Lethal Agent (Mitch Rapp #18)(44)
When she entered, she saw Christine Barnett sitting near the back of the long table that dominated the room. She didn’t rise, instead glaring at Kennedy and giving her an almost imperceptible nod. In contrast, the other man in the room strode over to take her hand. Robert Woodman had been the director of the DEA for just over two years but Kennedy didn’t know him particularly well. He was something of an enigma in Washington—a former lawyer who had known the president since college but who had few other contacts inside the Beltway. His leadership at the DEA had been competent, but cautious. Her gut feeling was that he was a smart, patriotic man who just didn’t have much passion for his organization’s mission.
“It’s good to see you, Bob,” Kennedy said, still in the dark as to the purpose of the meeting. Of course, she’d been briefed on the well-publicized bust in San Ysidro, but that was very much outside of her sphere of influence. When the army’s diminutive bioweapons expert entered, though, her heart sank.
Gary Statham’s face held none of the warmth or inquisitiveness that it normally did. He remained silent as he shook hands with Kennedy and Woodman. A moment later, he was seated at the table, staring down at it as though it held some secret.
When the president entered, Kennedy chose a seat as far from Christine Barnett as possible. Not only because of her personal distaste for the woman, but in hopes that some physical distance would keep the senator focused on the subject at hand and not her hatred of the CIA.
“I’m sure all of you are aware of the recent drug bust at that mall in California?” the president said.
“It’d be hard to miss,” Barnett said, responding to what was obviously a rhetorical question. “What’s next? Are we going to find levitating subterranean trains? The fact that our borders—”
“I’m sure we’re all looking forward to you solving America’s drug problem,” Alexander said, cutting her off. “Robert? Could you bring us up to speed?”
Woodman nodded. “The truck that came through that tunnel was carrying roughly four hundred kilos of cocaine in two hundred separate packages. As a matter of procedure, we select a random sampling of them to test for purity, contamination, and to get an idea of where it came from. When our analysts opened the bags, it was clear that one of them didn’t contain cocaine or any other narcotic. In light of everything that’s been going on, we closed it back up and called Gary’s people.”
The president turned his attention to the army colonel, who immediately picked up the narrative.
“It contained anthrax,” he said simply.
“How much damage could it have done?” the president asked.
“That depends on how it was deployed. To be clear, there’s no way to make this some kind of weapon of mass destruction. It can’t, for instance, be put in a crop duster and flown over New York. And with all the publicity, I imagine anyone opening an envelope full of suspicious powder would get in touch with the authorities pretty quickly. Having said that, Gabriel Bertrand knows what he’s doing. This is finely ground, weapons-grade stuff. Obviously it could be put in food or drinks, but a much worse scenario would be if someone who knew what they were doing got it into a building’s ventilation system. You wouldn’t know it until people started coming down with symptoms and then it would be too late for many of them.”
“How many casualties are we talking about with the quantity that was found?”
“The nature of this pathogen is that most of it is going to be wasted. Absolute worst case, you could have seen as many as a couple of hundred people infected, with casualty rates probably around fifty percent.”
“Are we just going to assume that package is all that’s out there?” Barnett interjected. “The fact that the DEA tripped over this one doesn’t mean there aren’t a hundred more that made it through.” She pointed to a vent near the ceiling. “It could be coming through there right now.”
“I don’t think so,” Statham responded. “Based on the equipment we’ve seen in the ISIS videos, this is about all the product they could have produced in the time they’ve had.”
“What if they have equipment that wasn’t in the videos?”
“Unlikely,” Kennedy said. “Halabi is going for maximum emotional impact. He knows that the strength of anthrax as a weapon isn’t its ability to generate a high body count. It’s its ability to generate fear. Showing off his biological weapons capability is in many ways more important than the attack itself.”
Barnett laughed. “That’s what I’m supposed to tell my constituents?”
“Senator,” the president cautioned, but Barnett ignored him.
“Are we at least assuming that Halabi’s making another batch? And that we can’t count on NASA to find it for us again?”
“I am,” Statham admitted.
“Then what are we doing about it?” the president said. “Irene?”
“Since he can’t go for big numbers, I think we can count on Halabi focusing on high-value targets. Politicians and business leaders concentrated in technology and defense. Maybe even celebrities. Among other things, we’ve already spoken with potential targets about securing the ventilation systems in their buildings. We’ve also tried to get our political leadership to randomize their habits, particularly where they eat and shop. We’ll go back and impress on them again the importance—”