They weren’t stupid people, none of them, and it gave them all pause to think. Where did it start? they must have wondered. How did the world ever get this crazy?
But Whispering Death was a practical man, the toughest of any of them, and he didn’t believe there was any profit in spending too long reflecting on Man’s enmity to Man.
‘It means we can cover the airports and borders with agents and arm them with scanning devices. It won’t matter what we call ’em – Geiger counters or whatever – as long as they read body temperature.
‘That’s one of the first signs of infection with smallpox. Naturally, we’ll pay close attention to Arabs or Muslims – so what if it’s profiling? Anyone with an elevated temperature will be directed to secondary screening and quarantine if necessary.’
The Secretary of State interrupted. ‘Is that the most likely method of attack, people deliberately—’
‘Suicide infectees,’ Whisperer said, picking up the thread. ‘Several years ago, we ran an exercise called Dark Winter, and that’s always been the favoured hypothesis.
‘If we can nail one of the vectors, then track it back – reverse-engineer their movements – we’ll find the people responsible.’
There was silence, but Whisperer knew it was the silence of success, not disappointment. It had taken hours, but now they had a workable strategy. In the circumstances, it was an excellent plan, and they couldn’t be faulted for the fact that their faces were showing a small flush of hope and confidence.
It was just a pity it didn’t have a chance of working.
First, no matter how many agents were put on the case, there was only a handful of people who knew of the Saracen’s movements, and they certainly weren’t disposed to help anybody. When Lord Abdul Mohammad Khan heard that all hell was breaking loose and that the Pakistanis, the Afghans – and even, for shit’s sake, the Iranian government – were searching for a man who had been travelling through the Hindu Kush and was supposedly trying to acquire a nuclear trigger, he couldn’t be sure it had anything to do with the doctor who had once been such a fiend with a Blowpipe. But, just to be on the safe side, he sent a courier – one of his grandsons, so he could be trusted completely – with a verbal message to the Iranian kidnappers. The content was simple: it told them, on their mother’s life, that he expected them not to say anything about what they had done for him in grabbing the three foreigners. The message back was just as simple. On their mother’s life, their lips were sealed.
The second problem was that the people in the White House believed in the weight of numbers, they believed in agents at every airport, they believed in scanners and elevated body temperature. They believed, like an article of faith, in suicide infectees as vectors. The Saracen, however, didn’t and, in view of the fact that he was the one with the smallpox, that was a critical distinction.
Dawn was touching the horizon, and the Secretary of State had just asked if they could get some food sent in when they heard from Echelon.
Chapter Forty-nine
TWO PHONE CALLS. The first pull from echelon had produced two satellite calls and both of them fitted the search criteria better than anyone could have expected.
Made three days apart, both of them were slam-dunk in the designated time frame and, although there had been a fair amount of atmospheric interference – probably another storm moving through the Hindu Kush or that damned wind blowing all the way to China – the NSA analysts who had handled the high-priority search for the White House were certain they had been made within a few miles of the ruined village.
It was quite possible that they were made from within the village, but that level of precision would have to wait for the IBM Roadrunners to try to determine the exact coordinates by filtering out the interference.
In addition, the two people on the line – the man in the Hindu Kush and a woman at a public phone box in southern Turkey – were both speaking English, although it wasn’t their native tongue.
The president and Whisperer, listening to the chief-of-staff’s report, looked at one another, and their expression said what the three Cabinet secretaries were thinking: could it get any better than this?
Then their luck ran out.
The two people on the phone might have been using English, but it didn’t help much. On the first call the man said very little; it was as if he was listening to a report. While the woman did nearly all of the talking, she was very smart – she had pre-recorded it, probably on a cellphone. What she had to say was culled from the BBC, CNN, MSNBC and a host of other English-speaking TV news services. Although she interrupted her recording a couple of times and offered what seemed to be additional information, it was impossible to get an idea of her age, level of education or anything else that FBI profilers might have been able to use.