“Larry?” Collen said, breaking the silence in the still, shadowy office. “What are we going to do? We didn’t anticipate any of these complications. And Brandon’s starting to waver.”
Drake let out a long breath as he forced himself back into the present. Gazenga’s knowledge of central Africa had been critical to their operation thus far, but it had always been understood that he’d eventually have to be dealt with — that he wouldn’t have the courage to go as far as was necessary. Losing him now, though, would be a minor disaster.
“I take it you’ve been learning fast, Dave?”
“Everything I can. But my level of expertise is nowhere near his. And neither are my contacts on the ground.”
Drake nodded his understanding. “We’re going to have to move up the timetable and go to full surveillance on him. I want it in place by tonight. Maybe he’ll show more backbone than we expect.”
“And Smith?”
“For now, we’ll just track him — see if he tips his hand as to how much he knows and who he’s working for. The moment it looks like they’re going to come up with anything useful, though, they’re going to have to disappear.”
Brandon Gazenga smiled blankly at the people moving through the hallway, trying to keep his gait natural as he slipped into his office and closed the door behind him.
How the hell had he gotten himself into this?
It was a depressingly easy question to answer. Drake had come to him personally and he’d swooned at the personal attention from the DCI. Given a chance to advance his career and play with the big boys, he’d just closed his eyes and jumped.
A world that seemed so black-and-white in college turned hopelessly gray inside the walls of CIA headquarters. A little spin here, a little data selection there, and you could make a report say anything you wanted. But now things had been turned completely upside down. There was no doubt in his mind that Drake was going to eventually want Smith and his people dead. Of course the CIA’s involvement would be as indirect as it always was — a quick cash payment to an intermediary, a passing along of information to bandits in the area, maybe a word to one of Bahame’s people. It was a cardinal rule that he had learned well over the past year: deniability must always be maintained.
But he would know the truth. The fact that the blood didn’t splash directly on him didn’t absolve him of responsibility.
The entire operation was an incredibly delicate balancing act — let the Iranians go far enough for the evidence to be irrefutable, but not so far that they would be in a position to actually deploy the parasite.
As his vision cleared, though, Gazenga began to see just how subjective that balance point was. How far were Drake and Collen willing to allow Iran to run? How much risk were they willing to take that this could spin out of control?
“Welcome to the big leagues,” he said to the empty office.
It was funny how different the reality was from the fantasy. Who would have ever thought he’d want nothing more than to join his brothers running the family restaurant chain? That standing elbow-deep in spiced beef and dishwater would be something he dreamed about?
Gazenga walked unsteadily to his desk and sat in the leather chair his father had presented him as a graduation gift. This was getting way too big for him to handle. He needed to talk to someone who knew what the hell they were doing. Someone he could trust.
24
Sarie van Keuren tossed a bungee cord over the crate of field equipment and Smith caught it, securing the hook to a hole rusted in the top of the cab.
“I think that’ll get us to Kampala,” he said, and the driver leaned through the open window, head bobbing in an energetic nod.
“No problem.”
Those seemed to be his only two words of English, but with the right inflection and expression, they could communicate just about any point.
Smith climbed into the front passenger’s seat, pulling his pack onto his lap before repeatedly slamming the tiny car’s door in an effort to get it to stay closed. “Peter! Let’s roll.”
Howell was standing on the sidewalk staring up at Uganda’s Entebbe Airport, hands jammed in the pockets of his faded jeans despite the heat and humidity. The original terminal building was gone now, but the airport was still something of a shrine for the men who served in the world’s special forces.
In 1976, Palestinian terrorists hijacked a plane ferrying 250 passengers from Tel Aviv to Paris, forcing the pilot to land in Idi Amin — controlled Uganda. After releasing some of the passengers, they’d threatened to kill their remaining hostages if a number of their imprisoned compatriots weren’t set free.
When it became clear that peaceful negotiations were going nowhere — due in no small part to Amin’s support of the hijackers — the Israelis began planning a rescue mission.
Operation Thunderbolt was carried out by one hundred elite commandos and took only an hour and a half to complete. When the dust settled, all but three of the hostages had been rescued and all the hijackers, as well as forty-five Ugandan troops, were dead.
It had been a very public demonstration of what a well-trained force could accomplish and had made that little airport a household name all over the world.
“Peter!” Sarie called, wrestling her pack into the backseat and then squeezing in next to it. “What are you looking at? Meter’s running!”
Her voice snapped him out of his trance and he slipped in next to her.
“You okay?” she asked.
“Of course I am, my dear. Why wouldn’t I be?”
Smith shot a quick glance back but then just settled into the vinyl-and-duct-tape seat as the cab shot into traffic. He watched the verdant hills dotted with houses pass by for a few minutes but found it more and more difficult to keep his eyes open. The drive to their hotel in the capital city wouldn’t take much more than a half hour, but he might as well put the time to good use. Unless he missed his guess, opportunities for sleep were going to be scarce over the next couple of weeks.
Sarie’s phone rang and he half monitored her circumspect questioning of the German parasitologist she’d left a message for earlier that day. When the inevitable disappointment became audible in her voice, he shifted his attention back to the monotonous drone of the engine. It seemed that Star had once again been right — whatever this phenomenon turned out to be, the two lousy pages she turned up were the entire body of knowledge on it.
Despite his exhaustion, Smith’s mind refused to shut down, instead churning through an ever-lengthening list of problems and unknowns.
Dealing with deadly diseases in the field was dangerous enough when you had iron-fisted control over every variable. Normally, he’d know more or less what pathogen he was dealing with, his patients would be grateful for his presence, and he would be leading a large team of highly trained specialists wielding multimillion-dollar equipment.
To say that his current situation wasn’t optimal would be the understatement of the century. His protective equipment consisted of some surgical gloves and masks raided from Sarie’s basement. He had virtually no knowledge of the pathogen they were after or, frankly, if it even existed. He had only guesses as to how it spread and no clue how it attacked its victims. And his patients, far from offering their thanks with donations of farm animals like they had last time he’d worked in Africa, were likely to try to tear him apart.