Peyton chewed her lip. She knew the recommendations were prudent but also that they would take time—especially the request to the National Reconnaissance Office, where bureaucratic red tape was a fact of life.
“How long would all that take?” Elliott asked.
“Unknown. DOD would have to advise on the RDF and vessel alignment; we’re not privy to their fleet positioning, but it’s safe to assume there are suitable vessels in the Gulf of Aden, Arabian Sea, and Indian Ocean. NRO would have to feed in on the sat requisition.”
“Can you guess?”
“Maybe seventy-two hours,” Richards said, “but I would again urge you not to go to Mandera at all, and if you do, to wait. Somalia is a failed state. We haven’t had an embassy there since ’91. It closed two years before the Battle of Mogadishu—that’s when the Black Hawk Down incidents took place. Frankly, that’s what you’ll be looking at if al-Shabaab militants find you and engage the Kenyan army. We’ve got a couple hundred US troops at the Mogadishu airport, but I can’t comment on whether they’d be able to assist in an emergency. I know CIA has special operators in Somalia. Also status unknown.”
Elliott looked over at Peyton. They had worked together so long, knew each other so well, that she could sense what he was thinking. She confirmed it with a short nod that silently said, We both know what we have to do.
“All right,” Elliott said, “we’d like to put in the requests to the NRO and DOD and expedite them as much as possible. I’ll have the director make calls.”
“You’re going to wait?” Richards asked.
“No. We’re going to deploy to Mandera with all possible haste.”
Richards shook his head in disbelief.
Elliott held up his hands. “Look, if we don’t stop this outbreak in Mandera, we’ll be fighting it in Nairobi and Mombasa and then in Cairo and Johannesburg and Casablanca. If we can’t stop it in Africa, we’ll be dealing with it here at home, in Atlanta, Chicago, New York, and San Francisco. Seventy-two hours could mean the difference between a local outbreak and a global pandemic, between a dozen deaths and millions. Right now, infected individuals could be boarding buses, trains, and airplanes. We don’t know who they are or where they’re going. They may well be on their way to infect cities anywhere in the world—cities that aren’t on alert, that have no idea that a deadly pathogen has just touched down within its borders. Our only chance of stopping this outbreak is containing it. That has to happen now, not three days from now. Our people are among the best trained in the world. They need to be there—right now. We’re the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. We can’t control this disease over the phone.”
When the conference broke, Peyton spoke privately to the EIS officers she’d selected for deployment.
“You heard the security situation. If any of you feel uncomfortable, I need to know now. I’m not going to put anything in your file. I’ll select an alternate and never say a word about it.”
At one p.m., Peyton made her way downstairs and walked nervously through the lobby, unsure how many of the officers she’d find waiting for her.
Outside, it took her eyes a few seconds to adjust to the sun.
When the scene came into focus, she saw every one of the EIS officers she had selected standing in front of the vans, their duffel bags beside them. She nodded at them, and they loaded up and drove to Dobbins Air Reserve Base.
Less than an hour later, they were on their way to Nairobi.
From a chain link fence that ringed Dobbins ARB, the man who had been following Peyton watched the Air Force transport lift off. When it was out of sight, he typed a message to his superiors:
Subject is en route to target zone.
Chapter 9
In the small flat in Berlin’s Wedding neighborhood, Desmond carefully cut the stitches that held the patch inside the suit jacket. The Savile Row label fell away, revealing the contents of the secret pocket: two prepaid Visa credit cards.
The cards were timely—Desmond was almost out of cash—but he had hoped for more. In particular, he had hoped for some clue about who he was, why he was in Berlin, and most of all, what had happened to him before he’d woken up that morning in the Concord hotel with no memories.
Something about the cards struck him as odd: each had a small vertical scratch after the tenth number. To the common eye, it might look random, but the fact that both cards had the mark raised his suspicion. Beside the mark on the first card were four smaller scratches. The second card had two small scratches to the right of the vertical line, just above the card numbers.
Was it another code? If so, it likely followed the pattern on the dry cleaning coupon—a simple substitution cipher. Add four to each of the first ten digits on the first card and two to the first ten digits on the second card. Ten numbers formed an American phone number.
Desmond drew out the prepaid smartphone and dialed, doing the math for each digit in his head. He listened anxiously as the first droning beep sounded. Another. A third. Then voicemail picked up. To his surprise, he heard his own voice.
“If you’ve reached this number, you know what to do. If you don’t, you’d better figure it out fast.”
When the beep sounded, Desmond paused, his mind racing. Was the voicemail box a sort of digital dead drop for messages to someone else? Or was he supposed to try to access the voicemail? He decided to do both.
“It’s Desmond. I need help.” He almost said his phone number, but stopped. The voicemail could have been hacked by whoever had sent Gunter Thorne to his hotel room, or the police could have found it by now. Revealing his new number might paint a target on his back; the police could trace the number to the nearest cell tower and triangulate his approximate location. He needed a digital dead drop of his own—something public and easy to access.