63
GIDEON TRIED TO focus on the road as Fordyce began to talk. “There’s a book proposal here, just ten pages. It’s titled OPERATION CORPSE.”
Gideon eased off the accelerator, slowing down to eighty so he could devote more attention to Fordyce. “A book proposal?”
“Yeah. An outline for a thriller.”
“About nuclear terrorists?”
“No. About smallpox.”
“Smallpox? What does that have to do with anything?”
“Just listen.” Fordyce paused, gathering his thoughts. “You need to understand some background first. The outline explains that, as a human disease, smallpox was completely wiped out in the wild back in 1977. All remaining viral cultures held in laboratories were destroyed…except for two. One is currently at the State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology in Koltsovo, Russia. And the other is at USAMRIID, in—” Fordyce paused for effect—“Fort Detrick, Maryland.”
Gideon felt himself go cold. “No shit.”
“The outline tells the story of a gang that plans to steal the smallpox from Fort Detrick. They want to get their hands on it and threaten to release it—in order to blackmail the world. They want a hundred billion dollars and their own small country—an island in the Pacific. They plan to keep the smallpox as protection, a guarantee of sorts, on their island and live out their lives in luxury and comfort.”
“So far, I don’t see the connection.”
“The rub is how they’re going to steal the smallpox: by creating a fake Islamic terrorist plot to detonate a nuke in DC.”
Gideon glanced at the agent. “Sink me.”
“And here’s the kicker: they fake the terrorist plot with an irradiated corpse—left in an apartment in New York City, made to look like it was killed in a radiation accident involving a nuclear bomb core. And the apartment is salted with phony evidence linking the man to radical Islamists and a jihadist terror cell.”
“Chalker,” Gideon said.
“Exactly. Not to mention a calendar with the intended date, and a burned map of Washington with potential targets.”
The wheels in Gideon’s mind began to turn. “Fort Detrick is only forty miles from Washington.”
Fordyce nodded. “Right.”
“So the threat to DC will have drawn off most of the soldiers at Fort Detrick.”
“Exactly,” said Fordyce. “Not only will the nuclear threat empty Fort Detrick of soldiers, but it’ll also strip away most of the security from USAMRIID, leaving the smallpox vulnerable.”
“Unbelievable,” said Gideon.
“In the outline, they have an inside contact who’s given them the codes to get into the vault where the virus is. They walk in, punch in the codes, open the biosafe holding the smallpox, take out a few frozen cultures, and walk out. The smallpox cultures are stored in these cryogenically sealed disks that are so small they can be hidden in your pocket.” Fordyce tapped the laptop. “It’s all here—in a book outline Blaine wrote six years ago. And get this: it says here the idea for the book was based on an actual covert operation launched by the British during World War Two, called Operation Mincemeat. British intelligence floated a corpse off the coast of Spain. Supposedly, it was the body of a high-level Brit officer drowned in a plane crash. In the pockets of the corpse were secret documents indicating that the Allies were going to invade Italy through Greece and Sardinia. But the whole thing was a plant—a scheme to misdirect the Germans from England’s true invasion plans. And it totally fooled the Germans, all the way up to Hitler himself.”
There was a brief silence as Gideon processed this. “British intelligence,” he murmured. “MI6. Just like Blaine.”
“The only difference,” Fordyce went on, “is that Chalker wasn’t a corpse.”
“Even alive, he was damn effective,” said Gideon. “Even a massive dose of radiation takes time to kill. They must’ve kidnapped him, kept him locked up, and performed God only knows what kind of brainwashing on him.”
“That dog crate in the lab we found,” Fordyce said. “It probably wasn’t for a dog, after all.”
“So those crazy rantings of Chalker about being kidnapped, experimented on, weren’t so crazy after all.” Gideon paused. “They framed him for being a jihadist—just like they framed me.”
Fordyce tapped at the keyboard. “Let me read you something. It says in this proposal that, since it’s been forty years since smallpox was seen in the wild, most people alive today have no resistance to it. It would scythe right through the human race. Check this out.”
Variola major, or smallpox, is considered by many epidemiologists to be the worst disease ever to afflict humankind. Depending on the strain, the mortality rate can run as high as one hundred percent. Variola is as infectious as the common cold and spreads like wildfire. Even those who survive are physically scarred for life and often blind as well.
Smallpox causes one of the most frightening and terrible deaths known. It commences with high fever, muscle pain, and vomiting. A rash develops, covering the body with hard, distended pustules, often forming on the tongue and palate. In its fulminating form, the pustules merge to form a single pustule-like covering to the victim’s entire body. The blood leaks out of the vessels into the muscles and organs, and the eyes fill up with blood and turn bright red. The symptoms of the disease are often accompanied by acute mental distress in which neurological changes cause the victim to suffer an overwhelming feeling of suffocating terror, a dread of impending doom. All too often, that fear becomes reality.
The World Health Organization has stated that a single case of smallpox appearing anywhere in the world would be a “worldwide medical emergency of the highest order” and would require “a complete and total quarantine of the infected region combined with an emergency ‘ring of vaccination’ program as containment. It seems likely that significant military force would be required to implement an effective quarantine of infected areas.”
When Fordyce finished reading there was silence in the car, the humming of the tires filling the space.
“So Blaine had an idea for a novel,” said Gideon. “He worked out all the details, wrote the proposal. It was going to make a terrific thriller. And then he realized it was too good to waste on a book. He decided to do it—for real.”
Fordyce nodded.
“I bet he went for it when he met Chalker and realized what a golden opportunity had just fallen into his lap. I mean, what better scapegoat for his irradiated corpse than a nuclear scientist at Los Alamos who’d converted to Islam?”
“Yes,” said Fordyce. “And another thing: I’d bet we’re dealing with a larger group here—not just Blaine. Novak’s in on it, and there must be others. This isn’t the kind of thing you can pull off solo.”
“You’re right. And I’ll bet one of those others is—or was—an airplane mechanic.”
“But here’s what I don’t get. Without a real nuke, how did they irradiate Chalker?”
Gideon considered this. “There are other ways. The most obvious would be with the radio-isotopes used in medical diagnoses.”
“That stuff’s easily available?”
“Not easily. But it is available to those with the right licenses. The thing is, medical isotopes are generally fission products of uranium or plutonium, the result of controlled criticality reactions. Of course, they’d have to calculate radioactive isotope ratios based on medical radioactivity, due to the fission yields driving these isotopic ratios.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“What I mean is, it could be done. You could fake a nuclear core accident by leaving traces of medical radio-isotopes in just the right ratios. Not only that, but medical radio-isotopes could have been used to irradiate Chalker, as well.”
“What about the U-235 they found on Chalker’s hands?” asked Fordyce.
“If you had an inside contact at Los Alamos—like Novak, say—that wouldn’t be difficult. All you’d need is a few nanograms. Someone could obtain that amount by simply swiping the tip of a gloved finger on a piece of U-235. The glove would bring away many nanograms of material that could then be transferred to Chalker’s hands with a mere handshake.”
“So why didn’t anyone consider the possibility this was faked?”
“It’s so improbable,” Gideon answered. “So…outré. Would you ever have guessed?”
Fordyce thought about this a moment. “Never.”
“Blaine must have rented that Queens apartment, supposedly for Chalker. No wonder Chalker said it wasn’t his place—chances were he’d never been there before. They probably kept him in that basement cage until he was suitably disoriented. Then they irradiated him, put a gun in his hand, and stuck him in Sunnyside with an innocent family. All for blackmail, for money.”
“If you’re talking smallpox, for a whole hell of a lot of money, no doubt.”
Gideon shook his head. “Jesus, that’s cold.”
They flashed past a sign announcing they were entering Virginia. Gideon slowed further.
“N-Day is here,” said Fordyce, glancing at his watch. “And we’ve got maybe five hours to figure out how we’re going to stop this thing.”