The officer gave Daniel a hard look. He flipped through the pages of immigration stamps in the passport. “You were in Nigeria six months ago. Was that business or personal?”
“We have clients in the petroleum industry.”
“And how long do you intend to be in the United Kingdom on this visit?”
“Shouldn’t be more than a week or two.”
“Local place of residence?”
“Claridge’s, just like I wrote on the card.” Daniel allowed a little annoyance into his tone.
The officer stamped Daniel’s passport, finally. “Best of luck with your efficiencies,” he said, not even pretending to mean it.
Daniel settled into the back of the big black cab for the ride to Mayfair. He loved visiting London, and you couldn’t beat their taxi service. He’d always enjoyed the ride into the city, but this time he barely took in the view, his interaction with the immigration officer still nagging at him.
The management consultant role was now Daniel’s official legend—his NOC, or non-official cover—the go-to cover story when dealing in his own name with the world outside the Foundation. He’d learned enough about the job to bluff his way through conversation, even with real management consultants. He could talk about maximizing externalities and the disintermediation of middlemen in the supply chain and the extraordinary profit potential of metacapitalism until he put himself to sleep. Even thinking about it made him wonder: Who would choose to do that for a living?
But as management consultants, Foundation operatives could plausibly live on the road, and that road could reach every country on the globe. They had cover for meeting with people in every major industry, government officials, academics . . . at a certain fiscal altitude, consultants were simply part of the landscape.
Although his legend might rankle people like the immigration officer, it connected Daniel to money and power, which made it useful because frontline civil servants have learned that messing with people connected to money and power is bad for the career. Everyone’s got mouths to feed.
Maybe that’s all it was: The officer was a working-class bloke, well aware that when a fancy consultant helps a company find efficiencies, working people get the sack.
Yes, probably that’s all it was. Daniel pulled out his cell phone, texted:
Border agent showed keen interest. Possibly nothing.
Whenever a Foundation field operative crossed borders, a computer at headquarters monitored various digital networks across the intelligence community, so they’d know if an agent’s entry had raised any red flags.
The answer to Daniel’s text came back only a few seconds after he hit Send:
Your name hasn’t popped. Will inform of any change.—A. O.
A. O. was Ayo Onatade, who, because of her expertise as lead analyst on the Foundation’s AIT team, had been assigned to shepherd Daniel on this operation. Although now based in New York, Ayo had only lived in the United States for five years. Originally from Nigeria, she’d moved with her parents to England as a child. She’d attended the best schools, and after Cambridge she’d risen through the ranks of support staff in the judiciary, eventually becoming the right-hand woman of a superior court justice, helping grease the wheels of the old empire. She was plugged into Britain’s political machine at the highest level, knew her way around the House of Lords and Number 10, but what she’d learned there had led her to join Carter Ames and the Fleur-de-Lis Foundation.
Ayo was beautiful, full figured and mahogany skinned, with ferocity behind her eyes and a sharp, dry wit. For Daniel, the attraction had been immediate but he’d decided pursuing it to find out if the attraction went both ways was a bad idea, regardless of the Foundation’s pro-fraternization policy. She was his first point of contact at headquarters when he was in the field, and that wasn’t something he wanted to complicate.
“What did you make of the man?” Ayo had asked the previous day when Daniel and Pat had returned to New York from West Virginia. Daniel’s ears were no longer ringing, but voices still sounded far away so he leaned in to hear. She smelled lovely. “You’ve seen the real thing before. Is it AIT?”
“It might be,” said Daniel. “He spoke Norwegian but that’s not akin to speaking backwards, is it? Anyone can learn a foreign language. He might’ve learned it as part of a secret DIA assignment that was kept out of his personnel file. Or I suppose, as the doctor suspected, he might not be Major Blankenship at all—he could be a plant, an impostor. Exceedingly less likely than the first scenario, but not impossible.”
“He called you father,” Raoul said, flipping to a page in a file folder. “Look, he spoke two sentences in Norwegian during your interview. The first translates to: It happened before in Mandal, where the revealed was once concealed and the concealed shall be revealed. And the second: Until we meet again, Priest. But there’s no way he could’ve known you were a priest—and don’t start with the ‘I’m not a priest’ thing. You know what I mean.”
“No, I get it,” said Daniel. “It threw me at first, too. But then Conrad Winter showed up. See, Blankenship didn’t know I was a priest, he was expecting a priest. And a priest did show up. Maybe he overheard the doctor telling someone a priest was coming, or maybe he’d requested a priest. Again, either is a more plausible explanation.”
“But—”
“I’m not saying it isn’t AIT. It probably is, given Conrad’s presence there. I’m simply saying I didn’t see enough for us to independently draw that conclusion. I also didn’t see evidence of trickery. We just don’t have enough information.”
“Actually, we have a lot of information,” said Ayo, “from the medical file.”
Raoul shot Daniel with his finger, “Nice play with the doctor, by the way, getting him to send all this.”
“Told you he was ready,” said Pat from his place of repose, leaning back in his chair, alligator boots on the table, a bottle of root beer in one hand, bendy straw between his teeth. He shot Raoul with a finger of his own, then raised the finger and blew on it.
“A little focus, boys,” said Ayo, opening the file folder in front of her. “Our Major Blankenship—who is not an impostor—was suffering from a strain of the bubonic plague, which we hoped would lead us to wherever he’d been before being shipped back home. He’d contracted the plague and he was talking about the plague, so it’s reasonable to suspect he knew the disease was present wherever he got sick. We scanned recent World Health Organization reports of outbreaks.” She shook her head. “There have been some isolated incidents, which we’re looking into, but nothing of significance since Madagascar last December.”
Daniel remembered reading the report on “physiological triggers” in his training material. The percentage of people experiencing AIT who were also suffering from certain maladies was, while small, disproportionate to the general population. Brain tumors and traumatic brain injuries, epilepsy, meningitis, schizophrenia, people who’d been pulled back from the very edge of death after flatlining, people who’d been hit by lightning . . .
Then he remembered the AIT prehistory brief. He said, “None of the modern strains of the plague are triggers, but it was once a trigger, a long time ago . . . is this a resurrection of an ancient strain?”
Carter Ames said, “More likely a new strain. Bacteria mutate, evolve. It’s how they survive.” He folded his hands on the table. “The man has the plague and he has AIT. Correlation does not imply causation, but we have to consider the possibility.”
Ayo said, “For now, we operate on the assumption that this plague may indeed be a trigger.”
Raoul said to Daniel, “You’re on the red-eye to England, leaving in three hours. Bags are already packed.”
Pat took his feet off the table, slurped the remaining root beer from the bottle. “Don’t suppose I get to visit Her Majesty with Dan.”
“Afraid not,” said Ayo. “The file
s also tell us that Major Blankenship worked in DIA directly under a Colonel Michael Dillman. Dillman was one of the soldiers who signed in with Conrad Winter at Red Ridge.”
“And Colonel Dillman is one spooky-as-hell spook,” said Raoul. “There’s almost nothing on this guy in the last twenty years, since he transferred from Air Force Intelligence to DIA. I mean, Dillman is so shadow he makes our fictional Colonel Walter Pomerance look like an open book. Your task is to find him and track him.”
“Why do I always get the easy jobs?” said Pat.
But Daniel wasn’t paying attention, thinking, Leaving in three hours? Bags already packed? After the day he’d just had, one night to decompress with some single malt did not seem an unreasonable expectation.
Unless . . .
“Wait, how bad is this new strain?” he asked.
“We don’t yet know,” said Carter Ames.
“Blankenship was responding to large dosages of Cipro,” said Ayo, “so we know it can be treated. But this new iteration of the bug looks different, and more robust. We’ve forwarded the medical records to an ally—leading microbiologist, based in London. She’ll brief you on what she learns. If we can find out what the hell we’re dealing with, we might have some actual dots to connect for once.”
11: THE DEVIL WENT DOWN TO GEORGIA
Little Five Points—Atlanta, Georgia
Conrad Winter sat alone at the bar, drinking a bottle of Chimay and eating an excellent cheeseburger and thinking about the bartender’s bowling shirt. The shirt had the name Chuck embroidered on the front pocket and a big Piggly Wiggly logo across the back. Wild cartoon eyes on the happy pink face of a clearly overweight pig—a pig dressed up as a butcher.
A pig butcher happily butchering pigs for humans.
Humans, thought Conrad, are an odd species.
Conrad wore black jeans and a dark green T-shirt. He’d been out of his clerical uniform in public a lot in the past six months, and he was still getting used to it. Until and including the Tim Trinity assignment, Conrad’s Council work had intersected with his job with the Vatican’s Office of World Outreach, so he’d stayed in uniform most of the time and had felt it his duty as a priest to do so whenever possible.
Because Conrad’s work for the Vatican wasn’t just a cover for his work on behalf of the Council. No, he loved the Church and considered his work there and his work for the Council complementary to each other. He’d always told himself that he wasn’t serving two masters, but serving God. Still, the Council had always come first, and each time he stepped out of uniform he missed it a little less.
Both the Vatican and the Council had wanted Tim Trinity silenced. The Vatican dispatched Daniel to debunk the man, but Daniel fell down on the job—walked away from the job, actually—and became Trinity’s protector. So the Council sent Conrad and he got the job done. Once the preacher had been dispatched, Conrad was summoned to Singapore for a debriefing and lunch with the director.
If the director of the Council for World Peace was not an easy man to get along with, he was an impossible man to make small talk with. He managed a brief and awkward congratulations for a job well done over pre-lunch martinis, and after that they passed some time discussing the menu in excruciating detail.
The lunch took place at the elegant Si Chuan Dou Hua, on the sixtieth floor of UOB Plaza One, seven floors below the director’s office. The food was outstanding and they forced some talk about their favorite restaurants in different cities, usually disagreeing, Conrad more politely than the director. And that got them through to coffee and brandy.
Clearing his throat for far too long, as old men do, the director signaled the end of their small-talk purgatory. “I’ve spoken with Cardinal Allodi and the Vatican has put you on indefinite leave from your duties at World Outreach.”
“I’m being punished?” Conrad put his coffee down. “What for?”
“On the contrary, Conrad, you’re being promoted. I’m putting you in charge of the Anomalous Information Transfer project.”
It took a couple seconds to sink in. “Oh. Thank you, sir.”
“You earned it.” But it sounded like an accusation, entirely without warmth. “You’ll still use your position at the Vatican as cover whenever needed—Allodi’s office will back you up. Officially, you’re on an extended research trip, the subject of which is confidential.” The director sipped his brandy. “This is a significant step for you. I just hope you don’t make a mess of it.”
Conrad didn’t rise to that. “What happened to Swan? I thought he was running the team.”
“Swan wasn’t strong enough. He thought he was, but as things moved forward he stopped looking at the target and started looking at the view. He got too soft. He couldn’t carry the weight.” The director finished the coffee in his cup. “You’re not too soft, are you, Conrad?”
After what I did for you in Bangalore? Abuja? New Orleans? Are you seriously asking me that question? But he kept it all inside. He pushed the anger down into the dark pit from which it had sprung, hating himself for how easily he allowed the director to push his buttons.
“When do I start?” he said.
When Colonel Michael Dillman entered the Vortex Bar and Grill with Dr. Hasting, Conrad left his spot at the bar and took a seat at a table near the back of the room. They followed. Dillman was also out of uniform, wearing chinos and a golf shirt. Hasting was a leading microbiologist at the Centers for Disease Control—thankfully, CDC doctors didn’t tend to wear their white lab coats or yellow biohazard containment suits outside of work.
As the new arrivals took their seats, Conrad said, “There’s been a leak. They’ve gotten hold of a copy of the major’s blood work.”
“It didn’t come from me.” Hasting’s tone and body language backed him up, declaring with absolute certainty that he was speaking the truth.
“We know,” said Conrad. “Anyway, that’s barn doors and horses, we need to focus on”—he almost said, “removing our fingerprints,” but that was inelegant—“minimizing our footprint.”
“The blood work is in the system. I can’t just make it disappear down a memory hole.” Hasting was silent for a moment, thinking it through. “What I can do . . . I’ll run a flawed simulation on the computer tonight, get back anemic results in the morning. Then I can downplay the preliminary findings, shuffle the study to the bottom of a very long to-do list. It’ll buy you six months, if . . .”
“Yes?”
“If Klukoff doesn’t notice.” Sasha Klukoff was the Foundation’s most senior ally at the CDC, residing a rung above the Council’s top man in the CDC hierarchy. “Sooner or later, the Foundation will realize what they’ve got and Klukoff will become a problem. He’s got the clearance to look wherever he wants whenever he wants. Nothing I can do about that.” Hasting’s left hand flittered upward and adjusted the tie he wasn’t wearing, his eyes ping-ponging between Conrad and Dillman. “I know you don’t need my advice on tactics, but I really think you should take him out of the game.”
Yes, Klukoff was a Foundation ally, but he was also one of the top four or five microbiologists in the world, possessed of a mind that would be of incalculable value as the planet struggled with the devastation that was coming, and Conrad understood the weight of the choice before him. He would let Klukoff live, as long as the man didn’t get curious.
Conrad nodded at Colonel Dillman, who dug into a pocket and handed Hasting a micro USB stick smaller than a thumbnail.
Dillman said, “You plug this stick into your computer. Thirty seconds later, you pull it out. The stick commits suicide after uploading its package, so you can just toss it in the trash.”
Conrad said, “If Sasha Klukoff tries to access the case file from anywhere in the system, he’ll be blocked and we’ll be alerted. Just play your part, bury the whole thing as best you can. We’ll take it from there.”
12: ARMAGIDEON
TIME
London, England
Daniel’s breast pocket vibrated three times in quick succession. He stopped walking and pulled out the phone. The screen showed three texts in a row:
She’s cranky.
She’s got good reason to be.
Stay charming.
He crossed Du Cane Road to the imposing Hammersmith Hospital, all orange bricks and tall windows, white trim and Edwardian importance, its green copper clock tower towering above. The grandest building on campus, it was now home to the molecular immunology department of Imperial College London. The she referenced in Ayo’s texts was Dr. Descia Milinkovic, chief microbiologist.
She pronounced it DAY-sha as she introduced herself, and she held her tongue long enough to get through polite how-do-you-dos, waving Daniel into a visitor’s chair across the paper-strewn desk, but her piercing blue eyes said the crankiness Ayo warned about was on its way.
As soon as Daniel was seated, it came.
“You can tell Carter he’s got some cheek, dropping this into my lap without advance warning,” she said. “I had that handsome bastard from Five here yesterday evening, Mike Stotter. Came by for one of his menacing little chats not two hours after this bombshell landed in my inbox, and he’s intensely interested. And after you, I’ve got some Homeland Security Yank stopping in for a friendly cuppa. Instead of supervising my team in the lab, I’m spending my time explaining what little we know to a bunch of bloody spooks.”
Descia’s department worked with some of the deadliest pathogens in the world; hers was a Level 5 biolab. If they had a security breach, a terrorist could waltz out with a bioweapon capable of wiping out entire cities. To help forestall such a breach, MI5 computers kept constant watch over the department’s computer network, including e-mail.
The Foundation computer geeks saw an opportunity to point the intelligence community toward the Council’s operation. Blankenship’s medical file was sent with an electronic breadcrumb trail leading back to a coffeehouse with public Wi-Fi in Wheeling, West Virginia. The one-paragraph e-mail message came from a Dr. Astor—they used the name of the doctor at Red Ridge—introducing himself vaguely as a “US military doctor” and suggesting that the lab look at the attached blood work, which seemed to indicate a previously unknown strain of Yersinia pestis. And since the message appeared to come from West Virginia, it was not unreasonable to suspect that Stotter, the MI5 man, might alert a contact at US Homeland Security. It seemed he had.
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