Dragonfly

by Dean Koontz

  McAlister closed his eyes and leaned back in his chair. He had heard all of this before, of course. And now he could see Rice under interrogation: sweat beading on his white face, sweat glistening in his eyebrows and along his hairline, his eyes bulging and bloodshot, saliva drooling from one corner of his mouth, his massive body twitching continuously and sometimes spasming uncontrollably as the drug savaged his central nervous system . . . McAlister felt a long snake of self-loathing uncoil slowly within him. He opened his eyes and stared at the whirling reels of tape; and he began to listen to the contents as well as to the tone of Rice's words. And when he listened closely and heard the evil in the man—the delusions of grandeur, the ruthlessness, the bigotry and jealousy and mindless hatred—he became so enraged that the snake of self-loathing coiled up in him and went back to sleep.

  Rice babbled on and thought that he was dispensing gems of military strategy, wisdom for the ages. He talked about the possibility of nuclear war with the Soviet Union. Neither he nor West nor anyone else in The Committee considered that a major worry. The Committee had Dragonfly's equivalent—with code names like Boris and Ilya—in many Russian missile installations. These Dragonflies carried liquefied nerve gas instead of deadly bacteria. When such a spansule was punctured, the gas would literally explode out of the carrier, expanding at an incredible speed. The personnel of an entire missile installation could be eliminated in seconds by a single Boris planted among them. Even so, some missiles would be launched. Warheads would be exchanged; there was no avoiding it. But Americans should not be frightened of nuclear war, Rice said. They should view it as a potentially necessary and helpful tool. Even a peacemaker like Henry Kissinger had said as much when he had written on the subject years before he became Secretary of State: we can survive a nuclear war. Millions would die, but most likely not tens of millions; and civilization would not pass. There were big risks involved here, Rice admitted. But the only way to destroy Communism before it destroyed us, the only way to insure the dominance of the White Race was to take big risks. Wasn't that true? Wasn't that true? Wasn't it?

  McAlister stopped the tape recorder.

  The President said, "Jesus H. Christ! Did you get the names of those twelve agents in Moscow?"

  "Yes."

  "The Russians will have to be told about them. Can a Dragonfly be—disarmed?"

  "Yes," McAlister said. "If the Russian surgeons know what to look for."

  "We can show them." He shook his head. "Rice is so damned naïve."

  "And he must be echoing his mentor—A.W. West."

  "How could a man like West, a man who has amassed a billion-dollar fortune, be so simple-minded as to think that private citizens can overthrow foreign governments with impunity? How can he believe that he has any moral right to start a war just because he, personally, thinks it's necessary?"

  "Lyndon Johnson greatly increased our involvement in Vietnam largely because he, personally, thought it was necessary. Nixon did the same thing in Cambodia, though on a smaller scale."

  "At least they were Presidents, elected officials!"

  McAlister shrugged.

  "How can West be so naïve as to think that he has all the answers to the problems of the world?" The President's face was no longer bloodless; it was mottled by rage.

  McAlister had worked it out in his mind, all of it, over and over again and he was tired of the subject. He just wanted to go somewhere and lie down and sleep for sixteen hours. From the moment he had entered the Oval Office, however, he had been carefully leading the President in one direction, toward one particular decision; and now that they were halfway to that decision, McAlister couldn't allow his weariness to distract him. "We allowed ITT and a couple of private companies to get away with overthrowing, or helping to overthrow, the Chilean government a few years back. That was a dangerous precedent."

  "But didn't they learn anything from that fiasco? Look what happened to Chile after the coup d'état The military dictatorship was inefficient, inept, incompetent! Chile's inflation rate the first year after the coup was seven hundred percent! Because they interfered with the free market, unemployment eventually rose to fifty percent. There were riots in the streets!"

  "I know all of that," McAlister said. "And I'm sure that Rice and West know it too. But these people are what David Canning likes to call 'masturbating adolescents.' They live partly in a fantasy world. To them, there are never any crossroads in life, just forks in the road, never more than two choices, never more than two ways to see a thing: yes or no, good or bad, stop or go, buy or sell, do or don't, us or them."

  Frowning, the President said, "A lot of very nice people look at life that way."

  "Of course," McAlister said. "But the difference between the nice people and the men like West and Rice is that the nice people, the decent people, aren't consumed by a lust for power."

  "Masturbating adolescents."

  "That's how Canning sees them. But that doesn't mean that they're harmless. Far from it. You read in the newspapers about wholesome teenage boys who murder their parents in the dead of night. A fool can be amusing—and be a killer at the same time." He ran the tape ahead for a few seconds, stopped it, checked the numbers in the counter, and punched the Start button:

  MCALISTER: Unless I'm mistaken, the Russian and Chinese operations are only two parts of a three-part plan.

  RICE: That's correct.

  MCALISTER: The third part is for The Committee to take control of the U.S. government.

  RICE: That's right. That's the core of it.

  MCALISTER: How would you accomplish that?

  RICE: Assassinate the President, Vice-President and the Speaker of the House, all within an hour of each other.

  MCALISTER: But how would that give you control of the government?

  RICE: The President pro tem of the Senate is next in the line of succession. He would move straight into the White House.

  MCALISTER: Let me be sure I understand you. You're saying that the President pro tem of the Senate is a Committeeman?

  RICE: Yes:

  MCALISTER: That would be Senator Konlick of New York?

  RICE: Yes. Raymond W. Konlick. (Excited background conversation)

  MCALISTER: But isn't it going to be rather obvious— everyone above Konlick getting killed, and him moving smoothly into power? RICE: An attempt will be made on his life too. He'll be wounded. Shot in the shoulder or arm. But the assassination will fail, and he'll take on the duties of the Presidency.

  MCALISTER: When is this to happen?

  RICE: Between two and four days after we trigger Dragonfly in Peking.

  McAlister stopped the tape recorder again.

  Unable to speak, the President got up and went to the Georgian window behind his desk. He stared out at Pennsylvania Avenue for a long moment. Then he suddenly jerked involuntarily, as if he had realized what a good target he was making of himself, and he came back to his desk. He sat down, looked at the tape recorder, looked at McAlister. "With what Rice has told you, will you have any real trouble getting hard evidence against A.W. West?"

  "If you appointed me special prosecutor and gave me a topnotch team of young lawyers and investigators, no one could stop the truth from coming out. We know where to look now. We could nail West and every other man, big and small, who Rice knows is connected with The Committee."

  The President sighed and slumped down in his chair. "This country is just beginning to calm down after a decade and a half of turmoil . . . And now we're about to hit it with more sensational news stories, investigations, trials. The rest of my first term's going to be totally wasted. I'll have to spend most of my time defending your investigations against charges of political harassment. I'll be on network television every other week trying to reassure the public. Left-wing extremists are going to get very moralistic and start bombing buildings and killing people in protest of the cruelty of capitalism. And you can be damned sure there won't be a second term for me. Bearers of bad tidings aren't
rewarded."

  Letting a moment pass in silence, McAlister then said, "And when the dust finally settles, the problem will still be unsolved."

  The President looked at him quizzically. "Explain that."

  This was the penultimate moment, the point toward which McAlister had been heading ever since he entered the Oval Office. "Well, sir, Rice won't know everyone behind The Committee movement."

  "West will know."

  "Perhaps. But we'd never get away with using the drug on him that we used on Rice. There will be some men who have extremely tenuous connections with The Committee, men who have protected themselves so damned well that we'll never nail them and might not even suspect them. Once the furor has passed, they'll quietly set about rebuilding The Committee—and this time they'll be much more careful about it."

  Sighing resignedly, the President nodded: Yes, you're right, that's the way it will be.

  McAlister leaned forward in his chair. "There have always been madmen like these, I suppose. But our modern technology has given them the means to destroy more things and more people more rapidly than ever before in history. West can wage bacteriological warfare against a foreign power. And once that's known, the SLA will get in the act to wage a little of it here at home. The knowledge is available; they just have to think about using it. When the West case is in all the papers, they'll think about growing some germs." He paused for effect. Then: "But there's a way to deal with these kind of people."

  "I'd like to hear about it," the President said.

  "There's a way we can defuse The Committee and yet avoid all of the investigations, trials, and public agony. There's a way we can keep the lid on the assassinations and all the rest of it—and still punish the guilty."

  The chief executive's eyes narrowed. "What you're going to suggest is ... unorthodox, isn't it?"

  "Yes, sir."

  The President looked at the tape recorder for several minutes. He said nothing; he did not move. Then: "Maybe I'm ready for the unorthodox. Let's hear it."

  "I want to play some more of the tape first," McAlister said. "I want you to be even readier than you are now." He switched on the machine:

  MCALISTER: Then Chai Po-han is Dragonfly?

  RICE: Yes.

  MCALISTER: If he was back in China way last March, why haven't you triggered him by now?

  RICE: In order to cover his absence from his room that night in Washington, we made it look like he'd been out carousing. We put him back to bed, soaked him in cheap whiskey, and put a pair of—a pair of lacy women's—panties in his hands . . .

  MCALISTER: Oh, for God's sake!

  RICE: Because his roommate, Chou P'eng-fei, was more lightly sedated than Chai, we knew he would wake up first in the morning, smell the whiskey, see the lace panties. We didn't foresee, couldn't foresee, how these crazy damned Chinks would react. When they got back to China, Chai was sent straight to a farm commune instead of to Peking. He was punished for what they call "counterrevolutionary" behavior.

  MCALISTER: The People's Republic is an extraordinarily puritanical society.

  RICE: It's crazy.

  MCALISTER: Most developing countries are puritanical. We were like that for a couple of hundred years, although not quite so fiercely as China today.

  RICE: We wouldn't send an American boy to a slave-labor camp just because he got drunk and took up with a hooker. It's crazy, I tell you.

  MCALISTER: They didn't see it as just "taking up with a hooker." To them it was a political statement.

  RICE: Craziness. Crazy Chinks.

  MCALISTER: Chai wasn't an American. Didn't you see, didn't you even suspect, that American standards might not apply? Christ, you fouled up the project at the very beginning! You screwed up on such a simple bit of business—yet you think you know how to run the world!

  RICE: It was an oversight. Anybody could have made the same mistake.

  MCALISTER: You're dangerous as hell, but you're a real buffoon.

  RICE: (Silence)

  MCALISTER: Chai is still on this commune?

  RICE: No. He was released. He arrived in Peking at five o'clock this morning, our time.

  MCALISTER: When will he be triggered?

  RICE: As soon as possible, within the next twelve hours.

  MCALISTER: Who is the trigger man in Peking?

  RICE: General Lin Shen-yang.

  MCALISTER: What? General Lin?

  (A flurry of indistinct conversation)

  MCALISTER: Is General Lin a part of The Committee?

  RICE: No.

  MCALISTER: Does he know he's the trigger?

  RICE: No.

  MCALISTER: He's been used, just like Chai?

  RICE: That's right.

  MCALISTER: How was it done?

  RICE: General Lin keeps a mistress in Seoul. We went to her, threatened her, and got her cooperation. When he visited her last March, we drugged his wine, planted a series of subliminal commands deep in his subconscious mind. When he woke, he had no knowledge of what had been done to him. When he is told to do so, he will seek out Chai Po-han and trigger him.

  MCALISTER: When he's told to do so?

  RICE: Yes.

  MCALISTER: Then you've established a sort of double trigger. Is that right?

  RICE: Yes.

  MCALISTER: Why so complex a mechanism?

  RICE: The sophisticated surgical facilities we needed to implant the spansule of bacteria existed only here in the States. We couldn't haul it off to Korea and turn General Lin into Dragonfly. We had to operate on someone who was visiting the Washington area. Then we had a problem setting up a trigger man. We couldn't use any of the three deep-cover agents the CIA has in China, because they're not Committeemen. So we had to rely on a Westerner who was one of us. Now, Chai Po-han doesn't have much contact with Westerners in Peking. Our man would have a difficult time getting to him without causing a spectacle. General Lin, on the other hand, has a great deal of contact with Westerners and with his countrymen alike. Our man, we realized, could trigger General Lin; the general could then trigger Dragonfly.

  MCALISTER: I understand. But who is your first trigger man, the one who gives the word to Lin?

  RICE: Alexander Webster.

  MCALISTER: Our ambassador to China?

  RICE: Yes.

  (A babble of voices)

  MCALISTER: Are you saying our embassy in Peking is a nest of Committeemen?

  RICE: No. Just Webster.

  MCALISTER: You're positive of that?

  RICE: Yes.

  (Ten seconds of silence)

  MCALISTER: What disease is Chai Po-han carrying?

  RICE: A mutated strain of the bubonic plague.

  MCALISTER: In what way is it mutated?

  RICE: First of all, it's transmitted differently from every other kind of plague. Most strains are carried by fleas, ticks, or lice. Wilson's plague is totally airborne.

  MCALISTER: It's transmitted through the air? Through the lungs?

  RICE: Yes. You're contaminated simply by breathing.

  MCALISTER: What are the other mutations?

  RICE: It's extremely short-lived and has a very low level of fertility. In three days it will be dead and gone.

  MCALISTER: So the Nationalist Chinese can move in then?

  RICE: Yes.

  MCALISTER: What other mutations?

  RICE: The bug needs just nine to twelve hours after it hits your lungs to kill you.

  MCALISTER: Is there a vaccine?

  RICE: Yes. But Wilson didn't produce much of it. You don't need much if the plague's one hundred percent abated by the time you send in troops.

  MCALISTER: How much vaccine is there?

  RICE: One vial. Webster has it.

  MCALISTER: What about the other Americans at the embassy?

  RICE: They will be sacrificed.

  MCALISTER: How noble of you.

  RICE: It was necessary. They aren't in sympathy with The Committee. They couldn't have been trusted.


  MCALISTER: How many people will die if Dragonfly is triggered?

  RICE: We have computer projections on that. Somewhere between two million and two and a quarter million deaths in the Peking area.

  MCALISTER: God help us.

  When McAlister switched off the tape recorder, the President said, "You sounded badly shaken on the tape, but now you're so damned calm. And it isn't over!"

  "I've sent my message to Canning," McAlister said. "I have faith in him."

  "Let's hope it's well founded, or we're all finished."

  "In any event," McAlister said, "there's nothing more that you or I can do. Let's talk about that unorthodox plan of mine."

  SEVEN

  PEKING: SUNDAY, 1:30 A.M. UNTIL DAWN

  The CIA's third deep-cover agent in Peking was very much like the first two deep-cover agents in Peking. He was in his sixties, just as Yuan and Ku had been. His name was Ch'en Tu-hsiu. Like Yuan and Ku, he had lost his family and money when the Maoists assumed power. Like Yuan and Ku, he had fled to Taiwan, but had returned soon enough as a dedicated CIA operative who would live under the Maoists for the rest of his life and pass out what information he could obtain. He had worked hard to prove what a loyal Maoist he was. As a result, and because he was an intelligent man to begin with (as were Yuan and Ku), he was promoted and promoted until he became Vice-Secretary of the Party in the Province of Hopeh, which included the capital city of Peking. And finally, just like Yuan and Ku, he was judged a truthful man by the computerized polygraph.

  Canning could not understand it. He examined the machine, found it to be functioning properly, and asked Lee Ann to go through the list of questions once more. Ch'en answered precisely as he had the first time; the machine said he was not a liar; and Canning was baffled.

  Lee Ann said, "If neither Yuan nor Ku is the trigger, then it has to be Ch'en, doesn't it? I'll ask the questions a third time."

  She did that.

  The purple line didn't move through any of Ch'en's answers.

  After having been misled with Sung Ch'ung-chen, General Lin was very suspicious. He stood stiff and straight, not bothering to work off the excess energy that always filled him, letting it build up toward an explosion. "You mean to say that none of your deep-cover agents knows about Dragonfly?"