The Chemist

Alex froze. “What did you say?”

He grinned. “Surprised that I know the appropriate historical analogy? I did pretty well in school, actually. I’ve got just as many brain cells as my brother.”

“No, about Tacoma. What do you mean?”

His grin shifted to confusion. “You know all about that – they gave you the file. You interrogated Danny —”

She leaned toward him, unconsciously clutching her computer more tightly against her ribs. “This is about the job you did with de la Fuentes? Does the T in TCX-1 stand for Tacoma?”

“I’ve never heard of TCX-1. The de la Fuentes job was about the Tacoma virus.”

“The Tacoma Plague?”

“I never heard it called that. What’s going on, Ollie?”

Alex yanked open her computer as she climbed onto the foot of the bed. She pulled up the most recent file she’d worked on – her coded case notes. She scrolled through the list of numbers and initials, feeling the bed shift as Kevin put one knee on it, leaning to read over her shoulder.

It felt like a long time since she’d written these notes. So much had happened, and the thoughts she’d attached to these brief lines were faded.

There it was – terrorist event number three, TP, the Tacoma Plague. The letters danced in front of her eyes, only some of them resolving into words in her memory. J, I-P, that was the town in India, on the Pakistani border. She couldn’t remember what the name of the terrorist cell was, only that they originated out of Fateh Jang. She looked at the initials for the connected names: DH – that was the scientist, Haugen; OM was Mirwani, the terrorist, and then P… The other American she couldn’t remember. She pressed her fist to her forehead, trying to force her recall.

“Ollie?” Kevin said again.

“I worked this case – years ago, when the formula was first stolen from the U.S. Long before de la Fuentes got hold of it.”

“Stolen from the U.S.? De la Fuentes got it out of Egypt.”

“No, it was developed in a lab just outside Tacoma. It was supposed to be theoretical, just research. Haugen… Dominic Haugen, that was the scientist.” The story came back to her as she concentrated. “He was on our side, but with the theft, the situation became too sensitive for him to continue where he was. The NSA buried him in a lab somewhere under their control. We had the terrorist cell’s second in command. He gave up the location of the lab in Jammu that was successfully creating the virus from the stolen blueprints. Black ops razed the lab. They thought they had the biological-weapon aspect locked up, but there were members of the cell who slipped through. As far as I know, the department was still working with the CIA on hunting them down a couple of years later… when Barnaby was killed.”

She looked up at him, the wheels in her head spinning so fast that she felt physically dizzy.

“When the CIA called you in, when they burned you – you said there were issues you were trying to track down. What were they?”

He blinked fast, reminding her of Daniel again. “The packaging on the vaccinations – the outside was in Arabic, but the inside packaging, the original labels – everything was in English. And the name, too: Tacoma. It didn’t make sense. If de la Fuentes had wanted them translated, he would have had it changed from Arabic to Spanish. I wanted to trace the virus back. I was sure it hadn’t originated in Egypt. I figured there had to be an American or a Brit working with the developers somewhere. I wanted to find the guy. You’re saying this thing started in Washington State?”

“It’s got to be the same thing. The timing’s right. We get some info about this virus, suddenly they start watching me and Barnaby. Two years later – around the time de la Fuentes got his hands on it, right? – they murder Barnaby. That has to be the catalyst. That’s why they killed him and tried to kill me. Because the virus was out there again, and if the public found out, we knew something that could connect it back…”

Barnaby had never told her what had triggered his paranoia, why he’d decided they needed to be ready to flee. She looked at the letters on her screen. DH, Dominic Haugen. It was unlikely that the bad guys would leave Haugen alive if they’d felt the need to erase her and Barnaby. Had Haugen been the first to die? Probably in some totally normal, expected way. Car accident. Heart attack. There were so many methods to make it look innocent. Had Barnaby seen some notice of Haugen’s death? Had that been the tip-off?

She wanted to do a quick search online, but if she was right about this, then Haugen’s name was sure to be flagged. Anyone inquiring into his death – no matter how anonymous the method – would be noticed.

Who was the P? She couldn’t even be positive she had that letter right. It had been a fleeting mention. Something short, she thought, something snappy…

“Ollie, the packaging… it looked… professional? Is that the right word? It wasn’t something put together in a makeshift lab somewhere in the Middle East.”

They stared at each other for a moment.

“I always thought it was a stretch,” she murmured. “That someone could actually fabricate the virus from nothing more than Haugen’s theoretical design. It seemed the equivalent of winning the terrorist lottery.”

“You think they stole more than notes?”

“Haugen must have done it – actually created the thing. If there was a supply that large, if the vaccine was packaged up so neatly… they must have been producing it. So working on weaponized viruses wasn’t just Haugen’s weekend hobby. It was a military project. There were hints of that… something about a lieutenant general’s involvement. No one wanted to follow up on the American side of things. They kept us focused on the cell. Usually they let us ask the questions that naturally followed… but I remember, this was different. Carston fed me the questions he wanted.”