The Devil's Hand

by Carr, Jack

  Ten seconds later, Ali went limp as the drug paralyzed his body to include the organs that facilitated breathing.

  “You won’t be able to open your eyes on your own, so this will ensure you can see everything I’m doing,” Reece said, taping Ali’s eyelids open. “I’d hate for you to miss out.

  “When this first dose wears off, I’ll have some questions. If you answer them to my satisfaction, I might let you live. If you don’t, well, there is plenty of succinylcholine for us to keep this up for hours, maybe even days. I can carve you up, remove fingers, toes, I might even cut your balls and dick off. You won’t be able to move, but you will feel and see, that I assure you. Don’t worry, though. I don’t think that will be necessary. Taking your air will be all I need to do.”

  As Ali’s ability to breathe shut down completely, Reece gave him thirty seconds before leaning over and placing the self-inflating Ambu bag over his nose and mouth, squeezing it to give him a life-sustaining breath.

  “Reece, what are you doing back there?” Haley asked nervously from the driver’s seat.

  “I’m not sure you want to know.”

  “Jesus, Reece.”

  “Just drive.”

  Reece lifted up one of Ali’s fingers, confirming there was no muscle tone. The succinylcholine was working exactly as intended.

  Reece came off the breathing bag and watched Ali’s eyes. The man was alive but had no control of his body. The very breath that sustained life now came from an infidel.

  Reece wiped the blood from the face of his Rolex and counted the second hands ticking away.

  “On average, it takes four to six minutes for the brain to die of oxygen starvation. With all your blood loss it will probably be a lot less.”

  At the one-minute mark Reece gave Ali another breath.

  “Ali, I already know the virus is Marburg Variant U. Your little helper broke like all you warriors of Allah. Tough when you are blowing up women and children or beheading prisoners but weak little bitches when put to the test. When this dose wears off, all you need to do is tell me where it came from, and if or how it transmits from human to human. I also want to know who came up with this plan and why. If we can work our way through that, we will take you to the hospital. If not, you are going to the morgue.”

  Reece gave Ali another breath as he began to stir, the paralytic diluting enough for him to begin breathing on his own, the resolve in his eyes replaced by fear.

  “You are going to talk to me, Ali,” Reece said, drawing a second dose from the bottle.

  Ali muttered something inaudible.

  “That’s not clear enough, Ali,” he said before injecting another 50 mg into the IV.

  Reece looked back at his watch. At the three-minute mark he gave Ali a breath, forcing precious air into the lungs and brain of a man dying in silent terror from suffocation, unable to do a thing about it.

  Haley turned in her seat.

  “Reece, feel his forehead.”

  “It’s hot. He’s burning up.”

  “Shit, malignant hyperthermia.”

  “What’s that?” Reece asked.

  “It’s a side effect of multiple doses of that drug you are giving him.”

  Reece gave him another breath.

  “Damn it, Reece. He’s going to hit 107 and seize. You are going to kill him before you get what we need.”

  “What can I do?”

  “Look in the locker for something called Dantrolene.”

  Reece pulled the breathing bag from Ali’s face and frantically searched the locker, reading labels and throwing bottles to the side.

  “Could it have another name?” he shouted, as Haley sped down the highway.

  “Possibly: Dantrium, Dantamacrin, or Dantrolen.”

  “Shit, I just tossed Dantrium,” Reece said, scrambling to the discarded bottles rolling around on the floor of the moving vehicle until he found what he was looking for.

  “Got it.”

  “Good. Inject twenty milligrams into the line.”

  Reece pushed the drug into the IV port and gave Ali another breath as the muscle paralytic wore off.

  Haley leaned across the seat and jerked a Yeti cooler from the floor of the passenger side onto the seat. Opening the lid, she pulled out a sandwich and dropped it to the seat. She fished around inside with her right hand and removed a Gatorade and two artificial ice packs.

  “Put these in his armpits and groin to help cool him down,” she said, tossing them back to Reece.

  Ali gasped as the ability to breathe on his own slowly returned. He had never been so utterly helpless, at the complete mercy of another. Who was this American devil? He thought of his brother hanging from the noose. Had he regretted his decision to take his own life? Had he desperately tried to loosen the rope that constricted the blood and oxygen to his brain? Ali wondered if he would shit and piss himself the way his brother had.

  “What are you thinking about, Ali? Ready to go another round?”

  “It came from Angola.”

  “What was that?” Reece asked, hitting the voice recorder on his phone.

  “It came from Angola, or it came from a lab here in America, grown by a radicalized U.S. citizen named Sebastian Phillips. I was only here for a job interview. That’s the story that this country will believe.”

  Without hesitation, Reece injected 75 mg of the paralyzing muscle agent into the IV and watched first the seconds and then the minutes tick by on his watch. He imagined the MC-130s taking off from Hurlburt, the pilots vectoring toward their targets, dropping the MOABs on citizens of their own country. He saw Lauren and Lucy playing together at a park in Coronado, looking up at an unfamiliar whistling sound as the bomb vectored in to explode overhead. Lauren became Katie, rushing to Lucy to shield her with her own body, Lucy’s curiosity turning to terror, screaming as the fuel-air explosive burned their bodies from existence.

  “Reece!” screamed Haley, jolting Reece back to the present.

  “I’m here. I’m here!”

  “He’s seizing!” Haley yelled, twisting in her seat.

  “Fuck!”

  Reece pushed the breathing device onto Ali’s face and started squeezing, forcing air in and out of his lungs.

  “Come on, fucker, I’m not done with you yet,” he said, the vison of Lauren, Lucy, and Katie seared into his consciousness.

  Reece slipped his fingers to the side of Ali’s neck.

  “No pulse!”

  “Hit him with the AED!” Haley yelled.

  “Shit!”

  “Wait,” Haley ordered. “Give him Valium first.”

  “Valium? Where?”

  Haley turned in her seat.

  “Try that drawer,” she said, pointing.

  “Got it. How much?”

  “Ten milligrams. Right into the IV port!”

  Reece drew what was close to 10 mg and pushed it into Ali’s body through the IV. He then reached for the automated external defibrillator and attached the AED pads to Ali’s chest, one on the right side, just below the collarbone, and the other on the lower left side of his body below the heart. He was thankful that before his last deployment all SEALs were required to add Automated External Defibrillator training to their predeployment workup checklist. Reece flipped the switch, bringing the machine to life, and followed the audio prompts. He hit the “analyze” button. At the “stand clear” prompt, Reece leaned back as a jolt of electricity surged through Ali’s chest.

  Nothing.

  “Shit!”

  “Hit him again!” Haley shouted from the front of the ambulance.

  Reece repeated the procedure and brought Ali back from the dead.

  “He’s got a heartbeat and he’s breathing,” Reece reported.

  “His body can’t take much more, Reece.”

  “Ali, listen to me. I can do this for days. You want to suffocate for days? I’ll keep you alive as long as it takes.”

  Reece extracted another 75 mg of succinylcholine, deliberately so tha
t Ali could process what was about to happen.

  The assassin saw his brother hanging from the beam in his home, looking up at him for hours until his mother had returned.

  The wailing of his mother.

  “It was a brilliant plan,” Ali whispered.

  “What?” Reece said, hitting his phone’s audio recorder.

  “Brilliant. Even with this forced confession. Brilliant.”

  “Whose plan, Ali?”

  “It was my plan. Nothing can stop it now. That traitor Monica Witt planted the seed. Destroy your own cities. The Soviets had those plans, too, you know.”

  “Witt? The Air Force sergeant?”

  “There is no stopping this now. I might just be telling you what you want to hear so that your president calls off the bombing, so that the virus spreads and destroys you.”

  “Is it a respiratory-spread virus?”

  Ali paused, considering his answer.

  “No. But can you trust my word?”

  “How did it get into the United States?”

  Ali paused and Reece injected the drug back into his system.

  “Almost there, Reece,” Haley reported, taking the exit for the airport.

  Reece counted three minutes and thirty seconds on his watch, then gave Ali a breath.

  “Just give me a name, Ali. Give me a name and I’ll end this.”

  Ali’s eyes darted back and forth, pure unadulterated panic gripping his soul as the drug wore off and allowed him to breathe.

  “Here’s an easy one,” Reece said. “What did you mean when you said I should be dead?”

  Through the confusion of the fever burning up his brain, the oxygen deprivation, and visions of his brother swinging from the rope, Ali whispered a name: “Hafez Qassem.”

  Ali’s eyes rolled back unto his head and his body contorted against the duct tape.

  “Shit. He’s seizing again!” Reece shouted.

  “Try the AED.”

  Reece turned on the machine and followed the prompts. This time the jolts did not return Ali from the dead. Reece transitioned to CPR as Haley rocketed toward the airport. After five minutes of chest compressions where Reece felt ribs breaking under the pressure, he tried the AED in a last-ditch effort to revive the terrorist.

  “It’s done, Reece.”

  Reece fell back into the side bench seat, completely spent and exhausted.

  “It doesn’t spread human to human. We can tell the president to call off the strikes,” Haley said, turning down a street leading to the private government terminal.

  “What if he was lying?”

  “He wasn’t lying, Reece.”

  Reece picked up his phone and sent the recording to Vic.

  “I don’t think it’s enough.”

  “For Christ’s sake,” Haley said, “what else do we need?”

  Reece looked at the dead body still attached to the gurney, covered in the blood, IV attached to his arm, the bottle of succinylcholine.

  Drugs. Vaccines. Bioweapons.

  Reece’s phone buzzed with a message from Vic.

  Final option. Noon tomorrow. Director is taking this information to the White House. Will need scientific evidence to back up claims.

  Reece texted back:

  Hafez Qassem?

  His phone buzzed a minute later.

  Iranian intelligence. Chief of station in D.C. Works from Pakistani Embassy.

  Put a team on him, Reece typed.

  Roger. RTB.

  “What did he say?” Haley asked.

  “RTB.”

  “RTB?”

  “Return to base,” Reece said, closing his eyes and processing everything he’d learned.

  “Before we do, pass that cooler back,” he said.

  “It’s empty.”

  “Perfect,” Reece said, pulling it into the back of the ambulance. “Park up ahead and get out of the car.”

  You saw me in Chicago and Atlanta? Iranian hit team in Maryland? Hafez Qassem? Iranian intelligence?

  Haley pulled into a parking space in the government terminal, turned off the ambulance, and got out of the vehicle, leaving Reece alone to finish the job.

  PART 3 ERADICATION

  “The roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea, and the destructive sword, are portions of eternity too great for the eye of man.”

  —WILLIAM BLAKE, PROVERBS OF HELL

  CHAPTER 58

  CIA Gulfstream 550

  REECE HADN’T SAID MUCH since they’d gone wheels up.

  He offered Haley the first shower and sat staring out the window at 45,000 feet as the Rolls-Royce engines pushed them toward the country’s capital at Mach 0.85.

  They had packed overnight bags, so at least there were clean clothes to put on.

  The G550’s cabin was separated into three living areas, with lavatories at each end of the aircraft.

  When Haley emerged toweling off her wet hair, she noticed that the cooler Reece had brought on board was by the icemaker. It was wrapped with duct tape.

  “You want a drink?” Haley asked, sliding in across from Reece at the four-seat conference table.

  “Huh?” Reece asked, still deep in thought.

  “You know, a drink?” Haley asked, tipping her hand with an imaginary cocktail.

  “Uh, yeah, maybe another water.”

  “I’ll join you,” she said, leaning across the aisle and grabbing two waters from the fridge.

  “I need to apologize to you, Reece.”

  “What for? I should be the one apologizing to you after what I just put you through.”

  “First, you didn’t put me though anything. Secondly, we are here because of my theory, remember?”

  “Good point. Apology accepted.”

  Haley laughed.

  She could tell he was spent: the fighting, the fire, the torture, the knowledge that what he did or didn’t do determined the fate of the nation.

  “As I was saying, on the apology front, I had a preconceived notion of who you were, who my best friend was dating. Katie and I have known each other for a long time, and I can get protective.”

  “Believe me, I understand,” Reece said.

  “I had this vision of an ex-SEAL—do you guys not say ‘ex’? It’s so confusing with Marines. I think you don’t say ‘ex’ with them, maybe former?”

  “I agree with you; it’s confusing with Marines.”

  “Anyway, I watched the news three years ago like everyone else. I couldn’t figure what Katie saw in you. She’s never felt this way about anyone.”

  “Really?” Reece said, suddenly more alert.

  “Really. So, here’s my apology. I saw myself as a doctor dedicated to saving lives around the globe, Médecins Sans Frontières and all that, battling infectious diseases on the front lines. I looked down on the military because it seemed our missions were so diametrically opposed. You take lives and I save them. I admit to being a bit of an elitist. Just ask my husband. He’s the conservative one and I’m the hippie flower child. Our marriage works, though.”

  “He’s a doctor at Fort Detrick, right?”

  “That’s right. He does what I do for CDC, but he does it for the Army. Well, not exactly the same thing. We are flip sides of the same coin. He’s working on vaccines for soldiers and citizens infected with bioagents. I study naturally occurring infectious diseases, and trace them to their index cases so we can better understand how they start, how they spread, and how we can stop them.”

  “I have nothing but respect for what you and your husband do,” Reece said.

  Haley studied the dark green eyes of the man across from her.

  “I know why you do what you do, Reece. I saw it today.”

  “I just don’t see another way. We are close but we are on the clock.”

  “I’ve been processing the events of the past few hours. Without you, we would not have the information we do. We’d only have my theory.”

  “Speaking of processing, let’s do
a hotwash.”

  “A what?” Haley asked.

  “Hotwash, an informal after-action report, to go through what we learned today so we can apply the lessons going forward.”

  “Like an operative report?”

  “I don’t know what that is.”

  “A report that goes in a medical record postsurgery, documenting the procedure.”

  “Yeah, like that.”

  “Let’s start with my theory: this is not a naturally occurring virus.”

  “Starting there, we now have two people involved in the plot confirming that you are correct. Downrange I’d verify those reports via two separate and distinct independent networks to ensure we were not getting played.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “In Iraq and Afghanistan, there were those who saw us as a way to settle what were sometimes centuries-old feuds. Could be because someone stole someone else’s great-great-grandfather’s goat. Anyway, they would tell us that so-and-so was al-Qaeda or Jaysh al-Mahdi so we would go pay them a visit in the middle of the night. We got wise to it pretty quickly, but it was something we always had to take into account when evaluating intelligence. In this case Shahram and Ali were not independent intelligence sources, as they were working together.”

  “I see.”

  “So ideally I’d want confirmation via two unrelated HUMINT—as in human intelligence—networks and then substantiate it via some technical means like phone calls, text messages, or emails.”

  “So, you think that Shahram and Ali might have had this story concocted to mix in just enough doubt that we couldn’t trust them?”

  “I think that’s a distinct possibility and one that our intelligence agencies will certainly highlight when briefing the president. He is going to need solid proof that by avoiding this action he’s not condemning ninety percent of the country to death.”

  “How do we verify their admissions?”

  “Let’s go back a second,” Reece said. “First, why disguise it as a naturally occurring virus?”

  “To hide the perpetrator.”

  “So, who has Marburg Variant U in their arsenal?”

  “Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran,” Haley confirmed.