Chapter Forty-seven

WHISPERING DEATH ENTERED the oval office to find that the secretaries of state, defense and homeland security had been summoned and were already seated in front of the Lincoln desk. President Grosvenor’s chief-of-staff was taking notes and using a small MP3 player to record what was said – whether it was for posterity, his autobiography or to boost his memory, nobody seemed quite sure.

The bare bones of the situation had already been explained to the three secretaries by the president, and that now made nine people privy to the secret. With the core of the government assembled, Grosvenor told them that there would be no greater act of treason than for any of them to divulge the threat that now confronted the nation – that meant to their wives, their children, their mistresses, page boys or anybody else they damn well cared to name.

They nodded their heads gravely, and Grosvenor just hoped it was genuine. He was about to launch into a hastily handwritten agenda when the Secretary of Defense interrupted. ‘In light of what we know, wouldn’t it be a good idea if we started with a reading from scripture or a short prayer? ’

Grosvenor saw Whispering Death and the Secretary of State raise their eyes to heaven and realized that he had at least two atheists in the kitchen Cabinet.

‘It’s a fine idea, Hal, ’ he replied evenly to the Defense Secretary, ‘and I’m sure all of us will ask privately for whatever spiritual help we need as the night wears on. For the moment, let’s keep going, shall we? ’

It was a good, diplomatic answer and it seemed to satisfy both Hal Enderby, the Secretary of Defense, and the atheists sitting behind him.

The president turned to Whisperer. ‘First, are we certain that the virus has been designed to try to crash through the vaccine? ’

‘Yes, ’ replied Whisperer. ‘There’s one gene – apparently associated with the immune system – that has been grafted on to its DNA. There is no way it’s a random occurrence. ’

‘Will it work? Could it defeat the vaccine? ’ the president asked. ‘I mean, this is way out on the frontier – it’s never been done before, has it? ’

‘Unfortunately, sir, that’s not true, ’ replied Whisperer, looking around, letting everyone know with his eyes that what he was about to say was highly classified. ‘During the late 1980s the Soviets had at least ten tons of smallpox which they had developed for use in MIRV warheads.

‘According to a highly placed asset of ours, that material had been engineered to be vaccine-evasive. I think we have every reason to believe it is possible. ’

The revelation by the country’s leading spook cast an instant pall over the room, broken only by the sole woman in the meeting – the Secretary of Homeland Security.

‘But that doesn’t mean this version works. The Russians are one thing, terrorists are completely different. We have no way of knowing, do we? ’ she said.

‘I think we know, ’ President Grosvenor said. ‘The man in the Hindu Kush had three prisoners – it’s inconceivable his experiment didn’t include vaccinating one of them and testing to see if the virus broke through. ’

‘That’s my reading, ’ Whisperer agreed. ‘Obviously, it worked – all the prisoners are dead. ’

‘It means we have no line of defence, ’ said the president. ‘Three hundred million doses of vaccine are probably useless. ’ Silence filled the dimly lit room. ‘We should have developed an anti-viral drug – a cure. That was the only real security, ’ Grosvenor said, almost to himself.

‘That door’s closed. There’s no time now, ’ the Secretary of State, an older man who already looked exhausted, responded.

Grosvenor nodded and turned to Whisperer. ‘And this is what they call a hot virus? ’

‘Very hot, ’ Whisperer said. ‘I believe that was deliberate too. The hotter the strain, the faster it burns out.

‘A virus isn’t exactly alive, ’ he continued, ‘but it’s certainly not dead. It can’t live outside the host – in this case, the human body.

‘The faster it destroys the hosts, the faster the epidemic wanes. I don’t believe whoever developed this wants to destroy the world – just us. ’

‘That’s comforting, ’ the president said ironically. ‘Okay – the man that got away. How do we find him? ’ He turned to the chief-of-staff. ‘Echelon? ’

Within five minutes the chief-of-staff had made the phone calls that would deliver to the Oval Office everything that Echelon had overheard. To keep the amount of material manageable, Whisperer had suggested restricting the initial ‘pull’ to a wide arc surrounding the mountaintop in the Hindu Kush over the last twelve days. Even so, he knew that the volume of data would be staggering.

There were no landlines in the area, of course, and cellular masts outside Kabul and a few other major cities were non-existent, so that meant satellite phones. While Echelon loved them – it was one of the easier signals in the world to vacuum up – the problem was that the Stone Age nature of all other communications in Afghanistan meant that everyone carried one. Drug traffickers, arms smugglers, warlords, Taliban commanders, aid workers, journalists, village headmen, doctors and travelling government officials were all equipped with them.

Add to that ten different local languages and over forty dialects – to say nothing of codes and encryption which ranged from the rudimentary to the sophisticated – and it made the amount of material overwhelming.

Nevertheless, if the lone man who Lieutenant Keating had glimpsed on the mountaintop had used a satellite phone anywhere near the village, Echelon would have heard and recorded it. Of course, the president knew there was no guarantee that the man even had a satellite phone but, in the present circumstances, he had little choice – when you don’t have anything else, you go with what you’ve got.

Responding to a direct order from the president, the water-cooled IBM Roadrunner computers at Fort Meade – among the fastest processing clusters in the world – immediately started scanning their databases.

If they found nothing on the first pull, their circle of search would extend out mile by mile until it covered not just countries, but subcontinents. Literally, they were looking for a single voice among tens of millions.