The Faithful Spy

In humans, Y. pestis causes several types of infections. The best known is bubonic plague. It begins with chills and shaking, followed by a fever spike that can top 105 degrees. The swollen lymph nodes — also called buboes — explode to the size of baseballs as the immune system tries desperately to clear Y. pestis from the body. A profound fatigue takes over, so severe that many victims find themselves beyond caring whether they live or die. In the final stages of disease, the explosion of Y. pestis in the bloodstream causes septic shock. The blood hemorrhages under the skin, and the arms and legs take on a deep blue-black tint, the signature symptom of the Black Death.

yet the black Death isn’t the most dangerous form of plague. Bubonic plague can’t be transmitted from person to person, and some victims recover without treatment. No, the real terror is the Red Death, pneumonic plague, the disease that results when Y. pestis infects the lungs. In that warm, moist environment, the germ replicates with furious speed.

An infected person first notices a fever, headache, a slight cough — the nuisances of daily life. But in a few hours Y. pestis takes over. The headache turns from annoyance to agony. The cough becomes a spiraling pneumonia. A vise of pain constricts the chest as bacteria fill the lungs and the heart struggles to pump blood. The victim spits up phlegm, watery and loose at first, then thick with clotted blood.

Within forty-eight hours, people infected with the Red Death have less than a 50 percent chance of survival even if they are put on a respirator and given intravenous antibiotics. Left untreated, they will die within days of shock or respiratory failure, choking to death as their lungs fill with blood. Living through pneumonic plague without treatment is about as likely as winning the lottery. Worse, infected people spit up clouds of Y. pestis bacteria each time they cough, so the disease jumps easily from person to person. And while modern antibiotics can stop plague if it is detected quickly, no vaccine for the germ exists. In fact, Y. pestis is in some ways its own worst enemy. Like Ebola, pneumonic plague kills its victims so fast that it can’t spread far under normal circumstances, limiting the danger of outbreaks in the wild. But that condition doesn’t apply if plague is released deliberately as a terror weapon. Scattering Y. pestis in the air over a major city could produce hundreds of thousands of infections at once, overwhelming hospitals and causing a worldwide panic. The World Health Organization has estimated that a release of Y. pestis in a metropolitan area of five million, the size of Washington, could cause 150,000 cases of pneumonic plague and kill 36,000 people. The WHO didn’t venture to guess what the plague might do in a larger city, like New York.

tarik dourant had a half dozen vials of Yersinia pestis stored in his basement.

He hadn’t needed to attack the Centers for Disease Control headquarters to get them, or to sneak into Vector, the giant germ factory in Siberia where the Soviet Union hid its biological-weapons research during the Cold War. Tarik hadn’t even needed to leave the house. He had just needed to be home when a FedEx delivery truck rolled up, so he could sign for a package from the Muhimbili Medical Center in Dar es Salaam. Tanzania had scores of plague cases every year, and its government worked hard to prevent outbreaks. Doctors who discovered a potential case were required to take blood samples to be tested at Muhimbili’s infectious disease lab, the most sophisticated in East Africa. There the samples came under the care of a quiet Pakistani technician who had moved to Tanzania to get a job at Muhimbili—

on the orders of the man who called himself Omar Khadri. Khadri figured that a Pakistani Muslim would have an easier time getting hired in Tanzania than at the Centers for Disease Control. He was right.

Thus the plague had found its way to Tarik, who at the tender age of twenty-three was the most sophisticated scientist ever to work for al Qaeda. Inshallah. God’s will. And so Tarik could not give his full attention to his studies at McGill.

the gray house was silent as Tarik unlocked the front door and stepped inside. “Fatima?” he called out. “Fatima?”