The Devil on Chardonnay (30 page)

            The logic in that seemed to sink right in.

            “Constantine owns an island,” Meilland said, face sagging in defeat.

            “Where?”

            “He owns Corvo.”

CHAPTER FIFTY TWO

New York

“This is Lester Holt with NBC News interrupting afternoon programming.  We have breaking news from Africa.  The outbreak of hemorrhagic fever in Khartoum, Sudan, reported on the Nightly News last night, has been identified by the World Health Organization as the deadly Ebola virus.  That nation has been isolated in the world’s first national quarantine, but enforcement of the quarantine is proving difficult. With the latest, we will go right to NBC chief foreign affairs correspondent Richard Engel in Cairo. Richard, what do you have for us on this shocking development?”

     “Thank you Lester.  The Egyptian Army has set up hospitals inside Sudan to treat thousands of refugees fleeing that nation.  Tanks and infantry are arrayed along the entire border preventing those refugees’ passage into Egypt.  This film, taken from an aircraft this afternoon, shows Wadi Halfa, the first town inside Sudan along the Nile River. You can see the stream of vehicles, camels and people streaming north from Khartoum, some 300 miles to the south. 

“The outbreak of the dread Ebola virus in Khartoum is widely believed to have come from monkeys carried by jihadists camped in the desert just outside town.  Jihadists were drawn there by the promise of returning the nation of South Sudan back into the realm of the New Caliphate, as it is being called.  The government of Sudan strongly denies having anything to do with this outbreak and disavows any connection with the several hundred jihadists.

     “Reports are coming in that the outbreak began in the jihadist camp and that many of them are among the sick and the dead.  However, in a development first reported by Al Jazeera, many of those jihadists seem to have been spared and remain in their camp at Khartoum, claiming that true believers are immune to 'The Wind of Allah,' which has devastated the population of Khartoum. Lester …”

“Richard, how is the quarantine going?”

“Lester, it seems strange, but look at these pictures we took this afternoon.  You can see the refugees streaming along the road there into Wadi Halfa, and you can see the roadblock there with people milling about.  Now, as we pull back, look outside of town in the desert at the trail of trucks and vehicles bypassing the roadblock and headed into Sudan.”

“Headed into the outbreak?”

“Yes, Lester.  It seems that thousands of jihadists are rushing into this trouble spot to have their faith tested by the 'Wind of Allah.'  And, I’m told that the roads from Cairo to Wadi Halfa are packed with vehicles of all types, rushing to jihad.”

“Thank you, Richard.  We’ll be back with Richard Engel later in the broadcast, but now for the report from the World Health Organization on what they know about this outbreak of Ebola.”

***********

When Boyd walked into the American Embassy at 1800 hours local, the embassy staff was still there.  It was early evening, and the staff should have been gone for the day, but they were clustered around the big screen in the staff conference room watching the satellite feed of world news.  He stopped to watch. 

“What’s up?”

“That virus outbreak in Africa, it has something to do with jihad,” a staffer said, popping the top on a can of American beer.  “The fucking Arabs are going nuts.”

A clip from Al Jazeera showed an Imam praising the jihadists for carrying the fight to the infidel and praying that many of them would pass the test of faith and survive the “Wind of Allah” to finally, after eight centuries restore the “Empire of the Faithful, the New Caliphate.”

“Are you Chailland?”  a staffer called out from the communications room.

“Yeah,” Boyd said, feeling the long arm of Ferguson on his shoulder.

“You’ve got a call.”

“Is this secure?”  he asked, taking the phone from the staffer.”

“Yeah, scrambled, satellite,” he said, closing the door.

“Holy Christ, Chailland, we’ve got a shit storm of the first magnitude here.  You better know where that pirate is with the Ebola or have that goddamned French banker’s nuts in your pocket.”

“Both.”

“Only good news I’ve had all day.  The news media wants to know if we’re going to send the Global Response Team into Khartoum, Congress wants a full report of what we know and when we knew it, the president sent his national security adviser over here, and the CDC is saying we botched this thing from the get-go and should have let them handle it.  The CIA is getting reports from a half a dozen places that there’s a lot of interest in Ebola, and the price is now $10 million.  I’ve got a blue flame under my butt to find this guy and shut him down.”

“Sucks to be you, sir.”

“Where is he?”

“Corvo. It’s one of the Azores.  I flew over it last week, didn’t see anything.”

“Does he have the virus?”

“Don’t know.  Meilland seemed truly surprised that Constantine was involved, but he’s such a good liar I can’t be sure.”

“So he was in the Azores the whole time.”

“They were to deliver the virus to a rendezvous east of the Cape Verde Islands.  That’s about a thousand miles from the Azores.  He could do that in about a day and a half with that souped up tuna boat he has. So he probably delivered the virus before I was even out of surgery the day after Chardonnay blew up.  He could have gotten back just as quick or gone somewhere else.”

“Good work!  How’d you find out?”

“Some Arabs cooked this up to try to put the diamond cartel out of business.  They came to Meilland as their agent.  An old man, he was willing to kill a million people to get the feeling of power again.  He lied the whole time I was with him, always holding something back in hopes of keeping what he had, and getting what I had.  It was just like Cooper Jordan, Lymon Byxbe and Mikki Meilland.  You have to take what they say and comb through it to find the truth.”

“It sounds like we’ve got some solid leads now.”

“Meilland didn’t intend for the Arabs to get all the virus and vaccine he had, so Constantine almost surely has more,” Boyd said. “Sir, I’ve been on this trail now since June.  The closer I get to Ebola, the worse the people are.  Constantine Coelho got his start from Charles Meilland, picked up some additional pointers on interpersonal relationships from Mikki, and is now on the leading edge of badass.  We need to get that island sealed off, quick. 

“But, Constantine has three tuna boats, meaning he’d have about 30 sailors, maybe more.  If they were all on the island at once, that would be a significant force.  In addition, he got the final payment for the Ebola, a million in gold.  You can buy a lot of firepower on the black market with that, and he’s had three weeks to get it there.”

Ferguson said, “OK, we’ve got some Marines just out of Norfolk, but they’re at least a week away.  It looks like Corvo is about 200 miles from our base at Lajes, that about right?”

“Yes, sir.  We flew out there in a Casa 212. It was right at 200.”

“We could alert the 82
^nd
Airborne and get some infantry into Lajes in 48 hours.”

“It’d be tricky to parachute onto an island that’s only a couple of miles wide, and part of it is steep as hell,” Boyd said. “There is a runway there that the Casa lands on, but I don’t know if a C-130 could land on it.”

“They don’t want to put a C-130 filled with airborne soldiers down on a contested landing strip.”

“Maybe I can put together an advance party from the Portuguese here to at least hold the runway.”

“See what you can do.”

“OK, we’ll need the State Department to lead on this.  That’s Portuguese territory there, and they’re real touchy about their space.  The first guy on the beach is going to have to be Portuguese.  The other issue is their navy.  We’re going to need their frigate to block Constantine from jumping into one of his tuna boats and slipping out the back door with Ebola.  They have other demands on their resources here. Someone needs to blow in their ear.”

“We have no Navy in the area that can be there that quick,” Ferguson said. “We have State already here at the command post, so I’ll task them with this right now.  I’ll get our Joint Staff member moving now to get permission for the insertion.  That has to go all the way to the White House.  Shouldn’t be a problem, they’re the ones turning up that blue flame under my butt.  Now, who did Meilland sell the virus to?”

 “An Arab in Doha, Qatar, named Hamid Tamim.”

“Always tricky dealing with Arabs. We’ll get the State Department on this, too.  I doubt the Qatari Emir wants Ebola breaking out in his oceanfront neighborhood.”

“I’ve got a flight back to Lisbon in a couple of hours, then the next flight back to the Azores gets me in there noon tomorrow.”

CHAPTER FIFTY THREE

Marzanabad, Iran

The vervet monkey peered through the double layers of glass with a plaintive look on his face.  Mahmoud Nashtarudi, his handler, knew this monkey well; they were friends.  Mahmoud could tell he wasn’t feeling well.  He was supposed to be well. He’d been vaccinated with a new vaccine and then, just three days before, exposed to some virus they were studying.

“Get Dr. Namazi,” he said, rushing out of the viewing port into the Level 3 containment facility buried 40 feet underground and hidden in the mountains north of Tehran.

The director came immediately, worry on his face as he rushed into the safe control room of the containment facility, his long white lab coat flapping behind him. 

“See, his eyes, sir.  He is sick,” Nashtarudi said, concern in his voice. 

Nashtarudi needed this job, and any adverse effect on a monkey in his care reflected on him personally.  He’d been working in a veterinarian’s office in the Caspian Sea coast town of Chalus when a civilian administrator from the prestigious Revolutionary Guard approached him about a job at a secret laboratory in the nearby mountains. 

“Hummph,” Namazi said. “You are right. How about the others?”

They opened the door to another viewing room and approached the other window.  Two other vervet monkeys were playing happily in their cages.  They were joined in the viewing room by two young Ph.D. candidates working with  Namazi.

“It’s OK, Mahmoud,” Namazi said, breezing back out the door and heading out of the control room, the two Ph.D.s right behind him. 

“Odd,” Namazi said to them as the door closed behind them.  We know from the Protein Data Bank that the crystal structure of the C-terminal domain of the Ebola virus has a pocket for a small molecule inhibitor that can prevent virus propagation.  That crude protein coat strip of mRNA attached to a plasmid we replicated last month fits perfectly, and the inhibitor we manufactured didn’t.” 

The three of them walked quickly down a long hall and into another corridor where  Namazi’s office was located. 

“Our fermenters aren’t big enough to make any quantity of vaccine with such a crude structure. We need to find out why that simpler molecule didn’t work.  Get the 3-D kiosk viewer up and put in the Ebola C-terminal image and I’ll be there in a minute,” Namazi said, dismissing his students and closing the door. 

He rummaged in his desk for a piece of paper and logged on to his computer.  He went to a secure Internet connection, logged in to a webmail account and called up a draft message.  He added a sentence to the draft message and then logged out. 

In Doha, Qatar, Kahlid logged into that same webmail account and went to the same draft message.  He read Namazi’s message, logged out and pulled a cell phone out of his robe.  He called a man in Egypt.

CHAPTER FIFTY FOUR

Charles Meilland

Can a man negotiate with God?

Charles Meilland hoped so.  He’d learned banking, the diamond trade and smuggling as a young man.  It was a family business conducted at the margins of legality, and often outside those margins, for hundreds of years.  The Meillands had changed their name from Oppenheim when they moved from Alsace to Luxembourg and opened the bank, and they’d always specialized in moving wealth about Europe and the world, hence the design, building and utilization of Chardonnay had been all about business and not for pleasure. 

Halakhah is the Hebrew word for Jewish law.  Its more literal translation would be “the path that one walks.”  Charles Meilland had strayed far from that path.  He knew his sins, and he knew the law.  He had some explaining to do in the afterlife, which for him was fast approaching.

When Hamid came to him with a crazy scheme to release sick monkeys around the diamond mines to scare away the miners and close the mines, Charles
was wary.  He knew Arabs.  He’d competed with Arabs buying diamonds as a young man, and he’d come to represent them in all manner of transactions, legal and not legal.  He had moved the wealth of emirs, crown princes, dictators, officials and bureaucrats out of Arabia and into his and other banks for years.  Chardonnay had been in the Persian Gulf many times.  

Arabs are not detail people.  There are no Bedouin plumbers or carpenters or electricians. They’re above all that.  Consequently, Arabs depend on others to manage their infrastructure.  Many times in his dealings with them, Charles
had recalled the scene in “Lawrence of Arabia” in which Peter O’Toole delivers the line to Anthony Quinn that Arabs will always remain an insignificant people because they are “ignorant, and petty, and cruel.”  So, when an Arab came to him with a plan that required fastidious attention to highly technical detail, he was pretty sure they would somehow screw it up.  He was counting on it, in fact. 

Charles Meilland had taken an incredible risk with the lives of people around the world in order to have a chance at saving his own immortal soul.  He’d recognized an impatience in Byxbe, a tendency to cut corners.    All the better, because Meilland was pretty sure the Arabs were going to try to do this caper on their own, and they’d probably let Ebola get out.  Meilland’s deal to God was to save the Jewish people, because he knew from the start it wasn’t about diamonds in Africa.  It was about Tel Aviv.