Bioterror

by Tim Curran

  Elizabeth sipped her coffee. “Sometimes.”

  She was uncomfortable with it and he knew it. He didn’t like that. She should have been overjoyed. She should have been embracing the brave new world that she had no small part in crafting. He didn’t like that and those he worked for would like it even less when he reported it to them, which, of course, he would. That was how the game was played. If you wanted power, real power, then you had to play the game.

  Be careful, he warned himself. She’s an old puzzle player. Don’t pretend to know her or understand her. And, dear God, don’t underestimate her. Don’t think for one moment that she’s not reporting you as you report her. The Collective considers her a valuable asset and you don’t want to cross them or her.

  “You’re bothered about something,” he said. “I can see it.”

  She didn’t smile and that reassured him somewhat, because when this lady smiled it meant she had you by the balls.

  “I’m not comfortable discussing particulars out loud,” she said.

  “It’s perfectly safe, Liz.”

  She uttered a cool laugh. “Here? In this place? Nothing’s safe here.”

  “Really, Liz. This office is swept a dozen times a day for bugs.”

  “And you’re certain you can trust the people doing the sweeping?”

  “Yes.”

  It was obvious she didn’t. Then again, she hadn’t gotten where she was today by being reckless. Parks believed he was well-informed as to the various technologies used to eavesdrop, so he tried to reassure her as to their complete safety.

  “There’s no more secure location in the world,” he said.

  “The onion, Gordon, never forget it’s all a big onion.”

  He knew the analogy. Like an onion, the dark world of espionage had many, many layers. It was the people you trusted that you had to watch out for. Still, he was satisfied they were alone, that the walls did not have ears.

  It’s more than that. Much more. She doesn’t trust you and she never has.

  Parks suspected that was true. Nobody in the game trusted anyone else and particularly not at the level they played ball. There was just too much at stake. Every admission, confession, or offhand comment could and would be used against you for leverage. She was being exceptionally careful because there was more on the line here than ever before. She was afraid of being recorded, of saying something that could hang her later.

  He understood that perfectly. No one really knew what limits there were to the power of The Collective or what exotic listening and interception technology they might be employing. He’d heard rumors that were too fantastic to believe.

  As he thought this, a fly landed on his desk. He immediately swatted it. You could never be too sure these days.

  He finished his drink and handed a yellow envelope to her. “This is a list of cities that will fall first, the beginning of the chain reaction. According to the latest research, it’s quite accurate.”

  She nodded, opening the envelope and scanning its contents. “Amazingly detailed.”

  He took that as a compliment. “Sorry to have to call you out here for this, but you have to understand I just didn’t trust a courier.”

  “Not a problem, Gordon. Always nice to see you.”

  He sat back down, giggling.

  “Am I missing something?”

  Parks shook his head. “I just keep thinking about Bob Pershing and his power plays.”

  “The less said about that the better.”

  “I suppose.”

  Still, he thought about who was playing and who was being played. Layers upon layers. The outbreak of BioGenesis was just the beginning and he knew it. It was a tool of terror. A country wide, worldwide trauma was necessary to impose control over the masses. By the time the dust had settled, they wouldn’t know what had hit them.

  “Is there anything else, Gordon?”

  “No, that should do it. I don’t have to tell you to be very discreet with what’s in that envelope.”

  Her dark eyes drilled into him. “No, you don’t.”

  He smiled. It was getting so close now, so very close. He thought about the detailed dossier he had on her and wondered what she had on him. Hopefully, neither of them would have to play that hand. Then again, if the The Collective deemed it prudent to expose her, he would not hesitate.

  A good marionette had to respect the hands that controlled it.

  After she had gone, he got on his sat phone and called the boys upstairs, as he often referred to the heavy players of The Collective.

  “Yes?” a voice said. “Tell us.”

  Parks swallowed. “She’s evasive. She refuses to speak directly about anything concerning the project. That could be just playing it smart or—”

  “She could be thinking of betraying us.”

  “Yes.”

  “Keep an eye on her. We can’t have any problems at this juncture. Understood?”

  “Yes.”

  “Excellent.”

  The connection was broken. Parks sat back in his chair, mopping sweat from his forehead. Yes, he would watch her, of course, but his greatest fear was that he, too, was being watched.

  CHICAGO: EVANSTON

  1:45 A.M.

  "You don’t have to do this.”

  Shawna looked at him and rolled her eyes. “I’m not some little cringing violet, Harry. I can take care of myself.”

  “Good, glad to hear it. But who’s going to take care of me?”

  “My hero.”

  They took Harry’s GTO over to Shawna’s building off Ridge Avenue. They drove by once, casually scoping it all out. There were no cars she didn’t recognize. Everything looked terribly normal, terribly mundane. And it was this, more than anything, that made Shawna start to wonder if somehow she’d imagined it all. If she was in reality living some crazy paranoid fantasy brought on by all the shit in her life of late.

  Harry parked a block away, an old hand at nosing into places he wasn’t wanted. He sat behind the wheel, lost in thought for a few minutes.

  “I don’t suppose you have a gun?”

  Shawna sighed heavily. “No, I don’t have a gun.” She tried to dismiss it as one his jokes, but she could see he was dead serious. “Do you really think we’ll need one?”

  He shrugged. “Who knows?”

  They moved up the sidewalk, trying to stay in the shadows and at the same time trying to appear nonchalant in case anyone was watching them. It was not very easy: one pretty much canceling out the other.

  There were ten units in Shawna’s building, all run by a widower named Jill Morell. She was the kindly, motherly type, Shawna told Harry, until it came time for the rent. Then she was a cutthroat mercenary. She took no prisoners where money was concerned.

  There was no one loitering out front. No shadowy figures waiting in a parked car. But to be on the safe side, they went in the back way. Shawna was so nervous she dropped her key three times. Harry was better; he only dropped it twice.

  They went in and all was quiet.

  The beige corridors were empty. They could hear TVs in a few of the units. Everything appeared quite sane and commonplace. Amongst the potted ferns and deep-pile carpeting it was hard to imagine underworld types skulking about. If, indeed, that’s what all this was about.

  Harry seemed to have a few ideas, Shawna knew, but he wasn’t saying.

  They came to the elevator and Harry shook his head. “Stairs,” he said under his breath.

  He was very good at this, Shawna found herself thinking. Maybe too good. It made her wonder exactly what sort of life he’d lived as a professional journalist. He often joked about the enemies he’d made. How certain politicians and corporate figures would have liked him dead. But she’d always thought they were just that: jokes. It was hard to tell with him when he was serious. He seemed to think just about everything was humorous.

  But now Shawna wondered.

  The stairs were carpeted and they made no noise whatsoever. She�
�d been edgy coming back here, but Harry’s uncharacteristic solemnity positively unnerved her now. Her entire body was packed down tight like a spring waiting to pop. Her arms trembled, her legs trembled, even her lips trembled. There was an unpleasant, infuriating little tic in the corner of her eye. And she hadn’t experienced that since she’d been busted with a joint in gym class, her junior year of high school.

  She was thinking about those old movies where the young couple always seem to be investigating some abandoned, decaying house looking for clues. The ones where they get separated and the hero always sneaks up behind the heroine and places his hand on her shoulder, scaring the living shit out of her.

  If somebody put their hand on my shoulder right now, she thought, I’d scream bloody murder, piss my pants, and then I’d gouge out their eyes.

  There was something about fear, she realized. Although every heart-pounding, gut-twisting second of it was like dying one gasping breath at a time, it sure kept you alert. It sure gave you an edge. She was ready to pounce, hiss, scratch and claw with the slightest provocation.

  At her apartment all looked well.

  Shawna handed Harry the keys (noticing with some terror just how incredibly loud they jingled), but he was already trying the knob.

  “Did you lock this before you left?” he asked.

  She nodded soberly. “Yes. It locks automatically.”

  “It’s not locked now.”

  She tried the knob herself. It wasn’t catching at all as if the mechanism in there had been damaged…forced. Filled with some bizarre emotion between terror and curiosity, she tried it again and again. The tongue was jammed, it wouldn’t catch.

  “Harry, let’s get the fuck out—”

  But he’d already opened the door.

  Everything seemed to be the way she’d left it. The place wasn’t torn apart like in the movies. Nothing seemed to have been touched. They went from room to room to room. They even looked in closets. Harry found a Harold Robbins paperback she used as a doorstop in her bedroom.

  “Just what I always expected: dirty sex books,” he said in a conspiratorial voice. “Naughty thing that you are, tsk, tsk.”

  “Fuck you, Harry.”

  “We’d better wait till later.”

  Nothing was out of place. She was fastidious about her digs. She liked them very orderly and organized. It was one of the things she relished about living alone. Things were always where you left them.

  She looked around. “What do you think?” she whispered.

  “I think those drapes are hideous,” he said.

  She kept looking around. Yes, everything appeared to be fine, except—

  Standing in the living room on the pretense that he was looking for her hardcore sex videos, Harry found a leather glove poking from beneath a cushion. “Always hide your gloves there, dear?” he said.

  “I didn’t put that there. That’s not my glove.”

  “Placed quite strategically, one would think,” he said, trying to remain calm and failing. He reached into his coat and took out a pair of rubber surgical gloves and put them on.

  “Do you always carry rubber gloves?”

  “Actually, yes. You’d be surprised at the disgusting things I’ve had to touch in my job.”

  Shawna stared wide-eyed as he took hold of the glove under the cushion and gently pulled it free.

  It was wet with something.

  Harry’s gloved fingers were stained red. “Not ketchup,” he reported.

  “Blood?” Shawna moaned. “Blood?”

  “Afraid so.”

  He pulled off the rest of the cushions.

  There was something wrapped in what looked like a dishtowel. A dishtowel soaked with blood. Harry unwrapped it carefully. It was a knife, also bloody. The kind used to carve a roast.

  Shawna stood there, disgusted, but also very confused. “Harry? What the hell is this? What the hell gives here? That’s not mine! I didn’t put that there.”

  “I know that. You know that.”

  He went to the kitchen and found a plastic garbage bag. He dropped the glove, towel, and knife in there.

  “Somebody’s playing a twisted fucking game here,” he said loudly as if he hoped someone was listening. “Obviously planted to incriminate you…but, dear God, how amateurish. How obvious. Whoever we’re dealing with isn’t exactly the imaginative sort.”

  Shawna was breathing heavily. “Let’s get out of here before we find out who that is.”

  They left the place as they’d found it save for the unusual items from beneath the sofa. They slipped down the stairs. Harry had to practically drag Shawna with him. Her dander was up and she wanted answers. It was one thing to fuck with her, but you never touched her stuff, her place.

  “Where’s that landlady at?” Harry asked when they got downstairs again.

  “This way,” Shawna said, motioning down the corridor. “Why?”

  “I think we better have a talk with her.”

  “It’s pretty late, Harry.”

  “Then we’ll be rude.”

  At Jill Morell’s apartment, they knocked and knocked.

  Harry tried the door and it was open.

  “It’s never unlocked,” Shawna informed him, her voice dry as dust. “Jill’s got this thing about burglars. She was robbed once... at gunpoint... years ago. She’d never leave her door open...”

  Harry stared into Shawna’s eyes. For the first time she saw real concern in them. It had been there, of course, when they found the knife, but it was really starting to blossom now.

  “This is starting to smell bad, Shawna.”

  He went in and right away they smelled it.

  A pungent, cloying odor of piss, shit, and something wet, metallic almost. Harry had smelled it many times before poking about crime scenes.

  In the kitchen, they found Jill.

  She was on the floor, cut and stabbed so viciously her head was nearly coming off. There was blood everywhere. Pooled on the floor, spattered on the walls, running down the refrigerator. All of it fresh, very fresh.

  “Oh my God,” Shawna said, turning away, nearly losing her lunch.

  Harry said nothing.

  There was money on the table, scattered on the floor.

  “Rent money, I’ll bet,” Harry said. “Was the rent due?”

  “Yesterday,” Shawna managed, trembling like an autumn leaf.

  “And if we go back to your place and look around, Shawna, I’m betting in some of your drawers we’d find more money. And maybe a little coke for good measure.”

  “I’m being set-up.” It wasn’t a question.

  In the distance they could hear sirens. They were getting closer all the time. They looked at each other. They knew the sirens, like the rest of this carefully plotted nightmare, was no coincidence.

  “Let’s get the hell out of here,” Harry said.

  They went out the front and hit the sidewalk running. And they kept running until they made it to Harry’s car.

  “What is this about?” Shawna demanded. “What the hell did I do?”

  “It’s not what you did. It’s what you saw.”

  She only wished she knew what that was.

  BOLLING AFB, WASHINGTON DC:

  DEFENSE INTELLIGENCE AGENCY

  2:00 A.M.

  Things weren’t going too well for Charles VanderMissen.

  He was sixty-six years old. He had four children, seven grandchildren, and was on his second wife. He owned a colonial in McLean worth nearly seven million dollars (if not more), a summer home on Cape Cod, and a winter retreat in St. Thomas. At one time he had been a Navy Rear Admiral with Naval Intelligence. He’d also been deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency for five years. There was an ugly patch of old scar tissue on his neck he’d received after bailing out of a burning helicopter on the Laotian border in the waning days of the war in Southeast Asia. He was a thin, lanky man who perpetually looked exhausted and old beyond his years.

  And he wa
s also one of the few men who knew about S5.

  Section Five had originally been called SIG, the Scientific Intelligence Group, back in the early days of the Cold War. Or just “the Group”, to those in the know. Some still called it that. Beyond himself, there were only a few select high-ranking individuals in the military establishment and intelligence bureaucracies who knew of Five’s existence or the shadowy rumors of the same. But within the country’s political structure, S5 did not exist. You would not find it in the Congressional Registry. It operated as a shadow agency under the umbrella of the CIA, but few in the CIA had heard of it. Unlike the NSA, FBI, DIA, or the military intelligence complex itself, it was kept from the public for reasons of security. S5 did, in effect, serve the public (though their methods would have been frowned upon by the general taxpayer), but their real loyalty was to national security. A vague term if ever there was one. Even the industrial scientific sector, which carried out research for them via CBT, did not know whom it was they really worked for.

  Five was a bureaucratic tangle that no Senate Select Committee or Congressional investigation would ever penetrate. S5’s payroll was handled by the Defense Department. There was no readily accessible paper trail. They existed within the cracks between the other intelligence organizations and had, in one form or another, since the early days of the Cold War.

  And it was S5 that was keeping VanderMissen up late these days.

  In fact, it was aging him well beyond his years.

  He was one of the nation’s secret keepers, you see.

  He could tell you the truth behind the Iran-Contra affair, the Kennedy assassination, the Philadelphia Experiment, Watergate, Area 51, the Clinton sex scandal, why we really invaded Iraq, and even what America’s true role was in the fall of the Soviet Union. He could tell you how high-ranking Nazi war criminals were protected by the United States after World War II via Operation Paperclip and in what capacity they then served the country. He could turn your hair white with tales of MK-ULTRA, the CIA’s mind control program of the 1960s. He could go on for hours about numerous black budget operations worldwide. He could even tell you why British MI5 had Princess Diana killed or how America really battled Islamic extremism with an ongoing policy of state-sponsored terror and even why President George W. Bush did not look at all surprised when he was told about the terrorist attacks of 9/11.