Resurrection Day (50 page)

Collins stood outside the glass-fronted window of the critical-care room. A couple of nurses were busy near Nikki's bed. She was sleeping. An enormous purple bruise covered the left side of her face, her head was bandaged, and a couple of drips were feeding into her left arm. The knot in Collins' stomach came back, tightened like steel.

Daniel was in another critical-care room off to the right, a curtain halfway round his bed. It was heart wrenching to see him, and Collins felt close to breaking down. The little boy was unconscious from the combination of drugs and injuries. Bottles and tubes ran into his veins, his chest and stomach were heavily bandaged, and his face and body were speckled with tiny cuts and a mass of dark, ugly bruises. An oxygen mask covered his mouth, he was wired up to a couple of monitors, and Collins noticed that his little chest barely moved as he breathed with the aid of a respirator.

He felt impotent, unable to do anything to help. A kind of catatonic numbness took hold, and as he stared from Nikki to Daniel he was unable even to pray. His mind sought the solace of emptiness, but the emptiness wouldn't come.

He thought of Sean, of the helplessness he had felt knowing that his son had died many thousands of miles away and he hadn't been there, that even if he had been there was nothing he could have done, just as there was nothing he could do now. He started to cry then, great convulsions of tears that shook his body and pained his chest.

When the tears subsided, when he had taken a couple of breaths to control himself, he knew two things with certainty: he wanted desperately for Daniel to live, didn't want Nikki to suffer the soul-numbing anguish of losing a child. And he wanted the people who had done this: he wanted Mohamed Rashid, wanted him and the others badly, the lust for revenge in his heart so savage that it went beyond all reason and truly frightened him.

Two minutes later, he was in the elevator, on his way down to the hospital exit.

Washington, DC 13 November 7.35 a.m.

How do you dispose of three hundred thousand corpses?

On Federal Plaza, Patrick Tod O'Brien was still stuck with the question as he studied the DC map. He thought perhaps they could entomb Washington, leave it as a monument to the dead, and go build a new capital. But he didn't believe that was a runner — you were talking about a national icon, a city of great historical and political importance. Turning it into some vast mausoleum wasn't really on.

And he foresaw other related problems in the aftermath: the entire centre of Washington — including hundreds of famous historical buildings and monuments — would have to be carefully cleaned of contaminants. O'Brien shuddered to think of the overall cost of this kind of disaster: you were talking about a clean-up costing billions upon billions of dollars, the biggest in America's history. But he had to get back to the question of the bodies.

They couldn't just leave three hundred thousand contaminated dead lying in the streets for long, not unless they wanted to risk plague, cholera or typhoid outbreaks. So the corpses had to be moved. And that meant transport. An awful lot of transport. And it meant body-bags, an awful lot of body-bags.

O'Brien's finger moved over the map, up to Boston to the north, then Baltimore and Philly to the east, and on to Chesapeake Bay farther south. He thought: All those bodies, we can really only go one way. They had to keep them far from the major cities to avoid spreading disease and contamination, move them out into the countryside to some holding area. And once there? He doubted that burning the corpses would be a runner. People — including government — would have a thing about tossing human dead on to funeral pyres, as if they were infected farm carcasses, to be destroyed because of some deadly animal virus. So where did the bodies go after they reached the holding area?

To slow decomposition and help reduce the risk of disease, O'Brien considered moving the bodies up north, off the coast of Maine, where it was colder. What if they used container ships and naval vessels out of nearby Chesapeake Bay? Then they could either keep the bodies in cold storage until they could be properly buried or bury them at sea, which was a touch more humane. But first the victims would have to removed in an orderly fashion out through Maryland and Virginia to the bay. FEMA would have to mission-assign the Department of Transportation the horrendous task of ferrying them out of the city to the holding area. O'Brien was back to the transport problem again. Thousands of vehicles would be needed. Tractor trailers, Greyhound buses, private trucks would have to be commandeered. A survey would have to be made secretly of where the Department of Transport could get the vehicles.

And yet more questions reared their ugly heads: how many bodies could you fit in a five- or ten-ton truck, in a Greyhound bus, in a container ship or naval vessel? An immediate study would have to be made. Every single type of vehicle or vessel intended for use would have to be measured and the numbers of corpses they could carry per load calculated. And after use, because the nerve gas had such a long footprint, they would have to be either destroyed or mothballed for long periods to prevent spreading contamination.

The nightmare went on: judging by the figures he'd been given, O'Brien reckoned the DC police, fire departments and emergency services were going to be pretty much defunct. The President — assuming he survived — would have to invoke martial law. Whenever civil order broke down, you had mindless chaos in the streets: incidences of lawlessness, looting, robberies and murders shot through the roof. You'd need to marshal the National Guard as a temporary police force. But with high numbers of casualties in DC, Guardsmen among them, they'd have to be looking out of state to fill the gap.

O'Brien knew for sure that the scenario was far too big for DC alone to handle: with the emergency services defunct, vast numbers of seriously ill and traumatised survivors to cope with, FEMA would have to be looking to the governors of Virginia, Maryland, Cleveland, Philly and even New York for help — asking them to put their hospitals, emergency services, fire crews and National Guards at Washington's disposal once the attack was under way. Thousands of out-of-state Guardsmen would have to be deputised, and then federalised, making them custodians of America's laws. Even before that, FEMA would have to secretly secure the governors' discreet co-operation and assistance. Something else worried O'Brien — he foresaw difficulties when it came to transporting massive numbers of contaminated, decomposing bodies over land to Chesapeake Bay. The state governors of Virginia and Maryland wouldn't like the idea of endless convoys of dangerous cargo being transported through their territory, for fear of contamination and disease.

Tough shit. FEMA's Director would have to advise that a presidential directive be signed into law.

Keeping everything under wraps until the attack took place, and yet at the same time having responders and emergency crews on stand-by ready for the event, was pretty much impossible, O'Brien figured. The best he could do to mask the truth behind the crisis would be to inform the crews involved that there was going to be a top-secret no-notice exercise, that they were on emergency call, and that all leave and vacation had been cancelled. Top-secret exercises were not uncommon.

But emergency crews weren't dumb: if they sensed a real threat, and if they had family or relatives in DC, they'd want to warn them, it was only human. It wouldn't be long before the District was in mass panic and there was total chaos in the streets. And what if the device went off then? The casualty figures could climb even higher. O'Brien sighed. The deeper you went into the problem, the messier it got. He knew FEMA would do everything possible to look after the victims, but the scenario was a recipe for monumental civil disaster.

Worse than that, thought O'Brien. It's like Armageddon.

A little after 7.45 he threw down his pen. He felt physically exhausted; his head throbbed. He'd had to deal with one of his most troubling and difficult assignments ever. True, he had the bones of a plan, the best he could come up with. He could roughly project how to try to cope with one and a half million unharmed survivors, two hundred thousand injured, and how to dispose of the corpses of three hundred thousand men, women and children. A massive amount of work remained to be done — he'd have to flesh out the plan, firm up the details. He also knew that having a plan was one thing, but in a crisis Murphy's Law was king.

Things went wrong, plans got messed up or had to be modified as you went along, and spanners got thrown in the works. And responders were human: large numbers of emergency personnel might crumple, mentally or physically unable to deal with the scale of such a staggering disaster — hundreds of thousands of dead, sick and injured. There was a good chance the plan could fall to pieces.

Troubled, O'Brien looked down at the photograph on his desk: of his wife of sixteen years, Helen, and their two young daughters. The most important people in his life. He loved them deeply. He felt a knot in the pit of his stomach, and a shiver suddenly went through him. He noticed that his hands were shaking.

He knew why. An assignment this secret — the Director had emphasised top secret — had to mean a realistic threat. And that worried the hell out of O'Brien. If this was for real, then Washington's citizens were in the deepest shit anyone could imagine.

The White House 8.45 a.m.

'OK, let me hear it again.'

'Yes, sir.' Doug Stevens, alone with the President in the Oval Office, rewound the tape of the recorded conversation with Abu Hasim from the night before. 'If it's all right with you, sir, I'll go from just before he cut us off a second time, prior to the truck-bomb explosion. Then I'll play back the bit where you say you've spoken with Kuzmin about the prisoners — which was right before Hasim issued his new ultimatum.'

The President nodded. The FBI Director found the relevant segment on the tape, hit the recorder's play button, and adjusted the volume. Hasim's voice filtered from the speakers, and the translator's words followed on right behind:

'As always, you Americans do not listen. I have told you my demands. I have told you I will not enter into dialogue. Yet you still attempt to cajole and bargain. Understand, I shall not bargain. You have vexed me by your attempts to negotiate, Mr President. But you have committed an even graver error.'

'What?'

'You have lied to me. I believe that you are not in the least serious about agreeing to my demands. I do not believe that you intend to honour the commitment you just gave. And that in asking me to help you, you are simply trying to buy time. I believe that you will use these remaining five days to try to locate the chemical device before the deadline expires ... '

Stevens pressed the stop button. 'Now we'll go to the part where you talk about Kuzmin, sir.'

Stevens fast-forwarded the tape, found the segment, hit the play button again. The President sounded crystal clear.

' ... I have spoken with President Kuzmin about the release of those in Russian prisons, and I can assure you his initial reaction is very favourable. But I need more time.'

There was a brief pause before Hasim's voice interrupted, followed quickly by the translation: 'You are lying! President Kuzmin is intent on keeping the prisoners. Furthermore, he has tried to destroy me by sending his bombers to attack my bases. Only by the grace of God, and your intervention, had he the sense to turn them back before it was too late ... '

Stevens depressed the stop button, cutting off the tape. Turning to the President, he said, 'OK, three things bother me. One, how could Hasim have known about Kuzmin's bombing attempt on his bases? The aircraft flew in darkness, too high to spot visually. Al-Qaeda may have access to a limited radar capability in Afghanistan, and perhaps could have been told about a large number of aircraft approaching their bases, but how would they have known specifically they were Russian aircraft, and not American? And that their mission was to bomb al-Qaeda's bases?'

'Go on.'

'Two, how could Hasim have known you weren't exactly being truthful about Kuzmin's reply to your request about the prisoner releases?'

The President nodded. 'Yes, I thought about that. But what if he simply made a guess?'

'He could have. But it didn't sound like a guess to me.'

'Why?'

'The quickness of his response.' Stevens clicked his fingers. 'Hasim came back at you like that — instantly. And he made the accusation that you had lied to him with such raw vehemence that I think he knew the truth even before you stated that Kuzmin's initial reaction was very favourable. That's why his reply was delivered with so much contempt — he already knew Kuzmin's position. He knew you hadn't told him the truth.'

'What are you getting at, Doug? That there's a traitor — a mole — within Kuzmin's inner circle, someone who passed on the information to al-Qaeda?'

'Someone with Chechen sympathies? It's quite feasible, yes. I think it's something you're going to have to put to him as soon as you speak with him again.'

The President sighed. He was dreading making the call to Kuzmin to inform him of the 10th Street suicide bombing, Hasim's new deadline, and to discuss once again the prisoner issue. He knew the Russian leader wasn't going to like what he heard. Nor would Kuzmin enjoy the intense pressure the US President intended to subject him to in order to persuade him to sanction the release of the Russian-held prisoners — sparks were definitely going to fly. He'd scheduled his call to Moscow for just over an hour's time.

'OK, so it may be a very serious problem. But really it's Kuzmin's problem. For us, it changes nothing about our situation. We're still in a fix. We've still got no way out of this. And Hasim's device is going to go off unless we comply with his demands.'

'I appreciate that, sir, but if you could just bear with me a moment.' Stevens moved back to the tape recorder. 'Hasim guessed rightly you were trying to buy time, sir. That we were attempting to use the five remaining days to find the device. It's possible he's shrewd enough to guess at that, but it seemed to me he knew exactly what we were about — like it wasn't a guess at all, but he'd been primed beforehand about our tactics. And it's pretty obvious to me he had the suicide bomb in place, ready to go, and was going to have it set off, even before he accused you of lying to him. It was all part of his plan to put more pressure on us. But Kuzmin didn't know about our tactics, so far as I'm aware. Did he, sir?'

The President shook his head. 'No, I didn't tell him any of that.'

'Like I say, it could still have been a shrewd guess on Hasim's part that we'd try to stymie him. The same applies when we tried the ploy of using Bob Rapp as a mediator. He cottoned on to that pretty fast, too.'

'Where the hell's all this leading, Doug?'

'To my third and last point. If you'd just listen carefully to this portion of the tape, sir, because it's vitally important. It's what Hasim said when he talked about the prisoners in Russian jails.'

Stevens rewound the tape once more, hit the play button and Hasim's voice again invaded the room, the translator relaying his words:

' ... As to the others, you say you have no control over their fate. That is untrue, Mr President. You have enormous power at your disposal, both military and financial, to influence those other states. I have no doubt you can use that power to its ultimate to ensure that all the remaining prisoners are released.'

Stevens hit the stop button. The President looked up. 'So what's your point, Doug?'

'We keep tapes of all the conversations we've had in the situation room. When I heard the words in the third and fourth sentences, they rang a bell — 1 was sure I'd heard them before. So I went back through all the tapes. Those words you just heard are almost exactly the same ones Bob Rapp used when he talked to you during our second meeting in the situation room — "You have enormous power at your disposal, both military and financial, to influence those other states. I have no doubt you can use that power to its ultimate to ensure that all the remaining prisoners are released." Word for word, pause for pause, syntax for syntax, they're the same damned sentences that Bob used, all except the words "I have no doubt". And just to be sure, I double-checked with the translator and he sticks by his original interpretation of Hasim's words, phrase for phrase.'

The President sat upright, a curious look on his face as he stared at Stevens. 'Get to the point.'

'What I'm saying is this: Rapp utters two sentences, and then Hasim says pretty much exactly the same two sentences. Now to me, it seems that the chances of that happening are unlikely, but I'll concede it's always possible we could be dealing with a sheer coincidence. However, when you take that coincidence — I mean, Christ, it's like reported speech, as if someone overheard the words and repeated them — when you take that in conjunction with the other two points I've already made, about the bombers and about the prisoners, then to me it poses a very big and very worrying question we can't afford to ignore.' Stevens was ashen faced. 'What if Hasim's information came from inside the White House?'

Salem New Jersey 13 November 10 a.m.