by Carr, Jack
Katie peered at him over the top of the menu and raised an eyebrow.
“Hmm…”
“Your usual?”
They were on the first floor, seated just past the bar at a corner table in their favorite restaurant, a Tuscan landmark in the heart of Old Town. It made Reece uncomfortable that there was no back exit. If something happened, at least he wouldn’t waste time deciding where to go; they would fight their way to the front door. Reece’s back was to the wall, and even though he knew the layout by heart, he’d still made his security assessment as he walked in. He couldn’t help himself. It was ingrained. He told himself it wasn’t paranoia; it was situational awareness. He’d lost his family because he had not been there. He wasn’t going to let that happen to Katie.
“Cheers,” Reece said, raising his glass.
It irritated Katie that Landini Brothers didn’t allow corkage, relegating patrons to their expensive wine list, which for some unknown reason didn’t list the vintage. She tolerated it because the food was delicious, the charming old-world atmosphere appealed to her, and unfortunately there were few great restaurant options in Old Town. Additionally, it happened to be walking distance from her condo. Looking at the wine list, Katie noticed two great “Super Tuscan” choices that happened to be among her favorites—Tenuta dell’Ornellaia Masseto, which was egregiously overpriced even though it was a tremendous wine, and Tenuta San Guido, Sassicaia, which was similarly an excellent bottle. With a smirk at the sommelier, who clearly had no idea what he was doing, Katie ordered the Sassicaia, which was mistakenly priced at half of what they should have charged.
So much for no corkage policy.
“To what are we drinking on this fine evening?” she asked.
“Uh, a weekend back from the Farm?”
“Can’t you think of anything more romantic than that?”
She liked to make him sweat. She’d seen him under pressure before, and it never failed to amuse her that someone who could be so calm, cool, and collected when the bullets were flying struggled to find words when it came to matters of the heart.
“Um, to uh…”
“Let me help you.” Katie smiled. “To us.”
“To us,” Reece said, relieved.
“See, that wasn’t so bad. I thought they were supposed to be turning you into a suave secret agent down there. I was expecting you to come back all ‘shaken, not stirred.’ ”
“They’re working on it,” Reece said with a smile. “I’m proving to be a tough case.”
It had been almost a year since Reece had returned from Siberia. Katie was less than pleased when Reece had gone off the grid, hunting the man who had killed his father and orchestrated the Russian hit team that had targeted and almost killed them both in the mountains of Montana. Reece was a man with grit. It was a trait she respected. It also terrified her.
“Before I forget, Caroline Hastings emailed me. She wants us to come back to the ranch as soon as we can. Her exact words were ‘Your cabin awaits.’ She says Raife is getting antsy and wants to take you on a hunt. He still has a bit of a limp that she says he is very good at hiding from everyone. She also said the house is as good as new; all the bullet holes have been patched and the glass replaced. She made a point of telling me they’ve also emplaced additional security; I think she wanted me to feel safe.”
“Let’s do it. I love Montana in the winter. Most people head south, which means there is just more of it for us to enjoy.”
“Wine by the fire beyond the grasp of these does sound nice,” she said, holding up her phone and making a point of dropping it in her purse so Reece knew he had her full attention.
As she was hanging her bag on the back of her chair, a guy at the bar chatting up a young woman spilling out of a dress a couple of sizes too small caught her eye and gave a little wave. Katie nodded back politely and turned back to Reece, rolling her eyes.
“Ugh, that guy is the worst.”
Reece shifted his eyes from Katie to the Romeo at the bar, recognizing him as a cable news personality, light on substance and heavy on hair products.
“Not to be gossipy,” she said conspiratorially, “but he is such a creep.”
Reece raised an eyebrow.
“That girl is a new producer, about a year out of college. Guess how he met his third and current wife, who is at home with the kids?”
“Producer?” Reece ventured.
“Exactly.”
“Doesn’t he have a book out?”
“Oh yes, a New York Times bestseller. Guess how that happened?”
“No idea.”
“You need to suffer through an evening of cable news. That should be all you need to figure it out. I wouldn’t mind as much if he wasn’t so slimy. I refuse to even do his show. It’s guys like him that make me seriously consider getting out of the news business.”
“Sounds like a real treat.”
“On to more pleasant topics. How was your week?” Katie asked, knowing Reece would have to be guarded about his final weeks at Camp Peary. “Are all those grad school coeds behaving themselves?”
The CIA’s Camp Peary was commonly known as the world’s most exclusive dating service. Recruits were typically in their mid- to late twenties, with graduate degrees from the nation’s most elite bastions of academia. That they were under intense pressure for the better part of a year and were restricted from talking about their training with anyone outside the circle made for some intense relationships. The Farm was responsible for more than a few marriages, as well as a slew of divorces.
Katie was familiar with government agencies. As one of the most recognizable journalists in the Beltway due to her book about the embassy annex attack in Benghazi, aptly titled The Benghazi Betrayal, Katie had interviewed a host of current and former CIA staff officers and contractors. Her exposé on the conspiracy to kill Reece’s team in the mountains of Afghanistan by a cabal of government-connected financiers only raised her profile as one of the country’s most respected investigative journalists.
“Well, it was, uh, interesting.”
“Oh, do tell,” Katie teased.
“I met with the president on Tuesday. So, have you decided? Want an appetizer?”
Katie dropped her menu on her plate.
“You what? You mean he came down from D.C. to address your class?”
“No, I mean he sent a helicopter and flew me up to Camp David. What do you think? Calamari or caprese?”
“Are you serious? What did he want?”
“That’s classified. I think I’ll start with the carpaccio. Salads look good, too. I love this place.”
“James, how long were you there?”
“About twenty-four hours. Did you know that Brezhnev almost crashed a Lincoln with Nixon in the passenger seat joyriding around the perimeter?”
“I was not aware,” Katie said, suddenly serious.
“What are you thinking for your main? Fillets here are fantastic.”
“James Reece, the president of the United States does not just summon a CIA recruit to Camp David to give him what I’m sure is a fascinating history.”
Reece put down his menu and looked into the deep blue eyes of the woman with whom he’d fallen in love.
“True. He wanted to discuss the events in Odessa. He said he might not even be in the seat if it hadn’t been for Freddy saving President Grimes.”
Reece felt more than a tinge of guilt for not telling Katie the whole truth, but what was he supposed to say? The president of the United States got himself elected to the highest office in the land to wage a personal war of retribution against those he believed helped facilitate the attacks of 9/11 that killed his fiancée?
“Did he ask you about Russia?”
“Interestingly enough, that didn’t come up. Did you know that FDR and Churchill planned D-Day there?”
“I did know that,” Katie acknowledged, still skeptical.
Their waiter interrupted just in time.
“H
ave you decided?” he asked.
“What are the specials tonight?” Reece asked, trying to draw out the disruption. He smiled at Katie, who shook her head, knowing exactly what he was doing.
Men could be so transparent.
They ordered appetizers and main courses, handing their menus back to the waiter before leaning back toward one another to continue their conversation.
“Change of topic,” Reece declared. “What have you been up to this week?”
“Well, I most certainly did not meet privately with the president. But I am in the middle of a fascinating investigation that my friend Haley Garrett is helping me with.”
“Isn’t she the one that works at the CDC?” Reece asked, using the acronym for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“That’s her. We were roommates at Davis before I changed my major and transferred to Berkeley. She was on the premed track, always talking about wanting to work with Doctors Without Borders, which she eventually did. She volunteered with them in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It changed her.”
“How so?” Reece asked, taking a sip of his wine, remembering how Africa gets in your blood.
“She was always a free spirit but seeing so many people, particularly children, die of malaria, Ebola, Zika, cholera, yellow fever, even bubonic plague, took her down a different path. She came back and got a master’s in public health and did a residency in internal medicine. She’s now at the CDC specializing in infectious diseases.”
“I’m glad somebody does it,” Reece said.
“As you may or may not have noticed, I have been devoting columns to Russian government–mafia collusion.”
“I hadn’t noticed,” Reece responded, with a hint of sarcasm. They’d had more than a few conversations on the subject, Reece advising her against poking the bear and Katie standing strong for the principles of her profession. It was her way of fighting back. When the Bratva tried to kill them both in Montana, Reece went to guns. Katie’s weapons were her words and her platform.
“Haley and I were talking about that very same thing.”
“What did she say?”
“She sounded an awful lot like you, Mr. Reece,” Katie said, swirling her wine in her glass and holding it up to the candlelight.
Before changing majors, Katie had been in the viticulture and enology program at UC Davis. She knew her wines.
“I like her already.”
Their appetizers arrived and Reece dug into the carpaccio while Katie picked at the caprese, choosing her next words carefully.
“She also said something that got me thinking.”
“And what was that?”
“When she was in the Congo, they heard about a village a couple hundred miles northeast where there had been an outbreak of hemorrhagic fever.”
“Like Ebola?”
“Yes, what do you know about it?”
“We did some training in bio and chemical weapons in the Teams in case we were ever tasked with hitting a WMD facility. Did some full mission profile exercises out on a base in Utah that’s set up for that type of scenario. Not a mission any of us were dying to do. Other than that, just what I read in The Hot Zone. True story if I remember correctly.”
“That’s right. It was about a scare they had just down the street in Reston, Virginia, back in 1989. They contained it. It didn’t get out of control. Anyway, she told me that they had heard rumors of Russian military advisors working in the area. When I heard that, I put my reporter hat on.”
“And?”
“Russian arms dealers and advisors have been going in and out of Africa for a generation. It is one of the least-talked-about battlegrounds of the Cold War, so that wasn’t surprising. What was surprising were the other rumors.”
“Other rumors?”
“That the Russians had been using villages as test subjects for their bioweapons programs since the early sixties.”
“Test subjects?”
“I hadn’t really thought about it before, so I did my research. Between 1976 and 2020 there were twenty-eight documented hemorrhagic fever outbreaks in Africa. All were assumed to be natural occurrences. Typically, the World Health Organization and various NGOs go in to treat infected people, take samples, and conduct research. There are firsthand reports of Congolese soldiers massacring entire villages and burning them to the ground to control the spread.”
“I hate to say this, but that’s not shocking. Human life tends to have a different value in certain parts of the world.”
“And sometimes in our very own part of it,” Katie concluded.
Though it had not been her intent, Reece’s memories flashed back to the smiling faces of his young daughter and beautiful wife.
“Very true,” Reece said, looking into the cherry-red wine in his glass.
“When Haley and her team arrived at the village the following day, do you know what they found?”
“I hate to even speculate.”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“The village had been incinerated, not just burned to the ground, but wiped off the map.”
“You said that was common practice.”
“Yes, but Haley said this was different. There was a huge crater where the village should have been, and the jungle was a charred ruin for what seemed like miles in every direction.”
“A crater? From a bomb?”
“That’s what she said.”
“Did she get any pictures?”
“They did, but it was back before everything was cloud based. On their way back to Kinshasa they were stopped at a roadblock. They were accused of being spies. She swears there were Russian mercenaries assisting the indigenous military personnel manning the checkpoint. All their phones, cameras, and computers were confiscated. They were ordered out of the country the following day.”
“They’re lucky they weren’t killed. African dictators don’t mess around over there,” Reece said, remembering his own experience with Raife working on a hunting concession back in their college days.
“I did a little more digging. What she’s describing could have been the result of an FAE.”
“A fuel air explosive?”
“That’s right. Do you know how they work?”
“I don’t have much experience with them, but I’ve seen video of some tests the Air Force did at China Lake; huge canister dropped by a parachute. If memory serves, an initial charge disperses the fuel over the target and then multiple secondary charges ignite it. Looks like a nuclear explosion.”
“That’s the general idea,” Katie confirmed. “We used them in Vietnam. The Soviets used them in a border dispute with China in 1969 and in Afghanistan in the eighties. In fact, it is the largest nonnuclear device in our arsenal and in the arsenal of Russia. The Russians call them vacuum bombs.”
They both took a moment to collect their thoughts as the waiter placed their main courses on the table.
“Can I get you anything else?” he asked.
Reece eyed the bottle of wine. “I think we are good for now. Katie?”
“This looks delicious. Thank you.”
Their server nodded.
“You think the Russians used an FAE to control an outbreak?” Reece asked when their waiter was a safe distance away.
“Yes, but I believe there is more to it.”
“Such as?”
“It’s possible these outbreaks are not naturally occurring.”
Reece slowed his chewing and chased the tender meat down with a large sip of wine.
“You think the Russians were testing a bioweapon on villagers in Africa and when they got what they wanted they cleaned it all up with an FAE?”
“We know that back in the Soviet days, the Russian military began collecting various strains of hemorrhagic viruses in Africa. They were and still are embedded in a host of African nations. I think they took samples back to the Soviet Union and weaponized them. More information on the Soviet bioweapons program h
as come to light in recent years. It even had a name: biopreparat. We are now finding out that there were hemorrhagic virus outbreaks in the Soviet Union in the seventies and eighties that were covered up. These are tropical diseases, Reece, not something you find outside Africa. The Russians were weaponizing some of the deadliest pathogens known to man. They also needed to test them. What better place to test a bioweapon than in a place where its effects would look like a naturally occurring event to the rest of the world? They refined their weapons in human test subjects, and if it looked like it was going to spread, they wiped the test village off the face of the earth.”
Reece took it all in.
“And you want to expose it?”
“I do, but I need proof. I need to talk with a doctor involved in the program or a pilot who dropped a bomb.”
“And what brought all that up to begin with?” Reece asked.
“There was another outbreak.”
“In Africa?”
“Yes. In Angola. Every time hemorrhagic fever breaks out, the World Health Organization is alerted. The CDC monitors the outbreak. They do what they can working with NGOs to treat infected people and contain the spread. Depending on the severity, Haley will take a team in to assist and bring back samples to study and compare to previous outbreaks, looking for mutations. Viruses adapt just like the enemy, Reece,” she said, framing it in terms he would under-stand.
“Do I remember that her husband worked at Fort Detrick? A scientist or doctor as well, right?”
“Ah, you do pay attention when I talk about my friends.”
“Steel trap,” Reece said, tapping his temple with his finger and giving her a wink. “What are your next steps?”
“I need to track down some Russian defectors.”
“There’s nothing I can do to discourage you from doing this, is there?”
“Nope.”
“I didn’t think so.”
“Well, be careful. While you are working to prove that a major world power violated an international bioweapons treaty, I have another week of training. My class is going to Harvey Point in North Carolina. That might be classified, but if you want any specifics you can just google it. All the information is out there in cyberspace. I know a lot of the instructors. It’s the improvised weapons course. James Bond and MacGyver stuff. The grad students love it.”