Bio-Strike pp-4

by Tom Clancy

  The complexities of manipulating a viral organism’s genetic blueprint were manifold. Given the additional requirement that its infectiousness be keyed to a particular genetic trait — blue eyes, left-handedness, familial diabetes, ethnic and racial characteristics, the possibilities were endless — the difficulty of the task became even more considerable. Still, the techniques needed to create such a microbe had been the focus of widespread experimentation in both private and government laboratories in the most advanced nations. And DeVane had gone several steps beyond. His criteria had been that the Sleeper pathogen respond to an unlimited range of inherited human characteristics on demand, laying dormant until activated by a chemical trigger or set of triggers. That it could, therefore, bring about symptoms in targets ranging from specific individuals to entire populations, depending entirely on which trigger was selected for dispersal.

  In effect, he had overseen the successful creation of a microscopic time bomb. It could be customized to order, residing harmlessly in one host, hatching explosive malignancy in another. It could be as precise as an assassin’s bullet or as widespread in its capacity for devastation as the Plague itself.

  It was, Kuhl thought now, nothing less than the ultimate biological weapon.

  He looked out the window and saw her emerge from the park, his lovely pale rider, punctual as always, crossing the Grande Allée to the brasserie, her blonde hair tossing in the wind, the collar of her dark, knee-length coat pulled up around her neck against the inclement weather. Though still a month off by the calendar, winter had made an early intrusion into the region, and spits of snow were blowing from a dark gray sky over the bare, rolling fields and ragged trees west of the Citadel.

  Kuhl was glad of this. In the long spread of park fringing the cliffs above the Saint Lawrence River, the armies of France and Britain had fought their climactic battle for domination of the region. Yet in the warm seasons, flowers bedecked the soil where the blood of generals had been spilled, and strollers sniffed the perfumed air in the smothering tameness of landscaped gardens.

  Those floral blankets scattered to the wind now, the harsh contours of nature were uncovered, appealing to something in the stony fastness of Kuhl’s heart.

  She spotted him from outside on the sidewalk, their eyes making contact through the window, a smile tracing at her lips. She entered the restaurant and strode directly toward his table, walking ahead of the punctilious maitre d’ who approached her at the door, motioning to indicate she’d already found her party. Kuhl rose to greet her, touching his lips to the soft white skin below her ear as he came around and helped her out of her coat, she lightly touching the back of his hand with her fingertips, he allowing his kiss to linger on her neck a moment before turning to give the coat to the maitre d’.

  They sat. Kuhl had been drinking mineral water, and he waved for the waiter, a quick snap of his hand. She ordered wine, an American Pinot Noir. The waiter hovered beside the table as she tasted it and nodded her approval to him, then hurried off, noticing the impatience in Kuhl’s glance, giving them their privacy.

  “Did you have a pleasant trip?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “And your lodging?” he said.

  “It’s fine,” she said, her English bearing the faint, indeterminate accent characteristic of those who have lived in various parts of the world. “I’ve missed you.”

  He nodded silently.

  “Will you be joining me at the hotel tonight?” she asked. Turning her wineglass in her hands.

  He leaned slightly forward over the table.

  “I would like nothing better,” he said. “But we have other dictates.”

  “Which can’t be postponed, even for a short while?”

  “I leave Quebec before sundown,” he said. “And your flight to the States is scheduled for early tomorrow morning.”

  “There have been so many flights lately.” She hesitated. “I’m tired.”

  He met her gaze. She was a receptive sexual partner, and he enjoyed her more than any of his other women. Exploring and penetrating her body was like opening a series of catches, one after another after another, unlocking progressively greater measures of her passion until she was his fully and without inhibition. There was exquisite power in reaching to the core of such lust. In being able to control its tornadic outpouring. And power was ever a temptation.

  “We will be together. Very soon,” he said. “But…”

  “Dictates.” She fell silent, lowering her eyes to her glass. After a few seconds she looked back up at him. “I understand.”

  Kuhl nodded and reached into the inside pocket of his sport coat, producing a black enameled gift box of the sort that might hold a bracelet, along with a small card envelope. He held both out to her across the table.

  “I’ve gotten you something very unique,” he said. “The rarest of items.”

  Anyone happening by the table would have seen her smile as she took them from him, their fingers making the briefest contact.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  He leaned his face closer to hers, dropped his voice to a near whisper.

  “In San Diego you will be meeting with someone named Enrique Quiros,” he said, his lips scarcely moving at all. “The note I’ve written in the card will tell you the rest.”

  She nodded with understanding and carefully placed the box and envelope into her purse.

  “I’ll be sure to read it back in my room.” She was looking into his eyes again, her own eyes shining, the smile on her lips no longer contrived for the benefit of idle viewers. “I wish you could be with me.”

  Kuhl acknowledged a stirring inside him.

  “Soon,” he said.

  “Tell me when—”

  “After this is done, I promise,” Kuhl said. “We can go to Madrid, if you’d like.” He paused a moment. “It is special to me.”

  She looked at him.

  “Madrid,” she said, raising the wineglass again, touching its rim to her bottom lip, letting it rest there a moment before taking a sip. “Yes, I would like that very much. Would like it to become special to both of us.”

  Kuhl watched her and nodded.

  “Surely,” he said, “it will.”

  “How long you been sitting on this?” Lucio Salazar said, the fingers of his right hand digging into the arm of his fleecy burgundy sofa, his other hand holding the last of the digital prints Lathrop had given him to scrutinize, the rest of the infrared photos on the coffee table in front of him.

  “What do you mean?” Lathrop said, answering Salazar’s question with one of his own, knowing damn well what he meant. This asshole had the balls to think he was going to interrogate him. It was pretty funny. “Your load was grabbed last night, I’m here today.”

  Salazar looked at him. He was a large man in his late fifties wearing a cream-colored tropical suit, a pale blue shirt open at the collar, and tan Gucci loafers. There was a Rolex with an enormous diamond-crusted gold band on his right hand, a diamond ring on his left pinkie, a diamond stud in his right earlobe. A gold figure of some saint or other hung from a chain around his thick neck.

  “I was asking when you found out these fucking maricónes were going to make a move on me,” he said. “If I had known sooner, I’d have been able to do something about it.”

  Lathrop’s expression was calmly businesslike.

  “You can get furnished with bad information from any weasel on the street and wind up chasing your own tail.” He leaned forward and tapped one of the snapshots on the coffee table with his finger. It showed Felix Quiros and his men cutting the knapsacks off the backs of Salazar’s massacred Indian couriers outside the smoking ruin of the tunnel entrance. “I get a tip, I check it out before coming to you with it. That’s quality, Lucio. And it’s what I provide.”

  “Value for the dollar, eh?”

  Lathrop grinned.

  “Believe it,” he said.

  Salazar fell silent again. His gold and jewels twinkled
in the sunlight pouring through the glass wall that faced the beachfront below and behind him. These days, Lathrop thought, the base price of a Del Mar home with an ocean view was maybe six, seven hundred grand, and that was if you were talking about something the size of Monopoly board real estate, where you had to stand tip-toe on the roof with a set of binoculars just to catch a glimpse of the water. A place like Salazar’s sin citadel here — built to his specs on a bluff, sprawling enough to contain the entire population of whatever burro shit Mexican village had spawned his proud ancestral line of cutthroat thieves, highwaymen, and pimps — a place like this had to have cost him in excess of three mil.

  After perhaps twenty seconds, Salazar leaned forward over the table and studied another of the pictures, his eyebrows knitted in brooding thought, slowly shaking his head from side to side as he recognized the body of the coyote Guillermo.

  “El muerto nada se lleva y todo se acaba,” he said in an undertone.

  The dead take nothing with them and everything comes to an end.

  He glanced back up at Lathrop. “You know if Felix was being stupid on his own, or does the stupidity go up the line?” he asked.

  “Felix? Come on,” Lathrop said, preparing to stir in the lie. “He might have his boys glom car computers, shake down bodega owners, nickel-dime stuff, on his own string. Might even get away with laying an extra cut on a key before he delivers it, skimming a few ounces for himself. But his big cousins are just letting him run off the leash so he feels a player instead of a punk, and even Felix isn’t brainless enough not to realize how far to take it before he smacks into a brick wall. What happened at the tunnel — he’d never in his miserable life try it without their endorsement.”

  Lathrop watched the thought lines on Salazar’s forehead deepen. He was seething, and with very good reason. In tight with the old-line South American growers and processors from the days when his father headed the clan, Lucio’s organization had been smuggling contraband across the U.S.-Mexico border for over half a century, starting with hot cars back in the fifties, and here in California was the principal polydrug distribution outfit along the Pacific coast, carrying cocaine, dope, pot, methamphetamine, name your favorite poison, from Chula Vista clear on up to Los Angeles and Frisco. The Quiroses were way down the hierarchy, with transit routes inland from northern Sonora into south Texas and sections of New Mexico, and until recently hadn’t done anything to challenge the Salazar empire, sticking to a relatively insignificant share of the coke market. New drug money, you might call them. But since they’d gotten tied in with El Tío’s network a year or so back — it was hard for Lathrop to believe he’d still been with the El Paso special field division at the time, my oh my how things had changed — there had been signs they were looking to make inroads into Salazar’s territory. What was now causing Lucio such profound and well-warranted distress was the sheer nerviness of the act — not only stealing some heavy dope, but intentionally humiliating him in the process, smearing his couriers all over the arroyo, killing his drivers, and leaving them with their mouths chock-full of their own privates.

  You go dissing someone like Lucio Salazar with that kind of impunity, you’re sending a big, bold-faced message that there’s major juice behind you.

  Salazar was still shaking his head with combined anger and dismay.

  “I can’t accept this,” he said.

  Which, Lathrop thought, was absolutely right on, assuming he wanted to stay in business.

  “It’s got to be fixed,” Salazar said.

  Which, Lathrop thought, equaled taking serious retaliation.

  Salazar looked at him.

  “You find out how the Quiroses knew when my shipment was coming, anything else about their setup, I give you my word of honor it’ll be worth a jackpot,” he said.

  Lathrop nodded, making an effort not to smile. He often wondered if guys like Salazar copped their dialogue from television and the movies or vice versa. Or whether it was some weird kind of self-perpetuating loop. Reality mimicking fiction mimicking reality.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” he said and rose from his chair feeling mightily satisfied with his performance… and just as strongly convinced it would lead to the results he desired.

  Next stop on the road, Enrique Quiros.

  * * *

  “I’m leaning in favor of Ricci’s idea,” Gordian said to Nimec from behind his desk.

  He reached for the container of rolled wafers in front of him, opened it, slipped a wafer out of the container, and stirred it in his coffee so the drink would pick up the flavor of its hazelnut praline filling. This new morning ritual was in observance of his wife’s latest dietary commandment: Thou shalt not drink hazelnut coffee. Her prohibition of his favorite blend rose from her theory that its hidden calories and fatty oils were responsible for the five-pound weight gain and slightly elevated cholesterol level revealed by his latest routine checkup.

  The flavored coffee of which he’d been drinking three to five cups a day for the past year, therefore, was gone and out, per spouse’s orders, replaced on her shopping list by the cream-filled wafers he was allowed to dip, stir, and consume twice a day to satisfy his hazelnut craving, the equivalent of nicotine chewing gum to a smoker trying to quit the habit.

  Admittedly, though, the sweet sticks were tasty, if not to say addictive, in their own right.

  “My primary reservations concern the delicacy of placing our RDTs in host countries that might feel threatened by their activities, perhaps with some justification,” he said, letting the wafer steep in his coffee. “Or, trickier still, inserting them into hostile countries where we know in advance that their presence would be unwelcome.”

  Across the immense desk from him, Nimec was trying not to betray his delight at now having gotten his second “yes” of the day — albeit another qualified one — with a fair and highly unexpected degree of ease.

  “I can relay your concerns to Tom, see that he addresses them in a formal written proposal,” he said.

  Gordian pulled the wafer stick out of his coffee and took a bite.

  “That would be a reasonable start,” he said, looking happy as he chewed.

  Nimec started to lift himself off his seat, eager to make his exit while the going was good.

  Gordian raised a hand.

  “One last thing before you go,” he said.

  Nimec settled back down, waited.

  “I’m with Megan that Rollie Thibodeau has to accept the plan, at least in theory, before we take it any further.”

  Nimec considered that a moment, then nodded.

  “I’ll ask her to talk to him,” he said.

  “No,” Gordian said.

  Nimec looked at him.

  “No?”

  Gordian shook his head.

  “You do it,” he said.

  Nimec kept looking at him.

  “She’s better with Rollie than I am, two of them go way back,” he said. “They’ve got a rapport.”

  “And that’s precisely why it’s going to be you and he who have the conversation,” Gordian said. He took a gulp of coffee, the wafer back in his cup like a swizzle stick. “The fractiousness I saw aboard the yacht last week troubles me. If it continues, our organization is going to split into separate camps, and once that happens, we’ll cease to be a functional team. Think about it, Pete. It has to stop.”

  Nimec ballooned his cheeks, slowly released a breath.

  “Ought to be an interesting chat,” he said.

  Gordian smiled.

  “Ought to be,” he said and munched down the rest of his treat.

  SIX

  SAN JOSE/SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA NOVEMBER 4, 2001

  Every day it was the same, for the whole day. Trying to work through the deepening bog of paperwork in front of him. Trying to decide which decisions needed to be made first and which could be deferred until later. All across his desktop half-finished fiscal reports and operational plans silently screamed for his attention. Employ
ment applications, personnel evaluations, and equipment requisitions were spilling from his overloaded in box like tenants from a collapsing high-rise. Only the adjoining out box was uncluttered, and that sure as hell wasn’t much encouragement. It seemed sadly neglected, waiting for something to drop into it.

  Six months after his elevation to the post of global field supervisor, Rollie Thibodeau had still to feel any balance between the continuous supervisory and administrative demands of an organization as large as Sword and his personal capacity to fulfill them.

  It wasn’t that he’d been ignorant of the job’s responsibilities when Megan Breen offered it to him, nor had he failed to recognize it would mean spending many more hours in an office chair than he ever did heading up night security at UpLink’s Brazilian manufacturing compound. Except…

  A desolate frown creased Thibodeau’s face.

  Too much sit-down break trousers, he thought. It was a Louisiana bayou adage that went back forever, and he could remember his mother chastening him with it time and again when she’d caught him shirking his chores around the house. Too much sit-down break trousers. You wore out the back of your pants as quickly sitting on your rump as doing honest work. Though maybe his rump was the most functional part of him these days, being one of the few spots on his body that hadn’t been drilled by a slug in Brazil.

  Not that anyone had expressed the tiniest smidgen of unhappiness with his performance to date. On the contrary, Gordian, Nimec, and Megan all seemed to approve of the way he was handling things. The dissatisfaction, the discontent, came entirely from inside him.

  “Watcha gonna say, boy?” he asked himself aloud. “Watcha gonna goddamn say, huh?”

  Shrugging, Thibodeau reached into his breast pocket — as was his often-noticed preference, he had on the official indigo blue Sword uniform blouse usually reserved for members of active security details rather than executives at the San Jose office tower, where business suits were the norm — and pulled a satiny Montecristo No. 2 from a two-finger leather cigar case. It was one of the few remaining torpedoes he’d brought from Cuiabá, beaucoup hard to find, and he’d planned to savor it over some drinks at his favorite local tavern tonight. But he felt ready for some uplifting, damn ready, and wasn’t about to stand on occasion.