Becky were on a tour bus near the pyramids on Cairo’s outskirts when 37MNF extremists hijacked it to the desert where they murdered all forty-two tourists, the driver and tour guide.
Egyptian police later tracked down the militants and shot them.
Lancer blamed himself.
While the analysis was not his, it reflected the work he did, and it had concluded that 37MNF did not constitute a valid threat.
Not a threat?
Then why did my wife and daughter come home in boxes?
Their deaths haunted him and led him to doubt what he did for a living and to doubt everything he had ever believed in.
After Lancer took bereavement leave, September 11 happened, and in the aftermath he used his rage to forge a new purpose. He was deployed to the National Anti-Threat Center where, in the years that followed, he buried himself in his work.
Now, as he drove, Lancer glimpsed his folder with Winfield’s file on the passenger seat.
Foster Winfield was born in Brooklyn, New York, where his father was a chemist and his mother was a math professor. Winfield was a gifted scientist. He’d been a professor at MIT before working with DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. He then left DARPA for the CIA to head some of its top-secret research.
Lancer left the dirt road for a grass-and-rock stretch that twisted down to the lakeshore and an A-frame cottage.
Winfield cut a solitary figure standing on the deck watching Lancer approach. The old man was wearing a rumpled bucket hat, khaki pants and a faded denim shirt with a pocket protector from which pens peeked out. He stood a few inches above Lancer’s six feet and had a firm handshake.
“Thanks for coming, Bob. Coffee?”
While they waited for the coffee to brew, Lancer noticed a golden retriever on the floor.
“That’s Tug, the neighbor’s dog. He comes by every day.”
Lancer’s gaze went to Winfield’s desk: a laptop hooked up to the satellite dish outside, a phone, files, a framed photo of Winfield’s wife, who’d died years earlier. They had no children.
It underscored a void familiar to Lancer.
The two men took their coffee out to the deck, where they sat in Adirondack chairs and Winfield talked about his terminal condition while he stroked the dog.
“I take medication—there’s no discomfort. They gave me six months, five months ago,” Winfield said. “It’s come full circle for me. My parents had a cottage here. Some of the happiest days of my life were the summers I spent here as a boy.”
Winfield gazed out at the tranquil lake.
“Forgive me, you’re not here to listen to an old man reminisce.”
“It’s all right, Foster.”
“As you know, DARPA was created in the late 1950s, after the Russians launched Sputnik. I came aboard many years later, after they’d headhunted me at MIT.”
After several years with DARPA, Winfield had been approached by the CIA.
“The Cold War was in its death throes and the CIA wanted me to put together a secret research team to ensure the nation did not let its guard down—exciting stuff but lots of pressure. I got the best people I could, Andrew Tolkman, very brilliant, from Chicago, Gretchen Sutsoff from San Francisco—she was our youngest team member and known for her strong will and strong views. We had Lester Weeks from Chicago, very even-handed, Phillip Kenyon, the über-intellectual from Harvard, and several others from MIT, Cornell and Pittsburgh. Our objective was to ensure that the U.S. not be surprised by an adversary’s technological advances in weaponry.
“First, we were to defend against, match, then surpass any work by the Soviets or Eastern Bloc scientists, or the Chinese, or North Koreans, or some Middle East and Gulf states whose research was emerging rapidly.
“The CIA provided us with historical intelligence on research by Nazi, Chinese and Japanese scientists, up to our time and on dangerous advances made by enemy states.”
“What kinds of stuff are we talking about, Foster?” Lancer asked.
“It was a spectrum of research over the years, ways to destroy your enemy’s crops with infestations, ways to contaminate the water supply, the air. We analyzed their work on mind-control experiments, the effects of chemical compounds on humans, parapsychology, engineered pathogens, advances in chemical and biological warfare, human endurance studies, medical breakthroughs and human engineering.”
“Sounds like a Pandora’s box.”
“Not all that long ago we learned that some African rogue states had initiated work on genetic attacks. They’d planned to secretly introduce malevolent microorganisms to attack the DNA profile of certain races by secretly contaminating a national health initiative, like flu shots. The microorganisms were