“All right. I’ll buy you something to eat,” said Rostislawitch. “Where?”
“Outside the station. Some place where they can’t hear.”
“Who?”
“The KGB. They’re everywhere.”
“Yes,” said Rostislawitch, not sure if the man was crazy or very sane.
19
Thomas Ciello put his fingers to his temples and squeezed, trying to relieve his headache. He’d been staring at the computer for so long that his neck and shoulders seemed to have welded themselves into a permanent forward slope. He tried twisting in his chair to loosen his muscles, but even the chair seemed frozen solid. Finally he pushed backward with his feet and rose slowly. Every joint in his body creaked.
“Argh,” he moaned. He hadn’t worked this hard or this long without a break since he set out to solve the August 2004 Alabama Black Triangle UFO sighting.
“Are you all right?”
Corrigan was standing in the doorway. This was a momentous occasion, thought Ciello — Corrigan never visited the research offices.
“I’m just a little tense,” said Ciello. He bent over at his trunk, trying to stretch out his back. His fingers stopped a good foot above his toes.
“OK,” said Corrigan, backing away. “When you get a chance, give me an update.”
“Wait!” yelled Ciello. He started to unfold himself, but his back was locked. He couldn’t move.
“Yes?” asked Corrigan.
“I — Kiska Babev is on her way to Naples.”
“Excuse me?”
“Kiska Babev, the FSB agent. I’ve been tracking her credit card accounts. She bought a plane ticket to Naples a couple of hours ago. Air One. She got it right before for the flight. It’s an hour flight. She may be there by now.”
Corrigan stepped into the room. Ciello was still bent over at the waist. It seemed a little odd, but then again, intelligence analysts were supposed to be odd.
“You’re sure about that?”
“I tracked all her bank accounts down. It hasn’t been easy. I talked to this guy Ferguson knows and—”
“Put it in a report. I have to go to tell Ferg.”
“OK.” Ciello tried again to straighten, but couldn’t. “You think you could help me get unfolded here?” he asked, but Corrigan was already gone.
20
The small airplane was flying low to avoid being picked up on radar. It was so low, in fact, that Atha thought several times they would hit a dune. He grabbed hold of the handle at the side of the windshield strut, gripping it tightly.
As usual, Ahmed was amused. He would tuck the plane up slightly, then back down, staying close to the contours of the earth. The desert was not quite the empty wasteland it looked on many maps. On the contrary, to Ahmed it teemed with life — desperate refugees escaping from Darfur or the Sudan or Chad, militiamen seeking justice or simply enemies, smugglers taking a convenient route. He loved the desert, especially when the radar detector tracked a radar somewhere above. It was impossible to tell what the signal had come from; military flights from Libya and Chad and occasionally NATO fighters crisscrossed the area. All were to be avoided at the pain of death; it was a challenge Ahmed relished.
Ahmed strained against his seat belt as he pushed his small plane forward, tracking through the highlands of northeast Sudan. If a jet were to appear above, he knew precisely what he would do, how he would turn and twist to get away, slinking into the crevices of the mountains ahead.
And then, like a photo suddenly coming into focus, they were there: Ahmed rose over a ridge and the camp spread out below, its buildings clustered around a tiny spring-fed pond in a scar-faced canyon.
Atha took a deep breath as Ahmed legged the plane onto the narrow, dusty landing strip. A great deal of work was about to reach fruition.
The Fuji FA-200 bumped hard on the strip. Ahmed came in a few knots too fast and had trouble braking; he needed the entire strip to stop. Behind him, a crowd of people swarmed the plane, hoping its occupant was in a good mood as he usually was when he returned from a long trip; he was known to throw candy to children and, on rare occasions, coins.
They would be disappointed today. Atha had not had a chance to pick up any sweets. They would gladly forgive him, however, for in many ways he was their savior.
He was also planning to be their executioner, though that part they didn’t know.
Except for the large pond that supplied a modicum of water even during the dry months, Atha’s camp was similar to the larger camps that dotted North Darfur, Sudan, and Chad farther south. Like those, it consisted of huts at irregular though relatively spacious intervals. The walls of the huts were generally made of rushes or other stalks of vegetation, trucked in from many miles away. The tops of these houses were plastic or nylon sheets.
With roughly five thousand people, Atha’s camp was smaller than many of the refugee camps to the south, even those in Chad, which tended to be less imposing than the cities of death in the deserts of West and North Darfur. It had two small permanent structures, made of thick stone and lashed vegetation, their metal roofs covered by plastic sheets so they appeared less conspicuous. But the major difference was the people — compared to the people in the other camps, Atha’s were far better fed, in far better health. For this was a necessary part of the plan: one could not start an epidemic with people who were already sick.
An old Jeep circled around the crowd. A young man in a baggy white tunic and pants stepped out of the Jeep, waving at the people before walking to the plane. Though not yet thirty, the young man was a doctor and a scientist, a man who knew nearly as much about bacteria as Rostislawitch did. Dr. Navid Hamid had, in fact, been a pupil of Rostislawitch’s for a brief time in Moscow, though Hamid doubted he remembered him and Atha had thought it best to conceal that fact from the Russian when he had made his arrangements.
“Atha, you have made it back,” said Dr. Hamid.
“By the grace of Allah, all glory to him,” said Atha, reaching into the back of the plane for the bag.
“This is it?”
“Yes, Doctor. This is it.” Atha handed over the bag. “How soon?”
“I can’t be sure. Perhaps thirty-six hours to have enough to infect the camp — if everything we were told is correct, and if these samples have held up to transport.”
“That was the entire reason for obtaining them,” said Atha.
“As I say, if everything we were told is correct. Thirty-six hours.”
“Go. The minister will want it done even quicker.”
The doctor nodded, then went back to the Jeep. Atha turned and looked at the crowd around him. At least three hundred people were close by, and others were coming as well. Children, women, fathers. Most were members of the Massalit tribe, ethnic Africans from farther south, but there was a good number of Arab Africans as well. Without any exception that Atha knew of, they were Sunnis, though had they been Shiites like him he still would have felt no pity for their fates. The poor were puppets for the powerful; the only relief was to escape poverty. It was the lesson he had taught the spider in the hotel the other day.
“Your passage has been arranged,” he told them in Arabic, speaking in a loud voice. “In a day, perhaps two, your journey will begin. Prepare.”
