I Am Pilgrim (40 page)

The president turned to Whisperer. ‘First, are we certain that the virus has been designed to try to crash through the vaccine?’

‘Yes,’ replied Whisperer. ‘There’s one gene – apparently associated with the immune system – that

has been grafted on to its DNA. There is no way it’s a random occurrence.’

‘Will it work? Could it defeat the vaccine?’ the president asked. ‘I mean, this is way out on the frontier – it’s never been done before, has it?’

‘Unfortunately, sir, that’s not true,’ replied Whisperer, looking around, letting everyone know with his eyes that what he was about to say was highly classified. ‘During the late 1980s the Soviets had at least ten tons of smallpox which they had developed for use in MIRV warheads.

‘According to a highly placed asset of ours, that material had been engineered to be vaccine-evasive. I think we have every reason to believe it is possible.’

The revelation by the country’s leading spook cast an instant pall over the room, broken only by

the sole woman in the meeting – the Secretary of Homeland Security.

‘But that doesn’t mean this version works. The Russians are one thing, terrorists are completely different. We have no way of knowing, do we?’ she said.

‘I think we know,’ President Grosvenor said. ‘The man in the Hindu Kush had three prisoners – it’s

inconceivable his experiment didn’t include vaccinating one of them and testing to see if the virus broke through.’

‘That’s my reading,’ Whisperer agreed. ‘Obviously, it worked – all the prisoners are dead.’

‘It means we have no line of defence,’ said the president. ‘Three hundred million doses of vaccine

are probably useless.’ Silence filled the dimly lit room. ‘We should have developed an anti-viral drug

– a cure. That was the only real security,’ Grosvenor said, almost to himself.

‘That door ’s closed. There’s no time now,’ the Secretary of State, an older man who already looked exhausted, responded.

Grosvenor nodded and turned to Whisperer. ‘And this is what they call a hot virus?’

‘Very hot,’ Whisperer said. ‘I believe that was deliberate too. The hotter the strain, the faster it burns out.

‘A virus isn’t exactly alive,’ he continued, ‘but it’s certainly not dead. It can’t live outside the host –

in this case, the human body.

‘The faster it destroys the hosts, the faster the epidemic wanes. I don’t believe whoever developed

this wants to destroy the world – just us.’

‘That’s comforting,’ the president said ironically. ‘Okay – the man that got away. How do we find

him?’ He turned to the chief-of-staff. ‘Echelon?’

Within five minutes the chief-of-staff had made the phone calls that would deliver to the Oval Office everything that Echelon had overheard. To keep the amount of material manageable, Whisperer had suggested restricting the initial ‘pull’ to a wide arc surrounding the mountaintop in the Hindu Kush over the last twelve days. Even so, he knew that the volume of data would be staggering.

There were no landlines in the area, of course, and cellular masts outside Kabul and a few other major cities were non-existent, so that meant satellite phones. While Echelon loved them – it was one of the easier signals in the world to vacuum up – the problem was that the Stone Age nature of all other communications in Afghanistan meant that everyone carried one. Drug traffickers, arms smugglers, warlords, Taliban commanders, aid workers, journalists, village headmen, doctors and travelling government officials were all equipped with them.

Add to that ten different local languages and over forty dialects – to say nothing of codes and encryption which ranged from the rudimentary to the sophisticated – and it made the amount of material overwhelming.

Nevertheless, if the lone man who Lieutenant Keating had glimpsed on the mountaintop had used a

satellite phone anywhere near the village, Echelon would have heard and recorded it. Of course, the

president knew there was no guarantee that the man even
had
a satellite phone but, in the present circumstances, he had little choice – when you don’t have anything else, you go with what you’ve got.

Responding to a direct order from the president, the water-cooled IBM Roadrunner computers at

Fort Meade – among the fastest processing clusters in the world – immediately started scanning their databases.

If they found nothing on the first pull, their circle of search would extend out mile by mile until it covered not just countries, but subcontinents. Literally, they were looking for a single voice among tens of millions.

Chapter Forty-eight

IN THE MEANTIME, the five men and one woman seated around the Lincoln desk tried to develop the outline of a plan. Almost immediately, they were at war among themselves.

The only thing they agreed on was that there should be no change to the nation’s threat status: it was at a low level and, in order to avoid panic and unwanted questions, it had to stay there. But in the two hours that followed, the atheists and the God-botherers took to each other ’s throats on almost every idea, then suddenly teamed up against the president on several others, split among themselves, formed uneasy alliances with their former opponents, returned to their natural alliances and then sallied forth on several occasions as lone gunslingers.

‘It’s worse than a meeting of the loya jirga,’ the chief-of-staff said quietly into his MP3 player. The loya jirga was the grand assembly of all the Afghan elders. The reason it was called that was because the word ‘clusterfuck’ had already been taken.

By the time exhaustion was creeping in, everybody had lined up against Whisperer, who, they all

thought privately, was the most obstinate man they had ever met. ‘Oh, get your hand off your dick!’

the Homeland Secretary told him in exasperation at one point. It was so unladylike, such an un-Christian turn of phrase, even she was shocked that she had said it. Then Whisperer laughed, good man that he was, and everybody else joined in.

As a result, they were all in a better mood when Whisperer suddenly came up with the first genuinely good idea. He was the one who thought up Polonium-210.

The reason why they had all found him so obstinate was that he refused to move forward on any

suggestion until somebody could explain to him how you could launch a worldwide dragnet for a man without revealing why you wanted him.

‘So we go to the Pakistanis and say we desperately need your help but, sorry, we won’t tell you the

reason,’ he said. ‘Not only will they be offended, but it will lead to speculation and, in my experience, when enough people speculate, somebody always gets it right.’

Later on, after they had all finished laughing at the homeland secretary’s brain-snap, Whisperer was taking them through the problem yet again: ‘We’re talking about using the resources of the entire US intelligence community and its allies. That’s over a hundred thousand people chasing one man.

Everybody’s going to assume it’s a terrorist and what are we going to say …’

His voice trailed away as his mind, running ahead of his voice, hit an unseen ramp and launched

into clean air.

The president looked at him. ‘What’s the matter?’

Whisperer smiled at them. ‘What we are going to say is that we have highly credible intelligence

that the kidnapping of the foreign nationals was part of a much larger plot.

‘It was to raise money in order to try to acquire a gram of Polonium-210.’

‘A nuclear trigger?’ the Secretary of State said.

‘That’s right,’ explained Whisperer. ‘We’ll say that either the man, or the organization he’s part of, are in the final stages of building a suitcase nuclear device.’

As the idea sank in, the others looked like cavemen who had just discovered fire. ‘Everybody will

help,’ the Secretary of Defense said. ‘There’s not a country in the world – not even the lunatic fringe –

who wants someone building a dirty bomb in their backyard.’

‘It’ll give us a reason to launch the biggest manhunt in history,’ Whisperer replied. ‘It’s so serious, nobody will question it – who’d make up something like that? Of course, we’ll act reluctant even to

reveal it—’

‘But we’ll leak it ourselves,’ the homeland secretary added. ‘Something reputable – the
Times
or the
Post
.’

Whispering Death smiled – now they were getting the idea.

‘It’ll cause panic,’ the chief-of-staff said, making sure that his sensible counsel was loud enough for the recorder.

‘Sure it will – but not as much as smallpox,’ Whisperer responded. He had already thought of the

public reaction and didn’t believe it was a deal-breaker. ‘It’s one bomb, one city. The president can assure the public we have the resources to stop it.’

Everybody turned to the commander-in-chief to see his reaction and were surprised to find that the

sadness on his face was even more pronounced than usual.

‘It’s a terrible commentary on our times,’ he said, ‘when a suitcase nuclear bomb is more palatable

than the truth.’

They weren’t stupid people, none of them, and it gave them all pause to think. Where did it start?

they must have wondered. How did the world ever get this crazy?

But Whispering Death was a practical man, the toughest of any of them, and he didn’t believe there

was any profit in spending too long reflecting on Man’s enmity to Man.

‘It means we can cover the airports and borders with agents and arm them with scanning devices. It

won’t matter what we call ’em – Geiger counters or whatever – as long as they read body temperature.

‘That’s one of the first signs of infection with smallpox. Naturally, we’ll pay close attention to Arabs or Muslims – so what if it’s profiling? Anyone with an elevated temperature will be directed to secondary screening and quarantine if necessary.’

The Secretary of State interrupted. ‘Is that the most likely method of attack, people deliberately—’

‘Suicide infectees,’ Whisperer said, picking up the thread. ‘Several years ago, we ran an exercise

called Dark Winter, and that’s always been the favoured hypothesis.

‘If we can nail one of the vectors, then track it back – reverse-engineer their movements – we’ll find the people responsible.’

There was silence, but Whisperer knew it was the silence of success, not disappointment. It had taken hours, but now they had a workable strategy. In the circumstances, it was an excellent plan, and they couldn’t be faulted for the fact that their faces were showing a small flush of hope and confidence.

It was just a pity it didn’t have a chance of working.

First, no matter how many agents were put on the case, there was only a handful of people who knew of the Saracen’s movements, and they certainly weren’t disposed to help anybody. When Lord

Abdul Mohammad Khan heard that all hell was breaking loose and that the Pakistanis, the Afghans –

and even, for shit’s sake, the Iranian government – were searching for a man who had been travelling through the Hindu Kush and was supposedly trying to acquire a nuclear trigger, he couldn’t be sure it had anything to do with the doctor who had once been such a fiend with a Blowpipe. But, just to be on the safe side, he sent a courier – one of his grandsons, so he could be trusted completely – with a verbal message to the Iranian kidnappers. The content was simple: it told them, on their mother ’s life, that he expected them not to say anything about what they had done for him in grabbing the three foreigners. The message back was just as simple. On their mother ’s life, their lips were sealed.

The second problem was that the people in the White House believed in the weight of numbers, they believed in agents at every airport, they believed in scanners and elevated body temperature. They believed, like an article of faith, in suicide infectees as vectors. The Saracen, however, didn’t and, in view of the fact that he was the one with the smallpox, that was a critical distinction.

Dawn was touching the horizon, and the Secretary of State had just asked if they could get some food sent in when they heard from Echelon.

Chapter Forty-nine

TWO PHONE CALLS. The first pull from echelon had produced two satellite calls and both of them fitted the search criteria better than anyone could have expected.

Made three days apart, both of them were slam-dunk in the designated time frame and, although there had been a fair amount of atmospheric interference – probably another storm moving through

the Hindu Kush or that damned wind blowing all the way to China – the NSA analysts who had handled the high-priority search for the White House were certain they had been made within a few

miles of the ruined village.

It was quite possible that they were made from
within
the village, but that level of precision would have to wait for the IBM Roadrunners to try to determine the exact coordinates by filtering out the interference.

In addition, the two people on the line – the man in the Hindu Kush and a woman at a public phone

box in southern Turkey – were both speaking English, although it wasn’t their native tongue.

The president and Whisperer, listening to the chief-of-staff’s report, looked at one another, and their expression said what the three Cabinet secretaries were thinking:
could it get any better than
this?

Then their luck ran out.

The two people on the phone might have been using English, but it didn’t help much. On the first