Fisher caught on, finishing the scenario. "Because, while they were working on Manas, they also found a neutralizing agent for it."
"You got it."
Fisher squeezed the bridge of his nose between his index finger and his thumb. "And right now, we've got nothing. No leads, no clues, no idea where Manas is--nothing."
Lambert gave him a weary smile, then stood up and placed a hand on his shoulder. "Sam, we've had less than that before and still come through the other side."
REDDINGarrived twenty minutes later, poured himself a cup of coffee, and joined them at the table. "Who wants to know how Omurbai probably found out about Chytridiomycota?"
Fisher raised a weary finger.
"Remember Oziri, Wondrash's man Friday?"
Fisher and Lambert nodded.
"Well, Grim asked me to do a little genealogy detective work. Here's the short version: Oziri was the grandfather of Samet, Omurbai's right-hand man and second-in-command of the KRLA. My guess, Oziri knew what Wondrash was looking for and had bragged or blabbed to a family member before they headed to Africa."
"Which means Wondrash had had some inkling of what Chytridiomycota was capable of even before he found the source," Fisher said.
Redding nodded. "That's part two. Quantico was able to restore most of Wondrash's journal you found aboard the Sunstar. He doesn't describe how they found the cave in the first place, or how he got onto the trail of the fungus in the first place, but he talks about the night they spent inside there. Evidently, some of the stuff must have rubbed off on their gear. The next morning they woke up, and everything made of rubber or plastic had dissolved."
Afew minutes later, Lambert's cell phone trilled. He picked it up, listened for a moment, said thanks, and disconnected. He walked to the nearest computer workstation, tapped a few keys, and one of the monitors glowed to life. The DCI's face filled the screen.
"Morning," he said. "I've got Dr. Russo's report in front of me. She's confident that Chytridiomycota is a type of petro-parasite."
Lambert told the DCI about Wondrash's journal and Omurbai's link to Oziri.
"Then I'd say that's proof enough," the DCI replied. "Russo also sent along a computer simulation. Worst-case scenario. I asked her to make some assumptions--namely that Manas has been enhanced for longevity and reproduction. Take a look."
The DCI's face disappeared and was replaced with a computer-generated Mercator projection of the earth. The camera zoomed in until it was focused on Central Asia, then paused. A clock graphic in the right-hand corner appeared and, beside it, the notation, DAY 1. A red dot appeared in the center of Kyrgyzstan, then expanded, doubling in size. The clock changed to DAY 5. The red dot expanded again, doubling again, and then again, and again, until the whole of Kyrgyzstan was covered, and the clock read DAY 11.
Fisher and the others continued to watch as Manas spread beyond the borders of Kyrgyzstan, north into Kazakhstan, east into China, south into Tajikistan, then India . . .
Thirty seconds later, half the globe had turned red, and the area was still increasing in size.
The clock read DAY 26.
Grimsdottir pushed through the door ten minutes later and stopped short as she saw the three of them sitting around the table. "Did I miss a memo?" she asked.
Lambert shook his head. "The Insomniacs' Club."
"Sign me up," she said, then poured her own cup of coffee, sat down, and powered up her laptop. Lambert briefed her on their discussion so far. She paused a few moments to take it all in, then said to Fisher, "Sam, you're sure that Stewart died at Site Seventeen?"
Fisher nodded. "Either there or in the water a few minutes later."
"Then we've got a mystery on our hands. I just heard from the comm center. Stewart's beacon is still active, and it's transmitting from Pyongyang, North Korea."
36
PYONGYANG, NORTH KOREA
FISHERhad gotten up at dawn and taken the Metro train to the Rungnado station, where he got off, stopped at a street kiosk to buy some green tea, then walked to a park and found a bench overlooking the Taedong River, which ran through the center of the North Korean capital. Beyond the river's opposite bank, Pyongyang's skyscrapers and gray cinder-block Soviet-style buildings spread across the horizon.
The sun was bright, glistening off the dew-covered grass. A hundred yards away, a group of thirty or so teenage boys and girls were practicing hapkido under the watchful eyes of North Korean People's Army officers. They barked orders, and the students answered "Ye!"Whether the teenagers were bothered by the rigorous early morning training, Fisher couldn't tell. Each teenager wore the same expression: thin-set mouths and narrowed eyes. Their collective breathing, which itself seemed to have a disciplined rhythm to it, steamed in the chilled, early morning air.
One of the officers barked another order, and the group bent at the waist, en masse, and picked up their rifles, old World War II-era Soviet Mosin-Nagant carbines, and began a drill routine.
The future of North Korea,Fisher thought. And, if Omurbai's Manas plan succeeded, perhaps the future of the world. Since Lambert had suggested the scenario, Fisher had been trying to wrap his head around the idea of North Korea as the world's only oil superpower. It was a frightening thought.
From the corner of his eye Fisher saw his escorts, a pair of plainclothes State Security Department officers, which he'd dubbed Flim and Flam, enter the park's west entrance and take up station at the railing along the river's edge.
Good morning, boys,Fisher thought. Like clockwork.
Since his arrival two days earlier, the SSD had thoroughly, if not imaginatively, watched his every movement. The pair that had just walked into the park was the day shift; the night shift came on at six p.m.
So far, every prediction he'd received about North Korean's security agencies had been proved true.
FIVEdays earlier and just two hours after Grimsdottir's revelation about Stewart's still-active beacon (which, Fisher suspected, Stewart had planted on Chin-Hwa Pak during the chaos aboard the Site 17 platform), he, Lambert, and Grimsdottir had been ordered to report to Camp Perry, the CIA's legendary training facility outside Williamsburg, Virginia. Waiting for them in the main conference room was Langley's DDO, or deputy directorate of operations, Tom Richards. Fisher knew Richards from the Iranian crisis the year before.
"I'll get to the point," Richards said. "We don't have any field people in North Korea, which puts us in a pickle."
The pickle to which Richards was referring was Fisher himself. Lambert had already pitched Third Echelon's plan directly to the president, who had approved it and ordered the CIA to act in a support role.
Accomplished as he was at covert operations, Fisher's expertise was of a more military nature, and despite his recent graduation from CROSSCUT, his bona fides as a field intelligence operative were nonexistent. For Fisher's part, his head was already in North Korea. A covert operation was a covert operation; the nuts and bolts of how Third Echelon and the CIA's DO did their jobs might be different, but the mind-set was the same: Get in, do the job, and get out, leaving as few footprints as possible.