Chapter 33
Chapter Thirty-Three
A wave of nausea crashed over Dan.
“You think they’re going to release the pathogen in the stadium.” The prospect of the match, the presence of the two ex-intelligence operatives, the number of potential spectators…
All of it added up to a disaster in the making.
All those people… those innocent people….
They’d come to watch the final match, and as a result, many would end up drawing their final breath.
Nathan nodded. “It’s perfect for their purposes. There’ll be a huge mixed crowd. A noisy one too. If Sam’s right, and they are going to use a nebulizer, I shouldn’t think it would be heard.”
“I’m still a little unclear on how that would work,” Dan confessed. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a nebulizer.”
“It’s a fairly simple device.” Sam looked around. “Do you have something I can sketch on, Nathan?”
“Here.” Gary retrieved his notebook from his jacket pocket. “Use this.” He handed it to her, along with a pen.
“Okay, thanks.” Sam opened it to a blank page and drew a rectangle.
“Let’s say this is the nebulizer. It’s basically a compressor that runs on AC or a lithium-ion battery.
I searched online for the ones I saw in his lab.
They’re designed to be portable.” She gazed at them.
“Have you ever used a spray gun? For painting a wall or a fence.”
“I have,” Gary told her. “My dad has one.”
“The nebulizer works the same way.” She drew two lines from the rectangle.
“This is a tube.” Then she drew a square at the end of it.
“This is the medicine cup, into which you pour the meds, usually 2.5 or 5 milliliters.” On the top of the square she sketched a cap, and from that, a rigid mouthpiece.
“You can also attach a face mask. So this is how it works. When you switch on the nebulizer, it produces a gentle forced air stream that flows through the tube and bubbles up through the medicine cup. What that does is atomize the drug, delivering a fine nebulous mist through this tube to the nose or mouth.” She sank back into her seat.
“That’s it.” She peered at Nathan, her eyes twinkling. “Still think I won’t be useful?”
Nathan rolled his eyes. “Fine. I know when I’m beaten.” He stared at her. “You have your uses. There, I’ve said it. Happy now?”
Despite her explanation, Dan was none the wiser. “So how could the professor adapt it for his purposes?”
Sam glanced at Nathan, who gave her an encouraging nod. “Tell them. My tech guys think you’re on the money.”
She leaned forward. “This is only supposition, all right?”
“Understood,” Dan responded.
“When I was in Robert’s secret lab, you remember I mentioned seeing a laptop in pieces?” Dan nodded. “Well, I got to thinking about that. How do you cool down a laptop’s innards?”
“It has a CPU fan,” Gary told her.
“Correct. Not a big one, maybe four or five inches along each side, and less than an inch thick.” She picked up the pen once more. “So what if he can do this?” Sam did another sketch, and Dan followed each movement, trying to fathom where she was going.
Then she was done. “Okay. Same setup as before, only now….”
“What’s that?” Dan pointed to an open-ended shape.
“A paper cup.”
Something stirred in his memory. “You saw paper cups in his lab, didn’t you?”
She nodded, then pointed to the rigid tube coming from the vial. “And instead of going into someone’s mouth, or to a face mask, you poke it through a hole into the side of the cup, about a third of the way from the bottom.”
“And what’s this?” In the base of the cup she’d drawn a long thin rectangle with a circle at its center, two lines radiating out to each end of the shape.
Sam’s face darkened. “That’s the cooling fan.” She pointed to a tube coming from the fan to a box labeled 9V. “It’s powered by another lithium-ion battery.”
“Wouldn’t it be simpler to use one of those hand-held fans? The tiny ones? That would be less complicated.”
She shook her head. “That would need to be switched on. This is neater, and more reliable, not to mention quieter.” She met Dan’s gaze.
“So now the compressor atomizes the drug, except it’s no longer asthma medication or something like it.
Now it’s the pathogen. That same stream of gentle forced air sends it along the tube into the cup, where the fan is already running.
” She fixed him with a hard stare. “Do you see? The fan pushes the fine nebulous mist out of the cup, accelerating it for wider dispersal.”
Ice spread through Dan’s veins. “How long would it run for on a battery? The nebulizer, I mean.”
“I looked up the model Robert had bought.” Sam swallowed. “About forty minutes, give or take.”
Gary frowned. “How could this be transported?”
“The nebulizer comes with its own black tote bag,” she told him.
“He’d need to wire everything up to a board small enough to fit into the base of the bag.
That way he—or she, because we don’t know who would be deploying it—could turn on the fan and nebulizer with one switch.
There’s a layer of mesh at each end of the bag.
He could cut a hole at one end, big enough to poke the rim of the cup through.
The mesh at the other end would be to let air in so the compressor would function properly.
You have to have sufficient air intake to make this work.
And I doubt anyone would look too closely at the bag. ”
“How big is this tote bag?” Gary inquired.
“Not big at all. The compressor would fit into the palm of your hand.”
“How quiet would it be?” Dan asked, his stomach tight.
“According to the online specifications, it’d be super quiet. I think it said a maximum of forty-five decibels. No more sound than you’d hear in, say, a library. And you know how quiet a CPU fan is.”
“So if they let it run continuously for forty minutes”—Dan didn’t want to ask the question, but he had to know—“how much pathogen could that disperse?”
Sam took a deep breath. “About ten milliliters.” She didn’t need to finish the sentence.
Enough to kill thousands.
“They don’t need to let it run continuously,” Nathan remarked. “They could move through the crowd, running it here and there. He hasn’t designed it this way to infect everyone. That’s not the aim. The goal is simply to infect as many as he can.”
Sam nodded. “Then everyone goes home, and it spreads like wildfire. It could take two weeks before we see the full picture of how many people have been affected.”
Dan blinked. “I thought smallpox was lethal. Doesn’t it kill everyone who gets infected?”
“Not everyone,” Sam informed him. “And it can be treated. Some do survive.” The skin around her mouth tightened. “Not many, though.”
“But we could be looking at many thousands of deaths, couldn’t we?” Dan wanted to throw up.
Robert Martin had been a doctor before he became a professor. He took an oath to preserve life, not take it.
Why? Why would he do this?
Something had been niggling away at the back of Gary’s mind ever since he’d learned about Nathan’s intention to pursue this case on foreign soil.
There was only one way to stop that nagging inner voice.
“Nathan? Question. Is our presence in South Africa unofficial?”
Nathan smiled. “That’s a good question. And the answer is no.
What you need to understand is that any activities essential to secure the United States can sometimes involve causes and effects generated well beyond US borders.
To achieve success, cooperation has to exist between foreign governments, multilateral organizations, and other international partners. ”
Dan bit back a smile. “That sounds as if you just recited the rulebook.”
Nathan’s eyes gleamed. “Very good, Mr. Porter.”
“So what you’re saying is, they know we’re coming. They know what’s about to go down.” Gary wanted absolute confirmation they weren’t going to walk headlong into an international incident.
Nathan counted off on his fingers. “I informed the US Consulate in Johannesburg of our impending arrival. We all have permits for our weapons. And we’re going to avoid any entanglement with the South African police as far as possible.
” His expression grew sober. “We don’t want anyone getting wind of this—especially them.
There’s a lot of corruption in South Africa. ”
Gary gazed at the faces of the operatives seated behind them. “You’ve brought a team of, what, ten people?”
He nodded. “That doesn’t include the two guys tailing Knight One, and two more tailing Knight Two and Gerber.
” He inclined his head toward the rear of the plane.
“See those two men on the back row? That’s Johan van Rensburg and Amahle Nkosi.
I brought them along because they’re both South African and speak Afrikaans. We might need them.”
Gary cocked his head. “Do you still think Gerber is the pawn?”
“I wasn’t certain—I mean, he really could be a consulate secretary going back to Johannesburg after a visit to the US—but after listening to Sam? Yes, I think there’s a strong possibility he’s the one they’re protecting.”
“What changed your mind?”
Nathan’s face grew solemn. “Because he arrived at the airport with, among other things, a black tote bag.”