Sea of Shadows eBook - Navy Thriller.com

56 JEFF EDWARDS
But where was the honor in killing an embassy full of civilians? He
had no doubt that the attackers considered themselves warriors. Whoever
they were, whatever their agenda was, they were probably congratulating
themselves on their bravery and declaring their attack a victory for their
cause. But it wasn’t a victory, and it wasn’t the act of warriors. It was
murder.
“Sir?”
The president flinched. It took a second to remember that Chapman
was still on the phone. “Huh? What?” The president tightened his grip on
the receiver and jerked his mind back to the phone conversation. “I’m
sorry, Clark. What were you saying?”
“Sir, we can go over this later.”
“No,” the president said. “Now. Go ahead.”
“We still don’t know very much about the bio-warfare agent, except
that it’s a powerful hemorrhagic—the victims all show signs of bleeding
from the nose, ears, and mouth. We also know that it works quickly, in
hours rather than days. And that eliminates a lot of agents, including
Ebola, plague, Q-fever, botulism, Hantavirus, anthrax, smallpox, and most
of the other commonly weaponized bugs.”
“Do we know how the attack was carried out?”
“Yes, sir. The attack vector appears to have been the carpet.”
The president’s eyebrows arched. “Say that again?”
“Sir, I know how crazy that sounds,” Secretary Chapman said. “The
bio-survey team can’t identify the agent—that’s going to take some lab
work—but they can detect it. There are traces of the agent all throughout
the building, but the highest concentrations by far are in the carpeting.
Apparently, the carpet was pretty much saturated by the agent.”
“How in the hell did that happen?”
“We don’t know, sir. Not yet.”
“All right,” the president said. “What’s our next move?”
“Well, sir, there are going to be victims outside the embassy. Personnel
who went home sick at the first sign of symptoms. Visitors, couriers,
reporters, people who passed through the embassy but don’t work there.
We’ll find some of them in clinics and emergency rooms. Some will be at
home in bed. Some of them are probably dead by now.”
The president sucked air through his teeth. “How contagious is this
thing?”
“We don’t know, sir,” Chapman said. “We won’t know that until
we’ve identified the agent that was used.”
“Or when the hospitals start filling up with sick people,” the president
said.