“They fulfilled their assignment,” the little man in the control station replied over their connection. “The proof is that you’re alive right now.”
“Are you out of your mind? I was handling things with Enrique. Talking to him. I never gave you the goddamned word—”
“It would be better if you could give me some respect. Quiros had people in the bushes ahead of you. I saw at least one of them holding a gun.”
Salazar’s brow wrinkled.
“Hold it a second,” he said. “Are you sure?”
“I know my job. Should I have waited until you reached those men? Let them make their move? If I’d done that, you’d be the one laying in your own blood right now.”
Not quite knowing how to respond, Salazar got off the phone and sat quietly as his driver turned toward the highway. In a way, the brief conversation had left him more confused than before. Looking back upon everything that had happened in the past half hour, remembering Quiros’s words to him, he had to admit that Quiros had seemed to genuinely believe it was the Salazar family that off’ed his bastardo nephew. And then there were his comments about making amends, which in hindsight also had sounded like they might have been sincere. On the other hand, Quiros had set a trap for him along the path, assuming the sniper boss had been on the level... and what would he have to gain from bullshitting about that?
The lines on Salazar’s forehead grew deeper. He supposed it didn’t pay to start entertaining second thoughts at this late stage. The best thing for him was probably to be thankful he was still in one piece, and move on. But questions of what Quiros had or hadn’t known—or done—kept gnawing at him. Because if there was even a speck of truth in the words he’d spoken before he was killed, it would cast serious doubt upon the reliability of Lathrop’s information. And then you’d have to start asking how Lathrop could have gotten it so wrong, and wondering about his motivations, his intentions ...
The Cadillac was swinging onto the entrance ramp to I-5, heading north to Del Mar, where the timed explosive charge beneath its fuel tank suddenly detonated with a crumping blast, sending a burst of flame through its interior, its force punching out metal, blowing out both windshields and three of its four side windows, instantly killing Lucio Salazar, his driver, and the bodyguards who had been riding inside with them—leaving Salazar’s questions to vaporize in the smoke and superheated air.
But then, in matters of life and death, one could very rarely expect to receive all the answers.
Ricci’s hand went to his Five-Seven, drew the pistol from its holster even as he turned fast at the hip and looked behind him.
The man standing there was dressed entirely in black, regarding him with sharp, intelligent eyes. His hands were straight down at his sides. One was empty. The other held a square, flat object that Ricci would have immediately recognized as a CD gem case had the setting been different. In the context of his present situation, it took him a second or two.
He studied the man’s face. If the gun Ricci was pointing at him gave him any fear, he showed no sign of it.
“Who are you?” Ricci said.
The man tilted his head up a little, his lips parting, seeming for the briefest of moments to gaze past Ricci into the night sky. Then he locked eyes with him. “One Who Knows,” he said. “But I’ll bet you already have that figured out.”
Ricci’s gun was steady in his grip. But it felt suddenly cold. “Tell me what the hell you want.”
The man shook his head. “It’s what you want that’s important, and I’ve got it right in my hand.” He lifted the gem case from his side, held it out toward Ricci. “Take it. Poor Enrique here’s a dead end, so you’d might as well. What’s there to lose? Maybe you’ll feel you owe me one. But that will be up to you.”
Silence.
Ricci did not move for a long moment. Then he slowly reached out to the man and took the case from him, keeping his gun trained on his chest.
The man’s hand dropped back to his side. “I’m going to steal away into the night now,” he said. “Just tell me I don’t have to worry about you putting a slug into me for some odd reason.”
Ricci was still watching his eyes. “You already have that figured,” he said.
The man smiled and dipped his head in a gesture that almost resembled a bow.
“Be careful now,” he said.
Then the man turned and walked into the darkness, heading toward a nearby footpath, disappearing into the shadows beneath the trees rising tall on either side of it, leaving Ricci crouched over the body of Enrique Quiros, alone in the silent green, one hand around his gun, the other holding tightly on to a mystery.
TWENTY-THREE
VARIOUS LOCALES NOVEMBER 17, 2001
THE CAPACITY TO BALANCE EMOTIONS THAT WOULD seem bound for shattering collision is a wonder of the human heart.
They had gathered in this room more times than any of them could recall. UpLink International was a vast organization with interests in many countries that were only an armed or political power play away from disintegration, and its very presence in those unstable regions often threw it into the center of violent conflict. In this room, they had plotted strategies and determined their reactions to swiftly unfolding crises in Afghanistan, Turkey, Russia, Malaysia, Brazil... even to a terrorist strike that had killed thousands in America’s largest metropolis. In this room, with its steel-reinforced concrete walls, its embedded sound-masking equipment, its bug detectors, phone and fax encryptors, and myriad other surveillance countermeasure systems, they had felt able to deliberate and exchange intelligence with an unexceeded level of privacy. Reserved for UpLink’s inner circle, it had been their closed chamber, their sanctum sanctorum. But, though their minds told them to trust Phil Hernandez’s assurances that its security remained intact, their hearts would permit no such confidence. How could they, after a hands-on custodian of their privacy had become their worst betrayer?
In the confines of this windowless room one level below the lobby of their San Jose headquarters, UpLink’s inner circle had gathered around Roger Gordian like knights at a modern round table, dedicated to helping him shape his dream of a freer, better world, offering him the sum of their insight, expertise, and counsel at moments of urgent decision. Now his chair at the table was vacant, and their hearts ached from his absence. How could they not, when it was his vision and strength of character that gave them inspiration? Yet somehow the members of this group took comfort in simply being here together, with their wide diversity of backgrounds and personalities, consolidated around a shared goal, determined to prevail over the challenges they faced. And stirring in the hearts of several of them—deeper in some than others—was an embryonic awareness that if the unthinkable did happen to Roger Gordian and his chair were to remain empty, one of their number had the attributes to pick up his fallen standard and guide them on toward the further realization of his dream.
“Now that everybody’s arrived, I think we’d better get the meeting under way,” Megan Breen said. She looked around the large conference table at Nimec, Scull, Ricci, Thibodeau, and finally at the morning’s unexpected visitor. “Alex, it’s good to see you back, these god-awful circumstances aside.”
He gave her a somber but genuine smile. A lean, fit, smartly dressed man in his late forties whose corrective laser eye surgery had made his once-familiar wire glasses a memory, Nordstrum had been UpLink’s chief foreign affairs consultant before his retirement for personal reasons the year before.
“I just wish I could have returned sooner,” he said. “Gord’s fighting for his life, and I’m off trekking in Morocco, footloose and oblivious.”
“Bad things can happen, Alex,” she said, “whether you’re here or gone. That’s life.”
“Maybe,” he said. “And maybe I’m finished with being gone.”
Megan’s was less of a true response than a signal she wanted to get down to business. They had much to cover, and the clock was ticking.
“We’ve all
seen the information on the compact disk Tom brought back from San Diego, and it’s an incredible amount to digest,” she said. “I’d hoped to organize the material in a report or have something ready on the digital projector. But there wasn’t a chance, so I had to settle for an old-fashioned chalkboard and pointer.” Megan paused and gestured at the transparent clamp binders she’d given to each of them. “As everyone can see, I did manage to make up printed transcripts of the audio portion of the carousel surveillance and the conversation between Quiros and Palardy.”
“We don’t need to get too fancy,” Ricci said. “With what Nameless gave me in Balboa Park, the threads are pretty easy to follow.”
“Some blanks gonna have to be filled in before we can do the boss any good,” Thibodeau said. “Otherwise it une cargaison. Not a cargo, but a load, y‘hear what I’m sayin’.”
Alex was nodding his agreement. “It’s like what I used to drum into the heads of my journalism undergrads. The six questions that are critical to any story,” he said. “Who, what, when, where, why, and how. We’ve gotten partial answers to most of them. We can make some fair guesses about the rest. But we need to find out more. And decide what needs to be found out first.”
“No argument from me,” Nimec said. “But before that, I figure it might pay for us to go through a quick rundown of everything we know.”
“Yeah,” Ricci said. “Starting with the blonde.”
He motioned toward the green chalkboard on the wall behind Megan.
Written on it in her hand was:
Megan went to the board, lifted her pointer, and held its tip to the line of aliases beneath the second arrow.
“The blonde it is,” she said. “The digital video we acquired from Nameless, as Tom calls him, establishes that she gave Quiros what Eric Oh believes to be some sort of activator for the viral agent—”
“This is from Quiros-Palardy, correct?” Nordstrum said. He was flipping through his copy of the transcript. “Apologies, everyone, but I’m still playing catch-up...”
“Yes,” Megan said. “We can guess the conversation occurred when Quiros passed along the activator to Palardy.” She had moved her pointer down one line. “Some of our major unanswered questions still revolve around how Roger contracted the dormant virus and who else might be carrying it. Eric’s working with the Sobel gene tech people to assure that we’ll have a rapid screening test for the germ very soon. It’s frightening to contemplate, but virtually all of us could have been infected ... you being the least likely, Alex, having been overseas. Which I hope won’t set you on a guilt jag again.”
He produced another wan smile. “And the activator?”
“A separate problem,” she said. “Unless Quiros was selling Palardy a complete load, we know they can be designed or adapted for individual targets. There were mentions of an ampule and liquid, so the assumption is that it was dispensed with a syringe. Injected into something Roger ate or drank. It would be a huge benefit to obtain a specimen of the activator Palardy slipped Roger. And we’re trying.”
“That what those guys in space suits are doing in the boss’s office this morning?” Scull said.
Megan nodded. “And in the cafeteria, and kitchen, and anywhere else in the building that edibles and drinkables might be kept,” she said. “I had a phone conversation with Eric at the crack of dawn, and he gave me some of the basics of viral biology. Most of it was leagues above my head. This is probably a terrible oversimplification, but from what I gather, viruses infect other living organisms by producing molecular proteins that let them fasten on to and penetrate the outer surfaces of the target cells. Eric thinks whoever designed the bug started out with a hantavirus, or something close, and modified it in important ways. We can’t know how many, but one of them allows it to be transmitted to humans by some route other than contact with rodents. Another presumably keeps it quiescent until the activator causes the release of binding and entry proteins. If we determine the activator, the scientists should be able to analyze its chemical makeup and learn what starts the bugs incubating. And how they attack their victims.”
“One thing,” Scull said. “How do we know Quiros didn’t sell Palardy a bill of goods about the activator? Don exposed the boss to it. Now he’s history. And the morgue docs haven’t come up with any results that show violent death. Or poisoning. From what they’ve told us, it looks like his heart gave out from the disease—”
“That’s only half accurate, Vince,” Nimec said. “The investigators know his heart quit on him. Period. There are poisons that can simulate a coronary seizure, and some of them are hard to detect. Especially when the vic’s system is already a mess from his sickness. The toxicologists still haven’t completed their batteries.”
“Even so,” Scull said, “if Quiros wanted him out of the picture, he wasn’t going to warn him about it. No matter what killed Palardy, the fact is he was infected. It could be that the activator’s one-size-fits-all. It could be the virus is what changes from person to person. Or could be neither of them does. I’m not trying to get us confused, but we’ve gotta be careful about our assumptions. It could make a difference, as far as finding a cure for the boss.”
Megan nodded. “You’re right,” she said. “We’re not taking anything for granted. On a kind of reverse track, Eric’s team has already begun tests on Don Palardy’s blood and tissue specimens. And they’re working with Peruvian medical authorities to get hold of any remaining samples taken from Alberto Colon. Once they do a comparison study of viruses that infected and killed them—and we’re really just speculating about Colón on this one, since there’s lots about the circumstances of his death that his government has kept filtered—they’ll know more about the processing mechanism that creates the binder cells.”
“The blonde,” Ricci said. He had been listening silently for a while. “We should get back to her.”
Megan turned to him. “Yes, we should,” she said. “And not just because she’s easy.”
They exchanged glances. She wasn’t smiling. But the flicker of amusement in her eyes told Ricci the pun had been intentional, and he was surprised to realize it had brightened his mood a little.
“Here’s the score,” she said, bringing the pointer up to the board again, moving it between the blonde’s various chalked-on pseudonyms and Quiros’s name. “The Balboa park carousel surveillance obviously ties the woman to Enrique Quiros. But Quiros-Palardy ties both of them to Brazil.... What’s the exact quote in the transcripts?”
Ricci picked up and opened his binder, scanning its pages as he turned them.
“Here, it’s in the middle of page thirty, Quiros talking,” he said after a few seconds. Then he read: “ ‘When you wanted money to pay off gambling debts in Cuiaba, you were glad to sell off confidential information about the layout and security of an installation that it was your job to protect.’ ”
“Quote unquote,” Megan said.
“Yeah,” Ricci said. “Small world.”
Her pointer moved up to the second name from the top. “We know Brazil equals the Wildcat,” she said. “That comment alone would give us a clear idea who sent the blonde to Quiros. But we’ve also got what our computers kicked out on her when we layered Profiler over the NCIC database.” She looked at Nimec. “Pete, you were at your computer early doing the search. Might as well give us a summary.”
“Our blonde’s a terrorist groupie; we all know the type,” he said. “Into bad boys and pretty things. She’s been detained for questioning by everyone from Europol to the Canadian Duddlies, but nothing’s ever been pinned on her. More often than not, she’s stayed under the radar. The FBI’s tracked her movements with some degree of consistency, but they’ve kept her dossier restricted. Who knows why. Maybe the usual proprietary reasons, distrust of other agencies—”
“They’ve shared it with us, Pete,” Megan said. “We shouldn’t forget that.”
Nimec made a slight face. “No, we shouldn‘t,” he said. “Anyway, the feebs
figure her for a runner of supplies and messages. When she first caught their eye in ’99, she was running with Amir Mamula, an Algerian resident of Montreal who’s been connected to the Groupes Islamique Armes, or GIA. That’s the same group that did the Air Paris hijack in Morocco a year later, where the Wildcat got vogued by the French diplomat. After Mamula lost his shine, our gal was scoped loving the nightlife with a parade of other top-dog narcos and terrorists. Changed her hair color, visited the plastic surgeon for some fine-tuning on her facial appearance. Boob job, needless to say. And those pseudonyms on the chalkboard are only the latest in an ongoing series. About a month ago, she went on a romp around the world using the Melina Laval handle. Europe, Latin America, Canada. I should mention that there have been a lot of hops to Canada. Eight, ten over the past half year.”
“Whereabouts?” Nordstrum asked.
“Mostly western Ontario. Quebec once... days before she showed in San Diego,” Nimec said. “That’s when she dropped off the screen again. Probably also got finished being Melina Laval.”
Nordstrum’s brow furrowed.
“Tell us what’s brewing, Alex,” Megan said.
His eyes traveled around the conference table. “Is it fair to say everyone here’s thinking we should look very closely at Canada as the site of the bioagent production facility?”
Nods.
“Okay,” he said. “Back when I was with the State Department, what made it difficult or impossible to prove foreign governments or militant groups were involved in the manufacture of biological weapons was the dual-use applications of the production technologies. Centrifugal separators, fermenters, freeze dryers, BL4 containment equipment, even known pathogens and toxins, are all readily available on the export market for legitimate medical, agricultural, and industrial purposes. We knew who was buying the stuff for the wrong reasons. But you can imagine the problems we confronted trying to argue our case before the UN Security Council, some of whose member nations were among the very ones hiding bioweapons programs.”
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