The Panic Zone

18

Fairfax County, Virginia

It was late.

Robert Lancer downed the last of his tepid coffee then dragged his hands over his face.

The unconfirmed intel out of Dar es Salaam concerning an imminent attack weighed on him. He’d been searching for anything to connect this dot to the next one. Before this had surfaced he had been working on a letter from a troubled ex-CIA scientist living in Canada.

His line rang.

“Lancer.”

“Bob, it’s Atkins at Homeland. We’ve got zip so far on Salelee.”

“Nothing to substantiate?”

“Zilch. The Tanzanians are keeping him for a while. He could’ve been blowing smoke. You know how these guys make claims to leverage deals, or deflect attention.”

“Keep looking and keep me posted.”

Lancer reached for his mug, remembering it was empty.

Like my apartment. Like my life, he thought, glancing at the framed photographs of his wife and daughter next to his phone.

Take nothing for granted.

He sat up and went back to Salelee’s file.

He realized that this latest threat was at risk of being rolled into so many others that had arisen over the years. As of last fall, U.S. security agencies were tracking about five thousand people, two hundred suspicious networks and investigating at least seventy-five active plots.

Lancer reviewed a few in the database. There was a threat to destroy a U.S. airliner over the Pacific. Nothing came of it. Then there was the group in New York arrested in a plot to use fertilizer-based explosives in attacks on packed nightclubs. On the international side, in the Chechen Republic, a man tied to extremist groups, who possessed large amounts of the lethal poison ricin in a barn outside of Grozny, had tickets for a charter tour of Washington, D.C., which included a visit to the White House. And in Turkey, a plot to bomb the U.S. embassy in Ankara was foiled.

Lancer exhaled. That was just a sampling.

He’d been deployed to the Anti-Threat Center from the FBI because he’d requested it. Besides, the people at the center wanted to take advantage of his counterterrorism experience. But Lancer knew he was afforded special consideration because of his “personal investment in U.S. national security,” according to the handwritten letter he’d received from the director.

He looked at the faces of his wife and daughter.

My personal investment in U.S. national security.

Lancer was given a special assignment, allowed to operate as a one-man flying squad, investigating where his skill and instinct took him. He was cleared to cut across jurisdictional and agency boundaries to help on hot files and cold cases. His primary concern was soft targets that could yield the highest number of civilian casualties on U.S. soil.

Salelee’s claim could involve a soft target, Lancer thought and reviewed possibilities, the bigger ones.

There was an upcoming spiritual gathering at the L.A. Memorial Coliseum that would draw one hundred thousand attendees. The Texas State Fair in Dallas would see over two million people pass through its gates. In Columbus, a music festival was expected to bring one hundred thousand people to Ohio Stadium.

Then Lancer looked at another big one: the Human World Conference coming up in New York City. It would be a family-friendly gathering of music and love, aimed at spreading harmony around the planet. There would be addresses by Nobel laureates, actors, authors, artists. Music groups would perform free concerts. It was set for Central Park and was expected to draw about one million people.

This one was on the radar of every local, state and federal security agency. There was a long list of potential attack methods to consider: suicide bombers, a truck or bus filled with explosives or a chemical, biological or radiological device-a dirty bomb.

Lancer considered recent history.

Some terrorist groups claimed to have chemical, biological or radiological weapons. While there had been few attacks on civilians employing such methods, those carried out were lethal.

In 1995, a cult known as the Supreme Truth released sarin, a deadly nerve agent into the Tokyo subway system killing a dozen people and injuring at least five hundred others.

In 2001, a series of anthrax attacks was launched in the U.S., using letters containing anthrax spores. At least five people were killed. In 1979, nearly nine hundred miles east of Moscow, several vials from top-secret biological and chemical military experiments vanished.

Take nothing for granted, Lancer thought and went back to the letter he’d been reviewing. It involved an older case and was written by a dying CIA scientist who’d overseen deadly classified U.S. military experiments that were long abandoned. The letter went first to the CIA, but upon assessing it, the agency referred it to the National Anti-Threat Center.

The scientist was concerned about rumors among fringe elements of the underground research community that an unknown international group was somehow now attempting to replicate parts of those “terrible experiments.”

Lancer questioned himself: Doesn’t that constitute a threat? Doesn’t it require investigation? He looked at the letter. The scientist was living out his final days in a remote cabin in Canada.

If Lancer chose to follow intelligence of this sort, policy required he make a face-to-face interview.

He read the letter one more time.

Take nothing for granted.

Lancer picked up the phone to make travel arrangements to Canada.