The Deadliest Strain

Chapter Nine

There's nothing else." Matt frowned, his fingers flying over the keyboard as his eyes scanned the screen. 'This is all duplication. There is virtually nothing about her online, other than occasional references to her as missing."

"What about the University of Baghdad Web site?"

"Same thing. The links go to the new Web sites set up over the past three or four years. Everything took a while to rebuild after Saddam's regime fell and the civil war started. The new sites have nothing we want." He clicked over the classified intelligence Internet engines. "Look, even the archived Web presences going back the past decade show very little. These are the pages that were in existence during the years she was on the faculty."

Austyn's eyes ran over the pages. "How about the political science department Web page?" he asked.

"Just her name on the list of faculty. No pictures, no individual pages, nothing."

"Go to the last year. What shows up on the faculty list?"

"This is it." Matt clicked back to the main page of the university. There were a few pictures of the buildings and some links to the different departments, but nothing useful. "They were worrying about other things at this point."

"Like 'shock and awe.'" Austyn, looking over his partner's shoulder, frowned at the screen. "And the Brits had nothing from her time at Oxford?"

"Grades and evaluations. Not a picture, not a fingerprint, nada. We could hunt up roommates and professors, but there's nothing online."

"So what you're saying is that we're wasting our time looking for Fahimah Banaz on the net."

"You got it." Matt nodded. "She just predates the era of the 'information superhighway,' as you old guys like to call it."

"Yeah, the Dark Ages," Austyn retorted.

The younger agent got serious again. "We've got agents in Baghdad. We can send a couple of them over to the university and have them physically go through what's left of the old personnel files."

"Let's get the ball rolling on that."

"Also, we could have our field people start some discreet inquiries about Rahaf."

"If the initial queries turn up nothing, we'll have to move quickly past the 'discreet' part. We don't have time to waste if she's out there and behind this."

"If we get nothing right away, we'll offer rewards for any information about her," Matt suggested. "If she's out there, someone will know something. Offer U.S. dollars, and the locals tend to talk."

"Good."

Austyn straightened up and moved to the wire-reinforced window separating them from Dr. Banaz in the other room. He raised the blinds and looked in at the woman.

He'd had her moved after she'd torn up the other cell. Through the window, they could both see each other. This room was furnished with a cot, as well. A new tray with food and drinks had been brought in, but she had yet to touch it. Austyn had positioned two female guards inside the room with her. He wouldn't risk having her hurt herself.

She was sitting cross-legged on the floor, her back against one of the walls. Her eyes were closed. The old blanket was spread across her lap. She was back to her meditation pose. He wondered if she really did have the ability to escape her surroundings mentally. She had to. How else could she have survived and kept her sanity for all these years? If the hole in which he'd found her was any indication of the type of cells she'd been kept in, it was amazing that she hadn't tried to take her own life a hundred times.

Inside the room, one of the guards said something to the other. Each room was sound-proofed. Austyn didn't hear what they said, but he could see that they both were watching the prisoner. It was obvious from their wariness and overt bravado that they were a little afraid of her.

Not a muscle moved on the prisoner's face. Her hands rested calmly on her knees. She looked to be totally at peace. He was a window-shopper when it came to things like meditation. He admired those who could do it. But to him meditation was almost the same as relaxing, and that was something that he lacked in the gene pool. His parents were the same way, and his siblings. No one in his family took vacations. They took on projects.

He wished he knew more about her. Matt and Austyn had left Washington with hundreds of pages of files on Rahaf, but there was nothing worthwhile in any of them about Fahimah. Matt had logged into the CIA and FBI files, archived files from the NSA, MI5, Interpol, Scotland Yard, everywhere. He'd even queried the FSB in the Kremlin. Nothing of any use. She was a nonthreat, and that made her nonexistent. She didn't even warrant a picture or a fingerprint anywhere they'd looked. If it wasn't for the bio at the end of an article published in London back in the late nineties, Austyn would have pushed aside the suspicion he had of the two sisters switching places. The article was about some Sufi poet, "In the Light of Rabi'a of Basrah," and it had a short biography of Fahimah Banaz. Educated at Oxford. This was the only piece of information that existed on her on the Internet. As far as Austyn was concerned, though, it was enough.

Her eyes opened. Through the glass divider, their gazes locked for a couple of seconds before she closed them again. She was no criminal. Austyn could feel it in his gut. She was lying, possibly sacrificing herself. A martyr, maybe. It was a stereotype, but if she was Fahimah, then she had given up everything for a sister. But if she was Rahaf, was she capable of the type of destruction that was happening in the U.S.? No, he didn't think so.

All he really knew for sure was that this woman was all they had, and Austyn had to win her cooperation somehow.

"I just received some pictures of the Sedona incident," Matt told him.

Austyn walked back to the computer. They'd heard the news only an hour ago. This was their worst nightmare. It meant that the bacteria could pop up anywhere at any time. The ten days in between had given them a false sense of security. Austyn had known what they'd seen in Maine couldn't have been a onetime thing.

His gut twisted as Matt started the slide show of the digital photos. The bodies outside of the truck were in very early stages of decomposition. The excruciating pain on one of the faces forced him to look away momentarily. Austyn glanced in the direction of the window again.

"It's getting worse," Matt said under his breath. "Looking at the pictures of the victims on that island in Maine… nothing was identifiable. But these… they're still human. You see it right there… what's happening to them."

"I'd like her to see these," Austyn told his partner.

"Are you sure?" Matt hesitated. "Especially if she's not Rahaf…"

"No amount of arguing will get the message across like these pictures. She needs to see them. I want her to know what's happening." He took his laptop out of his briefcase. "Load it onto this. I'll take it in to her."

Matt started booting up the computer.

Captain Adams walked in. She took a look at the window separating them from the prisoner before turning to them.

"Is it true?" she asked. "I just got word of another attack in the U.S."

"We don't know if it was an attack."

"Right," she said, skepticism lacing the word.

"We're only classifying it as an outbreak at this point. Both occurred in areas that are not exactly population centers. If they're part of an attack, the perpetrators are not trying to do any major damage."

The captain nodded. Austyn motioned with his head to the pictures on his partner's screen.

"We've just received these shots of the victims in Arizona. It's pretty ugly."

Adams moved behind the desk and went through the pictures, her face grim. "What's the number of fatalities for this one?"

"Five, as far as we know," Austyn answered. "It could have been a lot worse. But thankfully, those two police officers described the bodies with enough clarity that no other local emergency personnel were exposed."

He wondered if those poor souls really knew how painful and horrifying their deaths would be.

"Here you go." Matt handed the laptop to Austyn. "You've got it all, including the info we turned up on… uh, on the prisoner earlier."

"I hear Rahaf has shown more life in this past hour than she's displayed for five years," Adams commented.

They hadn't told Adams about Austyn's suspicions. There was no reason to muddy the waters until they were a hundred percent positive. The same went with their director back in the U.S. Austyn wanted to have proof first. His partner agreed. They had a suspect in custody. That was a start.

"The last pictures disturbed her. I'm hoping that these will upset her even more."

"I'm surprised. I didn't think she had any human feeling left. You might break her yet."

Break her. Nice term, Austyn thought ironically. He was not exactly made for this side of the business. He certainly hoped she would open up to him, though he was only cautiously optimistic.

Austyn carried the laptop into the adjoining room and directed the guards to wait outside. Dr. Banaz gave no indication that she'd heard him coming in. He didn't bother with a chair and sat on the floor beside her, leaning his back against the wall and stretching his legs out in front of him.

Without saying anything, he studied the room from this angle. Whitewashed walls. The furnishings were the same as those she'd torn up in the other cell. He stared at the separating window. The overhead light cast a shadow on the glass and very little was visible from this angle. He barely made out someone backing away from the window. He guessed it was Captain Adams.

"Now I know what a fish in an aquarium feels like," he said under his breath. "Have you ever been to an aquarium?"

She didn't answer.

He turned to her. "Do you feel rested after meditating? Is it like getting a good night's sleep?"

He was surprised to have her open her eyes and look at him. Her gaze spoke volumes about how pointless she thought his questions were.

"I don't want to sign up for your Meditation 101 class, Professor Banaz," Austyn told her. "But I need your attention for a few minutes. We've just received some news that my partner and I believe you should be made aware of."

He didn't expect small talk and she didn't disappoint. Austyn opened his laptop and sat it on the floor between them. He brought up the pictures they'd just received.

She only looked at the screen for a second before turning her head away.

"You're making it way too easy for me," he said quietly. "Dr. Rahaf Banaz would look at these pictures."

"What do you know?" she murmured. "What do you know about anything?"

"I'm trying to know."

He waited, but she said nothing more.

"Rahaf Banaz would force herself to look at these photographs, gruesome and painful and unpleasant as they are, because she is a scientist, and her professional curiosity would take an upper hand. Her mind would ask a hundred questions. She'd want to know the specifics of where and how… the circumstances, the time of death. She's ask what lab work has already been done on the remains of the victims. She'd demand to know the results. Am I wrong?"

The woman still kept her eyes averted. She seemed to be focused on a crack in the wall opposite them.

"No amount of time in prison would shut down that side of her. As a biochemist, this is her field, the topic she spent a decade of her life researching. Someone else has done this, created the potential for an epidemic. She knows she is innocent. She knows that if her captors had any intelligence, they would recognize that, as well. She had a genetically compatible strain of this bacteria in her labs five years ago, but she didn't allow it to be unleashed. Not against the enemies of Saddam Hussein, even when they were knocking on her nation's door. She understands the danger of what is out there better than anyone else in the world, perhaps. That's why she'd care."

Her head turned. She stared at the screen. He had her. Rahaf or Fahimah. He was connecting, penetrating the thick veil of indifference that she had used to protect herself… or her sister… for so long. She was responding.

"Sedona, Arizona. Five people are dead," he said, paging slowly through the pictures. He watched the expression on her face. The green eyes were glued to the screen. 'This happened today, only a few hours ago."

From the clenching of the muscles along her jawbone, he knew she was trying to hide her feelings, but it was an impossible task. The green eyes were expressive, and patches of color crept up her neck and into her sallow cheeks. She was clearly disturbed by the images.

"Do you know how far Arizona is from Maine?" he asked.

He expected no answer, but he waited a moment, anyway.

"Your sister would know that," he said.

"Some three thousand miles," she whispered. "I've been to both places."

Her answer caught him by surprise. They knew that Fahimah had never been to America, not as a student or a tourist. No visa had ever been issued to her. Rahaf could have been to both places. Nice try, he thought. The information was basic enough that an educated person could have come up with the answer. At the same time, if going along with her playing the role of Rahaf was the way to get her to cooperate, then he'd play along.

"The two outbreaks are three thousand miles apart," he said with a nod. "So far, we have found no possibility of contact between the two groups of victims "

She'd leaned her head back against the wall. Her eyes slowly closed. He wasn't sure if she was listening to anything he was saying or not. He wasn't used to being shut down like this. He thought they'd started a dialogue, albeit with his side a little more vocal than hers. He slapped the top of the laptop down.

"Back to meditating?" he asked thinly.

Getting no immediate answer from her, he decided to let her have it. "I'm not here to interrogate you, Dr. Banaz. I don't have any agenda other than what I told you. For most of your life, you've claimed to be a scientist. Well, that's what I am. It's what I do. I prevent bad things from happening. I try to stop the spread of illnesses that can hurt people. And I've read enough of your files to know that your facility was never tied in to any of the mass poisoning of Kurds or the Iranians during the Iran-Iraq War."

He laid the laptop aside. She was listening.

"Rahaf Banaz was involved with many humanitarian causes in New York. I'd like to think she hasn't changed, that we have a lot in common. I believe that it was Saddam's government and the estrangement between our governments that colored our view of what you were doing."

He let that sink in a moment before continuing.

"But we have a problem that could become an international disaster. It involves all of us, you and me included. You've seen the pictures. They're real. They…"

"I wasn't meditating," she interrupted him.

He had to reel in the rest of his lecture. He turned to look at her. She was staring at the window to the adjoining room. Austyn was happy to see that no one was standing there. He didn't want anything distracting her.

"I was thinking," she told him.

He waited for her to say more, but she was silent. "Are you thinking about helping me?"

She gave a hesitant nod. "Yes, I'll help you."

"I'm very relieved."

"I don't have any quick answers for you." She gathered her knees against her chest and pulled the blanket around her shoulders. "I've been a prisoner for too long. My work seems almost a dream to me now."

"We will change that," he said encouragingly. "We can show you all the laboratory results we have relevant to the victims. Naturally, we don't have the DNA sequence of the microbe from today's incident yet, but you can start looking at what we have from the Maine outbreak."

Minutes of silence dragged by. Austyn didn't care if she felt the need to rehearse her words a few times in her head first. The important thing was that this was the most she'd communicated with anyone since her capture.

"I was never told what was recovered from my lab after the bombing."

"Very little."

Her green eyes told him that she didn't believe him.

"We wouldn't be here asking for your help if any documentation had survived." He was telling the truth. "There were test samples that were collected, but all the files had been destroyed."

Austyn could have sworn that a satisfied expression crossed her pale features. Of course!

"But you knew that," he said. "You destroyed them yourself."

She didn't deny it. And this also explained how she'd survived the bombing. She'd been found in an office in the basement of the building, where she must have been shredding files. The section of the facility that housed the labs had been demolished by the bombing. Only a refrigerated safe in one corner of the labs had survived the devastation. It had contained a single vial of the microbe.

"Did anyone else live through the bombing?" she asked.

It was sad that all these years in prison and she'd never been able to ask these questions. Fahimah or Rahaf. Whichever sister she was, she'd been in that building. If she was Rahaf, she knew the people who worked there.

"No. You were the only one," he told her.

She showed no grief, but she looked away. Austyn saw Adams cross the window again. Fahimah's eyes flickered toward the glass.

"You are correct," she said. "I don't like fish tanks."

"You don't have to stay here," he told her. "Name the place, the facility. We'll take you wherever you want to work. Time is very important, though. We have labs available in this region or in Europe. We'll find as many people as you need to work with you. Some of the researchers in those facilities, you might even know."

He wasn't sure if this last bit of information was positive or negative, considering he still couldn't decide who she really was. She didn't look alarmed, however.

She rested her chin on the blanket covering her knees. She was silent again for a very long time. It was hard for Austyn not to push, not to encourage her to make a decision. Patience wasn't his middle name, but he had to allow her to set the pace. Whatever he'd done so far was working.

"There's not enough time to start everything fresh. To run new tests and wait for results," she said.

"I agree. That's why we're here. We have people in the U.S. working on this, but we don't have much hope for a quick solution there."

"You want an antidote… a serum to stop the microbe."

"We don't think standard antibiotics will work quickly enough."

"They won't," she said, a faraway look coming into her eyes. She seemed to be thinking about something else.

"What can you tell us?"

She continued to gaze into space for a moment.

"What I destroyed in the lab in Diyala wasn't all of my research," she said finally. "I have files."

She was lying now. Something in her voice… in her face… told him. Austyn was no fool. She had no reason to tell him the truth, and it would make perfect sense for her to send them on a wild-goose chase. Put out the decoy and go the other way. It worked for Osama bin Laden. It was the standard operating procedure in every peace negotiation in the Middle East, and had been for the past fifty years. Austyn could see it would be the same with the Banaz files. He could feel it coming.

Don't be such a cynic, he told himself. Keep an open mind.

"Okay, do you think your research files have been safe? Iraq has been a mess for some time. Where did you leave the files?"

Her silence was his only answer.

Austyn decided to change direction, to work on her empathy again. "The sample microbe we found at your lab. Did you witness the effects of the microbe on complex organisms?"

She nodded.

"Laboratory animals?"

"No," she said quickly. "I… I…" Her voice trailed off.

His mind jumped at the possibility. "Humans?" he asked hesitantly.

"One," she said quietly. "One person was accidentally exposed to the microbe."

Austyn saw her green eyes mist up before she looked away. She wasn't lying now.

"You watched him die?"

"I watched him suffer. But no, death did not ensue. There is a remedy. The microbe can be stopped."