“I guess tempers are running high,” he said, forcing a smile.
Drake nodded. “I agree that the risks — to us and to the country — are higher than we hoped. But I disagree that pulling the plug will change that. What would Castilla be able to do? Go after Bahame? He already took out our best team. Make our suspicions public? That will just turn into a bunch of political posturing that’ll give the Iranians even more time to work on this thing and cover their tracks. Khamenei’s losing his grip — he knows that better than we do. He’s going all-in on this. He doesn’t have any choice.”
Drake paused to let Collen respond, but the man just stared at the ground.
“Here’s what I propose, Dave. We initiate another shake-up of our bioterror response system — throw a bunch of new scenarios at them, including one that quietly approximates a worst-case scenario for this parasite being weaponized. That way we’ll have something that can be implemented quickly if the Iranians manage to refine the parasite before they release it. Casualties will be worse than our estimates but should stay within the three quarters of a million that we considered the high side of acceptable. In the end, though, I doubt we’re going to see that kind of sophistication. My hunch is that Smith and his team are dead.”
His assistant nodded silently.
“Do you agree?” Drake prompted.
Collen finally met his eye. “Yeah. I’m sorry, Larry. You’re right. We always knew that taking down the Iranians wouldn’t be easy, but…”
“We hoped it would be easier than this,” Drake said, finishing his thought.
“Yeah.”
“Okay, then. Randi Russell. Where do we stand with her?”
“The news is better there. She’s locked down tight — physically and electronically — and she doesn’t seem to have done anything at all since contacting the TSA.”
“No more follow-up on Brandon’s death with her FBI contact?”
“Nothing.”
“Has she made any more attempts to get in touch with Smith?”
“Not after the second call to Fort Detrick.”
“So you’re confident she’s gotten nowhere?”
“All I can say is that I’m fairly confident she doesn’t know anything more than whatever was written on the piece of paper Brandon put in her pocket.”
“Do you think she’s given up? Should we step back from our plans to deal with her?”
Collen shook his head. “If it was anybody else, I’d say we should reassess. But Randi Russell never gives up. Once she gets her teeth into something, she doesn’t let go until she’s satisfied. My take is that she’s hit a dead end and this is just a pause while she figures out her next move.”
“I agree. Now’s the time to do this — before she gets hold of some loose end we missed. Have you contacted Gohlam?”
“Everything’s set. We’ve given him all her details and he’s waiting for the go-ahead.”
Drake drummed his fingers on his desk, fixing for a moment on the closed door to his office. Padshah Gohlam was an Afghan mole living in Maryland on a student visa. The CIA had known about him since the beginning and let him into the United States to try to ferret out his contacts. They’d managed to crack his communications system, which allowed Collen to impersonate his Afghan handler while circumventing the agency’s surveillance. As far as Gohlam knew, he was being activated to take out an American operative responsible for the deaths of countless jihadists across the globe.
It was a seemingly perfect scenario. Not only would there be no reason for anyone at the agency to be suspicious of Gohlam’s motives; they would be very anxious to sweep their failure to control him under the rug. Randi Russell would disappear and the details of her death would be swallowed by a black hole of administrative ass covering.
“Do it.”
“To be clear,” Collen said carefully, “you’re telling me to give him the signal to take out Russell.”
Drake nodded. “Do it now before she figures out a way to bring all this down on top of us.”
50
Can you hold it out a little more, Sarie?”
She pressed herself tighter to the bars and twisted the padlock in her hands, giving Smith a better angle to attack it with the rusted saw. They’d been at it for hours and he guessed they weren’t much more than a sixteenth of an inch through the hardened steel. But what was the alternative? Sit and wait for death?
His arms felt like they were on fire and the sweat streaming down his nose occasionally choked him as he gulped the blood-scented air. When he nearly fumbled the blade, he finally staggered back and let Howell take over.
Dr. De Vries was standing lookout at the edge of the only passage into the chamber but was too old and decrepit to be counted on for much else. The infected woman imprisoned next to them was weakening fast, lying in mud created by her own blood. She saw him looking at her and lunged feebly at the bars with twisted, shattered hands. It wouldn’t be long now before she was too far gone to do even that. And then Bahame would be back.
Smith pressed his back to the cave wall and slid down into the dirt, trying futilely to find something he’d missed. Some way to get out of there.
“How do you know Bahame?” Sarie said.
Her face and Howell’s were only a few inches apart, and she seemed to be searching his eyes for the answer.
“There was a time we ran in the same social circles,” he said, starting in on the lock.
“It’s a little late to be mysterious, isn’t it? We’re going to die here.”
Howell stopped sawing for a moment. “Dead is dead and almost dead is alive. Very different things.”
He went back to work, and Smith turned his attention to the equipment in the lab. There had to be something there. Something they could use.
He was examining the broken generator against the wall for what must have been the twentieth time when Howell started talking again.
“I did some work in Angola years ago. After it was finished, I decided to travel around the continent a bit. See the sights. I ended up in a village not far from here where an aid agency was working on an irrigation project. They were a man down and I had some knowledge from growing up in farm country, so I threw in for a bit…A tad higher, dear.”
Sarie adjusted the position of the lock and he continued. “Bahame wasn’t the man you see today. He was leading a group of former drug runners and cutthroats on a bit of a pillaging-and-raping spree. I suppose this was before he found God.” Howell smiled bitterly. “In any event, I’d been at the village for about six months when he and his men showed up.”
“What happened?”
“Oh, they overran us quite quickly — the people living there were a peaceful lot. No weapons beyond the tools they used for farming.”
“But you got away.”
“You’d be surprised how effective certain farm tools can be in the right hands. I killed six or seven of Bahame’s men before I was forced into the jungle. I tried to get back, but I’d been shot and couldn’t move very quickly. I’m afraid by the time I managed to stop the bleeding, it was over.”
“Who is Yakobo?”
Howell didn’t answer immediately, focusing his full attention on the lock. “He was a boy whose parents had died and whose aunt and uncle weren’t particularly interested in his upbringing. I helped him out here and there. More trouble than he was worth, really.”
The heaviness in his voice suggested that Yakobo had, in fact, been very much worth the trouble.
“I’m so sorry, Peter.”
Howell stopped and took a step back, signaling that he needed a break.