by Tom Clancy
“If they find our friend here,” Henriksen replied.
Brightling nodded and thought quickly. “Dmitriy, have you ever been to Kansas?”
“Hello, Mr. Maclean,” Tom Sullivan said.
“Oh, hi. Want to talk to me some more?”
“Yes, if you don’t mind,” Frank Chatham told him.
“Okay, come on in,” Maclean said, opening the door all the way, walking back to his living room, and telling himself to be cool. He sat down and muted his TV. “So, what do you want to know?”
“Anyone else you remember who might have been close to Mary Bannister?” The two agents saw Maclean frown, then shake his head.
“Nobody I can put a name on. I mean, you know, it’s a singles bar, and people bump into each other and talk, and make friends and stuff, y’know?” He thought for a second more. “Maybe one guy, but I don’t know his name . . . tall guy, ’bout my age, sandy hair, big guy, like he works out and stuff . . . but I don’t know his name, sorry. Mary danced with him and had drinks with him, I think, but aside from that, hey, it’s too dark and crowded in there.”
“And you walked her home just that one time?”
“ ’Fraid so. We talked and joked some, but we never really hit it off. Just casual. I never, uh, made a move on her, if you know what I mean. Never got that far, like. Yeah, sure, I walked her home, but didn’t even go in the building, didn’t kiss her good night, even, just shook hands.” He saw Chatham taking notes. Was this what he’d told them before? He thought so, but it was hard to remember with two federal cops in his living room. The hell of it was he didn’t remember much about her. He’d selected her, loaded her into the truck, but that was all. He had no idea where she was now, though he imagined she was probably dead. Maclean knew what that part of the project was all about, and that made him a kidnapper and accessory to murder, two things he didn’t exactly plan to give to these two FBI guys. New York had a death penalty statute now, and for all he knew so did the federal government. Unconsciously, he licked his lips and rubbed his hands on his slacks as he leaned back on the couch. Then he stood and faced toward the kitchen. “Can I get you guys anything?”
“No, thanks, but you go right ahead,” Sullivan said. He’d just seen something he hadn’t noticed in their first interview. Tension. Was it the occasional flips people got talking to FBI agents, or was this guy trying to conceal something? They watched Maclean build a drink and come back.
“How would you describe Mary Bannister?” Sullivan asked.
“Pretty, but no knockout. Nice, personable—I mean, pleasant, sense of humor, sense of fun about her. Out-of-town girl in the big city for the first time—I mean, she’s just a girl, y’know?”
“But nobody really close to her, you said?”
“Not that I know of, but I didn’t know her that well. What do other people say?”
“Well, people from the bar said you were pretty friendly with her . . .”
“Maybe, yeah, but not that friendly. I mean, it never went anywhere. I never even kissed her.” He was repeating himself now, as he sipped at his bourbon and water. “Wish I did, but I didn’t,” he added.
“Who at the bar are you close to?” Chatham asked.
“Hey, that’s kinda private, isn’t it?” Kirk objected.
“Well, you know how it goes. We’re trying to get a feel for the place, how it works, that sort of thing.”
“Well, I don’t kiss and tell, okay? Not my thing.”
“I can’t blame you for that,” Sullivan observed with a smile, “but it is kinda unusual for the singles bar crowd.”
“Oh, sure, there’s guys there who put notches on their guns, but that’s not my style.”
“So, Mary Bannister disappeared, and you didn’t notice?”
“Maybe, but I didn’t think much about it. It’s a transient community, y’know? People come in and out, and some you never see again. They just disappear, like.”
“Ever call her?”
Maclean frowned. “No, I don’t remember that she gave me her number. I suppose she was in the book, but, no, I never called her.”
“Just walked her home only that one time?”
“Right, just that one time,” Maclean confirmed, taking another pull on his drink and wishing these two inquisitors out of his home. Did they—could they know something? Why had they come back? Well, there was nothing in his apartment to confirm that he knew any female from the Turtle Inn. Well, just some phone numbers, but not so much as a loose sock from the women he’d occasionally brought here. “I mean, you guys looked around the first time you were here,” Maclean volunteered.
“No big deal. We always ask to do that. It’s just routine,” Sullivan told their suspect. “Well, we have another appointment in a few minutes up the street. Thanks for letting us talk to you. You still have my card?”
“Yeah, in the kitchen, stuck on the refrigerator.”
“Okay. Look, this case is kinda hard for us. Please think it over and if you come up with anything—anything at all, please call me, okay?”
“Sure will.” Maclean stood and walked them to the door, then came back to his drink and took another swallow.
“He’s nervous,” Chatham said, out on the street.
“Sure as hell. We have enough to do a background check on him?”
“No problem,” Chatham replied.
“Tomorrow morning,” the senior agent said.
It was his second trip to Teterboro Airport, in New Jersey, across the river from Manhattan, but this time it was a different aircraft, with HORIZON CORP. painted on the rudder fin. Dmitriy played along, figuring that he could escape from any place in the United States, and knowing that Henriksen would warn Brightling not to try anything drastic. There was an element of anxiety to the trip, but no greater than his curiosity, and so Popov settled into his seat on the left side and waited for the aircraft to start its engines and taxi out. There was even a flight attendant, a pretty one, to give him a shot of Finlandia vodka, which he sipped as the Gulfstream V started rolling. Kansas, he thought, a state of wheat fields and tornadoes, less than three hours away.
“Mr. Henriksen?”
“Yeah, who’s this?”
“Kirk Maclean.”
“Anything wrong?” Henriksen asked, alerted by the tone of his voice.
CHAPTER 31
MOVEMENT
The darkness hid the landscape. Popov stepped off the aircraft, and found a large military-type automobile waiting for him. Then he noticed the lines painted on the pavement and wondered if he’d landed on an airport runway or a country road of some sort. But, no, in the distance was a huge building, partially lit. More curious than ever, Dmitriy got into the vehicle and headed off toward it. His eyes gradually got accustomed to the darkness. The surrounding land seemed very flat, with only gentle rolls visible. Behind him he saw a fuel truck had pulled up to the business jet, perhaps to send it back to New Jersey. Well, they were expensive, and doubtless Brightling and his people wanted it back where he could use it. Popov didn’t know that Horizon Corporation owned many of them; their number just increased by three from the factory outside Savannah, Georgia. He was still jet-lagged, he found on entering the building. A uniformed security guard walked him to the elevator and then to his fourth-floor room, which was not unlike a medium-decent hotel room, complete with cooking facilities and a refrigerator. There was a TV and VCR, and all the tapes in the adjacent storage cupboard were—nature tapes, he saw. Lions, bears, moose, spawning salmon. Not a single feature film. The magazines on the bedside table were similarly nature oriented. How odd. But there was also a complete bar, including Absolut vodka, which was almost as good as the Russian kind he preferred. He poured himself a drink and switched on the TV to CNN.
Henriksen was being overly cautious, Dmitriy thought. What could the FBI possibly have on him? A name? From that they could perhaps develop—what? Credit cards, if they were very lucky, and from that his travel records, but none of them woul
d have evidentiary value in any court of law. No, unless Sean Grady positively identified him as a conduit of information and funds, he was totally safe, and Popov thought he could depend on Grady not to cooperate with the British. He hated them too much to be cooperative. It was just a matter of crawling back into his hole and pulling it in after himself—an Americanism he admired. The money he’d stashed in the secondary Swiss account might be discoverable, but there were ways to handle that—attorneys were so useful as an institution, he’d learned. Working through them was better than all the KGB fieldcraft combined.
No, if there was any danger to him, it was to be found in his employer, who might not know the rules of the game—but even if he didn’t, Henriksen would help, and so Dmitriy relaxed and sipped his drink. He’d explore this place tomorrow, and from the way he was treated, he’d know—
—no, there was an even easier way. He lifted his phone, hit 9 to get an outside line, then dialed his apartment in New York. The call went through. The phone rang four times before his answering machine clicked in. So, he had phone access to the outside. That meant he was safe, but he was no closer to understanding what was going on than he’d been during that first meeting in France, chatting with the American businessman and regaling him with tales of a former KGB field intelligence officer. Now here he was, in Kansas, USA, drinking vodka and watching television, with over six million American dollars in two numbered accounts in Switzerland. He’d reached one goal. Next he had to meet another. What the hell was this adventure all about? Would he find out here? He hoped so.
The airplanes were crammed with people, all of them inbound to Kingsford Smith International Airport outside Sydney. Many of them landed on the runway, which stuck out like a finger into Botany Bay, so famous as the landing point for criminals and other English rejects sent halfway round the world on wooden sailing ships to start a new country, which, to the disbelief of those who’d dispatched them, they’d done remarkably well. Many of the passengers on the inbound flights were young, fit athletes, the pride and pick of the countries that had sent them dressed in uniform clothing that proclaimed their nations of origin. Most were tourists, people with ticket-and-accommodation packages expensively bought from travel agents or given as gifts from political figures in their home countries. Many carried miniature flags. The few business passengers had listened to all manner of enthusiastic predictions for national glory at the Olympic games, which would start in the next few days.
On arriving, the athletes were treated like visiting royalty and conveyed to buses that would take them up Highway 64 to the city, and thence to the Olympic Village, which had been expensively built by the Australian government to house them. They could see the magnificent stadium nearby, and the athletes looked and wondered if they’d find personal glory there.
“So, Colonel, what do you think?”
“It’s one hell of a stadium, and that’s a fact,” Colonel Wilson Gearing, U.S. Army Chemical Corps, retired, replied. “But it sure gets hot here in the summer, pal.”
“It’s that El Niño business again. The ocean currents off South America have changed again, and that’s associated with unusually hot temperatures here. It’ll be in the mid-thirties—nineties to you, I suppose—for the whole Olympiad.”
“Well, I hope this fogging system works, ’cuz if it doesn’t, you’ll have a lot of heat-stroke cases here, pal.”
“It works,” the Aussie cop told him. “It’s fully tested.”
“Can I take a look at it now? Bill Henriksen wants me to see if it could be used as a chemical-agent delivery system by the bad guys.”
“Certainly. This way.” They were there in five minutes. The water-input piping was contained in its own locked room. The cop had the key for this, and took the colonel inside.
“Oh, you chlorinate the water here?” Gearing asked in semisurprise. The water came in from the Sydney city water system, didn’t it?
“Yes, we don’t want to spread any germs on our guests, do we?”
“Not exactly,” Colonel Gearing agreed, looking at the plastic chlorine container that hung on the distribution piping beyond the actual pumps. Water was filtered through that before it went into the fogging nozzles that hung in all the concourses and ramps to the stadium bowl itself. The system would have to be flushed with unchlorinated water before delivery would work, but that was easily accomplished, and the false chlorine container in his hotel room was an exact twin of this one. The contents even looked like chlorine, almost, though the nano-capsules actually contained something called Shiva. Gearing thought about that behind blank brown eyes. He’d been a chemical weapons expert his whole professional life, having worked at the Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland and Dugway Proving Ground in Utah—but, well, this wasn’t really chemical warfare. It was bio-war, a sister science of the one he’d studied for over twenty uniformed years. “Is the door guarded?” he asked.
“No, but it is alarmed, and it takes some minutes to play with the system, as you can see. The alarm system reports to the command post, and we have an ample reaction force there.”
“How ample?” the retired colonel asked next.
“Twenty SAS members, plus twenty police constables, are there at all times, plus ten more SAS circulating in pairs around the stadium. The people at the CP are armed with automatic weapons. The ones on patrol with pistols and radios. There is also a supplementary reaction force a kilometer distant with light armored vehicles and heavy weapons, platoon strength. Beyond that, a battalion of infantry twenty kilometers away, with helicopters and other support.”
“Sounds good to me,” Colonel Gearing said. “Can you give me the alarm code for this facility?”
They didn’t even hesitate. He was a former staff-grade army officer, after all, and a senior member of the consulting team for security at the Olympic Games. “One-One-Three-Three-Six-Six,” the senior cop told him. Gearing wrote it down, then punched the numbers into the keypad, which armed and then disarmed the system. He’d be able to switch out the chlorine canister very quickly. The system was designed for rapid servicing. This would work just fine, just like the model they’d set up in Kansas, on which he and his people had practiced for several days. They’d gotten the swap-out time down to fourteen seconds. Anything under twenty meant that nobody would notice anything remiss in the fog-cooling system, because residual pressure would maintain the fogging stream.
For the first time, Gearing saw the place where he’d be doing it, and that generated a slight chill in his blood. Planning was one thing. Seeing where it would happen for-real was something else. This was the place. Here he would start a global plague that would take lives in numbers far too great to tally, and which in the end would leave alive only the elect. It would save the planet—at a ghastly price, to be sure, but he’d been committed to this mission for years. He’d seen what man could do to harm things. He’d been a young lieutenant at Dugway Proving Grounds when they’d had the well-publicized accident with GB, a persistent nerve agent that had blown too far and slaughtered a few hundred sheep—and neurotoxins were not a pretty death, even for sheep. The news media hadn’t even bothered to talk about the wild game that had died a similar, ugly death, everything from insects to antelope. It had shaken him that his own organization, the United States Army, could make so grave an error to cause such pain. The things he’d learned later had been worse. The binary agents he’d worked on for years—an effort to manufacture “safe” poisons for battlefield use . . . the crazy part was that it had all begun in Germany as insecticide research in the 1920s and 1930s. Most of the chemicals used to kill off insects were nerve agents, simple ones that attacked and destroyed the rudimentary nervous systems in ants and beetles, but those German chemists had stumbled upon some of the deadliest chemical compounds ever formulated. So much of Gearing’s career had been spent with the intelligence community, evaluating information about possible chemical-warfare plants in countries not trusted to have such things.
But the prob
lem with chemical weapons had always been their distribution—how to spread them evenly across a battlefield, thus exposing enemy soldiers efficiently. That the same chemicals would travel downrange and kill innocent civilians had been the dirty secret that the organizations and the governments that ruled them had always ignored. And they didn’t even consider the wildlife that would also be exterminated in vast quantities—and worse still, the genetic damage those agents caused, because marginal doses of nerve gas, below the exposure needed to kill, invaded the very DNA of the victim, ensuring mutations that would last for generations. Gearing had spent his life knowing these things, and he supposed that it had desensitized him to the taking of life in large quantities.
This wasn’t quite the same thing. He would not be spreading organophosphate chemical poisons, but rather tiny virus particles. And the people walking through the cooling fog in the concourses and ramps to the stadium bowl would breathe them in, and their body chemistry would break down the nano-capsules, allowing the Shiva strands to go to work … slowly, of course … and they’d go home to spread the Shiva farther, and in four to six weeks after the ending of the Sydney Olympics, the plague would erupt worldwide, and a global panic would ensue. Then Horizon Corporation would announce that it had an experimental “A” vaccine that had worked in animals and primates—and was safe for human usage—ready for mass production, and so it would be mass-produced and distributed worldwide, and four to six weeks after injection, those people, too, would develop the Shiva symptoms, and with luck the world would be depopulated down to a fractional percentage of the current population. Disorders would break out, killing many of the people blessed by Nature with highly effective immune systems, and in six months or so, there would be just a few left, well organized and well equipped, safe in Kansas and Brazil, and in six months more they would be the inheritors of a world returning to its natural state. This wouldn’t be like Dugway, a purposeless accident. This would be a considered act by a man who’d contemplated mass murder for all of his professional life, but who’d only helped kill innocent animals … He turned to look at his hosts.