“Yes, yes,” he said into the telephone. “We have four people on right now. We will have six when the shift turns over. By tonight? It’s possible. I don’t want to promise too much. Call me around ten a.m., and I will have a better idea.”

He listened for a moment. “Well, I would say a van would be big enough. That size can easily pull back to the loading dock. These things are smaller than the eye can see. Even trillions of them don’t take up that much space. If we had to do it, we might be able to fit it all in the trunk of a car. But if so, I would suggest two cars. One to go on the road, and one to go to the airport.”

He hung up the phone. The man’s code name was Adam. The first man, because he was the first man hired for this job. He fully understood the risks, even if the others did not. He alone knew the entire scope of the project.

He watched the floor of the small warehouse through the big office window. They were working around the clock in three shifts. The people in there now, three men and a woman, wore white laboratory gowns, goggles, ventilator masks, rubber gloves, and booties on their feet.

The workers had been selected for their ability to do simple microbiology. Their job was to grow and multiply a virus using the food medium Adam supplied, then freeze-dry the samples for later transport and aerosol transmission. It was tedious work, but not difficult. Any laboratory assistant or second year biochemistry student could do it.

The twenty-four-hour schedule meant that the stockpiles of freeze-dried virus were growing very quickly. Adam gave a report to his employers every six or eight hours, and they always expressed their pleasure with the pace. In the past day, their pleasure had begun to give way to delight. The work would soon be complete, perhaps as early as today.

Adam smiled at that. His employers were well-pleased, and they were paying him very, very well.

He sipped coffee from a Styrofoam cup and continued to watch the workers. He had lost count of the amount of coffee he had consumed in the past few days. It was a lot. The days were beginning to blur together. When he became exhausted, he would lie down on the cot in his office and sleep for a little while. He wore the same protective gear as the workers out in the lab. He hadn’t taken it off now in two and a half days.

Adam had done his best to build a makeshift laboratory in the rented warehouse. He had done his best to protect the workers and himself. They had protective clothing to wear. There was a room in which to discard the clothing after each shift, and there were showers for the workers to wash off any residue afterward.

But there were also funding and time constraints to consider. The schedule was fast, and of course there was the question of secrecy. He knew the protections were not up to the standards of the American Centers for Disease Control – if he’d had a million dollars and six months to build this place, it still wouldn’t be enough.

In the end, he had built the lab in less than two weeks. It was located in a rugged district of old, low-slung warehouses, deep inside a neighborhood that had long been a center of Cuban and other immigration to the United States.

No one would look at the place twice. There was no sign on the building, and it was elbow-to-elbow with a dozen similar buildings. The lease was paid for the next six months, even though they only needed the facility for a very short time. It had its own small parking lot, and the workers came and went like warehouse and factory workers everywhere – in eight-hour intervals.

The workers were well-paid in cash, and few of them spoke any English. The workers knew what to do with the virus, but they didn’t know exactly what they were handling or why. A police raid was unlikely.

Still, it made him nervous to be so close to the virus. He would be relieved to finish this part of the job, receive his final payment, and then evacuate this place as if he had never been here. After that, he would take a flight to the west coast. For Adam, there were two parts to this job. One here, and one… somewhere else.

And the first part would be done soon.

Today? Yes, perhaps even as early as today.

He would leave the country for a while, he had decided. After all of this was over, he would take a nice long holiday. The south coast of France sounded nice to him right now. With the money he was making, he could go anywhere he liked.

It was simple. A van, or a car, or perhaps two cars would pull into the yard. Adam would close the gates so nobody on the street could see what was happening. His workers would take a few moments loading the materials into the vehicles. He would make sure they were careful, so maybe the whole thing would require twenty minutes.

Adam smiled to himself. Soon after the loading was done, he would be on a plane to the west coast. Soon after that, the nightmare would begin. And there was nothing anyone could do to stop it.

CHAPTER EIGHT

5:40 a.m.

The Skies Over West Virginia

The six-seat Learjet shrieked across the early morning sky. The jet was dark blue with the Secret Service seal on the side. Behind it, a sliver of the rising sun just poked above the clouds.

Luke and his team used the front four passenger seats as their meeting area. They stowed their luggage, and their gear, in the seats at the back.

He had the team back together. In the seat next to him sat big Ed Newsam, in khaki cargo pants and a long-sleeved T-shirt. He had a pair of crutches tucked to the side of his seat, just under the window.

Across from Luke and to the left, facing him, was Mark Swann. He was tall and thin, with sandy hair and glasses. He stretched his long legs out into the aisle. He wore an old pair of ripped jeans and a pair of red Chuck Taylor sneakers. He had been liberated from duty as a pedophile decoy, and he looked like he couldn’t be much more pleased than he was.

Directly across from Luke sat Trudy Wellington. She had curly brown hair, was slim and attractive in a green sweater and slacks. She wore big round glasses on her face. She was very pretty, but the glasses made her look almost like an owl.

Luke felt okay, not great. He had called Becca before they left. The conversation hadn’t gone well. It had barely gone at all.

“Where are you going?” she said.

“Texas. Galveston. There’s been a security breach at a lab there.”

“The BSL-4 lab?” she said. Becca was herself a cancer researcher. She had been working on a cure for melanoma for some years. She was part of a team, based at several different research institutions, that had been having some success killing melanoma cells by injecting the herpes virus into them.

Luke nodded. “That’s right. The BSL-4 lab.”

“It’s dangerous,” she said. “You realize that, I’m sure.”

He nearly laughed. “Sweetheart, they don’t call me in when it’s safe.”

Her voice was cold. “Well, please be careful. We love you, you know.”

We love you.

It was an odd way to say it, as if she and Gunner as a team loved him, but not necessarily as individuals.

“I know,” he said. “I love you both very much.”

There was silence over the line.

“Becca?”

“Luke, I can’t guarantee we’re going to be here when you get back.”

Now, aboard the plane, he shook his head to clear it. It was part of the job. He had to compartmentalize. He was having family problems, yes. He didn’t know how to fix them. But he also couldn’t bring them with him to Galveston. They would distract him from what he was doing, and that could be dangerous, for himself and everyone involved. His focus on the matter at hand had to be total.

He glanced out the window. The jet streaked across the sky, moving fast. Below them, white clouds skidded by. He took a deep breath.

“All right, Trudy,” he said. “What do you have for us?”

Trudy held up her computer tablet for everyone’s inspection. She positively beamed. “They gave me my old tablet back. Thanks, boss.”

He shook his head and smiled just a touch. “Luke is fine. Now give it to us. Please.”

“I’m going to assume no prior knowledge.”

Luke nodded. “Fair enough.”

“Okay. We are on our way to the Galveston National Laboratory, in Galveston, Texas. It is one of only four known Biosafety Level 4 facilities in the United States. These are the highest security microbiology research facilities, with the most extensive safety protocols for workers. These facilities deal with some of the most lethal and infectious viruses and bacteria known to science.”

Swann raised a hand from out of his slump. “You say one of four known facilities. Are there unknown facilities?”

Trudy shrugged. “Certain life sciences corporations, especially ones that are closely held, could have BSL-4 facilities without the government knowing about it. Yeah. It’s possible.”

Swann nodded.

“The thing that’s different about this facility in Galveston is the other three BSL-4 facilities are located on highly secure government installations. Galveston is the only one on an academic campus, a fact which was repeatedly raised as a security concern before the facility first opened in 2006.”

“What did they do about it?” Ed Newsam said.

Trudy smiled again. “They promised they’d be extra careful.”

“Terrific,” Ed said.

“Let’s get to the meat of it,” Luke said.

Trudy nodded. “Okay. Three nights ago, a power failure occurred.”

Luke drifted just a bit as Trudy went through the material the lab director covered with Susan and her staff the night before. The night guard, the woman, the vial of Ebola. He heard these things, but he was barely listening.

An image of Becca and Gunner on the patio as he was leaving flashed in his mind. He tried to squash it, but it lingered on. For a long second, all he saw was Gunner staring down dejectedly at a striped bass on the grill.

“It sure sounds like sabotage,” Newsam said.

“It most likely was,” Trudy said. “The system was built for redundancy, and not only did the primary power source fail, the redundancy also failed. That just doesn’t happen very often unless someone helps it happen.”

“What do we know about the woman who was inside at the time?” Luke said. “What is her name? Anything new on her?”

“I did some looking into her. Aabha Rushdie, twenty-nine years old. She’s still missing. She has an exemplary record as a junior scientist. Doctorate in Microbiology. Highest honors at King’s College, London. Advanced training in BSL-3 and BSL-4 protocols, including certification to work solo in the lab, which is not a place everyone reaches.

“She’s been at Galveston for three years, and has worked on a number of important programs, including the weapons program we’re concerned with.”

“Okay,” Swann said. “This is a weapons program?”

Trudy raised a hand. “I’ll get to that in a minute. Let me finish with Aabha. The most interesting thing about her is she died in 1990.”

Everyone stared at Trudy.

“Aabha Rushdie died in a car crash in Delhi, India, when she was four years old. Her parents moved to London soon after. Later, they divorced and Aabha’s mother moved back to India. Her father died of a heart attack seven years ago. And five years ago, Aabha suddenly came back to life, with a life story, schools attended, jobs, and glowing recommendations from college professors in India, all just in time to study for her doctorate in England.”

“She’s a ghost,” Luke said.

“It would seem so.”

“But why is she Indian?”

Trudy glanced at her notes. “There are about a billion people in India, but no is really sure of the total figure. The country is far behind the Western world in computerizing birth and death records. There’s widespread corruption in the civil services there, so it’s pretty straightforward to buy the identity of someone who is dead. India is a major global source of fake people.”

“Yeah,” Swann said, “but then you have to hire an Indian ghost.”

Trudy raised a finger. “Not necessarily. To Westerners, there’s very little difference in the appearance of people from northern India, where Delhi is, and people from Pakistan, which is right nearby. In fact, to Indians and Pakistanis themselves there isn’t much difference. So I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that Aabha Rushdie is actually a Pakistani, and most likely a Muslim. She might be an agent of the intelligence services there, or worse, a member of a conservative Sunni or Wahhabi sect.”

Ed Newsam audibly groaned.

Luke’s heart did a lazy belly flop somewhere inside his chest. Of all the analysts he had worked with, Trudy’s intel was always at the highest level. Her scenario-spinning ability might well be the best of the bunch. If she was correct in this case, then a Sunni from Pakistan had just stolen a vial of Ebola virus.

Good morning. Rise and shine.

He looked around at the four of them. His eyes landed on Trudy.

“Give us all of it,” he said.

“Okay, here comes the worst part,” Trudy said.

“It gets worse?” Swann said. “I thought we just heard the worst part. How does it get any worse than that?”

“First, the heads of the Galveston facility spent the first forty-eight hours after they realized a theft had occurred covering it up. Well, I don’t want to say they covered it up. They did their own internal investigation, which bore no fruit at all. They sent people to look for Aabha Rushdie, although she was probably already long gone. They could not initially believe that Aabha had stolen a virus. The people I talked to late last night still can’t believe it. Everyone there loved her, apparently, though no one knew much about her.”

“You mean, like they didn’t know she’s been dead for twenty-five years?” Swann said.

Trudy went on. “So they interviewed all of the lab technicians, to see if anyone had taken the vial by accident. No one confessed, and there was no reason to suspect anyone. They checked their inventory records, and of course, the vial had been inventoried as secured just a few hours before the lights went out.”

“Why do you suppose they delayed?”

“That’s the second thing, and probably the worst part of all of this. The vial taken isn’t just the Ebola virus. It’s a weaponized version of the Ebola virus. Three years ago, the lab received a large grant from the United States Centers for Disease Control, and match funding from the National Institutes of Health, and the Department of Homeland Security. The funding was to find ways to modify the virus, making it even more virulent than it already was – increasing the ease with which it could be transmitted from person to person, the speed with which the Ebola disease would onset, and the percentage of infected people the virus would kill.”

“Why the hell would they do that?” Swann said.

“The idea was to weaponize the virus before any terrorists could, then study its properties, identify its vulnerabilities, and find ways to cure people who might one day become infected by it. The lab scientists succeeded with the first part of this task – weaponization – beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. Using a gene therapy technique known as insertion, the researchers were able to create a number of mutations to the original Ebola virus.

“The new virus can be introduced into a population through an aerosol spray. Once infected, a person will become contagious within an hour, and will show onset of symptoms within at most two to three hours. In other words, an infected person could begin to infect others before symptoms of the disease appear.

“This is important. It’s a radical departure from the virus in its natural state. The progression of Ebola in human populations is normally stopped when victims are quarantined in a hospital before, or very soon after, they become contagious. To stop this virus, an entire geographic area, sick people and healthy people, would have to be quarantined together. You wouldn’t know right away who had the virus and who didn’t. That means road closures, checkpoints, and barricades.”

“Martial law,” Ed Newsam said.

“Exactly. And even worse, this virus can pass from person to person through tiny droplets in the air, and the illness usually presents with a violent cough. So no exposure to blood, vomit, or excrement is necessary, another radical departure from the original.”

“Anything else?” Luke said. He felt like he had already heard enough.

“Yes. The absolute worst part, as far as I’m concerned. The virus is highly virulent and very deadly. The lethality of the hemorrhagic illness it brings on is estimated at about ninety-four percent without medical intervention. This is the rate at which it killed off a colony of three hundred rhesus monkeys at a secure research facility in San Antonio two months ago. The virus was deliberately introduced into the colony, and within forty-eight hours, two hundred eighty-two of the monkeys were dead. More than half died within the first six hours. Of the eighteen who survived, three never contracted the illness, and fifteen recovered on their own over the next few weeks.

“The disease presents a nightmare scenario in which organs fail, blood vessels collapse, and the victim becomes completely debilitated and basically bleeds out, often in spectacular fashion. We’re talking about blood from the mouth, the ears, the eyes, the anus, and vagina, basically any bodily orifice, sometimes including the pores of the skin.”

Swann raised his hands. “Okay. You said ninety-four percent died without medical intervention. What would the kill rate be if there was a medical intervention?”

Trudy shook her head. “No one knows. The virus is so contagious, so fast-acting, and so lethal that medical intervention may not be possible. As far as we know, nearly every unprotected person who comes into contact with the virus will become sick. The only effective way to stop an outbreak might be to quarantine a population until the disease runs its course.”

“With the people trapped inside the quarantine zone left to die?” Ed Newsam said.

“Yes, in most cases. And it’s a horrible death.”

A long moment passed. Luke shook his head. This was a far cry from the tone the facility director had used with the President the evening before. The guy had clearly been trying to downplay the severity of the breach, even with the President of the United States in the room.

Luke looked up from his thoughts. Everyone on the plane was staring at him.

“We have to get that vial back,” he said.

CHAPTER NINE

9:55 a.m.

Galveston National Laboratory, campus of the University of Texas Medical Branch – Galveston, Texas

“We’re too far behind,” Trudy said.

Her voice trembled the slightest amount. She said it abruptly, with no prompting from anyone. Trudy had become uncharacteristically quiet on the second half of the flight down here. While Swann and Newsam traded tall tales, she had sat with her head against the window, typing notes into her tablet.

Now, Luke watched her. She and Swann were unpacking laptop computers and setting them up on a long table. Luke’s team was in an old classroom. The room was on the seventh floor, on the other side of the building from the BSL-4 lab, and down at the end of a long hallway. It was quiet up here. There was nobody around.

This was their operations center. The room looked like it hadn’t been used in years.

Luke ran a finger along the windowsill. It was coated with a fine layer of dust. The lab heads wanted to seem like they were cooperating, but this was less than robust cooperation. Luke got the feeling they were tucked away back here because no one wanted them snooping around the facility. Well, it wasn’t going to matter what the lab people wanted.

He glanced out the window at the sunny, sticky South Texas morning.

“Tell me,” he said.

She didn’t even look at him. “I’ve been running numbers and scenarios. The situation is very, very bad, worse than I even thought at first. This crime took place four days ago. It might as well have been a year.”

“I’m listening,” he said.

“Well, there’s no reason to assume the vial is still in the hands of the person who stole it. In fact, I’d say the chances are ninety-nine percent that it isn’t. It probably passed hands, and got on an airplane the same night it was stolen, or very early the next morning. So we’re looking at a possible operations radius that includes the entire world. The vial could be anywhere on Earth by now.”

Luke hadn’t allowed himself to think about it in that way. He wasn’t ready to search the whole world. At this moment, he was more concerned about Trudy than the Ebola. He had seen a lot of breakdowns in his time as a soldier and an operative, and Trudy was beginning to look like a candidate for one. He couldn’t say he blamed her. It had been a hell of a past week.

The government had nearly been toppled, and people were wondering what she knew, and when. Don Morris, her boss until very recently, and the man with whom she’d been having an affair, was in federal prison as a co-conspirator. She was under a lot of stress. Everyone had their breaking point.

“Okay,” he said. “We’re going to take this one step at a time. We’re still crawling right now.”

She shook her head. “You don’t get it. The Ebola is already weaponized. All that’s required now is to multiply it, which is a pretty straightforward affair. College students could do it. You could set up a lab, in Syria say, or in the tribal areas of Pakistan, or in northern Nigeria, outside the reach of any law or state. If you make enough of the stuff, then we’re talking about the potential for multiple attacks, again and again, with one of the most dangerous substances known to man.”

Luke thought about what she was saying for a long moment. “Wouldn’t it take a lot of money and expertise to build a lab like that? I mean, look at this place.” He gestured ironically at the empty, low-tech classroom. “It must have cost a billion dollars.”

She shook her head emphatically. “It doesn’t matter what we spend on facilities. This is the United States. You can do the same thing only faster, and on the cheap, especially if the people handling the virus are true believers. You’re not concerned with safety. You’re building to the barest minimum standards. You don’t care if your people get sick. Also, this theft was obviously planned months, if not years, in advance. They could have built the lab two years ago, waiting for this day.”

Luke felt that familiar sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. It was an old friend by now. Trudy was right. Of course she was. They were far behind. He would call the President today and tell her they needed more resources. Hell, they needed a gigantic manhunt. They needed Navy SEAL and Delta Force operators banging down doors and busting through walls.

And that would come. But first he needed to steer this conversation back onto a productive course. There were things they could do, right here and right now, and they needed to start doing them. The thief wasn’t so far ahead that they couldn’t catch up.

“The first thing we need to do is figure out where the woman went,” he said to the room. “Can we do that?”

Trudy shook her head. “Let’s just say the possibilities are unlimited. I mean, it’s the ultimate needle in a haystack.”

“Why?” Luke said. He knew why, but he needed to hear it. It would help him clarify his own thoughts.

Trudy shrugged. “She could have gone anywhere, by any means. She could be recovering from facial surgery by now, with a dye job, and a whole new identity. She had too many options available for us to calculate. First off, she disappeared in Texas, a state with thirty million people, and a dozen major highways. We’re not far from Houston, where there are two major airports. Then there’s San Antonio, Austin, and Dallas, all major hubs of transportation. Not to mention she could have gone right out of Galveston, by air or by sea.”

Ed Newsam grunted. He leaned against a blank white wall, his crutches next to him. “If I’m carrying precious cargo, no way I’m flying out with regular folks at a public airport. Too risky. One chance in a hundred they spot a little vial like that during the security check, but what if they do? You went to all that trouble to steal the prize, only to lose it the next day at the airport? Unh-uh.”

“Sure,” Trudy said. “But that’s assuming she didn’t drive her car out to the West Texas hill country. What if she did? What if she drove out into the middle of nowhere, away from any traffic or security cameras, and someone picked her up? Then what?”

“All right,” Luke said.

He raised a hand as if to say STOP. Even so, he liked where this was going. His people were thinking, their minds were sparking off each other, reaching out across time and space, making connections. This was how they were going to track down that woman.

“Let’s dial this back to the beginning,” he said. “Don’t assume anything, right? This is a secure facility. That means there are video cameras in the parking lot. Maybe they were working that night, maybe they weren’t. But there’s also going to be traffic cams on the roads leading over to the highway, and security cameras on entryways to businesses, in alleyways, and in parking lots. She’s going to be picked up as a peripheral image on a lot of footage.”

“True enough,” Trudy said.

“So we start from the moment she left the grounds. We have that time, right?”

Trudy nodded. “We have the security guard’s testimony. Also, if it wasn’t down, the electronic key system will have data on her ID passing out of the building.”

“Perfect,” Luke said. “What was she driving again?”

Trudy glanced at her tablet. “A blue BMW Z4 convertible. Texas plates.”

“Great. It’s a distinctive car. It doesn’t look like everything else. Find that car on camera, then follow it out from here in an ever-expanding arc. See where she went. Did she stop anywhere? If you think about it, it’s not really a needle in a haystack. We know what time she left, and from where. We’re right on the coast – we know she didn’t drive south into the Gulf of Mexico, and there really aren’t many places to go west or east. That’s going to narrow the amount of surveillance footage we need.”

“This is also a sensitive area,” Swann said. He had three laptops lined up across the table. He opened them each in turn. In his left hand he held a loop of yellow cabling.

“You’ve got a ton of shipping here, you’ve got oil refineries, you’ve got this biological facility, and it’s all on this little strip of land. It wouldn’t surprise me if there are satellites watching this peninsula twenty-four hours a day. Our satellites, Russian satellites, Saudi satellites, Iranians, Israelis, Chinese, various corporate and black satellites. I’ll bet you five dollars there’s plenty of interest in what goes on here.”

“Can you access that stuff?” Luke said.

Swann smiled.

“Okay,” Luke said. “If you can get four-day-old satellite data off of corporate or Chinese servers, you’re the man.”

“I am the man,” Swann said. “Watching you, watching me, that’s the game we’re all playing.”

Luke nodded. “Good. My bet is that Ed is right. She didn’t go out of a major airport. Too much scrutiny. So pay particular attention for gaps in the video footage. Try to sync it with the satellite data. Does she disappear from video for a while? If so, where is she? Is she near a small private airport, or even an old airfield? Is she near a marina? There’s nothing but open ocean here. She could have gone out by boat.”

“What if she pulled into the parking lot of a little league field and just handed the vial to someone?” Trudy said.

“We try to pinpoint that moment. If Swann can get satellite data, maybe we see the two cars parked side by side. Then we have two cars to follow. Listen, I’m not saying it’s easy. I’m just saying it’s necessary. If there’s too much information to sift through, hire it out like we’ve done before. I don’t care. Personally, I think she stops somewhere, and if so, I want to see her do it.”

“And if she didn’t?”

“If she didn’t stop, then we follow her as far as we can out to the hill country. We at least try to confirm that she really did jump in her car and drive two or three hundred miles with a vial of weaponized Ebola in her glove box. I don’t think she did, but I’m open to being wrong about it.”

A young man in a white lab coat and glasses stood in the open doorway. He appeared there all of a sudden, as if he had come carefully down the hallway without making a sound. He cleared his throat.

“Agent Stone? The director is ready to see you, sir.”

Luke looked at Trudy and Swann.

“Are we a go?”

They nodded. “We’re a go,” Swann said.

“Then go, kids, go. Get me that BMW. Once we have that, we have a beachhead. We’ll fight for territory from there. In the meantime, Ed and I are going downstairs to work over this director.”

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