Chapter Forty-four

THE SECRET HELD. By midnight on that sunday night only nine people in the world – apart from the Saracen – knew the truth. A short time later, even though I had long ago surrendered my badge, I became the tenth.

The first two initiates – Drax and his boss – were at the army’s Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. The third was the Deputy Director of National Intelligence. Once he had confirmed the truth of what he had been told, he made an urgent phone call and the head of his department – the Director of National Intelligence – became the fourth.

The director, no grey bureaucrat, was steeped in the history and practice of the sprawling intelligence community: he had started his career at the National Security Agency, analysing photos of Soviet military installations taken by U2 overflights, and had then moved into covert operations with the CIA. Thanks to his dark history of targeted killings in that section and the fact that he was the most softly spoken person ever to work in Washington, he was given a nickname, which had followed him throughout his storied career. Whispering Death was what they called him.

He phoned the president, asleep in his bedroom in the family quarters on the second floor of the White House, and waited a moment while the commander-in-chief shook the sleep out of his brain and moved into the study next door. It was past 11 p. m. by then.

The president had been widowed for the past seven years and he didn’t move into the adjoining room for fear of waking anyone; he had lived a monastic life since his wife had passed and he slept alone. No, he wanted to buy himself a little time to grab a robe from the back of the door. He could tell from the time of the call and the tone of Whispering Death’s voice that something huge had happened, and he didn’t want the damned New York Times reporting that he was lying in bed in his underpants when he heard.

Sitting at his desk, the president listened as Whisperer told him that a sample of live smallpox had been recovered from an abandoned village in Afghanistan, that it wasn’t just ordinary smallpox, it appeared to have been engineered to crash through the vaccine, that the genetic analysis indicated it had been made from individual components that were readily available throughout the world, that the virus appeared to have undergone a dry-gulch clinical trial in the Hindu Kush mountains, that three innocent people were dead, and the only suspect, a person who nobody knew anything about, had escaped and undoubtedly vanished into one of the nearby Arab nations, which had a combined population of about four hundred million people. In short, they were facing a potential catastrophe.

It was in those circumstances that the president – who was very pleased he had put on his robe – became the fifth person to know the secret.

Neither he nor the Director of Intelligence had any doubt – not then or in any of the weeks that followed – that America was the target. With a sinking heart and growing anger, the president asked the director how long he thought they had before an attack was launched.

‘I don’t know, ’ Whispering Death replied. ‘All I can tell you is that somebody – or some group – appears to have synthesized it and now has good reason to believe that it works. Why would they delay? ’

‘I understand, ’ the president said coldly, ‘but you’re the Director of National Intelligence, I need some sort of time frame – a best guess, anything. ’

‘How would I know? Damn soon, that’s all I can say. ’ It was a small blessing that the White House recording system extended to the president’s private study – it meant that there was now a historical record of the only time Whispering Death had ever been known to raise his voice.

He told the president he was about to call for a car and would be at the White House in twenty minutes. He rang off and sat in contemplation for a moment. In the long silence of his fear, he couldn’t help thinking that Fort Detrick had once again lived up to its nickname – Fort Doom.