Marc Cameron - National Security

“Supposedly,” Mahoney said. “I think they had better luck with Marburg…” She sat hunched over on the couch, elbows on her knees. She was still stunned from the discovery that Arab terrorists had found a way not only to make a variant of the Ebola virus airborne, but contagious before-if only just barely, according to Justin-the carrier showed any symptoms of the disease.

Her head snapped up. “Don’t y’all see? A person with this… this Pandora form of Ebola would be the mother of all Typhoid Marys. We… I mean the CDC… the government has all kinds plans in place for quarantine in case of plague, tularemia, smallpox-all sorts of biological pandemic. But we’ll never even see this coming. People won’t even know they’re sick while they’re passing it to their families… the checkout lady at the grocery store, the guy who holds the door open for them at the bank… Imagine the underground Metro stations with their moist crowded air…” She took a deep breath, nodding her head as if to bring her thoughts into focus. “Over the last two decades HIV/AIDS has crept like a slow burn over the entire world. It’s infected tens of thousands of people-most generally transmitted through unprotected sex. Even the most flagrant individual is more discreet about having sex than he is with his breathing. We’re such a mobile society, in a matter of hours after Zafir becomes contagious, hundreds of people he has infected will get on airplanes and buses, taxis and subways…” Megan slumped as if she had already lost.

“How long?” Thibodaux asked, pacing beside the door. He was a doer and all this talking made him visibly twitchy. “How long do we have until Zafir is hot?”

“These guys aren’t stupid,” Quinn offered. “Megan, you think it’s safe to say they’d wait until they were out of their own country before they infect themselves with Pandora?”

“I’d think so,” she said. “This virus is so deadly I’m sure the guys who don’t want to be martyrs will insist on it.”

Palmer, who generally seemed content to sit back and listen, tapped a pencil on his leather desk blotter. “You called that one correctly. The Saudi deputy foreign minister sent word six hours ago that he was closing the borders to all incoming traffic. They’ve stationed Saudi military personnel at all border crossings. Trains, buses, and aircraft coming into the country have been halted until further notice. They’re blaming it on swine flu. It’s stirring up quite a scare over there. Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iran have all followed suit. Egypt is bound to be next.

“We need to play this extremely close-hold.” Palmer continued. “We could end up with ten dozen more FBI Agent Chaffees staring down our necks if we let other agencies get involved in the reality of this thing.” Palmer leaned back and stared up at the ceiling some more. At length, he let the chair tip forward and rested his forearms on his desk. “I’ll work up a story for all the networks. Zafir is the biggest terrorist since Carlos the Jackal; that ought to get their juices flowing. I’ll release his photograph to all the wire services and get everyone in the country looking for him. We’ll leak it that he has nuclear material. There’s no such thing as a kill order on NCIC, but we’ll let everyone know he should be considered armed and much too dangerous to approach. Scary enough to keep local law enforcement at a respectable standoff distance.”

“That’ll work if we find him before he goes contagious on us,” Mahoney mused. “You say the Saudis shut their borders six hours ago? Someone with influence in the Kingdom must have expected people to start getting hot at about that time. If we go with that pattern, Kalil came in first, followed about twenty-four hours later by Hamid. That would put Zafir arriving sometime today.”

“Makes sense,” Quinn said. “I got a call from one of my OSI buddies in Iraq a couple of hours ago. My informant, Sadiq, has gone missing. He says there was quite a bit of blood on the floor of the kid’s apartment so no one’s holding out too much hope of finding him alive.”

“I suppose they were all in the john,” Thibodaux snorted. “And didn’t see a thing.”

“A neighbor remembers a guy with a deformed hand walking up the stairs sometime on the eleventh. That would have been shortly after Sadiq called me.” Quinn scribbled in his black Moleskine notebook as he spoke. “DOD finally came up with a name to go with the third martyr photograph we gave them. Zafir Mamoud al Jawad. He was arrested with a bunch of other insurgents outside Baquba sometime in oh-seven. The report said they had American hostages. Should have gone to trial, but he escaped his Iraqi police detail along with some other prisoners and got away in the desert. He’s a Bedouin, real tough guy, missing three fingers and part of his left hand, apparently from some sword fight.”

“Now we’re gettin’ somewhere, beb.” Thibodaux bobbed his big head. “So we figure Zafir was still in Iraq on the eleventh. Let’s say he left on the twelfth, how long would we have from right now until he was contagious?”

“If the virus in him reacts like it does in the macaques,” Mahoney said, “and supposing he infected himself as soon as he left the Middle East, maybe a day.” She walked to a poster-size calendar Palmer had on his wall above a mahogany credenza that matched his desk. The September scene was a photograph of two sailboats racing in cobalt water of Cabo San Lucas.

Taking a red marker from a mug on the credenza, she drew a big circle around September 16. In the center of the circle, she wrote 10 a. m EDT.

She looked at her watch. “I don’t know how we’re going to do it, but before ten tomorrow morning, we need to find Zafir Jawad and kill him.”

“Eighteen hours,” Thibodaux moaned, leaning back in a huge, yawning stretch. “I guess I can sleep after I’m dead.”

Zafir removed his shirt to kill the leader of the three cocaine smugglers. He used a short knife with a silver eagle head on the hilt he’d bought from a street vendor in Nuevo Progresso-across the Rio Grande in Mexico. The night was inky dark, but he couldn’t risk getting caught. Not now, not when he was so close. U.S. Border Patrol agents were everywhere and the dying drug smugglers provided them with a job to take their minds off chasing illegal aliens-especially those from the Middle East.

The knife was an inexpensive weapon, nothing like the fine steel Zafir was used to in his homeland, where such a blade was often used to take a life. The eagle-head blade was easily sharpened, as cheap knives often were, but easily dulled-much like most of the people Zafir knew. By the time he’d removed the head of the first cocaine smuggler, he had to stop and use a flat piece of sandstone from the river to bring back the edge. The other two smugglers looked on, trussed like goats as he tended to his gruesome work. Their eyes sparkled with that strange sort of glowing shock Zafir had come to appreciate. Lying on the their bellies, hands and feet behind their backs, neither moved, paralyzed by the sheer terror of watching their companion lose his head to a person who was an obvious expert at such things. Their mouths were taped, but Zafir guessed they wouldn’t have made a sound if he’d done nothing but tie them.

These were young, cocky men from the nearby city of Reynosa, who had made the mistake of many in the lower echelons of criminal organizations, believing that since their boss commanded respect, such respect automatically trickled down to their level. Zafir had never heard of the Ochoa cartel, and when they’d thrown the name out as something that should certainly strike fear in his heart, he’d only laughed and stabbed the apparent leader in the belly. He’d knocked the other two senseless with a rock.