by Tom Clancy
Werner considered that for about half a second or so before speaking. “If so, he hasn’t been a raving success. The operations have some of the earmarks of professionalism, but not enough of it to matter. Hell, Dan, you know the drill. If the bad guys are in the same place for more than an hour, we descend on them and take them out the instant they screw up. Professional terrorists or not, they are not well-trained people, they don’t have anything like our resources, and they surrender the initiative to us sooner or later. All we need to know is where they are, remember? After that, the thunderbolt is in our hands.”
“Yeah, and you have zapped a few, Gus. And that’s why we need better intelligence, to zap them before they show up on the radarscope of their own accord.”
“Well, one thing I can’t do is their intel for them. They’re closer to the sources than we are,” Werner said, “and I bet they don’t send us everything they have anyway.”
“They can’t. Too much of it to fax back and forth.”
“Okay, yes, three hard incidents looks like a lot, but we can’t tell if it’s just coincidence or part of a plan unless we have people to ask. Like a live terrorist. Clark’s boys haven’t taken anyone alive yet, have they?”
“Nope,” Murray agreed. “That’s not part of their mission statement.”
“So tell them that if they want hard intel, they have to have somebody with a live brain and a mouth after the shooting stops.” But Werner knew that that wasn’t easy under the best of circumstances. Just as taking tigers alive was far harder than taking them dead, it was difficult to capture someone possessing a loaded submachine gun and the will to use it. Even the HRT shooters, who were trained to bring them in alive in order to toss them in front of a Federal District Court judge for proper sentencing and caging at Marion, Illinois, hadn’t done well in that area. And Rainbow was made up of soldiers for whom the niceties of law were somewhat foreign. The Hague Convention established rules for war that were looser than anything found in the United States Constitution. You couldn’t kill prisoners, but you had to capture them alive before they were prisoners, and that was something armies generally didn’t emphasize.
“Does our friend Mr. Clark require any more guidance from us?” Werner asked.
“Hey, he’s on our side, remember?”
“He’s a good guy, yes. Hell, Dan, I met with him while they were setting Rainbow up, and I let him have one of our best troops in Timmy Noonan, and I’ll grant you he’s done a great job—three of them so far. But he’s not one of us, Dan. He doesn’t think like a cop, but if he wants better intel, that’s what he has to do. Tell him that, will ya?”
“I will, Gus,” Murray promised. Then they moved on to other things.
“So what are we supposed to do?” Stanley asked. “Shoot the bloody guns out of their hands? That only happens in the cinema, John.”
“Weber did exactly that, remember?”
“Yes, and that was against policy, and we damned well can’t encourage it,” Alistair replied.
“Come on, Al, if we want better intelligence information, we have to capture some alive, don’t we?”
“Fine, if possible, which it rarely will be, John. Bloody rarely.”
“I know,” Rainbow Six conceded. “But can we at least get the boys to think about it?”
“It’s possible, but to make that sort of decision on the fly is difficult at best.”
“We need the intel, Al,” Clark persisted.
“True, but not at the cost of death or injury to one of our men.”
“All things in life are a compromise of some sort,” Rainbow Six observed. “Would you like to have some hard intelligence information on these people?”
“Of course, but—”
“ ‘But,’ my ass. If we need it, let’s figure a way to get it,” Clark persisted.
“We’re not police constables, John. That is not part of our mission.”
“Then we’re going to change the mission. If it becomes possible to take a subject alive, then we’ll give it a try. You can always shoot ’em in the head if it’s not. The guy Homer took with that gut shot. We could have taken him alive, Al. He wasn’t a direct threat to anyone. Okay, he deserved it, and he was standing out in the open with a weapon, and our training said kill, and sure enough, Johnston took the shot, and decided to make a statement of his own because he wanted to—but it would have been just as easy to take out his kneecap, in which case we’d have somebody to talk to now, and maybe he would have sung like most of them do, and then maybe we’d know something we’d sure as hell like to know now, wouldn’t we?”
“Quite so, John,” Stanley conceded. Arguing with Clark wasn’t easy. He’d come to Rainbow with the reputation of a CIA knuckle-dragger, but that’s not what he was at all, the Brit reminded himself.
“We just don’t know enough, and I don’t like not knowing enough about the environment. I think Ding’s right. Somebody’s setting these bastards loose. If we can figure out a little about that, then maybe we can locate the guy and have the local cops put the bag on him wherever he is, and then maybe we can have a friendly little chat and maybe the ultimate result will be fewer incidents to go out and take risks on.” The ultimate goal of Rainbow was an odd one, after all: to train for missions that rarely—if ever—came, to be the fire department in a town with no fires.
“Very well, John. We should talk with Peter and Domingo about it first of all, I think.”
“Tomorrow morning, then.” Clark stood from his desk. “How about a beer at the club?”
“Dmitriy Arkadeyevich, I haven’t seen you in quite some time,” the man said.
“Four years,” Popov confirmed. They were in London, at a pub three blocks from the Russian Embassy. He’d taken the train here just on the off chance that one of his former colleagues might show up, and so one had, Ivan Petrovich Kirilenko. Ivan Petrovich had been a rising star, a few years younger than Popov, a skilled field officer who’d made full colonel at the age of thirty-eight. Now, he was probably—
“You are the rezident for Station London now?”
“I am not allowed to say such things, Dmitriy.” Kirilenko smiled and nodded even so. He’d come very far and very fast in a downsized agency of the Russian government, and was doubtless still actively pursuing political and other intelligence, or rather, had a goodly staff of people to do it for him. Russia was worried about NATO expansion; the alliance once so threatening to the Soviet Union was now advancing eastward toward his country’s borders, and some in Moscow worried, as they were paid to worry, that this could be the precursor to an attack on the Motherland. Kirilenko knew this was rubbish, as did Popov, but even so he was paid to make sure of it, and the new rezident was doing his job as instructed. “So, what are you doing now?”
“I am not permitted to say.” Which was the obvious reply. It could mean anything, but in the context of their former organization, it meant that Popov was still a player of some sort. What sort, Kirilenko didn’t know, though he’d heard that Dmitriy Arkadeyevich had been RIF’d from the organization. That had been a surprise to him. Popov still enjoyed an excellent service reputation as a field spook. “I am living between worlds now, Vanya. I work for a commercial business, but I perform other duties as well,” he allowed. The truth was so often a useful tool, in the service of lies.
“You did not appear here by accident,” Kirilenko pointed out.
“True. I hoped to see a colleague here.” The pub was too close to the Embassy on Palace Green, Kensington, for serious work, but it was a comfortable place, for casual meets, and besides, Kirilenko believed his status as rezident to be entirely secret. Showing up in a place like this enhanced that. No real spook, everybody knew, would take the chance. “I need some help with something.”
“What might that be?” the intelligence officer asked, over a sip of bitter.
“A report on a CIA officer who is probably known to us.”
“The name?”
“John Clark.”
“Why?”
“He is now, I believe, the leader of a black operation based here in England. I would like to offer the information I have on the man in return for whatever information you might have. I can perhaps add a few things to that dossier. I believe my information will be of interest,” Popov concluded mildly. In context, it was a large promise.
“John Clark,” Kirilenko repeated. “I will see what I can do for you. You have my number?”
Popov slipped a piece of paper on the bar unseen. “Here is my number. No. Do you have a card?”
“Certainly.” The Russian pocketed the scrap of paper and pulled out his wallet and handed the card over. I. P. Kirilenko, it said, Third Secretary, Russian Embassy, London. 0181-946-0001, with -9009 as the fax number. Popov pocketed the card. “Well, I must get back. Good to see you, Dmitriy.” The rezident set his glass down and walked out onto the street.
“Get the picture?” one “Five” man said to the other on the way out the door, about forty seconds behind their surveillance target.
“Well, not good enough for the National Portrait Gallery, but . . .” The problem with covert cameras was that the lenses were too small to make a really good photo. They were usually good enough for identification purposes, however, and he’d gotten eleven exposures, which, combined with computer-enhancement, should be entirely adequate. Kirilenko, they knew, thought his cover to be adequate. He didn’t and couldn’t know that “Five,” once called MI-5, and now officially called the Security Service, had its own source inside the Russian Embassy. The Great Game was still ongoing in London and elsewhere, new world order or not. They hadn’t caught Kirilenko in a compromising act yet, but he was the rezident, after all, and therefore not given to such action. But you tracked such people anyway, because you knew who they were, and sooner or later, you got something on them, or from them. Like the chap he’d just had a beer with. Not a regular for this pub—they knew who they were. No name. Just some photos that would be compared with the library of photos at “Five’s” new headquarters building, Thames House, right on the river near Lambeth Bridge.
Popov stepped outside, turned left, and walked past Kensington Palace to catch a cab to the train station. Now, if only Kirilenko could get him something of use. He should be able to. He’d offered something juicy in return.
CHAPTER 19
SEARCHING
Three of the winos died that day, all from internal bleeds in the upper GI. Killgore went down to check them. Two had died in the same hour, the third five hours later, and the morphine had helped them expire either unconscious or in a painless, merciful stupor. That left five out of the original ten, and none of them would see the end of the week. Shiva was every bit as deadly as they’d hoped, and, it would seem, just as communicable as Maggie had promised. Finally, the delivery system worked. That was proven by Mary Bannister, Subject F4, who’d just moved into the treatment center with the onset of frank symptoms. So, the Shiva Project was fully successful to this point. Everything was nominal to the test parameters and the experimental predictions.
“How bad is the pain?” he asked his doomed patient.
“Cramping, pretty bad,” she replied. “Like flu, plus something else.”
“Well, you do have a moderate fever. Any idea where you may have caught it? I mean, there is a new strain of flu out of Hong Kong, and looks like you have it.”
“Maybe at work . . . before I came here. Can’t remember. I’m going to be okay, right?” The concern had fought its way through the Valium-impregnated food she got every day.
“I think so.” Killgore smiled around his surgical mask. “This one can be dangerous, but only to infants and the elderly, and you’re not either one of those, are you?”
“I guess not.” She smiled, too, at the reassurance from the physician, which was always comforting.
“Okay, what we’re going to do is get an IV started to keep you properly hydrated. And we’ll work on the discomfort a little with a little morphine drip, okay?”
“You’re the doctor,” Subject F4 replied.
“Okay, hold your arm still. I have to make a stick, and it will hurt a little bit . . . there,” he said, on doing it. “How was that?”
“Not too bad.”
“Okay.” Killgore punched in the activation number on the Christmas tree. The morphine drip started instantly. About ten seconds later, it got into the patient’s bloodstream.
“Ohhhh, oh yes,” she said, eyes closed when the initial rush of the drug hit her system. Killgore had never experienced it himself, but he imagined it to be almost a sexual feeling, the way the narcotic soothed her entire body. The tension in her musculature all went away at once. You could see the body relax. Her mouth changed most of all, from tension to the slackness of sleep. It was too bad, really. F4 wasn’t exactly beautiful, but she was pretty in her way, and judging from what he’d watched on the control-room TV monitor, she was a sexual treat for her partners, even though that had been caused by the tranquilizers. But, good lay or not, she would be dead in five to seven days, despite the best efforts he and his people would render. On the tree was a small drip-bottle of Interleukin- 3a, recently developed by SmithKline’s excellent collection of research scientists for cancer treatment—it had also shown some promise in countering viruses, which was unique in the world of medicine. Somehow it encouraged the body’s immune system, though through a mechanism that was not yet understood. It would be the most likely treatment for Shiva victims once the disease became widespread, and he had to confirm that it wouldn’t work. That had been the case with the winos, but they also needed to test it in fundamentally healthy patients, male and female, just to make sure. Too bad for her, he thought, since she had a face and a name to go along with her number. It would also be too bad for millions—actually billions—of others. But it would be easier with them. He might see their faces on TV, but TV wasn’t real, was it? Just dots on a phosphor screen.
The idea was simple enough. A rat was a pig was a dog, was a boy—woman in this case. All had an equal right to life. They’d done extensive testing of Shiva on monkeys, for whom it had proved universally lethal, and he’d watched all those tests, and shared the pain of the sub-sentient animals who felt pain as real as what F4 felt, though in the case of the monkeys morphine hadn’t been possible, and he’d hated that—hated inflicting pain on innocent creatures with whom he could not talk and to whom he could not explain things. And though it was justifiable in the big-picture sense—they would be saving millions, billions of animals from the depredations of humans—to see an animal suffer was a lot for him and his colleagues to bear, for they all empathized with all creatures great and small, and more for the small, the innocent, and the helpless than for the larger two-legged creatures who cared not a whim about them. As F4 probably did not, though they’d never asked. Why confuse the issue, after all? He looked down again. F4 was already stuporous from the narcotic he’d administered. At least she, unlike the experimental monkeys, was not in pain. That was merciful of them, wasn’t it?
“What black operation is that?” the desk officer asked over the secure phone link.
“I have no idea, but he is a serious man, remember? A colonel of the Innostrannoye Upravleniye, you will recall, Division Four, Directorate S.”
“Ah, yes, I know him. He spent much time at Fensterwalde and Karlovy Vary. He was RIF’d along with all those people. What is he doing now?”
“I do not know, but he offers us information on this Clark in return for some of our data. I recommend that we make the trade, Vasily Borissovich.”
“Clark is a name known to us. He has met personally with Sergey Nikolay’ch,” the desk officer told the rezident. “He’s a senior field officer, principally a paramilitary type, but also an instructor at the CIA Academy in Virginia. He is known to be close to Mary Patricia Foleyeva and her husband. It is also said that he has the ear of the American President. Yes, I think we would be interested in his current activities.”
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The phone they spoke over was the Russian version of the American STU-3, the technology having been stolen about three years before by a team working for Directorate T of the First Chief Directorate. The internal microchips, which had been slavishly copied, scrambled the incoming and outgoing signals with a 128-bit encryption system whose key changed every hour, and changed further with the individual users whose personal codes were part of the insertable plastic keys they used. The STU system had defied the Russians’ best efforts to crack it, even with exact knowledge of the internal workings of the system hardware, and they assumed that the Americans had the same problems—after all, for centuries Russia had produced the world’s best mathematicians, and the best of them hadn’t even come up with a theoretical model for cracking the scrambling system.
But the Americans had, with the revolutionary application of quantum theory to communications security, a decryption system so complex that only a handful of the “Directorate Z” people at the National Security Agency actually understood it. But they didn’t have to. They had the world’s most powerful supercomputers to do the real work. These were located in the basement of the sprawling NSA headquarters building, a dungeonlike area whose roof was held up with naked steel I-beams because it had been excavated for just this purpose. The star machine there was one made by a company gone bankrupt, the Super-Connector from Thinking Machines, Inc., of Cam-bridge, Massachusetts. The machine, custom-built for NSA, had sat largely unused for six years, because nobody had come up with a way to program it efficiently, but the advent of quantum theory had changed that, too, and the monster machine was now cranking merrily away while its operators wondered who they could find to make the next generation of this complex machine.
