by Carr, Jack
We’d contain it, Qassem answered.
What else? What if it escaped the containment zone?
We’d have to kill it.
Precisely. And how would you do that? How do you destroy what can’t be seen?
It must be eradicated.
In Russia we had a protocol called yasnyy veter, “cleansing wind,” the old scientist said. All cities near our facilities studying the deadliest pathogens were on a target list. Biological weapon production facilities, bio-weapon research labs, storage facilities, testing grounds: Zagorsk, Pokrov, Kirov, Omutninsk, Vozrozhdeniya, Aralsk, Nukus, Vladivostok. In the eventuality that a pathogen escaped, the area would need to be obliterated before the contagion destroyed the entire country.
The Soviet Union targeted its own cities for destruction?
It was the most efficient way to contain an outbreak that could have destroyed the country.
Are you sure?
My son, I developed the contingency.
Before he left the old man’s apartment, a plan had started to form in the intelligence officer’s head. He now knew what would lead a country to destroy its own cities. And he knew why those MC-130s were staged at the ready in Florida. Qassem would turn the might of the American military against itself.
Qassem remembered the long-term penetration program he had helped design years earlier, sending young students abroad to study medicine to help modernize the Iranian health system; he remembered one student in particular. He would be perfect.
First, he’d need to sell it through his superiors to the Ayatollah.
There was nothing electronic to tie Iran to the plan; no emails, no text messages, no cloud-based spy communications network like the CIA’s foolish COVAIR system. This would be done the old way. The way of the Hashshasin. The way things were handled when the Persian Empire was at the height of its power. This attack would restore Iran to its rightful place in the world order, reducing what the Americans liked to call a “beacon of hope” to a legacy of ashes.
CHAPTER 10
Gillette Stadium
Foxborough, Massachusetts
THEY HAD MET ONCE before, at a football match in Germany. It had been a number of years, but Qassem and Ali had been trained by one of the most ruthless intelligence organizations in existence. They had not forgotten each other or the procedures for exchanging bona fides.
Security was tight with the Boston Marathon bombing still relatively fresh in the minds of those who attended sporting events in the Cradle of Liberty, but the plainclothes and uniformed officers were looking for something else, unaware that an attack was being set in motion in the very birthplace of the American Revolution.
The spymaster and the assassin did not do a brush pass or a dead drop. They made no attempt to avoid the multitude of cameras covering the event.
Leaving the bathroom, Qassem stopped next to a concession stand selling hats and jerseys to rub on hand sanitizer and adjust his mask. It was a blessing from Allah that the masks they were forced to wear at sporting events were now the accepted norm. Facial recognition software could take parts of the ears and eyes and put together partial matches, but it was not the tool of the state it had been just a year earlier. The Americans had tried to enforce six-foot distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic, obviously so they could build their databases, matching “partials” to build their sample volume and increase occlusion detection accuracy. Coverings were nothing new. Masks were just added to a list of facial obstructions including sunglasses, scarves, and hats so algorithms could make matches via an ear, an uncovered nose, or just one eye.
The Americans are such sheep.
If the intelligence services went back weeks from now and pieced together the meeting with partial matches from their facial recognition databases, it would already be too late.
“Excuse me.”
Qassem turned and looked into the eyes he remembered from their meeting in Germany.
“Yes?” Qassem responded.
“Could you spare a few drops of that sanitizer? I seem to have forgotten mine in the car.”
“Of course,” Qassem said, holding out the small bottle.
“Thank you. Great game.”
“Ha! Not quite like those in Europe but it will have to do.”
“Agreed.”
“Here, take this extra bottle, I have plenty,” Qassem said, pulling another unopened bottle from his pocket.
“I couldn’t.”
“Please, I insist.”
“Thank you.”
“Ma‘al-salfāmah,” Qassem said through his mask. With peace.
“Ff’ amfān Allfāh,” Ali responded. In God’s protection.
Ali touched his right hand to his heart and walked back to his seat to finish the game. For American soccer, it wasn’t half bad.
One of the deadliest toxins ever developed had just been placed in the hands of an assassin.
CHAPTER 11
Club Aegis
Washington, D.C.
SENATOR EDWARD THWAITE’S BLACK Suburban stopped in the alley on the 700 block of 15th Street, not far from the Treasury Building and within easy walking distance of the White House. He dropped his phone and tablet into a leather pouch that he handed to his aide for safekeeping. Electronic devices were not allowed where he was going. His aide took them without a word, knowing not to speak unless spoken to. He’d never been invited inside. He knew his place: out here in the vehicle.
The driver stayed behind the wheel while the detail lead exited the passenger side and opened the door for the senator, escorting him to what looked to be the back exit to any number of businesses whose fronts faced Lafayette Square. The senator nodded to another man who waited by the door.
“He’s upstairs, sir,” the advance man stated.
“Thank you,” the senator replied, taking a key card from his pocket and sliding it into the card reader affixed to the door.
He punched in a code that was also his membership number and stepped inside with his bodyguard, leaving the advance man in the street. The senator much preferred arriving through the main entrance and taking the private elevator up to the second floor. This back entrance was installed during Prohibition, when the same people who outlawed alcohol needed a speakeasy nearby to enjoy a drink; regardless of who controlled the House and Senate, hypocrisy was a constant. Today, the alley entrance allowed for additional anonymity but did require him to make the trek to the second level on foot, a journey that left him slightly winded.
It was almost a straight shot down Pennsylvania Avenue from Capitol Hill and offered a beautiful walk, though the senator had never exercised that option. Nestled in among the monuments, federal agencies, and museums for which Washington was famous, Club Aegis, or AG for those in the know, was the last true bipartisan private club in D.C. Membership was not based on political leanings. Republicans and Democrats were welcomed with open arms, if they could pay, if they had power, and if they could wait. The five-person membership committee was made up of three generations of the Marchetti family. Rumors abounded that there was a connection to what insiders called “the outfit.” The rest of the world called it the mafia.
Power was the currency traded upon in the high-backed leather chairs of Club Aegis. If Los Angeles was about sex and New York was about money, D.C. was all about supremacy. Aegis, in Greek mythology, conjured up images of a protective shield from the Iliad, an image reinforced by statues of Zeus and Athena that framed the bar. Members thought of themselves as protectors of the republic, though the goal of most was to protect and grow their bank accounts.
Senator Thwaite was a second-generation Aegis member, his father having served in the Senate for thirty years before Edward took over the seat. In his father’s day, one would look around and see Kissinger, Abrams, McNamara, William Weed Kaufmann, Harold Brown, John Rubel, Alain C. Enthoven, Maxwell Taylor, William Westmoreland, Olaf Helmer, Herman Kahn, and even a Kennedy or two until that idiot Bobby started going after the mob, t
he very people who had delivered the Italian vote for his brother. That sort of idealism and treachery saw them both to early graves. The death of Camelot. True power still came from the barrel of a gun. Mao had been onto something.
Today, men with the same pedigrees sat in the same seats. There were no fedoras in the coat room, but the windows were still covered with the same bloodred drapes to conceal the business within. The president could fool around in the White House all he wanted; it was here that deals were struck and budgets were allocated. Those who controlled the purse strings had the de facto power. What happened in the halls of Congress was theater, distraction for a gullible public who still believed in a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. No one would ever imagine that the world’s most powerful nation was run from a sixty-year-old cigar club on 15th Street.
They entered through a dark corridor around the corner from the second-level bar. Thwaite handed his coat to the striking yet conservatively dressed hostess. His bodyguard took a seat at the far end of the best-stocked bar in the city and ordered an ice water from the tuxedo-clad bartender, keeping an eye on his principal in the reflection behind a sea of spirits.
Thwaite opened the glass door to the walk-in humidor and approached his personal humidity-controlled “locker.” He produced a key and extracted a Fuente Opus X, holding it under his nose and savoring the aroma. To Thwaite it wasn’t just a cigar, it represented his ability to impact the world. At sixty-four he still believed he had a chance at the coveted top job. It had been within his grasp until that brash young California Democrat started making moves. The new president was going to find out that it could get very lonely at the top.
Senator Thwaite closed the door behind him, intentionally avoiding the corner table where he knew his appointment waited. He needed to send a message as to who was the alpha male, though he doubted the man would care. It infuriated the senator that nothing seemed to faze the former military officer.
Doing his best to hide his annoyance, he made his way back out onto the floor, passing a waitress in a skimpy black dress. The all-male membership raised no objections to the staff’s required attire, harking back to the building’s original days as a whorehouse at the turn of the century. It had fallen into disrepair after Prohibition. There had been attempts at a few different restaurants, all unsuccessful, before an Italian family had purchased it in the late 1950s with outside investors from New York and Chicago. The downstairs home-style Italian food supported a profitable business, and the full menu was available to the private club on floors two and three. The club refused to adopt bylaws, which allowed them to reject membership applications on a whim without fear of a recriminatory lawsuit. It boasted a ten-year waiting list for those willing to pay an undisclosed fee that would horrify most.
Thwaite walked up to the third-level mezzanine, passing between a lion and a crocodile standing guard at the base of the staircase. Both floors boasted an assortment of African wildlife taxidermy and safari art donated by an early member, which gave the establishment the aura of a man cave on steroids. That same member had been hastily expelled and his membership revoked for getting drunk and grabby with a hostess. The arrangements made between the hostesses and club members behind closed doors were one thing, but making a spectacle in the club was grounds for immediate expulsion. They had kept his taxidermy as a final fuck you and a reminder to other members of the proper rules of etiquette.
Thwaite stopped by a table overlooking the bar to say hello to Pietro and Franco Beretta, who were enjoying a meal with two members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, one of whom was a senator from Tennessee, where Beretta had recently moved its U.S. manufacturing facility. Thwaite shook hands with them all. He thanked Franco for the kind gift of matched 20-gauges he’d presented to Thwaite’s wife on a driven pheasant hunt outside Gubbio, when they’d been guests of the Beretta family the previous fall. Loosely adhering to the U.S. Senate gift rules, the shotguns were given to his wife as a “thank you” for a speech she had given to Beretta’s employees in conjunction with her corporate consulting business.
In Club Aegis it would have been considered rude not to offer a quick hello. One acknowledged the other patrons one knew and then moved on to the business of the day.
He floated among the tables shaking hands and making his presence known, hoping his sojourn was causing the man in the corner to sweat. He made sure to acknowledge the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations/Low-Intensity Conflict, who sat drinking wine from the most exhaustive list in the swamp with an executive from Raytheon, an untouched bowl of calamari between them.
He only nodded to two tables of competing pharmaceutical companies, as even Thwaite found their ilk distasteful. He recognized a lobbyist for Purdue Pharma sitting with the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, and though the second-generation congressman couldn’t make out what he was saying, the unmistakable southern drawl of the chairman permeated the air. The Sackler family minions had been hard at work to minimize the financial impact of the two thousand state and local lawsuits filed to recover the losses associated with fighting the opioid epidemic. They had hired an army that included twenty-two separate lobbying firms to ensure they could continue peddling drugs to the most vulnerable segments of society, all the while reaping the financial benefits. To assuage some of that guilt, the Sacklers had plastered their family name over everything from university chairs to the wings of world-renowned museums. Thwaite wondered if that helped. The nail in their coffin was the recent publication of a book by Gerald Posner titled Pharma: Greed, Lies, and the Poisoning of America. It was being hailed as the twenty-first-century equivalent of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. Thwaite would be sure to reference it when the CEO of Purdue answered questions in Senate hearings later that month. Thwaite looked forward to watching him squirm.
Though it might seem like a very public place to discuss such sensitive and controversial topics, that was the magic of Club Aegis. Business was conducted in plain sight, conversations disappearing along with the tobacco smoke into the state-of-the-art ventilation system. When the participants parted ways, like an unfamiliar perfume lingering in the wake of a forbidden affair, the only evidence that remained from meetings in AG was a hint of smoke on the conspirators’ clothing.
Bidding a good day to an executive vice president of Royal Dutch Shell, Thwaite descended the stairs. Returning to the second level, he took another three steps down off the raised bar area, leaving the original wood floor and striding onto a black carpet inlayed with gold tobacco leaves. He slid into a leather chair the color of the finest Connecticut shade tobacco leaf before finally making eye contact with his appointment. The man across from him removed a thick Cohiba Behike from between his teeth and slowly exhaled, the gray smoke finding its way into the vents above. Even though he had no love for the Cuban government, the man had no qualms about procuring his beloved Cohibas whenever he was beyond the borders of the United States. While D.C. had banned cigar clubs and indoor smoking a decade ago, Aegis was grandfathered in, due in no small part to the powerful political connections of its membership.
“And how is the most underappreciated champion of the people doing today?” the man asked.
Even though Thwaite had kept him waiting for more than forty-five minutes, Erik Sawyer did not look the least bit disturbed. He didn’t steal a knowing glance at the large Hublot watch on his wrist or inquire as to why the senator was late. He acted as if Thwaite was right on time. He was dressed comfortably in slacks and a sport jacket. As usual, he was not wearing a tie, something about it serving no useful purpose in a fight.
In his mid-fifties, he was a decade the senator’s junior. His confidence bordered on arrogance, a trait unsettling to politicians accustomed to holding all the cards. His short-cropped salt-and-pepper hair betrayed a military background exacerbated by a physique more befitting a man who was decades younger. Erik Sawyer was a born businessman trapped in the body of a soldier, and t
hough he might be getting up there in years, his eyes and mind were as sharp as ever.
He had read the tea leaves prior to the attacks of 9/11, merging the entrepreneurial spirit infused into him by a father who had left his children an inheritance they would not be able to spend in a lifetime with his experience on the ground as an Army Ranger in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1993. He returned home with a vision: to create a privatized intelligence and security apparatus leaner and more agile than the CIA and the U.S. military, services for which he’d charge a pretty penny. His timing could not have been better.
Senator Thwaite’s wealth came from owed favors; he was beholden not just to his constituents but to donors, to lobbyists, to other politicians, family members, and reporters. Sawyer, in contrast, did not owe anyone favors. He had the financial freedom to sit on a beach drinking fruity cocktails in the sun at the home he kept on the island of Mustique in the West Indies if he so desired, but that was not Sawyer’s way. He could not stop building an empire that had grown to include government contracts worth billions over the past twenty years. He was both a patriot and a die-hard capitalist. He provided something of value. It was rumored that the intelligence wing of his operation had collected information on more than a few of Thwaite’s competitors. The senator had attempted to buy the information from Sawyer in years past, but the former Ranger had only laughed. That information, if it existed, was not for sale. He called it his “get out of jail free card.” He’d almost had to use it when a convoy of his contractors had hit an IED outside Gardez in 2005. Instead of retreating, they laid waste to a nearby village as a warning to not target their convoys. Unfortunately for them, a New York Times reporter had gotten wind of the atrocity and plastered photos of the dead, unarmed villagers across the front page. Sawyer had weathered the storm and even paid the legal expenses for the contractors involved. They’d still gone to prison, but the company had survived. As part of a public relations rebranding effort, Sawyer changed the business name to Masada. The following year, State Department contracts almost doubled and classified contracts with the CIA increased tenfold. Thwaite could only venture a guess at the value of the information in the files Sawyer had gathered over the years. He wondered what information the corporate warrior had collected on him.