by Tom Clancy
The important thing at the moment was that this national counterterror outfit was a potential danger. What if they deployed to Melbourne? Would that hurt anything? It surely wouldn’t help, especially if there was an FBI agent on the team. He’d spent fifteen years in the Bureau, and Henriksen was under no illusions about those men and women. They had eyes that could see and brains that could think, and they looked into everything. And so, his strategy to raise the world’s consciousness of the terrorist threat, and so help himself get the Melbourne job, might have gone an unplanned step further. Damn. But the Law of Unintended Consequences could hit anyone, couldn’t it? That’s why he was in the loop, because it was his job to deal with the unintended things. And so here he was, still in the intelligence-gathering mode. He needed to learn more. The really bad news was that he had to fly off to Australia in less than a day, and would himself be unable to do any more gathering. Well. He’d have dinner tonight with his boss to pass along what he knew, and maybe that ex-KGB guy on the payroll could take it a little further. Damned sure he’d performed pretty well to this point. A pipe smoker. It never ceased to amaze Henriksen how such little things could break open a case. You just had to keep your head up and eyes open.
“The Interleukin isn’t doing anything,” John Killgore said, looking away from the monitor. The screen of the electron microscope was clear. The Shiva strands were reproducing merrily away, devouring healthy tissue in the process.
“So?” Dr. Archer asked.
“So, that’s the only treatment option I was worried about: -3a is an exciting new development, but Shiva just laughs at it and moves on. This is one scary little mother of a bug, Barb.”
“And the subjects?”
“I was just in there. Pete’s a goner, so are the rest. The Shiva’s eating them up. They all have major internal bleeds, and nothing is stopping the tissue breakdown. I’ve tried everything in the book. These poor bastards wouldn’t be getting better treatment at Hopkins, Harvard, or the Mayo Clinic, and they’re all going to die. Now,” he allowed, “there will be some whose immune systems can deal with it, but that’s going to be pretty damned rare.”
“How rare?” she asked the epidemiologist.
“Less than one in a thousand, probably, maybe one in ten thousand. Even the pneumonic variant of plague doesn’t kill everybody,” he reminded her. That was about the most lethal disease on the planet, and allowed only one in ten thousand to survive. Some people, she knew, had immune systems that killed everything that didn’t belong. Those were the ones who lived to a hundred years of age or so. It had nothing to do with smoking, not smoking, having a drink in the morning, or any of the other rubbish they published in the papers as the secret of living forever. It was all in the genes. Some were better than others. It was that simple.
“Well, that’s not really something to worry about, is it?”
“World population is between five and six billion now. That’s a little more than five times ten to the ninth people, subtract four orders from that and you have something on the order of five times ten to the fifth survivors. Figure a few hundred thousand who might not like us very much.”
“Spread all over the world,” Barbara told him. “Not organized, needing leadership and scientific knowledge to help them survive. How will they even connect? The only eight hundred people surviving in New York? And what about the diseases that come with all those deaths? The best immune system in the world can’t protect you against them.”
“True,” Killgore conceded. Then he smiled. “We’re even improving the breed, aren’t we?”
Dr. Archer saw the humor of that. “Yes, John, we are. So, Vaccine-B is ready?”
He nodded. “Yes, I had my injection a few hours ago. Ready for yours?”
“And -A?”
“In the freezer, ready for mass production as soon as people need it. We’ll be able to turn it out in thousand-liter lots per week when we have to. Enough to cover the planet,” he told her. “Steve Berg and I worked that out yesterday.”
“Can anybody else—”
“No way. Not even Merck can move that fast—and even if they did, they’d have to use our formula, wouldn’t they?”
That was the ultimate hook. If the plan to spread Shiva around the globe didn’t work as well as hoped, then the entire world would be given Vaccine-A, which Antigen Laboratories, a division of The Horizon Corp., just happened to be working on as part of its corporate effort to help the Third World, where all the hemorrhagic fevers lived. A fortunate accident, albeit one already known in the medical literature. Both John Killgore and Steve Berg had published papers on these diseases, which had been made quite high-profile by the big scare America and the world had gone through not so long before. So, the medical world knew that Horizon/Antigen was working in this area, and wouldn’t be surprised to learn that there was a vaccine in the works. They’d even test the vaccines in laboratories and find that, sure enough, the liquid had all manner of antibodies. But they’d be the wrong antibodies, and the live-virus vaccine would be a death sentence to anyone who had it enter his system. The time from injection to onset of frank symptoms was programmed at four to six weeks, and, again, the only survivors would be those lucky souls from the deepest end of the gene pool. One hundred such people out of a million would survive. Maybe less. Ebola-Shiva was one nasty little bastard of a bug, three years in the making, and how odd, Killgore thought, that it had been that easy to construct. Well, that was science for you. Gene manipulation was a new field, and those things were unpredictable. The sad part, maybe, was that the same people in the same lab were charging along a new and unexpected path—human longevity— and reportedly making real progress. Well, so much the better. An extended life to appreciate the new world that Shiva would bring about.
And the breakthroughs wouldn’t stop. Many on the select list to receive Vaccine-B were scientists. Some of them wouldn’t like the news, when they were told, but they’d have little choice, and being scientists, they’d soon get back to their work.
Not everyone in the Project approved. Some of the radical ones actually said that bringing physicians along was contrary to the nature of the mission—because medicine didn’t allow nature to take her course. Sure, Killgore snorted to himself. Fine, they’d let those idiots have their babies in farm fields after a morning’s plowing or hunter-gathering, and soon enough those ideologues would breed themselves out. He planned to study and enjoy nature, but he’d do so wearing shoes and a jacket to keep the chill out. He planned to remain an educated man, not revert to the naked ape. His mind wandered. . . . There’d be a division of labor, of course. Farmers to grow the food and tend the cattle they’d eat—or hunters to shoot the buffalo, whose meat was healthier, lower in cholesterol. The buffalo should come back pretty fast, he thought. Wheat would continue to grow wild in the Great Plains, and they’d grow fat and healthy, especially since their predators had been so ruthlessly hunted down that they’d be slower to catch up. Domestic cattle would thrive also, but they’d ultimately be edged out by the buffalo, a much hardier breed better suited to free life. Killgore wanted to see that, see the vast herds that had once covered the West. He wanted to see Africa, too.
That meant that the Project needed airplanes and pilots. Horizon already had its own collection of G-V business jets, capable of spanning most of the world, and so they’d also need small teams of people to manage and maintain a few airports—Zambia, for instance. He wanted to see Africa wild and free. That would take perhaps ten years to come about, Killgore estimated, and it wasn’t all that big a deal. AIDS was killing off that continent at a nasty pace, and Shiva would only make it go faster, and so the Dark Continent would again be free of man, and he’d be able to go there and observe nature in all her glory . . . and maybe shoot a lion to make a rug for his home in Kansas? Some of the people in the Project would raise pure fucking hell over that, but what was one lion more or less? The Project would be saving hundreds of thousands of them, perhaps millions
, free to roam and hunt in their prides. What a beautiful New World it would be, once you eliminated the parasitic species that was working so hard to destroy it.
A beeper went off. He turned to look at the control panel. “It’s Ernie, M5—looks like cardiac arrest,” he said.
“What are you going to do?” Barbara Archer asked.
Killgore stood. “Make sure he’s dead.” He bent down to select a camera for the big monitor on his desk. “Here, you can watch.”
Two minutes later, he appeared on the screen. An orderly was already there, but did little more than watch. She saw Killgore check the man’s pulse, then check his eyes. Despite having the -B vaccine, Killgore used gloves and a mask. Well, that made sense. Then he stood back up and switched off the monitoring equipment. The orderly detached the IV lines and covered the body with a sheet. Killgore pointed to the door, and soon the orderly wheeled the gurney out, heading off for the incinerator. Killgore took the time to look at other subjects, and even appeared to speak with one before leaving the screen for good.
“I figured that,” he said, returning to the control room without his protective gear. “Ernie’s heart wasn’t all that good, and Shiva went right after it. Wendell’s going to be next, M2. Maybe tomorrow morning. Liver function’s off the chart, and he’s bleeding out big-time in the upper GI.”
“What about the control group?”
“Mary, F4, two more days she’s going to be in frank symptoms.”
“So the delivery system works?” Archer asked.
“Like a charm.” Killgore nodded, getting some coffee before he sat back down. “It’s all going to work, Barb, and the computer projections look better than our requirement parameters. Six months from initiation, the world is going to be a very different place,” he promised her.
“I still worry about those six months, John. If anybody figures out what’s happened—their last conscious act will be to try and kill us all.”
“That’s why we have guns, Barb.”
“It’s called ‘Rainbow,’ ” he told them, having gotten the best information of the day. “It’s based in England. It was set up by a CIA guy named John Clark, and he’s evidently the boss of the outfit.”
“That makes sense,” said Henriksen. “Multinational, right?”
“I think so,” John Brightling confirmed.
“Yes,” Dmitriy Popov said, picking at his Caesar salad. “That is all sensible, some sort of NATO unit, I imagine, based at Hereford?”
“Correct,” said Henriksen. “By the way, nice job figuring out who they were.”
Popov shrugged. “It was simple, really. I ought to have made the guess sooner. My question now, what do you want me to do about it?”
“I think we need to learn more,” Henriksen said, with a glance at his boss. “A lot more.”
“How do you do that?” Brightling asked.
“It is not difficult,” Popov assured him. “Once you know where to look—that is most of the battle. Once you know that, you merely go there and look. And I already have one name, do I not?”
“You want to take it?” John asked the Russian.
“Certainly.” If you pay me to do so. “There are dangers, but—”
“What kind of dangers?”
“I once worked in England. There is the possibility that they have a photograph of me, under a different name, but I do not think that likely.”
“Can you fake the accent?” Henriksen asked.
“Most certainly, old boy,” Popov replied with a grin. “You were FBI once?”
A nod. “Yep.”
“Then you know how it is done. A week, I think.”
“Okay,” Brightling said. “Fly over tomorrow.”
“Travel documents?” Henriksen asked.
“I have several sets, all current, and all perfect,” the intelligence officer assured him.
It was nice to have a pro on the payroll, Henriksen thought to himself. “Well, I have an early flight, and I haven’t packed yet, guys. See you next week when I get back.”
“Easy on the jet lag, Bill,” John advised.
The former FBI agent laughed. “You got a drug that works on that?”
CHAPTER 18
LOOKS
Popov boarded the morning Concorde flight. He’d never flown the Concorde before, and found the interior of the aircraft cramped, though the legroom was all right. He settled into seat 4-C. Meanwhile, at another terminal, Bill Henriksen was in a first-class seat in an American DC-10 for his trip to Los Angeles.
William Henriksen, Dmitriy Arkadeyevich Popov thought. Formerly of the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team, and an expert on counterterrorism, president of an international security-consulting company now headed off to Australia to seek a consulting contract for the next Olympics. . . . How did that factor into what Popov had been doing for John Brightling’s Horizon Corporation? What, exactly, was he doing—more properly, what idea was he serving? What task? He was certainly being paid top dollar—he hadn’t even raised the money issue over dinner, because he was sure he’d get whatever he asked for. He was thinking in terms of $250,000 for this job alone, even though it held few dangers, aside from driving an automobile in British traffic. $250,000? Maybe more, Popov told himself. After all, this mission seemed pretty important to them.
How did an expert on the mission side of terrorism and an expert on counterterrorism factor into the same plan? Why had they so rapidly seized on his discovery that there was a new international counterterror organization? It was important to them—but why? What the hell were they up to? He shook his head. He was so smart, yet he didn’t have a clue. And he wanted to know, now more than ever.
Again, it was the not-knowing that worried him. Worried? Yes, he was worried now. The KGB had never encouraged curiosity, but even they knew that you had to tell intelligent people something, and so with mission orders had usually come some kind of explanation—and at the least he’d always known that he was serving the interests of his country. Whatever information he’d gathered, whatever foreign national he’d recruited, it had all been aimed at making his nation more secure, more knowledgeable, more strong. That the entire effort had failed was not his fault. The KGB had never failed the State. It had been the State that had failed the KGB. He’d been part of the world’s finest intelligence service, and he remained proud of its abilities and his own.
But he didn’t know what he was doing now. He was supposed to gather information, and it was quite easy for him, but he still didn’t know why. The things he’d learned at dinner the night before had merely opened another door into another mystery. It seemed so like some Hollywood movie of conspiracy or some detective book whose ending he could not yet discern. He’d take the money and do the job, but for the first time he was uneasy, and the feeling was not a pleasant one, as the aircraft raced down the runway and took off into the rising sun for London Heathrow.
“Any progress, Bill?”
Tawney leaned back in his chair. “Not much. The Spanish have identified two of the terrorists as Basque separatists, and the French think they have a line on another of their citizens at the park, but that’s all. I suppose we could ask Carlos for some information, but it’s rather doubtful that he’d cooperate—and who’s to say that he even knew the buggers in the first place?”
“True.” Clark took a seat. “You know, Ding’s right. One of these incidents was probably to be expected, but three all in the brief time we’ve been here seems like a lot. Is it possible that somebody is setting them loose somehow, Bill?”
“I suppose it’s possible, but who would do it—and why would he do it?” Tawney asked.
“Back up. Stay with the ‘who’ part first. Who has the ability?”
“Someone who had access to them back in the seventies and eighties—that means someone well inside the movement or someone who controlled them, ‘influenced’ them, from the outside. That would mean a KGB type. Notionally this chap would be known to them, would have means to contact t
hem, and thus the ability to activate them.”
“All three groups have been heavily ideological. . . .”
“That’s why the contact would have to be former—or maybe active?—KGB. He’d have to be someone they trust—more than that, a person with the kind of authority they would recognize and respect.” Tawney sipped at his tea. “That has to mean an intelligence officer, perhaps a fairly senior one with whom they’d worked back in the old days, someone who interfaced with them for their training and support in the old East Bloc.”
“German, Czech, Russian?”
“Russian,” Tawney said. “Remember that KGB let the other Bloc countries support them only under their close direction—the standoff nature of the arrangement was always paper-thin, John. It was meant more for their own comfort than for anyone else’s. ‘Progressive elements,’ and all that rubbish. They were usually trained outside of Moscow, and then quartered in safe houses in Eastern Europe, mainly East Germany. We got a good deal of material from the old East German Stasi when the DDR collapsed. I have some colleagues at Century House going back over the information right now. That will take time. It was, unfortunately, never computerized or even properly cross-referenced. Funding problems,” Tawney explained.
“Why not go straight to KGB? Hell, I’ve met Golovko.”
Tawney didn’t know that. “You’re kidding.”
“How do you think Ding and I got into Iran so quick with a Russian cover? You think CIA can pull off an operation that fast? I wish, Bill. No, Golovko set it up, and Ding and I were in his office before we flew down.”
“Well, then, if you can, why not give it a try?”
“I’d have to get authorization from Langley.”
“Will Sergey actually cooperate?”
“Not sure,” John admitted. “Even money at best. But before I do such a thing, I’d need a good idea of exactly what I want. It can’t be a fishing expedition. It has to be well directed.”