Pretoria, South Africa
November 12, 7:12 A.M.
The attack on Batting Bridge had been tracked into the mountains to the west, where three people fell ill but did not die. Williams received this information from the woman who met their C-21, Deputy Chief of Navy Caroline Swane. Williams said he was encouraged by the quick degradation of the disease germ.
“Not half so much as we,” the forty-nine-year-old naval officer replied. Her large eyes were heavy-lidded, as though she had not slept for some time. Her brown uniform was crisp but spotted with perspiration. Williams was sure the already eighty-degree temperature and unobstructed sun were only partly responsible.
The trio saw Grace Lee and Jaz Rivette off and had been shown to a spacious—and subtly armored—van for the ride from the Thaba Tshwane facility to their next destination. The men placed their gear in back, declining the driver’s efforts to do so. Williams followed Breen inside, where he learned that they were not going to see Minister Barbara Niekerk. He had spent the better part of an hour reading up on her background.
“We are headed a short distance to Defence Ministry Headquarters,” she told Williams, who was beside her, and Breen, who was sitting across from her. “There are new developments.”
Breen’s expression said he was alert for a hustle. Having no choice for now but to cooperate, Williams remained hopeful.
The woman said, “Minister Niekerk was at one point—around 2009—involved in a research project with Dr. Gray Raeburn, who was serving then, as now, with the navy’s Military Health Service. They were working on a cure to the AIDS virus and made, I’m told, admirable progress. Until the cure proved as potentially deadly as the disease.”
“Let me guess,” Williams said. “What they came up with got loose.”
Perhaps because she was exhausted, the woman smiled and said, “Thank you, Commander Williams, for whipping ’round to the finish line. Your reputation for clarity and grasp was not overstated.”
“I wasn’t aware I had one,” he said. “A reputation.”
“The man we are going to see knows of your work. General Tobias Krummeck, our chief intelligence officer.”
“I’ve met him,” Williams said. “I don’t imagine he was involved with Minister Niekerk’s original project.”
“That, Commander, I do not know. When we had Dr. Raeburn’s name, we sought him out and learned that he had been sent to Prince Edward this morning. The flight was logged as a fact-finding mission authorized by General Krummeck. It remains unclear why a communicable diseases specialist went directly to the intelligence chief, but he did.”
“Did the men have a social relationship?” Williams asked.
“That does not appear to be the case,” the woman said. “And your inference bears exploring, Commander. The general was not unaware of the research project.”
They pulled up in front of a columned white mansion at the corner of Nossob and Boeing Streets. The deputy chief of navy motioned for them to remain.
“The general seemed disinterested in cooperating until I informed him that neither the doctor nor his pilot had been heard from since their departure,” the woman said. She regarded Williams. “I do not know why, but he agreed to talk only to you.” She nodded toward the guard standing at the door. “You’re expected.”
Breen’s cautioning look returned.
“I will remain here with Major Breen,” the South African officer added. “There are considerations I wish to discuss with him.”
“It’s okay,” Breen told Williams. “The general obviously knows more about you than I do.”
Williams did not miss the subtext. The criminologist missed nothing. Breen was on a mission with a man that the woman had called “Commander.” That was something the major had not known. That Williams had been in intelligence had probably been inferred—but the general knew it for a fact, more than the other Black Wasps did.
“I’ll address that later, Major,” Williams assured him as he slid the van door back.
Major Breen was too professional to let outsider status affect the mission. He was also too smart to waste by keeping him in the dark. Matt Berry’s orders be damned, it was time for the two men to have a talk.
Williams went up the wide stairs, was checked through, and was directed to room 309.
He took the ornate staircase to a third-floor warren of offices. Though the building belonged to a bygone era, it reminded him of Op-Center’s old headquarters—but up instead of down. People were moving through quiet halls, acknowledging those they knew and worked with, but not stopping to chat.
An efficient adjutant was standing behind her desk when Williams arrived. The woman showed him directly to the spacious office in back, with bay windows that overlooked an old section of the city. General Krummeck rose. He came around his desk, hand extended, as the office door closed heavily.
The general was a big man with the body of a bear but the face of a tiger. Strong, carnivorous qualities were what you needed to survive in this business. Krummeck was fortunate to possess them outwardly; it saved time.
“It is good to see you again,” the officer said with apparent sincerity.
“The same. I was thinking—the International Security Conference, 2016, wasn’t it?”
“In Copenhagen, yes. But it took me some doing to find out exactly what a supposedly retired military officer with no known intelligence affiliation was doing there. Well, that was the key, wasn’t it? You were not affiliated with a very public organization.”
“That is true.”
“I had heard of your National Crisis Management Center when it was run by Mr. Paul Hood. We … learned that you two had met several times, so it was a natural deduction.”
“It’s one of the great flaws in espionage that one never imagines allies spying on them,” Williams remarked. The statement flirted with being an accusation.
“In our case, it was not for information but to justify a budget. You understand.”
“Use the money or lose it.”
Krummeck smiled benignly. “Coffee? Tea? Something else?” the general asked as he indicated a pair of facing armchairs.
“Thanks, no. Deputy Swane said you wanted to talk to me.”
“Yes. I was very happy to hear from Chief of Navy Roodt that you and a team were being fielded. We need trusted help on this.”
“May I ask, General—the country … or you?”
The men sat and Krummeck smiled, with teeth. “Both, Commander. You have people bound for Marion Island. They will need to go from there to Prince Edward. As you probably know, that is where this problem originated.”
“Something you put there?”
“That’s right.”
“A confidence you trust I will not break,” Williams said.
“Unlike my enemies here, you have nothing to gain by my downfall. And you might benefit from a relationship that provides eyes-on intelligence regarding the Chinese in the South Indian Ocean.”
Despite the indecency of using South African lives as leverage, dealings of this kind were to be expected.
“I’ll keep your confidence, of course,” Williams assured him.
Krummeck thanked him. Either the intelligence chief was trusting or, more likely, he was canny. If his participation in this “Exodus bug” were to become known—and at last, finally, there was confirmation that this was an engineered toxin—powerful international allies would help give him job security. Especially in the face of Chinese aggression.
“Deputy Swane has briefed you, yes?” the general asked.
“A little.”
“That’s all she knows … a ‘little.’ Years ago, Dr. Raeburn was working with Minister Niekerk on an AIDS cure. The cure cured the disease but disabled the immune system, hardly a gain. I financed Dr. Raeburn’s continued efforts.”
“Why?”
“The Communist Party wanted to use the disease to eliminate enemies, is the short answer. We needed a cure. The Exodus bug was to be it. Unfortunately, all the lieutenant colonel’s efforts succeeded in doing was making an even more potent disease, an airborne plague germ with the capacity to kill millions. To have destroyed it or stored it would have required additional personnel—the possibility of either an intelligence or physical leak was of great concern.”
“So you buried the samples deep in a place you thought would never be found,” Williams said. “A cleaner solution than trying to destroy the thing. The cold kept them inert?”
“Very good understanding,” Krummeck said.
“I can’t take credit,” Williams said. “A geologist suggested it.”
Krummeck continued. “Between the constantly frigid climate and the environmental protections put in place, it should never have been found. But it was—by whom, we do not yet know. And it has been again—by the Chinese.”
“You’re sure of this?”
“The Marion outpost has been silent for quite some time. We believe it may have been commandeered by personnel from the corvette at anchor off Prince Edward.”
“My team is—well, it’s an independent team, not really mine, and I will hear from them only when they feel the need to communicate,” Williams said.
“I see. They are good?”
“They are very good. But you have a more immediate concern than the Chinese. You have an active killer here in South Africa.”
“We believe that whoever made their way to Prince Edward returned with samples of the bug,” Krummeck agreed.
“You trust Raeburn? Might he have sold the information to anyone?”
“I don’t believe so, but that was the first thing I checked,” Krummeck replied. “As soon as he left I had his residence searched, his accounts examined, his phone records studied. Nothing surfaced.”
“But he is missing, now. He could have left to give himself an alibi.”
“A thought that is concerning, actions that are suspicious—but I have watched him since we worked on this for expressly that reason. I do not think he is responsible.”
“And no one else had access to his data, the burial location.”
“Two men went with him to Prince Edward. One was a pilot, killed subsequently in a plane crash. The other is the deputy minister of planning, monitoring, and evaluation, with an eye on the presidency. I vouch for all three men.”
“Do you have any leads?”
Krummeck smiled thinly. “If I did, you and I should not have met again. I can give you the precise location of the site where we put the toxins. I am hoping you have access to reconnaissance that might cover the hours before the passenger jet went down.”
“General, I have looked at two days’ worth of reconnaissance in that area from a variety of sources. There was nothing suspicious. What would someone have needed to reach the microbe, either by accident or design?”
“Apparently not much, if it was done this clandestinely.”
“That radio intercept from a vessel seemed to suggest that,” Williams said. “The men on the call were careful not to say very much, other than that the caller was terrified.”
“But they may not have been the precipitating cause,” Krummeck said. “Just in the wrong place.”
“Possibly,” Williams said. He thought back. The men had talked about a boat and a dinghy. There were boats in some of the surveillance photos. He might not have noticed a landing party in the dark.
“Would any environmentalists have had reason to take samples from the island?” Williams asked.
“Those are openly sanctioned by the Department of Environmental Affairs. No one with a legitimate research project need sneak ashore.”
“What would constitute an illegitimate research project?”
“Poaching. Poisoning.”
“Poisoning what?”
“Mice,” Krummeck said. “They came with early explorers and were adaptable enough to survive and multiply. There are tens of thousands of them and they eat albatross chicks—bird fanciers have been after the government to eradicate the pests. Perhaps someone was secretly testing bait. But that would not have required digging.”
“I assume you buried the bug deeper than mice could dig.”
“We actually considered that when we picked the site, so yes.”
Williams thought back to his research that morning. He held up his phone. “General, is there an office I can borrow?”
“Use mine,” Krummeck said, rising. “Ten minutes?”
“No more than that,” Williams said.
Obligingly, the general rose and left. If this were Washington, time would have been wasted summoning an aide and finding a place to relocate him. When the door clicked shut, he texted Berry.
With SANDF. Analysis of Prince Ed boat pics from yest?
Williams waited. The original call, the one the navy had intercepted, had come from a boat. They had a position, north of Prince Edward. General Krummeck had certainly heard the call too and hadn’t been able to piece anything together from it. He was not looking to shift blame. He was trying to solve the problem and at the same time build a relationship to prevent this sort of thing from happening again.
The phone pinged. Berry’s image grabs were returned with notations:
Filtered by proximity to PE and anchor/delay in region:
✓Australian meteorological vessel Wanderer
✓Philippine fishing ship, logged engine repair
✓Private cruise ship Cape Town—Antarctica
✕Private yacht, no ID
✓Indian bulk freighter Pooja Rana
✓New Zealand doc film crew vessel 1221-F
The checkmark meant that every ship had been verified with its port of origin, had returned, and there were no open questions about known crewmembers or the purpose of the passage.
Williams looked at the enhanced image of the yacht.
It reeks of up-to-no-good, he thought.
If there was a name at the stern, it was artfully covered with flapping canvas so it could not be seen by satellite. There was an autogyro without obvious markings. It had to be IDed in some fashion. As a flying craft, that meant underneath. It could be seen from the ground, or by bending and looking once it landed. Not from above.
There was also no indication about where it had originated or ended up.
Krummeck returned while Williams was examining the photograph. He stood and showed it to the general.
“Recognize this?”
The general withdrew reading glasses from inside his uniform jacket and bent low over the photograph.
“No. Where was this taken?”
“About two miles north of Prince Edward not quite two days before the jet went down.”
“Did it stay in those waters?”
“It did not, and—yes—other planes would have passed overhead between the time this photograph was taken and the Airbus crashed.”
“It’s not likely they deposited a party of some kind,” Krummeck said. “Difficult to hide there, and we patrol by air, low helicopter flights, twice daily.”
“That leads to the next possibility, that there may have been a corrosive process at work.” Williams shut the phone. “On the day of the accident there was a glow rising from the area. In previous images, it was not present. If not for the attack on the bridge, I would have said it might have been natural erosion that released the bug. But someone was there. Someone harvested it.”
“Which means finding out about that unidentified boat,” Krummeck said. “Of course, it may not have been one of ours. There’s Crozet and the other French islands to the east, Madagascar, Mauritius—”
“The bridge was here. The attacker wanted to get your attention.”
“He has more,” Krummeck said, resigned to a reality he had already deduced.
“We have to assume so.”
“You know he called the East London police.”
Williams nodded. “But not since the attack?”
“No. And that location may have been a feint, a ruse. He used an untraceable phone.”
“Sophisticated, then,” Williams said. “Accustomed to covering tracks.”
“My conclusion, which suggests a human trafficker, drug- or gun-running, or clandestine surveillance for a foreign power.”
“But someone who had a reason to go to Prince Edward and dig,” Williams pointed out.
“Possibly to bury contraband for later recovery,” Krummeck said. “In which case the seawall would be a perfect location. Quickly accessible from the sea, not easily observed by the island patrol.”
“Who among the list you just gave me is also a sociopath willing to unleash a weapon of mass destruction?” Williams asked.
The leonine smile was long gone. “That’s just it. Our known enemies, those who dodge justice, are known, their whereabouts tracked. This one is either new or off the radar.”
“Or about some business you haven’t looked at,” Williams said. “That original radio call we intercepted. The man talked about other trips they had taken.
“Regardless, he has to be found, and in a backdoor fashion that won’t cause him to release it again.”
Williams’s admonition and clarity sent Krummeck moving quickly to his desk. “Commander, if I may have that photograph—I’d like to send it to someone.”
“Who?”
“The man who knows our coast and its shipping better than anyone,” he answered.