“Yes, sir.”
Fordyce hoped to hell the guy wasn’t a fiction reader.
“You say you have no license?”
“I have a license, Officer, but it was stolen.” He had to engineer this one fast. He pitched his voice in a confidential tone. “My dad was a state trooper just like you, shot in the line of duty—”
“Please step out of the car, sir,” said the trooper, impassive.
Gideon moved to comply, fumbling with the doorknob while he continued talking. “Routine traffic stop, two guys, turned out they’d just robbed a bank…” He continued fumbling. “Damn door…”
“Out. Now.” The man brought his hand to rest on the butt of his sidearm, as a precaution.
Fordyce could see that this was already going the wrong way. He took out his shield and leaned over Gideon, showing it to the trooper. “Officer?” he said. “Special Agent Fordyce, FBI.”
The trooper, startled, took the shield and examined it through the mirrored shades. He handed it back to Fordyce, making a show of being unimpressed. Then he turned to Gideon once again. “I asked you to step out of the car.”
Fordyce was irritated. He opened his door and got out.
“You remain in the car, sir,” said the trooper.
“Excuse me,” said Fordyce, sharply. He walked around the front of the car and approached the trooper, staring at his shield. “Officer Mackie, is it? As I said, I’m a special agent from the DC field office.” He did not offer his hand. “My associate here is an FBI technical liaison. We’re traveling undercover. We’re both assigned to NEST, working on the terrorist case. I’ve given you my name and shown you my badge number, and you’re welcome to check out my affiliation. But I am sorry to say you are notgoing to see any ID from this gentleman and you’ll just have to accept that. Do you understand?”
He paused. Mackie said nothing.
“I said, do you understandme, Officer Mackie?”
The trooper remained unmoved. “I will check out your affiliation, thank you. May I have your identification back, sir?”
This wasn’t acceptable: the last thing Fordyce wanted was for Millard to learn he was two-thirds of the way across the country in Simon Blaine’s Jeep. But… If the man needed the identification back, it meant he hadn’t noted his name. Fordyce took another step toward the trooper and lowered his voice. “No more of this bullshit. We need to get to Washington, and we’re in a big-time hurry. That’s why we were speeding. Because we’re traveling undercover, we can’t slap a siren on the vehicle or travel with an escort. Call in my ID, check it out—no problem. You do that. But in case you haven’t been listening to the news, there’s a crisis going on, and my associate and I sure as hell can’t wait around while you check us out.” He paused, scanning the man’s face to see if he was penetrating that stolid exterior.
The state trooper remained more or less impassive. A tough one. Well, so be it. He raised his voice to a shout.
“And I might just add, Officer, that if your activities blow our cover, you’ll find yourself at the bottom of the Mariana Shit Trench. We’re on a critical mission and you’ve already wasted too much of our time.”
And now, finally, Fordyce saw the man’s truculent, brick-like face flush with fear and anger. “I’m just doing my job, sir, you’ve no business talking to me like that.”
Fordyce eased off abruptly, exhaled, laid a hand on the man’s shoulder. “I know. I’m sorry. We’re alljust doing our jobs—in a tough situation. I’m sorry for speaking to you sharply, Troop. We’re under a lot of stress here, as you might imagine. But we really do need to keep going. By all means, call in my name and badge number, check it out—but please don’t hold us up.”
The man straightened. “Yes, sir. I understand. I think we’re done here. I’m going to radio your plate number ahead and let everyone know you’ll be coming through on official law enforcement business, so you can exceed the speed limit at least as far as the state line.”
Fordyce gave his shoulder a squeeze. “Appreciate it, Troop. Very much.” He slipped back into the passenger seat and Gideon took off. After a moment, Fordyce said, “Father a state trooper shot in the line of duty? Fucking lame. Lucky I was around to pull your fat out of the fire.”
“You had the badge, I didn’t,” Gideon said. Then he added, grudgingly: “Still, you did good.”
“Damn right.” Fordyce frowned. “Lot of good it’s going to do us. We’re, what, seven hours out of DC and we still don’t have a clue what Blaine’s up to. This laptop is as clean as the driven snow.”
“There’s got to be something in there. You can’t plan a huge conspiracy like this and not have it leak into your work in some way.”
“What if we’re wrong? What if he’s innocent, after all?”
Gideon fell silent. Then he shook his head. “For personal reasons, a huge part of me wishes he was. But he’s behind this. He has to be. Nothing else makes sense.”
With a weary sense of futility, Fordyce went back to OPERATION CORPSE. He knew what he’d find, the same thing he’d found in all the other endless files: the straightforward work of a dedicated and prolific writer.
OPERATION CORPSE was a ten-page outline for a novel, apparently one Blaine had never written—at least, not by that title. Fordyce rubbed his eyes, began skimming the synopsis, then stopped. As he stared at the screen, he felt his heart just about do a flip. He blinked once, twice. Then he went back to the beginning and began again, more slowly this time.
When he reached the end, he looked over at Gideon. “Oh my God,” he said in a low voice. “You aren’t going to believe this.”
63
Gideon tried to focus on the road as Fordyce began to talk. “There’s a book proposal here, just ten pages. It’s titled OPERATION CORPSE.”
Gideon eased off the accelerator, slowing down to eighty so he could devote more attention to Fordyce. “A book proposal?”
“Yeah. An outline for a thriller.”
“About nuclear terrorists?”
“No. About smallpox.”
“Smallpox? What does that have to do with anything?”
“Just listen.” Fordyce paused, gathering his thoughts. “You need to understand some background first. The outline explains that, as a human disease, smallpox was completely wiped out in the wild back in 1977. All remaining viral cultures held in laboratories were destroyed… except for two. One is currently at the State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology in Koltsovo, Russia. And the other is at USAMRIID, in—” Fordyce paused for effect—“Fort Detrick, Maryland.”
Gideon felt himself go cold. “No shit.”
“The outline tells the story of a gang that plans to steal the smallpox from Fort Detrick. They want to get their hands on it and threaten to release it—in order to blackmail the world. They want a hundred billion dollars and their own small country—an island in the Pacific. They plan to keep the smallpox as protection, a guarantee of sorts, on their island and live out their lives in luxury and comfort.”
“So far, I don’t see the connection.”
“The rub is howthey’re going to steal the smallpox: by creating a fake Islamic terrorist plot to detonate a nuke in DC.”
Gideon glanced at the agent. “Sink me.”
“And here’s the kicker: they fake the terrorist plot with an irradiated corpse—left in an apartment in New York City, made to look like it was killed in a radiation accident involving a nuclear bomb core. And the apartment is salted with phony evidence linking the man to radical Islamists and a jihadist terror cell.”
“Chalker,” Gideon said.
“Exactly. Not to mention a calendar with the intended date, and a burned map of Washington with potential targets.”
The wheels in Gideon’s mind began to turn. “Fort Detrick is only forty miles from Washington.”
Fordyce nodded. “Right.”