Black Flagged Redux

Chapter 38





7:50 PM

CIA Headquarters

Langley, Virginia





Karl Berg shut his laptop and looked up at Audra, who was rubbing her temples and staring at one of her two flat-screen monitors. It was nearly eight o'clock on Sunday evening, and the two agents had been working in her office since nine in the morning. They had put most of the final touches on the package that Audra would bring to the National Clandestine Service's director, Thomas Manning, as soon as he arrived on Monday morning. Berg would meet Audra here a few hours before the director's usual arrival time and add the laboratory evidence they expected to receive from Finland.

"I wish I could be there to see the looks on their faces. It’s not every day that someone delivers a cooler stuffed with a severed head," Berg said.

"I don't like to think about it. Brilliant overall, considering what we suspect…but gruesome," she said.

"They don't seem to be constrained by the same psychological processes that keep the rest of us in check. I don't know where Sanderson finds these guys, but he certainly does his homework."

"I hate to say it, but we need people like this on our side."

"I couldn't agree with you more. I'm calling it a night. I'll be in at 3:30 to make sure the lab reports are available for your report. I'm keeping the team in Helsinki for now, just in case," he added.

The embassy in Helsinki had arranged for priority handling of the team's biological sample at the Division of Infectious Diseases in the Helsinki University Hospital. They felt confident with Sanderson's team moving the sample. The location of the Gulfstream's wreckage remained a mystery, and she didn't expect the Russians to disclose the location. Damage from an air-to-air missile was nearly impossible to hide from seasoned investigators. With the Russians playing hardball, anything was possible. The team was expected to arrive in Ouru, Finland, within three hours and would be placed on a commercial flight leaving at 11:30 AM, local time. They both doubted the Russians would shoot down a Boeing 717 flown by Scandinavian Airlines.

The evidence gathered in Monchegorsk would be the tipping point. Audra expected their package to make its way to the White House immediately after the meeting. From that point forward, it would likely be out of their hands. Pictures of the Russian Army Mobile Battlefield feed had also been sent to Reuters in London, and nobody could predict the fallout that would ensue from worldwide exposure of the Russians’ siege in Monchegorsk.

Russian military authorities had been careful with their wording of the orders, and Berg saw no mention of an epidemic in any of the digital images taken from the battalion commander’s MBT. The word "insurgency" was used in place of "epidemic", and the infected were called "insurgents." Russian military orders to shoot insurgents on sight would provoke international outrage, and the United Nations would demand an investigation, but the Russians weren't likely to bow to this pressure. Berg didn't think that the world would discover the true scope of Monchegorsk's tragedy within a useful timeframe, so with Kaparov's help, Berg still planned to send Sanderson's team after Reznikov.

He didn't trust the speed at which the White House bureaucracy would react to the threat. Their only hope of quickly discovering the true implications of the Kazakhstan laboratory remained with the Russian scientist. There was little doubt that he had poisoned Monchegorsk, with cataclysmic results. At this point, Reznikov's link to Al Qaeda was purely circumstantial and in most cases, anecdotal. They needed time sensitive information that couldn't wait for weeks of sleep deprivation and waterboarding in a secret location. If the virus had been mass produced for Al Qaeda, which he suspected, the West might be looking at days, instead of weeks, before a massive coordinated biological attack. He needed Sanderson's team to find Reznikov before the Russians silenced him.