Cold Silence Read Online Free PDF Page B

has a crush on you, One,” Eddie would say. “I like her.”
    â€œMe, too, but not in that way.” This was a lie. I was strongly drawn to her. I would never act on it.
    â€œAll guys like her in that way.”
    â€œThen talk to them.”
    Chris broke in. “Colonel Rush has to go in and you know it, Frank. We have Americans on the ground who need help.”
    â€œChris, you have a big heart.” Burke sighed, but he didn’t tell meto turn around. He was probably realizing that since I’d gone in without permission, I’d be blamed if things went sour. He’d get credit if they worked. If he stopped me, and U.S. scientists died, Frank would be on the hot seat. Frank would have to explain the lapse. Not me.
    His slow smile told me that he did not appreciate being manipulated. I couldn’t care less. I was still trying to understand why the committee was in session.
    The admiral asked me now, “Do you have more photos?”
    â€œNo, sir.”
    â€œDr. Nash’s face looks swollen, but you can’t see features,” said Chris thoughtfully.
    â€œIt’s not the same thing,” insisted Frank Burke.
    I thought,
The same thing as what?
    â€œWell, it certainly
looks
swollen the same way,” said the next face in line, Dr. Colonel Wilbur Gaines, from Fort Detrick, Maryland, where the Army had its bioterror labs. Gaines, the top-left-hand face, headed disease tracking and was in his late forties, with light brown skin, thick short hair, and round, clear reading glasses on a red string around his neck. He got along well with Burke.
    â€œI agree it is a stretch, Frank, but we need a better photo.”
    Burke said, “Can we blow this shot up, make it clearer?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œCan we ask the sender to resend?”
    â€œI can try.”
    Left to right, box to box, as in a high school yearbook, I saw Ray Havlicek, FBI, Chris’s ex-boyfriend, who still carried a torch for her and would head up domestic investigations in the event of attack; Celia St. Johns, CIA, in a tent dress, a sixty-two-year-old onetime Cold War Mata Hari, who looked more like a bag lady these days, and, who, considering her appearance—brown tent dresses, wet wool smell, mustard stains, stringy matted gray hair—had to be really good at her job, or know secrets, to still represent her agency at this high level.
    Next was Lester Ormand, FEMA, emergency food and med-aid, a natty man who looked more like a Wall Street lawyer, and Carla Vasquez, forty-nine, White House liaison with governors of all states. Carla was a third cousin to the vice president, and a former big fund-raiser from Miami.
    â€œPerfect social life for you,” Eddie liked to say. “All work. At least someone calls out for food.”
    If Chris spoke for compassion, the next speaker represented urgency. Ray Havlicek, forty-nine, was an ex–college sprinter from the University of North Carolina, still lean and fit, the son of an FBI agent who had arrested Rajneeshee cult members for carrying out a food poisoning attack in Dalles, Oregon, in 1984. Ray had led the team that stopped Madyan Al Onazy’s 2009 smallpox attack on a Saudi Airlines 747 on its way to Dulles Airport. That midair fight and arrest remained classified. Ray was a heavyweight and I respected him. I had a feeling he’d been a jealous boyfriend when he’d dated Chris. It was still in his eyes.
    â€œI agree with Chris. Dr. Rush must go in,” he said.
    To his left, inside his square, was impassive-looking Air Force Major General Wayne Homza, whose career I’d almost wrecked a year ago, by proving him wrong during an outbreak, and then resurrected it, by ending a threat with minimal loss of life. Homza had been grateful, but some people can’t sustain that emotion. Thanks becomes resentment. These days he was making a professional comeback. Homza was the only officer in the United States with