The Widow's Strike (10 page)

A
s th
e scientist
took a
chair, Malik scanned around, looking for the net closing on him. Seeing nothing, he glanced at his cell for an alert. He had brought both Roshan and Sanjar with him, leaving the other two team members at the safe house with the son, and was using them on both ends of Biopolis Way. If any police vehicles closed on the Chronos building, they would have to pass by his team.

The phone was clear, and he sat down.

Dr. Nakarat remained mute. Malik saw a slight tremor in his hands and relaxed, believing the initial phone call had worked. Even so, he started with the threats.

“I assume you did not alert anyone about our conversation?”

“No, no. I have told no one. Please. I’ve followed all of your instructions. What do you want? I have no money. I think you’ve made a mistake. Please, let my son go and I promise I won’t tell anyone about this.”

“You
do
have something I value, but before we get to that, I want to make sure you understand what will happen to your son should anyone suspect anything. Make no mistake, he will be killed in a most painful manner. Of course you will not speak to anyone, but you must also watch your mannerisms. Your day-to-day interactions. No one must suspect a thing or Kavi will pay the price. You understand?”

“Yes! Dear God, yes. What do you want?”

“It’s simple. You have been working on a vaccine for an H5N1 virus modified for airborne transmission in humans. I want five samples of that virus, along with the recipe for the vaccine.”

He saw the doctor blanch, the blood draining from his face. He thought it was the enormity of the request until the doctor recovered enough to speak.

“I . . . we . . . yes, we were working on a vaccine, but we were ordered to stop. The virus has been destroyed. I don’t have five samples.”

Malik heard the words but had trouble assimilating them. Before he could speak, Dr. Nakarat began babbling.

“A man died during the research. We couldn’t continue. The vaccine didn’t work anyway. It failed completely in males and rendered females as asymptomatic carriers. They carried the virus without getting sick. You see? I don’t have five samples. I’m telling you the truth. Please, let my son go. I’ll give you anything else I have. Anything I can find.”

Malik understood now why he had gone white. He believed he was killing his son because he couldn’t help.

“Can you re-create the virus?”

Dr. Nakarat squeezed his fists together. “No! Not by myself. I’d have to use the entire team.”

Malik scowled, and the scientist became shrill. “Please. There may be one sample. I heard management talking about saving a copy of the virus. I didn’t see it, but maybe you should ask them. I can contact them right now. Bring them here.”

He pulled out his phone and Malik raised his hand. “Stop.”

Clearly, the scientist was cracking. He couldn’t even see how stupid his statement was.

Dr. Nakarat waited, his hands trembling hard enough to rap the phone against the table in a drumbeat.

Malik said, “You will get this sample. You have access to it.”

“No! I don’t. I swear.”

“Think, doctor. You were shut down because of the risk involved, yes?”

When he nodded, Malik continued. “There is no way they took such a dangerous thing out of the lab. They can’t simply lock it up in the glove box of their car. Where would it be in the lab? In a controlled environment?”

Dr. Nakarat’s eyes darted left and right as he began cataloging his workspace in his mind. After a few seconds, they settled back on Malik, now with some hope.

“The patent reefer. That’s where it will be. We have a double security zone there, not because the material in it is dangerous, but because it’s proprietary. They don’t want anyone stealing the formulas through industrial espionage.”

Malik smiled. “Good. Very good. Can you access it?”

“I suppose so. I have in the past, but only with other scientists. I have never gone in there by myself. And the company will know every move I make. I’m telling you, they’re serious about espionage. I’ll have to log out the sample, and they’ll know.”

“No, doctor. You’re still thinking with the company. You need to be thinking with your son. I ask again, can you do it without alerting the lab?”

At the mention of Kavi, Dr. Nakarat began to tremble anew, a thin sheen of sweat appearing on his upper lip.

“I’ll have to create a reason to go in. Something tomorrow. I won’t be able to access it until Tuesday at the earliest.”

“Tuesday? I want it right now.”

“That’s impossible! It’s Sunday. The lab is closed! No way can I do that. I couldn’t even get into the patent reefer today if I wanted. It’s locked down and alarmed. I need at least a day to create an excuse, or they’ll know.”

Malik fought the logic in his mind but eventually relented. “Okay. Tuesday it is. I need you to call your son’s boarding school and tell them he is with you. Tell them you had a family emergency or something else that will keep them from attempting to find him.” He watched the scientist’s shoulders droop and said, “I’m not stupid, doctor. Please believe that I’ll know before you what treachery you plan.”

While the doctor called, Malik considered what he knew.
One sample.
Not the original plan. He’d only be able to create one cluster instead of five spread throughout the United States. One cluster that might be contained if the American health care system was fast enough. He needed to come up with something to defeat that. Then he remembered what the scientist had said about the vaccine.

It didn’t work anyway. Didn’t that make the entire mission moot? He had planned on Iranian scientists genetically reproducing the vaccine, getting enough doses to protect as many people in Iran as possible, starting immediately, before the virus was released. Of course, they’d leave out all the dissidents who continually attempted to protest against the regime. Kill two birds with one stone, as it were.

Now they had nothing. They’d simply end up with 50 percent of the population running around like rats carrying the black plague.

Rats carrying the plague.
Malik’s fertile mind turned the thought over, and an idea began to form. When the doctor ended his conversation with the school, he said, “All’s well?”

“Yes. They believe he’s visiting me here.”

“Good. Tell me about this vaccine. Does it really protect females?”

“Yes. Well, it keeps them from showing any flu symptoms but doesn’t destroy the virus. It’s worthless. I thought we might have found the genetic flaw from that generation of the vaccine, but we never got to test the final one we produced. We were shut down before then.”

“Can they pass on the disease, or do they just carry it?”

“They’re contagious, but not airborne. We ran a test on the virus after we developed it but before we began the vaccine protocol. If we put a ferret in one isolator box and let him breathe into a tube, forcing the exhalations into the other isolator box with a healthy ferret, we succeeded in killing both ferrets. That’s how we knew it was airborne. We ran that test again with the vaccinated females but didn’t get the same results. If we manually transmitted bodily fluids to other ferrets, though, they became infected.”

Dr. Nakarat held his hands up. “I see where you’re going with this. Trust me, the vaccine failed. Once the secondary ferret became infected, he was as pathogenic as any of them, airborne or otherwise. Lethal.”

You have no idea where I’m going with this.
“I want that vaccine as well. Not the final untested one. The generation before it, that you tested.”

“Why?”

“Not your concern.” He passed across a cell phone. “Call me when you have the virus. There’s only one number in the contact list. Mine. I will know if the phone contacts anyone else.” Before the scientist could pick it up, he said, “Give me your cell phone in return.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t want you leaving here and thinking up something stupid or inadvertently giving away what you’re doing when someone calls. Just tell everyone it died.”

Next, Malik slid across a hotel key-card. “That’s to a suite in the Marina Bay Sands hotel. From here on out, don’t go home. Sleep there.”

Now becoming numb at the loss of control, the doctor stammered, “W-what about clothes? Toiletries? I need to go get them.”

“There’s a mall in the hotel. Buy what you need and charge it to the room. Do not go back home. Eat, sleep, and shop at the Marina Bay Sands. Until this is done, that is your entire universe. Understood?”

When the scientist picked up the key, Malik clamped a hand down on his arm and squeezed. “Do not, in any way, attempt to cross me.”

Dr. Nakarat nodded his head over and over again. When Malik released his arm, the doctor scampered away without even looking back, the mouse escaping the snake.

Malik realized that the doctor hadn’t even had the presence of mind to demand the most rudimentary requirement of a hostage negotiation: proof of life. He’d spoken to his son on the initial phone call, and that was it. The doctor hadn’t even asked about transfer procedures. Now it didn’t matter what Malik did with the son, as the next meeting would be the final one. It would be too late to demand anything, as he could simply take what the doctor brought.

He found Sanjar and Roshan outside the Buona Vista LRT station. “Have the team dispose of the boy. He’s now become superfluous. Make sure they do it in a planned way. Nothing sloppy. Make sure that he won’t be found. Nobody will be looking from this end, so the only mistake will be our own. There’s no urgency to the situation. Whatever you do, don’t kill him in the house. My name is on the lease.”

When Sanjar nodded, Malik turned to Roshan. “You worked on the Chechnya cell before this mission?”

“Yes.”

“Get me a contact. Someone who can provide a
shahid
.”

“Why them? We can do that ourselves, through Hezbollah.”

“Trust me, Hezbollah has nothing as deadly as what they can provide.”

“I
t wasn’t your
fault,” Doku
said. “The circuitry had a short in it.”

Elina said, “I told you that. Did you not believe me?”

Doku smiled. “I never questioned your commitment, but others would have. It’s good you came back with the vest.”

Elina simply nodded, but inside she relaxed. After the strike against her father’s murderers she had fled the square, returning to live like a wolf in the forest, debating what she should do. She’d stayed for two days, considering her options. She knew the insurgency leadership would be questioning her commitment. Wondering if she was now the enemy—and she’d seen what punishment they meted out to traitors. It would be much, much worse than what she had attempted on the Kadyrovtsy. A slow, painful demise. The only way to prove she was still a Black Widow was to return, but the visit would be fraught with risk. Doku’s statement gave her hope that she’d made the right choice.

He continued. “The attack was spectacular, right in the heart of the beast. Early counts are upwards of fifty people killed, many more injured. Very few civilians.”

“I saw my father’s murderer. That’s all I cared about.”

He said nothing for a moment, considering her words. “So you are done?”

“No,” she said, “Kariina did my duty for me. I still owe for others of my family.”

Doku turned to the window. Speaking over his shoulder, he said, “I’m very glad to hear that. You are different than the other female
shuhada
I have trained. As dangerous as they were, you’re smarter. More cunning. More driven.”

He turned back and said, “Tell me, could you be a
shahid
against someone other than the Kadyrovtsy? Someone that is unrelated to the tragedy that befell your family?”

“Why?”

“Because I have a mission for you. A very special mission.”

“P
ike, you’d better
get up
here.”

I stared at the handheld radio for a split second like it was a snake, then snatched it up and scrambled to the ladder, Jennifer and Decoy hot on my heels. I knew that little sentence would be nothing but trouble.

We’d rented the upper floor of an apartment complex just off Sukhumvit Road, getting both apartments along with roof access. It was the closest place we could find to the anchor we’d been given that would still allow us to maintain anonymity.

Reaching the ladder, I said, “What’s up? The general finally show?”

I knew that wasn’t it, because that wouldn’t have required my presence. Only a jot in the logbook.

The anchor from Kurt had turned out to be a house, recently rented, with the general’s name on the lease. That’s all we had as a starting point, and so far, it had been a bust. We’d maintained eyes on it for close to two days with little to show for it, which would be embarrassing when we were relieved by the inbound team. There had been a couple of men who came and went, and they did look Arabic, but that didn’t mean a whole lot, given the house’s location.

It was situated about a block off of what was known as “Little Arabia,” just off Soi 3 in downtown Bangkok, which, considering the general’s nationality, had seemed to make sense.

Little Arabia was just that: a slice of the Middle East right smack in downtown Bangkok, complete with women wearing full-length abayas and niqab face veils, men in traditional Gulf attire—which we charitably called a man-dress—and signs in Arabic. It had made any close-in reconnaissance hard, because we would have stuck out as bad as if it had been Fallujah.

I exited the roof access and found Knuckles staring at our Wasp screen, while Retro fiddled with a computer. We’d decided to use the UAV first, before getting more aggressive, which is why access to the roof had been key.

Knuckles said, “Take a look. The two tenants are emptying the place, taking out all the Persian rugs.”

I studied the screen, seeing an open trunk of a car in the walled courtyard, the two men coming and going from the house, loading what looked to me like cinder blocks.

“What do you make of it? Are they leaving?”

Which would suck, because we had no other anchor.

Retro said, “That’s not what’s interesting. Look at this, I’ve been running a feed. I’ve got it on tape. The first carpet they brought out was big. And it was moving.”

“Moving?”

He hit play, and I saw both men come out of the house, one on each end of a large rug. When the first man hit the bottom step to the courtyard, the rug began to writhe up and down, left and right, until it popped out of his hands. He immediately jumped on it, while the second man began beating the top part of the carpet with something I couldn’t identify. After three or four blows, the rug became still, and the men loaded it into the backseat of the car.

What the hell? Who do they have?

Retro said, “We kept eyes on afterward, and the rug doesn’t move again. Whoever is in it is either dead or out cold.”

Shit. This really causes a dilemma.

My mission was simply to get a handle on the general, then pass off everything I knew to the inbound team—the clean team—for them to exploit in accordance with whatever the Oversight Council deemed necessary. In no way was I to do anything that might invite compromise of my team or the mission. Interdict this escapade, and the Iranians would
know
they were being watched. Don’t interdict, and whoever was bound up in the rug was more than likely dead.

Which really made life difficult when you were supposed to be the white knight. A choice that had no good ending. I had seen this exact same thing play out in Iraq. Watching a nobody who was going to lead us to a somebody, only to have the nobody begin to do something evil right in front of us, like shoving some poor Iraqi into the trunk of a car.

The choice then had been horrific, stretching my sense of right and wrong to the breaking point and leading to a moral equivocation. If I saved the Iraqi, the terrorist would know his contact was blown, forcing us to start at ground zero as he moved operations and remade his cellular infrastructure, burning anyone who might lead to him. But if I didn’t, I was culpable for a death, because I had the power to stop it.

It was much more than a simple equation of immediate right versus wrong, because saving the one guy in the trunk most definitely would ensure that others would die later on. The terrorist would remain operational while we climbed up the tree again, and every day lost in the hunt was another day for him to kill.

It had been a hard decision, but I made it with the overarching mission in mind.

Knuckles said, “They’re locking up the house. They’re finished. What do you want to do?”

I felt the time disappearing like water down a drain, knowing there was only so much before it no longer mattered and the sink was empty. I considered the same choices as before, along with the repercussions. The general, according to Kurt, was up to some very destructive actions. Much worse than the killing of a single guy. Hell, I didn’t even know if the man in the rug wasn’t bad as well, somebody who had been facilitating Iranian operations and was now no longer of any use.

On the other hand, I didn’t know if he
was
either.

“They’re in the car, lights just came on.”

Screw it. Anyone bitches, I’ll say we did the same thing in Iraq.

“You got a pinecone on the Wasp?”

Knuckles grinned. “Yeah.”

“Deploy it and vector me in. Jennifer, stay here and help with the airborne surveillance. Get Kurt on the VPN and let him know what we’ve got. Everyone else, kit up.”

Back in Iraq, on my call, we’d saved the man in the trunk in a vehicle interdiction, and he’d ended up being nothing but a farmer with some bad luck. I’d gotten a ration of shit about it until we’d killed the terrorist two nights later in blind luck. Or maybe it had been karma. The farmer became a staunch supporter of all Coalition operations, along with his entire extended family—which, although it wasn’t why I had executed, had helped the overarching mission.

I figured Spock could kiss my ass again. Sometimes the needs of the one outweighed the needs of the many.

While the rest of the team raced back down the ladder, Knuckles’s grin faded to a sour look. I said, “Hey, you’re still too beat-up. Somebody’s got to man the beacon, and we might need your insider knowledge of the prison in about six hours.”

Jennifer smiled at that, saying, “I’ll make sure he stays on the roof.”

As I turned to go, the weight of the decision sinking in, she grabbed my sleeve. “This is the right thing, no matter how it turns out. Don’t second-guess once you’re on the road.”

The comment brought a measure of calm, reminding me of why I had joined the Taskforce in the first place, an organization designed to prevent death and destruction by preemptive actions. She was always a good sounding board, which was the very reason I had asked her to join as well. Her moral compass had no equivocation. It was black and white, right and wrong. Nobody else could puncture my sense of superiority like Jennifer. And nobody else could poke her back in the eye like I could.

I said, “Yeah, yeah. Don’t worry. I’m doing it for the guy in the carpet. I wouldn’t execute just because I want to go kick some ass. I’m not like Knuckles.”

She gave me her disapproving-teacher look, and I said, “Just get that beacon emplaced, or it’s a dead issue. That thing isn’t the best we’ve ever used.”

Which was an understatement. I, personally, thought the pinecone was the dumbest idea ever conceived. Something that sounds great on paper but ends up being a waste of tax dollars. It had been thrown in as a benny when we’d modified the Wasp UAV, but as far as I knew, it had never been used operationally because of its shortcomings in emplacement.

Basically, it was a normal beacon that operated off of the cell network, about the size of a fifty-cent piece and twice as thick. The unique thing was how it was emplaced. It was secured onto the bottom of the Wasp with electronic magnets and had a single wing sticking out of its side that also served as its antenna. When the power was cut to the magnet, it fell free and floated down, spinning like a seed from a pinecone on its single wing, auto-rotating until it made contact with the target, where another magnet held it in place. As a beacon it worked pretty well, with a battery life of over twelve hours. The problem was getting it on the target.

The big idea had come because of the Wasp’s limited range. It couldn’t track a car like the Predator or Reaper. Its range was just too shallow, and it flew too slowly to be able to match the speed of a car. The great idea had been to equip the Wasp with the pinecone, the theory being that when you saw you were going to lose the car, you’d beacon it for further tracking. Unfortunately, the very things that made the Wasp unsuitable for tracking on its own made it unsuitable for emplacing the beacon. It had proven impossible to drop the pinecone with any hope of it hitting a moving car. Great idea in theory, sorry in execution.

Until now. The Bangkok traffic would limit the speed these guys could move, and with its stop-and-go nature, we actually might succeed. Especially since there was no way the target was going to be breaking any traffic laws with a body in the back.

For once, I hoped I’d eat my words about how stupid the idea had been.