"Right," Delchamps said. "By that time, he's really scared. When he called off the hit on you, he called it off on Gorner, too. Which he was supposed to ensure. And he doesn't know what the hell he's going to find in Vienna. With no other options, short of swallowing his own bullet, now he really has to use you. So he offers you the most important thing he has to barter, the chemical factory in Congo-Kinshasa."
And, very probably, since sex is what makes the world go 'round, he offers up his baby sister, too.
It took you a long time to figure that out, didn't it, Romeo?
"You think that's important?" Castillo said.
"Charley, do you know what's there, what was there?" Darby asked.
Castillo shook his head.
"In the bad old days, the West Germans had a nuclear laboratory there," Delchamps said matter-of-factly. "That area was German East Africa before Versailles. We pretended not to know, but when the wall came down, we made them shut it down. It's another of the reasons the Krauts don't like us much anymore; the Israelis have nukes and they don't."
"You're saying there's a nuclear laboratory there?"
"I'm saying there's a chemical laboratory there, Ace, and a factory."
"Making what?"
"Maybe something as simple as Francisella tularensis," Darby said. "Or . . . you know what I'm talking about, Charley?"
"I think I probably read the same bio-warfare stuff that you did," Castillo said. "It causes rabbit fever, right?"
Darby nodded. "Or something else: anthrax, botulinum toxin, plague . . ."
"I'm not trying to be argumentative, Alex, but what I've read says that, as scary as all that stuff sounds, it's not all that dangerous. Only anthrax and the rabbit fever virus can survive in water, and the ordinary chlorination of water in a water system kills both."
"And both can be filtered out by a zero-point-one-micron or smaller filter, right?" Delchamps asked, paused, and then said, "You want to take a chance that these bastards haven't developed a chlorine-proof bacterium, or something that'll get around or through that point-one filter?"
"You think this is the real thing, don't you?"
Delchamps did not answer directly. Instead, he held up his index finger in a gesture of Hold that thought, then said, "Now, throw this into your reasoning."
He nodded at Jack Britton.
"This is conjecture again, Colonel," Britton said. "But it fits. I've been wondering why they tried to whack Sandra and me in Philly. First, they had to go to a lot of trouble to find out who Ali Abid ar-Raziq was--I just disappeared from the mosque, you'll remember; no busts, no questioning by me, nothing that would tell them I was a cop--and then for them to set up the hit. They're just not smart enough to do that, period. Somebody smart found me."
"And why was that so important?" Castillo asked.
"I knew which of the mullahs had gone to Africa, including the Congo, on somebody else's dime," Britton said, "and one of the things I did for Allah was take pictures of the water supply so it could be poisoned. When I turned that in, both to the Department and to Homeland Security, the response was not to worry, chlorine and filters, etcetera."
"Moments ago, Jack, you asked me if I ever wondered why the people responsible for--"
"Stealing the 727 bothered with a bunch of morons?"
"Essentially."
"I have my own theory, which nobody agrees with, except sometimes Sandra."
"And, since last night, me," Santini offered.
"And me and Darby," Delchamps added. "This is what really pushed us over the edge, Charley. Listen to him. Go on, Jack."
"The people behind this, Charley, don't really expect to wipe out half the population of Philadelphia by poisoning the water any more than they expected the morons to be able to find the Liberty Bell, much less fly into it with an airliner."
"Then what?"
"To cause trouble in several ways. First, exactly as the greatest damage done by the lunatics who flew into the Twin Towers was not the towers themselves, but the cost, the disrupted economy.