by Brad Taylor
The Secret Service protective detail opened the door, and he saw the president on a canopied bed, surrounded by three other men, intravenous lines running into both arms, a plethora of monitors bleeping around him. And looking pissed.
“Whose bright idea was it to divert a Taskforce team to chase another Taskforce team?”
Vice President Hannister said, “It was a collective decision, but ultimately my call.”
“And Kurt went along with it? Did he go as batshit crazy as the rest of you?”
The men shuffled back and forth. Palmer cleared his throat, getting the president’s attention.
“Sir, he… uh… resigned. So did George Wolffe. We had Lieutenant Colonel Blaine Alexander running the operation against Pike and Jennifer.”
President Warren looked like he was going to explode. A monitor began flashing and a squad of doctors and nurses barged in. He waved them away.
The lead doctor said, “Sir, you really should be resting. I’m going to have to ask these men—”
“Leave this room right now.”
They began to backpedal, and he said, “Jesus, I just have the flu. You’d think I was terminal.”
After the door closed again, he said, “So you’ve got the Taskforce chain of command on unemployment, a lieutenant colonel heading up a chase for Taskforce members instead of an Iranian general, where other Taskforce members refused to participate and let them go. Am I summing things up pretty well?”
Hannister said, “We diverted assets to track the general but failed to pick him up again. Whatever phone he was using has been dead since Pike’s original sighting. We do, however, believe we have the name he’s using.”
“So you’re on him? That would be some good news.”
“No, sir. The alias took a flight to Venezuela yesterday. We believe he’s no longer in the country.”
He looked at the director of the CIA. “Venezuela? Why there?”
“Honestly, we don’t have any idea.”
“What about the carrier?”
“We never had a single hit on her. We’re still looking, trying to track her down through the original source of the infection in Manhattan. If we can backtrack his movements we might get a lead.”
“So you’re now convinced it isn’t Jennifer?”
“Well, yeah. I’m not saying going after her was wrong. She’s still a risk. Just that she couldn’t be the one who caused this specific outbreak. It was too soon. If we can locate where this guy got sick, we might be able to juxtapose other intelligence for the carrier, start tracking her.”
“Is he cooperating?”
“He’s dead.”
“Well, that’s great.” He turned to Chip. “What’s the status of the company that started this whole mess?”
Chip said, “It’s a small firm in Singapore that partnered with an American company here. I’m still trying to sort out who knew what.”
“Keep working it. I want to know who to hang when this is over.”
Chip felt sweat form on the back of his neck but nodded vigorously.
“Everyone else, listen up. Number one, no more Taskforce operations until I’m cleared back to work. Just put them on hold. I can’t have that force running around under a lieutenant colonel, and you people showed me about as much judgment as a kindergartner.”
Hannister started to protest, and President Warren cut him off with a glare.
“Number two, focus on Malik. Get whatever assets we have available in Venezuela to start working his location. They drop everything else. I mean NSA, CIA, DIA, and any other agency that can help.”
He looked at the secretary of state. “Finally, start bringing pressure on Iran. Go through the Swiss protecting powers and pass a message. Let them know we suspect what Malik’s up to, and we’re going to unleash holy hell if it comes to fruition. I know they’ll proclaim no knowledge, but put them on notice. Scare the shit out of them, like we are right now. If we can’t find Malik, maybe they’ll do it for us.”
The men nodded, waiting on further instructions.
President Warren said, “What the hell are you still standing here for? Get to work. The next time we talk, I want some good news.”
As they began to leave, President Warren pulled Alexander Palmer’s sleeve. “Alex, hold up.”
“Yes, sir?”
“Find Kurt Hale. I want to talk to him. Immediately.”
“He’s not going to be able to do anything more than what you’ve outlined.”
“Bullshit. Right now I feel like all we’re doing is talking. The carrier is real, and she doesn’t give a damn about anything I just said. I’d like to change that, and he’s got the men who can do it.”
68
The sun crested the bow of the boat, hitting Malik in the face. He groaned and rolled over, feeling the crust from his vomit on the small aft cushion someone had told him was a bed.
The captain tapped his leg and said, “Come on. Get up. Calmer seas today, I promise. We’ve taken on fuel and are ready to go. Only about ten more hours.”
The very thought of ten hours on the open ocean turned Malik’s stomach. Just sleeping on board with the gentle rocking of the marina had caused him to throw up most of the night.
He’d arrived in Caracas, Venezuela, in the late afternoon two days ago, getting picked up by his contact — the man who would build the martyr vest. They had driven down the coast for four hours, then transferred to a boat bound for a marina on Margarita Island. It was an indicator of what was to come, bouncing across the water in the dead of night.
That trip had been short enough to prevent any discomfort, and Malik had the misconception that the boat taking him to meet the Black Widow would be some grand ship, a large fishing trawler or the equivalent.
Arriving at the marina, he’d met the two-man crew and was shown the boat. Something much, much smaller than he’d had in his mind’s eye.
“This will take us across the ocean?”
The captain had said, “Yes, of course. It’s a Bertram Thirty-Eight Special. Twenty-six knots and really good range.”
Having grown up in the desert, the words meant absolutely nothing to him. What he saw was a boat barely forty feet long, and he knew how far they had to go. He told them the destination, praying they’d take him to another boat when they realized the distance. They didn’t. Completely unfazed, the two talked among themselves for a couple of minutes until Malik interrupted.
“Can you do it? How long will it take?”
“Yes, of course we can. Two days. We leave tomorrow morning and drive hard to Dominica. We get there, get fuel and spend the night, then complete the journey.”
Something else he hadn’t factored in. The distance was only about five hundred miles as the bird flew, and he’d figured that’s exactly what the boat would do, getting there in one day.
“We can’t make it in a single day?”
“No, no. Much too dangerous. We’ll hug the islands, stopping for fuel.”
He’d said, “Two days is the absolute maximum time. I have a meeting in three days.”
The next morning they had set out, him, the two-man crew, and the bomb builder. At first, he had spent his time ensuring the vest was constructed correctly, wanting to prevent the man from attempting to build a device that was designed to kill by itself, using a large explosive charge and nails or ball bearings. He wanted something to spread the virus, period, under a charade of an attack.
Two hours into the trip, he had thrown up for the first time, much to the crew’s amusement. He spent the rest of the trip in utter misery, vomiting over and over again until his body was as weak as a newborn kitten.
With today’s journey in front of him, he was unsure if he would survive.
At least the vest is complete.
He pulled out his smartphone and turned it on. Not wanting to waste the battery power on the open ocean devoid of cell towers, he’d shut it off after they’d left, then had been too miserable to turn it back on when
they’d docked the night before.
Five minutes later, it vibrated with no less than five missed calls. From the cleric.
He got the captain’s attention, pointed at his phone, and said, “Don’t leave yet.”
Knowing it wouldn’t be good news, he considered simply ignoring the calls, but, while the odds weren’t that great, it could have been intelligence he needed to accomplish the mission.
The cleric answered and Malik began relaying his status, only to be interrupted.
“The mission has changed. We no longer want to attack. The United States is aware of the virus and our role in it.”
Malik squeezed his eyes shut, hearing the very last thing he wanted. “How do you know? We are too close to stop because someone is getting skittish.”
“Malik, they named you, along with your position in the Pasdaran Quds. They know the carrier is a woman. They know the alias name you’re using. And those are just the things they told us. They don’t suspect, they know, and that was the one thing we couldn’t have. We couldn’t give them any reason to retaliate.”
They know my name? Then they know I flew to Venezuela. The mission was going to be very, very close. He would need to erase the crew members and the bomb maker.
“We can still go ahead. They won’t attack us and risk losing the vaccine. We should continue, and when they rattle their sabers, feign innocence and offer them the vaccine. We will accomplish much even if they manage to stop the pandemic.”
Malik knew he was grasping, but it was all he could think to say.
“No. We will not. They have threatened to destroy the Islamic republic, and we don’t believe they are bluffing. They were more overt than we have ever seen. No hidden meanings. We want you to meet the Black Widow as you intended, but instead of giving her the explosives, draw some blood from her. Bring that home. At the least, we can use the virus as a future deterrent.”
Malik knew he would never convince the cleric and gave up. “What do you want me to do with the Widow?”
“Kill her on the ocean. Make sure she cannot contaminate anyone.”
The comment sank in, and Malik knew the cleric had lost his way. Perhaps the regime as well. Fear of repercussions alone ruled their response. It was not what the revolution was founded upon, when a small band of students overcame a tyrant and thereby set about altering the course of the Islamic world. He remembered his friends tortured to death by the shah’s SAVAK, wondering if the cleric knew of such sacrifice. Men who willingly embraced the repercussions of the revolution.
The Black Widow had volunteered for this mission, much like Malik had in 1979, fully willing to give her life for a greater cause, and Malik would not simply toss her in the ocean so that the cowardly people in charge would have a “deterrent.” She was better than all of them and deserved to achieve the martyrdom she had striven for.
He closed his eyes and went back to those days, remembering the heady success of the revolution. When everything had been clear-cut, before the Islamic republic began straying from the pure path and fighting among themselves. Politics had superseded the revolution, with President Ahmadinejad spending his final months in power fighting the clerics over petty things. It sickened him.
Malik said, “I understand. I will be home in less than four days.”
He hung up to find the bomb maker standing in the galley. “Bad news?”
“Only if one chooses to listen to it. Tell the captain to cast off.”
69
Jennifer said, “This has got to be a mistake. We’re missing something.”
Driving down the spit of land known as Cocoa Beach, I was with her, absolutely confused as to why the iPad trace had landed here. There was nothing but third-tier vacation rentals and cheap surf shops. Certainly nothing that would be worthy of releasing the virus.
Why would you drive out of Manhattan, one of the most densely populated cities in the United States, to come here?
It had to be a way station. Something picked because of an ease of use to segue into something else.
But what?
Yeah, Cape Canaveral was here, along with the Kennedy Space Center, but why on earth would that be a target? Was Iran’s intel so pathetic they thought attack planning against them happened here? In some secret basement? Maybe. You never could predict what the other guy believed. Trust me, I’d seen enough bad intelligence over the years to know even the greatest superpower on earth sometimes ends up chasing a rabbit down the hole.
I said, “Let’s get to the hotel and check it out. At least we can eliminate it as a location. Somebody will either recognize your sketch or not.”
We’d called Kurt within minutes of getting out of the Ghostbusters Hotel, and, luckily, he’d proven to be on our side. Unlike the other jackasses at the Oversight Council, he’d coordinated to get us to a professional law enforcement sketch artist. I don’t know how he did it, but it was the first bit of common sense that I’d heard in days. Well, other than Knuckles and his team getting us out. Now we had a sketch of the woman, which, along with her accent, would help neck things down.
Getting a start point to even show the sketch had taken more time than I would have liked. Turns out, you can track an individual iPad, but only if the owner signs up for an account called iCloud, thereby registering something called a MAC address. The MAC, or Media Access Control, was a numerical identification for the magic widget in the iPad that communicated with a Wi-Fi hotspot, which left us with two problems. One, the carrier had never initiated an iCloud account, and two, we had no idea of the MAC address. But we did know where her iPad had been bought.
After some wheedling with Kurt, he’d agreed to authorize the penetration of the Apple store in Hong Kong through the hacking cell. I had the date, time, and location of the purchase; all they needed to do was get the serial number of the iPad. From there, further exploration would give us the specifications of that particular iPad, to include the MAC address.
I had no idea how he accomplished it, since he’d officially resigned. Well, actually, I did. He was a commander that people followed because of his personality, not his rank. He’d probably just walked into the building and started issuing orders. Nobody there would have questioned him, including LTC Alexander.
We got the MAC, only to run into the iCloud problem. Now I was not only asking for the penetration of Apple computing but also the manipulation of its systems, because we needed to create a fake iCloud account and feed it the MAC address, tricking the software into thinking the “find me” feature was active in the iPad. Something that was way, way outside of our mandate — even in normal times, when Kurt was officially in charge. Now it was impossible. Kurt had shut me down. For one night, anyway.
Yesterday, I’d woken up to my phone ringing. Kurt had apparently been contacted by the president, and the world was decidedly different from just eight hours before. Nothing was off the table, and he had the trace of the iPad. I didn’t ask any questions.
Now I wasn’t sure if we were too late. The trace was two days old, and we had no idea if the carrier was still here. Two days of wasted time.
We pulled into the Marriott and parked in back, away from the entrance. I left Jennifer in the car and took her sketch into the hotel. I didn’t want to risk her bumping into the carrier if she happened to be getting coffee in the lobby, so Jennifer would stay outside in the heat, sweating.
I asked for a manager and stated I was conducting an investigation, using a phony badge provided by the Taskforce. In fine print it said something stupid like “Investigator of the Paranormal.” Well, not that bad, but it wouldn’t stand up to any scrutiny.
Luckily, the badge did its job. I got the staff into a room and passed the sketch around, giving a story about trying to find a runaway.
Nobody recognized the drawing. I said, “She would have checked in during the last week. We know she was here two days ago.”
The manager said, “This sketch isn’t that great. We see hundreds of people a day. Do
you have a name?”
“No. Believe me, I wish I did, but I don’t. I have no idea what name she’s using. She has an accent, though. Sounds like an Eastern European.”
He laughed. “Do you know how many foreigners come through here? We make our money on cruise ship stopovers. We get more foreigners here than Washington, DC.” My face went sour, and he said, “Hey, you can hang around for another twenty minutes. The other shift will come on and maybe they’ll have seen her, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.”
I left the hotel and found Jennifer on the phone. I said, “Who are you talking to?”
She held up a finger, saying, “Yes, alpha, six, alpha. That’s right.”
I patiently waited, and she started writing in the air. I looked at her like she’d lost her mind and she hissed, “Get me a something to write with!”
Ripping through the seat cushions of our rental, I found a broken pencil and handed it to her, along with a napkin from our last stop. She scribbled something down and hung up.
“What was that all about?”
“I got sick of waiting around in the car, so I trolled the parking lot. I found five cars with New York license plates. One is from a rental car company at JFK driven by a woman from Latvia. Named Elina Maskhadov.”
When I didn’t respond, Jennifer said, “You trying to catch flies with that open mouth? It wasn’t rocket science. The car in question is hidden by a Dumpster.”
I snapped my mouth closed, then said, “Holy shit, you are the heat! That’s the smartest thing I’ve seen in years! So we know she’s still here, and we have a name.”
Her eyes widened at my accolades, completely oblivious that what she had done was outside the box and something very few would have thought of. But only for a second. She grinned and said, “Don’t get worked up. Me being the heat doesn’t get you any closer to the flame. You want to go back in and see if this helps?”
I felt an irrational pull to lean in and kiss her. I didn’t. Maybe, given what was coming, it would have helped, but at that moment I was sure it was the wrong time and wrong place. I was never a good judge of that.