want a hundred billion dollars and their own small country—an island in the Pacific. They plan to keep the smallpox as protection, a guarantee of sorts, on their island and live out their lives in luxury and comfort.”
“So far, I don’t see the connection.”
“The rub is how they’re going to steal the smallpox: by creating a fake Islamic terrorist plot to detonate a nuke in DC.”
Gideon glanced at the agent. “Sink me.”
“And here’s the kicker: they fake the terrorist plot with an irradiated corpse—left in an apartment in New York City, made to look like it was killed in a radiation accident involving a nuclear bomb core. And the apartment is salted with phony evidence linking the man to radical Islamists and a jihadist terror cell.”
“Chalker,” Gideon said.
“Exactly. Not to mention a calendar with the intended date, and a burned map of Washington with potential targets.”
The wheels in Gideon’s mind began to turn. “Fort Detrick is only forty miles from Washington.”
Fordyce nodded. “Right.”
“So the threat to DC will have drawn off most of the soldiers at Fort Detrick.”
“Exactly,” said Fordyce. “Not only will the nuclear threat empty Fort Detrick of soldiers, but it’ll also strip away most of the security from USAMRIID, leaving the smallpox vulnerable.”
“Unbelievable,” said Gideon.
“In the outline, they have an inside contact who’s given them the codes to get into the vault where the virus is. They walk in, punch in the codes, open the biosafe holding the smallpox, take out a few frozen cultures, and walk out. The smallpox cultures are stored in these cryogenically sealed disks that are so small they can be hidden in your pocket.” Fordyce tapped the laptop. “It’s all here—in a book outline Blaine wrote six years ago. And get this: it says here the idea for the book was based on an actual covert operation launched by the British during World War Two, called Operation Mincemeat. British intelligence floated a corpse off the coast of Spain. Supposedly, it was the body of a high-level Brit officer drowned in a plane crash. In the pockets of the corpse were secret documents indicating that the Allies were going to invade Italy through Greece and Sardinia. But the whole thing was a plant—a scheme to misdirect the Germans from England’s true invasion plans. And it totally fooled the Germans, all the way up to Hitler himself.”
There was a brief silence as Gideon processed this. “British intelligence,” he murmured. “MI6. Just like Blaine.”
“The only difference,” Fordyce went on, “is that Chalker wasn’t a corpse.”
“Even alive, he was damn effective,” said Gideon. “Even a massive dose of radiation takes time to kill. They must’ve kidnapped him, kept him locked up, and performed God only knows what kind of brainwashing on him.”
“That dog crate in the lab we found,” Fordyce said. “It probably wasn’t for a dog, after all.”
“So those crazy rantings of Chalker about being kidnapped, experimented on, weren’t so crazy after all.” Gideon paused. “They framed him for being a jihadist—just like they framed me.”
Fordyce tapped at the keyboard. “Let me read you something. It says in this proposal that, since it’s been forty years since smallpox was seen in the wild, most people alive today have no resistance to it. It would scythe right through the human race. Check this out.”
Variola major, or smallpox, is considered by many epidemiologists to be the worst disease ever to afflict humankind. Depending on the strain, the mortality rate can run as high as one hundred percent. Variola is as infectious as the common cold and spreads like wildfire. Even those who survive are physically scarred for life and often blind as well.
Smallpox causes one of the most frightening and terrible deaths known. It commences with high fever, muscle pain, and vomiting. A rash develops, covering the body with hard, distended pustules, often forming on the tongue and palate. In its fulminating form, the pustules merge to form a single pustule-like covering to the victim’s entire body. The blood leaks out of the vessels into the muscles and organs, and the eyes fill up with blood and turn bright red. The symptoms of the disease are often accompanied by acute mental distress in which neurological changes cause the victim to suffer an overwhelming feeling of suffocating terror, a dread of impending doom. All too often, that fear becomes reality.
The World Health Organization has stated that a single case of smallpox appearing anywhere in the world would be a “worldwide medical emergency of the highest order” and would