by Tom Clancy
“Yes, this is Henriksen,” he said into the hotel phone.
“This is Bob Aukland,” the voice said. He was the senior cop at the meeting, Bill remembered. “I have good news for you.”
“Oh? What might that be, sir?”
“The name’s Bob, old man. We spoke with the Minister, and he agrees that we should award Global Security the consulting contract for the Olympics.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“So, could you come down in the morning to work out the details with me?”
“Okay, good. When can I go out to the facility?”
“I’ll fly you down myself tomorrow afternoon.”
“Excellent, Bob. Thank you for listening to me. What about your SAS people?”
“They’ll be at the stadium as well.”
“Great. I look forward to working with them,” Henriksen told them.
“They want to see that new communications equipment you told them about.”
“E-Systems has just started manufacturing it for our Delta people. Six ounces per unit, real-time 128-bit encryption, X-band frequency, side-band, burst-transmission. Damned near impossible to intercept, and highly reliable.”
“For what do we deserve this honor, Ed?” Clark asked.
“You have a fairy godmother at the White House. The first thirty sets go to you. Ought to be there in two days,” the DCI told Rainbow Six.
“Who at the White House?”
“Carol Brightling, Presidential Science Advisor. She’s into the cryppie gear, and after the Worldpark job she called me to suggest you get these new radios.”
“She’s not cleared into us, Ed,” Clark remembered. “At least, I don’t remember her name on the list.”
“Well, somebody must have told her something, John. When she called, she knew the codeword, and she is cleared into damned near everything, remember. Nuclear weapons, and all the commo stuff.”
“The President doesn’t like her, or so I hear. . . .”
“Yeah, she’s a radical tree-hugger, I know. But she’s pretty smart, too, and getting you this gear was a good call on her part. I talked to Sam Wilson down at Snake Headquarters, and his people have signed off on it with enthusiasm. Jam-proof, encrypted, digital clarity, and light as a feather.” As well it ought to be, at seven thousand dollars per set, but that included the R&D costs, Foley reminded himself. He wondered if it might be something his field officers could use for covert operations.
“Okay, two days, you said?”
“Yep. Regular trash-haul out of Dover to RAF Mildenhall, and a truck from there, I guess. Oh, one other thing.”
“What’s that?”
“Tell Noonan that his letter about that people-finder gadget has generated results. The company’s sending a new unit for him to play with—four of them, as a matter of fact. Improved antenna and GPS locator, too. What is that thing, anyway?”
“I’ve only seen it once. It seems to track people from their heartbeats.”
“Oh, how’s it do that?” Foley asked.
“Damned if I know, Ed, but I’ve seen it track people through blank walls. Noonan’s going nuts over it. He said it needed improvements, though.”
“Well, DKL—that’s the company—must have listened. Four new sets are in the same shipment with a request for your evaluation of the upgrade.”
“Okay, I’ll pass that along to Tim.”
“Any further word on the terrorists you got in Spain?”
“We’re faxing it over later today. They’ve ID’d six of them now. Mainly suspected Basques, the Spanish figured out. The French have largely struck out, just two probables—well, one of them’s fairly certain. And still no clue on who might be sending these people out of the dugout after us.”
“Russian,” Foley said. “A KGB RIF, I bet.”
“I won’t disagree with that, seeing how that guy showed up in London—we think—but the ‘Five’ guys haven’t turned up anything else.”
“Who’s working the case at ‘Five’?”
“Holt, Cyril Holt,” Clark answered.
“Oh, okay, I know Cyril. Good man. You can believe what he tells you.”
“That’s nice, but right now I believe it when he says he doesn’t have jackshit. I’ve been toying with the idea of calling Sergey Nikolay’ch myself and asking for a little help.”
“I don’t think so, John. That’ll have to go through me, remember? I like Sergey, too, but not on this one. Too open-ended.”
“That leaves us dead in the water, Ed. I do not like the fact that there’s some Russkie around who knows my name and my current job.”
Foley had to nod at that. No field officer liked the idea of being known to anyone at all, and Clark had ample reason to worry about it, with his family sharing his current duty station. He’d never taken Sandy into the field to use them as cover on a job, as some field officers had done in their careers. No officer had ever lost a spouse that way, but a few had been roughed up, and it was now contrary to CIA policy. More than that, John had lived his entire professional life as an unperson, a ghost seen by few, recognized by none, and known only to those on his own side. He would no more wish to change that than to change his sex, but his anonymity had been changed, and it upset him. Well, the Russians knew him and knew about him, and that had been his own doing in Japan and Iran; he must have known then that his actions would have consequences.
“John, they know you. Hell, Golovko knows you personally, and it figures they’d be interested in you, right?”
“I know, Ed, but—damn it!”
“John, I understand, but you’re high-profile now, and there’s no evading that fact. So, just sit tight, do your job, and let us rattle some bushes to find out what’s happening, okay?”
“I guess, Ed” was the resigned reply.
“If I turn anything, I’ll be on the phone to you immediately.”
“Aye aye, sir,” Clark replied, using the naval term that had been part of his life a long time ago. Now he reserved it for things he really didn’t like.
The Assistant Special Agent in Charge of the Gary, Indiana, FBI field office was a serious black man named Chuck Ussery. Forty-four, a recent arrival in this office, he’d been in the Bureau for seventeen years, and before that a police officer in Chicago. Skip Bannister’s call had rapidly been routed to his desk, and inside five minutes he’d told the man to drive to the office at once. Twenty-five minutes later, the man came in. Five-eleven, stocky, fifty-five or so, and profoundly frightened, the agent saw. First of all he got the man sat down and offered him coffee, which was refused. Then came the questions, routine at first. Then the questions got a lot more directed.
“Mr. Bannister, do you have the e-mail you told me about?”
James Bannister pulled the sheet of paper from his pocket and handed it across.
Three paragraphs, Ussery saw, disjointed and ungrammatical. Confused. His first impression was . . .
“Mr. Bannister, do you have any reason to suspect that your daughter has ever used drugs of any kind?”
“Not my Mary!” was the immediate reply. “No way. Okay, she likes to drink beer and wine, but no drugs, not my little girl, not ever!”
Ussery held up his hands. “Please, I understand how you feel. I’ve worked kidnappings before and—”
“You think she’s been kidnapped?” Skip Bannister asked, now faced with the confirmation of his greatest fear. That was far worse than the suggestion that his daughter was a doper.
“Based on this letter, yes, I think it’s a possibility, and we will treat this case as a kidnapping investigation.” Ussery lifted his phone. “Send Pat O’Connor in, will you?” he told his secretary.
Supervisory Special Agent Patrick D. O’Connor was one of the Gary office’s squad supervisors. Thirty-eight, red-haired, fair-skinned, and very fit, O’Connor headed the office kidnapping squad. “Yeah, Chuck?” he said coming in.
“This is Mr. James Bannister. He has a missing daughter, age twen
ty-one, disappeared in New York about a month ago. Yesterday he got this on his e-mail.” Ussery handed it over.
O’Connor scanned it and nodded. “Okay, Chuck.”
“Pat, it’s your case. Run with it.”
“You bet, Chuck. Mr. Bannister, would you come with me, please?”
“Pat runs these cases for us,” Ussery explained. “He will take charge of it, and report to me on a daily basis. Mr. Bannister, the FBI treats kidnappings as major felonies. This will be a top-priority case until we clear it. Ten men, Pat?”
“For starters, yes, more in New York. Sir,” he said to their guest, “we all have kids. We know how you feel. If there’s a way to locate your daughter for you, we’ll find it. Now I need to ask you a bunch of questions so that we can get started, okay?”
“Yeah.” The man stood and followed O’Connor out into the office bay. He’d be there for the next three hours, telling everything he knew about his daughter and her life in New York to this and other agents. First of all he handed over a recent photograph, a good one as it turned out. O’Connor looked at it. He’d keep it for the case file. O’Connor and his squad hadn’t worked a kidnapping in several years. It was a crime the FBI had essentially extinguished in the United States—kidnapping for money, in any case. There was just no percentage in it. The FBI always solved them, came down on the perps like the Wrath of God. Today’s kidnappings were generally of children, and, parental kidnappings aside, were almost always by sexual deviants who most often used them for personal gratification, and often as not killed them thereafter. If anything, that merely increased the FBI’s institutional rage. The Bannister Case, as it was already being called, would have the highest priority in manpower and resources in every office it might touch. Pending cases against organized crime families would be set aside for this one. That was just part of the FBI’s institutional ethos.
Four hours after Skip Bannister’s arrival in the Gary office, two agents from the New York field division in the Jacob Javits Building downtown knocked on the door of the superintendent of Mary Bannister’s dingy apartment building. The super gave them the key and told them where the apartment was. The two agents entered and commenced their search, looking first of all for notes, photographs, correspondence, anything that might help. They’d been there an hour when a NYPD detective showed up, summoned by the FBI office to assist. There were 30,000 policemen in the city, and for a kidnapping, they could all be called upon to assist in the investigation and canvassing.
“Got a picture?” the detective asked.
“Here.” The lead agent handed over the one faxed from Gary.
“You know, I got a call a few weeks ago from somebody in Des Moines, girl’s name was . . . Pretloe, I think. Yeah, Anne Pretloe, mid-twenties, legal secretary. Lived a few blocks from here. Just up and disappeared. Didn’t show up for work—just vanished. Roughly the same age and sex, guys,” the detective pointed out. “Connection, maybe?”
“Been checking Jane Does?” the junior agent asked. He didn’t have to go further. Their instant thought was the obvious one: Was there a serial killer operating in New York City? That sort of criminal nearly always went after women between eighteen and thirty years of age, as selective a predator as there was anywhere in nature.
“Yeah, but nothing that fit the Pretloe girl’s description, or this one for that matter.” He handed the photo back. “This case is a head-scratcher. Find anything?”
“Not yet,” the senior agent replied. “Diary, but nothing useful in it. No photos of men. Just clothes, cosmetics, normal stuff for a girl this age.”
“Prints?”
A nod. “That’s next. We have our guy on the way now.” But they all knew that this was a thin reed, after the apartment had been vacant for a month. The oils that made fingerprints evaporated over time, though there was some hope here, in a climate-controlled and sealed apartment.
“This one’s not going to be easy,” the NYPD detective observed next.
“They never are,” the senior FBI agent replied.
“What if there’s more than two?” the other FBI agent asked.
“Lots of people turn up missing in this town,” the detective said. “But I’ll run a computer check.”
Subject F5 was a hot little number, Killgore saw. And she liked Chip, too. That wasn’t very good news for Chip Smitton, who hadn’t been exposed to Shiva by injection, vaccine testing, or the fogging system. No, he’d been exposed by sexual contact only, and now his blood was showing antibodies, too. So, that means of transmission worked also, and better yet, it worked female-to-male, not just male-to-female. Shiva was everything they’d hoped it would be.
It was distasteful to watch people making love. Not the least bit arousing for him, playing voyeur. Anne Pretloe, F5, was within two days of symptoms, judging by her blood work, eating, drinking, and being very merry right before his eyes on the black-and-white monitor. Well, the tranquilizers had lowered every subject’s resistance to loose behavior, and there was no telling what she was like in real life, though she certainly knew the techniques well enough.
Strangely, Killgore had never paid attention to this sort of thing in animal tests. Rats, he imagined, came into season, and when they did, the boy rats and girl rats must have gotten it on, but somehow he’d never noticed. He respected rats as a life-form, but didn’t find their sexual congress the least bit interesting, whereas here, he had to admit to himself, he did find his eyes returning to the screen every few seconds. Well, Pretloe, Subject F5, was the cutest of the bunch, and if he’d found her in a singles bar, he might have offered her a drink and said hello and . . . let things develop. But she was doomed, too, as doomed as white, bred-for-the-purpose lab rats. Those cute little pink-eyed creatures were used all over the world because they were genetically identical, and so test results in one country would match the test results generated anywhere else in the world. They probably didn’t have the wherewithal to survive in the wild, and that was too bad. But their white color would work against them—cats and dogs would spot them far more easily, and that was not a good thing in the wild, was it? And they were an artificial species anyway, not part of Nature’s plan, but a work of Man, and therefore unworthy of continuance. A pity they were cute, but that was a subjective, not objective, observation, and Killgore had long since learned to differentiate between the two. After all, Pretloe, F5, was cute, too, and his pity for her was a lingering atavistic attitude on his part, unworthy of a Project member. But that got him thinking as he watched Chip Smitton screw Anne Pretloe. This was the kind of thing Hitler might have done with Jews, saved a small number of them as human lab rats, maybe as crash-test dummies for auto-safety tests. . . . So, did that make him a Nazi? Killgore thought. They were using F5 and M7 as such . . . but, no, they didn’t discriminate on race or creed, or gender, did they? There were no politics involved, really—well, maybe, depending on how one defined the term, not in the way he defined the term. This was science, after all. The whole Project was about science and love of Nature. Project members included all races and categories of people, though not much in the way of religions, unless you considered love of Nature to be a religion . . . which in a way it was, the doctor told himself. Yes, surely it was.
What they were doing on his TV screen was natural, or nearly so—as it had been largely instigated by mood depressants—but the mechanics certainly were. So were their instincts, he to spread his seed as far as possible, and she to receive his seed—and his own, Killgore’s mind went on, to be a predator, and through his depredations to decide which members of that species would live and which would not.
These two would not live, attractive as both were . . . like the lab rats with their cute white hair and cute pink eyes and twitching white whiskers. Well, none of them would be around much longer, would they? It was aesthetically troubling, but a valid choice in view of the future that they all beheld.
CHAPTER 22
COUNTERMEASURES
“So, nothing
else from our Russian friend?”Bill Tawney asked.
“Nothing,” Cyril Holt confirmed. “Tapes of Kirilenko show that he walks to work the same way every day and at exactly the same time, when the streets are crowded, stops in his pub for a pint four nights out of five, and bumps into all manner of people. But all it takes is a minor attempt at disguise and a little knowledge of trade-craft to outfox us, unless we really tighten our coverage, and there’s too great a chance that Ivan Petrovich would notice it and simply upgrade his own efforts to remain covert. It’s a chance we’d prefer not to take.”
“Quite so,” Tawney had to agree, despite his disappointment. “Nothing from other sources?”
“Other sources” meant whomever the Security Service might have working for them inside the Russian Embassy. There almost had to be someone there, but Holt would not discuss it over a telephone line, encrypted or not, because if there was one thing you had to protect in this business, it was the identity of your sources. Not protecting them could get them killed.
“No, Bill, nothing. Vanya hasn’t spoken over his phone line to Moscow on this subject. Nor has he used his secure fax line. Whatever discussions developed from this incident, well, we do not have even a confirmed face, just that chap in the pub, and that might well have been nothing. Three months ago, I had one of my chaps strike up a conversation with him at the pub, and they talked about football—he’s a serious fan, and he knows the game quite well, and never even revealed his nationality. His accent is bloody perfect. So that chap in the photo might well be nothing at all, just another coincidence. Kirilenko is a professional, Bill. He doesn’t make many mistakes. Whatever information came out of this was doubtless written up and couriered off.”