27/10/07
8:50 PM
Ashford
Doctor Mullin put her key in to her front door. She needed a shower, sleep and food, not necessarily in that order.
"Hey Laura." Her housemate called down from upstairs. She was on head and neck surgery, so didn't have to work as many weekends as Laura Mullin did.
"Hey." She called back.
"How was your shift?"
"Ah, vomity." She took off her coat and put her keys down. "Had two interesting cases and a very long phone conversation with a specialist unit in Cornwall." She stepped away from the door and in to the kitchen. Almost at once, someone rang the doorbell. She huffed in irritation and went back to the door. She didn't recognise the face she saw, so she put the chain on.
"Doctor Mullin?" The man asked, in a deep, slow American accent.
"Yes, who's asking?"
"May I come in? I need to talk to you." Laura Mullin hesitated.
"My flatmate is upstairs."
"That's fine, but I need to talk to you."
"Okay." She let him in.
"May I sit down?"
"Okay." She led him in to the sitting room. He sat down, she copied him.
"Doctor Mullin, my name is Finn Karowski, I am an agent of the CIA." Doctor Mullin felt her jaw drop slightly. She wasn't sure what she'd been expecting, but it hadn't been that. "I understand that you treated an Arab man today, you didn't know his name. He's early thirties, stands about five-ten five-eleven."
"Yeah, I did. Do you know who he is?"
"The man's name is Zaffar Younis, we've been trying to pin him down for weeks and it's imperative that we find him as quickly as possible."
"Why?"
"He's a very violent jihadist. We have good reason to believe he's masterminding a plot to bomb five or six middle schools in the US simultaneously, using the children themselves as bombers. He's good at making young boys see his way. If his plan goes off, we're talking maybe a hundred dead, almost all of them under fourteen. He fled the US a month ago, but we think he's still running the show."
"That… He's not in a fit state to run anything. He's been tortured." Finn Karowski raised his eyebrows.
"That's news to me. How bad?"
"Pretty bad. I don't think he could have walked even if he hadn't been drugged."
"He was drugged?" Doctor Mullin nodded once. "That sounds like in-fighting in a terrorist cell to me. They're a bunch of vision-driven maniacs, when the visions don't line up, things get very violent. And a lot of jihadi cells have drugs, they get money that way. If they have links to groups around Kandahar, they often buy drugs straight from the cartels that run those hills. Even if his cell's breaking up, we need to find him. He might be willing to snitch on the rest if they've turned on him." Doctor Mullin ran a hand back through her hair. "I know it's a lot to take in, but we don't' have a lot of time."
"Why come to me? Why not go through hospital records?"
"Because to do that, we need MI5's approval, which can take days or even weeks. Often it's much quicker just to go to a sensible professional."
Doctor Mullin hesitated. "Can I see some ID?"
"I don't dare carry any on this operation. If these jihadis found me, if they had any reason to think for a moment I was CIA, my people would find me in twelve different dumpsters two days later." She didn't reply at once. He set a hand on her knee. "Doctor Mullin, I just need to know where you sent him. This won't come back to you, and there are a hundred children's lives riding on this."
Silence hung for almost a full minute.
"Truro."
Note: Kandahar is a region of Afghanistan in which opium poppies are grown. The Canadian Army took most of its losses there in the Afghan war, a lot of those due to IEDs.
The race is on.