Checkmate

5

“Silence those alarms, Anna,” Lambert ordered.

The room went quiet.

“How’s this possible?” Lambert asked. “This is the NSA, for God’s sake, not eBay. How could something get past our firewalls?”

“The laptop,” Fisher murmured.

Grimsdottir nodded, eyes fixed on the screen. “You got it. Colonel, there was a virus buried in one of the hard drive’s sectors. A worm, designed to come alive as soon as it detected a connection with any of the laptop’s ports. As soon as I hooked it up to run diagnostics—”

“Can you stop it?”

“Working on it. It’s moving fast, spreading through the mainframe. I’m trying to get ahead of it… set up a firebreak. If I can divert it into a unused server, I can trap it. Damn, it’s moving fast!”

For the next fifteen minutes Fisher and Lambert watched in silence as she worked. Blocks of green-on-black computer code streamed across the monitor. Grimsdottir’s hands became a blur on the keyboard. Slowly the code seemed to lose momentum, coming in erratic bursts, until finally she leaned back and exhaled. Her face glistened with sweat. Her hands were shaking.

“I got it,” she said. “It’s trapped on an empty archive server.”

“How much damage did it do?” Lambert asked.

“A lot, but it didn’t reach the backup systems, so we’ll be able to rebuild most of the mainframe.”

“And the laptop?” Fisher asked.

“Gone. Well and truly dead. One piece of good news, though: There’s only a few people in the world with the voodoo it takes to write that kind of virus. Give me a day, and I’ll have a name.”

“Go,” Lambert ordered.

Once she was gone, Fisher turned to Lambert. “I have an idea about the Trego.”

“I’m listening.”

“I don’t buy the Liberia registration.”

“Me neither.”

“You can disguise a ship in a lot of ways, but there’s one thing you can’t hide: the engine serial numbers. They’re stamped everywhere. Here’s the rub, though: The FBI will eventually find the numbers and eventually the info will trickle down to us—”

Lambert grinned. “I hate the word eventually.”

In this case, “eventually” could mean weeks of bureaucratic wrangling. Fisher returned Lambert’s smile. “Me too.”

Fisher had known Lambert for nearly twenty years, having first worked with him in the Army’s Delta Force, then again as they were both tapped for an experimental program that took special ops soldiers from each branch of the military and transferred them to counterpart units. Rangers went to Delta; Delta went to Marine Force Recon; and in Fisher and Lambert’s case, Delta went to the U.S. Navy’s Special Warfare Sea-Air-Land unit — the SEALs. The idea was to create operators of the highest caliber, trained to be the elite of the military’s special forces community.

Lambert said, “As luck would have it, I’ve already had this discussion with the President. The FBI’s taking the lead on the case, but we’ve been cleared to conduct our own parallel investigation — separate from the FBI.”

Fisher understood the order. While he loathed politics in general and did his best to stay out of it, he knew what was driving the President’s caution: the war in Iraq. Someone had just launched an attack on the U.S. that could have killed thousands of people and rendered a section of the Virginia shoreline radioactive for decades, perhaps centuries. So far, the only suspect was a lone man of Middle Eastern descent aboard the Trego. If America was headed toward another war in the Middle East, the President didn’t want another intelligence fiasco. America had just started rebuilding the credibility it had lost over Iraq. It would be Third Echelon’s job to make doubly sure all t’s were crossed and i’s were dotted.

“Restrictions?” Fisher asked.

“None,” Lambert replied. “We do it our way; gloves off.”

“The only way to fly.”

“Amen. Now, go get some sleep. Tomorrow night, you’re breaking into a U.S. naval base.”

Fisher lived outside Germantown, Maryland, about thirty minutes northwest of Washington, in a small farmhouse surrounded by two acres of red maple and pine. He’d tried living a normal bachelor life: a townhouse, socializing with neighbors, sitting around the pool… But he’d quickly admitted what he already knew in the back of his mind: He wasn’t much of a people person. Not that he disliked people per se, but he had a limited tolerance for most of them.

It was a hazard that came with the job. Dealing with the worst of men in the worst of situations tended to change you. Living in the condo, Fisher had found himself mentally dissecting both his neighbors and his surroundings: threat or no threat; likely ambush sites; clear lines of fire… Living on the razor’s edge, while often exciting, was also all-consuming. You didn’t survive long in special operations without fully immersing yourself in that world. Not having a home where he could let down his guard and decompress had gotten very old, very quickly.

At the farmhouse, his closest neighbor was half a mile away. He could sit on his porch at night and hear nothing but the hum of the cicadas and the croaking of frogs. Surprisingly, he’d found the land itself therapeutic. He’d bought the property at a deep discount from an owner who’d allowed it to fall into disrepair, so he spent much of his time working at taming the landscaping or restoring the farmhouse, which needed new everything, from windows to shingles to plumbing. Fisher took comfort in the work — in the ordinariness of it all. Even the briefest of layovers at the farmhouse between missions helped recharge his batteries.

By the time he got home it was near dawn. He threw in a load of laundry, took a shower, checked his e-mail, and stretched out on the couch. He found the remote and turned on the TV. The channel was set to CNN.

“… what few initial eyewitness reports we’ve come across talk of dozens of people collapsing where they were standing or slumping over at the dining table… ”

Fisher sat bolt upright. He turned up the volume.

“The spokesperson for the governor’s office issued a statement stating that investigators were en route to the small town of Slipstone and that the governor himself would be holding a press conference later this morning. Meanwhile, speculation abounds as to what may be behind the sudden and mysterious deaths in the remote town of Slipstone, New Mexico.”

Fisher felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up. His cell phone started ringing.

He was back at Situation Room forty minutes later. Lambert stood at the conference table watching an MSNBC report. Grimsdottir and Redding were seated at workstations on either side of him. In the background Fisher heard the static hiss of radio punctuated by a female voice:

“Slipstone Nine-one-one, please hold… Slipstone Nine-one-one, please hold… Slipstone Nine-one-one, please hold… ”

Lambert looked over his shoulder at Fisher. “Two hundred emergency calls and counting. As far as we can decipher, there are hundreds dead. They’re laying in the streets, in homes, dead at their steering wheels… ”

“Good God,” Fisher murmured.

Grimsdottir called, “I’ve got it, Colonel.”

“Put it up.”

The main monitor resolved into a thermal satellite image of what Fisher assumed was Slipstone.

“Give me the overlay, Anna.”

Grimsdottir tapped the keyboard and the image changed to a maze of yellow and orange lines punctuated by circular blooms of red. To Fisher the colors looked eerily familiar. Already guessing the answer, he asked, “What are we seeing, Colonel?”

“Slipstone’s water system.”

“There’re only a few ways that many people can die that quickly: waterborne or airborne.”

His eyes still fixed on the monitor, Lambert nodded grimly. “How long, Anna?”

“Almost there, Colonel.” A few moments later: “Confirmed: it’s the same signature as the Trego.”

Fisher felt like he’d been punched in the stomach. He turned away from the screen and took a deep breath. The Trego had just been the opening salvo. This was the real event.

Someone had just poisoned an entire American town.