by Tom Clancy
“And his inclination is to ask the director to okay us,” she said. “Right up to the highest classification levels.”
“Up to,” he said.
She nodded.
“But not including.”
She nodded again.
“That won’t cut it,” he said. “Your average uniformed cop can input the overall system from his prowl if it’s got an onboard computer. I want Lang to arrange for unrestricted access.”
Nimec lifted both mitts in the air. She threw a one-two combination, followed through with a straight left, and blocked another swipe at her head without surrendering any canvas.
“It gets sort of complicated,” she said. “National security’s foremost with him.”
Nimec looked confused.
“He doesn’t trust us?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Then complicated how?”
“I’d rather not explain it right now.”
She saw his frown of confusion deepen.
“Leave it alone, Pete. I’m flying to D.C. again in a couple of days. We’ll see what Bob’s got to say.”
Nimec looked at her a moment.
Bob again, he thought.
Then he gave a little shrug and shifted direction, dropping his right mitt to take an uppercut. Megan swung and made only glancing contact.
“You pulled that one. Again.”
She brought her arm up smoothly, throwing her shoulder into the blow, and felt the satisfying impact of her fist thumping the leather dead on.
“Okay, that was perfect. Relax a minute,” he said, coming to a flat-footed halt. “Now listen, this is important.” He patted the middle of his rib cage with his mitt. “A guy comes at you, here’s where you hit him. Do it hard and clean, and it’ll collapse his diaphragm, doesn’t matter how big he is. And he won’t have expected it from a woman. People who don’t know how to fight will generally make the same mistakes. They either aim for the nose or chin, which aren’t easy to tag, or the gut, where there’s more muscle, fat, whatever sort of insulation, than anywhere else.” He lifted the other mitt to the side of his neck, just below the ear. “If you don’t have an opening for the upper body, and you think you have the reach, you’ll want to pop him right here. At the pressure point. Got it?”
“The chest or the neck,” Megan said, the words spaced between long gulps of breath. She brushed a trickle of sweat from her eye with her glove. “You’ve told me that at least a dozen times.”
“Reinforcement’s never hurt anyone I’ve trained.” He wiggled the mitt in front of his ribs. “Quick, let me have some—”
“Pete—”
“And we’ll be through for today.”
She let him have some.
Ten minutes later, they were outside the ropes, towels draped over their shoulders, their T-shirts splotched with perspiration and clinging to their bodies. Nimec went over to his supply locker, put away his target mitts, then helped Megan to unlace her gloves.
“There’s another item of business we need to discuss,” he said, hanging the gloves on a peg inside the locker.
“Concerning?
“Ricci’s brain flash about establishing RDTs,” he said. “I’ve been mulling it over and feel it ought to be done.”
Megan stood undoing her hand wraps, her open gym bag on a bench against the wall behind her.
“I agree,” she said. “Provisionally.”
“Your provisions being ... ?”
“It would have to be on an experimental basis and subject to constant review. And I’d want everybody on board. Meaning Gord and Rollie.” She looked at him. “You seem surprised, Pete.”
Nimec shrugged.
“You didn’t seem too enthused about the suggestion when it was offered,” he said. “I figured I’d run into more resistance.”
Megan considered how to respond. She finished removing the linen wraps, wound them up neatly, then turned to the bench and dropped them into her bag.
“Ricci’s aptitude isn’t anything that I question,” she said finally, looking back at Nimec. “I just don’t enjoy his contentious solo flier routine. And sometimes I need to be where he isn’t to get past it.”
Nimec shrugged a little, his hand on the locker’s open door.
“Sounds like some kind of solution, anyway.”
“You could call it that,” she said. “I think of it as keeping my sights on the bigger picture.”
He gave her a questioning glance.
“Whoever attacked us in Brazil last spring killed a lot of our people and would have caused even more destruction ... would have been able to blackmail every country on earth ... if we hadn’t gotten in the way of their plans,” she said. “Put me in our enemy’s shoes, I’d be carrying one serious grudge. And the thought of not being ready if and when it’s acted upon worries the hell out of me, Pete.”
He kept looking at her for several long seconds and then swung the locker door inward. It shut with a dull, metallic clang.
“Makes two of us,” he said.
Some months earlier in Madrid, in the Villanueva building of the Museo del Prado, he had gone to view Brueghel the Elder’s painting The Triumph of Death, and even now was unsure how long he had stood before it. It was as if time had stilled around him. As if his innermost visions had been projected onto the wall of the gallery.
He had not known where to rest his eye. On the molten orange landscape with its pools of fire, its spewing clouds of black, volcanic smoke? Or the medieval village besieged by an exterminating army of skeletons, banners of war hoisted above their skull heads, the hollow sockets of their eyes showing only a pitiless adherence to their single objective? Here they hacked at the living with broadswords. Here they impaled them on the points of spears. There a cadaverous looter knelt over his prostrate victim, holding knife to throat to deliver the finishing stroke. In the right foreground, a peasant woman who had fallen atop a pile of twisted corpses raised her arms in a futile plea for mercy as a bone soldier stood with one conquering foot planted on her body, his battle-ax swinging inexorably downward. Where to rest the eye? On which scene of fabulous annihilation? The death barge advancing over a mire of crushed bodies and blood, its skeletal crew wrapped in the white cerements of the grave? The townsman hanging, limp, from the single forking limb of a shattered tree? The emaciated dog, all skin and protruding ribs, sniffing hungrily at the child in its fallen mother’s embrace? Or the revelers in peacock finery scattering from their dinner table in helpless panic as a swarm of cadaverous marauders closed ranks around them?
Where, indeed, to rest the eye?
The painting had been remarkable. Absorbed in its sweeping infernal beauty, Siegfried Kuhl might have believed its creator had reached a hand across the centuries and tapped deep into his mind for inspiration. His umbilical connection to it had been overwhelming. It had at once seemed to draw its energy from him and infuse him with its own.
Until that unforgettable experience, Kuhl had never been moved by a work of art. He had gone to the museum out of curiosity and nothing more, compelled by Harlan DeVane’s remark that he might find it of interest. Six months ago, it had been. After the debacle in Kazakhstan, where only a chance diversion had allowed him to break away from the Sword operative with whom he’d grappled in the launch center’s cargo-processing facility.
The man’s features were framed in his mind in photographic detail. Whenever he pictured the sharply angular jut of his cheekbones, the set of his mouth, he would feel the restless desire for vengeance slide coldly through his intestines. As he felt it now, six months later and a continent away, sitting at a window table in a brasserie called La Pistou, opposite the Champs de Bataille Pare, in Quebec City. Watching the entrance to the park, waiting for his lovely courier to arrive.
Kuhl’s failure at the Cosmodrome had been a severe blow. Driven underground, wishing to get far ahead of his pursuers, he had altered his appearance, obtaining colored contact lenses, darkening his hair, filling
out his lips with collagen injections, even growing a short beard. Then, in his global migrations, he had found himself in Spain for a time, and he realized it was no accident that brought him there.
DeVane had understood how it would be for him to see Brueghel’s masterpiece, reflecting, as it did, the grim sensibility of an age when the Black Death had raged across continents, an indiscriminate scourge exempting no man or authority, no civilized institution, from being laid to waste. An age when none knew whether to blame Heaven or Hell for their miseries.
What power a man who let neither hold sway over his conscience, a man of iron and will, could have seized amid such upheaval. In violent action Kuhl was calm. In chaos he was whole. In the storm amid cries of turmoil he was strongest. And in strength he achieved fulfillment.
DeVane had understood, yes. And it seemed in retrospect that his comments had been as revealing as they were insightful—most probably by design. He found it amusing to lay out enigmatic, far-winding paths for others to untangle.
At any rate, his Sleeper Project must have been well along at that point. Kuhl was not a scientist, but he had sufficient knowledge of the basics of genetic engineering to be certain it would have taken years to produce a pathogenic agent of the type generated at the Ontario facility. The procurement of recombinant DNA technology and raw biological materials would have been a difficult, expensive undertaking. As would the search for top experts in the field from around the world. And preliminary challenges of that sort would have paled to insignificance before those that emerged in the later developmental stages.
The complexities of manipulating a viral organism’s genetic blueprint were manifold. Given the additional requirement that its infectiousness be keyed to a particular genetic trait—blue eyes, left-handedness, familial diabetes, ethnic and racial characteristics, the possibilities were endless—the difficulty of the task became even more considerable. Still, the techniques needed to create such a microbe had been the focus of widespread experimentation in both private and government laboratories in the most advanced nations. And DeVane had gone several steps beyond. His criteria had been that the Sleeper pathogen respond to an unlimited range of inherited human characteristics on demand, laying dormant until activated by a chemical trigger or set of triggers. That it could, therefore, bring about symptoms in targets ranging from specific individuals to entire populations, depending entirely on which trigger was selected for dispersal.
In effect, he had overseen the successful creation of a microscopic time bomb. It could be customized to order, residing harmlessly in one host, hatching explosive malignancy in another. It could be as precise as an assassin’s bullet or as widespread in its capacity for devastation as the Plague itself.
It was, Kuhl thought now, nothing less than the ultimate biological weapon.
He looked out the window and saw her emerge from the park, his lovely pale rider, punctual as always, crossing the Grande Allée to the brasserie, her blonde hair tossing in the wind, the collar of her dark, knee-length coat pulled up around her neck against the inclement weather. Though still a month off by the calendar, winter had made an early intrusion into the region, and spits of snow were blowing from a dark gray sky over the bare, rolling fields and ragged trees west of the Citadel.
Kuhl was glad of this. In the long spread of park fringing the cliffs above the Saint Lawrence River, the armies of France and Britain had fought their climactic battle for domination of the region. Yet in the warm seasons, flowers bedecked the soil where the blood of generals had been spilled, and strollers sniffed the perfumed air in the smothering tameness of landscaped gardens.
Those floral blankets scattered to the wind now, the harsh contours of nature were uncovered, appealing to something in the stony fastness of Kuhl’s heart.
She spotted him from outside on the sidewalk, their eyes making contact through the window, a smile tracing at her lips. She entered the restaurant and strode directly toward his table, walking ahead of the punctilious maitre d’ who approached her at the door, motioning to indicate she’d already found her party. Kuhl rose to greet her, touching his lips to the soft white skin below her ear as he came around and helped her out of her coat, she lightly touching the back of his hand with her fingertips, he allowing his kiss to linger on her neck a moment before turning to give the coat to the maitre d’.
They sat. Kuhl had been drinking mineral water, and he waved for the waiter, a quick snap of his hand. She ordered wine, an American Pinot Noir. The waiter hovered beside the table as she tasted it and nodded her approval to him, then hurried off, noticing the impatience in Kuhl’s glance, giving them their privacy.
“Did you have a pleasant trip?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“And your lodging?” he said.
“It’s fine,” she said, her English bearing the faint, indeterminate accent characteristic of those who have lived in various parts of the world. “I’ve missed you.”
He nodded silently.
“Will you be joining me at the hotel tonight?” she asked. Turning her wineglass in her hands.
He leaned slightly forward over the table.
“I would like nothing better,” he said. “But we have other dictates.”
“Which can’t be postponed, even for a short while?”
“I leave Quebec before sundown,” he said. “And your flight to the States is scheduled for early tomorrow morning.”
“There have been so many flights lately.” She hesitated. “I’m tired.”
He met her gaze. She was a receptive sexual partner, and he enjoyed her more than any of his other women. Exploring and penetrating her body was like opening a series of catches, one after another after another, unlocking progressively greater measures of her passion until she was his fully and without inhibition. There was exquisite power in reaching to the core of such lust. In being able to control its tornadic outpouring. And power was ever a temptation.
“We will be together. Very soon,” he said. “But ...”
“Dictates.” She fell silent, lowering her eyes to her glass. After a few seconds she looked back up at him. “I understand.”
Kuhl nodded and reached into the inside pocket of his sport coat, producing a black enameled gift box of the sort that might hold a bracelet, along with a small card envelope. He held both out to her across the table.
“I’ve gotten you something very unique,” he said. “The rarest of items.”
Anyone happening by the table would have seen her smile as she took them from him, their fingers making the briefest contact.
“Thank you,” she said.
He leaned his face closer to hers, dropped his voice to a near whisper.
“In San Diego you will be meeting with someone named Enrique Quiros,” he said, his lips scarcely moving at all. “The note I’ve written in the card will tell you the rest.”
She nodded with understanding and carefully placed the box and envelope into her purse.
“I’ll be sure to read it back in my room.” She was looking into his eyes again, her own eyes shining, the smile on her lips no longer contrived for the benefit of idle viewers. “I wish you could be with me.”
Kuhl acknowledged a stirring inside him.
“Soon,” he said.
“Tell me when—”
“After this is done, I promise,” Kuhl said. “We can go to Madrid, if you’d like.” He paused a moment. “It is special to me.”
She looked at him.
“Madrid,” she said, raising the wineglass again, touching its rim to her bottom lip, letting it rest there a moment before taking a sip. “Yes, I would like that very much. Would like it to become special to both of us.”
Kuhl watched her and nodded.
“Surely,” he said, “it will.”
“How long you been sitting on this?” Lucio Salazar said, the fingers of his right hand digging into the arm of his fleecy burgundy sofa, his other hand holding the last of the digital prints Lathrop had g
iven him to scrutinize, the rest of the infrared photos on the coffee table in front of him.
“What do you mean?” Lathrop said, answering Salazar’s question with one of his own, knowing damn well what he meant. This asshole had the balls to think he was going to interrogate him. It was pretty funny. “Your load was grabbed last night, I’m here today.”
Salazar looked at him. He was a large man in his late fifties wearing a cream-colored tropical suit, a pale blue shirt open at the collar, and tan Gucci loafers. There was a Rolex with an enormous diamond-crusted gold band on his right hand, a diamond ring on his left pinkie, a diamond stud in his right earlobe. A gold figure of some saint or other hung from a chain around his thick neck.
“I was asking when you found out these fucking maricónes were going to make a move on me,” he said. “If I had known sooner, I’d have been able to do something about it.”
Lathrop’s expression was calmly businesslike.
“You can get furnished with bad information from any weasel on the street and wind up chasing your own tail.” He leaned forward and tapped one of the snapshots on the coffee table with his finger. It showed Felix Quiros and his men cutting the knapsacks off the backs of Salazar’s massacred Indian couriers outside the smoking ruin of the tunnel entrance. “I get a tip, I check it out before coming to you with it. That’s quality, Lucio. And it’s what I provide.”
“Value for the dollar, eh?”
Lathrop grinned.
“Believe it,” he said.
Salazar fell silent again. His gold and jewels twinkled in the sunlight pouring through the glass wall that faced the beachfront below and behind him. These days, Lathrop thought, the base price of a Del Mar home with an ocean view was maybe six, seven hundred grand, and that was if you were talking about something the size of Monopoly board real estate, where you had to stand tip-toe on the roof with a set of binoculars just to catch a glimpse of the water. A place like Salazar’s sin citadel here—built to his specs on a bluff, sprawling enough to contain the entire population of whatever burro shit Mexican village had spawned his proud ancestral line of cutthroat thieves, highwaymen, and pimps—a place like this had to have cost him in excess of three mil.
