Rob Regan ran his hand through his hair and stared at the imagery on the screen in front of him. The satellite photographs were grainy, but he could clearly make out the words ‘Hyderabad Laundry Company’ on the side of the white four-wheel drive.
‘What do you think a fucking laundry truck would have been doing in a place like Darra Adam Khel and why would it now be headed for Peshawar?’ he mused out loud.
‘Not collecting the sheets would be my first guess,’ his lanky deputy, Tony Carmello said, getting up from his own desk and ambling over to his boss’s.
‘Precisely. This war on terror would be a fucking sight easier if the Pakis got off their black asses and cleaned out this cesspool on their border,’ Regan grumbled.
‘Fat chance,’ his deputy responded. Both men knew that the Pakistani government had been unwilling to exert any serious control over the border with Afghanistan. Despite intense pressure from the United States and the UN, Pakistan had refused to regulate the madrassas, the Islamic schools that were financially supported by the puritanical Wahhabis from Saudi Arabia and other equally fanatical Islamists. Hundreds of the Taliban schools were flourishing in the North-West Frontier Province. The invective from furious and often illiterate Imams filled impressionable young minds with a burning hatred towards the West. The world was being flooded with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of suicide bombers, but any Pakistani leader who tried to rein in the madrassas and restrict their teaching to the real messages of the Qu’ran risked losing office at the hands of Pakistan’s Islamic hardliners and the ISI, Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence agency, which was a strong supporter of the Taliban. In Pakistan’s relatively short history a coup was an ever-present possibility.
‘Have we heard from Crawford?’ Regan asked.
‘Not since yesterday; I’ll check what’s happening.’
A minute later, Tony Carmello handed his boss a handset that was connected through an encryption system that no terrorist would be able to break. ‘Crawford. He says his target hasn’t left the hotel.’
‘Back entrance?’ the station chief asked his latest recruit bluntly.
‘There’s a loading dock but I’ve got that in view as well,’ the young CIA agent answered confidently. ‘The only movement out of there has been a laundry truck and that was early this morning.’
‘Would that have belonged to the Hyderabad Laundry Company?’ Regan asked.
‘I think it might have,’ Crawford replied, less certain now.
‘If you’re going to be successful in this game, Crawford, you’re not only going to have to think, you’re going to have to know!’ Regan barked down the phone. The long hours were taking their toll. ‘How big was the truck? What colour?’
‘A Toyota four-wheel drive and it was white,’ the young agent replied nervously.
‘Get yourself up to Peshawar and find it because right now I’ve got satellite imagery that tells me a white four-wheel drive Toyota belonging to the Hyderabad Laundry Company is headed towards there and something tells my end of nose that it might be the same four-wheel drive you watched leave this morning. When you do find it, I don’t want any fucking heroics. Just keep it under surveillance and see if you can find out what they’re up to. And be careful. Peshawar isn’t a tourist resort.’
‘Whatever they’re up to, I think you’re right, it’s got fuck all to do with delivering clean linen,’ Regan said when he’d hung up the phone. Sometimes, all a CIA agent in the field had to go on was a hunch, but hunches based on years of experience sometimes paid off.
CHAPTER 33
W hen will the contingency plan for a terrorist attack on the Beijing Olympics be ready?’ Tom McNamara asked O’Connor, turning the focus away from what Richard Halliwell might be up to.
‘We’re still developing the possible scenarios and our responses, but the head of the Olympic Task Force will have a draft for you within the next couple of months,’ Curtis replied.
‘How’s it shaping up?’ McNamara asked, keen to get the views of an agent he knew to be a straightshooter.
‘The biggest worry is a biological attack. Genetic engineering of viruses is a very real threat and we may not have the right vaccines. I haven’t seen anything to confirm my suspicions, but if someone like Kadeer can get hold of a bioweapon and we don’t take notice of his warnings to start negotiating, I think he’ll use it.’
‘At the Olympics?’
‘The Beijing Olympics are particularly vulnerable because for two weeks in August over three million people from hundreds of thousands of different places around the world are going to be concentrated in the one spot. Once they leave the area, if they’re carrying a deadly virus it would be like exporting a far more deadly bird flu all over the world. Although it’s not as simple as the media make it sound, Tom. You and I know that in the 1980s and 1990s Aum Shinrikyo were successful when they put plastic bags full of sarin on the Tokyo subway trains and punctured them with umbrellas, but you might remember they carried out at least nine other attacks and the only one of those that was successful was another sarin attack. The anthrax and botulinum attacks all failed.’
Tom McNamara nodded grimly. ‘Shoko Asahara. Another fucking crackpot who thinks the world’s about to end. He and that raving lunatic Buffett make a good pair,’ he grumbled. ‘What gets me is that otherwise sane and intelligent people believe all this shit. If the Japanese police hadn’t tumbled to these whackers, they might have killed a lot more than nineteen people and what was it… 1000 wounded?’
‘Plus another 4000 “worried well”; although I guess we can’t blame them for being worried. When you see hundreds of people lying on the ground with blood pouring out of their noses and mouths, it’s not a pretty sight. And you’re right, if they’d had more time and if their university whiz kids had isolated the virulent strain of anthrax rather than the vaccine strain, it might have been a very different story.’
‘Hmm,’ the DDO grunted, ‘but did you see the final report on the Daschle anthrax?’
Curtis nodded. ‘I’ve got my own theory on that and that was a different story. That stuff was weapons grade.’
Curtis O’Connor and Tom McNamara had both been startled when, just six days after September 11, someone in New Jersey had mailed anthrax to the New York Post, to CBS, ABC, NBC and the offices of Senate Majority Leader, Tom Daschle. Two mail workers in the Brentwood mail-sorting facility in Washington had died and epidemiologists from the CDC had frantically tested over 5000 employees from Capitol Hill for exposure to the deadly spores.
‘Whoever mailed that stuff, Tom, not only had a very high degree of professional expertise, but he or she had access to some pretty sophisticated laboratories.’ The perpetrators had been able to achieve what Aum Shinrikyo and other terrorist organisations had not. They’d been able to refine the anthrax to the point where it was lighter than air so that it would float like an aerosol mist. ‘That anthrax was not only very pure and concentrated but whoever did it found a way to coat the spores.’
‘Is that hard?’ the DDO asked, deferring to his younger colleague’s earlier years as a biochemist.
‘Very difficult. The Daschle anthrax would have had to come from a state-run facility. Outside of here and some of our allies, there are not too many labs that have that capability,’ Curtis added pointedly, suspicious that the attack had originated from somewhere within the United States. ‘Anthrax spores are ovoid, like a headache capsule, except they’re measured in microns or millionths of a metre,’ he explained. ‘You can’t see them with the naked eye but someone found a way to coat them with even smaller superfine particles of silicon dioxide.’