The Bug Hunter: A Novel Page 18

  Pale and trembling, the merchant fled the marketplace and made his way many, many miles to the city of Samarra.

  But when at last he came to the city of Samarra, the merchant saw waiting for him the angel.

  “Why did you look surprised when you saw me this morning in Baghdad?” the merchant asked the Angel of Death.

  “Because,” said Death, “I had an appointment with you tonight in Samarra.”

  Jensen and Gabriel looked at each other. Each had his own association with Samarra, a city in the Sunni Triangle in Iraq and the site of some of the most intense sectarian violence of the Iraq War. “Read it again, Brooksy,” Jensen said. “Out loud.”

  Brooks read it again. Gabriel closed his eyes and tried to follow the story. When she was done, Brooks asked, “Where’s Samarra?”

  “Samarra is a city in Iraq,” Gabriel said. “It’s also the home of one of the holiest sites in Shi‘a Islam. The al-Askari mosque is there. When it got blown up in 2006, it basically set off the civil war between the Sunnis and the Shi‘a.”

  “It’s a dark place. Full of religious symbolism,” Jensen added. “The al-Askari mosque is a Shi‘a shrine, but the Sunnis historically ran the city, just like they ran all of Iraq. Nobody knows who actually blew it up, but the Sunnis were likely behind it. After the invasion, the Iraqi government turned Shi‘a, and the Sunnis have been in the government minority ever since. That’s how ISIS came about. It was the Sunnis fighting back.”

  “How do you guys know so much about it?” Brooks asked.

  Gabriel laughed. “We both spent a lot of time fighting bad guys in the Sunni Triangle.”

  Brooks nodded. “So what do you make of this—what is it? A poem?”

  “I think it’s more of a parable, actually,” Gabriel said. “So, is that all there is in the file?”

  Brooks scrolled down. “No, there’s a huge file attached. Bunch of letters repeating.”

  “Let me see that,” Gabriel said. “That’s a DNA sequence.” He looked at the metadata at the top of the page. “Shit. It’s the sequence for KPC.”

  “Isn’t that the one that Lebedev took with him out of GenomeX?”

  “Yep.”

  “What is KPC?” Brooks asked.

  “It’s a Gram-negative bacterium that is resistant to antibiotics. It’s basically a lethal superbug that can’t be stopped.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “You can say that again,” Gabriel said.

  Gabriel hadn’t intentionally avoided Brooks’s question on what the parable meant; the truth is he wasn’t sure. The essence of it was clear: man’s death is predestined, and no matter what you do, when your time is up, it’s up. But what else did it mean? That he did not know.

  He spent the next few hours Googling “Samarra” and “merchant in Baghdad” and “death in Samarra” and found some more information about the parable. It was attributed to a play written by W. Somerset Maugham in 1933 and was an epigraph in a famous John O’Hara novel, Appointment in Samarra. It was loosely based on a passage from the Babylonian Talmud in which King Solomon unwittingly sends two of his servants to their deaths.

  All of which only brought up more questions. Wasn’t the Talmud a Jewish text? Was this some kind of a message? A clue? Was this a message from Adnan? Or was it a feint, a way to confuse them? Or just another way of saying that the infidel was destined to die?

  Fortunately, Gabriel knew just whom to ask.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Washington, DC

  “Well, boss, to quote George Costanza, we’re no longer the master of our domain.”

  Jason Witt looked at Lee Jensen and smiled in spite of himself. He had just gotten a call from the White House summoning him to an emergency meeting of the FBI and the national-security team.

  The jig was up.

  “Get all the material you have, and be prepared to hand it over to the FBI. I want to share everything with them. And I do mean everything,” he said pointedly.

  Jensen said nothing at first. He knew that from both a moral and legal perspective, cooperation was essential. This was no time to play turf games. But he also knew that Witt was unlikely to drop the investigation completely, and he assumed that unofficially they’d stay on the case. But he wanted to hear it from Witt firsthand. “What’s our play?”

  “We’re gonna cooperate. Let’s see what the president says,” he said.

  Jensen waited for more. When Witt said nothing further, Jensen’s mood sank. He hated the thought of giving up on this case. He was fully invested.

  Then, just as he was heading out the door to the White House, Witt turned and said, “When I get back, we can talk about our next move.”

  Jensen grinned. “OK, boss.”

  When Witt arrived at the White House, he was escorted downstairs to the Situation Room, a high-tech conference room located in the basement. It was staffed 24-7 by the National Security Council and had the latest in high-tech, ultrasecure communication technology.

  Witt entered the room and shook hands with the secretary of defense and the National Security Advisor and nodded to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He also noticed Ken Smythe of the CDC on the large screen at the head of the room, conferencing in from California. Witt had just found his seat when the director of the FBI, Mark Timmons, sat down next to him.

  “Jason, I understand you’ve been working this case for the past several weeks without me knowing about it.”

  “We’ve been working the bug attack in conjunction with the CDC; that’s correct.”

  “This is much more than a bug attack. You’ve stepped smack into the middle of a yearlong investigation into an ISIS cell at George Mason University. You almost screwed it up.”

  “Look, Mark, we’ve been following our leads, and I’ve been in full communication with the president. She gave us the go-ahead.”

  “Maybe. But that’s done now. And I’m going to need everything you’ve got on this.”

  Just as Witt was about to respond, President Cooperman entered the room. They all stood.

  “Take your seats, please,” she said. “I’ve called this meeting because we have confirmation of a second outbreak of botulinum toxin in California. Director Smythe, can you update us please?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Smythe said, his voice echoing from speakers in the ceiling. “We have verified four hundred cases of poisoning stretching from Red Bluff, California, to Sacramento. The poisoning occurred in almond-based products that were manufactured with locally grown almonds. We are now looking at data from across the country to see if any of these almonds were exported, which we believe they were.”

  “How many fatalities?” Cooperman asked.

  “Sixty-five confirmed with another hundred fifty in critical condition,” Smythe said. “We expect the death toll to rise significantly, possibly into the thousands, depending on how far and wide the almonds were distributed.”

  “Jesus,” Cooperman said. “What do we know about the source of the toxin?”

  Smythe lifted a vial. “This may not be easy to see, but we think there may be a link between the poisoning and these mites. Farmers noticed a dramatic increase in mite infestation about four months ago. While they damaged some of the trees, they didn’t dramatically impact the harvest of almonds.”

  “What are we doing to verify that?”

  “Secretary Witt has sent me two of his bug guys, and we are having genetic testing done at the CDC to see if the mites have been altered in the same way that the medflies were in Florida.”

  “Jason, any comment?”

  “Until we have the results, we can’t know for sure. But it looks consistent with what happened in Florida.”

  “Madam President,” the director of the FBI said, “all this bug talk is interesting, but can we get to the root of the threat? This is a jihadist atta
ck on the United States, and I want to make sure we have all the information we need to stop the next one.”

  Cooperman didn’t like being interrupted. “Mark, I’m getting there. First, I want to make sure we are coordinating our response to the attack that has just occurred. That OK with you?”

  Timmons turned red, and Witt suppressed a smile. “Yes, ma’am,” Timmons said.

  “Good. Jason, what are we doing about shutting down almond exports?”

  “I have customs on it. They’ve impounded all shipments of almond products—almost five hundred SKUs—that were at ports ready for loading onto ships. The Ag Department is issuing a directive to all farmers in the affected areas to burn their crops wherever possible. The FDA has issued a full recall for all five hundred products as well, so those are being pulled out of the stores. And we have a national ad campaign about to start running asking people to check their pantries and dispose of any almond products produced anytime in the last four months.”

  “God, that’s going to create hysteria on a massive scale. Not to mention crater our economy,” Cooperman said.

  “It will, but there is no other way, ma’am,” Witt said.

  Cooperman then turned back to Timmons. “Mark, what’s the latest on the investigation?”

  “We’ve been working a suspected ISIS cell at George Mason University for the past year, and we recently connected the murder of a Biomedical Research Lab scientist—a Dr. Adnan Mishner—with a radical student group called the Islamic Students Against Mideast Oppression or ISAMO. Mishner was an entomologist who worked on genomics and insects. His girlfriend was a woman who was one of the ringleaders of the ISAMO group. She disappeared after Mishner’s murder, and we haven’t been able to locate or identify her yet. But we have identified the ISAMO faculty advisor, Abdul-Azim Bashera, who is a computer science professor who emigrated to the US from Iraq via Turkey. We’ve taken him into custody.”

  Witt made a motion attempting to get Cooperman’s attention. “Yes, Jason?” she said.

  “Ma’am, Bashera’s real name is Abdul-Azim Rahman. We’ve identified him as a former Baath Party member and computer specialist for Saddam Hussein and”—Witt looked at Timmons and could see his face reddening—“later al-Qaeda in Iraq, where he personally worked with al-Zarqawi before he was killed.”

  “Really?” Cooperman said. “Director Timmons did you know this?”

  Timmons looked as if he’d seen a ghost. “No, ma’am.”

  Cooperman nodded. “I suggest you and Jason here get together and compare notes,” she said. “Have you learned anything from this man Rahman?”

  Timmons sighed. “No, ma’am. He’s got a lawyer and is refusing to talk.”

  The secretary of defense almost came unglued. “You Mirandized him? Are you fucking kidding me?”

  “No, I’m not fucking kidding you,” Timmons growled back. “This is the United States. That’s what we do when we arrest people.”

  “Jesus Christ! You should’ve sent him to Guantánamo!”

  “That’s enough!” Cooperman said, stopping the SecDef from saying something he might later regret. “What’s done is done. Let’s move forward.” She then turned to Jason Witt. “Jason, you and your team have information that will be important to the FBI, and you will cooperate fully with Director Timmons and provide whatever assistance you can.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “This investigation now belongs to the FBI,” Cooperman said. “If they need help from DHS or the CDC or FDA—or any other agency for that matter—they’ll ask for it. Is that clear to everyone?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” they all said in unison.

  “Good.” Cooperman then turned to the secretary of defense and the chair of the JCS. “Now, let’s talk about some military options. I want to make sure we send a message to ISIS that this attack will not go unanswered.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  Langley, Virginia

  “Well, I can relate to this. Samarra almost killed me too.”

  Sam Gaddis read the parable again and then closed his eyes. He was thinking about that week after the al-Askari mosque was blown up, and the shit storm that had rained down on him and his team. It was the bloodiest week of the bloodiest year in Iraq. It left an indelible impression.

  Gabriel was sitting at a table in Gaddis’s office, a small space tucked away on the fifth floor of CIA Headquarters. On the walls were pictures of Gaddis sporting a thick beard and a kaffiyeh around his neck, kitted up with an M4 submachine gun, in various locations around Iraq. One picture was of Gaddis and General Stan McChrystal, who at that time was head of Joint Special Operations Command and was leading the hunt for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. In an irony not lost on Gabriel, it was McChrystal who had called in the airstrike that killed al-Zarqawi, sending Abdul-Azim Rahman first to Turkey and then to George Mason University, where he was in the best possible position to do damage to America.

  “What was it like working with McChrystal?” Gabriel asked.

  “Fantastic. He’s a relentless motherfucker. I loved the guy.”

  Gabriel just nodded. It conformed to what he’d heard from others who had worked with McChrystal and JSOC. “So what do you think it means?” Gabriel asked, pointing to the paper on Gaddis’s desk.

  “I think it’s a message that we—the infidels—are destined to die. But the Samarra reference is interesting because of what the city represents.”

  “Well, I know what it represents for me,” Gabriel said. “But what’s the bigger picture?”

  “Samarra was one of the capitals of the Abbasid caliphate that came to power in the eighth century. It was the seat of Islam during the early years of what is known as the Golden Age of Islam.”

  “What was so golden about it?”

  “It was kind of like the Renaissance. A period when science and technology advanced, and when culture flourished.”

  Gabriel obviously looked confused, because Gaddis then said, “I know, seems counterintuitive, right? Islam being associated with science and culture.”

  “Radical Islam sure doesn’t have that connotation,” Gabriel said. “So is it weird that Samarra would be the reference they used?”

  “Not really. ISIS and the radical jihadists see the golden age as a time when Islam was ascendant, and when the original battle between two visions of Islam, those of Ahl al-Hadith and of the Mu‘tazilites, was in play. The Ahl al-Hadith were the fundamentalists who took the Koran literally, including all the stuff about killing nonbelievers. The Mu‘tazilites were more liberal and saw reason and logic as more important than what was written in the Koran. In the end the Mu‘tazilites won out, but as we’ve seen, the Ahl al-Hadith are still a major strain of Islam and are the inspiration for Salafism.”

  “At the risk of oversimplifying this, the Salafists are the Neanderthals of Islam—the anti-modernists who want to return to the Dark Ages. Women in bondage, honor killings, death to the nonbelievers, etc.”

  Gaddis said, “That’s about right.”

  Gabriel pulled another paper out from his bag and handed it to Gaddis. “I did some research and found that Somerset Maugham’s version of the parable was inspired by a passage in the Babylonian Talmud,” he said, handing it over to Gaddis. “Basically it goes like this: King Solomon meets the Angel of Death and asks why he looks sad. The angel says he’s been sent to take away Solomon’s two Cushite servants. So Solomon sends the servants away to the city of Luz where Death supposedly can’t go. Then the next day Solomon finds Death and asks why he looks so happy. And Death answers, because you sent them to the very place I was to meet them.”

  Gaddis looked at Gabriel and then looked down at the paper.

  “What I don’t understand is why Islamists would use a story from the Talmud,” said Gabriel. “I thought the Talmud was Jewish.”

  “Actually, the Babylonian Talmud originated in
Iraq. Most people don’t know that Islam and Judaism came largely from the same place and have many shared elements.”

  “So what do you think the Solomon reference means?”

  “I’m not sure—and I’m certainly no expert on this. I know that Solomon was the son of King David and was revered in both the Talmud and the Koran. He’s a symbol of wisdom and power. Maybe the message is that not even someone as powerful as Solomon can avoid the Angel of Death when death is ordained.”

  “And that even the powerful Americans will not be able to escape jihad?”

  “Maybe,” Gaddis said with a slight shrug.

  “There has to be more to it than that.”

  “I actually know a guy who can help us figure it out,” he said, pulling out his iPhone and searching his contacts. When he found what he was looking for, he texted it to Gabriel.

  Gabriel looked at his phone when it buzzed. “Rabbi Yossi Rafaeli. Who’s that?”

  “He’s probably the foremost Talmudic scholar in the United States. He was in Iraq doing research when I was there. I first met him at the bar at the Al Rasheed hotel in Baghdad. We became drinking buddies. He’s a crazy bastard. You’ll love him.”

  “He’s in New York?”

  “Yep. I’ll tell him we’re coming.”

  “We’re coming?”

  “Hell yes. I’m bored out of my mind. And I love New York,” Gaddis said.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  New York, New York

  The Mazer School of Talmudic Studies at Yeshiva University was a modern building on the corner of Amsterdam Avenue and 185th Street. A mix of steel, concrete, and glass, it was an incongruous home for a school that studied the ancient foundation of the world’s oldest monotheistic religion.

  Gabriel and Sam Gaddis had taken the bullet train from Washington’s Union Station and arrived at New York’s Penn Station in less than two hours. It had taken almost that long to get from Midtown up to northern Manhattan, and Gabriel had spent the time in the back of the self-driving Uber longing for Claire and the serenity of the Russian River Valley. He’d be happy when this was over and he could go home.