Mortal Threat Page 4

  Rhazziq’s mind reeled from the thought of a bullet entering his friend’s head. But he knew that death would be immediate, as would be the release of his friend’s soul.

  From the partially opened curtain, Rhazziq watched the doctor walk across the dusty street. He found himself mentally picturing the shot. He eyed the sniper across the street on the rooftop, waiting and expecting.

  Quizmahel continued forward, slowing a bit as if wondering why the shot had not occurred, when suddenly a young boy on a buzzing moped sped past him in the opposite direction. Rhazziq’s last thought before his friend’s head blew apart was that he had indeed created the most masterful psychological operation of all time.

  The high-pitched whining of the moped’s engine muted the shot, but as planned, the NATO caliber bullet had entered the doctor’s skull and killed him instantly.

  He watched his friend tumble to the ground as the moped raced by. Immediately, Rhazziq removed his satellite-enabled wireless device from his vest pocket and sent a note to his operative in Tanzania. Even Rhazziq feared the man he called The Leopard. Better to have him hunting for the HIV and Ebola cures in Tanzania than prowling the streets of Marrakesh or Rabat.

  If The Leopard failed at the mission, which was unlikely, Rhazziq’s backup plan was to spring Paul Inkota, a man he called The Cheetah, from the Rwandan war criminal prison in Arusha. Known for killing with two swords swinging like a pendulum in the Rwandan killing fields over twenty years ago, The Cheetah would be ready for a fresh kill.

  But first, The Leopard. Rhazziq’s message to him simply read: We need the medicine .

  4

  Mwanza, Tanzania

  Amanda held the secure satellite iridium phone to her ear as she knelt behind a generator and watched the thatch huts of the orphanage burn. Kiram and Mumbato flanked her with two Askari securing her position, just as they had rehearsed. The afternoon sun seemed to propel the fire from hut to hut. The jungle was about a quarter mile away. Thankfully Sharifa had gathered the orphans in the safe house, then had begun moving them to rally point number two. Amanda had instructed one of the guards to don the protective gear and drive the lone Land Rover with a barely conscious Likika and Arthur King’s body in the back. Amanda had rehearsed this evacuation plan with Sharifa just a few weeks earlier, minus the concept of a dead body.

  Amanda watched the procession diminish to the east as she dialed her father’s number.

  When he answered, she said, “Dad, we’re being attacked. We think it’s just one person, but we’re not sure. He killed Dr. King, and now he’s burning the village, which we are evacuating. Sharifa is on her way to our rally point with the kids,” she said in a calm voice that belied her fear.

  Her father, Colonel Zachary Garrett, listened, she presumed, from his Special Forces command post in Djibouti in the Horn of Africa. “Have you executed your defensive plan?” he asked.

  Amanda stared intently at the flames engulfing two huts. “I did all that before calling you. We’ve got Dr. King’s body in the Land Rover moving to the rally point with the main group. I’m with Kiram and Mumbato, and we’re executing Broken Needle. There’s no doubt in my mind that whoever is doing this is after the recipe.”

  Broken Needle was their code word and a reference to Broken Arrow , a common military contingency plan enacted when an enemy was about to overrun a defensive perimeter. The commander would call in Broken Arrow , which would result in the Air Force dropping danger-close bombs to attempt to repel the attackers and, sometimes, to destroy equipment so the enemy could not use it in the future.

  She had prayed she would never have to implement Broken Needle but always understood it was a possibility. But still, the impact would be felt far and wide. They were close to solving the riddle of HIV and Ebola. In addition to finding positive-to-negative conversions in the children, they had proven both the cure and the vaccine worked by testing a portion of the truck drivers who delivered their supplies on a weekly basis. Over the years, they had been able to identify about twenty HIV-negative men of the 111 drivers that would sojourn along the trade route past their village. They had inoculated the twenty men with the vaccine and, for the other ninety-one, had provided the cure. All but one of the twenty vaccine recipients had remained HIV-negative. There was some question as to whether the twentieth man had already been infected and had not yet turned seropositive when initially tested with the Western blot test. When he’d showed positive months after receiving the vaccination, Dr. King had ordered that Amanda provide him the natural remedy, which had worked. Later he was deemed seronegative and given the vaccine.

  Of the ninety-one cure recipients, twelve had died and the remainder eventually converted to serum negative. Some required repeated testing. Of the nine Ebola victims they had treated, all had survived and recovered after administration of the same formula Amanda and King had developed to cure and vaccinate against HIV. They had reams of data stored on the computers in both laboratories. She was proudest of the fact that she was training Kiram to be a doctor. Kiram had helped with nearly every administration of the vaccine. He would look the children or the truck drivers in the eyes, holding them by the shoulders, reassuring them in their native tongue while Amanda inserted the special serum into their arms.

  Amanda knew and had recorded all of the ingredients to the recipe except for one, and that was the black paste that Kiram and Mumbato would bring back from their “special place.” She had tried to conduct a chemical decomposition of the substance and found that her results kept coming back as what biologists called angiosperm xylem. She preferred to call it the insides of a hardwood tree. She’d found properties such as potassium, calcium, magnesium, nitrogen, and a mystery element she so far had been unable to identify. She had been close to making the boys take her on the trek to the special place, but now this.

  “Okay, which rally point?” her father said over their secure satellite link.

  “We’re moving toward rally point two. Rally point one is unsafe right now,” Amanda said. Rally point one was the laboratory where Dr. King had been working. She presumed it would be risky to go there.

  “Okay. And?”

  “We’re taking all necessary supplies,” Amanda said, then paused. “I mean all, ” she emphasized.

  “Okay, honey, I will have a team link up with you at rally point two, and you’ll be good to go. Be safe. Love you,” her father said.

  “Good to go. Love you.”

  They each hung up the phone after speaking in partial rehearsed code. Her father had instructed Amanda to use the iridium phone only in extremis. Nothing could be more extreme than an attack on the village where someone was seeking the recipe. She knew that her uncle, Matt, and her father were two of only a few people who had access to and responsibilities regarding Project Nightingale . Typically they communicated in coded, innocuous texts and emails such as the one she had sent to Jake earlier, or “Solved two puzzles today, Dad. Love you…”

  Amanda rallied her charges. Like a football coach talking to a quarterback in a big game, she snatched Kiram by the arm and shouted, “You and Mumbato check the orphanage one last time with the Askari, then we will link up at the cellar and move out to rally point two from there.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Everyone else is already gone, but we make final check now. Rest of Askari took villagers away, also.”

  “Good. We’ll shut down the lab, grab our supplies, and then move out.”

  “Everything is on fire, Miss Amanda. Hurry.”

  As if to emphasize his point, a thatch hut burst into flames as the wind pushed the fire from one structure to the next like a fireball from hell rolling through the village. Amanda flinched at the warmth cast upon her face as they knelt in the center of what would soon be a ghost town. The Mwanza orphanage sat on the outskirts of a small village, which served as a truck stop on the north-south artery of eastern Africa. Less than one hundred villagers actually lived in the town that was nearly a mile away. Amanda was glad to know that
the local police forces were protecting those people as well. The CIA paid for her two guards at the orphanage, yet the intelligence organization had eschewed deeper security so as to not overtly reveal Project Nightingale as an agency operation. Her uncle, Matt, had called it hiding in plain sight , which had worked well until now. Amanda knew that the image the CIA wanted to project was that Nightingale was just another of thousands of American humanitarian projects around the continent. Yet once she’d begun achieving results, the word must have begun to spread.

  “Go now,” she said quietly. She gave Kiram a gentle shove and watched Mumbato follow. In truth, she didn’t want either of them to see what she was about to do. The laboratory was isolated and might not catch fire like the huts. She couldn’t take any chances. As part of Broken Needle , her CIA instructions were to destroy the laboratory to conceal any evidence of Project Nightingale . Since the Tanzanian government had no knowledge of the program, they could not run the risk of anything from the research remaining behind. Amanda ran across the dirt road toward one of the burning huts and grabbed a three-foot-long chunk of flaming acacia that had been used as a support beam. The wood was hot to the touch but manageable. Holding the burning branch at a distance, she jogged to the laboratory and tossed it onto the wooden porch. She watched the flame licking at the parched planks of the steps and then the building behind it. Soon the façade of the laboratory was lit, and Amanda knew it would not be long before the entire building was destroyed. Burned with the building would be any linkages to the HIV and Ebola vaccine program, save her go-bag.

  Now Amanda ran in the opposite direction and turned the corner toward the soccer field. The blackened embers of a former mud and thatch hut lay at the farthest end of the orphanage from the laboratory. She had deliberately constructed a cellar on the back side of her hut, where she kept a go-bag of the recipe’s essential ingredients: small quantities of the mixed vaccine they called “ready-vac,” larger quantities of the cure, vials of the black paste, and several small glass bottles of live HIV and Ebola for testing. These were the key elements of their program, which had been weeks, if not days, from going operational. Now, without Dr. King and with thieves in pursuit of their work, who knew how long it would be?

  She stepped quickly into her hut, took thirty seconds to grab her external drive, and pressed two buttons that wiped her computer.

  As she heard the Askari either exchanging gunfire or shooting blindly at someone she couldn’t see, she ran from her home, clutching the external drive containing all of her test data. Taking the steps in one leap, she dashed for the secret facility beneath the storm doors less than fifty meters from her hut.

  Two doors on hinges that lay at an angle protected the stairwell that led to an underground room that had been built with sturdy mahogany boards. She had padlocked the door, so she slid the key attached to the necklace of her locket to her front where she could unlock the hasp. She pulled back the shutters, which were constructed very similar to a Kansas tornado shelter.

  Instinctively, she patted her breast pocket to ensure she still had her satellite iPhone secured in her vest, which she did. Amanda also subconsciously tapped her cargo pocket to reassure herself that she had the iridium satellite phone, which she did. She climbed down the steps into the shelter, the sounds of gunfire snapping through the village. Amidst the chaos, she stopped what she was doing, pulled her iPhone from her vest pocket, and typed out a quick email to her husband, Jake.

  Jake, Love you. Under some stress now. Call my dad. Be safe. Always and all ways, Amanda.

  She watched the data wheel spin her email to Jake and tucked the iPhone back into her vest pocket. Regaining focus, Amanda spotted the green Army rucksack and the small medical supply cooler plugged into the wall. The generator powered the cooler, which effectively served as a refrigerator. She calculated that the batteries would last about forty-eight hours before the viruses died and the serums decomposed if they did not get to a new refrigeration source or electrical power. She hoisted the ruck onto her back and then, at the last moment, unplugged the cooler.

  In the rucksack, which she had inspected weekly since creating their emergency plan, were a smaller backpack, called an assault pack, and all the essentials for restarting the program and keeping their work alive. Laboring in secrecy had been a tough call. There were many who wanted to claim credit for what she and Dr. King were doing, which was not a big concern to Amanda. However, those who wanted to claim credit wanted to do so for financial or nefarious purposes. Amanda’s work was purely humanitarian and funded by the CIA, which came with strings attached. One of those strings was to keep the operation secret until they could reliably mass-produce the formula. Their rapid success was unexpected, catching Amanda, Dr. King, and the agency unprepared for a full-scale attack.

  Also, she knew that there were those who did not want the cure or the vaccine to come to fruition. Amanda did not understand the reasons people might have this distorted vision. The vaccine in particular represented a sort of Rosetta stone. It would forever change the course of history, especially on this continent.

  Amanda scrambled up the steps of the cellar and was met by a hot wind blowing into her face.

  “This way, Miss Amanda,” Kiram screamed. She saw Kiram and Mumbato running toward her, but with clear intent to continue beyond her. The fire was belching from the windows of a nearby hut like greedy orange arms reaching skyward.

  With the Askari providing covering fire, Kiram snatched the cooler from Amanda as the three of them gathered and began trotting to the southeast, toward rally point number two, an abandoned airfield forty miles away.

  5

  The Leopard watched the blond American woman through his riflescope as he received the message from Zhor Rhazziq, his current employer. He felt his left arm vibrate, causing him to look at his new satellite Al Rhazziq Media wearable sleeve, or ARM-Sleeve. The device was a high-tech carbon fiber sheath, much like a football quarterback’s forearm playbook, that covered his massive left wrist and part of his arm. He saw the message.

  We need the medicine .

  No shit , he thought. He would deliver. He had already killed the white-haired doctor and left him in the woods for one of the orphans to discover.

  He used the camera function on his ARM-Sleeve to quickly snap two pictures of the American girl tossing the log onto the medical clinic. Those would prove valuable for the propaganda war and would keep Rhazziq off his ass. Essentially a wearable iPhone, his ARM-Sleeve enabled him to immediately email the photos to Rhazziq. He knew that Rhazziq had developed the cutting-edge wearable technology to compete with Google and Apple. The Leopard could watch streaming video, download email, browse the Internet, and make phone calls on his ARM-Sleeve.

  He pressed the fabric to shut down the device and save battery life, though the batteries were constantly recharging via solar energy. Looking up, he studied Amanda Garrett and waited for her to make her move for the cure. Like the sniper he was, The Leopard lay perfectly still four hundred meters away. As he waited, he thought about how he had killed Dr. King yesterday.

  ***

  Yesterday, The Leopard had pre-positioned himself near Lake Victoria, Tanzania, where he’d found a different small village that was teeming in the day with young African children and a few constabularies smoking cigarettes. The target folder Rhazziq had provided him identified this village as containing the production facility, while a woman named Amanda Garrett ran the testing program some seventy miles away. The altitude, near eight thousand feet, and the fact that they were in the wet season had made for a brisk drive in his open-air vehicle. But the sun had brought temperatures into the mid-nineties during the day as he observed through binoculars from a distant hilltop the patterns of life in the town. As night had fallen, he had watched the constabularies retire to a mud hut, probably to chew on some qhat. The children had all vanished inside similar structures as if on cue.

  The Leopard repositioned his vehicle on the backside of a smal
l forest about a half mile from the village. He followed the edge of the dense foliage toward the ersatz community.

  He stood at the end of the tree line, no less than one hundred meters from the village. He saw a dirt road framed by single-story mud structures with open doorways and windows. Set apart from the huts was a wooden building, much more recently built, though its architecture was similar to the other buildings.

  This was his target.

  Walking behind the huts, he passed trash and feces and the usual flotsam of an underfunded and forgotten orphanage. He ascended the steps of the medical clinic and opened the door.

  There he found Dr. Arthur King sitting with his back to him staring at a computer monitor, apparently so deep in thought that The Leopard’s presence did not register.

  “Where is the cure?” The Leopard asked.

  The man looked like his dossier photo, The Leopard thought. Arthur King, a wiry immunologist from Ohio, calmly turned around and looked at his hulking presence in the doorway.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You’ve got five minutes to give me the HIV and Ebola recipes or I will kill you. It’s that simple.”

  The Leopard’s English was nearly perfect, but he could weave the Maghreb octave into a heavy Middle Eastern accent when necessary, as he did now under the assumption an Arabic voice might project more fear into the American.

  “Seems like two shitty options,” the doctor replied. A wave of understanding crossed over his face. “Who sent you? A pharmaceutical company?”

  The Leopard said nothing.

  “It’s not here.” King shrugged. The Leopard almost believed him, but the defiance in the doctor’s eyes told a different story.

  The Leopard was large, about six and a half feet tall and close to 250 pounds. His ripped muscles flexed beneath the silken sheen of his black T-shirt that hugged his frame like body paint.

  “Besides, you’re going to kill me anyway,” Dr. King smugly responded. “And with me, you will kill millions of people who will never get the treatments that I can deliver. AIDS is wiping out this country, and Ebola could wipe out the world.”