by Tom Clancy
“It’s that El Niño business again. The ocean currents off South America have changed again, and that’s associated with unusually hot temperatures here. It’ll be in the mid-thirties—nineties to you, I suppose—for the whole Olympiad.”
“Well, I hope this fogging system works, ’cuz if it doesn’t, you’ll have a lot of heat-stroke cases here, pal.”
“It works,” the Aussie cop told him. “It’s fully tested.”
“Can I take a look at it now? Bill Henriksen wants me to see if it could be used as a chemical-agent delivery system by the bad guys.”
“Certainly. This way.” They were there in five minutes. The water-input piping was contained in its own locked room. The cop had the key for this, and took the colonel inside.
“Oh, you chlorinate the water here?” Gearing asked in semisurprise. The water came in from the Sydney city water system, didn’t it?
“Yes, we don’t want to spread any germs on our guests, do we?”
“Not exactly,” Colonel Gearing agreed, looking at the plastic chlorine container that hung on the distribution piping beyond the actual pumps. Water was filtered through that before it went into the fogging nozzles that hung in all the concourses and ramps to the stadium bowl itself. The system would have to be flushed with unchlorinated water before delivery would work, but that was easily accomplished, and the false chlorine container in his hotel room was an exact twin of this one. The contents even looked like chlorine, almost, though the nano-capsules actually contained something called Shiva. Gearing thought about that behind blank brown eyes. He’d been a chemical weapons expert his whole professional life, having worked at the Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland and Dugway Proving Ground in Utah—but, well, this wasn’t really chemical warfare. It was bio-war, a sister science of the one he’d studied for over twenty uniformed years. “Is the door guarded?” he asked.
“No, but it is alarmed, and it takes some minutes to play with the system, as you can see. The alarm system reports to the command post, and we have an ample reaction force there.”
“How ample?” the retired colonel asked next.
“Twenty SAS members, plus twenty police constables, are there at all times, plus ten more SAS circulating in pairs around the stadium. The people at the CP are armed with automatic weapons. The ones on patrol with pistols and radios. There is also a supplementary reaction force a kilometer distant with light armored vehicles and heavy weapons, platoon strength. Beyond that, a battalion of infantry twenty kilometers away, with helicopters and other support.”
“Sounds good to me,” Colonel Gearing said. “Can you give me the alarm code for this facility?”
They didn’t even hesitate. He was a former staff-grade army officer, after all, and a senior member of the consulting team for security at the Olympic Games. “One-One-Three-Three-Six-Six,” the senior cop told him. Gearing wrote it down, then punched the numbers into the keypad, which armed and then disarmed the system. He’d be able to switch out the chlorine canister very quickly. The system was designed for rapid servicing. This would work just fine, just like the model they’d set up in Kansas, on which he and his people had practiced for several days. They’d gotten the swap-out time down to fourteen seconds. Anything under twenty meant that nobody would notice anything remiss in the fog-cooling system, because residual pressure would maintain the fogging stream.
For the first time, Gearing saw the place where he’d be doing it, and that generated a slight chill in his blood. Planning was one thing. Seeing where it would happen for-real was something else. This was the place. Here he would start a global plague that would take lives in numbers far too great to tally, and which in the end would leave alive only the elect. It would save the planet—at a ghastly price, to be sure, but he’d been committed to this mission for years. He’d seen what man could do to harm things. He’d been a young lieutenant at Dugway Proving Grounds when they’d had the well-publicized accident with GB, a persistent nerve agent that had blown too far and slaughtered a few hundred sheep—and neurotoxins were not a pretty death, even for sheep. The news media hadn’t even bothered to talk about the wild game that had died a similar, ugly death, everything from insects to antelope. It had shaken him that his own organization, the United States Army, could make so grave an error to cause such pain. The things he’d learned later had been worse. The binary agents he’d worked on for years—an effort to manufacture “safe” poisons for battlefield use . . . the crazy part was that it had all begun in Germany as insecticide research in the 1920s and 1930s. Most of the chemicals used to kill off insects were nerve agents, simple ones that attacked and destroyed the rudimentary nervous systems in ants and beetles, but those German chemists had stumbled upon some of the deadliest chemical compounds ever formulated. So much of Gearing’s career had been spent with the intelligence community, evaluating information about possible chemical-warfare plants in countries not trusted to have such things.
But the problem with chemical weapons had always been their distribution—how to spread them evenly across a battlefield, thus exposing enemy soldiers efficiently. That the same chemicals would travel downrange and kill innocent civilians had been the dirty secret that the organizations and the governments that ruled them had always ignored. And they didn’t even consider the wildlife that would also be exterminated in vast quantities—and worse still, the genetic damage those agents caused, because marginal doses of nerve gas, below the exposure needed to kill, invaded the very DNA of the victim, ensuring mutations that would last for generations. Gearing had spent his life knowing these things, and he supposed that it had desensitized him to the taking of life in large quantities.
This wasn’t quite the same thing. He would not be spreading organophosphate chemical poisons, but rather tiny virus particles. And the people walking through the cooling fog in the concourses and ramps to the stadium bowl would breathe them in, and their body chemistry would break down the nano-capsules, allowing the Shiva strands to go to work … slowly, of course … and they’d go home to spread the Shiva farther, and in four to six weeks after the ending of the Sydney Olympics, the plague would erupt worldwide, and a global panic would ensue. Then Horizon Corporation would announce that it had an experimental “A” vaccine that had worked in animals and primates—and was safe for human usage—ready for mass production, and so it would be mass-produced and distributed worldwide, and four to six weeks after injection, those people, too, would develop the Shiva symptoms, and with luck the world would be depopulated down to a fractional percentage of the current population. Disorders would break out, killing many of the people blessed by Nature with highly effective immune systems, and in six months or so, there would be just a few left, well organized and well equipped, safe in Kansas and Brazil, and in six months more they would be the inheritors of a world returning to its natural state. This wouldn’t be like Dugway, a purposeless accident. This would be a considered act by a man who’d contemplated mass murder for all of his professional life, but who’d only helped kill innocent animals … He turned to look at his hosts.
“What’s the extended weather forecast?”
“Hot and dry, old boy. I hope the athletes are fit. They’ll need to be.”
“Well, then, this fogging system will be a lifesaver,” Gearing observed. “Just so the wrong people don’t fool with it. With your permission, I’ll have my people keep an eye on this thing.”
“Fine,” the senior cop agreed. The American was really fixated on this fogging system, but he’d been a gas soldier, and maybe that explained it.
Popov hadn’t closed his shades the previous evening, and so the dawn awoke him rather abruptly. He opened his eyes, then squinted them in pain as the sun rose over the Kansas plains. The medicine cabinet in the bathroom, he found, had Tylenol and aspirin, and there were coffee grounds for the machine in the kitchen area, but nothing of value in the refrigerator. So he showered and had his coffee, then went out of the room looking for food. He found a cafete
ria—a huge one—almost entirely empty of patrons, though there were a few people near the food tables, and there he went, got breakfast and sat alone, as he looked at the others in the cavernous room. Mainly people in their thirties and forties, he thought, professional-looking, some wearing white laboratory coats.
“Mr. Popov?” a voice said. Dmitriy turned.
“Yes?”
“I’m David Dawson, chief of security here. I have a badge for you to wear”—he handed over a white plastic shield that pinned to his shirt—“and I’m supposed to show you around today. Welcome to Kansas.”
“Thank you.” Popov pinned the badge on. It even had his picture on it, the Russian saw.
“You want to wear that at all times, so that people know you belong here,” Dawson explained helpfully.
“Yes, I understand.” So this place was pass-controlled, and it had a director of site security. How interesting.
“How was your flight in last night?”
“Pleasant and uneventful,” Popov replied, sipping his second coffee of the morning. “So, what is this place?”
“Well, Horizon set it up as a research facility. You know what the company does, right?”
“Yes.” Popov nodded. “Medicines and biological research, a world leader.”
“Well, this is another research-and-development facility for their work. It was just finished recently. We’re bringing people in now. It will soon be the company’s main facility.”
“Why here in the middle of nothing?” Popov asked, looking around at the mainly empty cafeteria.
“Well, for starters, it’s centrally located. You can be anywhere in the country in less than three hours. And nobody’s around to bother us. It’s a secure facility, too. Horizon does lots of work that requires protection, you see.”
“Industrial espionage?”
Dawson nodded. “That’s right. We worry about that.”
“Will I be able to look around, see the grounds and such?”
“I’ll drive you around myself. Mr. Henriksen told me to extend you the hospitality of the facility. Go ahead and finish your breakfast. I have a few things I have to do. I’ll be back in about fifteen minutes.”
“Good, thank you,” Popov said, watching him walk out of the room. This would be useful. There was a strange, institutional quality to this place, almost like a secure government facility . . . like a Russian facility, Popov thought. It seemed to have no soul at all, no character, no human dimension that he could identify. Even KGB would have hung a photo of Lenin on the huge, bare, white walls to give the place some human scale. There was a wall of tinted windows, which allowed him to see out to what appeared to be wheat fields and a road, but nothing else. It was almost like being on a ship at sea, he thought, unlike anything he’d ever experienced. The former KGB officer worked through his breakfast, all of his instincts on alert, hoping to learn more, and as quickly as he could.
“Domingo, I need you to take this one,” John said.
“It’s a long way to go, John, and I just became a daddy,” Chavez objected.
“Sorry, pal, but Covington is down. So’s Chin. I’m going to send you and four men. It’s an easy job, Ding. The Aussies know their stuff, but they asked us to come down and give it a look—and the reason for that is the expert way you handled your field assignments, okay?”
“When do I leave?”
“Tonight, 747 out of Heathrow.” Clark held up the ticket envelope.
“Great,” Chavez grumbled.
“Hey, at least you were there for the delivery, pop.”
“I suppose. What if something crops up while we’re away?” Chavez tried as a weak final argument.
“We can scratch a team together, but you really think somebody’s going to yank our chain anytime soon? After we bagged those IRA pukes? I don’t,” Clark concluded.
“What about the Russian guy, Serov?”
“The FBI’s on it, trying to run him down in New York. They’ve assigned a bunch of agents to it.”
One of them was Tom Sullivan. He was currently in the post office. Box 1453 at this station belonged to the mysterious Mr. Serov. It had some junk mail in it, and a Visa bill, but no one had opened the box in at least nine days, judging by the dates on the envelopes, and none of the clerks professed to know what the owner of Box 1453 looked like, though one thought he didn’t pick up his mail very often. He’d given a street address when obtaining the box, but that address, it turned out, was to an Italian bakery several blocks away, and the phone number was a dud, evidently made up for the purpose.
“Sure as hell, this guy’s a spook,” Sullivan thought aloud, wondering why the Foreign Counterintelligence group hadn’t picked up the case.
“Sure wiggles like one,” Chatham agreed. And their assignment ended right there. They had no evidence of a crime for the subject, and not enough manpower to assign an agent to watch the P.O. box around the clock.
Security was good here, Popov thought, as he rode around in another of the military-type vehicles that Dawson called a Hummer. The first thing about security was to have defensive depth. That they had. It was ten kilometers at least before you approached a property line.
“It used to be a number of large farms, but Horizon bought them all out a few years ago and started building the research lab. It took a while, but it’s finished now.”
“You still grow wheat here?”
“Yeah, the facility itself doesn’t use all that much of the land, and we try to keep the rest of it the way it was. Hell, we grow almost enough wheat for all the people at the lab, got our own elevators an’ all over that way.” He pointed to the north.
Popov looked that way and saw the massive concrete structures some distance away. It was amazing how large America was, Dmitriy Arkadeyevich thought, and this part seemed so flat, not unlike the Russian steppes. The land had some dips and rises, but all they seemed to do was emphasize the lack of a real hill anywhere. The Hummer went north, and eventually crossed a rail line that evidently led to the grain silos—elevators, Dawson had called them? Elevators? Why that word? Farther north and he could barely make out traffic moving on a distant highway.
“That’s the northern border,” Dawson explained, as they passed into nonfarm land.
“What’s that?”
“Oh, that’s our little herd of pronghorn antelopes.” Dawson turned the wheel slightly to go closer. The Hummer bumped over the grassy land.
“They’re pretty animals.”
“That they are, and very fast. We call ’em the speed-goat. Not a true antelope at all, genetically closer to goats. Those babies can run at forty miles an hour, and do it for damned near an hour. They also have superb eyesight.”
“Difficult to hunt, I imagine. Do you hunt?”
“They are, and I’m not. I’m a vegan.”
“What?”
“Vegetarian. I don’t eat meat or other animal products,” Dawson said somewhat proudly. Even his belt was made of canvas rather than leather.
“Why is that, David?” Popov asked. He’d never come across anyone like him before.
“Oh, just a choice I made. I don’t approve of killing animals for food or any other reason”—he turned—“not everybody agrees with me, not even here at the Project, but I’m not the only one who thinks that way. Nature is something to be respected, not exploited.”
“So, you don’t buy your wife a fur coat,” Popov said, with a smile. He had heard about those fanatics.
“Not hardly!” Dawson laughed.
“I’ve never hunted,” Popov said next, wondering what response he’d get. “I never saw the sense in it, and in Russia they’ve nearly exterminated most game animals.”
“So I understand. That’s very sad, but they’ll come back someday,” Dawson pronounced.
“How, with all the state hunters working to kill them?” That institution hadn’t ended even with the demise of Communist rule.
Dawson’s face took on a curious expression, one Po
pov had seen many times before at KGB. The man knew something he was unwilling to say right now, though what he knew was important somehow. “Oh, there’s ways, pal. There’s ways.”
The driving tour required an hour and a half, at the end of which Popov was mightily impressed with the size of the facility. The approach road to the building complex was an airport, he saw, with electronic instruments to guide airplanes in and traffic lights to warn autos off when flight operations were in progress. He asked Dawson about it.
“Yeah, it is kinda obvious, isn’t it? You can get a G in and out of here pretty easy. They say you can bring in real commercial jets, too, medium-sized ones, but I’ve never seen that done.”
“Dr. Brightling spent a lot of money to build this establishment.”
“That he did,” Dawson agreed. “But it’s worth it, trust me.” He drove up the highway/runway to the lab building and stopped. “Come with me.”
Popov followed without asking why. He’d never appreciated the power of a major American corporation. This could and should have been a government facility, with all the land and the huge building complex. The hotel building in which he’d spent the night could probably hold thousands of people—and why build such a place here? Was Brightling going to move his entire corporation here, all his employees? So far from major cities, airports, all the things that civilization offered. Why here? Except, of course, for security. It was also far from large police agencies, from news media and reporters. For the purposes of security, this facility might as easily have been on the moon.
The lab building was also larger than it needed to be, Dmitriy thought, but unlike the others, it appeared to be functioning at the moment. Inside was a desk, and a receptionist who knew David Dawson. The two men proceeded unimpeded to the elevators, then up to the fourth floor, and right to an office.
“Hi, Doc,” Dawson said. “This is Dmitriy. Dr. Brightling sent him to us last night. He’s going to be here awhile,” the security chief added.