the head honcho at the Agency’s Baghdad Station, slouched in the stiff-backed chair next to hers. Both of them faced a video projection screen. It showed the image of several serious-looking men wearing business suits, starched dress shirts, and carefully knotted ties seated at a similar table in a conference room on the seventh-floor of the CIA’s Langley, Virginia, headquarters.
Behold one of the miracles of modern technology, Randi thought caustically. We bounce signals off satellites orbiting high above the earth, erasing a gulf of thousands of miles and hours of relative time with remarkable ease ? and we do it all only so we can hold yet another interminable, indecisive meeting.
On the Virginia end of the conference, Nicholas Kaye, the Director of Central Intelligence, leaned slowly forward in his seat. Now in his sixties, Kaye was a jowly, heavyset man. Decades ago, he had served briefly in the Agency before retreating to the calmer waters of academia and high-priced Beltway Bandit think tanks. Brought in largely as a caretaker replacement for David Hanson, his over-aggressive, scandal-plagued predecessor, the DCI’s mannerisms were sometimes as ponderous and ill defined as his decision-making process. “I understand that this former Iraqi Mnkhabarat officer you’ve captured, General Hussain al-Douri, is still refusing to cooperate?”
Andriessen nodded tiredly. “That’s correct, sir. So far, he’s stone-walling our interrogation team pretty successfully.”
One of the other men at Langley, the deputy director for Operations, interjected, “At the moment, I think we’re all rather more interested in those Eighth Directorate files you captured with General al-Douri. Your first reports indicated they seemed to contain critical intelligence on a top-secret biological weapons program. One previously unknown to us. Is that still your assessment?”
“Yes, sir, it is,” Andriessen said. He indicated Randi. “Ms. Russell here can brief you more fully on what we’ve learned. Since her special-ops team snatched al-Douri in the first place, she’s been in charge of exploiting the information we collected at his safe house.”
The head of the Baghdad Station leaned over and murmured a sotto voce warning in her ear. “Now play it cool, Randi. Don’t piss these guys off?not when you’re angling for permission to go hunting so far out of our theater of operations.”
She nodded tightly. “Don’t worry, Phil. I promise I’ll be a good little girl.”
Andriessen grinned at her. “Sure. And maybe the moon is made of green cheese.” He turned on her mike. “Go ahead.”
“We’ve been able to decode and read almost every file on the hard drive of his personal computer,” Randi told the CIA senior managers watching and listening to her from thousands of miles away. “Naturally, we’ve already funneled the day-to-day insurgent operations material to III Corps and the Iraqi Special Forces. And for once, our friends in uniform have been very grateful.”
That drew nods of appreciation and pleased smiles. Al-Douri had been far more than just another high- ranking Saddam Hussein loyalist on the run. He had also commanded a particularly brutal and effective Sunni insurgent cell, one that had masterminded several dozen car-bombings, murders, and assassinations. Taken together, the lists of names, police payoffs, phone numbers, and weapons caches they had found on his computer should enable the U.S. military and its Iraqi allies to rip his terrorist organization apart at the seams.
“The files we were especially interested in were buried much deeper,”
Randi went on. “They were also encrypted using a more sophisticated system ?one based on high-level KGB codes from the late 1980s.”
“Codes the Soviets passed on to their friends in the Mukhabarat,” the Operations director commented.
She nodded. “Yes, sir.”
“And what have you found so far?”
“References to a highly classified biological weapons program,” Randi said flatly. “One apparently so secret that it was set up outside the Baathist regime’s ordinary chain-of-command structures.”
“How far outside?”
“Almost entirely,” Randi said. She laid down her next bombshell with quiet assurance. “There are firm indications that this research was being kept hidden from Saddam Hussein himself. General al-Douri made sure that any reports about it passed solely through his hands… and stayed in his hands.
They were never sent any higher in the Mukhabarat hierarchy.”
That drew low whistles of surprise. The ex-Iraqi dictator had been a believer in absolute one-man rule, with all the strands of significant power held tightly in his own grip. Throughout Saddam’s thirty-year reign, those who thwarted his will or even who might someday pose a threat to his safety were casually butchered. By keeping secrets from his master, the onetime head of the Eighth Directorate had been playing a very dangerous game.
“Was this bio war program intended to produce weapons capable of causing mass casualties?” one of the senior CIA officials asked.
She shook her head. “Apparently not. The Eighth Directorate was set up to develop weapons for use on a smaller, though no less deadly, scale. Its primary mission was supplying the regime with nerve agents, specialized biotox-ins, and other poisons to assassinate opponents both here in Iraq and around the world.”
“What sort of scope are we talking about here?” the same man asked. “A small lab and a few researchers? Or a much bigger effort?”
Randi shrugged. “My guess would be that this program was on the smaller end of things ?at least in terms of logistics and lab space.”
“What about its cost?”
“Substantial,” she said tersely. “From what we can see now, probably somewhere on the order of tens of millions of dollars over a one-or two-year period.”
Eyebrows went up around the conference table in Virginia. Even in a regime awash in illicit cash, that was serious money. “And the sources of this funding?” the head of Operations asked grimly. “Diverted from the UN oil- for-food fiasco, I suppose.”
“No, sir,” Randi said quietly. “The money for this program appears to have arrived directly, wired in from a number of anonymous bank accounts around the world. Roughly a million dollars ended up lining our friend al- Douri’s own pocket, but the rest seems to have paid for scientific equipment, supplies, and salaries.”
Nicholas Kaye frowned. “I hardly consider any of this earth-shaking news,” the heavyset CIA chief grumbled peevishly. “What difference does our uncovering one more outlawed Iraqi science project make?”
Randi smiled sweetly. “Because, sir, this particular secret weapons project does not seem to have been an Iraqi-sponsored program at all.”
There was a moment of stunned silence.
“Explain that,” Kaye demanded at last.
“Al-Douri’s notes are fragmentary and incomplete,” Randi said. “But they clearly indicate that all of the researchers involved were, quote, foreigners, unquote.”
“Then where are these foreign scientists now?” the head of the CIA wondered.
“Long gone,” Randi told him. “Several entries show that they packed up all their equipment and left Iraq before our troops reached Baghdad. Probably via Syria.”
“Let me be sure I understand your theory on this, Ms. Russell,” the Agency’s Operations director said carefully. “Are you suggesting that someone else was using Iraq as a cover for their own illegal biological weapons program?”
Randi nodded. “Yes, I am.” She smiled wryly. “After all, where better to hide a dirty needle than in a haystack already filled with other dirty needles that don’t belong to you.”
“Any strong suspects?”
“Based on the material we found in al-Douri’s computer?” She shrugged.
“Not really. If he knew who was paying him to set up this bioweapons lab inside his organization, al-Douri was very careful not to record that fact. My hunch, though, is that he didn’t know and didn’t much care.”
“Then all we’re left with is another useless, fading, will-o’-the-wisp,” Kaye complained.
“Not quite, sir,” Randi said with forced patience. Behind his back, the heavyset CIA chief was known as “Dr. No” throughout the Agency, both for his general pessimism and his near-automatic impulse to reject any proposal that involved risk or contravened conventional wisdom.
“Go on, Ms. Russell,” the Operations director told her gently, with a faint smile of his own. “For some strange reason, I suspect you have an ace hidden up your sleeve.”
Almost against her will, Randi grinned back at the projection screen. “Not exactly an ace, sir. More like a
