Lethal Agent Read online

  “We’ll continue to distract them by fanning the flames of their fear and division,” he said.

  “And after that?” the man pressed.

  “After that we’ll strike at them in a way that no one in history has ever even conceived of.”

  CHAPTER 3

  AL HUDAYDAH

  YEMEN

  THE port city still had more than two million residents, but at this point it was just because they didn’t have anywhere else to go. Some buildings remained untouched, but others had taken hits from the Saudi air force and were now in various states of ruin. Almost nightly, bombing runs rewrote the map of Al Hudaydah, strewing tons of rubble across some streets while blasting others clean.

  Rapp walked around a burned-out car and turned onto a pitted road that was a bit more populated. Knots of men had formed around wooden carts, buying and trading for whatever was available. Women, covered from head to toe in traditional dress, dotted the crowd, but only sparsely. They tended to be kept squirreled away in this part of the world, adding to the dysfunction.

  One was walking toward Rapp, clinging to the arm of a male relative whose function would normally have been to watch over her. In this case, the roles had been reversed. He was carrying the AK-47 and ceremonial dagger that were obligatory fashion accessories in Yemen, but also suffering from one of the severe illnesses unleashed by the war. The woman was the only thing keeping him upright.

  He stumbled and Rapp caught him, supporting his weight until he could get his feet under him again. When the woman mumbled her thanks, Rapp figured he’d take advantage of her gratitude. The map he’d been given by the CIA wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on.

  “Do you know where Café Pachachi is?”

  Her eyes—the only part of her visible—widened and she took a hesitant step back.

  It wasn’t surprising. As ISIS lost territory, a lot of its unpaid and leaderless fighters were turning to extortion, drug trafficking, and sexual slavery to make a living. Rapp’s physical appearance and Iraqi accent would likely mark him as one of those men.

  “Café Pachachi?” he repeated.

  She gave a jerky nod and a few brief instructions before skirting him and disappearing into the glare of the sun.

  It took another thirty minutes, but he finally found it. The restaurant was housed in a mostly intact stone building with low plastic tables and chairs set up out front. A few makeshift awnings provided shade, and improvised barriers kept customers from falling into a bomb crater along the eastern edge.

  Despite the war, business seemed good. The patio was filled with men leaning close to each other, speaking about politics, God, and death. Waiters hustled in and out of the open storefront, shuttling food and drinks, clearing dishes, and occasionally getting drawn into one of the passionate conversations going on around them.

  It was hard to believe that this was pretty much the sum total of the CIA’s presence in Yemen. It was one of the most lawless, terrorist-ridden countries in the world, and the United States had ceded its interests to the Saudis.

  America’s politicians were concerned with nothing but the perpetuation of their own power through the next election cycle. The sitting president was playing defense, trying not to do anything that could cause problems for his party in the upcoming presidential election. The primaries were in full swing, with the sleaziest, most destructive candidates on both sides in the lead. And the American people were laser-locked on all of it, goading the participants on like it was some kind of pro wrestling cage match.

  With no one watching the store in Yemen, ISIS was starting to find its footing again—using the chaos as cover to regroup and evolve. It was a mistake the politicians couldn’t seem to stop making. Or maybe it wasn’t a mistake at all. Terrorism was great theater—full of sympathetic victims, courageous soldiers, and evil antagonists. It was the ultimate political prop. Perhaps America’s elected officials weren’t as anxious to give it up as their constituents thought. Solved problems didn’t get out the vote.

  “Allah has delivered you safely!” Shamir Karman exclaimed, weaving through the busy tables to embrace him. “Welcome, my friend!”

  Rapp didn’t immediately recognize the man. Karman always carried an extra twenty-five or so pounds in a gravity-defying ring around his waist. It was completely gone now and his bearded face looked drawn.

  “It’s good to see you again,” Rapp said in the amiable tone expected by the diners around him.

  “Come! There’s no reason for us to stand among this riffraff. I keep the good food and coffee in the back.”

  Laughter rose up from his customers as he led Rapp into the dilapidated building. The human element had always been Karman’s genius. The native Yemeni had been recruited by the CIA years ago, but it had been clear from the beginning that he’d never be a shooter. No, his weapon was that he was likable as hell. The kind of guy you told your deepest secrets to. That you wanted in your wedding party. That you invited to come stay indefinitely at your house. All within the first ten minutes of meeting him.

  “There was another bombing last night,” he said as they passed indoor tables that had been set aside for women to sit with their families.

  “Did they get close?”

  The Agency was working to keep the Saudis away from this neighborhood, but no one was anxious to tell them too much out of fear of a leak. It was the kind of tightrope walk that was Irene Kennedy’s bread and butter, but there were no guarantees. One arrogant commander or confused pilot could turn Karman and his operation into a pillar of fire.

  “No. The bastards were just dropping random bombs to hide their real target.”

  “Which was?”

  “The sanitation facility we keep putting back together with spit and chewing gum. We’re already dealing with one of the deadliest outbreaks of cholera in history, and they want to make it worse. If they can’t bomb us into submission, they’ll kill us with disease and hunger.”

  The anger in his voice wasn’t just for the benefit of his cover. In truth, Karman’s loyalties were a bit hard to pin down, but that’s what made him so good at his job. He sincerely cared about his country, and anyone who met him could feel that sincerity.

  “Did you come with family?” the Yemeni said.

  It wasn’t hard to figure out what he was asking. He was worried that Coleman and his men were in-country and would stand out like a sore thumb. Rapp shared that concern and had sent them to Riyadh. They were currently floating in the pool of a five-star resort at the American taxpayers’ expense.

  “No. I’m alone.”

  “You’ll stay with me, of course. I can’t offer you much luxury, but there’s not a lot of that to be had in Yemen anymore.”

  “Thank you. You’re very generous, my friend.”

  They entered the kitchen and instead of the pleasant odor of boiling saltah, Rapp was hit with the powerful stench of bleach.

  “My success isn’t just about my skills as a chef and my consistent supply of food,” Karman said, reading his expression. “With the cholera outbreak, it’s all about cleanliness. No one has ever gotten sick eating at my establishment.” He increased the volume of his voice. “And no one ever will, right?”

  The kitchen staff loudly assured him that was the case.

  “Seriously,” he said, pushing through a door at the back. “Don’t put anything in your mouth that doesn’t come from here or you’ll find yourself shitting and vomiting your guts out. And you’ll be doing it on your own. The hospital’s been bombed three times and still has hundreds of new patients flooding in every day. The sick and dying are covering every centimeter of floor there and spilling out into the parking lot. I don’t know why. There’s no medicine. Hardly any staff. Nothing.”

  The room they found themselves in was about eight feet square, illuminated by a bare bulb hanging from the celling. There was a folding table that served as a desk and a single plastic chair raided from the restaurant. Walls were stacked with boxes labeled
with the word “bleach” in Arabic. A few notebooks that looked like business ledgers and a tiny potted plant rounded out the inventory.

  According to Rapp’s briefing, there was also a hidden chamber with communications equipment and a few weapons, but it was best to use it sparingly. If anyone discovered its existence, Karman’s body would be hanging from one of his restaurant’s ceiling beams inside an hour.

  “Better than bleach . . .” the Yemeni said, rummaging in a box behind him, “is alcohol.”

  He retrieved a half-full bottle of Jack Daniel’s and poured careful measures into two coffee cups before handing one to Rapp.

  “Did your work go well?” he asked, keeping the conversation vague and in Arabic. He was well-liked and trusted in the area, but it was still a war zone. People were always listening. Always suspicious.

  “No. I wasn’t able to connect with our friend.”

  Karman’s face fell. “I’m sorry for that. I did the best I could to schedule it, but you know how unpredictable he can be.”

  Rapp nodded and took a sip of his drink.

  “I’ve become nothing more than a tea room gossip,” Karman said in a hushed tone. “Trying to live off the pittance the restaurant makes and arguing politics with whoever sits down at one of my tables.”

  The message was clear. He was calling for resources. Unfortunately, the dipshits in Washington weren’t in the mood to provide them.

  “Really? Business looks good to me.”

  “An illusion. Customers are dwindling and talk has turned wild. Spies. Intrigue. Conspiracies. I spend my days listening to this and searching the sky for the Saudi missile that will kill me. Or looking behind me for the man who will put a knife in my back for the money in my pocket.”

  “Former ISIS fighters?” Rapp said.

  Karman nodded. “They’re heavily armed and purposeless. Young men full of hate, violence, and lust. All believing that their every whim is a directive from God. If Sayid Halabi is alive I would have expected him to move them toward the lawless middle of the country. But he doesn’t seem interested. The rumor is that he’s forming a much smaller group of well-educated, well-trained followers.”

  Karman brought his mug to his lips and closed his eyes as he swished the whiskey around in his mouth before swallowing. “People speak of him as though he’s a ghost. As if he’d died and returned. They believe that God spoke to him and gave him the secret to defeating the infidels.”

  “Do you believe that’s true?”

  “No. But I think Halabi does. And I think that he’s even more brilliant than he is twisted. What I can tell you for certain is that ISIS is evolving. And if he’s behind that, I guarantee you he’s not doing it for his entertainment. He’s working toward something. Something big.”

  Again, Karman was using the cover of idle gossip to make a point: that something needed to be done before Halabi could assert his dominance over a reinvigorated jihadist movement. Unfortunately, he was preaching to the choir. Rapp and Kennedy spent a hell of a lot of time and effort making that precise case to politicians who seemed less interested every day.

  Karman reached for a pack of cigarettes and lit one before speaking again. “There’s nothing more for us here, my friend. I can’t distinguish one day from another anymore. I serve food. I clean. I listen to loose talk. And I wait for death.”

  CHAPTER 4

  CENTRAL YEMEN

  THE boy curled up on the dirty cot, covering his mouth and bracing himself for the coughing fit that was to come. Dr. Victoria Schaefer watched helplessly as he convulsed, the sound of his choking muffled by the hazmat suit she was wearing. When it was over, he reached out a hand spattered with blood from his lungs.

  She took it, squeezing gently through rubber gloves and fighting back the urge to cry. With the headgear she was wearing, there was no way to wipe the tears away. It was a lesson she’d learned over and over again throughout the years.

  “It’s going to be all right,” she lied through her faceplate.

  The respiratory disease she’d stumbled upon in that remote Yemeni village killed more than a third of the people who displayed symptoms. Soon he’d be added to that statistic. And there was nothing she could do about it.

  He managed to say something as he pointed to another of the cots lined up in the tiny stone building. She didn’t understand the words—bringing her interpreter into this makeshift clinic would have been too dangerous—but she understood their meaning. The woman lying by the door was his mother. After days of struggling for every breath, she’d lost her fight two hours ago.

  “She’s just sleeping,” Schaefer said in as soothing a tone as she could manage.

  The boy was young enough to have eyes still full of trust and hope. In contrast, the adults in the village had started to lose faith in her. And why not? Even before her medical supplies had dwindled, she’d been largely powerless. Beyond keeping victims as comfortable as possible and treating their secondary infections with antibiotics, there was little choice but to just let the virus run its course.

  The boy lost consciousness and Schaefer walked through the gloom to a stool in the corner. The windows had been sealed and the door was closed tight against a jamb enhanced with rubber stripping. Light was provided by a hole in the roof covered with a piece of white cloth that was the best filter they could come up with.

  The other three living people in the building were in various stages of the illness. One—ironically a man who estimated himself to be in his late sixties—was on his way to recovery. What that recovery would look like, though, she wasn’t sure. Yemeni acute respiratory syndrome, as they’d dubbed it, left about thirty percent of its survivors permanently disabled. It was almost certain that he would never be able to work again. The question was whether he would even be able to care for himself without assistance.

  The ultimate fate of the other two victims was unknown. They were in the early stages and it was still too soon to tell. Both were strong and in their twenties, but that didn’t seem to make any difference to YARS. It was an equal opportunity killer that took healthy adults at about the same rate it did children and the elderly.

  The boy started to cough again, but this time she didn’t go to him, instead staring down at his blood on her gloves. She’d leave his mother where he could see her and take comfort from her presence. The heat in the building was suffocating, but it didn’t matter. He wouldn’t last long enough for her to start to decompose.

  • • •

  “Vick—”

  The satellite phone cut out and Schaefer shook it violently. Not the most high-tech solution, but it seemed to work. She was able to make out the last few words of her boss’s sentence, but ignored them. Ken Dinh was the president of Doctors Without Borders, a good man and a personal friend. But he was sitting behind a desk in Toronto and she was on the ground in the middle-of-nowhere Yemen.

  “Are you listening to what I’m saying, Vicky?”

  No one was watching, so she allowed herself a guilty frown. At forty-two, she’d already been through a number of husbands, all of whom had roughly the same complaints. The top of the list was that she was obsessed with her job. Second was that she was—to use her last husband’s words—always camped out in some war-torn, disease-ridden, third-world hellhole. The last one was something about never listening and instead just waiting to talk. She wasn’t sure, though, because she hadn’t really been listening.

  “I heard you but I don’t know what you want me to say. No worries? Hey, maybe it’s not as bad as it looks? And what do you want me to tell the people in this village? Take two aspirin and call me in the morning?”

  “This sarcasm isn’t like you, Vicky.”

  “Seriously?”

  “No. Obviously that was a joke.”

  “So now we’re going to sit around telling jokes?”

  Even from half a world away she could hear his deep sigh. “But it’s isolated, right? You haven’t seen or heard anything that points to an outbreak ou
tside that village.”

  She’d walked about a third of a mile to make the call, stopping partway up a slope containing boulders big enough to provide shade. It was the place she came when she needed to be alone. When she needed to find a little perspective in a world that didn’t offer much anymore.

  The village below wasn’t much to look at, a few buildings constructed of the same reddish stone and dirt that extended to the horizon in every direction. She surveyed it for a few moments instead of answering. Dinh was technically right. The disease she’d discovered appeared to be isolated to this forgotten place and its forty-three remaining inhabitants.

  And because of that, no one cared. It had no strategic relevance to the Houthi rebels or government forces fighting for control of the country. The ISIS and al Qaeda forces operating in the area didn’t consider it a sufficient prize to send the two or three armed men necessary to take it. And the Saudis had no reason to waste fuel and ordnance blowing it up.

  The disease devastating the village had probably come from one of the bat populations living in caves set into the slope she was now calling from. But the specialists she’d consulted assured her that their range was nowhere near sufficient to make it to the closest population center—a similarly tiny village over forty hard miles to the east.

  “It’s isolated,” she admitted finally. “But I don’t know for how much longer. I’m containing it by giving these people food and health care so none of them have any reason to leave. And I’m counting on the fact that no one from outside has any reason to come. Is that what you want to hang your hat on?”

  “You also told me that you thought the whole thing was a fluke, right? The war cut off the village’s food supply and they started eating bats for the first time?”

  “That’s just a guess,” she responded through clenched teeth. “We can’t get anyone with the right expertise to come here to do the testing. Look, Ken, I’m here with one nurse and a microbiologist who’s only interested in getting his name in the science journals. Twenty-five people in this village are dead. That’s a third of the population.”