Chapter Forty-eight

IN THE MEANTIME, the five men and one woman seated around the Lincoln desk tried to develop the outline of a plan. Almost immediately, they were at war among themselves.

The only thing they agreed on was that there should be no change to the nation’s threat status: it was at a low level and, in order to avoid panic and unwanted questions, it had to stay there. But in the two hours that followed, the atheists and the God-botherers took to each other’s throats on almost every idea, then suddenly teamed up against the president on several others, split among themselves, formed uneasy alliances with their former opponents, returned to their natural alliances and then sallied forth on several occasions as lone gunslingers.

‘It’s worse than a meeting of the loya jirga, ’ the chief-of-staff said quietly into his MP3 player. The loya jirga was the grand assembly of all the Afghan elders. The reason it was called that was because the word ‘clusterfuck’ had already been taken.

By the time exhaustion was creeping in, everybody had lined up against Whisperer, who, they all thought privately, was the most obstinate man they had ever met. ‘Oh, get your hand off your dick! ’ the Homeland Secretary told him in exasperation at one point. It was so unladylike, such an un-Christian turn of phrase, even she was shocked that she had said it. Then Whisperer laughed, good man that he was, and everybody else joined in.

As a result, they were all in a better mood when Whisperer suddenly came up with the first genuinely good idea. He was the one who thought up Polonium-210.

The reason why they had all found him so obstinate was that he refused to move forward on any suggestion until somebody could explain to him how you could launch a worldwide dragnet for a man without revealing why you wanted him.

‘So we go to the Pakistanis and say we desperately need your help but, sorry, we won’t tell you the reason, ’ he said. ‘Not only will they be offended, but it will lead to speculation and, in my experience, when enough people speculate, somebody always gets it right. ’

Later on, after they had all finished laughing at the homeland secretary’s brain-snap, Whisperer was taking them through the problem yet again: ‘We’re talking about using the resources of the entire US intelligence community and its allies. That’s over a hundred thousand people chasing one man. Everybody’s going to assume it’s a terrorist and what are we going to say …’

His voice trailed away as his mind, running ahead of his voice, hit an unseen ramp and launched into clean air.

The president looked at him. ‘What’s the matter? ’

Whisperer smiled at them. ‘What we are going to say is that we have highly credible intelligence that the kidnapping of the foreign nationals was part of a much larger plot.

‘It was to raise money in order to try to acquire a gram of Polonium-210. ’

‘A nuclear trigger? ’ the Secretary of State said.

‘That’s right, ’ explained Whisperer. ‘We’ll say that either the man, or the organization he’s part of, are in the final stages of building a suitcase nuclear device. ’

As the idea sank in, the others looked like cavemen who had just discovered fire. ‘Everybody will help, ’ the Secretary of Defense said. ‘There’s not a country in the world – not even the lunatic fringe – who wants someone building a dirty bomb in their backyard. ’

‘It’ll give us a reason to launch the biggest manhunt in history, ’ Whisperer replied. ‘It’s so serious, nobody will question it – who’d make up something like that? Of course, we’ll act reluctant even to reveal it—’

‘But we’ll leak it ourselves, ’ the homeland secretary added. ‘Something reputable – the Times or the Post. ’

Whispering Death smiled – now they were getting the idea.

‘It’ll cause panic, ’ the chief-of-staff said, making sure that his sensible counsel was loud enough for the recorder.

‘Sure it will – but not as much as smallpox, ’ Whisperer responded. He had already thought of the public reaction and didn’t believe it was a deal-breaker. ‘It’s one bomb, one city. The president can assure the public we have the resources to stop it. ’

Everybody turned to the commander-in-chief to see his reaction and were surprised to find that the sadness on his face was even more pronounced than usual.

‘It’s a terrible commentary on our times, ’ he said, ‘when a suitcase nuclear bomb is more palatable than the truth. ’

They weren’t stupid people, none of them, and it gave them all pause to think. Where did it start? they must have wondered. How did the world ever get this crazy?

But Whispering Death was a practical man, the toughest of any of them, and he didn’t believe there was any profit in spending too long reflecting on Man’s enmity to Man.

‘It means we can cover the airports and borders with agents and arm them with scanning devices. It won’t matter what we call ’em – Geiger counters or whatever – as long as they read body temperature.

‘That’s one of the first signs of infection with smallpox. Naturally, we’ll pay close attention to Arabs or Muslims – so what if it’s profiling? Anyone with an elevated temperature will be directed to secondary screening and quarantine if necessary. ’

The Secretary of State interrupted. ‘Is that the most likely method of attack, people deliberately—’

‘Suicide infectees, ’ Whisperer said, picking up the thread. ‘Several years ago, we ran an exercise called Dark Winter, and that’s always been the favoured hypothesis.

‘If we can nail one of the vectors, then track it back – reverse-engineer their movements – we’ll find the people responsible. ’

There was silence, but Whisperer knew it was the silence of success, not disappointment. It had taken hours, but now they had a workable strategy. In the circumstances, it was an excellent plan, and they couldn’t be faulted for the fact that their faces were showing a small flush of hope and confidence.

It was just a pity it didn’t have a chance of working.

First, no matter how many agents were put on the case, there was only a handful of people who knew of the Saracen’s movements, and they certainly weren’t disposed to help anybody. When Lord Abdul Mohammad Khan heard that all hell was breaking loose and that the Pakistanis, the Afghans – and even, for shit’s sake, the Iranian government – were searching for a man who had been travelling through the Hindu Kush and was supposedly trying to acquire a nuclear trigger, he couldn’t be sure it had anything to do with the doctor who had once been such a fiend with a Blowpipe. But, just to be on the safe side, he sent a courier – one of his grandsons, so he could be trusted completely – with a verbal message to the Iranian kidnappers. The content was simple: it told them, on their mother’s life, that he expected them not to say anything about what they had done for him in grabbing the three foreigners. The message back was just as simple. On their mother’s life, their lips were sealed.

The second problem was that the people in the White House believed in the weight of numbers, they believed in agents at every airport, they believed in scanners and elevated body temperature. They believed, like an article of faith, in suicide infectees as vectors. The Saracen, however, didn’t and, in view of the fact that he was the one with the smallpox, that was a critical distinction.

Dawn was touching the horizon, and the Secretary of State had just asked if they could get some food sent in when they heard from Echelon.