71. Chapter Seventy-One
Chapter seventy-one
The mood in the situation room was tense.
Most of the techs were silent, either rapping keys as they worked to sift through the copious amounts of data which had come in, or like Sam, their eyes were glued to the large flat screen, now showing a real-time satellite feed of Zagreb with the current position of the fast reaction team marked in a green circle.
“He wouldn’t use it, would he?” Deputy Director Nguy?n asked.
He stood in his meticulously tailored suit, a dainty saucer in one hand and a porcelain cup filled with green tea in the other, delivered to him by a dutiful secretary.
Lifeless fluorescents picked out the grey in his hair.
He thrust his chin at the television screen.
“Your contractor, he wouldn’t use the antidote, would he?
If he got infected somehow? Do you think he’d take it for himself? ”
Sam clutched a cheap paper cup filled with discount coffee between her hands. The coffee smelled like tar mixed with acid and her eyes burned. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d slept. Sam swallowed before answering. “I couldn’t say. I don’t know him that well.”
She sipped cold coffee and thought to herself, God, I hope so.
“Surely he wouldn’t take the antidote for himself,” Nguy?n murmured, more to himself than to Sam. “Who would do that?”
Sam glanced over at the director and then back to the flatscreen where the little green circle crept ever closer to Zagreb.
A glitch ran through the feed. For a moment the image pixelated, breaking up into geometric static squares.
Seconds later the problem resolved and the desaturated grayscale of Zagreb snapped back into focus.
Sam suspected about three quarters of the people on the planet would take the antidote if they had it in hand, maybe as many as eighty or ninety percent.
It’s easy to be high-minded and noble standing in a situation room on the other side of the globe, green tea in hand.
Looking at the big picture is easy from thousands of miles away, watching the situation unfold on a television screen.
It’s another thing entirely when you’re on the ground.
That’s what gave Sam an edge over guys like Nguy?n, guys who had spent their entire career driving desks at Langley. Sam had actually been in the field, on the ground, with bullets flying overhead. She knew the big picture got fuzzy fast when it was your own life hanging in the balance.
One of the computer cowboys announced, “We’ve got reports of shots fired in Ban Jela?i? Square.”
Nguy?n nearly spit green tea. He put the cup down, still holding the saucer, and asked, “When was this?”
The tech put a hand to his earphone, listened a moment to a news report and answered, “This is happening right now. Chatter on the web is some lunatic opened fire in the middle of Ban Jela?i?. Police are en route.”
Nguy?n cursed. “How far out is the QRF?”
Sam eyed the satellite feed and shook her head. She’d watched enough satellite feeds tracking military units in her time with Israeli intelligence to make an educated guess. “Ten minutes at least.”
“That’s too long,” Nguy?n said. “Get on the horn and tell them they need to put the pedal to the metal.”
The tech nodded and turned back to his computer.
He relayed those directions to the carrier group, who would in turn relay the directions to the helicopter pilots.
By that time another four or five minutes would have slipped past. How long was the average police response time in Zagreb, Sam wondered?
Who was doing the shooting? Who had been shot?
Questions with no answers.
She checked her phone, hoping, praying for a call from Jake.