Bio-Strike pp-4

by Tom Clancy

  AWAKEN THE SLEEPER

  FEE: 50 MILLION

  INSTRUCTIONS TO FOLLOW WITHIN ONE WEEK

  Suddenly, items one through one hundred on Grover’s wish list could be his for the asking.

  Wild as it seemed, for the asking.

  The North, the South, the Midwest… to hell with grabbing slices of the American pie when he could have the whole thing laid before him in shiny gift wrapping, like the best and biggest present under the tree on Christmas morning.

  At fifty million dollars, Murdock Williams considered it a bargain. A first grader could calculate the profit-versus-loss margins easily enough; he wasn’t talking quantum physics here but simple checkbook arithmetic.

  Williams’s lawyers had already offered that elderly couple on the Upper East Side, what, two, three million dollars to relinquish the lease to their rental apartment and vacate, guaranteeing them a two-bedroom elsewhere in the city. This was far more than the building’s other occupants had gotten — Williams believed the highest any of them had been paid was 1.5 mil — and they’d all jumped at the offer. You were talking about handing over a pot of gold, giving them the chance to strike it rich by ordinary standards, how many people wouldn’t?

  Well, those two fossils Mr. and Mrs. Bognar, obviously. Husband something like eighty, wife only a few years younger, living in the same York Avenue apartment for half a century, you’d think they might appreciate a change of scenery before God lowered the boom. Instead, they were sticking like old wallpaper.

  It wasn’t that Williams harbored any personal animosity toward them — would he have upped the buyout offer if he did? In fact, there was some sympathy in him. Some understanding. His own great-grandparents had been from Russia, fled the pogroms, arrived in America with next to nothing. He was sure he still had a photograph, or daguerreotype, whatever, of Fred and Erna Waskow, bearers of his pre-Ellis Island family name, hanging on a wall somewhere in one of his homes. The Bognars, they’d come over as refugees when the Russkies pushed into Budapest in ’56, so there was a definite feeling of kinship in Williams’s heart. But no real estate developer ever reached his level of success by shying away from the bottom line, sympathy and understanding aside.

  The Mews was what they called those East Side apartment houses, erected around wide, gated courts and area-ways in the late 1800s. Williams could see how historic-minded types found them appealing, although history didn’t cut it for him personally. Occupying big hunks of river frontage, they had started out as sanatoriums where moneyed tuberculosis patients could come for the then fresh air, and thirty or forty years later were converted into dwellings for the city’s growing middle class — predominantly Hungarian and German immigrants displaced by one overseas conflict or another. In the 1980s, the addresses became fashionable, attracting droves of yuppies from hither and yon, but a sizable number of Europeans from yesteryear had clung to their rent-stabilized apartments throughout the neighborhood transition.

  When Williams acquired the properties from their former owner, he’d paid top dollar, knowing full well that the purchase price would represent only a fraction of his eventual expenses. But his bean counters estimated his long-range profits to be in the hundreds of millions, possibly over a billion dollars, way off the board like that, the real value being in the airspace above the existing structures.

  Just six stories tall, they were a colossal waste of prime living space as they stood. Because the row of four contiguous buildings included a corner lot, Manhattan zoning regulations allowed them to be torn down and replaced with a single high-rise skyscraper that would dominate almost an entire square block and soar at least ninety-five stories above the city, surpassing in height the residential tower that Williams’s famous rival was raising opposite the United Nations… the very same competitor-slash-mogul who was always getting his picture on the front pages, and who had presold penthouse units in his building for upwards of ten million dollars apiece before so much as a single drop of concrete was mixed for its foundation.

  At stake, therefore, was a staggering bundle and also the posterity Williams would finally achieve by owning the largest residential structure in New York City, ergo the country, ergo the world.

  With the t’s crossed and the i’s dotted on his owner- ship papers, Williams had lost no time making lavish buyout offers to the residents of the buildings, about 75 percent of whom had happily taken the deal. A smaller group of tenants had waited for him to sweeten the pot, which he’d done by somewhat upping the dollar amount and in some cases tossing in the free relocation proviso.

  It wasn’t long before the remaining holdouts cleared the premises — except for the Bognars, who refused to budge from the Mews to which they were sentimentally attached. The Bognars, who would not change their minds regardless of how much cash was shoved at them, be it over, under, or around the table. The Bognars, who, despite their advanced age, appeared to be in sufficiently good health to stay put in their apartment for years to come before finally giving up the ghost.

  And years was longer than Williams intended to wait.

  After having his last buyout offer snubbed, he’d instructed his attorneys to start eviction procedures against the Bognars, but even the Legal Aid interns they got to represent them had possessed the savvy to call his bluff. The rent-control laws were ironclad when it came to validating their current lease and giving them a renewal option once it lapsed. Moreover, as sitting tenants, they were by the same legislation entitled to renew indefinitely.

  Blown out of the courtroom, catching heat from senior-citizen advocacy groups that had salivated over the chance to make the Bognars a cause célèbre, Williams in desperation got in touch with certain admittedly shady operators about providing what might be called extralegal recourse. He was thinking that these operators — who had their hands in the construction industry among many others around town, controlling the unions, drywall suppliers, plumbing and electrical companies, you name it, from behind the scenes — might be able to throw a scare into the couple, something of that nature. But when he’d made his request to one such acquaintance over dinner in Little Italy, Williams was told that the fuss made by the various senior-rights organizations on local media outlets had created an awkward hitch.

  “Think about it,” his acquaintance had explained. “All the bad publicity you’ve gotten on this, a wasp stings one of those decrepit old farts, and he or she cries ouch, somebody’s going to claim the fucking thing was trained and sent on its mission by Murdock Williams.”

  Williams had looked at him pointedly across the table.

  “You people are supposed to be experts at persuasion, and I can’t see how this is a tall order,” he’d insisted. “Besides, I’m not the only one losing out while the old farts sit on a fortune. Or don’t you understand how much of this wealth your organization could be sharing?”

  The other man had stared at him a moment, then slowly lowered his fork onto his plate.

  “Isn’t me who’s misunderstanding,” he’d replied. “I said there were problems, not that we couldn’t get past them. You sit tight, I need to approach somebody I know of. He’s on another level from everyone else, so I’ll have to go through the Commission. If he thinks he can help, he’ll reach you.”

  And reach Williams he did. The original notification had been E-mailed to him within a week, and it struck him as the craziest damned thing. A designer virus, that was what the sender had declared he could provide. There might have been a hundred other proposals Williams wouldn’t have questioned for an instant, recognizing that his acquaintance moved in a realm that was beyond his experience. But it had seemed absolutely far out. He’d had trouble giving credence to it.

  Little by little, though, a belief in the claim’s legitimacy had begun to emerge in his mind. Something about the way his unidentified contact had been spoken about at the Little Italy meeting had impressed Williams. This cyberspace phantom commanded deference from a man who was almost nobody’s lesser.

&n
bsp; Nor was it just that. Under the advisement of his broker, Williams had bought heavily into the genomic futures market, but not before doing his homework. Projects that involved the mapping of human and non-human DNA were on the verge of leading to a scientific revolution on a scale with the coming of the industrial age, the harnessing of atomic energy, and the advent of the microchip in its ramifications for society. Genomic research promised rapid breakthroughs in the prevention and diagnosis of disease, drug treatments, the farming of lab-cloned body parts for transplantation… there was no telling what advances to expect, no keeping pace with those that had already been made. Nearly every day some new application of biotechnology was announced, so why be skeptical that a customizable virus had been hatched? The longer Williams contemplated it, the more the idea that one hadn’t was what started to look far-fetched.

  In fact, he’d thought, it would be selling short his own biotech investment folder to doubt the probability — and Murdock Williams never bet against himself.

  He replied to the E-mail with a note requesting that he be advised when the product was ready for issue and then tried his best to focus on other business. Still, in his idle moments, Williams would visualize his building soaring above the riverfront, a lasting, commanding monument to his mastery of the developer’s art. And as far as it went for that old couple, how much time could they have left before they reached their expiration dates, anyway? Cancer, heart attack, stroke, everybody got hammered sooner or later. Williams honestly felt he’d just be hastening along the inevitable.

  As his appreciation for the beauty of the solution increased, his craving to gratify his drive and ambition became unbearable. Had the “cyber-phantom” taken any longer to respond, the impatience would have eaten him up alive.

  Thank heaven the wait was finally over. He’d have paid ten times the asking price to end it.

  Awaken the Sleeper, fee fifty million, instructions to follow within one week, he thought now, the message that had finally showed up in his on-line mailbox ticking in his mind like a NASDAQ readout.

  A week, one more week — seven days until he could get things rolling.

  Williams knew he’d be counting down the hours.

  ELEVEN

  SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA NOVEMBER 8, 2001

  “I can’t do what you’re asking. It isn’t an option.”

  “I’m sorry you feel that way, Palardy,” Enrique Quiros said. “Because, as a matter of fact, it’s your only option.”

  “Don’t use my name. It isn’t safe—”

  Quiros shook his head and indicated the portable bug detector on the seat between them.

  “There’s where you’re mistaken again,” he said. “Because this is my Safe Car. Honestly, that’s what I call it, just as some people might give their cars endearing little names like Bessie, Marie, or whatever.”

  Palardy let out a sigh. The Safe Car in which they sat was a Fiat Coupé that Quiros had driven into the parking lot outside the cruise ship terminal on Harbor Drive. It was six P.M., the upper rim of the sun sinking into San Diego Bay, the area outside the terminal crosshatched with dusky shadows. Palardy had left his own Dodge Caravan several aisles away when he’d reluctantly arrived in answer to Quiros’s summons.

  “Those pocket units aren’t reliable,” he said. “Their bandwidth sensitivity’s limited. And certain kinds of listening devices operate in modes that won’t scan. It’s my job to know this sort of thing, my goddamned job, or did you forget—”

  “Settle down. I haven’t forgotten anything,” Quiros interrupted. “This vehicle is garaged on my property, and the grounds are under constant video surveillance. There are alarms. Canine patrols. Unless I happen to be inside it, as now, it’s never parked anywhere else.”

  They looked at each other, Palardy seeing his own features reflected in Quiros’s dark green Brooks Brothers sunglasses. He’d always found it offensive when a man wore tinted lenses during a talk with somebody who wasn’t wearing them, in this instance himself, the concealment of the eyes a blatant means of gaining distance and position. State troopers, paranoiacs, egotistical movie stars — so many personality types, and yet that desire to set themselves apart was an attribute they all shared.

  “Open areas are hard to secure; even the military has problems with them, I don’t care how many watchdogs or alarms you’ve got.” Palardy sighed heavily again. “Listen, I’m not trying to argue. My point’s just that it doesn’t hurt to be careful.”

  Plainly tired of the subject, Quiros reached into the inner pocket of his sport jacket and produced a zippered leather case.

  “Let’s make this short so we can both move on,” he said, holding the case out to Palardy. “Everything you’ll need is in here.”

  “I told you I can’t do this. It’s too dangerous. It’s too much for me.”

  Quiros looked at him in silence for several moments. Then he nodded to himself, turned toward the front of the car, and leaned back against his headrest.

  “Okay,” he said, staring straight ahead with the case still in his hand. “Okay, here’s how it is. I’m not interested in what you have to tell me. When you wanted money to pay off your gambling debts in Cuiabá, you were glad to sell off confidential information about the layout and security of an installation that it was your job to protect. When you were rotated back to the States and found yourself in hock again, loan sharks riding all over you, you became more than eager to slink into your employer’s office and collect material for a genetic blueprint that you knew would be—”

  “Please, I don’t feel comfortable talking about—”

  Quiros raised his hand. The gesture was slow and without anger, but something about it instantly quieted Palardy.

  “If I were you, I wouldn’t feel comfortable, either. Because you’ve done worse than break bonds with every professional trust that’s been placed in you. You’ve been an accessory to acts of murder and sabotage. And if that information were to surface, it could put you away in prison for the rest of your life.”

  There was a brief silence. Palardy swallowed spitlessly. It made a clicking sound in his throat.

  “A decision’s been made for you,” Quiros said. “It’s too late for objections or disavowals. And my advice is to drop them right now. Or I promise you’ll regret it.”

  Palardy swallowed again. Click.

  “I didn’t want to get involved in anything like this,” he said hoarsely.

  Quiros stared out at the terminal in the deepening pool of shadows near the harbor’s edge.

  “It could be we have that in common,” he said, his voice quiet. And paused a beat. “You’ll do what you have to do.”

  He extended the case across the seat without turning from the windshield.

  This time, Palardy took it.

  In a rental van on the opposite side of the parking aisle, Lathrop began to pack his remote laser voice monitoring system into its black hardshell camera case. From the rear window panel of the van, the invisible beam of the device’s near-infrared semiconductor laser diode had been aimed at a ninety-degree angle through the back windshield at the Fiat’s rearview mirror.

  It is a basic rule of optics that the angle of incidence is equal to the angle of reflection. What this means in practical application is that a beam of coherent light — that is, a beam in which all light waves are in phase, the defining and essential quality of a laser transmission — will bounce back to its source at the same angle at which it strikes a reflecting surface, unless that surface creates some sort of modulation, or interference, to throw the waves out of phase, causing some to bounce back at different angles than others. Vibrating infinitesimally from the conversation inside the Fiat — perhaps a thousandth of an inch or less with each utterance — the window glass had caused corresponding fluctuations in the optical beam reflecting off it, which were then converted into electronic pulses by the eavesdropping unit’s receiver, filtered from background noise, enhanced, and digitally recorded.

  Lat
hrop had gotten every word spoken inside the car. And though he wasn’t yet certain what they all meant, one thing was eminently clear to him.

  After days of following Enrique Quiros in a succession of rentals and disguises, days of following his instincts, his patience finally had been rewarded with a deeper and richer load of pay dirt than he could have imagined.

  TWELVE

  SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA NOVEMBER 11, 2001

  The instant Palardy entered Roger Gordian’s office, a strange feeling came over him. Everything seemed the same yet different, like in one of those dreams that was so close to real life you awoke confused about whether its events had actually occurred. The setting of the dream might be the place you grew up, the home you lived in, the park across the street, it didn’t matter. You knew you were somewhere familiar, but things weren’t quite the way they should be. Both inside and outside yourself.

  It was like that for him this morning. The same yet different.

  He tried to shake that floaty, disoriented sensation as he strode across the carpet toward Gordian’s desk.

  “You’ll do what you have to do, ” Quiros had insisted. And Palardy thought now that he could.

  He could do it.

  Because this was only a day after his regular countersurveillance sweep, Palardy was not carrying the Big Sniffer or any of its accompanying equipment, which made him a bit more conspicuous than he otherwise might be. But once Enrique Quiros had forced this thing upon him, he’d known he would want to get it done right away. That zippered case he took from Quiros, it had felt so heavy in his hand, so heavy in his pocket. Like some superdense piece of lead being drawn toward the earth’s magnetic core, pulling him down with it. Every minute he held onto it, that downward pull grew harder to resist. Palardy needed to get the thing over with before he sank into the ground.