Reprisal Read Free Page B

took a deep breath and watched as a sparrow lifted off a nearby tree. It paddled upwards along the stones on the side of the old City Hall where Peregrine falcons sometimes swooped down from the ramparts to snatch prey like the sparrow.
    Zehra started toward the cool of her office, plotting how she was going to dump the case.
     
     

Two
     
    The fact that Americans weren’t immune to the disease, had been the key to everything. Mustafa Ammar closed his leather bound copy of the Qur’an. He rose from his knees, completed his prayers, and removed the old, tan cotton robe. Underneath, he wore a blue Hugo Boss suit with a white shirt open at the collar.
    Several years earlier, as part of his planning, he had successfully embedded himself in the Minnesota company called Health Technologies. He worked there as Michael Ammar, a genetic scientist—a perfect cover for his real work. After his prayers, he prepared to leave for the office and the labs.
    Today, his immediate problem was a lack of information. With the launch date set for less than two weeks from now, Mustafa worried about the last minute details. Years of planning and struggle and setting up a network of believers, would finally pay-off. Could he control things until the release?
    As he had intended, El-Amin had been accused of killing the Somali boy. Mustafa was certain he wouldn’t reveal anything, but Mustafa still worried. He needed information about law enforcement. What were they doing on El-Amin’s case? Would they uncover anything?
    The scream of boiling water in the teapot startled him. He moved to the kitchen and poured hot water over loose tea leaves. Smelled the comforting aroma. Sitting in the hard chair beside the window, Mustafa thought back over years of work leading up to this point.
    The key triggering everything was the fact that the deadly disease of smallpox had been eradicated from the world in the late 1970s. Drug companies stopped making vaccines. The Western infidels continued blissfully shopping, eating, and getting fat, confident that smallpox was a mass killer of the past. And even though people no longer had an immunity to it, that was okay since the disease didn’t exist.
    Except for two places.
    He’d learned there remained two repositories of the virus. One, located in the Maximum Containment Laboratory at the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia, was under the heaviest security. The other was located in Vector, an old city in Russia. During what the infidels called the “Cold War,” both the United States and Russia agreed to maintain the virus in safe deep freeze, so that in the case of an unexpected break-out, vaccines could be developed from the saved virus.
    Mustafa sipped the tea and enjoyed the floral fragrance. He and his brotherhood saw this as an opportunity to strike at the West in a fashion more devastating than anything ever done before. Let others set off bombs in subways. What did that do? Kill a few people. And a week later, everyone forgot about it.
    The Al-Qaeda attack on the World Trade Center first gave Mustafa a hint of what could be done. Not the destruction itself, but the ensuing panic. What if he could do something even worse, more widespread, and unstoppable that would lead to panic and death on a nation-wide scale?
    He’d be blessed by Allah and revered the world over for his courage and vision.
    The security at Vector was a joke and was bought-off cheaply. He’d already taken one shipment from them for testing on the Somali boys. The second one would be coming. He’d meet it himself. Once here, the delivery systems to spread the plague were also simple. The virus attached itself to the moist membranes of human mouths, noses, and throats. Like a greedy parasite, it exploded in uncontrolled growth. Unlike a parasite, the virus spread easily and killed quickly.
    Finishing his tea, he cleaned up the few dishes in the kitchen and left for work. He pampered himself here in America. He justified