by Tom Clancy
“Too bad,” Dr. Archer agreed. She showed the emotion one might display on seeing a dead dog at the side of the road.
“Nice figure,” the man said, as the pajama tops came off. “I haven’t seen an X-rated movie in a long time, Barb.” A videotape was running, of course. The experimental protocol was set in stone. Everything had to be recorded so that the staff could monitor the entire test program. Nice tits, he thought, about the same time Chip did, right before he caressed them on the screen.
“She was fairly inhibited when she got here. The tranquilizers really work, depressing them that way.” Another clinical observation. Things progressed rapidly from that point on. Both doctors sipped their coffee as they watched. Tranquilizers or not, the baser human instincts charged forward, and within five minutes Chip and Mary were humping madly away, with the usual sound effects, though the picture, blessedly, wasn’t all that clear. A few minutes later, they were lying side by side on the thick shag rug, kissing tiredly and contentedly, his hand stroking her breasts, his eyes closed, his breathing deep and regular as he rolled onto his back.
“Well, Barb, if nothing else, we have a pretty good weekend getaway for couples here,” the man observed with a sly grin. “How long do you figure on his blood work?”
“Three or four days until he starts showing antibodies, probably.” Chip hadn’t been exposed in the shower as Mary had.
“What about the vaccine testers?”
“Five with -A. We have three left as uncontaminated controls for -B testing.”
“Oh? Who are we letting live?”
“M2, M3, and F9,” Dr. Archer replied. “They seem to have proper attitudes. One’s a member of the Sierra Club, would you believe? The others like it outdoors, and they should be okay with what we’re doing.”
“Political criteria for scientific tests—what are we coming to?” the man asked with another chuckle.
“Well, if they’re going to live, they might as well be people we can get along with,” Archer observed.
“True.” A nod. “How confident are you with -B?”
“Very. I expect it to be about ninety-seven percent effective, perhaps a little better,” she added conservatively.
“But not a hundred?”
“No, Shiva’s a little too nasty for that,” Archer told him. “The animal testing is a little crude, I admit, but the results follow the computer model almost exactly, well within the testing-error criteria. Steve’s been pretty good on that side.”
“Berg’s pretty smart,” the other doctor agreed. Then he shifted in his chair. “You know, Barb, what we’re doing here isn’t exactly—”
“I know that,” she assured him. “But we all knew that coming in.”
“True.” He nodded submission, annoyed at himself for the second thoughts. Well, his family would survive, and they all shared his love of the world and its many sorts of inhabitants. Still, these two people on the TV, they were humans, just like himself, and he’d just peeped in on them like some sort of pervert. Oh, yeah, they’d only done it because both were loaded with drugs fed to them through their food or in pill form, but they were both sentenced to death and—
“Relax, will you?” Archer said, looking at his face and reading his mind. “At least they’re getting a little love, aren’t they? That’s a hell of a lot more than the rest of the world’ll get—”
“I won’t have to watch them.” Being a voyeur wasn’t his idea of fun, and he’d told himself often enough that he wouldn’t have to watch what he’d be helping to start.
“No, but we’ll know about it. It’ll be on the TV news, won’t it? But then it will be too late, and if they find out, their last conscious act will be to come after us. That’s the part that has me worried.”
“The Project enclave in Kansas is pretty damned secure, Barb,” the man assured her. “The one in Brazil’s even more so.” Which was where he’d be going eventually. The rain forest had always fascinated him.
“Could be better,” Barbara Archer thought.
“The world isn’t a laboratory, doctor, remember?” Wasn’t that what the whole Shiva project was about, for Christ’s sake? Christ? he wondered. Well, another idea that had to be set aside. He wasn’t cynical enough to invoke the name of God into what they were doing. Nature, perhaps, which wasn’t quite the same thing, he thought.
“Good morning, Dmitriy,” he said, coming into his office early.
“Good morning, sir,” the intelligence officer said, rising to his feet as his employer entered the anteroom. It was a European custom, harkening back to royalty, and one that had somehow conveyed itself to the Marxist state that had nurtured and trained the Russian now living in New York.
“What do you have for me?” the boss asked, unlocking his office door and going in.
“Something very interesting,” Popov said. “How important it is I am not certain. You can better judge that than I can.”
“Okay, let’s see it.” He sat down and turned in his swivel chair to flip on his office coffee machine.
Popov went to the far wall, and slid back the panel that covered the electronics equipment in the woodwork. He retrieved the remote control and keyed up the large-screen TV and VCR. Then he inserted a videocassette.
“This is the news coverage of Bern,” he told his employer. The tape only ran for thirty seconds before he stopped it, ejected the cassette, and inserted another. “Vienna,” he said then, hitting the PLAY button. Another segment, which ran less than a minute. This he also ejected. “Last night at the park in Spain.” This one he also played. This segment lasted just over a minute before he stopped it.
“Yes?” the man said, when it was all over.
“What did you see, sir?”
“Some guys smoking—the same guy, you’re saying?”
“Correct. In all three incidents, the same man, or so it would appear.”
“Go on,” his employer told Popov.
“The same special-operations group responded to and terminated all three incidents. That is very interesting.”
“Why?”
Popov took a patient breath. This man may have been a genius in some areas, but in others he was a babe in the woods. “Sir, the same team responded to incidents in three separate countries, with three separate national police forces, and in all three cases, this special team took over from those three separate national police agencies and dealt with the situation. In other words, there is now some special internationally credited team of special-operations troops—I would expect them to be military rather than policemen—currently operating in Europe. Such a group has never been admitted to in the open press. It is, therefore, a ‘black’ group, highly secret. I can speculate that it is a NATO team of some sort, but that is only speculation. Now,” Popov went on, “I have some questions for you.”
“Okay.” The boss nodded.
“Did you know of this team? Did you know they existed?”
A shake of the head. “No.” Then he turned to pour a cup of coffee.
“Is it possible for you to find out some things about them?”
A shrug. “Maybe. Why is it important?”
“That depends on another question—why are you paying me to incite terrorists to do things?” Popov asked.
“You do not have a need to know that, Dmitriy.”
“Yes, sir, I do have such a need. One cannot stage operations against sophisticated opposition without having some idea of the overall objective. It simply cannot be done, sir. Moreover, you have applied significant assets to these operations. There must be a point. I need to know what it is.” The unspoken part, which got through the words, was that he wanted to know, and in due course, he might well figure it out, whether he was told or not.
It also occurred to his employer that his existence was somewhat in pawn to this Russian ex-spook. He could deny everything the man might say in an open public forum, and he even had the ability to make the man disappear, an option less attractive than it appeared
outside of a movie script, since Popov might well have told others, or even left a written record.
The bank accounts from which Popov had drawn the funds he’d distributed were thoroughly laundered, of course, but there was a trail of sorts that a very clever and thorough investigator might be able to trace back closely enough to him to cause some minor concern. The problem with electronic banking was that there was always a trail of electrons, and bank records were both time-stamped and amount-specific, enough to make some connection appear to exist. That could be an embarrassment of large or small order. Worse, it wasn’t something he could easily afford, but a hindrance to the larger mission now under way in places as diverse as New York, Kansas, and Brazil. And Australia, of course, which was the whole point of what he was doing.
“Dmitriy, will you let me think about that?”
“Yes, sir. Of course. I merely say that if you want me to do my job effectively, I need to know more. Surely you have other people in your confidence. Show these tapes to those people and see if they think the information is significant.” Popov stood. “Call me when you need me, sir.”
“Thanks for the information.” He waited for the door to close, then dialed a number from memory. The phone rang four times before it was answered:
“Hi,” a voice said in the earpiece. “You’ve reached the home of Bill Henriksen. Sorry, I can’t make it to the phone right now. Why don’t you try my office.”
“Damn,” the executive said. Then he had an idea, and picked up the remote for his TV. CBS, no, NBC, no . . .
“But to kill a sick child,” the host said on ABC’s Good Morning, America.
“Charlie, a long time ago, a guy named Lenin said that the purpose of terrorism was to terrorize. That’s who they are, and that’s what they do. It’s still a dangerous world out there, maybe even more so today that there are no nation-states who, though they used to support terrorists, actually imposed some restraints on their behavior. Those restraints are gone now,” Henriksen said. “This group reportedly wanted their old friend Carlos the Jackal released from prison. Well, it didn’t work, but it’s worth noting that they cared enough to try a classic terrorist mission, to secure the release of one of their own. Fortunately, the mission failed, thanks to the Spanish police.”
“How would you evaluate the police performance?”
“Pretty good. They all train out of the same playbook, of course, and the best of them cross-train at Fort Bragg or at Hereford in England, and other places, Germany and Israel, for example.”
“But one hostage was murdered.”
“Charlie, you can’t stop them all,” the expert said sadly. “You can be ten feet away with a loaded weapon in your hands, and sometimes you can’t take action, because to do so would only get more hostages killed. I’m as sickened by that murder as you are, my friend, but these people won’t be doing any more of that.”
“Well, thanks for coming in. Bill Henriksen, president of Global Security and a consultant to ABC on terrorism. It’s forty-six minutes after the hour.” Cut to commercial.
In his desk he had Bill’s beeper number. This he called, keying in his private line. Four minutes later, the phone rang.
“Yeah, John, what is it?” There was street noise on the cellular phone. Henriksen must have been outside the ABC studio, just off Central Park West, probably walking to his car.
“Bill, I need to see you in my office ASAP. Can you come right down?”
“Sure. Give me twenty minutes.”
Henriksen had a clicker to get into the building’s garage, and access to one of the reserved spaces. He walked into the office eighteen minutes after the call.
“What gives?”
“Caught you on TV this morning.”
“They always call me in on this stuff,” Henriksen said. “Great job taking the bastards down, least from what the TV footage showed. I’ll get the rest of it.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah, I have the right contacts. The video they released was edited down quite a bit. My people’ll get all the tapes from the Spanish—it isn’t classified in any way—for analysis.”
“Watch this,” John told him, flipping his office TV to the VCR and running the released tape of Worldpark. Then he had to rise and switch to the cassette of Vienna. Thirty seconds of that and then Bern. “So, what do you think?”
“The same team on all three?” Henriksen wondered aloud. “Sure does look like it—but who the hell are they?”
“You know who Popov is, right?”
Bill nodded. “Yeah, the KGB guy you found. Is he the guy who twigged to this?”
“Yep.” A nod. “Less than an hour ago, he was in here to show me these tapes. It worries him. Does it worry you?”
The former FBI agent grimaced. “Not sure. I’d want to know more about them first.”
“Can you find out?”
This time he shrugged. “I can talk to some contacts, rattle a few bushes. Thing is, if there is a really black special-ops team out there, I should have known about it already. I mean, I’ve got the contacts throughout the business. What about you?”
“I can probably try a few things, quietly. Probably mask it as plain curiosity.”
“Okay, I can check around. What else did Popov say to you?”
“He wants to know why I’m having him do the things.”
“That’s the problem with spooks. They like to know things. I mean, he’s thinking, what if he starts a mission and one of the subjects gets taken alive. Very often they sing like fucking canaries once they’re in custody, John. If one fingers him, he could be in the shitter. Unlikely, I admit, but possible, and spooks are trained to be cautious.”
“What if we have to take him out?”
Another grimace. “You want to be careful doing that, in case he’s left a package with a friend somewhere. No telling if he has, but I’d have to assume he’s done it. Like I said, they’re trained to be cautious. This operation is not without its dangers, John. We knew that going in. How close are we to having the technical—”
“Very close. The test program is moving along nicely. Another month or so and we’ll know all we need to know.”
“Well, all I have to do is get the contract for Sydney. I’m flying down tomorrow. These incidents won’t hurt.”
“Who will you be working with?”
“The Aussies have their own SAS. It’s supposed to be small—pretty well-trained, but short on the newest hardware. That’s the hook I plan to use. I got what they need, at cost,” Henriksen emphasized. “Run that tape again, the one of the Spanish job,” he said.
John rose from his desk, inserted the tape, and rewound it back to the beginning of the released TV coverage. It showed the assault team zip-lining down from the helicopter.
“Shit, I missed that!” the expert admitted.
“What?”
“We need to have the tape enhanced, but that doesn’t look like a police chopper. It’s a Sikorsky H-60.”
“So?”
“So, the -60 has never been certified for civilian use. See how it’s got POLICE painted on the side? That’s a civilian application. It isn’t a police chopper, John. It’s military . . . and if this is a refueling probe,” he said, pointing, “then it’s a special-ops bird. That means U.S. Air Force, man. That also tells us where these people are based—”
“Where?”
“England. The Air Force has a special-ops wing based in Europe, part in Germany, part in England . . . MH-60K, I think the designation of the chopper is, made for combat search-and-rescue and getting people into special places to do special things. Hey, your friend Popov is right. There is a special bunch of people handling these things, and they’ve got American support at least, maybe a lot more. Thing is, who the hell are they?”
“It’s important?”
“Potentially, yes. What if the Aussies call them in to help out on the job I’m trying to get, John? That could screw up the whole thing.”
“You r
attle your bushes. I’ll rattle mine.”
“Right.”
CHAPTER 17
BUSHES
Pete now had six friends in the treatment center. Only two of the subjects felt well enough now to remain in the open bay with the TV cartoons and the whiskey, and Killgore figured they’d be in here by the end of the week, so full was their blood with Shiva antibodies. It was odd how the disease attacked different people in such different ways, but everyone had a different immune system. That was why some people got cancer, and others did not despite smoking and other methods of self-abuse.
Aside from that, it was going easier than he’d expected. He supposed it was due to the high doses of morphine that had all of them pretty well zonked out. It was a relatively new discovery in medicine that there really wasn’t a maximum safe dosage of painkillers. If the patient still felt pain, you could give more until it went away. Dose levels that would cause respiratory arrest in healthy people were perfectly safe for those in great pain, and that made his job far easier. Every drug-dispensing machine had a button the subjects could hit if they needed it, and so they were medicating themselves into peaceful oblivion, which also made things safer for the staffs, who didn’t have to do all that many sticks. They hung nutrients on the trees, checked to make sure the IVs were secure, and avoided touching the subjects as much as possible. Later today, they’d all get injected with Vaccine-B, which was supposed to safeguard them against Shiva with a high degree of reliability—Steve Berg said 98 to 99 percent. They all knew that wasn’t the same as 100 percent, though, and so the protective measures would be continued.
Agreeably, there was little sympathy for the subjects. Picking winos off the street had been a good call. The next set of test subjects would appear more sympathetic, but everyone in this side of the building had been fully briefed. Much of what they did might be distasteful, but it would still be done.
“You know, sometimes I think the Earth First people are right,” Kevin Mayflower said in the Palm restaurant.