‘How did he finish up running a place like USAMRIID?’
‘I suspect the Secretary of Defense thinks he’s a bright cookie. Takes one to know one,’ Tom said. ‘Have you heard of a Professor Imran Sayed?’
‘If it’s the same Imran Sayed I think it is, they’ve at least got that nomination right. I met him a few years back. Sayed’s one of the best virologists in the world, although it’s a bit odd that Wassenberg would give up a scientist of that calibre, no matter how sensitive the liaison job. It’s even odder that the Professor would accept it.’
‘He hasn’t yet,’ Tom replied. ‘ Neither has the other scientist. Part of your job will be to remind them both of their duty to their country.’
‘Who’s the other one?’
‘A Dr Kate Braithwaite. Both their details are in there,’ Tom said, handing Curtis the file.
‘Pretty easy on the eye,’ Curtis said with a grin, looking at Kate’s photograph on the inside cover.
‘Sometimes, O’Connor, I think your brains are in the end of your dick,’ McNamara said, a resigned look on his face. ‘I need hardly remind you that the system hasn’t quite got over your little contretemps with the Russian.’
‘She gave me some very useful information,’ Curtis protested, still grinning.
‘That’s not all she gave you,’ the DDO replied, looking over the top of his glasses. ‘I want you to run these two in the same way you’d run a couple of agents out of Moscow.’ O’Connor smirked and Tom immediately regretted the analogy. ‘Or Baluchistan, which is where you’ll be sent if you fuck this up. Once you’re convinced they can do the job, and looking at their background there’s probably not much doubt about that, bring them into the compartment and make it happen.’
‘It’s the funding that’s black, Tom,’ O’Connor replied, more serious now. ‘If I try and run these two in the same way you and I have run agents out of Moscow I’ll finish up meeting them separately in Lafayette Park and they’ll freak. I think we ought to do this with as much normality as possible. It’s not exactly a secret that I talk to a lot of scientists about biological threats. I go to conferences with them for Christ’s sake.’
Tom McNamara grunted. ‘I’ll leave that up to you as long as what goes on at Halliwell is watertight. As far as vaccines are concerned, the Vice President seems particularly keen on ensuring that the athletes and officials in our Beijing Olympic team are protected, so without disclosing what we’re on about, you’ll need to liaise closely with the US Olympic Committee.’
‘Do we have a codeword yet?’
‘Operation P LASMID and this one is about as tightly held as it can get. Apart from you and I and wunderkind on the seventh floor, not even the Secretary of State’s been told – just the President, Vice President, Secretary of Defense and that little turd Esposito.’
‘What about Halliwell?’
‘From what you’ve told me about him, if there’s a buck in it he’ll come on board.’
Dr Richard Halliwell had been on board the day the top-secret laboratory had been certified as safe, but not in a way that either Tom McNamara or O’Connor could ever have imagined.
Back in his office Curtis scanned the files on the two scientists. Given the White House’s wildly unreasonable demands for the program to be up and running yesterday, he would need to get them in tomorrow and he pondered his approach. Both of them had been staunch opponents of the retention of the smallpox stocks, and talking them into being part of the top-secret Operation P LASMID might not be easy although his own sympathies lay with the scientists. Unlike an Administration that had no idea how dangerous this could be, the two scientists would know what they were letting themselves in for.
Curtis O’Connor looked at his watch and prepared to drop and lock after another long day at the farm. The photograph of Kate Braithwaite reminded him of how long it had been since he’d been in the company of a beautiful, intelligent woman. His line of work made it difficult to have a longstanding relationship with anybody and he knew that too much emotional involvement with someone could make him lose focus on the job he had to do. Fleetingly, he wondered what it might be like to live a more normal life; one that was not dictated by work and would allow him to have someone to go home to. He ran his hand through his hair and let out a deep sigh of frustration, his thoughts turning back to the other part of his mission. ‘While you’re at it, O’Connor, could you rock over to Koltsovo in Siberia, and hole up in the Altai Mountains where it gets down to minus 40 degrees fucking Celsius and give this Dolinsky guy a lift back to the States? Sure. The Russians might get a bit pissed about it, and there’s no guarantee it won’t all turn into a shit box, but you’ll manage, you always do.’ O’Connor shook his head and spun the combination on his safe.
‘We never seem to learn,’ he muttered. Hot extractions were inevitably messy, as Oliver North and Ronald Reagan had found out after the Ayatollah Khomeini had overthrown the Shah of Iran in 1978. The following year, sixty-six hostages had been taken prisoner in the US Embassy in Tehran. O’Connor again reflected on a rescue attempt that had been an unmitigated disaster. One of the Marines’ Stallion helicopters had crashed into a C-130 transport in the Iranian desert and, in the panic to get out, top-secret plans which identified all of the CIA’s agents in Iran were left behind. Curtis knew that it had taken years to recover from that disaster and here was another one on the cards, but rescuing Dolinsky from the clutches of the Kremlin would have to wait until he sorted out Halliwell and the scientists, he thought. As he headed towards the security desk at the main entrance and out into what was left of the night, he reflected on a world that was going barking bloody mad.
CHAPTER 34
R ichard Halliwell watched in amusement as Dan Esposito duffed his third shot, but his smile soon vanished. Instead of disappearing into the creek, the ball hit the middle of the stone-arch bridge and bounced fiendishly, landing halfway up the middle of the fairway on the other side. Halliwell and the President reached the first green in the regulation three shots and while they were waiting in their cart for Dan Esposito to take his fourth, the President quietly raised his plans for research into biological weapons.
‘I think the Reverend Buffett is absolutely right, Mr President,’ Richard Halliwell responded. Halliwell had concluded some time ago that the shortest route to the inside circle of this White House was a biblical one. ‘These Muslims will not stop until they’ve achieved their goal of a pan-Islamic society, and we need to do everything we can to ensure that doesn’t happen. It would be an honour to take on the task, Mr President.’
‘You’d be doing this nation a great service, Hal. A great service.’
Dan Esposito wobbled his flabby arse and then swung his club like a baseball bat. Somehow the club connected with the ball, which sizzled off the fairway, along with a sizeable chunk of The Vineyard’s best turf. Had Esposito’s ball not immediately developed a vicious slice it would have finished up on the next fairway.
‘Oh shit!’ Esposito’s expletive carried across the course. If any of the members had been within earshot, there would have been an instant complaint of ‘ungentlemanly language’.
Halliwell smirked with satisfaction as he watched Esposito’s ball veer towards trouble among the tall pines on the right-hand side of the green, but his smirk faded as a resounding thwack reverberated across the course. Esposito’s ball had slammed into a large redwood, bounced back onto the green and into the hole.