Blown by Francine Mathews Read Free Book Online Page A

Tomlinson, the FBI director, that the Marine Corps Marathon had been hit by a terrorist. While Tomlinson called the White House, Tom got in touch with the Marine colonel who’d spent more than a year planning the race, and broke the bad news. Stannis Morrow wasn’t sleeping—he’d been following the reports of mass illness with growing dread—and thirty minutes later he faxed Tom his computerized registration list of the fifteen thousand people who’d run that day. The FBI was calling each of them now, one by one.
    Shephard demanded the names and service records of every Marine who’d worked the Hains Point water and aid stations—just in case the anonymous letter wasn’t joking. Then he asked Colonel Morrow to send the twelve men to the J. Edgar Hoover Building immediately.
    With shuddering speed the machinery slid into place. There was a protocol for chem-bio attacks, established months before in the event of such a strike against Washington. An army of medical and law enforcement personnel fanned out across the city. District police took up stations along the marathon route. Hospitals called in extra staff and braced for the flood of worried runners with vague symptoms and imperfect memories of what they’d ingested where. Remaining supplies of fruit and bottled water intended for race-time distribution, along with twelve tons of garbage collected along the route, were seized and trucked to the Bureau’s Laboratory Division, where every scrap would be tested for ricin or other contaminants. And Tom Shephard held a press conference.
    “Tonight the Federal Bureau of Investigation, at the direction of the President of the United States, is forced to declare a national emergency,” he said bluntly into the microphone set up at 10:53 P . M . in the Headquarters auditorium. The briefing would be broadcast simultaneously on all the major television channels, preempting the eleven o’clock news, and might take out Leno and Letterman if questions ran long enough. Shephard in the nation’s living rooms, he thought acidly. A real stand-up comic.
    “The FBI has received information tonight claiming responsibility for the poisoning of an undetermined number of participants in the Marine Corps Marathon with the castor bean derivative, ricin.” Beyond the halogen bulbs flooding his eyes Tom could glimpse the shadowy figures of the reporters and cameramen, one hundred sixty-two at last count, but even this crowd didn’t begin to fill the auditorium and he was reminded incongruously of his high school drama club days, the dress rehearsals in a darkened house, audience reaction impossible to judge. “The ricin may have been ingested in water distributed by rogue operators unaffiliated with the Marine Corps. The attack is believed to have been the work of a person or group of persons loosely associated with a European terrorist group known as 30 April Organization, acting on U.S. soil, and may have occurred around mile twenty of the race course in the neighborhood of Hains Point. Anyone who observed suspicious activity at that location or elsewhere during the race is urged to come forward, and those race participants who may be experiencing gastric discomfort should report immediately to medical facilities. A hotline has been set up . . .”
    The questions were predictable and the answers were few. No, we haven’t identified the terrorists involved. We have no estimate of the number of casualties but it is likely to run in the hundreds. There is no cure for ricin poisoning. We have no reason to believe that 30 April’s leader Mlan Krucevic survived last week’s attack on his compound outside Sarajevo . . .
    The chief problem, Tom thought as he stepped down from the podium with a description of ricin’s chemical structure in his hand and the press still clamoring for information, was that they hadn’t a single fucking lead to follow. Caroline had called from her car and urged him to check out Payne’s Naval Observatory