by Tom Clancy
“Well, I’m Pete. You’re not from around here, are you?”
“Not originally. England, actually,” Dmitriy went on, trying that accent on for size.
“Oh, yeah? What brings you here?”
“Business.”
“What kind?” Pete asked.
“I am a consultant, kind of a go-between.”
“So, how’d you get stuck out here, Joe?” the driver asked.
What was the matter with this man? Was he a police officer? He asked questions like someone from the Second Chief Directorate. “My, uh, friend, had a family emergency, and he had to drop me off there to wait for a bus.”
“Oh.” And that shut him up, Popov saw, blessing his most recent lie. You see, I just shot and killed someone who wanted to kill you and everyone you know . . . It was one of those times when the truth simply didn’t work for him or for anyone else. His mind was going at a very rapid speed, faster by a considerable margin than this damned pickup truck, whose driver seemed unwilling to push the pedal much harder, every other vehicle on the road whizzing past. The farmer was an elderly man and evidently a patient one. Had Popov been driving, he’d soon establish how fast this damned truck could go. But for all that, it was only ten minutes to the green exit sign with the silhouette of an airplane tacked onto one side. He tried not to pound his fist on the armrest as the driver slowly took the exit, then a right turn to what looked like a small regional airport. In another minute, Pete took him to the US Air Express door.
“Thank you, sir,” Popov said, as he left.
“Have a good trip, Joe,” the driver said, with a friendly Kansas smile.
Popov walked rapidly into the diminutive terminal, and then to the desk, only twenty meters inside.
“I need to get to New York,” Popov told the clerk. “First class, if possible.”
“Well, we have a flight leaving in fifteen minutes for Kansas City, and from there you can connect to a US Airways flight to La Guardia, Mr.? . . . ”
“Demetrius,” Popov replied, remembering the name on his single remaining credit card. “Joseph Demetrius,” he said, taking out his wallet and handing the card over. He had a passport in that name in a safe-deposit box in New York, and the credit card was good, with a high limit and nothing charged on it in the past three months. The desk clerk probably thought he was working quickly, but Popov also needed to visit a men’s room and did his best not to show that urgent requirement. It was at that moment he realized he had a loaded revolver in the saddle-bags he was carrying, and he had to get rid of that at once.
“Okay, Mr. Demetrius, here’s your ticket for now, Gate 1, and here’s the one for the Kansas City flight. It will be leaving from Gate A-34, and it’s a first-class aisle seat, 2C. Any questions, sir?”
“No, no, thank you.” Popov took the tickets and tucked them in his pocket. Then he looked for the entrance to the departure concourse, and headed that way, stopped by a waste bin and, after quickly looking around, very carefully took the monster handgun out of the bags, wiped it, and dumped it into the trash. He checked the terminal again. No, no one had noticed. He checked the saddlebags for anything else they might contain, but they were completely empty now. Satisfied, he headed through the security checkpoint, whose magnetometer blessedly didn’t beep at his passage. Collecting the leather saddle-bags off the conveyor system, he looked for and found a men’s room, to which he headed directly, emerging in another minute feeling far better.
This regional airport, he saw, had but two gates, but it did have a bar, to which Popov went next. He had fifty dollars of cash in his wallet, and five of those paid for a double vodka, which he gulped down before taking the next hundred steps to the gate. Handing the ticket to the next clerk, he was directed out the door. The aircraft had propellers, and he hadn’t traveled on one of those for years. But for this flight he would have settled for rubber bands, and Popov clambered aboard the Saab 340B short-haul airliner. Five minutes later, the propellers started turning, and Popov started to relax. Thirty-five minutes to Kansas City, a forty-five-minute layover, and then off to New York on a 737, in first class, where the alcohol was free. Best of all, he sat alone on the left side of the aircraft, with nobody to engage him in conversation. Popov needed to think, very carefully, and though quickly, not too quickly.
He closed his eyes as the aircraft started its takeoff roll, the noise of the engines blotting out all extraneous noise. Okay, he thought, what have you learned, and what should you do with that knowledge? Two simple questions, perhaps, but he had to organize the answer to the first before he knew how to answer the second. He almost started praying to a God in whose existence he did not believe, but instead he stared out the window at the mainly dark ground while his mind churned away in a darkness of its own.
Clark awoke with a start. It was three in the morning at Hereford, and he’d had a dream whose substance retreated away from his consciousness like a cloud of smoke, shapeless and impossible to grab. He knew it had been an unpleasant dream, and he could only estimate the degree of unpleasantness by the fact that it had awakened him, a rare occurrence even when on a dangerous field assignment. He realized that his hands were shaking—and he didn’t know why. He dismissed it, rolled back over, and closed his eyes for more sleep. He had a budgeting meeting today, the bane of his existence as commander of Rainbow group, playing goddamned accountant. Maybe that had been the substance of his dream, he thought with his head on the pillow. Trapped forever with accountants in discussions of where the money came from and how it would be spent . . .
The landing at Kansas City was a smooth one, and the Saab airliner pulled up to the terminal, where, presently, the propellers stopped. A ground-crewman came up and attached a rope to the propeller tip to keep it from turning while the passengers debarked. Popov checked his watch. They were a few minutes early as he walked out the door into the clean air, then into the terminal. There, three gates away from his flight at A-34—he checked to make sure it was the correct flight—he found a bar again. They even allowed smoking in here, which was unusual for an American airport, and he sniffed in the secondhand fumes, remembering the youth in which he’d smoked Trud cigarettes, and almost asked one of these Americans for a smoke. But he stopped short of it and merely drank his next double vodka in a corner booth, facing the wall, wanting no one to have a reason to remember him here. After thirty minutes, his flight was called. He left ten dollars on the table and walked off, carrying the empty saddlebags, then asked himself why he was bothering. But it would appear unusual for a person to board a flight carrying nothing, and so he retained them, and tucked them into the overhead bin. The best news of this flight was that 2-D was not occupied, and he took that, facing the window to make it harder for the stewardess to see his face. Then the Boeing 737 backed away from the gate and took off into the darkness. Popov declined the drink offered to him. He’d had enough for the moment, and though some alcohol helped him to organize his thoughts, too much of it muddled them. He had enough in his system to relax, and that was all he wanted.
What exactly had he learned this day? How did it fit in with all the other things he’d learned at the building complex in western Kansas? The answer to the second question was easier than the first: whatever hard data he’d learned today contradicted nothing about the project’s nature, location, or even its decor. It hadn’t contradicted the magazines by his bedside, nor the videotapes next to the TV, nor the conversations he’d overheard in the corridors or in the building’s cafeteria. Those maniacs were planning to end the world in the name of their pagan beliefs—but how the hell could he persuade anyone that this was so? And exactly what hard data did he have to give to someone else—and to which someone else? It had to be someone who would both believe him and be able to take action. But who? There was the additional problem that he’d murdered Foster Hunnicutt—he’d had no choice in the matter; he’d had to get away from the Project, and that had been his only chance to do so covertly. But now they could accuse
him rightfully of murder, which meant that some police force might try to arrest him, and then how could he get the word out to stop those fucking druids from doing what they said they’d do? No policeman in the known world would believe his tale. It was far too grotesque to be absorbed by a normal mind—and surely those people in the Project had a cover story or legend which had been carefully constructed to shunt aside any sort of official inquiry. That was the most rudimentary security concern, and that Henriksen fellow would have worked on that himself.
Carol Brightling stood in her office. She’d just printed up a letter to the chief of staff saying that she’d be taking a leave of absence to work on a special scientific project. She’d discussed this matter with Arnie van Damm earlier in the day and gotten no serious objection to her departure. She would not be missed, his body language had told her quite clearly. Well, she thought with a cold look at the computer screen, neither would he, when it came to that.
Dr. Brightling tucked the letter in an envelope, sealed it, and left it on her assistant’s desk for transfer into the White House proper the next day. She’d done her job for the Project and for the planet, and it was now time for her to leave. It had been so long, so very long, since she’d felt John’s arms around her. The divorce had been well publicized. It had had to be. She would never have gotten the White House job if she’d been married to one of the country’s richest men. And so, she’d forsworn him, and he’d publicly forsworn the movement, the beliefs they’d both held ten years before when they’d formulated the idea for the Project, but he’d never stopped believing, any more than she had. And so she’d gotten all the way inside the government, and gotten a security clearance that gave her access to literally everything, even operational intelligence, which she then forwarded to John when he needed it. Most especially, she’d gotten access to biological-warfare information, so that they knew what USAMRIID and others had done to protect America, and so knew how to engineer Shiva in such a way as to defeat any proposed vaccine except those which Horizon Corporation had formulated.
But it had had its own price. John had been seen in public with all manner of young women, and had doubtless dallied with many of them, for he’d always been a passionate man. It was something they hadn’t discussed before their public divorce, and for that reason it had come to her as an unpleasant surprise to see him at those occasional social functions they both had to attend, always with a pretty young thing on his arm—always a different one, since he’d never formed a real relationship with anyone but her. Carol Brightling told herself that this was good, since it meant that she was the only woman really a part of John’s life, and thus those annoying young women were merely a way for him to dissipate his male hormones. . . . But it hadn’t been easy to see, and harder still to think about, alone in her home, with only Jiggs for company, and often as not weeping in her loneliness.
But set against that small personal consideration was the Project. The White House job had merely fortified her beliefs. She’d seen it all here, Carol Brightling reminded herself, from the specifications for new nuclear weapons to bio-war reports. The Iranian attempt at a national plague, which had predated her government job, had both frightened and encouraged her. Frightened, because it had been a real threat to the country, and one that could have begun a massive effort to counter a future attack. Encouraged, because she’d learned in short order that a really effective defense was difficult at best, because vaccines had to be tailored for specific bugs. And, when one got down to it, the Iranian plague had merely heightened the public’s appreciation of the threat, and that would make distribution of the “A” vaccine the easier to sell to the public . . . and to the government bureaucrats here and around the world who would leap at the offered cure. She would even return to her OEOB office at the proper time to urge approval for this essential public health measure, and on this issue she would be trusted.
Dr. Carol Brightling walked out of her office, turned left down the wide corridor, then left again and down the steps to her parked car. Twenty minutes later, she locked the car and walked up the steps of her apartment building, there to be greeted by the faithful Jiggs, who jumped into her arms and rubbed his furry head against her breast, as he always did. Her ten years of misery were over, and though the sacrifice had been hard to endure, the reward for it would be a planet turning back to green, and a Nature restored to Her deserved Glory.
It was somehow good to be back in New York. Though he didn’t dare to return to his apartment, this was at least a city, and here he could disappear as easily as a rat in a junkyard. He told the taxi driver to take him to Essex House, an upscale hotel on Central Park South, and there he checked in under the name of Joseph Demetrius. Agreeably, there was a minibar in his room, and he mixed a drink with two miniatures of an American brand of vodka, whose inferior taste he was too anxious to be concerned about. Then, having come to his decision, he called the airline to confirm flight information, checked his watch, then called the front desk and instructed the clerk there to give him a wake-up call at the hellish hour of 3:30 A.M. The Russian collapsed into the bed without undressing. He’d have to do some quick shopping in the morning, and also visit his bank to pull his Demetrius passport out of the safe-deposit box. Then he’d get five hundred dollars out of an ATM cash machine, courtesy of his Demetrius MasterCard, and he’d be safe . . . well, if not truly safe, then safer than he was now, enough to be somewhat confident in himself and his future, such as it was, if the Project could be stopped. And if not, he told himself behind closed and somewhat drunken eyes, then at least he’d know what to avoid in order to keep himself alive. Probably.
Clark awoke at his accustomed hour. JC was sleeping better now, after two weeks of life, and this morning he’d at least synchronized himself with the master of the house, John found, as he emerged from his morning shave to hear his grandson’s first wake-up chirps in the bedroom where he and Patsy were currently quartered. Sandy was awakened by the sounds, though she’d managed to ignore the alarm on John’s side of the bed, her maternal or grand-maternal instincts obviously having their own selective power. Clark headed down to the kitchen to flip on the coffee machine, then opened the front door to collect his morning copies of the Times, the Daily Telegraph, and the Manchester Guardian for his morning news brief. One thing about Brit papers, he’d learned, the quality of the writing was better than in most American newspapers, and the articles were rather more concise.
The little guy was growing, John told himself when Patsy came into the kitchen with JC affixed to her left breast and Sandy in tow behind. But his daughter wasn’t drinking coffee, evidently fearful that the caffeine might find its way into her breast milk. Instead she drank milk herself, while Sandy got breakfast going. John Conor Chavez was fully engaged with his breakfast, and in ten minutes, his grandfather was similarly engaged with his own, the radio now on a BBC channel to catch the morning news to supplement the print in front of him. Both modalities confirmed that the world was essentially at peace. The lead story was the Olympic Games, which Ding had reported on every night for them—the morning for him, all those time zones away—the reports usually ending with the phone held to JC’s little face so that his proud father might hear the mewings he occasionally made, though rarely on cue.
By 6:30, John was dressed and heading out the door, and this morning, unlike a few others, he drove to the athletic field for his morning exercises. The men of Team-1 were there, their numbers still short because of the losses at the hospital shoot-out, but proud and tough as ever. Sergeant First Class Fred Franklin led the team this morning, and Clark followed his instructions, not as ably as the younger men, but trying still to keep up, and so earn their respect if also a few disparaging looks at the old fart who thought he was something else. The also short-numbered Team-2 was at the other side of the field, led by Sergeant Major Eddie Price, John saw. Half an hour later, he showered again—doing so twice in ninety minutes almost every day had often struck him as strange, but the
wake-up shower was so firm a part of his life that he couldn’t dispense with it, and after working up a sweat with the troops, he always needed another. After that, dressed in his “boss’s” suit, he entered the headquarters building, checked the fax machine first, as always, and found a message from FBI headquarters that told him that nothing new had developed on the Serov case. A second fax told him that a package would be couriered to him early that morning from Whitehall, without saying exactly what it was. Well, John thought, flipping on the office coffee-drip machine, he’d find out in due course.
Al Stanley came in just before eight, still showing the effects of his wounds, but bouncing back well for a man of his age. Bill Tawney was in just two minutes later, and the senior leadership of Rainbow was in place for another working day.
The phone woke him up with a jolt. Popov reached for it in the darkness, missed, then reached again. “Yes.”
“It’s three-thirty, Mr. Demetrius,” the operator said.
“Yes, thank you,” Dmitriy Arkadeyevich replied, switching on the light and swiveling to get his feet on the carpeted floor. The note next to his phone told him how to dial the number he wanted: nine . . . zero-one-one-four four . . .
Alice Foorgate came in a few minutes early. She put her purse in a desk drawer and sat down, and began reviewing her notes on the things that were supposed to happen today. Oh, she saw, a budget meeting. Mr. Clark would be in a foul mood until after lunch. Then her phone rang.
“I need to speak to Mr. John Clark,” the voice said.
“May I tell him who’s calling?”
“No,” the voice said. “You may not.”
That made the secretary blink with puzzlement. She almost said that she could hardly forward a call under such circumstances, but didn’t. It was too early in the morning for unpleasantness. She placed the incoming call on hold and punched another button.