Prime (Chess Team Adventure, #0.5)

That got Parker’s attention.

If the Voynich manuscript did date back to the 1400s, then it wasn’t too much of stretch to believe that it might contain knowledge about the Black Death, which had ravaged Europe less than a century earlier. The plague bacteria had already been used as a bio-weapon; it was widely believed that the first outbreak of the disease in Europe had occurred after an invading Mongol army catapulted infected bodies into the besieged city of Caffa. Seven hundred years later, the organism that had caused the plague—Yersinia pestis—remained a pathogen with deadly potential for exploitation as a germ warfare agent.

Ultimately, it didn’t matter whether the Voynich manuscript really contained information about the plague, or even if it could be decoded at all. Somebody was trying to cook up a nasty new weapon, and it was his job—his team’s job—to identify them and put them in the ground.

“That’s good enough for me,” he said, rising to his feet.

Sasha’s face creased in confusion. “You…believe me? Just like that?”

“It doesn’t matter what I believe.” His grin was back, but this time it was a cold smile of anticipation. “I’ve got a job to do. It’s going to be a busy night.”





FOUR


Washington, D.C.



Domenick Boucher waited patiently for the President’s daily national security briefing to conclude. As Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, he’d been the first to speak, providing the Commander-in-Chief with a succinct snapshot of how the world had changed during the previous twenty-four hours. He had then listened attentively as other members of the National Security Council had done the same, but all the while his thoughts never strayed far from the one piece of information he had withheld; he clenched it in his mind, like a hand grenade with the safety pin removed. It was an apt simile. He was about to drop this particular grenade on Tom Duncan’s desk, and the odds were good that neither of them would be able to escape the shitstorm of political shrapnel that would follow.

When the President finally dismissed the meeting, Boucher stood with the rest of the attendees but didn’t join the exit queue. President Duncan settled into the executive chair behind the Resolute Desk and leaned back, crossing his arms over his chest. “Something on your mind, Dom?”

Boucher pursed his lips. “Mr. President…”

“It’s just us, Dom. Spit it out.”

Easier said than done. Boucher wasn’t just the DCIA; he was also Tom Duncan’s friend, and that made this so much harder. He took a single sheet of paper from his leather portfolio and placed it in on the desktop. Duncan ignored it, maintaining eye contact with Boucher, compelling him to speak.

“Last night, a Delta team running CT operations in Ramadi captured two couriers working with the al-Awda resistance—”

“Refresh my memory.”

“Al-Awda is Arabic for ‘The Return,’ as in the return of Saddam Hussein. It’s a small group, made up of Ba’ath party members and Saddam loyalists. They’ve mostly been marginalized since Operation Red Dawn, but information recovered last night suggests that they are still active. We think they might have set up shop at a remote site east of Samarra…” Boucher paused a beat then dropped the grenade. “It looks like the place is an undocumented Iraqi bio-weapons laboratory.”

Duncan processed this for a moment then leaned forward, his palms flat on the desk to either side of the unread brief. “Undocumented? Christ, Dom, are you telling me that we’ve finally found the smoking gun?”

“I’m afraid it looks that way.”

In October 2002, after several months of evident non-compliance on the part of Saddam Hussein’s government with UN weapons inspectors, the United States Congress voted to authorize military action against Iraq. Four months later, the US Secretary of State, speaking before the United Nations Security Council, presented evidence of an ongoing Iraqi effort to develop weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), with the intent of using them against Western nations. Shortly thereafter, the war began. Almost two hundred thousand soldiers from the United States and three other countries, swept across the border, and in just twenty-one days of fighting, toppled the Ba’athist regime of Saddam Hussein.

But no WMDs were found.