by Tom Clancy
No, Popov decided as he finished packing, the only thing that made sense was that this was the last operation. Brightling would be closing things down. To Popov that meant that this was his last chance to cash in. And so he found himself hoping that Grady and his band of murderers would come to as shabby an end as all the others in Bern and Vienna—and even Spain, though he’d had no part in that one. He had the number and control code for the new Swiss account, and in that was enough money to support him for the rest of his life. All he needed to happen was for the Rainbow team to kill them off, and then he could disappear forever. With that hopeful thought in his mind, Popov went outside and flagged a cab to take him to Teterboro Airport.
He’d think about it all the way across the Atlantic.
CHAPTER 27
TRANSFER AGENTS
“It really is a waste of time,” Barbara Archer said at her seat in the conference room. “F4 is dead, just her heart’s still beating. We’ve tried everything. Nothing stops Shiva. Not a damned thing.”
“Except the -B vaccine antibodies,” Killgore noted.
“Except them,” Archer agreed. “But nothing else works, does it?”
There was agreement around the table. They had literally tried every treatment modality known to medicine, including things merely speculated upon at CDC, USAMRIID, and the Pasteur Institute in Paris. They’d even tried every antibiotic in the arsenal from penicillin to Keflex, and two new synthetics under experimentation by Merck and Horizon. The use of the antibiotics had merely been t-crossing and i-dotting, since not one of them helped viral infections, but in desperate times people tried desperate measures, and perhaps something new and unexpected might have happened—
—but not with Shiva. This new and improved version of Ebola hemorrhagic fever, genetically engineered to be hardier than the naturally produced version that still haunted the Congo River Valley, was as close to 100 percent fatal and 100 percent resistant to treatment as anything known to medical science, and absent a landmark breakthrough in infectious-disease treatment, nothing would help those exposed to it. Many would suffer exposure from the initial release, and the rest would get it from the -A vaccine Steve Berg had developed, and through both modalities, Shiva would sweep across the world like a slow-developing storm. Inside of six months, the people left alive would fall into three categories. First, those who hadn’t been exposed in any way. There would be few of them, since every nation on earth would gobble up supplies of the -A vaccine and inject their citizens with it, because the first Shiva victims would horrify any human with access to a television. The second group would be those rarest of people whose immune systems were sufficient to protect them from Shiva. The lab had yet to discover any such individuals, but some would inevitably be out there—happily, most of those would probably die from the collapse of social services in the cities and towns of the world, mainly from starvation or from the panicked lawlessness sure to accompany the plague or from the ordinary bacterial diseases that accompanied large numbers of unburied dead.
The third group would be the few thousand people in Kansas. Project Lifeboat, as they thought of it. That group would be composed of active Project members—just a few hundred of them—and their families, and other selected scientists protected by Berg’s -B vaccine. The Kansas facility was large, isolated, and protected by large quantities of weapons, should any unwelcome visitors approach.
Six months, they thought. Twenty-seven weeks. That’s what the computer projections told them. Some areas would go faster than others. The models suggested that Africa would go last of all, because they’d be the last to get the -A vaccine distributed, and because of the poor infrastructure for delivering vital services. Europe would go down first, with its socialized medical-care systems and pliant citizens sure to show up for their shots when summoned, then America, then, in due course, the rest of the world.
“The whole world, just like that,” Killgore observed, looking out the windows at the New York/New Jersey border area, with its rolling hills and green deciduous trees. The great farms on the plains that ran from Canada to Texas would go fallow, though some would grow wild wheat for centuries to come. The bison would expand rapidly from their enclaves in Yellowstone and private game farms, and with them the wolves and barren-ground grizzly bear, and the birds, and the coyotes and the prairie dogs. Nature would restore Her balance very quickly, the computer models told them; in less than five years, the entire earth would be transformed.
“Yes, John,” Barb Archer agreed. “But we’re not there yet. What do we do with the test subjects?”
Killgore knew what she’d be suggesting. Archer hated clinical medicine. “F4 first?”
“It’s a waste of air to keep her breathing, and we all know it. They’re all in pain, and we’re not learning anything except that Shiva is lethal—and we already knew that. Plus, we’re going to be moving out west in a few weeks, and why keep them alive that long? We’re not moving them out with us, are we?”
“Well, no,” another physician admitted.
“Okay, I am tired of wasting my time as a clinician for dead people. I move that we do what we have to do, and be done with it.”
“Second,” agreed another scientist at the table.
“In favor?” Killgore asked, counting the hands. “Opposed.” Only two of those. “The ayes have it. Okay. Barbara and I will take care of it—today, Barb?”
“Why wait, John?” Archer inquired tiredly.
“Kirk Maclean?” Agent Sullivan asked.
“That’s right,” the man said from behind the door.
“FBI.” Sullivan held up his ID. “Can we talk to you?”
“About what?” The usual alarm, the agents saw.
“Do we have to stand in the hall to talk?” Sullivan asked reasonably.
“Oh, okay, sure, come in.” Maclean stepped back and opened the door to let them in, then led them into his living room. The TV was on, some cable movie, the agents saw. Kung fu and guns mostly, it appeared.
“I’m Tom Sullivan, and this is Frank Chatham. We’re looking into the disappearance of two women,” the senior agent said, after sitting down. “We’re hoping that you might be able to help us.”
“Sure—you mean, like they were kidnapped or something?” the man asked.
“That is a possibility. Their names are Anne Pretloe and Mary Bannister. Some people have told us that you might have known one or both of them,” Chatham said next.
They watched Maclean close his eyes, then look off to the window for a few seconds. “From the Turtle Inn, maybe?”
“Is that where you met them?”
“Hey, guys, I meet a lot of girls, y’know? That’s a good place for it, with the music and all. Got pictures?”
“Here.” Chatham handed them across.
“Okay, yeah, I remember Annie—never learned her last name,” he explained. “Legal secretary, isn’t she?”
“That’s correct,” Sullivan confirmed. “How well did you know her?”
“We danced some, talked some, had a few drinks, but I never dated her.”
“Ever leave the bar with her, take a walk, anything like that?”
“I think I walked her home once. Her apartment was just a few blocks away, right? . . . Yeah,” he remembered after a few seconds. “Half a block off Columbus Avenue. I walked her home—but, hey, I didn’t go inside—I mean we never—I mean, I didn’t, well—you know, I never did have sex with her.” He appeared embarrassed.
“Do you know if she had any other friends?” Chatham asked, taking interview notes.
“Yeah, there was a guy she was tight with, Jim something. Accountant, I think. I don’t know how tight they were, but when the two of them were at the bar, they’d usually have drinks together. The other one, I remember the face, but not the name. Maybe we talked some, but I don’t remember much. Hey, you know, it’s a singles bar, and you meet lotsa people, and sometimes you connect, but mainly you don’t.”
“Phone numbe
rs?”
“Not from these two. I have two from other gals I met there. Want ’em?” Maclean asked.
“Did they know Mary Bannister or Anne Pretloe?” Sullivan asked.
“Maybe. The women connect better than the men do, y’know, little cliques, like, checking us out—like the guys do, but they’re better organized, like, y’know?”
There were more questions, about half an hour’s worth, some repeated a few times, which Maclean didn’t seem to mind, as some did. Finally they asked if they could look around the apartment. They had no legal right to do this, but oddly, even criminals often allowed it, and more than one of them had been caught because they’d had evidence out in plain view. In this case the agents would be looking for periodicals with photographs of deviant sex practices or even personal photographs of such behavior. But when Maclean led them about, the only photos they saw were of animals and periodicals about nature and conservation—some of them from groups the FBI deemed to be extremist—and all manner of outdoors gear.
“Hiker?” Chatham asked.
“Love it in the backcountry,” Maclean confirmed. “What I need is a gal who likes it, too, but you don’t find many of those in this town.”
“Guess not.” Sullivan handed over his card. “If you think of anything, please call me right away. My home number’s on the back. Thanks for your help.”
“Not sure I helped very much,” the man observed.
“Every little bit, as they say. See you,” Sullivan said, shaking his hand.
Maclean closed the door behind them and let out a long breath. How the fuck had they gotten his name and address? The questions were everything he would have expected, and he’d thought about the answers often enough—but a long time ago, he told himself. Why now? Were the cops dumb, or slow, or what?
“Whole lot of nothing,” Chatham said, as they got to their car.
“Well, maybe the women he gave us can tell us something.”
“I doubt it. I talked to the second one last night at the bar.”
“Go back to her. Ask her what she thinks of Maclean,” Sullivan suggested.
“Okay, Tom. That I can do. You get any vibes off the guy? I didn’t,” Chatham said.
Sullivan shook his head. “No, but I haven’t learned to read minds yet.”
Chatham nodded. “Right.”
It was time, and there was no point in delaying it. Barbara Archer unlocked the medication cabinet with her keys and took out ten ampoules of potassium-saline solution. These went into her pockets. Outside F4’s treatment room, she filled a 50cc syringe, then opened the door.
“Hello.” Mainly a groan from the patient, who was lying in bed and watching the wall-mounted TV listlessly.
“Hello, Mary. How are we feeling?” Archer suddenly wondered why it was that physicians asked how we were feeling. An odd linguistic nuance, she told herself, learned in medical school, probably, maybe to establish solidarity with the patient—which hardly existed in this case. One of her first summer jobs in college had been working at a dog pound. The animals had been given seven days, and if nobody claimed them, they were euthanized—murdered, as she thought of it, mainly with heavy doses of phenobarbital. The injection always went into the left foreleg, she remembered, and the dogs just went to sleep in five seconds or so. She’d always cried afterward—it had always been done on Tuesday, right before lunch, she recalled, and she’d never eaten lunch afterward, sometimes not even supper if she’d been forced to terminate a particularly cute dog. They’d lined them up on stainless-steel treatment tables, and another employee had held them still to make the murders easier. She’d always talk soothingly to the dogs, to lessen their fear and so give them an easier death. Archer bit her lip, feeling rather like Adolf Eichmann must have—well, should have, anyway.
“Pretty rotten,” Mary Bannister replied finally.
“Well, this will help,” Archer promised, pulling the syringe out and thumbing off the plastic safety cover from the needle. She took the three steps to the left side of the bed, reached for F4’s arm, and held it still, then pushed the needle into the vein inside the elbow. Then she looked into F4’s eyes and slid the plunger in.
Mary’s eyes went wide. The potassium solution seared the veins as it moved through them. Her right hand flew to the upper left arm, and then, a second later, to her upper chest, as the burning sensation moved rapidly to her heart. The potassium stopped the heart at once. The EKG machine next to the bed had shown fairly normal sinus rhythm, but now the moving line jumped once and went totally flat, setting off the alarm beeper. Somehow Mary’s eyes remained open, for the brain has enough oxygen for up to a minute’s activity even after the heart stops delivering blood. There was shock there. F4 couldn’t speak, couldn’t object, because her breathing had stopped along with her heart, but she looked straight into Archer’s eyes . . . rather as the dog had done, the doctor thought, though the dog’s eyes had never seemed to accuse her as these two did. Archer returned the look, no emotion at all in her face, unlike her time at the pound. Then, in less than a minute, F4’s eyes closed, and then she was dead. One down. Nine more to go, before Dr. Archer could go to her car and drive home. She hoped her VCR had worked properly. She’d wanted to tape the Discovery Channel’s show on the wolves in Yellowstone, but figuring the damned machine out sometimes drove her crazy.
Thirty minutes later, the bodies were wrapped in plastic and wheeled to the incinerator. It was a special model designed for medical applications, the destruction of disposable biological material such as fetuses or amputated limbs. Fueled by natural gas, it reached an extremely high temperature, even destroying tooth fillings, and converted all to an ash so fine that prevailing winds lifted it into the stratosphere, and then carried it out to sea. The treatment rooms would be scrubbed down so that there would be no lingering Shiva presence, and for the first time in months the facility would have no virus strands actively looking for hosts to feed upon and kill. The Project members would be pleased by that, Archer thought on her drive home. Shiva was a useful tool for their objective, but sufficiently creepy that they’d all be glad when it was gone.
Popov managed five hours of sleep on the trip across and was awakened when the flight attendant shook his shoulder twenty minutes out of Shannon. The former seaplane facility where Pan American’s Boeing-made clippers had landed before flying on to Southampton—and where the airline had invented Irish coffee to help the passengers wake up—was on the West Coast of Ireland, surrounded by farms and green wetlands that seemed to glisten in the light of dawn. Popov washed up in the lavatory, and retook his seat for the arrival. The touchdown was smooth, and the roll-out brief as the aircraft approached the general aviation terminal, where a few other business jets sat, similar to the G-V that Horizon Corporation had chartered for him. Barely had it stopped when a dingy official car approached the aircraft, and a man in uniform got out to jump up the stairs. The pilot waved the man to the back.
“Welcome to Shannon, sir,” the immigration official said. “May I see your passport, please?”
“Here.” Popov handed it across.
The bureaucrat thumbed through it. “Ah, you’ve been here recently. The purpose of your trip, sir?”
“Business. Pharmaceuticals,” the Russian added, in case the immigration official wanted to open his bags.
“Mm-hmm,” the man responded, without a shred of interest. He stamped the passport and handed it back. “Anything to declare?”
“Not really.”
“Very well. Have a pleasant time, sir.” The smile was as mechanical as his movement forward, then he left to go down the steps to his car.
Popov didn’t so much sigh in relief as grumble at his tension, which had clearly been wasted. Who would charter such an aircraft for $100,000 to smuggle drugs, after all? Something else to learn about capitalism, Dmitriy Arkadeyevich told himself. If you had enough money to travel like a prince, then you couldn’t be outside the law. Amazing, he thought. He put on his ove
rcoat and walked out of the aircraft, where a black Jaguar was waiting, his bags already loaded into the boot.
“Mr. Serov?” the driver asked, holding the door open. There was enough noise out here that he didn’t have to worry about being overheard.
“That’s right. Off to see Sean?”
“Yes, sir.”
Popov nodded and got into the back. A minute later, they were heading off the airport grounds. The country roads were like those in England, narrower than those in America—and he was still driving on the wrong side of the road. How strange, Popov thought. If the Irish didn’t like the English, then why did they emulate their driving patterns?
The ride took half an hour, and ended in a farmhouse well off the main roads. Two cars were there and a van, with one man standing outside to keep watch. Popov recognized him. It was Roddy Sands, the cautious one of this unit.
Dmitriy got out and looked at him, without shaking hands. He took the black drug-filled suitcase from the boot and walked in.
“Good morning, Iosef,” Grady said in greeting. “How was your flight?”
“Comfortable.” Popov handed the bag over. “This is what you requested, Sean.”
The tone of voice was clear in its meaning. Grady looked his guest in the eye, a little embarrassment on his face. “I don’t like it, either, but one must have money to support operations, and this is a means of getting it.” The ten pounds of cocaine had a variable value. It had cost Horizon Corporation a mere $25,000, having bought it on the market that was open to drug companies. Diluted, on the street, it would be worth five hundred times that. Such was another aspect of capitalism, Popov thought, dismissing it now that the transfer had been made. Then he handed over a slip of paper.
