by Tom Clancy
“There is a new counter-terror team operating in England now,” Dmitriy told him.
“Oh?” Grady hadn’t known that, and the revelation surprised him.
“Yes. It is called Rainbow. It is a joint effort of the British and Americans, and it was they who handled the jobs at Worldpark, Vienna, and Bern. They have not yet been committed to this particular mission, but that is only, I think, a matter of time.”
“What do you know about this new group?”
“Quite a lot.” Popov handed over his written summary.
“Hereford,” Grady observed. “We’ve been there to look, but it is not a place one can easily attack.”
“Yes, I know that, Sean, but there are additional vulnerabilities, and with proper planning, we think it possible to strike a hard blow on this Rainbow group. You see, both the wife and daughter of the group commander, this American, John Clark, work at the nearby community hospital. They would be the bait for the mission—”
“Bait?” Grady asked.
“Yes, Sean.” And then Popov went on to describe the mission concept. Grady, as ever, didn’t react, but two of his people did, shifting in their chairs and trading looks while waiting for their commander to speak. This he finally did, rather formally.
“Colonel Serov, you propose that we undertake a major risk.”
Dmitriy nodded. “Yes, that is true, and it is for you to decide if the risk is worth the rewards.” Popov didn’t have to remind the IRA chieftain that he’d helped them in the past—in a minor way to be sure, but these were not people to forget assistance—but neither did he have to point out that this mission, if successful, would not only catapult Grady to the forefront of IRA commanders, but also, perhaps, poison the peace process between the British government and the “official” faction of the PIRA. To be the man who humbled the SAS and other special-operations teams on their own turf would win him such prestige as no Irish revolutionary had enjoyed since 1920. That was always the weakness of such people, Popov knew. Their dedication to ideology made them hostage to their egos, to their vision, not only of their political objectives, but of themselves.
“Iosef Andreyevich, unfortunately, we do not have the resources to consider such a mission as this.”
“I understand that. What resources do you require, Sean?”
“More than you can offer.” From his own experience, and from speaking with others in the community of world terrorists, Grady knew how tight the KGB was with its cash. But that only set him up for the next surprise.
“Five million American dollars, in a numbered and codeword-controlled Swiss account,” Popov said evenly, and this time he saw emotion on Grady’s face. The eyes blinked. The mouth opened slightly, as though to voice an objection, but then he restored his self-control.
“Six,” Grady said, just to take control of the agenda.
That suited Popov just fine. “Very well, then, I suppose I can offer as much as six million. How quickly will you need it?”
“How quickly can you deliver it?”
“A week, I think. How long for you to plan the operation?”
Grady thought for a few seconds. “Two weeks.” He already knew much of the area around Hereford. That he had not been able to conduct an attack in earlier days hadn’t prevented him from thinking—dreaming—about it, and gathering the needed intelligence. He had also tried to gather information on SAS operations, but had found that the SAS didn’t talk very much, even afterward, except within their own community. A few covert photographs had been generated, but they hadn’t proven very useful in the field. No, what they’d needed and hadn’t had in previous years was a combination of people willing to undertake a huge risk and the resources to obtain the items the mission would require.
“One other thing,” Grady said.
“Yes?”
“How good are your contacts with drug dealers?” Grady asked.
Popov allowed himself to be shocked, though he didn’t react visibly. Grady wanted drugs to sell? That was a huge change in the PIRA’s ethos. In earlier years, the Provos had made a point of killing or kneecapping drug dealers as a means of showing that they were worthy of community support. So, this had changed, too?
“I have some indirect contacts, I suppose. What would you require?”
“Cocaine, a large quantity of it, preferably pure.”
“To sell here?”
“Yes. Money is money, Iosef,” Grady pointed out. “And we need a continuing income to maintain operations.”
“I make no promises, but I will see what I can do.”
“Very well. Let me know about the money. When it is available to us, I will let you know if the mission can be carried out, and when we might be able to do it.”
“Weapons?”
“That is not a concern,” Grady assured him.
“I need a telephone number to call.”
Grady nodded, took a pad from the table, and wrote it out for him. It was clearly a cellular phone. The Russian pocketed the note. “That should be good for another few weeks. Is that sufficient to your needs?”
“Yes, it is.” Popov stood. There was nothing else to be said. Popov was led out of the building and back to the car he had arrived in. The meeting had gone well, Dmitriy told himself on the drive back to his hotel.
“Sean, this is a suicide mission!” Roddy Sands warned back in the warehouse.
“Not if we control the situation, Roddy,” Grady replied. “And we can do that if we have the proper resources. We’ll have to be careful, and very quick, but we can do it.” And when we do, Grady didn’t have to go on, then the entire movement will see who really represents the people of Ireland. “We’ll need fifteen men or so. We can get the right fifteen men, Roddy.” Then Grady stood and walked out the other door in the room and got his own car for the drive to his safe house. There he had work to do, the sort of work he always did alone.
Henriksen was assembling his team. He figured ten men total, all experienced, and all briefed in on the Project. Foremost among them would be Lieutenant Colonel Wilson Gearing, formerly of the United States Army Chemical Corps. A genuine expert on chemical weapons, he would be the deliveryman. The rest would consult with the local security forces, and tell them things they already knew, establishing and enforcing the international rule that an Expert Was Somebody From Out Of Town. The Australian SAS would listen politely to everything his people said, and maybe even learn a thing or two, especially when his people brought down the new radio gear from E-Systems and Dick Voss trained the Aussies up on them. The new radios for special-operations troops and SWAT cops were a thing of beauty. After that, they’d merely strut around with special ID to get them through all the security checkpoints, and even onto the track-and-field grounds of the huge stadium. They’d be able to watch the Olympics close up, which would be an interesting fringe benny for his people, some of whom, he was sure, were real sports fans who would enjoy seeing the last Olympics.
He selected his best people, and then had the corporation’s travel agent set up the flights and accommodations—the latter through the Australian police, which had reserved a block of hotel suites close to the stadium for their own use throughout the Olympic games. Henriksen wondered if there would be media attention for his company. Ordinarily, he would have insisted on it, just as advertising, but not this time, he decided. There wasn’t much point in advertising his company anymore, was there?
So, this project was done. Hollister looked over the buildings, the roads, parking lots, and the ersatz airplane runway whose construction he’d supervised here in the Kansas plains. The final stuff had been the usual confusion of niggling little details, but all the subcontractors had responded well to his browbeating, especially since their contracts all had incentive clauses as well.
The company car pulled up to his four-by-four and stopped, and then Hollister was surprised. The guy who got out was the big boss, John Brightling himself. He’d never met the chairman of the corporation, though he
knew the name, and had seen the face on TV once or twice. He must have flown in this very morning on one of his corporate jets, and the construction superintendent was somewhat disappointed that he hadn’t used the approach road, which could have easily accommodated the Gulfstream.
“Mr. Hollister, I presume?”
“Yes, sir.” He took the extended hand and shook it. “It’s all done, as of today, sir.”
“You beat your promise by two and a half weeks,” Brightling observed.
“Well, the weather helped us out some. I can’t take credit for that.”
Brightling laughed. “I would.”
“The toughest part was the environmental systems. That’s the most demanding set of specifications I’ve ever seen. What’s the big deal, Dr. Brightling?”
“Well, some of the things we work with demand full isolation—Level Four, we call it in the business. Hot Lab stuff, and we have to treat it very carefully, as you might imagine. Federal rules on that we have to follow.”
“But the whole building?” Hollister asked. It had been like building a ship or an aircraft. Rarely was any large structure designed to be completely airtight. But this one was, which had forced them to do air-pressure tests when each module had been completed, and driven his window contractors slightly crazy.
“Well, we just wanted it done our way.”
“Your building, Doc,” Hollister allowed. That one specification had added five million dollars of labor costs to the project, all of it to the window contractor, whose workers had hated the detail work, though not the extra pay to do it. The old Boeing plant down the road at Wichita had hardly been called upon to do such finely finished work. “You picked a pretty setting for it, though.”
“Didn’t we, though?” All around, the land was covered with a swaying green carpet of wheat, just about a quarter way into its growing cycle. There were some farm machines visible, fertilizing and weeding the crop. Maybe not as pretty as a golf course, but a lot more practical. The complex even had its own large institutional bakery to bake its own bread, maybe from the wheat grown right here on the campus? Hollister wondered. Why hadn’t he thought about that one before? The farms that had been bought along with the land even included a feedlot for fattening up cattle, and other land used for truck-farm vegetables. This whole complex could be self-sustaining if somebody ever wanted it to be. Well, maybe they just wanted it to fit in with the area. This part of Kansas was all farms, and though the steel-and-glass buildings of the project didn’t exactly look like barns and equipment sheds, their surroundings somehow muted their invasiveness. And besides, you could hardly see them from the interstate highway to the north, and only from a few public roads closer than that, and the gatehouses for limiting access were stout buildings, almost like pillboxes—to protect against tornadoes, the specifications had said, and sure enough no tornado could hurt them—hell, even some loony farmer with a .50-caliber machine gun couldn’t hurt those security huts.
“So, you’ve earned your bonus. The money will be in your account by the close of business tomorrow,” Dr. John Brightling promised.
“Suits me, sir.” Hollister fished in his pocket and pulled out the master key, the one that would open any door in the complex. It was a little ceremony he always performed when he finished a project. He handed it over. “Well, sir, it’s your building complex now.”
Brightling looked at the electronic key and smiled. This was the last major hurdle for the Project. This would be the home of nearly all of his people. A similar but much smaller structure in Brazil had been finished two months earlier, but that one barely accommodated a hundred people. This one could house three thousand—somewhat crowded, but comfortably even so—for some months, and that was about right. After the first couple of months, he could sustain his medical research efforts here with his best people—most of them not briefed in on the Project, but worthy of life even so—because that work was heading in some unexpectedly promising directions. So promising that he wondered how long he himself might live here. Fifty years? A hundred? A thousand, perhaps? Who could say now?
Olympus, he’d call it, Brightling decided on the spot. The home of the gods, for that was exactly what he expected it to be. From here they could watch the world, study it, enjoy it, appreciate it. He would use the call-sign OLYMPUS-1 on his portable radio. From here he’d be able to fly all over the world with picked companions, to observe and learn how the ecology was supposed to work. For twenty years or so, they’d be able to use communications satellites—no telling how long they’d last, and after that they’d be stuck with long-wire radio systems. That was an inconvenience for the future, but launching his own replacement satellites was just too difficult in terms of manpower and resources, and besides, satellite launchers polluted like nothing else humankind had ever invented.
Brightling wondered how long his people would choose to live here. Some would scatter quickly, probably drive all over America, setting up their own enclaves, reporting back by satellite at first. Others would go to Africa—that seemed likely to be the most popular destination. Still others to Brazil and the rain forest study area. Perhaps some of the primitive tribes down there would be spared the Shiva exposure, and his people would study them as well and how Primitive Man lived in a pristine physical environment, living in full harmony with Nature. They’d study them as they were, a unique species worthy of protection—and too backward to be a danger to the environment. Might some African tribes survive as well? His people didn’t think so. The African countries allowed their primitives to interface too readily with city folk, and the cities would be the focal centers of death for every nation on earth—especially when Vaccine-A was distributed. Thousands of liters of it would be produced, flown all over the world, and then distributed, ostensibly to preserve life, but really to take it … slowly, of course.
Progress was going well. Back at his corporate headquarters the fictional documentation for -A was already fully formulated. It had been supposedly tested on over a thousand monkeys who were then exposed to Shiva, and only two of them had become symptomatic, and only one of those had died over the nineteen-month trial that existed only on paper and computer memories. They hadn’t yet approached the FDA for human trials, because that wasn’t necessary—but when Shiva started appearing all over the world, Horizon Corporation would announce that it had been working quietly on hemorrhagic fever vaccines ever since the Iranian attack on America, and faced with a global emergency and a fully documented treatment modality, the FDA would have no choice but to approve human use, and so officially bless the Project’s goal of global human extermination. Not so much the elimination, John Brightling thought more precisely, as the culling back of the most dangerous species on the planet, which would allow Nature to restore Herself, with just enough human stewards to watch and study and appreciate the process. In a thousand or so years, there might be a million or so humans, but that was a small number in the great scheme of things, and the people would be properly educated to understand and respect nature instead of destroying her. The goal of the Project wasn’t to end the world. It was to build a new one, a new world in the shape that Nature Herself intended. On that he would put his own name for all eternity. John Brightling, the man who saved the planet.
Brightling looked at the key in his hand, then got back into his car. The driver took him to the main entrance, and there he used the key, surprised and miffed to see that the door was unlocked. Well, there were still people going in and out. He took the elevator to his office-apartment atop the main building. That door, he saw, was locked as it was supposed to be, and he opened it with a kind of one-person ceremony, and walked into the seat of Olympus’s chief god. No, that wasn’t right. Insofar as there was a god, it was Nature. From his office windows, he could see out over the plains of Kansas, the swaying young wheat . . . it was so beautiful. Almost enough to bring tears to his eyes. Nature. She could be cruel to individuals, but individuals didn’t matter. Despite all the warnings, huma
nkind hadn’t learned that.
Well, learn it they would, the way Nature taught all Her lessons. The hard way.
Pat O’Connor made his daily report to the ASAC in the evening. Coatless, he slid into the chair opposite Ussery’s desk with his folder in hand. It was already fairly thick.
“Bannister case,” Chuck Ussery said. “Anything shaking loose yet, Pat?”
“Nothing,” the supervisory special agent replied. “We’ve interviewed fourteen friends in the Gary area. None of them had any idea what Mary was doing in New York. Only six of them even knew she was there, and she never discussed jobs or boyfriends, if any, with them. So, nothing at all has happened here.”
“New York?” the ASAC asked next.
“Two agents on the case there, Tom Sullivan and Frank Chatham. They’ve established contact with a NYPD detective lieutenant named d’Allessandro. Forensics has been through her apartment—nothing. Latent prints are all hers, not even a maid. Neighbors in the building knew her by sight, but no real friendships established, and therefore no known associates. The New York idea is to print up some flyers and pass them out via the NYPD. The local detective is worried there might be a serial killer loose. He has another missing female, same age, roughly the same appearance and area of residence, fell off the world about the same time.”
“Behavioral Sciences?” Ussery asked at once.
O’Connor nodded. “They’ve looked over the facts we have to date. They wonder if the e-mail was sent by the victim or maybe by a serial killer who wants to fuck over the family. Style differences on the message that Mr. Bannister brought in—well, we both saw that it appeared to have been written by a different person, or someone on drugs, but she was evidently not a drug user. And we can’t trace the e-mail back anywhere. It went into an anonymous-remailer system. That sort of thing is designed to protect the originator of electronic mail, I guess so people can swap porno over the Net. I talked with Eddie Morales in Baltimore. He’s the technical wizard in Innocent Images”—that was an ongoing FBI project to track down, arrest, and imprison those who swapped kiddie porn over their computers—“and Bert said they’re playing with some technical fixes. They have a hacker on the payroll who thinks he can come up with a way to crack through the anonymity feature, but he’s not there yet, and the local U.S. Attorney isn’t sure it’s legal anyway.”