At last everyone’s attention concentrated upon Danilov. He said, “Twice.”
“Which uniquely qualifies you to do so again,” decided Chelyag. “More particularly because such a theft would not have been committed by amateurs and you head the Organized Crime Bureau—”
“Here in Moscow,” broke in Danilov.
“You will operate directly and specifically with the authority of the White House,” Chelyag set out. “Everyone in Gorki—and anywhere else it’s necessary for you to go—will be made aware of that.” He paused, looking around the table again. “General Danilov is to get total and unimpeded cooperation.”
“I don’t think there’s any doubt about the degree or extent of support that is being made available,” said Belik, speaking at last.
Or whom the sacrifice would be in the event of a mistake or failure, Danilov realized. Once more he thought how irrelevant that seemed. On his way home he’d change the flowers on Larissa’s grave. He hadn’t been there for four days.
“I think the bank imposes upon you too much,” complained Elizabeth Hollis. She was a tall, stiffly upright woman, close to being gaunt, her iron-gray hair in tightly permed ridges.
“Nothing I can’t handle,” said Hollis.
“You know how you’ve got to be careful.”
Hollis winced at the reminder. Physically he was a complete contrast to his mother, a round-faced, bespectacled man overweight by at least twenty pounds, which he had been from grade school. As he felt about a lot of things in life, Hollis considered his size unfair. Because of it—and for what doctors labeled a weak chest, because it stopped just short of asthma—he’d been judged unfit for the army cadets and later for the National Guard and had long ago abandoned diets, none of which worked. He was still careful about what he ate, though, as he was careful about everything.
“Dinner will be about half an hour. Steak,” said the woman.
“Broiled,” Hollis insisted at once. “Trim the fat.”
“I know how you like it!” said the woman in mock irritation. “What are you going to do?”
“Work on my computer for a while.”
“I don’t understand why you want to spend the time you do on a computer here when it’s all you do at work.”
“It’s like magic, mother,” said the man in the awed voice of a committed cyber nerd. “There’s nothing I can’t do—nowhere I can’t go.” But some places he wouldn’t go again. He could go on playing the war games—retain his rank as the Quartermaster if he chose—but he wouldn’t maintain the telephone contact code worked out with the General through the personal columns of
Soldier
magazine. It had been a mistake but one easily rectified. Tonight he wouldn’t even go to war. Easily Hollis began cracking into unaware host systems, for them to be charged his usage time, burrowing through three before dialing up the porn channel. He took his time with his selection, too, and when he found the movie he wanted charged it against the credit card number he’d gotten from the issuing bank in Buffalo. The woman was blonde, and it was very easy for Hollis to imagine it was Carole Parker, not an actress.
Clarence Snelling wasn’t enamoured of computers. He didn’t understand them and didn’t want to and thought of them as an enemy, technology that had made him redundant as a clerk, throwing him on the scrap heap on a pension so inadequate he had to scrabble around as a part-time bookkeeper for businesses too small to afford a screen and a keyboard. And those businesses seemed to be decreasing by the day.
To Clarence Snelling a handwritten page of figures was a thing of beauty, art almost. It was nothing at all like the sterile electronically printed sheet he was studying at that moment, comparing it to the ledger into which he was carefully transferring it. He threw the bank statement impatiently aside and called: “Martha! They’ve done it again!”
William Cowley was discomfited by so many still and television cameras, particularly when he was recognized as the man who had gone into the UN building with the germ warfare scientists and became the filmed and question-shouted focus of the gathering. He tolerated the cameras but studiously ignored the questions. Most of the other public figures around him were self-consciously posing to appear unposed, irritated that Cowley’s sudden fame was deflecting attention—and the cameras—away from them.
For the benefit of daytime newscasts and evening newspapers, Henry Hartz, the guttural-voiced, German-born secretary of state, stressed to the assembled journalists that the official status of everyone present showed the importance America was giving to what he referred to as “this appalling near atrocity.” He held up what he claimed to be a personal assurance from the Russian president of complete cooperation, which in fact it wasn’t. It was notification from the Moscow ambassador that such a guarantee had been promised by the Russian Foreign Ministry. Hartz concluded with the promise of a longer statement at the end of the meeting.
Cowley didn’t think, from an earlier breakfast discussion, that Leonard Ross had fully absorbed the horror of what might have been postponed only by a fluke. Even more certainly Cowley didn’t believe the bureau’s twitchingly eager, nervously laughing antiterrorist chief had, either. Burt Bradley was the first director of the bureau’s specially dedicated unit. There’d been the New York World Trade Center attacks and Oklahoma and before that the Beirut U.S. Embassy bombing, but the unit’s primary function had otherwise been liaising with other more frequently attacked European countries. Cowley’s impression wasn’t that Bradley was overawed, as he initially had been. He thought Bradley was positively frightened. And from his just completed personal analysis, he couldn’t condemn the man for it. Any more than he criticized anyone else in the room for what he regarded as performance warmup time, practicing posterity phrases and photo-shoot postures.
“I want a complete update,” opened Hartz, without introducing people he expected already to know each other. His German birth precluded Hartz from ever running for the presidency, which he coveted, but he considered being secretary of state the next best political role and ran his Foggy Bottom fiefdom as he would have run a White House administration, with unquestioned, unchallenged autocracy. He knew—and didn’t mind—that he was referred to within the department as the Führer. Looking between Cowley and Schnecker he said, “Let’s have the scientific thinking first.”
Unencumbered by his protective suit and domed helmet, James Schnecker was a surprisingly small man with an even more surprising tendency to squint, as if suffering unexpected pain twinges. He coughed, clearing his throat, and said professorially, “One warhead contained sarin, a known nerve agent produced in either liquid or vapor form. As liquid it’s absorbed through the skin or mucous membranes; as vapor it’s inhaled, obviously. In both states it attacks the respiratory and nervous systems. You’ll remember it was released on the Tokyo Underground in 1998 by a fanatical religious group. It’s a well known and long-standing weapon, first produced in Germany in 1937. The other warhead contained anthrax which you’re all familiar with after the events of September, 2001. Bacillus anthracio is again a pulmonary complaint. Biologically it’s most commonly found in cattle—although to a much lesser extent in sheep—and in Africa, where it is endemic, humans contract it from tics. It’s produced as a biological weapon as a plasma-encoded toxin by combining three bacillus proteins. Separately none of the proteins has a biologically harmful effect. Combined they create edema, the pathological accumulation of fluid in the body tissues and pulmonary collapse. There’s acute and agonizing swelling and hemorrhaging from all body openings. It attacks the spleen and causes splenetic fever. In weapon form, as it was in this warhead, it infects through inhalation. It’s almost invariably fatal to humans after an incubation period of between one to five days.”
“So it was both a chemical
and
biological attack?” broke in Frank Norton. The president’s chief of staff was a former Pentagon general on the short list for when the present White House incumbent completed his second term of office. He’d already decided that the outcome of what had been thrust upon him now could determine whether there needed to be anyone else in the race. It had been Norton, who cultivated for its political appeal the appearance of the rawboned marine officer he’d once been, who’d proposed the media invitation. The concentration on the goddamned FBI man had been unexpected and annoying.
“Absolutely.” Schnecker frowned, surprised at the question. “We’d never encountered a delivery system like it before at Fort Detrick. It seems to be a modification of a Russian missile known as the Grail or SA-7: two warheads attached to the body of a rocket intended to carry just one. Which probably prevented the catastrophe. It’s top-heavy, quite out of balance. All the forensic examinations we’ve carried out so far point to it spinning, top over bottom, instead of traveling in a proper trajectory. And to it, incredibly, striking glass through which it passed virtually unobstructed. The fins and the body sustained all the impact damage and in doing so snapped the detonation mechanism, which was extremely crude: percussion pins intended to shatter the containers to release their contents.”
“Thank God for a bad design,” said Hartz.
“An almost too obvious bad design,” Burt Bradley broke in quickly. “Bad enough to have been realized from its first test firing. Accepting that it’s Russian, what’s the chances of the warhead being put together here, by unqualified people?”
“All our ferroalloy tests haven’t been completed yet,” the scientist said doubtfully. “So far all the metal is provably Russian. If it was a hybrid cobbled together here, there’d be some American components. I don’t think we should overlook the possibility that we’ve never seen anything like it before because it was a design that
didn’t
work and was abandoned after preliminary or failed tests. The date on the casing was 1974.”
Cowley saw the overly ambitious antiterrorist chief wince at the rejection in front of the FBI director, a carelessly fat, carelessly dressed man. If Ross saw it as a rebuff he gave no indication.
“Guide us here,” demanded the CIA director, John Butterworth, a retired navy admiral anxious to counteract criticism of naive amateurism from intelligence professionals at his Langley appointment. “What would have happened if the missile had
missed
the tower? Flown on?”
Schnecker frowned at the hypothesis. “I can’t itemize every one, but there are quite a few skyscrapers after the UN building it could have hit. Had it done so, there probably wouldn’t have been the miracle of it going through window glass. Or tailfirst. If it missed all the high buildings, I guess it would have gone on into New Jersey. The single payload of the SA-7 is fifteen kilograms, with a range of ten kilometers, or 6.2 miles. This double warhead weighed twenty-two kilograms. That would have shortened the range, which would also have been affected by the top-over-bottom instability. And there was the crosswind. You want a ballpark guess, draw a line down from Newark to Trenton.”
“And how likely would it have been that the warhead would have burst simply by impact against the ground, whether it hit nosefirst or not?” asked Butterworth, a bald, angularly featured man.
Schnecker continued frowning. “It’s another hypothesis, but I would say a rupture of some sort, if not an actual detonation, would have been inevitable.”
“What about the combined effect of both warheads, if they’d exploded?” asked Norton.
“I’m not aware of any research that’s mixed the two. Scientifically it’s not possible to combine them. I think the idea was a double delivery of two separate agents.”
“Are there antidotes, treatment?” said Ross.
“There’s treatment for isolated cases, if it’s immediate. The casualty rate yesterday, if they’d activated, would have been overwhelming.”
“How many?” demanded Norton, seizing the headline question. “The president guessed at a thousand dying.”
Schnecker hesitated. “It could have been more than
a
thousand.”
“How many more?” demanded the man. “Tens or hundreds?”
“It could have gone as high as five, conceivably higher still,” estimated the scientist. “It wouldn’t have simply been the sarin or anthrax. It would have accelerated existing medical conditions from which people were already suffering. The vapor could have gotten into hospitals through the air conditioning.”
“Jesus!” said Norton, the only sound in a long silence.
Breaking it—and remembering his conversation with the UN secretary-general the previous day—Cowley said, “They meant to kill. Dramatically and hugely. Next time they will. And people this determined
will
do it again, if they have a missile. Or a way to get another one.”
“How’s an SA-7 fired?”
“Shoulder-held portable launcher,” replied Schnecker.
“All the statements aren’t in yet, but it’s obvious it was fired from a moving boat,” said Cowley. “Assuming that the UN tower
was
the target, which I think we must, the fact that it was hit at all from a shoulder-held rocket launcher fired from a moving boat—to some extent against the wind—surely indicates whoever did it has some military experience of missiles.”
“I would say so, yes,” agreed Schnecker. “From which a working knowledge of missiles naturally follows.”
Looking to the antiterrorist chief, Cowley said, “There
are
files on known or suspected terrorists, right?”
“Yes?” Bradley frowned.
“Anyone specifically listed with a knowledge of missiles would be worth publicly posting.”
“The check’s already being made,” the younger man said impatiently.
Then it would have helped if you’d mentioned it at the breakfast meeting, thought Cowley. To Schnecker he said, “What about something as practical as fingerprints on the missile?”
Schnecker shook his head. “Clean.”
“Knowingly to set out, as these people did, to kill thousands of people is fanaticism. Zealotry. Or total homicidal madness,” said the terrorist chief, who had a degree in forensic psychology. “Zealous fanaticism fits Islamic fundamentalism, which we’re all familiar with from the past.”
Bradley had shared the breakfast meeting with the FBI director but hadn’t offered any opinion about anything, remembered Cowley. Now Bradley seemed to be trying too hard. Leonard Ross appeared to have the same impression, looking curiously sideways at the man. Cowley said, “Don’t we have the same problem if we’re dealing with a bunch of homicidal maniacs?”
Bradley shook his head. “They wanted to hit and run. So they’ll want to boast, claim responsibility.”
“Why haven’t they, after more than twenty-four hours?” asked Cowley.
“What’s your point?” the younger man demanded belligerently.
“Simply that at this stage, this early, we don’t know enough to speculate about anything and certainly not to exclude any group,” said Cowley.
“The obvious essential is to prevent a repetition,” declared the CIA director. “I suggest we make it immediately public that the missile is a flawed design that won’t work. If the terrorists have another, it might prevent them from trying to use it.”
There were frowns at Butterworth from around the table.
“Sir,” said Schnecker. “The missile that hit the UN building didn’t detonate because it went in backward and through practically unresisting glass. A fluke. If it had hit the concrete of the building, it would have gone off. As would another—bad design or not—if it hit a hard and solid object.”
“How many eyewitnesses do we have?” Hartz broke in quickly, to spare the agency chief.
“Three who seem reliable,” Cowley responded at once. “Another seaplane commuter pilot in addition to the one from Asharoken. And the captain of a trash barge that was going downriver. All were attracted by the firing flash but none was looking directly at the cruiser. They all agree it was motor, not sail, but we’ve got three different descriptions of size, color, and potential make. None of them saw the missile or the launcher, and when there wasn’t any obvious fire or distress signal all three dismissed it.”
“We’ve got nothing, in fact?” demanded Butterworth, too eager again.
“I’ve moved thirty agents up to the New York office,” said Ross. “There
does
seem to be agreement that the cruiser had a flying bridge. The uncertainty is the color: whether it was totally white or had some blue at the waterline. Quite obviously we’re tracing the owners of every flying-bridged cruiser in every marina, yacht basin, and mooring between New York and Boston as well as Long Island. We’re not, in fact, imposing a territorial limit: I’ve gone south as far as the Chesapeake. But we’re talking
thousands
of boats. We’re also, again obviously, checking any cruiser thefts or cruiser hire.” He looked invitingly back to Cowley.
“None of the three we’ve traced so far talk of anyone on the cruiser dressed unusually for a boat.”