Darren said, ‘A couple of months ago, somebody in Damascus made a mistake. One phone call. That’s all it took.’
Monty laughed. ‘Man, one phone call sure can fry your ass. What happened?’
‘It was from a satellite phone that we’ve been monitoring in a neighborhood near Suq Hamadiya in Damascus. It was one of a parcel purchased by al-Qaeda members or supporters. The phone had not been used much, and when it was used the chatter was brief and low-key.’
Monty said, ‘What’s the mistake? Somebody use it to order some couscous?’
Darren managed a smile. ‘Close. Somebody used it to call a local garage. Said he was tired of waiting for the transmission to be fixed. Wanted it fixed that afternoon or the mechanic’s head would be on a pike, and his children would be forced to beg from the streets. So that was the break we got. Easy enough from there to find out who the car belonged to, and what it looked like. Put a tracking device in one of the tires. Easy enough again to put the car in the daily tasking orders for the Predators deployed in that area. And then…well, Adrianna?’
‘Just watch,’ she said. ‘Just watch.’
Brian rubbed at his eyes, looked at the car, inching its way through traffic. Then it stopped at an intersection. A cop or traffic guy, standing on a little concrete island, tried his best to direct traffic, and it looked like he was being ignored. Then, strangely enough, vehicles in front of the Toyota moved, but it stayed still, just for a second. Then a hand appeared from the front passenger window, just for a moment, as it dropped something onto the sidewalk.
The car moved. Brian said, ‘Can you freeze that, right there?’
Frozen. The car, the traffic, the frantic white-gloved hands of the traffic cop. Not moving.
Brian said, ‘Play it back, slow.’
Like some comedy newsreel from the 1930s, the traffic moved backwards, and Brian stood up, leaned into the plasma screen, tried to see what was happening. Something flew up into the outstretched hand, and—
‘Reverse it, right now.’
And the object was dropped.
Brian sat down. ‘Okay. You can keep playing it.’
The tape ran for another thirty minutes, and twice more the white Toyota stopped at an intersection, and the passenger’s hand reached out to drop something on the sidewalk. The bustling lines of people, pressed up against the walls of the buildings or the edge of the crumbling sidewalk, seemed to pay no mind for what was being dropped at their feet.
The plasma screen went blank. Brian turned and was surprised to see the team members looking at him, especially Adrianna. She said, ‘There was something there you noticed, Brian.’
‘Yeah.’
‘What was it?’
He paused for a moment, wondered if he was being tested again. If so, what the hell. ‘The guy in the passenger side of the Toyota. Looked like he was dropping something off.’
‘What was it?’
He rubbed at his face, realized he had missed a spot on his chin while hurriedly shaving that morning. ‘If this was in the States, and if there was a radio car on its ass, lights flashing and siren sounding, then I’d guess it’d be a couple of drug perps. And that they’d be dropping off little baggies of whatever it is they were selling that day, to dump the evidence. But these clowns weren’t being chased, near as I could tell.’
A pause. The group still looked at him. Made him still feel like he was trying to prove something to them, that even a non-Fed like himself could do the job, and he pressed on. ‘Another thing, too. Perps in a situation like that, they’re panicking. They’re tossing out their merchandise, tossing it far, hoping that the cops on their ass won’t find it. These guys weren’t doing this. It was deliberate. It was—’
There. It came to him.
Brian looked over to Adrianna, now feeling slightly nauseous, wishing he hadn’t had those two cups of coffee this Sunday morning on an empty stomach, and he said, ‘They’re deliberately dropping these plastic baggies. At intersections. Knowing that traffic and people walking will move over the baggies, rip open the plastic, distribute what’s in there.’
Monty whispered, ’Holy shit.’
Victor said in a shaky voice, ‘The perfect delivery system.’
Now everyone was looking at the doctor, whose face seemed even more pale. Victor went to his laptop and said, ‘You get weaponized anthrax. You have a lot of weaponized anthrax. All right. What’s the delivery system? The US Post Office? Good if you want to create panic like the fall of ‘01, not good if you’re looking for mass casualties. Crop dusters over cities? Not good enough. Too much of a wide distribution, too much dispersal. A few people get sick and that’s it. A bit of a panic but life goes on…Good Christ.’
Victor waited, and then bulled on, his voice coming quick now, syllables rolling over each other, as he looked up at the blank plasma screen, as if recalling what had just been viewed up there. ‘That’s how you do it. You have a crew, ten, thirty, forty guys. Whatever number you need. You immunize them before they go in. They each get twenty or thirty baggies of anthrax. Respiratory kind. Anthrax spores weaponized so it’s finely milled. Drive out to the middle of cities, Manhattan, Boston, LA, maybe three or four teams per city. Christ. Drop off the baggies at crowded intersections, during lunch. Baggies get broken, clouds of anthrax spores rise up, get spread around the streets. Infect scores -shit, no — hundreds, maybe even thousands. In a single day. The perfect delivery system. Time it right and you get respiratory-anthrax outbreaks in a dozen major cities, tens of thousands of causalities within a week. Maybe more. Holy fucking Christ.’
Now the silence was thick, still, just the hum of the laptops working merrily along. Brian had a sudden thought, the four of them clustered around this table, wheezing themselves to death, while the laptops merrily went on with their powered lives, outliving their owners by years.
Adrianna said, ‘Monty?’
‘Yeah,’ he grunted. Brian thought the man looked ill.
‘Seems to be a likely scenario, doesn’t it? Question is, how can we defend against it?’
Monty looked at all of them and then shook his head.
‘Bottom line, we can’t.’
‘Come on, there has to be something that we can do,’ Brian said. ‘I mean, look at it—’
Monty turned to him, glaring. ‘Don’t lecture me on my job, ‘kay? Here’s the deal, and you all know it, even if I have to spell it out for you. You heard what the good doctor said, what we’re up against. Okay. Maybe ten, fifteen teams out there. Ready to hit us in less than a month. What do we do? Close down the borders? Do person-by-person, vehicle-by-vehicle searches for everything coming up through Mexico and down through Canada? Is that it? Clog up the airports? Or the seaports? And that’s assuming these assholes aren’t here already. Maybe they came here last year. Maybe they all got jobs at 7-Eleven and the local gas stations and they’ve blended in so well, they’re acting like good citizens. What do you do then?’
Adrianna said quietly, ‘At about four a.m. this morning, I left a department meeting of the Tiger Team director. There’s a full-court press to pick up those Syrians, start interrogating them, start looking at what other intercepts and records might be out there. We even got the Canadians on board. One working theory is that the gentleman dumped at the Vancouver hospital was exposed to the respiratory anthrax before being fully immunized. But even if we do get some breaks, there’s a good chance that we’ll miss a number of these teams. It just stands to reason.’
Darren shook his head. ‘Dark Winter.’
Brian said, ‘Excuse me?’
‘Dark Winter,’ Darren said, and Brian noticed that Adrianna seemed to flinch. ‘Terrorism scenario, run by the National Security Council, the summer of 2001. Before September eleventh.’