Twenty-five

Lyon, France

Raslan Nadr grumbled the entire way across the de Tattre Bridge toward Lyon’s Second arrondissement. The handle of the plastic Monoprix grocery bag dug into his palms. That prick Abdul insisted on adding Coca-Cola and tins of tomato sauce to the shopping list. Of course. When it was Abdul’s turn to shop, he never returned with anything heavier than a baguette.

Nadr wore jeans, aging Doc Martens, and his Lyon Villeurbanne rugby jersey with matching scarf. He looked like a couple thousand other shoppers. With white buds in his ears and a Nano stuffed into his hip pocket, he drew no stares, no attention.

He switched the two heavy plastic bags to his right hand and stared glumly at the ligature marks the plastic had left on his left-hand fingers.

Abdul … that prick.

Nadr turned right after he cleared the banks of the Saône River. Twenty minutes later, he was at the safe house. He could barely feel the fingers of either hand. He thought it would serve Abdul right if he drank two of the six Coca-Colas before that prick got home from his shift at the garage. Maybe three.

Let him complain.

Raslan Nadr let himself into the safe house and hefted both bags up onto the peeled linoleum counter between the two-burner stove and the shallow aluminum sink.

The sink was filled with dirty dishes from last night’s tin of potato soup and pita with hummus. Nadr yanked the earbuds free, the music fading.

Prick.

He unwound the scarf, threw it over the twelve-inch TV in the living room and froze, his right arm still extended from tossing the aqua-and-black scarf.

Abdul, the prick, was facedown on the aged, orange shag carpet, his arms at his sides. The carpet was only a little bit stained with his blood. Being orange shag, Raslan Nadr doubted it would affect the cleaning deposit.

Major Khalid Belhadj sat on the room’s radiator, hugging a sapper jacket around his frame, a mug of coffee balanced precariously atop the curved, white-painted radiator.

A bird sat on the raspberry-colored couch. Raslan had picked up the term bird from expatriate English rugby fans at the Villeurbanne home matches. She was nicely rounded with good muscle tone, shoulder-length black hair, very straight, and midnight-black eyes. Wearing tight jeans and boots, she sat with legs crossed. She was reading a magazine as if she were the only one in the room, and as if her left boot wasn’t resting on the upturned ass of that prick, Abdul.

Nadr had always thought of Belhadj as the ultimate soldier. He never imagined the man with a woman. He never even imagined the man having friends.

The curvy bird ignoring them suggested something different.

Raslan Nadr said, “Is Abdul all right?”

Belhadj plucked the mug off the radiator and sipped. The bird turned a page in her magazine.

“Was he ever?” Belhadj seemed to ask the mug.

Nadr shrugged. “No. He’s a prick.”

“Well, the prick lives.”

With no hint of emotion, Nadr said, “Praise God.”

“I know. His uncle is a such-and-such in the party. A big whistle. At least, he is this month.”

Raslan Nadr studied the plastic-handle creases in his palms, as blood returned to them. His eyes turned to the upturned soles of Abdul’s virgin-white Nikes and realized they were pristine, unscuffed, and American.

“When I was a boy, I had a hermit crab in a little balsa wood cage. The thing hardly ever moved. It would have made a better partner than Abdul.”

The dark-haired bird laughed. So she spoke Arabic. Nadr filed that away.

“Of course. It’s been like that since…” Belhadj didn’t finish the sentence, just shrugged. Both men knew he was talking about the civil war in Syria. There were far too many cooks in the kitchen of Syrian intelligence these days. No way of telling whose broth one was tasting.

Belhadj said, “So. What is the official story?”

“You went insane. You attacked our own people. Killed your own crew in America. You’re attacking Western forces. You’re so enraged by the betrayal of Islam in Libya, in Egypt, in Tunisia, and especially at home, that you snapped.”

Belhadj sipped his coffee, nodded. The bird ripped a preperfumed page out of the magazine, sniffed it, set it aside. Nadr had no idea how to describe her eyes. They were—simply—black.

“The story is, your loyalty to the Assad family is such that you are on Jihad. And while that is admirable and speaks well of your family, you are to be stopped.”

Belhadj did something very uncharacteristic. He smiled. Then he puffed out his cheeks in a semi-laugh. He made eye contact with Nadr. “And…?”

Raslan Nadr smiled back. “Good to see you, Major. What do you need?”

*   *   *

Nadr drove them to a seedy bar that gave seedy bars a bad name. He peered out through the grimy windows of his Toyota. “Are you sure, Major? Perhaps the young lady would be better off waiting in the car.”

In the backseat, Daria said, “Afraid of criminals, Mr. Nadr?”

“Tetanus,” he said, studying the tavern. “Mostly just the tetanus.”

Daria opened her door and said to Belhadj, “I like this one.”

When she had stepped out, Nadr handed the major a cheap drawstring bag, the kind you get when you buy sunglasses. “Contacts for the biochemist in Milan. A mobile. Also some euros and a couple of credit cards that are clean. I can get guns but it would take a day.”

Belhadj took the bag. “We have guns.” He nodded out the window at Daria. “My friend is fast and quiet. Abdul never saw who hit him.”

“Then praise God, the filthy thieves who stole his phone, euros, and credit cards didn’t kill him.” Nadr shrugged. “Also, they took his new Nikes, I noticed.”

Belhadj poked through the bag, nodded his approval.

Nadr said, “I posted a query through Russian intelligence channels. I said one of my sources spotted you in London. A lot of eyes will turn that direction, I think. It might buy you some time.”

Belhadj hefted the drawstring bag. “You’re a good man.”

“Our country—” Raslan Nadr broke off. He peered out the window again and shook his head forlornly.

“I know.”

“Go with God, Major.”

*   *   *

Daria entered the bar first. Belhadj waited ninety seconds, then walked in. It was dark and dank, ripe with the funk of sweat and old beer. Belhadj ordered a coffee and found a corner table, where he could use the light of a neon Pilsner sign to read his new cell phone.

He kept his head down so as not to be obvious about watching Daria. She was by the pool tables, getting reacquainted with Lyon’s smuggling elite. She had told him that she had worked with them often when she’d been stationed in Paris. They seemed to remember her well—a little intimately, Belhadj thought but kept to himself.

Twenty minutes later, Daria slid in beside him, rather than opposite, to keep her eye on the room. She had secured the only glass of good cold champagne the bar likely had ever served. Belhadj had seen the bartender send a boy out to retrieve it shortly after Daria entered.

“I have a pilot with a Skyhawk,” she said. “He can get us over the border to an airfield outside Stressa. The price was reasonably unreasonable, given the time constraints.”

“Raslan gave me some money. It’s not much but—”

Daria said, “It’s paid.”

He angled the phone her way. He’d found a story on al-Jazeera about the battle at the factory in Paris. “The site’s been quarantined. The World Health Organization said they are investigating a pandemic they are calling Pegasus-B.”

“Pegasus.” The file name for the CIA operation in Manhattan.

“Yes. Come on,” he said, pushing the table away so they could both stand.

*   *   *

Daria led him out of the bar and around to a snow-covered pétanque pitch. It gave them privacy. Raslan Nadr had secured both the phone number and the name “Bianchi,” under which the biologist had been living.

Daria made the call. The voice that answered was elderly and male. He spoke in Italian but was no native.

“Dottore Bianchi? I am sorry to bother you, but my friend and I wondered if we could talk to you about one of your creations.”

She waited through the long-distance hiss, hugging the phone against her shoulder and zipping up the denim jacket.

“Who is this, please?”

“My friend does business with Damascus. You once contacted his organization regarding a product you had created. We wish to drop by and see you, later today if we may.”

The elderly voice hacked a dry cough. “I don’t know you. I don’t know that to which you refer, signora.”

“No, but perhaps we could share a cup of tea and discuss it. Hot tea would help for a winter conversation that is influenced by the cold.”

She used the Italian idiom: influenza del freddo. She thought the word flu might be too common to trigger computerized antiterrorism monitors, but she didn’t want to chance it.

“You wish to speak to me about this?”

“We do, sir.”

The old man sighed. It was difficult to separate the sigh from the static. “I can see you around four? But not in my home. Do you know the Café della Amalfi?”

“No, sir, but I know Milan. I can find it.”

“Across from the cathedral.”

Daria said, “Then of course I can find it.”

“I’ll be seated outside, drinking tea. Four o’clock?”

“Four o’clock, Dr. Bianchi.”

She hung up and winked at Belhadj. “We’re all set.”

Milan, Italy

Dr. János Tuychiev’s childhood accent from Tajikistan had completely evaporated but he still held a trace of the Moscow accent from his twenties, thirties, and forties. “It was a woman,” he said. “Not Italian. I cannot place the accent, but—”

Asher Sahar sat opposite the old man in the cluttered Milanese apartment, in a forest green armchair with an old-fashioned antimacassar thrown over the humped back. He smiled and cleaned his lenses on the tail of his cardigan.

“Your phone line is quite good, Doctor. I could hear her.”

The thin, pale Israeli’s smile was difficult to categorize, even for someone who’d been around as long as János Tuychiev. Wistful? Intimate? Predatory but patient?

“She is an old friend,” he said. His voice was dry and soft, a little reedy, and the old man eyed the comma-shaped scar on his throat and wondered if that wasn’t the cause. He also had a somewhat professorial air about him, which Tuychiev liked. He hated working with the peasant types who tended to migrate into the terrorism world.

“She mentioned my influenza strain. And Damascus.”

“Yes. She is traveling with a Syrian but is not herself Syrian. She is with American intelligence. They badly want to stop our project.”

The old man’s pale blue eyes grew as hard as Candoglia marble. He was frail, with a long, thin neck showing blue veins, and long, brushed-back white hair, which made him look like someone’s cliché of an orchestra conductor. But he wore an immaculate suit, tie firmly knotted, and had offered good sweet tea to his guests. His apartment was large for Milan and expensive.

“She agreed to meet me at the café.”

Asher turned to his companions, the hulking Eli Schullman and the happy-go-lucky psychotic, Will Halliday. If they were surprised to hear that Daria Gibron was alive, they were keeping up their poker faces.

Asher drew an envelope out of his olive tunic and handed it to the elderly biologist. Dr. Tuychiev studied the cashier’s check. It was for the amount that they had agreed upon weeks earlier.

Asher crossed his knees and leaned back, teacup and saucer on his lap, his demeanor oddly offset by his fatigue jacket, rumpled trousers, and sturdy workingman’s boots. “An antidote, Doctor?”

“Antiviral drugs are not like antibiotics. They do not destroy the targeted pathogens, but lessen their impact. And it would take the West eighteen months or more to culture my chimera and develop a sufficient cache of antiviral injections.”

“But you have an answer to this dilemma?”

The old man preened a bit. “The antigen groupings in my virus can be broken down by contact with a second one of my viruses. The second virus disrupts the protein bonds with the host cells. Infect the infected, and my original virus becomes as dangerous as the common cold.”

Asher’s eyes almost disappeared whenever he laughed. “Oh, sir. There is nothing about you, nor your creations, that one would describe as common.”

*   *   *

Asher led the two men outside the apartment, bundling his coat and adjusting his scarf. The sky was the color of wet cement. An array of subcompacts were parked with barely more than three inches between bumpers. Milanese hustled by, walking briskly, heads down.

Asher turned to Will Halliday. “Could you get the car?” They drove an SUV, which was all but impossible to park in Milan’s residential neighborhoods. They had left it three blocks from János Tuychiev’s place.

As the American ambled away, Schullman lit a Diana Caraterre. Surprisingly, he had come to like the Italian cigarettes in the plain black-and-white packs. “And so Daria lives.”

Asher tugged gloves out of his coat. “To be expected.”

“Halliday?” Schullman blew smoke straight up.

Asher watched the receding back of the American, who ambled the way Asher had seen in movies and read about in westerns. He’d never actually seen a real person do it. “I have an exquisitely difficult needle, which I would like you to thread.”

Schullman shoved the cigarette between his lips and looked at his gorilla-sized hands. “Threading needles. That’s in my wheelhouse.”

“What I need is—where does that term come from? Wheelhouse?”

Schullman rolled his eyes. “Baseball.”

“Really? I would have thought—”

“Asher.”

“Yes. Right. Sorry, never mind. Thank you. At the cathedral: Belhadj dies; Will Halliday dies; Dr. Tuychiev gives us access to his second virus, which gives us a virtual off switch for his flu, then he dies. As for Daria…? If there is a way to frame her, even if it requires wounding her, slightly…” He shrugged. “I don’t mind her being caught by the Americans or the Italians. But I don’t want her dead.”

“And what does Hannah Herself and the Group want?”

Asher cocked his head, studying his friend. Very few people ever attempted to lecture Asher Sahar.

“That’s what this is all about,” the soldier grumbled. “The Group only ever had one goal. Survival for Israel. Of making sure our historic allies have just cause to remain true. You know this.”

“And you think I forget this?”

Schullman smoked the cigarette to its filter, absorbing the last half of it in one great drag. He shrugged.

Asher said, “I don’t want Daria dead.”

Schullman tossed the butt to the pavement, ground it under his boot, and looked his friend directly in the eyes. He spoke softly, clearly, and distinctly. “I know.”

It wasn’t I obey. Just I know.

Both men understood the subtext.

Will Halliday tooted the SUV’s horn and pulled up next to the apartment building.

Langley

Nanette Sylvestri had just arrived at the Shark Tank in time to see one of the signal intelligence analysts stand, rising up on the balls of her loafers, arms stretched upward, fists extended.

“Got ’em!”

“Gibron and Belhadj?” Others turned to see Sylvestri, as she doffed her quilted parka. “You know where they are?”

“We know where they’re going to be in, ah, just over four hours.”

“Highlights, please.”

“Last night, the World Health Organization filed a potential threshold event.”

Nanette said simply, “John Broom’s thing.”

The seniormost analyst on the early morning shift raised his hand and angled his monitor toward the still-standing Sylvestri. “Broom’s with Major Theo James, U.S. Army, who filed the event. The DCRI found two bodies with signs of a hemorrhagic fever. They declared the entire firefight a biohazard zone.”

The audio tech pointed at her screen. “World Health referred to a Soviet-era biologist living in Italy. We set up an audio trap on his phone. Gibron called him. She set up a meet, four P.M. Italian time, in Milan.”

Sylvestri hadn’t even had time to set down her coat. “Okay, the G-8 Summit has been moved to the Beta Location?”

Someone else piped in. “No. They took the precaution to skip ahead to the Gamma Site. Some of the delegates are already wheels-down in Majorca.”

The senior analyst caught her attention again. “The French are reporting some pretty sophisticated medical and lab equipment in that factory. Something called an RNA sequencer.”

“And who’d have need of that?” Sylvestri asked.

“Somebody working with recombinant flu.”

God, Sylvestri thought. John’s Pegasus-B theory. “Okay. Get Swing Band to Milan. I want a videoconference with Thorson inside of ten minutes. Get me ADAT Cohen. Get me DCRI, Paris station chief, and let him know when Swing Band is clear of French airspace. Get me AISI in Rome, station chief or better. Ask for a weapons-hot status for Swing Band. The Italian premier is going to the G8 Summit, so Italian Security should be accommodating. Find out—”

“Nanette?” The senior analyst suddenly sat forward, peering at his monitor. “Hang on.”

“Now what?”

“World Health. They’ve named the threshold event. They’re calling this new virus…” He squinted at his screen.

“What?’

“Pegasus-B.”

“Honest to God?”

“Ah, yes, ma’am.”

Nanette Sylvestri tried really hard not to start laughing. That had John’s sardonic touch to it, all right. “Okay, get me everyone I just asked for. But first get me John freakin’ Broom.”