by Tom Clancy
“I got the fax.” The physician stood and extended his hand to Popov. “Hi, I’m John Killgore. Follow me.” And the two of them went through a side door into an examining room, while Dawson waited outside. Killgore told Popov to disrobe down to his underwear, and proceeded to give him a physical examination, taking blood pressure, checking eyes and ears and reflexes, prodding his belly to make sure that the liver was nonpalpable, and finally taking four test tubes of blood for further examination. Popov submitted to it all without objection, somewhat bemused by the whole thing, and slightly intimidated by the physician, as most people were. Finally, Killgore pulled a vial from the medicine cabinet and stuck a disposable syringe into it.
“What’s this?” Dmitriy Arkadeyevich asked.
“Just a booster shot,” Killgore explained, setting the vial down.
Popov picked it up and looked at the label, which read “B-2100 11-21-00” and nothing else. Then he winced when the needle went into his upper arm. He’d never enjoyed getting shots.
“There, that’s done,” Killgore said. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow about the blood work.” With that done, he pointed his patient to the hook his clothing hung on. It was a pity, Killgore thought, that the patient couldn’t be appreciative for having his life saved.
“He might as well not exist,” Special Agent Sullivan told his boss. “Maybe somebody comes in to check his mail, but not in the past nine or ten days.”
“What can we do about that?”
“If you want, we can put a camera and motion sensor inside the box, like the FCI guys do to cover dead-drops. We can do it, but it costs money and manpower to keep an agent or two close if the alarm goes off. Is this case that important?”
“Yes, it is now,” the Assistant Special Agent in charge of the New York field division told his subordinate. “Gus Werner started this one off, and he’s keeping a personal eye on the case file. So, talk to the FCI guys and get them to help you cover the P.O. box.”
Sullivan nodded and concealed his surprise. “Okay, will do.”
“Next, what about the Bannister case?”
“That’s not going anywhere at the moment. The closest thing to a hit we’ve gotten to this point is the second interview with this Kirk Maclean guy. He acted a little antsy. Maybe just nerves on his part, maybe something else—we have nothing on him and the missing victim, except that they had drinks and talked together at this bar uptown. We ran a background on him. Nothing much to report. Makes a good living for Horizon Corporation—he’s a biochemist by profession, graduated University of Delaware, master’s degree, working toward a doctorate at Columbia. Belongs to some conservation groups, including Earth First and the Sierra Club, gets their periodicals. His main hobby is backpacking. He has twenty-two grand in the bank, and he pays his bills on time. His neighbors say he’s quiet and withdrawn, doesn’t make many friends in the building. No known girlfriends. He says he knew Mary Bannister casually, walked her home once, no sexual involvement, and that’s it, he says.”
“Anything else?” the ASAC asked.
“The flyers the NYPD handed out haven’t developed into anything yet. I can’t say that I’m very hopeful at this point.”
“What’s next, then?”
Sullivan shrugged. “In a few more days we’re going back to Maclean to interview him again. Like I said, he looked a little bit hinky, but not enough to justify coverage on him.”
“I talked to this Lieutenant d’Allessandro. He’s thinking there might be a serial killer working that part of town.”
“Maybe so. There’s another girl missing, Anne Pretloe’s her name, but nothing’s turning on that one either. Nothing for us to work with. We’ll keep scratching away at it,” Sullivan promised. “If one of them’s out there, sooner or later he’ll make a mistake.” But until he did, more young women would continue to disappear into that particular black hole, and the combined forces of the NYPD and the FBI couldn’t do much to stop it. “I’ve never worked a case like this before.”
“I have,” the ASAC said. “The Green River killer in Seattle. We put a ton of resources on that one, but we never caught the mutt, and the killings just stopped. Maybe he got picked up for burglary or robbing a liquor store, and maybe he’s sitting it out in a Washington State prison, waiting to get paroled so he can take down some more hookers. We have a great profile on how his brain works, but that’s it, and we don’t know what brain the profile fits. These cases are real head-scratchers.”
Kirk Maclean was having lunch just then, sitting in one of the hundreds of New York delicatessens, eating egg salad and drinking a cream soda.
“So?” Henriksen asked.
“So, they came back to talk to me again, asking the same fuckin’ questions over and over, like they expect me to change my story.”
“Did you?” the former FBI agent asked.
“No, there’s only one story I’m going to tell, and that’s the one I prepared in advance. How did you know that they might come to me like this?” Maclean asked.
“I used to be FBI. I’ve worked cases, and I know how the Bureau operates. They are very easy to underestimate, and then they appear—no, then you appear on the scope, and they start looking, and mainly they don’t stop looking until they find something,” Henriksen said, as a further warning to this kid.
“So, where are they now?” Maclean asked. “The girls, I mean.”
“You don’t need to know that, Kirk. Remember that. You do not need to know.”
“Okay.” Maclean nodded his submission. “Now what?”
“They’ll come to see you again. They’ve probably done a background check on you and—”
“What’s that mean?”
“Talk to your neighbors, coworkers, check your credit history, your car, whether you have tickets, any criminal convictions, look for anything that suggests that you could be a bad guy,” Henriksen explained.
“There isn’t anything like that on me,” Kirk said.
“I know.” Henriksen had done the same sort of check himself. There was no sense in having somebody with a criminal past out breaking the law in the name of the Project. The only black mark against him was Maclean’s membership in Earth First, which was regarded by the Bureau almost as a terrorist—well, extremist—organization. But all Maclean did with that bunch was to read their monthly newsletter. They had a lot of good ideas, and there was talk in the Project about getting some of them injected with the “B” vaccine, but they had too many members whose ideas of protecting the planet were limited to driving nails into trees, so that the buzz saws would break. That sort of thing only chopped up workers in sawmills and raised the ire of the ignorant public without teaching them anything useful. That was the problem with terrorists, Henriksen had known for years. Their actions never matched their aspirations. Well, they weren’t smart enough to develop the resources they needed to be effective. You had to live in the economic eco-structure to achieve that, and they just couldn’t compete on that battlefield. Ideology was never enough. You needed brains and adaptability, too. To be one of the elect, you had to be worthy. Kirk Maclean wasn’t really worthy, but he was part of the team. And now he was rattled by the attention of the FBI. All he had to do was stick to his story. But he was shook up, and that meant he couldn’t be trusted. So, they’d have to do something about it.
“Get your stuff packed. We’ll move you out to the Project tonight.” What the hell, it would be starting soon anyway. Very soon, in fact.
“Good,” Maclean responded, finishing his egg salad. Henriksen was eating pastrami, he saw. Not a vegan. Well, maybe someday.
Artwork was finally going up on some of the blank walls. So, Popov thought, the facility wasn’t to be entirely soulless. It was nature paintings—mountains, forests, and animals. Some of the pictures were quite good, but most of them were ordinary, the kind of thing you found on the walls of cheap motels. How strange, the Russian thought, that with all the money they’d spent to build this monstrous facility
in the middle of nowhere, that the artwork was second-rate. Well, taste was taste, and Brightling was a technocrat, and doubtless uneducated in the finer aspects of life. In ancient times he would have been a druid, Dmitriy thought, a bearded man in a long white robe who worshiped trees and animals and sacrificed virgins on stone altars to his pagan beliefs. There were better things to do with virgins. There was such a strange mixture of the old and the new in this man—and his company. The director of security was a “vegan,” who never ate meat? What rubbish! Horizon Corporation was a world leader in several vital new technological areas, but it was peopled by madmen of such primitive and strange beliefs. He supposed it was an American affectation. Such a huge country, the brilliant coexisting with the mad. Brightling was a genius, but he’d hired Popov to initiate terrorist incidents—
—and then he’d brought Popov here. Dmitriy Arkadeyevich thought about that as he chewed his dinner. Why here? What was so special about this place?
Now he could understand why Brightling had shrugged off the amount he’d transferred to the terrorists. Horizon Corporation had spent more paving one of the access roads than all the money Popov had taken from the corporate coffers and translated into his own. But this place was important. You could see that in every detail, down to the revolving doors that kept the air inside—every doorway he’d seen was like some sort of air lock, and made him think of a spacecraft. Not a single dollar had been spared to make this facility perfect. But perfect for what?
Popov shook his head and sipped at his tea. The quality of the food was excellent. The quality of everything was excellent, except the absurdly pedestrian artwork. There was, therefore, not a single mistake here. Brightling was not the sort of man to compromise on anything, was he? Therefore, Dmitriy Arkadeyevich told himself, everything here was deliberate, and everything fit into a pattern, from which he could discern the purpose of the building and the man who’d erected it. He’d allowed himself to be beguiled this day with his tour—and his physical examination? What the hell was that all about? The doctor had given him an injection. A “booster” he’d called it. But what for? Against what?
Outside this shrine to technology was a mere farm, and outside that, wild animals, which his driver of the day had seemed to worship.
Druids, he thought. In his time as a field officer in England he’d taken the time to read books and learn about the culture of the English, played the tourist, even traveled to Stonehenge and other places, in the hope of understanding the people better. Ultimately, though, he found that history was history, and though highly interesting, no more logical there than in the Soviet Union—where history had mainly been lies concocted to fit the ideological pattern of Marxism-Leninism.
Druids had been pagans, their culture based on the gods supposed to live in trees and rocks, and to which human lives had been sacrificed. That had doubtless been a measure exercised by the druid priesthood to maintain their control over the peasants … and the nobility, too, in fact, as all religions tended to do. In return for offering some hope and certainty for the greatest mysteries of life—what happened after death, why the rain fell when it did, how the world had come to be—they extracted their price of earthly power, which was to tell everyone how to live. It had probably been a way for people of intellectual gifts but ignoble birth to achieve the power associated with the nobility. But it had always been about power—earthly power. And like the members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the druid priesthood had probably believed that which they said and that which they enforced because—they had to believe it. It had been the source of their power, and you had to believe in that.
But these people here weren’t primitives, were they? They were mainly scientists, some of them world leaders in their fields. Horizon Corporation was a collection of geniuses, wasn’t it? How else had Brightling accumulated so much money?
Popov frowned as he piled his plates back on the tray, then walked off to deposit them on the collection table. This was oddly like the KGB cafeteria at Number 2 Dzerzhinsky Square. Good food and anonymity. Finished, he made his way back to his room, still in the dark as to what the hell had taken place in his life over the past months. Druids? How could people of science be like that? Vegans? How could people of good sense not want to eat meat? What was so special about the gray-brown antelopes that lived on the margins of the property? And that man, he was the director of security here, and therefore he was supposedly a man with the highest personal trust. A fucking vegetarian in a land that produced beef in quantities the rest of the world could only dream about.
What the hell was that shot for? Popov wondered again as he flipped on the television. “Booster”? Against what? Why had he been examined at all? The deeper he went, the more information he found, the more perplexing the puzzle became.
But whatever this was all about, it had to be commensurate in scope to the investment Brightling and his company had made—and that was vast! And whatever it was about, it didn’t shrink at causing the death of people unknown and clearly unimportant to John Brightling. But what possible pattern did all of that fit?
Popov admitted yet again that he still didn’t have a clue. Had he reported on this adventure to his KGB superiors, they would have thought him slightly mad, but they would have ordered him to pursue the case further until he had some sort of conclusion to present, and because he was KGB-trained, he could no more stop pursuing the facts to their conclusion than he could stop breathing.
At least the first-class seats were comfortable, Chavez told himself. The flight would be a long one—about as long as a flight could be, since the destination was 10,500 miles away, and the whole planet was only 24,000 miles around. British Airways Flight 9 would be leaving at 10:15 P.M., go eleven and three quarters hours to Bangkok, lay over for an hour and a half, then another eight hours and fifty minutes to Sydney, by which time, Ding thought, he’d be about ready to pull out his pistol and shoot the flight crew. All this, plus not having his wife and son handy, just because the fucking Aussies wanted him to hold their hand during the track meet. He’d arrive at 5:20 A.M. two days from now due to the vagaries of the equator and the International Dateline, with his body clock probably more scrambled than the eggs he had for breakfast. But there was nothing he could do about it, and at least BA had stopped smoking on their flights—those people who did smoke would probably be going totally nuts, but that wasn’t his problem. He had four books and six magazines to pass the time, plus a private TV screen for movies, and decided that he had to make the best of it. The flight attendants closed the doors, the engines started, and the captain came on the intercom to welcome them aboard their home for the next day—or two days, depending on how you looked at it.
CHAPTER 32
BLOOD WORK
“Was that a good idea?” Brightling asked.
“I think so. Kirk was on the travel list anyway. We can have his coworkers tell anybody who asks that he was called out of town on company business,” Henriksen said.
“What if the FBI agents go back to see him?”
“Then he’s out of town, and they’ll just have to wait,” Henriksen answered. “Investigations like this last for months, but there won’t be months, will there?”
Brightling nodded. “I suppose. How’s Dmitriy doing out there?”
“Dave Dawson says he’s doing okay, asking a lot of touristy questions, but that’s all. He had his physical from Johnny Killgore, and he’s gotten his ‘B’ shot.”
“I hope he likes being alive. From what he said, he might turn out to be our kind of people, you know?”
“I’m not so sure about that, but he doesn’t know squat, and by the time he finds out, it’ll be too late anyway. Wil Gearing is in place, and he says everything’s going according to plan, John. Three more weeks, and then it’ll all be under way. So, it’s time to start moving our people to Kansas.”
“Too bad. The longevity project’s really looking good at the moment.”
“Oh?”<
br />
“Well, it’s pretty hard to predict breakthroughs, but the research threads all look very interesting at the moment, Bill.”
“So we might have lived forever? . . .” Henriksen asked, with a wry smile. For all the time he’d been associated with Brightling and Horizon Corporation, he had trouble believing such predictions. The company had caused some genuine medical miracles, but this was just too much to credit.
“I can think of worse things to happen. I’m going to make sure that whole team gets the ‘B’ shot,” Brightling said.
“Well, take the whole team out there and put ’em to work in Kansas, for crying out loud,” Bill suggested. “What about the rest of the company?”
Brightling didn’t like that question, didn’t like the fact that more than half of the Horizon employees would be treated like the rest of humanity—left to die at best, or to be murdered by the “A” vaccine at worst. John Brightling, M.D., Ph.D., had some lingering morality, part of which was loyalty to the people who worked for him—which was why Dmitriy Popov was in Kansas with the “B”-class antibodies in his system. So, even the Big Boss wasn’t entirely comfortable with what he was doing, Henriksen saw. Well, that was conscience for you. Shakespeare had written about the phenomenon.
“That’s already decided,” Brightling said, after a second’s discomfort. He’d be saving those who were part of the Project, and those whose scientific knowledge would be useful in the future. Accountants, lawyers, and secretaries, by and large, would not be saved. That he’d be saving about five thousand people—as many as the Kansas and Brazil facilities could hold—was quite a stretch, especially considering that only a small fraction of those people knew what the Project was all about. Had he been a Marxist, Brightling would have thought or even said aloud that the world needed an intellectual elite to make it into the New World, but he didn’t really think in those terms. He truly did believe that he was saving the planet, and though the cost of doing so was murderously high, it was a goal worth pursuing, though part of him hoped that he’d be able to live through the transition period without taking his own life from the guilt factor that was sure to assault him.