Collateral Damage - Marc Cerasini [55]
"I'm sorry, Agent Bauer," the woman said softly. "We did what we could, but Director Holman lost too much blood. He's gone..."
* * *
7:18:50 P.M. EDT
Security Station One
CTU Headquarters, NYC
Morris O'Brian downloaded the contents of Brice Holman's cell phone. After opening the files in his briefcase computer, he copied the data, bundled it with the information retrieved from Judith Foy's cell, then forwarded complete data packages to the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley; FBI Headquarters in Washington, D.C.; and CTU Los Angeles for further analysis.
He also sent them the cleaned up audio of the mad, ranting speech by Ibrahim Noor, which was picked up from Holman's cell phone and processed at CTU New York.
Then Morris went to work analyzing the photographic images shot by Deputy Director Judith Foy at Newark Liberty Airport that morning.
Thanks to Chloe's alarmingly titled e-mail — a false alarm as it mercifully turned out — Morris had been able to retrieve Agent Foy's intelligence data, which had been sent as an attachment.
Now Morris worked with the surveillance photographs on his screen, using the CTU known-terrorist database to analyze facial features for a match. Within fifteen minutes, he'd come up with a potential equivalent.
He called up the personnel file of the known terrorist and his alias and made a closer comparison. Suddenly Morris's angular face broke into a grin of triumph.
"As the old lady at the church bazaar said — Bingo!"
"Pardon me?" Peter Randall called from the next station.
"Never mind, back to work," Morris said. "Nothing to see here, mate."
Morris placed the two photographs side by side for a final eyesight comparison. "Got you," he whispered.
The man posing as Canadian structural engineer Faoud S. Mubajii, from Montreal, Quebec, was really a Saudi Arabian scientist named Said al Kabbibi.
Morris scanned the man's file. Kabbibi's list of known terrorist affiliations was as long as the degrees after his name. According to the database, Kabbibi was a doctor of medicine, Harvard; a doctor of pharmacological sciences, MIT; a doctor of biochemistry, Berlin University, who hung out with members of the PLO, the Taliban, and the Republican Guard in Iraq.
Back in the 1980s, Kabbibi was so well known inside the intelligence community that he had an official handle: "Biohazard Bob."
As it turned out, Kabbibi had dropped out of sight for more than a decade. The last time anyone saw him — anyone being agents of Britain's MI-5 — Biohazard Bob Kabbibi had been a guest of Saddam Hussein, the current dictator of Iraq. The scientist apparently resided in some opulence, inside a villa near an Iraqi army base on the outskirts of Baghdad.
Not coincidentally, that villa was less than a kilometer away from a state-of-the-art biological warfare facility.
* * *
7:28:51 P.M. EDT
Carlisle, Pennsylvania
Luddie Kuzma rolled his vehicle into a remote spot on the edge of the sprawling truck stop parking lot. He powered down the window and cut the engine. The night was more comfortable than the afternoon, but it was warm and becoming humid. Still, Luddie welcomed the fresh air streaming through the window after hours spent with a rattling air conditioner.
Massaging his neck, Lud savored the silence — at least he did until a frailer truck rumbled past his van and rolled to a halt, air brakes hissing in protest.
He watched as the man in the passenger seat jumped out and helped guide the big truck into a parking spot between a moving van and an Ethan Allen furniture truck. He noted with interest that the newcomer lacked backup alarms — as annoying as those beepers were, they were also a requirement in most states. The vehicle had a small logo that Lud strained to read.
Dreizehn Trucking
The license was local, too. The vehicle was based in New Jersey.
Yawning, Lud forgot about the truck and glanced at the illuminated dial of his plastic sports watch. Not even eight o'clock yet, and it's already been a long day— too long to get right back on the road.
Lud tilted his seat back, stretched out his