Thats just it, Rolly said. The deputy asked me if I saw any cars at the scene or on the highway, and I didnt. But I saw this car just before we came to yours.
Thats just it, Rolly said. The deputy asked me if I saw any cars at the scene or on the highway, and I didnt. But I saw this car just before we came to yours.
Where was this? Mave asked him.
At the junction. Mom, you had leaned over to look at the gas gauge and tell Dad how he shoulda stopped in Big Cloud. I just looked east and it was way out there. I couldnt tell you the make. It couldve been white. This car was way off by the T-stop near Fox Junction, way off kicking up dust on that dirt road. It was moving real fast.
Less than an hour later at the Big Cloud County Sheriffs Office, Reed Cobbs head snapped up from the glossy pages of a hunting magazine. Some fool was spanking the hell out of that bell at the front counter. Cobbs utility belt squeaked as he got up and went to straighten them out.
Emma? What the-?
There was a second car, she said.
What?
There was a second car fleeing the crash! Rolly Quiggly saw it. I just came from the Quiggly ranch.
Hold on-
This means someone saved Tyler! My babys alive!
Emmas commotion drew other deputies and clerks to the counter.
Emma, you should be home resting. Cobb gave a little nod to the others.
No! You should get your people out there looking for that damn car!
Emma, youre upsetting yourself. Cobb exchanged glances with the other staff members. Were going to get you home. John and Heather are going to make sure you get home safely.
No!
We can take of care your car later.
The deputies, John Holcomb and Heather MacPhee, approached Emma. She knew them a little from school fund-raisers down at the Big Cloud fair grounds. Holcomb was a part-time rodeo clown who operated a dunk tank and MacPhee sold home-baked pies and tarts. Her apple pie was very good. The deputies each took one of Emmas upper arms.
No, Emma said. Stop! What are you doing?
Take it easy now, Emma. Holcombs grip was firm.
My babys alive! Help me find him!
Emma, you have to stop this kind of talk, Cobb said. Its not doing you any good.
No! Emma struggled. Why are you doing this? Help me find my son!
20
Dog Lake, Ontario, Canada
After landing in Ottawa, Robert Lancer drove southwest for nearly two hours before turning his rental car onto Burnt Hills Road.
The side road led to secluded parts of cottage country, where Foster Winfield, the CIAs former chief scientist, was living out his last days. Upon crossing a wooden bridge over a waterway, the pavement became a dirt road winding through sweet-smelling forests. Gravel popped against the undercarriage and dust clouds rose in his rearview mirror, pulling Lancer back to Said Salelees claim of a looming attack.
Marty Wellers team was following Salelees information. Tanzanian police and U.S. agents were searching for other Avenging Lions for questioning, to determine who was behind the operation.
Was Salelees information valid or, like most raw data, unverifiable?
They had to be vigilant.
As I shouldve been with Jen and Becky.
As Lancer drove, he remembered the events of a decade ago.
Seeing his wife and daughter off at the airport for their trip to Egypt.
Becky, who was attending school in New York, had received a scholarship to study Egyptian art in Cairo for a year. Jen, who had worked in Cairo when she was a cultural attache with the State Department, was going to help her set up. Back then, he was with FBI Counterterrorism.
Watching their plane lift off that night in the rain, Lancer had felt a drop of concern ripple through him because of threats against the West by 37MNF, a new militant faction in Egypt. U.S. analysis said the group was poorly organized and poorly funded with little means to carry out an action.
That analysis was dead wrong and the life Lancer knew ended the moment his section chief called him into his office and told him to sit down.
Jen and Becky were on a tour bus near the pyramids on Cairos outskirts when 37MNF extremists hijacked it to the desert where they murdered all forty-two tourists, the driver and tour guide.
Egyptian police later tracked down the militants and shot them.
Lancer blamed himself.
While the analysis was not his, it reflected the work he did, and it had concluded that 37MNF did not constitute a valid threat.
Not a threat?
Then why did my wife and daughter come home in boxes?
Their deaths haunted him and led him to doubt what he did for a living and to doubt everything he had ever believed in.
After Lancer took bereavement leave, September 11 happened, and in the aftermath he used his rage to forge a new purpose. He was deployed to the National Anti-Threat Center where, in the years that followed, he buried himself in his work.
Now, as he drove, Lancer glimpsed his folder with Winfields file on the passenger seat.
Foster Winfield was born in Brooklyn, New York, where his father was a chemist and his mother was a math professor. Winfield was a gifted scientist. Hed been a professor at MIT before working with DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. He then left DARPA for the CIA to head some of its top-secret research.
Lancer left the dirt road for a grass-and-rock stretch that twisted down to the lakeshore and an A-frame cottage.
Winfield cut a solitary figure standing on the deck watching Lancer approach. The old man was wearing a rumpled bucket hat, khaki pants and a faded denim shirt with a pocket protector from which pens peeked out. He stood a few inches above Lancers six feet and had a firm handshake.
Thanks for coming, Bob. Coffee?
While they waited for the coffee to brew, Lancer noticed a golden retriever on the floor.
Thats Tug, the neighbors dog. He comes by every day.
Lancers gaze went to Winfields desk: a laptop hooked up to the satellite dish outside, a phone, files, a framed photo of Winfields wife, whod died years earlier. They had no children.
It underscored a void familiar to Lancer.
The two men took their coffee out to the deck, where they sat in Adirondack chairs and Winfield talked about his terminal condition while he stroked the dog.
I take medication-theres no discomfort. They gave me six months, five months ago, Winfield said. Its come full circle for me. My parents had a cottage here. Some of the happiest days of my life were the summers I spent here as a boy.
Winfield gazed out at the tranquil lake.
Forgive me, youre not here to listen to an old man reminisce.
Its all right, Foster.
As you know, DARPA was created in the late 1950s, after the Russians launched Sputnik. I came aboard many years later, after theyd headhunted me at MIT.
After several years with DARPA, Winfield had been approached by the CIA.
The Cold War was in its death throes and the CIA wanted me to put together a secret research team to ensure the nation did not let its guard down-exciting stuff but lots of pressure. I got the best people I could, Andrew Tolkman, very brilliant, from Chicago, Gretchen Sutsoff from San Francisco-she was our youngest team member and known for her strong will and strong views. We had Lester Weeks from Chicago, very even-handed, Phillip Kenyon, the uber-intellectual from Harvard, and several others from MIT, Cornell and Pittsburgh. Our objective was to ensure that the U.S. not be surprised by an adversarys technological advances in weaponry.
First, we were to defend against, match, then surpass any work by the Soviets or Eastern Bloc scientists, or the Chinese, or North Koreans, or some Middle East and Gulf states whose research was emerging rapidly.
The CIA provided us with historical intelligence on research by Nazi, Chinese and Japanese scientists, up to our time and on dangerous advances made by enemy states.
What kinds of stuff are we talking about, Foster? Lancer asked.
It was a spectrum of research over the years, ways to destroy your enemys crops with infestations, ways to contaminate the water supply, the air. We analyzed their work on mind-control experiments, the effects of chemical compounds on humans, parapsychology, engineered pathogens, advances in chemical and biological warfare, human endurance studies, medical breakthroughs and human engineering.
Sounds like a Pandoras box.
Not all that long ago we learned that some African rogue states had initiated work on genetic attacks. Theyd planned to secretly introduce malevolent microorganisms to attack the DNA profile of certain races by secretly contaminating a national health initiative, like flu shots. The microorganisms were designed to cause an extremely high rate of miscarriages in that race, with the aim of wiping it out. That work was covertly thwarted.
Another disturbing file concerned biological warfare. One of the Soviet satellite countries was developing a new lethal airborne virus that could be used to infect enemy troops. The scientists who engineered the virus also created the antidote, so that the weapon could not be used on their forces and population. That threat was also contained. And, more recently, we learned of something called File 91.
File 91?
North Korean scientists had made advances on hyper tissue regeneration, to accelerate and increase survival rates of battlefield wounds. The research used nanotechnology, essentially, microscopic robots introduced into the body that are programmed and controlled by computer via low-frequency radio signals to read DNA and engage in rapid rebuilding-molecular manufacturing of cells, tissue and bones.
It sounds miraculous.
Yes. But theres a flip side. The CIA had learned that other rogue states and terrorist groups wanted to exploit the technology to reverse the process, to manipulate it to attack and destroy, rather than rebuild.
Im not sure I follow you.
We feared File 91 technology could, in theory, be used to deliver a synthetic biological agent or microorganism that was unlike any known pathogen.
Would it work?
With File 91, it is theoretically possible to create a new deadly microbe you could introduce into a host, but it would not harm the host. The host could be your mode of delivery. You could manipulate and control release of the new agent, control infection or even target infection of a certain population using DNA profiles, using cutting-edge nanotechnology and state-of-the-art genetic manipulation.