“Home with the sitter. They’re both okay,” he assured her.
“Mr. President?” It was Goodley. “This is pretty hot.”
“Okay, then shall we get to work? Who starts?”
“I do,” the DCI said. He slid a sheet of paper across the table. “Here.”
Ryan took it and scanned it. It was some sort of official form, and the words were all in French. “What’s this?”
1125
“It’s the immigration and customs clearance form for an airplane. Check the ID box, top-left corner.”
“HX-NJA. Okay, so?” SWORDSMAN asked. His chief of staff sat at his side, keeping his peace. He felt the tension that the executives had brought into the room.
The blowup of Chavez’s photo at Mehrabad Airport was actually larger than a poster, and had been printed up mainly as a joke. Mary Pat unrolled it, and laid it flat on the table. Two briefcases were used to keep it from rolling back up. “Check the tail,” the DDO advised.
“HX-NJA. I don’t have time for Agatha Christie, people,” the President warned them.
“Mr. President.” This was Dan Murray. “Let me walk you through this, but I’ll say up front, that photo is something I could take into court and get a conviction with.
“The customs form identifies a business jet, a Gulf-stream G-IV belonging to this Swiss-based corporation.” A piece of paper went down on the conference table. “Flown by this flight crew.” Two photos and fingerprint cards. “It left Zaire with three passengers. Two were nuns, Sister Jean Baptiste and Sister Maria Magdalena. They were both nurses at a Catholic hospital down there. Sister Jean treated Benedict Mkusa, a little boy who contracted Ebola and died of it. Somehow, Sister Jean caught it, too, and the third passenger, Dr. Mohammed Moudi– we don’t have a photo of him yet; we’re working on it– decided to fly the sick one to Paris for treatment. Sister Maria tagged along, too. Dr. Moudi is an Iranian national working with the WHO. He told the boss-nun that she might have a chance there and said that he could whistle up a private jet to get her there. With me so far?”
“And this is the jet.”
“Correct, Mr. President. This is the jet. Except for one thing. This jet supposedly crashed into the sea after taking off after a refueling stop in Libya. We have a ton of paperwork about that. Except for one thing.” He tapped the poster again. “That photo was taken by Domingo Chavez–”
“You know him,” Mary Pat put in.
“Go on. When did Ding shoot the frame?”
1126
“Clark and Chavez accompanied Secretary Adler to Tehran, just last week.”
“The aircraft was reported lost some time before that. It was even tracked by one of our destroyers when it squawked emergency. No trace was ever found, however,” Murray went on. “Ed?”
“When Iraq came apart, Iran allowed the senior military leadership to skip. They all had golden parachutes. Our friend Daryaei let them jump out of the airplane. He even provided transport, all right? This started the day after the jet disappeared,” Foley told them. “They were flown to Khartoum, in the Sudan. Our station chief there is Frank Clayton, and he drove to the airport and shot these pictures to confirm our intelligence information.” The DCI slid them across.
“Looks like the same airplane, but what if somebody just played with the numbers–letters, whatever?” Ryan asked.
“Next indicator,” Murray said. “There were two Ebola cases in Khartoum.”
“Clark and Chavez talked to the attending physician a few hours ago,” Mary Pat added.
“Both the patients flew on this airplane. We have photos of them getting off. So,” the FBI Director said, “now, we have an airplane with a sick person aboard. The airplane disappears–but it turns up less than twenty-four hours later somewhere else, and two of the passengers come down with the same illness that the nun had. The passengers came from Iraq, via Iran, to the Sudan.”
“Who owns the airplane?” Arnie asked.
“It’s a corporation. We should have further details in a few hours from the Swiss. But the flight crew is Iranian. We have info on them because they learned how to fly over here,” Murray explained. “And, finally, we have our friend Daryaei here on the same airplane. Looks like it’s been taken out of international service. Maybe Daryaei is using it to hop around his new country now. So, Mr. President, we have the disease, the airplane, and the owner, all tied up. Tomorrow we’ll work with Gulfstream to see if the aircraft has any unique characteristics that we can
1127
identify in addition to the registration code. We’ll have the Swiss pull info on the ownership and the flight logs for the rest of their fleet.
“We now know who did this, sir,” Murray concluded. “This chain of evidence is hard to beat.”
“There are more details to flesh out,” Mary Pat said. “Background on this Dr. Moudi. Tracking down some monkey shipments–they use monkeys to study the disease. How they staged the faked airplane crash–you believe it? The bastards even made an insurance claim.”
“We’re going to suspend this meeting for a moment. Andrea?”
“Yes, Mr. President.”
“Get Secretary Bretano and Admiral Jackson in here.”
“Yes, sir.” She left the room.
Ed Foley waited for the door to close behind her. “Uh, Mr. President?”
“Yeah, Ed?”
“There is one other thing. I haven’t even told Dan this yet. We now know that the UIR–really, our friend Mah-moud Haji Daryaei–is behind this. Chavez brought something up before we sent him and John off. The other side could well expect us to trace this back to them. Operational security for something like this is almost impossible to achieve.”
“So?”
“So, two things, Jack. First, whatever they’re planning, they may think it’s irreversible, and therefore it doesn’t matter whether we figure this out or not. Second, let’s remember how they knocked off Iraq. They got somebody all the way inside.”
Those were two very big thoughts. Ryan started pondering the first one. Dan Murray’s head turned to his roving inspector and they traded looks on the second.
“Christ, Ed,” the FBI Director said a moment later.
“Think it through, Dan,” the DCI said. “We have a President. We have a Senate. We have a third of the House. We do not have a Vice President yet. The presidential succession is still dicey, no really powerful figures, and the top level of the government is still gutted. Toss in
1128
this epidemic, which has the whole country tied up in knots. To almost anybody outside, we look weak and vulnerable.”
Ryan looked up as Andrea came back in. “Wait a minute. They made a play for Katie. Why do that if they want me out of the way?”
“What’s this?” Price asked.
“The other side has demonstrated a frightening capability. One,” Foley said, “they got all the way into the Iraqi President’s security detail and blew him away. Two, the operation last week was run by a sleeper agent who’s been here more than a decade, and in that time did nothing at all, but when he woke up, he cared enough to assist in an attempt on a child.”
Murray had to agree with that: “That’s occurred to us, too. The Intelligence Division is thinking about it right now.”
“Wait a minute,” Andrea objected. “I know every person on the Detail. For God’s sake, we lost five of them defending SANDBOX!”
“Agent Price,” Mary Pat Foley said. “You know how many times CIA’s been burned by people we knew all about–people / knew. Hell, I lost three agents to one of those fucking moles. I knew them, and I knew the guy who shopped ’em. Don’t tell me about paranoia. We are up against a very capable enemy here. And it only takes one.”
Murray whistled as the argument took its full form. His mind had been racing for the past few hours in one direction. Now it had to race in another.
“Mrs. Foley, I–”
“Andrea,” Inspector O’Day said, “this isn’t personal. Take a step back and think about it. If you had the resources of a nation-state, if you were patient, and if you had people who were really motivated, how would you do it?”
“How did they do Iraq?” Ed Foley took up the argument. “Would you have thought that was possible?”
The President looked around the room. Fabulous, now they’re telling me not to trust the Secret Service.
“It all makes sense if you think like the other guy,”
: 1129
Mary Pat told them. “It’s part of their tradition, remember?”
“Okay, but what do we do about it?” Andrea asked, her face openly stunned at the possibility.
“Pat, you have a new assignment,” Murray told his subordinate. “With the President’s permission, that is.”
“Granted,” POTUS breathed.
“Rules?” O’Day wanted to know.
“None, none at all,” Price told him.
1T WAS AP P ROAC HIN G noon over the United Islamic Republic. Maintenance was going well on the six heavy divisions based in the south-central part of the country. Nearly all the tracks on the mechanized fighting vehicles had been replaced. A healthy spirit of competition had developed between the former Iraqi divisions and those moved down from Iran. With their vehicles restored to full fighting order, the troopers drew ammunition to bring all of the T-80 tanks and BMP infantry carriers to full basic-loads.