Bio-Strike pp-4

by Tom Clancy

  Silence.

  Gordian kept his eyes on him. He opened his mouth to speak, closed it. Rubbed his cheek.

  “Well,” he said. “You certainly aren’t on the bubble about this.” He rubbed his cheek again. “I just wish you’d come to me with your feelings sooner.”

  Ricci merely shrugged, but it was obvious to Nimec why he hadn’t. Whatever their disagreements, he and Ricci had been friends for many years. For Ricci to approach Gordian directly would have meant going over his head, and Ricci’s sense of personal loyalty would never permit that.

  After a brief pause, Gordian looked around the table.

  “Anybody like to comment?”

  Thibodeau was quick to gesture that he did. Maybe too quick, Nimec would think in hindsight.

  “We gotta be realistic,” he said, frowning. “Never mind the drain that kind of manhunt would put on our resources. Be hard enough gettin’ approval to patrol our ground facilities in foreign countries. By whose sanction we gonna have armed search teams operate across borders?”

  “Our own,” Ricci said at once.

  Thibodeau’s frown deepened.

  “That might’ve washed when you was a city cop lookin’ to haul some gangbangers off the street, but not when you got to abide by international rules of law,” he said. “We can’t be goin’ anywhere we want, doin’ anythin’ we please.”

  Ricci had fixed him with a sharp look.

  “Like when you got yourself shot to bits playing Wyatt Earp in Brazil, that right?” he said.

  The sudden tension in the room was palpable. Thibodeau stiffened in his chair, glaring at Ricci with open resentment and hostility.

  “Knew plenty of tough guys in ‘Nam,” he said. His voice was trembling. “They either gave up their attitudes or choked on ’em.”

  Ricci said nothing in response. He sat absolutely still, his face impassive, his eyes locked on Thibodeau’s.

  Nimec hadn’t been sure what was going on between them but had felt deep down that it had little to do with their differences over the investigation. There had been scarcely a moment to think about that, however. He’d been afraid Thibodeau would lunge at Ricci and was watching him closely, preparing to haul them apart if that happened.

  Fortunately, it never did, thanks to Gordian’s intervention. He had made a loud business of clearing his throat, breaking into the strained silence.

  “I believe we should call it an afternoon, spend some time enjoying the fresh air,” he’d said in a deliberate tone.

  Thibodeau had started to reply, but Gordian cut him short.

  “Meeting adjourned,” he said, abruptly rising from his seat. “Let’s try to relax.”

  And that had about finished it, or at least discouraged the hostilities from boiling over on the spot. And here Nimec stood topside two hours later, Ricci beside him at the rail, both men staring contemplatively into the blue distance.

  What was Thibodeau’s problem, exactly? he thought. Why had Ricci provoked such blistering rancor from him, the Fish That Got Away notwithstanding? Pete had always known Thibodeau to be a grounded, fundamentally reasonable man, and it was hard to reconcile that with his mercurial outbursts. His mind once again insisted that the root cause of his behavior was as yet unspoken and unknown… which got him where insofar as being able to keep the show he and Megan had scripted from folding?

  Nimec wasn’t quite certain — more or less standard for him lately, he supposed — but it had struck him that maybe part of the answer could be found in his recollection of another meeting, one that took place at UpLink’s corporate headquarters just over a half year earlier and ended on a note very unlike the crashing discord of today’s grand finale. It had been three, four days after Ricci had returned from his mission in Kazakhstan, something like that, and he’d joined Nimec, Megan, and Gordian to confer about the troublesome loose ends they’d been left to grapple with. At that point, their spirits had been anything but high, and it had been Ricci’s thoughts on the affair that had helped to bring them around.

  Nimec glanced over at him now, remembering.

  “Small steps, that’s how you count your gains,” he said quietly. “Those words sound familiar?”

  Ricci didn’t move for several seconds. Then he turned toward him, the faintest hint of a smile on his face.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Familiar.”

  “It’s solid advice,” Nimec said. “I can’t think of a better way of saying you ought to give things a chance to work out.”

  Ricci grunted and studied the water again.

  “Assuming for a minute that I would,” he said. “If Thibodeau shoves, from now on, I’m shoving back harder. That bother you?”

  Nimec shrugged.

  “Whether or not it does, I’d be willing to carry it,” he said.

  Ricci gave no comment, just leaned forward with his elbows on the rail.

  “The bay’s pretty this late in the afternoon,” he said after a long while.

  “Yeah,” Nimec said. “It’s how the sun hits the swells when it dips toward the horizon.”

  “Just sort of glances off their tops, makes it look like they’re sprinkled with a few zillion gold flakes.”

  “Yeah.”

  Ricci looked over at him.

  “I’ll stick around, Pete,” he said. “For now.”

  Nimec nodded, and this time it was his turn to smile a little.

  “That’s about all I can ask,” he said.

  * * *

  A distancing from consequence salves the betrayer’s guilt. Do not look toward crime and politics for examples; that facile sense of remove is bait for the waiting trap, and we’ve all heard the excuses in our ordinary lives. The woman next door that leaves the cat behind on moving day — van’s here, have to go, who’d have thought the dumb thing would wander off for so long after she let it out? The family man enjoying a peccadillo with his secretary after office hours — his wife’s happily provided for, bought her an expensive gold bracelet last week, and he’s sure his kids prefer their computer games to hanging around with dull old Pop.

  Remove any act from a broader context, and one can become convinced it means nothing. You see how easily this happens? Just close the eyes to cause, look away from effect, and walk on down the road.

  Alone in Roger Gordian’s office at UpLink in San Jose, Don Palardy told himself it was only a few hairs he was taking.

  Only a few hairs, what was the terrible crime?

  White cotton gloves on his hands, he stood behind Gordian’s open desk drawer and used a tweezer to pull a strand from the comb in one of its neat compartments. He carefully dropped it into his Zippit evidence collection bag and then plucked two more from the teeth of the comb, dropping them into the plastic bag as well.

  As head of the sweep team that performed weekly electronic countersurveillance checks in the building’s executive offices and conference rooms, Palardy had no concerns about being discovered in an awkward or compromising position.

  He knew that Gordian was at the yearly blue-water conference and would not be walking in on him today. He knew that he wasn’t being observed through hidden spy cameras first and foremost because it would have been he, Palardy, or one of his subordinates who performed their installation, had Gordian ever requested it— and he had not. Moreover, Palardy had carried into the room with him the broad-spectrum bug detector known in his section as the Big Sniffer — a twenty-thousand-dollar device that looked like a somewhat larger-than-standard briefcase when closed, and that was now opened and unfolded on the floor to reveal a microcomputer-controlled system of radio, audio, infrared, and acoustic correlation scanners, the output of which was displayed on LED bar graphs or optional hard-copy printouts. Among the Big Sniffer’s package of advanced tools was a Very Low Frequency receiver sensitive to the 15.75 kilohertz frequency emitted by the horizontal oscillators of video cameras. And the VLF detector was neither beeping nor flickering, which indicated none had been located.

  Alone an
d trusted here in the office — safe from “surreptitious intercept,” as it was known in the trade — Pa — lardy slid the evidence bag between his thumb and forefinger to seal it, dropped the bag into a patch pocket of his coveralls, and pushed the kneehole drawer shut.

  The deed done, he plugged the cable of his boom detector into its socket in the rear of the Big Sniffer and went about his routine sweep with due diligence. Taking care to avoid the antique Swiss bracket clock he so admired, moving the mop-shaped antenna across the walls of the office, Palardy probed for the harmonic signals of tape recorders, microphones, and other passive and active bugs. Had he found anything amiss, he would have been quick to disable it and report his findings to his higher-ups in Sword security.

  Don Palardy considered himself a decent and caring man, though not without human frailty. Had he found an expensive piece of jewelry on the carpet here, a missing cuff link or tie clip studded with diamonds, he would have returned it to his employer, regardless of how much taking it with him would have helped with his debts.

  All he had taken were a couple, three hairs.

  Since Brazil, he’d gotten very good at rationalizing away his transgressions.

  FOUR

  BAJA PENINSULA, MEXICO OCTOBER 31, 2001

  The tunnel was about ten feet deep and ran for two miles toward the United States under the sage-brush desert midway between Tijuana and Mexicali. Its southern opening was accessible through a trapdoor in the rear of a barnyard storage shed. Its northern opening was a small cleft in the hillside at the bottom of an arroyo within eyeshot of the California border. The old tales said it had been dug by Jesuit priests wishing to secrete away a portion of their abundant wealth — al — leged to have been gathered through outlawed trade with pirates and Manila galleons — when the jealous Spanish crown ordered its confiscation in 1767. Over 230 years later, it remained a busy conduit for smuggling operations, although the clandestine traffic was now in narcotics and illegal immigrants bound for America. “The occasion makes the thief,” went the Mexican saying.

  Tonight, some thirty yards from the tunnel’s northern entrance, two stripped-down, lightweight all-terrain vehicles and a dusty old Chevrolet pickup sat hidden from Border Patrol agents by a carefully arranged screen of manzanita and chamiso. The truck’s windshield had been blown out, and broken glass was sprayed all over the hood and interior. Both men inside were dead, slumped backward in their seats, the woven upholstery soaked with blood and chewed to ragged scraps by the fusillade of bullets that had passed through and around their flesh. Their pants were drawn down over their ankles, their severed genitals stuffed into their gaping mouths. Each of the lifeless ATV drivers had been shot, mutilated, and left sitting in an identical fashion.

  Above the blind of shrubbery that surrounded the vehicles, a dozen men were positioned on sandstone ledges along the east and west walls of the gulch, the four-by-fours in which they had arrived from Tijuana parked at a distance. They carried Mendoza bullpup submachine guns with tritium dot sights and lamp attachments. On the outcropping nearest the tunnel mouth was a wiry, dark-skinned young man with a neat little chin beard and coal-colored hair swept straight back from his forehead. He stood flattened against the slope in a toss of shadows cast by the dim light of a quarter moon. Beside him on the rock shelf was a can-shaped metal object with a thin telescoping antenna on top. His weapon against the leg of his blue jeans, he studied the tunnel mouth from his elevated vantage, not suspecting that he, too, was being observed.

  Higher up the arroyo’s western slope, Lathrop crouched behind a wide slab of rimrock, his mouth slightly open, his upper lip curled back, almost seeming to sniff the air as he watched the men below with intense fixation. It was an attitude queerly resembling the flehmen reaction in cats — the detection of airborne trace molecules with the Jacobson’s organ, a tiny, exceedingly acute sensory receptor in the roof of the mouth that, like the tailbone, remains vestigial in humans, and whose function is something between smell and taste, endowing the feline with what is often taken for a sixth sense.

  Lathrop had held an affinity for cats since childhood, was fascinated by their ways, owned three of them even now — though this was in all probability nothing but coincidence with regard to his own flehmen, of which he was altogether unconscious.

  Calm, motionless, wholly focused in on his surveillance of those below, Lathrop watched from his solitary position of concealment. His face was daubed with camouflage cream. He had on lightweight black fatigues and tactical webbing with a.40 caliber Beretta in a hip holster. Lying beside him on the ground was his SIG-Sauer SSG 2000 sniper rifle. The firearms had been brought only as a precaution. If he were forced to use either of them, it would mean he’d botched the whole setup.

  Peering into the eyepiece of his miniature DVD camcorder, Lathrop switched it to photo mode and made a minor adjustment to the night-vision scope coupled to its lens.

  He’d have a lot of extra material on disk before he was finished, but better that than to take the chance of missing something important. Anyway, whatever was nonessential could be edited out when he input the digital images to the wallet-sized computer on his belt.

  “Okay, Felix, let’s do it with feeling,” Lathrop whispered under his breath.

  He zoomed in tightly on the bearded man and pressed the Record button.

  Guillermo hated going into the hole. Hated entering a shed piled with swine feed to lower himself onto a precarious wooden staircase that creaked, swayed, and buckled with each downward step. Hated the stifling heat inside by day, the miserable cold by night. Hated the low roof pressing down overhead, forcing the tallest men to stoop as they walked. Hated the close dirt walls, crudely shored up in places with wood and concrete but still looking as if they might collapse around him without warning. Hated the skitter of rodents and insects in darkness so thick you could almost feel it pouring over your skin, smothering you like black sludge. Perhaps more than anything else, though, he hated the fetid odor of sweat, unwashed clothing, and bodily wastes that permeated the narrow tunnel despite the swamp coolers used to pull fresh air through ventilation shafts along its entire length.

  He hated going into the hole, yes, hated every moment of every passage he’d made through its cramped, stinking twists and turns, but he knew with an absolute certainty that without it he’d never have lasted a decade, more than a decade, in an occupation that had put many behind prison bars in a fraction of that time. It was because of the hole that he’d had unmatched success at eluding the border patrols, because of the advantage it gave him over the competition that the Salazar brothers had turned an ever-increasing volume and diversity of trade his way. There were dozens of coyotes on the peninsula to whom Los Reyes Magos de Tijuana granted their blessing and protection, but Guillermo was sure that none besides himself would have been entrusted with this latest bulk shipment, sixty kilograms of high-quality black-tar heroin, worth a fortune on the norteamericano wholesale market. And while the job was far riskier than others he’d carried out for them in the past, it was also less work than having to hustle together enough people who could afford his thousand-dollar-per-head fee to make a border crossing worth the trouble. Most often he was booking agent and conductor rolled into one. Tonight, the train had been filled prior to his involvement, and he had merely to bring it up to the line to receive his payment from Lucio Salazar.

  Un coyote, sí, Guillermo thought reflectively. This was the popular label for a smuggler of human beings and contraband, and he was well aware not all its connotations were flattering. Fast, canny, and dangerous, wise to the lay of the land, the creature was also an opportunist that scavenged its meals wherever and however it could. Sí, sí, why take shame in it? The environment Guillermo inhabited tolerated moralists poorly, and he much preferred survival to becoming a righteous casualty.

  His flashlight shining into the gloom now, he moved through the tunnel ahead of the Indians who had back-packed the heroin from Sonoma — thirty-five villagers by
his hasty count, none older than twenty, most teenagers, perhaps a third of them girls — the youthful couriers themselves followed at gunpoint by a half dozen of the Salazars’ forzadores, their enforcers. It made for, what, fifty people, give or take, double the number he’d brought down with him on any previous run, easily double. Madre Dios, he hoped these walls could withstand the tread of all those feet.

  Imagined or not, the increased danger of a cave-in during this particular run only worsened Guillermo’s usual state of unease. As, he supposed, did the rifles being leveled at the niñas. One of them in particular, a pretty fourteen- or fifteen-year-old, had reminded him of his own angelic daughter, who was about her age and had hair that was the same length, that even fell over her forehead in an uncannily similar way… though he wasn’t willing to let their resemblance lead him to any exaggerated assumptions. The government was fond of propagandizing that the Salazars had turned remote villages in the Gran Desierto and further south across the Sierra Madres into armed camps and sources of slave labor. But why did that portrayal make no mention of the abominable conditions that the inhabitants had endured before their “occupation,” of families starving in shelters pieced together from the remnants of cardboard boxes until the Salazars arrived and replaced them with permanent dwellings? Which alternative left them better off? Guillermo didn’t know, hadn’t enough information to form a balanced opinion, and at any rate, it was truly none of his affair. The train was not his. He had only to mind his business and guide it along toward Estación Lucio, as it were. And collect.