by Tom Clancy
He buzzed over the groves, once, twice, and again, a vaporous swath trailing from his wings with each deliberate pass. The aerosol hung in the blue, billowed in the blue, marked the blue with wide, white, parallel stripes that gradually scattered and bled into a light, milky haze.
Then—gently, softly—it settled to earth.
A Boeing 747 wide-bodied jumbo jet can carry over 400 passengers on an international trip, seating as many as 10 abreast, far exceeding the capacity of other commercial airliners. For Steve Whitford this had been so much a mixed blessing that he found himself happily awaiting his layover as his flight taxied to a halt in Sydney.
While he had gotten the last available booking on that flight at the very last possible minute—and supposed he should have been too thankful for the seat to bemoan the absence of leg and elbow room—Steve had little doubt the plane would have burst open like an overstuffed tube of Pillsbury cookie dough had they tried squeezing even a single additional body aboard. At a spindly six feet four—with most of that beanpole height stacked from hip to shin—he was willing to admit his opinion might be a tad prejudiced, but he would have argued its worthiness, nonetheless. Higher than himself can no man think, hadn’t some famous philosopher said that once upon a time?
Good lawyer that he was, Steve never missed an opportunity to cite precedent.
“... like to thank those of you who are visiting Australia or going on to connecting flights for choosing our airline. For those continuing to London with us after the stop, please feel free to stretch your legs and enjoy the airport’s restaurants, shops, and other amenities....”
Steve unfastened his seat belt, slid into the aisle, and took the flight attendant’s advice, stretching, massaging the small of his back with his knuckles. His achiness and complaints aside, he had to admit that there were worse things in life than rubbing up against his neighbor in the window seat.
He glanced over at her, an appealing blonde of about thirty in a sort of retro hippieish outfit consisting of a peasant blouse, hip-hugging bell-bottoms, and big, round red earrings like three-dimensional polka dots. At forty-four, Steve could recall an era when clothes of that type hadn’t been so, well, form-fitted, as if they’d come straight out of a chic fashion designer’s showroom.
Not that she didn’t look good in them. In fact, he’d been very aware of how good she looked the moment they boarded the jet in Hong Kong, and had tried striking up a conversation with her soon after takeoff. Just chitchat, really, while he’d checked her finger for a wedding band—a quick glance verified there wasn’t one—and tried to assess whether she might be inclined to pursue a more intimate dialogue at some later point in time. He’d told her his name, that he was an attorney who had been in Asia doing some patent and licensing work for a Massachusetts-based toy manufacturer, and that he was about to take a few days’ R and R in London before returning to the grind. She, in turn, introduced herself as Melina, no surname given and none asked, her English subtly laced with an accent he couldn’t associate with any particular nationality. It was kind of exotic, that name, especially hanging there exparte, so to speak. With a whimsy peculiar to the solo traveler, he had speculated that she might be an actress or pop star.
At any rate, she’d been reserved but pleasant, responding to his comments on the weather, their runway delays, and the lousy airline food, not revealing much about herself in the process. When he thought about it, she seemed almost secretive ... although it was likely he was coming off too many days of legal gamesmanship to be a reasonable judge.
Steve got his travel bag out of the overhead stowage compartment, figuring he’d find a restaurant, eat a halfway decent meal, then maybe slap some cologne on his face in the rest room to freshen up for the next long leg of the transcontinental haul. He’d batted around the idea of asking Melina to join him and was still undecided. Why necessarily take her reticence as a snub? It was understandable that a woman flying alone would be cautious toward some strange guy talking her up. Besides, he couldn’t see anything inappropriate in a friendly invite.
He stood looking at her from the aisle. Still in her seat, she’d reached into her purse for a pen and a paper bag with the words Gift Shop printed on it in frilly silver lettering, then slipped some postcards out of the bag. It appeared she meant to stay put during the layover ... unless he could persuade her to do otherwise.
He took a breath and leaned toward her. “Excuse me,” he said. “I was wondering if you’d like to join me for a cup of coffee, maybe grab a quick bite. My treat.”
Her smile was polite, nothing more, nothing less. “Thank you, but I really have to fill these out.” She placed the postcards on her tray table. “It’s the kind of thing that can slip right by.”
“Why not bring the cards along? A change of scene might inspire you to write better. Or faster, anyway.”
The cool, unchanging smile was a rebuff in itself, making her clipped reply superfluous. “No, I think I’ll stay right here.”
Steve decided to do some face saving. They would be sitting together for another seven hours or so once the plane got back in the air, and he didn’t want the situation to get awkward.
He nodded toward the postcards in front of her.
“Guess you do have a fair-sized stack there.”
“Yes.” She looked at him. “You know how it is with obligations. They’re like little plagues on my mind.”
Steve stood looking back at her. Sure, whatever you say, he thought.
He told her he’d see her later, turned back into the aisle, and filed toward the exit with the other debarking passengers.
She waited, her eyes following him until he stepped off the plane. Then she rapidly got down to business.
She removed the top of her pen and dropped it onto her tray beside the postcards. The ink cartridge was metal, with a small plastic cap above the refill opening. She twisted the cap to loosen the cartridge, slipped it out of the pen, and put the bottom half of the pen beside the other items on the tray.
Little plagues, she thought. A choice of words the man who was both her employer and her lover might have appreciated, though he surely would have disapproved of her speaking them aloud.
Her thumb and forefinger tweezered around the cap, she separated it from the cylindrical cartridge with an easy pull. Careful that no one was watching, she held the cartridge away from herself, turned it upside down, and tapped it with her fingertip. A powdery white substance sprinkled out and immediately dispersed in the cabin’s cycling air. On newer commuter jets, maximum-efficiency filters might have trapped a significant amount of the contaminant, but she knew the aging fleet of Boeing 747s used ventilation systems that would suck it in and recirculate it with the plane’s oxygen supply.
Entering the respiratory tracts of the aircraft’s crew and passengers, the microscopic capsules would release the dormant presences within them. Transmitted from person to person, airport to airport, and city to city, spread across nations and continents by their hosts, these unsuspected invaders would aggressively do what they had been created to do.
They would incubate. They would multiply. And they would smolder until fanned into inextinguishable wild-fires, outbreaks that would burn scouring rings around the world.
Now the blonde woman checked her watch and decided it might be best to move on.
She extracted a replacement ink cartridge from her purse, loaded it into the pen, then put her stack of blank postcards back into the gift shop bag. Returning the pen and bag to her purse, she recapped the empty ink cartridge and dropped it into her sweater pocket for later disposal. When she noticed that a few specks of powder had landed on the surface of her tray table, she blew them off with a little puff of breath. They wisped away into the artificial air currents of the cabin.
She nodded, satisfied. Her business was concluded.
Folding back her tray table, she rose from her seat and slid into the aisle. The plane was empty except for a handful of passengers and one male fli
ght attendant near the exit, and she smiled at him as she left the plane.
He smiled back, a touch admiringly.
She passed through the jetway into the terminal and glanced up at the monitors listing arrivals and departures. Her next flight was slotted for departure in just over two hours. It would be the seventh and last, and she knew better than to believe the number was coincidence. No, it was without question a demonic fancy. A conceit of the fiend to whom she had given herself willingly, needfully, body and soul.
Little plagues. Seven, and then some.
She was tired, even exhausted, from crisscrossing the globe. But she had dispensed almost her entire supply of the agent and, after the jog into Frankfurt, would be through with the remainder.
Meanwhile, she could find a place to relax for a while and possibly have something to eat. As long as she was careful to stay clear of her latest seatmate, why not?
There was a comfortable margin of time left before she had to be at the boarding gate.
Sight being its only faculty, the eye trusts what it sees. Striving always to keep us on a steady path, it will often slide past the out of place to turn toward the familiar. This makes it easily fooled.
A business-suited investor in Manhattan’s financial district. A crop duster winging over open farmland. An airline passenger filling out postcards to kill time during a layover. All are sights that fit and belong. And all may be something other than they appear, camouflage to deceive the willing eye.
In San Jose, California, a municipal street sweeper brought the aerosol payload through the target zone, dispensing it from an extra spray reservoir aboard its heavy steel frame. It whooshed along Rosita Avenue, amber cab lights strobing, circular gutter brooms whirling, wash-down nozzles deluging the pavement with water as the lab-cooked agent jetted from its second tank.
An everyday part of the urban scene, the sweeper barely scratched the surface of people’s awareness: It was a minor inconvenience, a momentary hiccup in their progress through the morning. Motorists shifted lanes to get out of its way. Pedestrians backstepped onto the curb to avoid its rotating brooms, raised their conversational pitch a notch or two as it swished past, and otherwise ignored it.
They breathed invisible clouds of aerosol and never attributed the slight tickle in the nose or scratchiness at the back of the throat to anything more harmful than stirred up sidewalk grit. They scattered the microscopic particles with their shoe bottoms, ferried them on their skin and clothing, and sent them out along countless routes of transmission with the money they exchanged for newspapers and lattes.
Their eyes seeing nothing amiss, no disruption in the orderly and ordinary course of their lives, they went on to their workplaces without an inkling that they had become carriers of a wholly new and insidious type of infection—many of them heading north on Rosita toward the high, sleek office spire that was the famed main branch headquarters of UpLink International, far and away their city’s largest corporate employer.
Hardly by chance, the street sweeper kept moving in the same direction.
When Roger Gordian’s daughter telephoned him on her way home from the courthouse, he didn’t know what to say. No matter that the proceeding’s outcome had been a foregone conclusion or that he’d had months to prepare for the news. No matter that he was used to talking to business leaders and heads of state from everywhere on earth, often under hot-button circumstances that required quick thinking and verbal agility. Julia was his daughter, and he didn’t know what to say, in part because almost everything he had said to her these past few months had proven to be exactly the wrong thing, leading to more than one inexplicable skirmish between them. Gordian had found himself having to consciously resist feeling like the parent of an adolescent again, prepared for every word he spoke to come back at him and explode in his face. That would have been thoughtless, unfair, and corrosive to their relationship. Julia was a remarkably competent thirty-three-year-old woman who’d led her own life for many years, and she deserved better than stale, fatherly programming from him ... difficult as that sometimes was.
“It’s over, my divorce is final,” she had told him over her cellular. “The paperwork’s signed, and I should be getting copies in a couple of weeks.”
That was four long seconds ago.
Five, now.
His stomach clutched.
He didn’t know what to say to her.
Six seconds and counting.
His watch ticked into the silence of his office.
Gordian was not by disposition an introspective man. He saw his mind and feelings as fairly uncomplicated. He loved his wife and two daughters, and he loved his work. The work less. Though for some years it had consumed a greater share of his time than it should have, and the family had felt bumped to the sidelines. His wife, in particular. He hadn’t realized, then, how much.
At first there was so much to be done, a decade of struggle building his electronics firm up from the ground. The importance of being an earner, a provider, had been fostered in him early in life. His father had died before the term quality time was coined, but it was doubtful Thomas Gordian would have been able to grasp the concept in any event. He’d been too busy adding thick layers of callus to his fingers at the industrial machine plant where he had pulled a modest but steady wage from the day he’d turned sixteen and quit high school to help support his depression-stricken family. For the elder Gordian, bringing home a paycheck was how you expressed your love of family, and that dogged blue-collar sensibility had taken deep root in his only son, enduring long after he’d returned from Vietnam and, with the help of loan officers and a handful of farsighted investors, purchased a limping, debt-ridden San Jose outfit called Global Technologies for the giveaway price of twelve million dollars.
The rewards of his gamble far exceeded Gordian’s hopes. In less than a decade, he turned Global into a Silicon Valley giant with a slew of tremendously successful defense industry patents. One after another, the contracts started coming in, and Gordian had worked harder than ever to keep them coming. He had used the technological windfall from his development of GAPS-FREE advanced military reconnaissance and targeting equipment to propel his firm to the leading edge of civilian satellite communications, and rechristened it UpLink International.
He had earned. He had provided for his loved ones. He had made more money than he would ever need.
And so he’d gone ahead and found a new reason to keep working.
By the time his corporation went multinational—and Fortune 500—in 1990, Gordian’s thoughts had slung outward to pursue what his wife usually referred to as The Dream, based upon an idea as straightforward as his personality: Information equaled freedom. No lightning bolt of originality there, perhaps, but his real inspiration had been in how he’d set out to draw concrete results from the abstract. As head of the world’s most extensive civilian telecommunications network, he’d been in a position to bring people access to information, a currency with which he could buy better lives for untold millions, particularly where totalitarian regimes sustained themselves by doing the very opposite—choking off the gateways of communication, isolating their citizens from knowledge that might challenge their strangleholds of oppression. History had shown that radical government change nearly always followed quieter revolutions in social consciousness, and the old axiom that democracy was contagious seemed no less true for all the times it had been used as a political cheer line.
Again, Gordian’s triumphs went far beyond his expectations—but, ironically, the signals Ashley was sending from home about her own unhappiness weren’t getting through the bottleneck of humanitarian goals he’d continued to pursue. Not till she’d compelled his attention with words he would remember for the rest of his days.
“I know that everything you’ve accomplished in the world makes a huge difference to people everywhere. I know it’s your calling, something you have to do. What I don’t know is if I’m strong enough to wait until you’re done.”
Her words, those shattering, unforgettable words, had forced him to look into a deep mirror and see things about himself that were difficult to accept. Far more importantly, they also saved his marriage.
He had been luckier than he’d even realized at the time.
“Dad, you still with me? I’m on the highway ramp and it’s pretty noisy—”
“Right here, hon.” Gordian tried to pull his thoughts together. “I’m just glad the worst of the ordeal’s behind you and that you can get on with your life.”
“Amen.” She produced a sharp laugh. “You know what happened when we were leaving court? After everything we’ve been through, all the legal sniping, all the ugliness, he asked me to have lunch with him. At this Italian place downtown we used to go to sometimes.”
Her voice dropped abruptly into silence.
Gordian waited, his hand tight around the receiver. That laugh—so harsh and humorless—had startled him. It was like hearing a thin pane of glass suddenly crack from extreme cold.
“I guess,” Julia finally said, “we were supposed to toast to our future as born again singles over wine and pasta.”
Gordian heard the creak of his office chair as he changed position. He, common noun, had once been referred to by name: Craig. Her husband of seven years. It was still unclear what had pulled them apart. The divorce petition Craig had filed cited irreconcilable differences, no elaboration. Over the months she’d been staying with her parents, Julia had occasionally talked about their long separations because of his career, about her loneliness when he was away on the job. He was a structural engineer, freelance, though most of his recent assignments had been for the big oil companies. His specialized niche was the design of fixed offshore drilling platforms, and he’d often spent many weeks on-site, overseeing construction. One month it was Alaska, the next Belize. His absences surely contributed to their problems, but Gordian suspected there had to be more. If Julia was the one feeling neglected, why was it Craig who’d wanted out? Gordian hadn’t pushed for answers, however, and Julia had offered very few on her own to either him or Ashley. She had claimed there was no infidelity, and they were trying to take her at her word. But why had she been so guarded with them? Were the reasons too painful to share? Or might Julia herself still be in the dark?
