From his armchair, Tremont gestured with his cigar. “Her call was such a shock all I could think of was getting rid of her. It's only now that we know how close she and Smith were.”
Sloat drank moodily. “Can we just ignore him? Hell, the woman'll be buried and forgotten soon, and it sure looks like Smith doesn't know much yet. Maybe it'll blow over.”
“You want to take that chance?” Tremont studied the sweating chairman of the Armed Services Committee. “All hell's going to break loose around the world soon, and we'll be the white knights to the rescue. Unless someone stumbles onto something incriminating and blows the whistle on us.”
Half-hidden in the flickering shadows of the farthest corner of the sunroom, Nadal al-Hassan warned, “Dr. Smith is at Fort Irwin at this moment. He may hear of our `government doctors.' ”
Tremont contemplated the thick ash of his cigar. “Smith's come a long way already. Not far enough to hurt us, but enough to get our attention. If he gets too close, Nadal will eliminate him without drawing attention to us or the death of Sophia Russell. Something very different. A tragic accident. Isn't that right, Nadal?”
“Suicide,” the Arab offered from the shadows. “He is obviously distraught over Dr. Russell's death.”
“That could be good, if you can make it airtight,” Tremont agreed. “Meanwhile, Congressman, block his investigation. Keep hiin in the lab. Get him reassigned. Anything.”
“I'll call General Salonen. He'll know the right man,” Sloat decided. “We'll need to keep the virus under wraps. Extreme sensitivity. Smith's only a doctor, an amateur, and this is a job for the pros.”
“That sounds about right.”
Sloat finished his single malt, smacked his lips, nodded in appreciation, and stood. “I'll call Salonen right away. But not from here. Better to use a pay phone in the village.”
After the congressman left, Tremont continued to smoke. He spoke without looking at Nadal al-Hassan. “We should've eliminated Smith. You were right. Griffin was wrong.”
“Perhaps. Or perhaps, in his view, he was quite right.”
Tremont turned. “How so?”
“I have wondered how Dr. Smith appeared to be so alert for our initial attacks. Why was he in that park so late, so far from his home in Thurmont? Why was he so ready to suspect murder?”
Tremont studied the Arab. “You think Griffin warned him. Why? Griffin stands to lose as much as the rest of us if we're exposed.” He paused thoughtfully. “Unless he's still working for the FBI?”,
“No, I checked that. Griffin is independent, I am sure. But perhaps he and Dr. Smith had some association in the past. My people are investigating.”
Victor Tremont had been frowning. Now he suddenly smiled. He told. al-Hassan, “There's a solution. An elegant solution. Keep checking the pasts of the two men, but at the same time tell your associate, Mr. Griffin, that I have changed my mind. I want him to personally find Smith… and eliminate him. Yes, kill him quickly.” He nodded coldly and smiled again. “This way we'll discover where Mr. Griffin's loyalties actually lie.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The rest of his interviews at Fort Irwin yesterday had added nothing more to what he had learned from Phyllis Anderson. After the last interview, Smith had flown all night from Victorville, sleeping fitfully most of the way. From Andrews, he drove straight to Fort Detrick, seeing no suspicious vehicles either following him or waiting at Detrick. The reports from the other family and associates interviews were in. They told him the homeless victim in Boston and the late father of the dead girl in Atlanta had also been in the army during the Gulf War. He searched the service records of all three soldiers.
Sgt. Harold Pickett had been in 1-502 Infantry Battalion, Second Brigade, 101st Air Assault Division in Desert Storm. He had been wounded and treated at 167th MASH. Specialist Four Mario Dublin had been an orderly at the 167th MASH. There was no record of the then-lieutenant Keith Anderson having been treated at the 167th, but units of the Third Armored had been at the Iraq-Kuwait border near the 167th.
The results made Smith reach once more for the telephone. He dialed Atlanta.
“Mrs. Pickett? Sorry to call you so early. I'm Lt. Col. Jonathan Smith from the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases. May I ask, you a few questions?”
The woman at the other end was close to hysterics. “No more. Please, Colonel. Haven't you people?”
Smith pressed on. “I know it's terribly difficult for you, Mrs. Pickett, but we're trying to prevent more girls like your daughter from dying the way she did.”
“Please?”
“Two questions.”
As the silence stretched, he thought she might have just walked away from the phone. Then her voice sounded again, low and dull. “Go ahead.”
“Was your daughter ever injured badly enough to need a blood transfusion, and did your husband donate the blood?”
Now the silence radiated fear. “How… how did you know?”
“It had to be something like that. One last question: Did government doctors call you on Saturday to ask questions about her death?”
He could almost hear her nod. “They certainly did. I was shocked They were like ghouls. I hung up on them.”
“No identification beyond just `government doctors'?”
“No, and I hope you fire them all.”
The line went dead, but he had what he needed.
All three soldiers had almost certainly been inoculated against “possible bacteriological warfare agent contamination” at the same MASH unit in Iraq-Kuwait ten years ago.
Smith dialed Brigadier General Kielburger's extension to tell him about the interviews.
“Desert Storm?” Kielburger almost squeaked in alarm. “Are you sure, Smith? Really sure?”
“As sure as I am of anything right now.”
“Damn! That'll explode the Pentagon after all the medical headaches and lawsuits about Gulf War syndrome. Don't talk to anyone until I've checked this with the Pentagon. Not a word. You understand?”
Smith hung up in disgust. Politics!
He went to lunch to think and decided the next thing to do was to locate the “government doctors.” Someone had ordered them to make those calls, but who?
Four long, wasted hours later, it was Smith who was ready to explode as he repeated into the telephone receiver, “…Yes, doctors who called Fort Irwin, California, Atlanta, and probably Boston. They asked nasty questions about the virus victims' deaths. The families are steamed, and I'm getting damn mad, too!”
“I'm just doing my job, Dr. Smith.” The woman on the other end of the line was testy. “Our director was killed in a hit-and-run accident yesterday, and we're shorthanded. Now tell me your name and your company again.”
He took a long breath. “Smith, Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan. From U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick.”
There was silence. She seemed to be writing down his name and “company.” She came back on. “Hold, please.”
He fumed. He had been running into the same bureaucratic red tape for the past four hours. Only the CDC had confirmed that they had not called the families. The surgeon general's office told him to put his request in writing. The various possible institutes at NIH referred him to general information, and the man there said they had been ordered to not discuss anything to do with those deaths. No matter how much he had explained that he was a government researcher already working on those deaths, he had gotten nowhere.
By the time he was turned away by the departments of the navy and air force and Health and Human Services, he knew he was being stonewalled. His last chance was the NIH's Federal Resource Medical Clearing
