chimpanzees had depressed her more than she realised and she’d asked her boss, Professor Imran Sayed, to make one last attempt to have the experiments stopped. With a sigh she began clearing a space on her desk.
‘Goodness! Not tidying up are we?’ Imran Sayed’s smile was warm and genuine. Imran was dressed in an expensive suit, his shirt a soft, understated pink. His olive skin was slightly pockmarked, his short dark hair brushed roughly into place. Imran had a long, aquiline nose, and his tortoiseshell glasses gave him a serious demeanor; his dark eyes were keen and alert. Kate knew that he also possessed a wicked sense of humour, particularly when they were alone. At sixty-three, he radiated the quiet confidence of a professor at the height of his powers. Kate had first met him when she was one of his post-doctoral students at the Yale School of Medicine and she had immediately warmed to him. Despite impressive international recognition for his stunning achievements in the world of virology, Professor Sayed still managed not to take life too seriously.
‘Don’t you start,’ Kate responded with another sigh.
‘How are your charges at the CDC?’ Imran asked more seriously. He had mentored this young scientist right from the start, carefully nurturing her career. After years of working with her he was immediately sensitive to her mood.
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