them here and in Xinjiang,’ he said as they drove out of the airport.
It was nearly midnight by the time they arrived but Peng Yu, al-Qaeda’s sadistic bear farm manager was up and waiting for them.
‘Has Dolinsky arrived?’ al-Falid asked.
‘He a’seep, Mr ’Flid,’ Peng Yu replied.
‘And the staff?’
‘Bear farm crosed for two weeks, just as you request, Mr ’Flid and staff given day off for Games.’
‘What about Dolinsky’s luggage?’
‘Many trunks, Mr ’Flid. In storehouse behind bears.’
‘You have done well, Yu. You can have the holiday as well but I will need your keys,’ he said as he turned to the driver. ‘Pick me up tomorrow.’ For what al-Falid had in mind, he wanted to make sure there were no witnesses.
After the manager and his driver had left, al-Falid returned to his room and took the Walther P38 from the small khaki bag. He checked to see that the magazine was loaded and smiled as he fitted the silencer. Khalid Kadeer was wrong, al-Falid thought. Like Osama bin Laden before him, the Uighur microbiologist had become a rallying point for many in the downtrodden Muslim world, but Kadeer was mistaken in thinking that you could negotiate with the West, just as he was wrong in thinking someone like Dolinsky should be spared. al-Falid feared that once the Georgian scientist realised the utter devastation of the virus he’d created there was a danger that, like those who’d worked on the Manhattan project and the nuclear bomb, he would talk. Anything that might lead back to Amon al-Falid’s identity in the United States had to be eliminated.
He crept up to Dolinsky’s room and inserted the manager’s master key. The door squeaked as he opened it but he need not have worried. The Georgian scientist’s snores were rattling off the thin walls. al-Falid placed the end of the gun barrel centimetres away from the back of Dolinsky’s head. The Walther kicked savagely – twice.
CHAPTER 95
H alliwell stood near the stainless steel bench seat. He picked up his biosuit and waved it at Kate in time with the symphony, a sinister smile playing around his thin lips as he mimicked squeezing a needle with his free hand. Kate felt sick as Halliwell moved towards her, unzipping his fly.
As soon as Curtis and Special Agent Bauer, together with two of the patrolmen, got out of the lift they could hear the sounds of the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Gun drawn, Curtis sprang into the opening of the tunnel. It was empty. The music was coming from beyond the half-open door some 800 metres away, echoing loudly through the tunnel.
Fitter than the other three men, Curtis was nearly 20 metres in front when he slowed, using the cover of the music to approach the door. What looked like a receiving bay was empty but beyond it another vault door was wide open. Halliwell had his back to Curtis and his hand was on someone strapped to a stainless steel trolley. Curtis realised that someone was Kate. As the first movement of the famous symphony came to a close, Halliwell applied the wheel brake and started to climb onto the trolley. Curtis approached silently, wishing he had a short length of wire to garrote him. In one movement Curtis wrenched the precariously balanced Halliwell from the trolley, throwing him to the concrete floor.
‘You’re a dead man, O’Connor,’ Halliwell snarled as the surprise on his face was quickly replaced with unbridled hatred. Halliwell sprang from the floor with surprising agility but Curtis’ boot smashed into his jaw. Seconds later Halliwell was face down, roaring like a wounded lion as the patrolmen snapped his wrists into cuffs, subduing Halliwell’s wildly flailing legs with the roll of industrial tape Curtis found on the trolley next to Kate.
‘I’ll join you in Halliwell’s office shortly,’ Curtis said to Kate and Rob Bauer, after Kate and Simone had both refused Curtis’ suggestion they be examined for shock. Curtis donned Halliwell’s biosuit, which was baggy on him, but it would protect him from whatever was on the far side of the vault-like door.
As he plugged his regulator in to the air hose and went through the airlock the hardened CIA man was sickened by what he found. For no reason other than unfortunate circumstances, these three human beings had been taken from the streets of a civilised western city. All three were still alive and strapped to their trolleys, but with no morphine or other medication they were suffering excruciating pain. Curtis stared at what appeared to be an eleven-year-old girl with a feeling of helplessness. With a body temperature of 37°C, the human species was the perfect host for a filo virus and the man-made virus she’d been injected with was multiplying at an astounding rate. He could see the dark blotches underneath her skin as the Ebolapox turned her organs to mush and her lungs slowly filled with blood and foul fluids. Curtis knew that unless they could find the missing vials, hundreds of millions of people were going to die the same horrible death as the filo virus was released into the wider world.
He checked a freezer beside the trolleys. Inside he found frozen packets of bear bile from the Qingdao Bear Farm. A more thorough search of Halliwell’s dark world would later reveal a supply of anthrax spores with a sophisticated coating of silicone particles engineered down to microns. The spores would prove to be identical to those found in the Daschle anthrax.
The door to Halliwell’s office opened and one of the patrol officers came in to report that Halliwell had been taken away under heavy police guard. The security guards were being taken in for questioning and the Chief of the Atlanta Police was on his way up the drive.
‘Split personality schizophrenic?’ the young patrol officer asked, genuinely shocked that such a dark side could exist in a man running for the Presidency of his country.
‘It’s too early to make that judgement,’ Curtis said. Young patrol officers like this had to learn on the job, and even in the middle of a crisis Curtis found a few seconds for his education. ‘No doubt Halliwell’s highly paid lawyers will come up with a defence along those lines but don’t be too shocked when people in powerful positions turn out to have fatal personality flaws,’ Curtis added, accurately reading the look of disillusionment on the young officer’s face. ‘Power and corruption often go hand in hand.’
While Kate sat on one of Halliwell’s couches with Simone, her hands no longer shaking as the Chivas calmed her, Curtis sat at Halliwell’s desk, waiting for his connection to the CIA’s internal computers to spool in. He turned to Rob Bauer.
‘For the moment it will be best if the administrative areas and pharmaceutical laboratories of Halliwell are allowed to operate normally,’ he said, ‘but I want the entrances to both of the Level 4 laboratories sealed off.’ When the pound man returned with two more vagrants the following day he would get a nasty shock, but the vagrants would be given another chance at life. ‘You’re going to have to trust me on this one again, Rob, but there’s another activity in Washington that we’ve yet to close in on and if any of this becomes public, that might be at risk.’
‘You got it, buddy,’ Rob replied, and as Simone was led away for questioning by one of the patrol officers, Special Agent Bauer disappeared to meet the Chief of the Atlanta Police Department.
‘You sure you don’t want a medical examination?’ Curtis asked Kate as the results for the checks on Alan Ferraro’s movements appeared on Halliwell’s computer, together with movements of the George Washington .
‘I’m fine,’ Kate said as Curtis scanned the movement schedule from the Port Authority of Savannah. The west coast port of Georgia was the nation’s sixth largest container port, and Curtis knew the departure of the ocean- going tug two weeks earlier would not have raised a ripple. Despite the demands for imagery over Baghdad and the border regions of Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Hindu Kush, the Administration kept a very careful watch on the growing threat from China, and the latest US satellite surveillance of Chinese ports had found the George Washington not far from the headquarters of the Chinese Northern Fleet in the harbour of Qingdao.
‘I’ve got to get going,’ Curtis said. ‘The packets of frozen bear bile in Halliwell’s freezer came from the Qingdao Bear Farm but I’ve got a hunch there’s more to that bear farm than meets the eye.’
‘Why don’t you get the Chinese to raid it?’ Kate suggested.
‘Because they’d keep the Ebolapox for their own research. This virus needs to be destroyed, and that goes for the world’s stocks of smallpox as well. I’m almost certain that I’m going to find al-Falid at this bear farm and probably Dolinsky as well. There’s no guarantee that Kadeer hasn’t infiltrated the Chinese police force and that
