Naylor's eyes narrowed, and he saw shock on her face. "What if I told you that you've been misinformed by people who wish to sabotage the most significant initiative against crime since DNA fingerprinting?"
Butcher opened the passenger door of his car. "I'd say you might be right. But I'd need to know more about your side of the story. The President-elect was too busy to give me an immediate response; perhaps you might like to instead."
Naylor hesitated for a moment and then let out a defeated sigh. "OK," she said eventually. "Let me tell my agents where I'll be." She put the cell phone to her thin lips and left a curt message. "But, Mr. Butcher," she said after she hung up, "what I'm going to tell you is off the record. And I'm telling you only so you understand this initiative mustn't be sabotaged."
"Fine, whatever you say," he said as she got into the car.
By the time they reached the Potomac it had begun to snow. As Butcher asked his questions, he ignored the large flakes falling from the sky. "So tell me about Dr. Kerr. She's made some serious allegations."
"Look, Dr. Kerr's brilliant, and the origin of Conscience undeniably comes from her work. But over the last six or so years she has been acting more and more unstable. Her work hasn't been a success, and most of the recent step changes on the project have come from Alice Prince, not her. Kathy's been feeling very insecure about her role in a project that she still regards as hers.
"Alice Prince offered to share the credit, but Kathy wanted a ridiculous financial reward and full credit or she would trash it. Naturally we can't allow a project as important as this to be held for ransom by one person--however much she's contributed. So we accepted her resignation, and now it appears she's trying to discredit the whole process."
Ahead, the sprawl of the airport rose through the thickening blizzard. Butcher peered through the windshield. "She claims you had her put away. Put in some mental asylum."
Naylor laughed at that. "What proof do you have for all this nonsense? I thought you were supposed to be a responsible journalist."
"It isn't just Kathy Kerr who claims you put her in an asylum. I've got another witness."
"Oh, yes? Who?"
"I'm not telling you that," he said. "Not yet anyway."
"Look, Mr. Butcher, there's no way anyone can corroborate a story that didn't happen unless he's lying. I asked for proof, not hearsay."
"I'm expecting more proof anytime now," he said. "Dr. Kerr says she's got records going back ten years or so."
They were heading for the main terminal building and the rental car dropoff points. He turned to ask her where she wanted to be dropped off when Director Naylor calmly reached into her jacket and in one fluid motion pulled out a gun and pressed it into his crotch. "Mr. Butcher, please take the turn for the long-term car lot. If you do not do exactly as I say, I will pull the trigger." The pistol was pushed hard into his balls, but for a good second or two he didn't react. His brain simply couldn't believe that this was happening.
Butcher exhaled suddenly, and Director Naylor watched in satisfaction as his grin faded and his face paled.
It hadn't been easy to make her prey think he was the predator. But she had no choice. She couldn't get one of her minions to handle Butcher because she needed to know what he knew. And she needed to do it quickly and discreetly.
Immediately after Toshack had asked about Kathy Kerr, Naylor had been on the phone to Jackson. Kerr had been delivered to Dr. Peters as agreed. Naylor hadn't been able to contact Peters, but he wouldn't have released Kathy. He had too much at stake. She had to find out who had got her out and why. Just the thought of Kerr's shooting off her self-righteous mouth to Weiss made her squirm. This had to be stamped out fast.
It had taken Director Naylor just two phone calls to discover where Hank Butcher was staying in Washington. She learned that he had checked out of the recently opened Mandrake Hotel this morning and had a reserved American Airlines seat to San Francisco from Reagan National Airport at four forty-six this afternoon. But his rental car was still parked under the hotel.
After a brief talk with Prince to sort out what they were going to tell Weiss tonight, she had taken a taxi to the Mandrake, then waited. Once Butcher spotted her, the rest had been easy.
Now she could interview him.
"What are you doing?" he demanded, his voice at least an octave higher than before. "You can't possibly hope to get away with this. I'm a journalist, for chrissakes."
"Be quiet and drive to the long-term parking lot."
It was now so white outside she couldn't see more than a few yards ahead. Butcher kept pleading with her as he drove through the automatic barriers and followed her instructions to the middle of the vast lot, parking eventually in a space surrounded by hundreds of increasingly snow-blanketed cars. His face had a greenish cast and was covered in a film of sweat when he switched off the ignition and turned to her. She could tell from his eyes that he was close to panic. Good.
"Hand me the keys."
He took the keys from the ignition and gave them to her. "What do you want?" he asked.
"Who got Kerr out of the Sanctuary?"
"I can't tell you that. I promised him I wouldn't. I've got to protect my sources."
She pushed her gun further into his groin until he grimaced in pain. "I'd think about protecting more than your sources right now, if I were you. Trust me, Mr. Butcher, unless you tell me what I need to know, I will shoot you and feel justified in doing so. We are embarked upon something that is vital to the future success of our species, something far too important to allow a couple of individuals to hijack it."
Butcher looked really scared now. "But if I tell you, how do I know you won't kill me anyway?"
"God, you journalists always ask questions. You don't know. But I assure you that if you don't tell me, you'll beg me to kill you."
She stared into his eyes and cocked the gun.
"OK, OK, I'll tell you. His name's Luke Decker; he contacted me by phone."
"Decker? As in Special Agent Luke Decker? Jesus."
"Yeah. He told me about getting Dr. Kerr out of the Sanctuary and how you'd deceived the FDA. Also how Axelman was possibly a mistake you wanted covered up. Or something else."
"Did he tell you what this something else might be?"
"No, he said Dr. Kerr's got some suspicions but nothing concrete. That's what I was asking Pamela Weiss about at the reception, but she seemed completely in the dark."
Naylor smiled at that. "Oh, she is, Mr. Butcher, she is. And that's exactly how it's going to stay. Would you please get out of the car now?"
A look of relief and then renewed fear crossed his face. "Why? What are you going to do with me?"
"Mr. Butcher, get out of the car, or I will shoot you where you sit. If you run or shout for help, I will shoot you dead. In this blizzard no one will see or hear you anyway."
Once they were out of the car she steered him to the back. "Open the trunk."
Shivering with terror and the sub-zero temperature, he did as she asked. There was a small case and a laptop inside. Otherwise it was empty.
"Get in the trunk."
"But it's freezing."
"Now! Or I will shoot you."
For a moment she thought he was going to struggle, but then he sat on the bumper, allowing her to push him into the trunk. Butcher lay there trembling, his eyes staring up at her though his eyeglasses, pleading with her.
"Let me leave you with two points of consolation," she said to him. "One, you aren't dying much sooner than you would have anyway. Two, you got off light compared with what I'm going to do with Dr. Kathy Kerr and Special Agent Luke Decker." With that she fired one perfectly placed bullet into Butcher's forehead and closed the trunk.
After checking she was still unseen in the vast snowswept lot, she retrieved a Swiss Army knife from her inside pocket and unscrewed the rear and front plates from the rental car. She swapped the rear one with a Saab's plate ten cars down and the front plate with a similar one on
a Chevy's two rows back. The whole process took her twelve minutes, but it ensured that Hank Butcher's rental car and therefore his body wouldn't be found for weeks, especially if the weather stayed cold. By then it wouldn't matter.
Walking toward the courtesy bus shelter, she turned to watch her footsteps disappear in the falling snow. Despite her reservations about exposing herself, there was something satisfying about doing a job personally and doing it well. It took her back to her early days as an agent, when she'd finished in the top percentile in her class at the Quantico FBI academy and helped bust two murder cases in her first six months, receiving a bullet in her left leg and right shoulder for her troubles. She certainly felt no remorse for what she had done. It was necessary, and in the long run the morality of the deed would cease to be relevant. In the courtesy bus shelter she reached for her cell phone and dialed Assistant Director Jackson's number.
"Jackson," she ordered when he picked up, "find Dr. Peters and get rid of him. He allowed our guest to escape. Then find Luke Decker. Dr. Kerr will be with him."
"Decker?"
"Yes, the same Decker who beats you every year at the Quantico shooting meet. Find them both and bring them to me. Naturally no one in the bureau except your people must know about this. Understand?"
"Yes, but what if I can't bring them to you alive?"
Naylor looked up as the courtesy bus approached through the snow. She checked her watch, calculating that she could get a cab from the terminal building in plenty of time to rendezvous with Alice Prince before their meeting with Pamela Weiss.
"Director," said the voice on the phone, "if I have to, can I kill them?"
Madeline Naylor looked back across the rows of cars, already unable to identify which contained the rapidly cooling corpse of Hank Butcher. "Of course you can, Jackson. You can do whatever you like. Just make damn sure you get them."
Chapter 23.
Babylon, Iraq.Thursday, November 6, 10:07 P.M.
The presidential palace in Babylon, one hundred kilometers south of Baghdad, was one of more than fifty built since the 1990 war. Its unrestrained opulence seemed obscene in a land where continuing international sanctions meant many people lived in poverty. The rais and his family now owned over eighty such residences, including the older palaces, around the country.
Standing in one of the military planning rooms, Dr. Yevgenia Krotova shifted the weight of her heavy frame from one foot to the other and stared at the six silent television screens on the far wall, each showing a different cable channel. These flickering images of the modern world contrasted sharply with the palace's old-world splendor: the marble pillars, the thick rugs, the gilt high-backed chairs facing the screens, and the alabaster water fountains visible in the floodlit courtyard beyond the tall, arched windows.
The ostentatious show of wealth didn't shock Yevgenia Krotova. After she had sold her soul to the devil, nothing shocked her anymore. Ten years ago she had been deputy director of Russia's State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology in Koltsovo, helping run its illegal germ warfare program. But Russia was poor and unable to maintain even the meager salary she was paid. Iraq had outbid both Iran and North Korea to purchase her expertise--and whatever secrets she could bring with her.
One freezing night in January 1998 Yevgenia had decamped with her husband and three daughters, and for the last decade she had headed Iraq's formidable biological warfare program. She was paid more money than she could ever use and had a good life, but she was a guarded prisoner, a bought possession of the rais. She was forbidden to leave the country, and her family would always be watched. Dr. Krotova never allowed herself to question her decision, though. Regret served no purpose.
But now she was in trouble. Aziz had died before he could explain the escalating deaths in the Republican Guard, and because he had involved her in his investigations, she had been summoned to the palace to supply answers. Any sadness she may have felt for Aziz's death was more than countered by frustration. She had been left to explain the unexplainable to the three generals? Why couldn't Aziz at least have left a few clues before he died? The only consolation was that the generals, not the rais himself, were here.
After greeting the generals, she stood in the middle of the room. It was late, and she felt tired. She wanted to sit down, but they didn't invite her to join them on one of the comfort-able-looking high-backed chairs surrounding the long table. Instead they left her standing and proceeded to interrogate her. Frowning, she tried to ignore the screens flickering over the generals' shoulders and concentrate on their questions.
"Dr. Krotova, do you or do you not know what the cause is?" General Akram was the tallest of the three men. His eyes searched her face as he spoke, his voice brusque. Ostensibly Akram had overall responsibility for medical matters in the army, although the man was an idiot who was given the role only because of his distant blood relationship to the rais.
"Not exactly, but I'm convinced Dr. Aziz was close. He thought it was steroid abuse at first, but now he has died with the same symptoms, which implies that whatever killed the men is infectious."
"Infectious?" asked General Rashani, a short, bald man with glasses. He sounded incredulous. "But these men have been dying of brain hemorrhages and committing suicide. How could that be infectious?"
"That's what Aziz was trying to confirm. It might be a complex virus or a prion or else something entirely new that changed the men's DNA and brain chemistry. Aziz was writing up his work on the night he died, and I tried to recover his report, but his computer was damaged, and most had been deleted. However, from the fragments we salvaged from his hard drive, I think he may have found something."
"But you don't know the cause or how to cure it?"
"Not yet. My people are reviewing all the tests Aziz's team conducted on the patients, and we are currently conducting detailed autopsies on the men's brains to shed more light on the pathology. But we need more time."
"You haven't got more time. We haven't got more time. We await the rais's order to march on Kuwait at any moment."
"But you can't wage a military campaign until we know more. This phenomenon is no longer confined to the Al Taji camp. At least a hundred men are now dead, and the rate is increasing. We need to check how widespread this epidemic has become and contain it. If you don't, you will lose even more men."
"In war men always die," said General Akram. "Unless you can explain what's wrong, we shall proceed as planned. If it's noninfectious, then there's no problem. And if it is, then at least they can serve a purpose before they die."
"But that's--" she started to say before the third general gave her a dark look.
"This is not open to debate," he said.
Yevgenia bit her lip, framing a more positive response. It was dangerous to anger them any more than she had done already. Before she could say anything else, she heard a loud voice speaking in English. The three generals swiveled around to face the wall of televisions, and Yevgenia realized that the volume had been increased on the top right-hand screen. The channel was CNN, and the voice she could hear was that of the U.S. President. He was standing in front of a podium, and at the bottom of the screen was a subtitle that read: "Bob Burbank Live from the White House." Behind him were four men and a woman. One of the men was in uniform. The President had been speaking for some minutes when Yevgenia, who spoke English well, picked up what he was saying.
"I hope and pray that the president of Iraq sees reason and doesn't cross the thirty-second parallel. But if he does, then the coalition allies are committed to crush his offensive. He must understand that we will execute this ruthlessly and decisively because we firmly believe that to delay would only encourage him further. We have the conventional force in place to destroy his army, and we will employ that force immediately if one Iraqi boot, tank, or plane crosses that line in the sand."
As the U.S. President spoke, his face was pale and his eyes looked tired. His face worried Yevgenia; he had the look of a man telling an
awful truth. "We are aware that the Iraqi president has promised to retaliate with unconventional weapons, but we will not appease him. We cannot appease him. The very last thing we want to do is start a conflict, let alone escalate one. But he must be in no doubt that if he raises the stakes one notch, we will have no choice but to end this decisively. The game of bluff and counterbluff he has been playing with the UN for the last eighteen years has come to an end. There is no more patience."
President Burbank seemed to sway on his feet, and as he did so, he wiped beads of sweat from his brow. At first Yevgenia thought that the man was affected by the import of what he was saying, but then she realized that it was more than that. He looked ill. "As I speak, the president of Iraq controls the greatest destructive force we have ever seen. His actions will determine whether this nuclear response remains unused or whether it is unleashed on him and his country." Burbank paused and looked into the camera, his face haggard. "I hope he chooses his actions wisely."
When he finished, there was a hush--not only in the palace but also in the White House briefing room on camera. Yevgenia looked at the generals and could see them craning over the backs of their chairs staring at the screen. Then, just as the journalists began asking their questions, the most unimaginable scene unfolded before her eyes: Bob Burbank clutched his chest, reached for the podium as his knees buckled, and collapsed to the floor. There was a second of shocked silence; then the screen went mad. Secret Service men in black glasses formed a circle around the man. Journalists left their seats to rush forward, and the President's aides stood around in panic.
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