A male agent raised his hand. “Where’d we get the description of the symptoms?” he said.
Laramie had a pretty good idea he was CIA just by looking at him.
“One of the Peace Corps volunteers kept a journal,” Sadie said. To Laramie her gravelly voice was starting to run out of fuel. “Copies of the journal made their way back to CDC about ten years ago. We have doctors on-site, but again, don’t get your hopes up. The trail is cold.”
The CIA man, Laramie observed, didn’t nod, offer thanks, or otherwise acknowledge the response to his question. Sadie, who didn’t seem to mind, whacked away at the keys of her laptop and caused a map of the United States to appear on the wall where the blue square had been. Sadie motioned to Bill, who stood again. Laramie took the opportunity to steal a glance at her guide, and found him missing. The doorjamb he’d been leaning against was empty. She did a slow swivel and checked around the rim of the room; no cigar. It seemed he’d flown the coop.
“To the plan, then,” Bill said. “Here’s where we are on this: our guy fucked up. Achar blew himself up before he had positioned all the virus serum in the correct spot. Maybe he made a mistake with whatever fertilizer and fuel he was storing in his garage, maybe it just blew up on its own when he wasn’t ready for it-but don’t forget the wife and son. They left town to see the wife’s parents in San Diego on the same day Achar blew himself up, and she’s admitted he booked the trip for her. So for this reason we think he meant to do it on the day he did it, he just got it wrong. He set off the blast prematurely, and the result of the mistake is he failed to disperse even ten percent of the filo he was keeping in the basement.”
Bill paced in front of the image of the map.
“We need to assume Achar wasn’t operating alone, if only due to the sophistication and quantity of the virus. Under this assumption, Sadie has calculated the potential intended effect on the American populace.”
Laramie glanced again at the doorjamb her guide had abandoned, and something caught her eye. On the floor, where he’d been standing, was a black Tumi travel bag. Laramie knew it was a Tumi because it was hers-the bag Ebbers told her they’d pack and deliver here.
Sadie came up with a remote control about the size of a business card. As she strolled to a spot beside the image on the wall, expanding circles began illustrating themselves on the wall from an epicenter in Florida Laramie assumed to be Emerald Lakes.
“If Achar doesn’t make his mistake,” Sadie said, “and instead gets his entire batch of serum dispersed, then just over two hundred times the amount that got airborne would have been up for grabs.” Animated, wavy lines appeared on the map and spread from the initial area covered by the expanding circles until the circles reached the greater Miami-Dade County area, which began to blink. A number appeared near ground zero-125-then zeroes began fading in at the number’s back end, so that 125 became 1,250, then 12,500, then 125,000, then 1,250,000 with a question mark beside it.
“With immediate exposure to this large an airborne filo sample,” Sadie said, “it’s our estimate that nearly ten thousand people would have been infected in the same period it took the hundred and twenty-five to come down with the disease in our real-world case. Infections would have occurred over a wider area, making quarantine efforts initially less effective. If the filo had reached Miami or Fort Myers, it might have spread at a rate that could easily have resulted in a hundred thousand deaths or more. Our conclusion is that Miami was ultimately the perp’s target. His mistake in detonating the bomb when he did resulted in a stunted spread of the filo that prevented it from reaching the urban center he had hoped to strike.”
A second expanding-circle illustration began in Washington state, east of Seattle. The same expansion, followed by the animated wavy lines pushing north, south, east, and west, played out across the Pacific Northwest. A third sequence illustrated itself in the Chicago area, a fourth in Texas, and a fifth in the northeast, near Boston.
“We’ve modeled ten sleepers detonating similar devices, and releasing a full dose of filo with no preestablished quarantine measures to slow the spread of the fever.” More expanding circles faded into view on the map, in the heartland, Rocky Mountains, then Manhattan. “You should know there is the potential effect, assuming there are other sleepers in this network, of ten to fifteen million casualties. Add to this the threat of overlap-meaning,” she said, “if two or more of the bio-dirty detonations occur within the same prequarantine period-say, forty-eight hours-you could see double the number of deaths, or triple, or worse. The effect would be a nullification of any quarantines. A ‘piggybacking’ rate-of-infection effect would likely activate a series of ‘perfect filo storms,’ or super-plague zones, where, within such areas, all are exposed, and no life is spared.”
Hurricane-like shapes visually connected three of the initial virus zones into three ominous-looking and extremely wide swaths of territory on the map. Casualty numbers beside the affected plague zones shifted from hundreds of thousands to tens of millions, then froze. Finally the image on the wall dissolved back to blue. Sadie closed her laptop and the blue square disappeared from the wall. She returned to her seat.
Sid stood.
“Who sent the filo to him?” he said. “How’d it get delivered? The perp’s profession presents both a problem and an opportunity, since every package with which Achar was associated should have had a tracking number. Bill’s group is working from lists of shipments Achar picked up, delivered, or otherwise handled. It’s a big list with no apparent connections to illegal medical labs or terrorist organizations.”
Sid came around the table to the place where Bill was seated. He reached over Bill’s shoulder, took hold of the dry-erase marker Bill had employed, went to the board, and drew a long arrow from each of the words Bill had circled. Sid’s arrows all led to the same place at the bottom of the board, where he wrote and double-underlined Public Enemy #1.
“We are assuming Achar wasn’t acting alone. He was just early, and ineffective. Why was he early? Why did he go maverick?”
Beneath his Public Enemy #1 line, Sid wrote, Time = Public Enemy #2. Laramie thought briefly of the idea that had shown itself, then escaped her earlier-an idea that had to do with Achar, his wife and son, and Mary’s take on them-but then the idea, whatever it was, retreated again into the abyss.
“What if there are nine, or eleven, or thirteen others out there, and they’re laying low for, what, another two weeks? A month? We don’t find out who they are, where they are, and who’s giving the orders before whenever it is they’re planning their D-Day, then Bill, you can kiss your wife goodbye. Sadie, your brother, and your nephew-hemorrhaged out in an emergency ward. Bob-those five rugrats of yours-they’ll die first.”
He encircled the batch of words he’d just written on the board.
“Public enemies number one and two. Session over.”
14
Cooper watched the landing lights approach, then flare, then douse as the ATR 72-500 cargo plane punched down on the longer runway of Terrance B. Lettsome International Airport. The blank-skinned turboprop charter wheeled into its assigned stall and the engines eased. As instructed, the pilot kept the props whirling. The bridge to Beef Island was sealed off for the night under the guise of midnight repair work-if he leaned back a notch, Cooper could just see the spinning kaleidoscope of blue and white emanating from the Mitsubishi minivan cruiser parked lengthwise across the bridge. They had the airport to themselves.