by Gregg Loomis
Jason handed it over. "Tell you what: you hold it till I come back through. If I have to kill someone, I'll do it with my bare hands."
"Thank you, sir." The man was clearly happy to be relieved of having to make a decision. "It'll be waiting for you."
As Jason stepped forward, there was a buzz, the snick of heavy bolts sliding, and the door on the other side of the room whirred open. A bank of two elevators faced him. Jason knew there were no buttons for selection of floors inside either. The cars moved at the direction of people elsewhere in the building.
Two floors up, another man greeted him with an expressionless face and voice to match. "This way, Mr. Peters."
Without waiting for a reply, he turned to precede Jason down a corridor flanked with steel doors.
The hall was deserted, filled with only the faint hum of electronic equipment and the sound of four shoes squeaking on linoleum. At the end a door swung open, throwing a beam of light into the otherwise dim hall. Framed in silhouette was a woman whose features appeared clearer as he drew close. Not old but not young, either. She wore listless brown hair in a bun behind her long, thin face.
She dismissed his escort and extended a slender hand to touch Jason's. The feel of her skin was as arid and cool as the first autumn breezes along the Potomac. She wore the fragrance he remembered, something that smelled of dried flowers.
"Bond, James Bond, to see M," he said in an overdone British accent.
She favored him with the threat of a smile. "Hello, Jason. Good to see you again. You're looking fit, all tan. The tropics must agree with you."
"Certainly more than Washington, Miss Tyson."
She clucked disapprovingly. "Now, now, Jason. We're happy to see you again."
He wondered if the pronoun included her boss. He had never known the boss to be happy about anything that didn't involve death, destruction, and mayhem of some sort.
"Nice to see you again, too."
Still holding his hand, she drew him across the threshold and the door silently swung shut.
Jason glanced around, noting the lack of change. The same bleak reception area, furnished with only a desk and secretarial chair that faced a worn leather couch. The walls were without windows or pictures. The room had the personality of a dial tone. He had often wondered how someone could spend time in such quarters, looking at nothing. Particularly if, as was the case with Miss Tyson, they never seemed to have anything to do. Perhaps she came in here only when her boss was expecting someone.
As though reading his thoughts, she pointed to the only wooden door he had seen in the building. "Go right in."
He knocked briskly, the comparatively mellow thump of wood somehow soothing after all the steel, and the door opened.
On the other side, the office was as lavish as Miss Tyson's space was spartan. Jason stepped onto the muted blues and reds of an antique Khurasan that cost more
than most houses. The rug's colors were softly repeated in four original Renoirs whose gilt frames hung on fabric wall covering. An Edwardian breakfront occupied most of the far wall, behind its rippled glass a collection of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century first editions. Floating on the rug's center medallion like a ship adrift, a mahogany partners' desk was topped with hand-tooled, gold-edged
Behind the desk sat an enormous black woman clad in a flowing caftan with an African print. With a hand the size of a catcher's mitt, she held the receiver of the telephone that was the only item on the desk. With the other, she motioned Jason into one of four Scalamandre silk wing chairs arranged in a semicircle in front of her.
He was unable to understand the language she was speaking, but, from the rare familiar word and hand gestures that accompanied each utterance, he guessed it was some dialect of Arabic or Farsi. He sat and waited.
Jason had to smile as he watched her, the ultimate minority-business-program beneficiary. An emigre from Haiti, she was simultaneously black, female, and non-Christian, embracing a belief in the African gods of voodoo and Santeria. She was the poster girl for politicians espousing egalitarianism above all. Unlike many such recipients of government largesse, however, she had qualifications beyond race, sex, and religion. As former second in command of her native land's Tonton Macoute, she was skilled at interrogation, torture, assassination, and manipulation of the political process, a resume the awareness of which no elected official could admit. Had anyone demurred at the government doing business with a person previously associated with an organization whose brutality made Hitler's Gestapo look like Boy Scouts, he would have been denounced not only as a racial and religious bigot, but sexist as well.
She served her only client well and was generously
compensated for taking on unsavory tasks to which no democratically elected government could admit, but which no government, democratic or otherwise, could do without. Any scruples she possessed related only to her "boys" and to the proper preparation of the fiery Creole cuisine of her homeland. Dealing with the nation's enemies of today required an unrelenting barbarity that made congressional stomachs churn. Narcom, Inc., provided the political antacid of deniability.
It was a marriage made perhaps not in heaven, but strong nonetheless.
In less than a minute she hung up and came around the desk. Jason stood to receive a hug that might have crushed the lungs of a man less fit.
"Jason! Good to see you again; always good to see one of Mama's boys!"
Mama's boys, the name she gave all her operatives, although Jason had met very few. By its nature, Narcom's business was strictly compartmentalized.
She relaxed her embrace, allowing Jason to draw a breath before he sat down. She returned to her chair behind the desk before speaking.
"How you doin' on that island of yours?"
"I'm not there anymore. I had some visitors."
As he related what had happened, she nodded. "Uh-huh. You stirred a stick in a bees' nest when you did Alazar down there in St. Bart's."
"You know that wasn't my fault. Whoever mixed the tranquilizing solution overdid it."
"I know, but somebody doesn't. Not that it matters. One less of those animals. I would have liked to ask him a few questions, though."
Alazar was fortunate, Jason thought, to be dead.
Mama continued. "Sounds like six bad guys won't be a problem anymore."
"At the cost of a damn nice house," Jason grumbled.
"With what you get paid, you can afford it," she said amicably. "But that's not why I invited you here."
She reached into a desk drawer and handed him a sheet of paper. On it was a series of lines in what Jason recognized as Russian. "This came off the computer you sent me, the one you took from Alazar."
Jason stared at the paper, unable to even guess what it was. "I speak a little Russian, but I don't read it."
Mama took the paper back. "Appears to be some sort of shopping list, an order for something that he supplied that was successfully used by the customer; refers to a type of new weapon. From the context, military intelligence thinks it's some sort of biochemical warfare, since it refers to 'containers.'" She wrinkled a brow. "Also talks about 'keeping it healthy,' like some sort of microbe."
The most oxymoronic of all government bureaucracy: military intelligence.
Right up there with legal ethics.
Jason leaned back in the chair, crossing his legs at the ankles. "And?"
The woman on the other side of the desk shook her head reproachfully, sending gold chandelier earrings flashing with reflected light. "I'll get there, Jason; just show me the courtesy of listening. Thing that got the attention over to Langley was the date this new whatever-it- is was used, last June."
Jason swallowed the urge to ask a number of questions, knowing Mama would answer most of them in her own way and in her own time.
"Last June, one of our coast guard boats in the Bering Sea found a Russian trawler, one of those supersize fishing boats. The whole crew had had their throats cut."
Jason h
unched forward in his chair, impatient to get to the point. "So? We're not in the business of protecting foreign fishing boats, particularly those poaching in our waters like I'd bet that one was."
Mama nodded, multiple chins shaking. "Jason, you just
won't wait, will you? Whatever happened to manners? Anyway, this Russian trawler was just the beginning. Since then, there've been loggers in Georgia, a team of geologists looking for possible oil off Florida's west coast, an Indian chemical plant executive and his whole family, a Polish coal mine owner and ..." She stopped and took a deep breath. "You get the idea. All found with their throats cut, no sign of any resistance."
Jason leaned back, letting the chair's softness envelop him. "Overfishing, timber cutting, petroleum exploration ... All ecological hot buttons. We've seen people chain themselves to trees, lie down in front of earth movers, even blow up some labs where animal experimentation is going on. But murder?"
"Not the first time. There've been occasional acts of violence by the lunatic fringe. This time, though, it looks like a well-organized, concerted effort."
"And why does the client want to dump this in our lap?"
"I don't ask questions, Jason. I just take the money and perform the service. That's part of the company's success. If I had to guess, though, I'd say the present administration doesn't want to get involved with anything looks like opposition to environmental causes, even violent ones. This is, after all, right before an election year, and the president isn't the tree kissers' hero. On the other hand, the Feds can't just sit by while people get killed."
Jason thought that over. Made sense. "And none of them seemed to put up a fight? I mean, someone was trying to give me that close a shave, I'd at least try."
"That's part of the problem."
"Or a clue." Jason uncrossed his legs and sat up straight. "Any idea why they didn't put up a fight? Drugs, poison?"
Mama placed the report on her desk, sausagelike fingers squaring the edges. "Not a glimmer. Autopsies on the Russian crew and the loggers were no help. Only thing unusual was that each person had a slight amount of sul- fates in the lungs and bloodstream, probably less than they would have inhaled from auto exhausts in any large city. And ethylene gas in the lung tissues."
"There aren't any cities in the Bering Sea. And what, exactly, is ethylene?"
"Dunno. Part of your job's gonna be to find out." She slipped the report across the desk. "Take this with you. It's classified, of course."
"Of course." Jason would not have been surprised if the people at Langley classified their grocery lists.
"That's jus' a summary. They got a complete one they'll deliver to you, a report on 'the Breath of the Earth.'"
"The Breath of...?"
"Breath of the Earth. At least, that's how the note on Alazar's computer refers to whatever it is."
Jason recrossed his legs, this time at the knee. "Breath of the Earth, sulfur, ethylene ... sounds more like halitosis to me. But then, halitosis is better than no breath at all."
Mama leaned forward, the desk groaning under her bulk. "Make all the jokes you like; our client takes this very, very seriously."
"So, you want me to do what?"
Mama shrugged. "First, we need to ascertain exactly what happened to those men on the fishing boat, the loggers, the others, see if there's any threat in this Breath of the Earth, whatever it might be. Then destroy it and whoever is using it."
"I don't suppose we have a name, an idea of who's behind this?"
Mama leaned farther forward, her elbows on the desk. "Matter of fact, we have an idea."
"Want to share it, or you'd rather I find out myself?"
She slowly shook her head in disapproval. "Sarcasm doesn't become you, Jason. There's an organization—if you can call it that—called Eco. Maybe you didn't know it, but the various conservationist groups around the world raise more money than the economy of a lot of
third-world countries. Eco has gotten rich from unwitting but well-meaning green groups. Every concert in Japan to cease whaling operations, every T-shirt sold in Germany bearing the Grün logo, every contribution to a conservationist cause, even the sale of some ecology-friendly devices such as recycling bins and biodegradable trash bags, Eco gets a cut, either by contract or just plain, old- fashioned extortion. You know, 'We'll "guarantee" your rally for the three-toed tree frog will be peaceful' et cetera.
"Eco's agenda, so far as we can tell, certainly includes the industries where people have been killed, and they have the money. We don't have anything more concrete than that."
"So, why not infiltrate and see what they're up to?"
"Easier said. They don't have members in the conventional sense. The only reason they came to our client's attention was a large transfer of cash to Alazar's Swiss account from a number of banks around the world, all within twenty-four hours."
Although the Swiss still prided themselves on bank secrecy, they could do nothing to prevent a record of any wire transfer of funds by SWIFT, Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications, the Brussels- based clearing center for all electronic transfers. Most of the world, including international criminals, were ignorant of SWIFT's existence or its post-9/11 cooperation with the CIA, FBI, Interpol, and other agencies. Fortunately, so were American politicians, whose rush to expose the arrangement in televised displays of righteous indignation would have compounded the country's security problems.
"And the CIA traced those accounts."
Mama treated him to another gleaming grin. "Anytime that much money changes hands, they know about it."
And the American people still thought privacy existed.
"Anything else?"
"Running some cross-checks, our customer believes
Eco is run by a man name of Boris Eglov and some buddies from the Russian Mafia. They have the money to finance something like this but haven't been heard from since the Russian police were hot on their trail a few years back. Not likely they all became honest businessmen."
"They don't get involved in causes other than their own pocketbooks. What's in it for them besides skimming and
"Most of the ecology-friendly groups are honest and nonviolent, but the word gets around when Eco strikes a real blow—something other than chaining little old ladies to bulldozers. You'd be surprised how many activists secretly cheer them on. After the murders on that fishing boat, contributions jumped forty percent to worldwide causes—and Eco gets a cut, remember. They want that sort of cash. Also, when Eglov was running black-market fencing and extortion schemes in Moscow, he was fanatic on the subject of the ecology. May have something to do with the fact that his parents and younger sister died from radiation at Chernobyl when the nuclear plant blew. He's suspected of personally strangling two of the surviving plant managers with his own hands."
Jason was impressed. "You've done your homework."
She reached into the same drawer and slid two sheets of paper across the desk. "I try. Here's what our friends in
Jason studied the picture stapled to the top right-hand corner of the first page. Though the image was grainy, he saw a broad-shouldered man with a shaved head. The eyes were hooded, slightly Oriental, while the rest of the face had a Slavic flatness. Below was a list of attributed crimes. Murder in one form or another was the most frequent offense, with strong-arm extortion or robbery a
"I'm surprised they let a guy like this stay on the
"You'll notice he wasn't convicted of any of those charges."
"I also notice a high mortality rate of witnesses."
"Some people are just lucky."
"Not if the police want you to testify against this guy."
Jason finished the list. "Professional criminal, vegetarian, and passionate friend of the environment. Somehow it doesn't seem to add up."
Mama retrieved the papers and returned them to the drawer. "What? You saying a criminal can't be a nature lover? Seems to me the man has set up a worldwide scam of conservation organiz
ations to fund his own agenda."
Jason groaned. "You're saying we're dealing with an idealist here, someone who kills in pursuit of his own Utopian ideals. Or, not to put too fine a point on it, a nutcase."
"Perhaps, but a deadly one."
Jason stood, circling his chair. "The customer didn't hire us to do a job unless they need to be able to deny any involvement. What is it you're not telling me?"
The woman's eyes widened with mock surprise. "Are you suggesting I wouldn't tell you everything?"
"Not suggesting—clearly stating. Come clean; what's the hitch?"
Mama put her hands on the desk, fingers interlocked. "If we are talking about a chemical agent here, chances are Alazar's buddies didn't manufacture it—at least, not in his part of the world. Not much chance of setting up a laboratory when you're on the run."
"So, our clients figure whatever it was, it was concocted somewhere else, maybe some sovereign nation that might just resent foreigners conducting an operation on their soil."
Mama nodded. "You're smart, Jason. Looks like mebbe Langley finally figured out the sovereignty thing."
Both remembered the international outcry raised when an undetermined number of CIA operatives had snatched
a terrorist suspect right off the streets of Milan. The Italian authorities had indicted six names on credit card receipts that indicated the kidnappers were American. Luck, rather than tradecraft, had stymied the prosecution when no real people could be matched with the credit cards. The only clue to surface so far was the fact that the cards involved were all Diners Club, a less than helpful discovery, even if the CitiCorp card did constitute less than three percent of the world's credit card charges.
Jason walked over to study one of the Renoirs, a woman lounging in the bow of a boat being rowed by a man in shirtsleeves and a straw hat. He was forever fascinated by the works of the earlier impressionists, pictures more likely created with palette knife than brush. At a few feet, the subject was clear. At close range, the whole thing dissolved into meaningless globs of paint. Only one of many things that didn't withstand minute inspection at Narcom.