by Tom Clancy
“Command, this is Johnston, you got company coming in! White guy, khaki shorts, red polo shirt, and backpack,” Homer announced loudly into everyone’s ear. Beside him, Sergeant Tomlinson started walking in that direction, too.
“Heads up,” Chavez said in the darkness. There were two shadows in the crack of light under the door, and then the sound of a key in the lock, and then there was another crack of light, a vertical one as the door opened, and a silhouette, a human shape—and just that fast, Chavez knew that it was all real after all. Would the lights reveal an inhuman monster, something from another planet, or . . .
. . . just a man, he saw, as the lights flipped on. About fifty, with closely cropped salt-and-pepper hair. A man who knew what he was about. He reached for the wrench hanging on the wall-mounted pegboard, then shrugged out of his backpack, and loosened the two straps that held the flap in place. It seemed to Chavez that he was watching a movie, something separated from reality, as the man flipped off the motor switch, ending the whirring. Then he closed the valve and lifted the wrench to—
“Hold it right there, pal,” Chavez said, emerging from the shadows.
“Who are you?” the man asked in surprise. Then his face told the tale. He was doing something he shouldn’t. He knew it, and suddenly someone else did, too.
“I could ask you the same thing, except I know who you are. Your name is Wil Gearing. What are you planning to do, Mr. Gearing?”
“I’m just here to swap out the chlorine canister on the fogging system,” Gearing replied, shaken all the more that this Latino seemed to know his name. How had that happened? Was he part of the Project—and if not, then what? It was as if someone had punched him in the stomach, and now his entire body cringed from the blow.
“Oh? Let’s see about that, Mr. Gearing. Tim?” Chavez gestured for Noonan to get the backpack. Sergeant Pierce stayed back, his hand on his pistol and his eyes locked on their visitor.
“Sure looks like a normal one,” Noonan said. If this was a counterfeit, it was a beaut. He was tempted to open the screw top, but he had good reason not to. Next to the pump motor, Chavez took the wrench and removed the existing canister.
“Looks about half full to me, pal. Not time to replace it yet, at least not with something called Shiva. Tim, let’s be careful with that one.”
“You bet.” Noonan tucked it back into Gearing’s pack and strapped the cover down. “We’ll have this checked out. Mr. Gearing, you are under arrest,” the FBI agent told him. “You have the right to remain silent. You have the right to have an attorney present during questioning. If you cannot afford an attorney, we will provide you with one. Anything you say can be used against you in a court of law. Do you understand these rights, sir?”
Gearing was shaking now, and turned to look at the door, wondering if he could—
—he couldn’t. Tomlinson and Johnston chose that moment to come in. “Got him?” Homer asked.
“Yep,” Ding replied. He pulled his cell phone out and called America. Again the encryption systems went through the synchronization process.
“We got him,” Chavez told Rainbow Six. “And we got the canister thing, whatever you call it. How the hell do we get everybody home?”
“There’s an Air Force C-17 at Alice Springs, if you can get there. It’ll wait for you.”
“Okay, I’ll see if we can fly there. Later, John.” Chavez thumbed the END button and turned to his prisoner. “Okay, pal, you’re coming with us. If you try anything stupid, Sergeant Pierce here will shoot you right in the head. Right, Mike?”
“Yes, sir, I sure as hell will,” Pierce responded in a voice from the grave.
Noonan reopened the valve and turned the pump motor back on. Then they went back out into the stadium concourse and walked to the cabstand. They ended up needing two taxis, both of which headed to the airport. There they had to wait an hour and a half for a 737 for the desert airport, a flight of nearly two hours.
Alice Springs is in the very center of the continental island called Australia, near the Macdonnell mountain range, and a strange place indeed to find the highest of high-tech equipment, but here were the huge antenna dishes that downloaded information from America’s reconnaissance, electronic intelligence, and military communications satellites. The facility there is operated by the National Security Agency, NSA, whose main site is at Fort Meade, Maryland, between Baltimore and Washington.
The Qantas flight was largely empty, and on arrival, an airport van took them to the USAF terminal, which was surprisingly comfortable, though here the temperature was blisteringly hot, heading down from an afternoon temperature of 120.
“You’re Chavez?” the sergeant in the Distinguished Visitors area asked.
“That’s right. When’s the plane leave?”
“They’re waiting for you now, sir. Come this way.” And with that they entered another van, which rolled them right to the front-left-side door, where a sergeant in a flight suit gestured them aboard.
“Where we going, Sarge?” Chavez asked on his way past.
“Hickam in Hawaii first, sir, then on to Travis in California.”
“Fair enough. Tell the driver he can leave.”
“Yes, sir.” The crew chief laughed, as he closed the door and walked forward.
It was a mobile cavern, this monster transport aircraft, and there seemed to be no other passengers aboard. Gearing hadn’t been handcuffed, somewhat to Ding’s disappointment, and he behaved docilely, with Noonan at his side.
“So, you want to talk to us about it, Mr. Gearing?” the FBI agent asked.
“What’s in it for me?”
He’d had to ask that question, Noonan supposed, but it was a sign of weakness, just what the FBI agent had hoped for. The question made the answer easy:
“Your life, if you’re lucky.”
CHAPTER 38
NATURE RESORT
It was just too much for Wil Gearing. Nobody had told him what to do in a case like this. It had never occurred to him that security would be broken on the Project. His life was forfeit now—how could that have happened? He could cooperate or not. The contents of the canister would be examined anyway, probably at USAMRIID at Fort Detrick, Maryland, and it would require only a few seconds for the medical experts there to see what he’d carried into the Olympic stadium, and there was no explaining that away, was there? His life, his plans for the future, had been taken away from him, and his only choice was to cooperate and hope for the best.
And so, as the C-17A Globemaster III transport climbed to its cruising altitude, he started talking. Noonan held a tape recorder in his hand, and hoped that the engine noise that permeated the cargo area wouldn’t wash it all away. It turned out that the hardest part for him was to keep a straight face. He’d heard about extreme environmental groups, the people who thought killing baby seals in Canada was right up there with Treblinka and Auschwitz, and he knew that the Bureau had looked at some for offenses like releasing laboratory animals from medical institutions, or spiking trees with nails so that no lumber company would dare to run trees from those areas through their sawmills, but he’d never heard of those groups doing anything more offensive than that. This, however, was such a crime as to redefine “monstrous.” And the religious fervor that went along with it was entirely alien to him, and therefore hard to credit. He wanted to believe that the contents of the chlorine canister really was just chlorine, but he knew that it was not. That and the backpack were now sealed in a mil-spec plastic container strapped down in a seat next to Sergeant Mike Pierce.
“He hasn’t called yet,” John Brightling observed, checking his watch. The closing ceremonies were under way. The head of the International Olympic Committee was about to give his speech, summoning the Youth of the World to the next set of games. Then the assembled orchestra would play, and the Olympic Flame would be extinguished . . . just as most of humanity would be extinguished. There was the same sort of sadness to it, but also the same inevitability. There wou
ld be no next Olympiad, and the Youth of the World would not be alive to hear the summons? . . .
“John, he’s probably watching this the same as we are. Give him some time,” Bill Henriksen advised.
“You say so.” Brightling put his arm around his wife’s shoulders and tried to relax. Even now, the people walking in the stadium were being sprinkled with the nano-capsules bearing Shiva. Bill was right. Nothing could have gone wrong. He could see it in his mind. The streets and highways empty, farms idle, airports shut down. The trees would thrive without lumberjacks to chop them down. The animals would nose about, wondering perhaps where all the noises and the two-legged creatures were. Rats and other carrion eaters would feast. Dogs and cats would return to their primal instincts and survive or not, as circumstances allowed. Herbivores and predators would be relieved of hunting pressure. Poison traps set out in the wild would continue to kill, but eventually these would run out of their poisons and stop killing game that farmers and others disliked. This year there would be no mass murder of baby harp seals for their lovely white coats. This year the world would be reborn … and even if that required an act of violence, it was worth the price for those who had the brains and aesthetic to appreciate it all. It was like a religion for Brightling and his people. Surely it had all the aspects of a religion. They worshiped the great collective life system called Nature. They were fighting for Her because they knew that She loved and nurtured them back. It was that simple. Nature was to them if not a person, then a huge enveloping idea that made and supported the things they loved. They were hardly the first people to dedicate their lives to an idea, were they?
“How long to Hickam?”
“Another ten hours, the crew chief told me,” Pierce said, checking his watch. “This is like being back in the Eight-Deuce. All I need’s my chute, Tim,” he told Noonan.
“Huh?”
“Eighty-Second Airborne, Fort Bragg, my first outfit. All the way, baby,” Pierce explained for the benefit of this FBI puke. He missed jumping, but that was something special-ops people didn’t do. Going in by helicopter was better organized and definitely safer, but it didn’t have the rush you got from leaping out of a transport aircraft along with your squadmates. “What do you think of what this guy was trying to do?” Pierce asked, pointing at Gearing.
“Hard to believe it’s real.”
“Yeah, I know,” Pierce agreed. “I’d like to think nobody’s that crazy. It’s too big a thought for my brain, man.”
“Yeah,” Noonan replied. “Mine, too.” He felt the mini tape recorder in his shirt pocket and wondered about the information it contained. Had he taken the confession legally? He’d given the mutt his rights, and Gearing said that he understood them, but any halfway competent attorney would try hard to have it all tossed, claiming that since they were aboard a military aircraft surrounded by armed men, the circumstances had been coercive—and maybe the judge would agree. He might also agree that the arrest had been illegal. But, Noonan thought, all of that was less important than the result. If Gearing had spoken the truth, this arrest might have saved millions of lives. . . . He went forward to the aircraft’s radio compartment, got on the secure system, and called New York.
Clark was asleep when his phone rang. He grabbed the receiver and grunted, “Yeah?” only to find that the security system was still handshaking. Then it announced that the line was secure. “What is it, Ding?”
“It’s Tim Noonan, John. I have a question.”
“What’s that?”
“What are you going to do when we get there? I have Gearing’s confession on tape, the whole thing, just like what you told Ding a few hours ago. Word for fucking word, John. What do we do now?”
“I don’t know yet. We probably have to talk to Director Murray, and also with Ed Foley at CIA. I’m not sure the law anticipates anything this big, and I’m not sure this is something we ever want to put in a public courtroom, y’know?”
“Well, yeah,” Noonan’s voice agreed from half a world away. “Okay, just so somebody’s thinking about it.”
“Okay, yeah, we’re thinking about it. Anything else?”
“I guess not.”
“Good. I’m going back to sleep.” And the line went dead, and Noonan walked back to the cargo compartment. Chavez and Tomlinson were keeping an eye on Gearing, while the rest of the people tried to get some sleep in the crummy USAF seats and thus pass the time on this most boring of flights. Except for the dreams, Noonan discovered in an hour. They weren’t boring at all.
“He still hasn’t called,” Brightling said, as the network coverage went through Olympic highlights.
“I know,” Henriksen conceded. “Okay, let me make a call.” He rose from his seat, pulled a card from his wallet, and dialed a number on the back of it to a cellular phone owned by a senior Global Security employee down in Sydney.
“Tony? This is Bill Henriksen. I need you to do something for me right now, okay? . . . Good. Find Wil Gearing and tell him to call me immediately. He has the number . . . Yes, that’s the one. Right now, Tony . . . Yeah. Thanks.” And Henriksen hung up. “That shouldn’t take long. Not too many places he can be except maybe on the way to the airport for his flight up the coast. Relax, John,” the security chief advised, still not feeling any chill on his skin. Gearing’s cell phone could have a dead battery, he could be caught up in the crowds and unable to get a cab back to his hotel, maybe there weren’t any cabs—any one of a number of innocent explanations.
Down in Sydney, Tony Johnson walked across the street to Wil Gearing’s hotel. He knew the room already, since they’d met there, and took the elevator to the right room. Defeating the lock was child’s play, just a matter of working a credit card into the doorjamb and flipping the angled latch, and then he was inside—
—and so were Gearing’s bags, sitting there by the sliding mirror-doors of the closet, and there on the desk-table was the folder with his flight tickets to the Northeast Coast of Australia, plus a map and some brochures about the Great Barrier Reef. This was odd. Wil’s flight—he checked the ticket folder—was due to go off in twenty minutes, and he ought to be all checked in and boarding the aircraft by now, but he hadn’t left the hotel. This was very odd. Where are you, Wil? Johnson wondered. Then he remembered why he was here, and lifted the phone.
“Yeah, Tony. So, where’s our boy?” Henriksen asked confidently. Then his face changed. “What do you mean? What else do you know? Okay, if you find out anything else, call me here. Bye.” Henriksen set the phone down and turned to look at the other two. “Wil Gearing’s disappeared. Not in his room, but his luggage and tickets are. Like he just fell off the planet.”
“What’s that mean?” Carol Brightling asked.
“I’m not sure. Hell, maybe he got hit by a car in the street—”
“—Or maybe Popov spilled his guts to the wrong people and they bagged him,” John Brightling suggested nervously.
“Popov didn’t even know his name—Hunnicutt couldn’t have told him, he didn’t know Gearing’s name either.” But then Henriksen thought, Oh, shit. Foster did know how the Shiva was supposed to be delivered, didn’t he? Oh, shit.
“What’s the matter, Bill?” John asked, seeing the man’s face and knowing that something was wrong.
“John, we may have a problem,” the former FBI agent announced.
“What problem?” Carol asked. Henriksen explained, and the mood in the room changed abruptly. “You mean, they might know? . . .”
Henriksen nodded. “That is possible, yes.”
“My God,” the Presidential Science Advisor exclaimed. “If they know that, then—then—then—”
“Yeah.” Bill nodded. “Then we’re fucked.”
“What can we do about this?”
“For starters, we destroy all the evidence. All the Shiva, all the vaccines, all the records. It’s all on computer, so we just erase it. There shouldn’t be much in the way of a paper trail, because we told people not to print anythin
g up, and to destroy any paper notes they might make. We can do that from here. I can access all the company computers from my office and kill off all the records—”
“They’re encrypted, all of them,” John Brightling pointed out.
“You want to bet against the code-breakers at Fort Meade? I don’t,” Henriksen told them. “No, those files all have to go, John. Look, you beat a criminal prosecution by denying evidence to the prosecutors. Without physical evidence, they can’t hurt you.”
“What about witnesses?”
“The most overrated thing in the world is an eyewitness. Any lawyer with half a brain can make fools out of them. No, when I was working cases for the Bureau, I wanted something I could hold in my hand, something you could pass over to the jury so they could see it and feel it. Eyewitness testimony is pretty useless in court, despite what you see on TV. Okay, I’m going to my office to get rid of the computer stuff.” Henriksen left at once, leaving the two Brightlings behind him.
“My God, John,” Carol said in quiet alarm, “what if people find out, nobody’ll understand . . .”
“Understand that we were going to kill them and their families? No,” her husband agreed dryly, “I don’t think Joe Sixpack and Archie Bunker will understand that very well.”
“So, what do we do?”
“We get the hell out of the country. We fly down to Brazil with everyone who knows what the Project is all about. We still have access to money—I have dozens of covert accounts we can access electronically—and they probably can’t make a criminal case against us if Bill can trash all the computer files. Okay, they may have Wil Gearing under arrest, but he’s just one voice, and I’m not sure they can come after us legally, in a foreign country, on the word of one person. There are only fifty or so people who really know what’s happening—all of it, I mean—and we have enough airplanes to get us all to Manaus.”
