Bio-Strike pp-4

by Tom Clancy

  “For what? The problem, like you said… it was never him. He wouldn’t have done that job at the tunnel if you didn’t authorize it.”

  Quiros shook his head. “He was on his own.”

  “No.” Salazar’s voice was at once weary and bitter. “We came all the way here, might as well be straight.”

  Quiros inhaled, exhaled. “That’s what’s been wrong from the start, Lucio. You answering your own questions. Making up your mind before you know the facts. I told you the truth, and you can believe it or not. It doesn’t make a difference to me. It isn’t even the real issue between us anymore. If you’d given me a chance, I’d have put Felix on the rack, made amends. But you chose otherwise. You took things into your own hands. What you did, how could you think it would resolve anything?”

  “What I did—?”

  “Killing my nephew. My sister’s only son. What were you thinking?”

  Salazar glared with anger. “Even here, between us, you’re trying to pass off that bullshit—”

  He never got to finish his sentence.

  There were four simultaneous flashes from four different points above the green, four rifle cracks that merged into one loud, echoing sound that split the night like a thunderclap. Salazar jerked with surprise and confusion as Quiros’s head snapped sideways, blood misting up around it and spurting from a hole in his chest, and then his mouth dropped open and blood was pouring from it, too, streaming over his lips and chin. Quiros went down, folded almost neatly, and lay still there in front of him on the grass.

  Salazar spun around and saw that Quiros’s guard was also on the ground, his own man standing over the sprawled body.

  He looked up at the roof of the museum, at the great fig tree, at the tops of the Spanish Village cottages and saw no sign of the snipers, nothing at all except shadows and pale silver moonlight.

  His eyes widened with confusion. He hadn’t given the order. What the hell had happened here? He hadn’t given the goddamned order.

  * * *

  Ricci and Glenn were within fifteen yards of the hedges when they heard the discharge of the sniper guns smack the air up ahead.

  Both had slowed to a trot to keep from scaring Quiros’s men out of the bushes. Now they came to a frozen standstill and looked at each other.

  “Those were rifle shots.” Ricci removed his radio’s earpiece so he could hear more clearly. “Plural, I’m pretty sure.”

  Glenn nodded. “I’ve heard synchronous fire before. You don’t forget the sound.”

  Ricci reached under his sport jacket and pulled his Five-Seven out of its holster. Glenn drew his own piece, a Beretta 9mm.

  “Where you think the shooting came from?” Ricci said.

  Glenn started to answer, then abruptly tapped his radio earpiece to indicate he’d been squawked, and listened.

  His features were stunned as he ten-foured into the unit’s neck mike.

  “Let’s have it,” Ricci said.

  Glenn looked at him.

  “Quiros is down,” he said. He pointed eastward beyond the walkway and hedges. “The green, back of the museum.”

  “Fuck.” Ricci’s breath escaped him in a sick rush. “What about Salazar and his bodyguard?”

  “They’re on the go.”

  “Tell our people to stay on his tail, but I don’t want anybody trying to take him, not under any circumstances. Those shooters that tapped Quiros have the overhead positions and are going to cover his retreat.”

  Glenn nodded and conveyed the message.

  Ricci was forcing himself to think. “We have to get over to Quir—”

  There was a loud stirring of vegetation to his right.

  They might have started out of the bushes a second or two earlier, Ricci wasn’t positive. In his momentary crushing distraction, his effort to pull his wits together, he could have missed hearing them right off. But he’d heard them now.

  He wheeled toward the sound of tossing branches, spotted Quiros’s men spotting Glenn and him, remembered a couple of them from the Golden Triangle office. One was the bulky door-opener, Jorge.

  Just doing his job, Ricci thought.

  And all within a heartbeat he saw the recognition in Jorge’s eyes, saw Jorge notice the Five-Seven in his hand…

  And then Ricci saw Jorge start to point his own gun at him.

  Glenn reacted to the disturbance in the shrubbery in near unison with Ricci, pivoting on his heel, whipping his Beretta toward the hitters as they appeared from cover.

  “Team One, move in!” he called into his throat mike.

  They were already moving.

  By the time he saw the gun coming up in front of him, Ricci was on automatic pilot: his position, movement, and firing seamlessly integrated, the large figure outlined against the bushes objectified to his trained eye, a target with specific aiming points.

  The Five-Seven in a firm, two-handed grip, his arms extended, feet apart, he dropped into the slight crouch of a police shooter’s stance and fired three rounds into the darkness, catching Jorge dead on with every one of them.

  Clouted off his feet, Jorge collapsed backward, a yawning hole briefly visible in his chest before he crashed heavily down into a clump of shrubbery.

  Ricci didn’t pause to think. You didn’t pause at these moments, didn’t think; at these moments you were the tip of an arrow.

  Leading with his Five-Seven, he swiveled to the right, where another slugger had advanced from the bushes, his pistol a blur as he brought it up toward Glenn. Ricci took a quick breath, sighted, pulled the trigger on his exhalation. Glenn’s Beretta spurted flame at the same instant. The slugger did a grotesque shimmy on his feet, then pitched over sideways.

  Ricci sought more movement, listened for more rattling in the hedges. There, over to the left, a third man raised his gun. A fourth beside him.

  And then from farther back in the darkness, a female voice called out, “Don’t try it! Toss your weapons, hands up in the air. Now!”

  Ricci focused on the spot from which the command had been shouted and saw a woman in a rigger’s outfit with a semiautomatic pistol in her right hand. The luminescent Sword ID on her breast identified her as one of his own.

  A moment ticked by.

  Two more figures had rushed out of the night to either side of the woman and formed up in a semicircle around the hedges. Men in dark civvies, firearms held out, glow-in-the-dark Sword insignias seeming to float over their chests.

  Ricci kept his Five-Seven on the sluggers, saw Glenn doing the same with his Beretta from the corner of his eye.

  Both men waited to see if the sluggers would pick smart or dead, their choice here, no lifelines, no polling the audience.

  They dropped their pieces, raised their hands.

  Smart.

  Ricci sprang out of his crouch toward Glenn, leaving the frisk-and-cuff to their foot team.

  “The green,” he said. His hand on Glenn’s arm. “Take me over there.”

  * * *

  Ricci had known Quiros was down but had hoped to a God he’d never been sure existed that Quiros wasn’t out. What he found on the lawn would not make a religious man out of him.

  One brief glance at the body on the grass was all it took to establish there wasn’t a spark of life remaining in it. Whatever part of the head hadn’t gotten scattered aross the lawn was a gaping, bloody mess. Ricci guessed it should have seemed odd to him that Quiros’s glasses had stayed on his face, that they weren’t even askew, but he’d been around violent death enough to know it often had a sardonic touch.

  He knelt over the body, searched through its pockets, and found nothing of use. Then he just knelt there feeling numb.

  Far across the lawn, he could see Glenn looking up at the tops of the buildings around them, standing with his gun loosely at rest against his leg. The roofs looked empty. The monster tree looked empty. Not much risk to being here, the snipers were probably gone by now. If they were still in place, they weren’t a threat. Their work showe
d they’d been top-tier pros, and the job they’d been hired to perform was finished.

  Glenn raised a hand to catch Ricci’s eye and signaled that he wanted to do a walkaround, pointing toward the front of the museum. Ricci waved for him to go ahead and watched him turn the building’s corner, leaving him alone with the body.

  Ricci knelt over it, looked down at it, the night feeling very deep around him, its chill penetrating his clothes.

  “You got away from me,” he said to Quiros’s un-hearing ears, his voice flat and husky. “Got away, you son of a bitch. And I don’t know what to do.”

  He never heard anyone slipping up on him. Never heard a sound. Despite his natural alertness, his finely keyed senses, not a sound until the voice spoke out of the darkness mere inches behind his back.

  “Shazam,” it said.

  “Jesus Christ, what’d your guys think they were doing?” Lucio Salazar barked into his cellular.

  Shaken and baffled, still clueless about why his hired triggers had opened fire, he was speeding from the park in his Caddy, unaware he’d just passed the spot where Sword’s roadblock for Enrique Quiros had been lifted moments earlier.

  * * *

  “They fulfilled their assignment,” the little man in the control station replied over their connection. “The proof is that you’re alive right now.”

  “Are you out of your mind? I was handling things with Enrique. Talking to him. I never gave you the goddamned word—”

  “It would be better if you could give me some respect. Quiros had people in the bushes ahead of you. I saw at least one of them holding a gun.”

  Salazar’s brow wrinkled.

  “Hold it a second,” he said. “Are you sure?”

  “I know my job. Should I have waited until you reached those men? Let them make their move? If I’d done that, you’d be the one laying in your own blood right now.”

  Not quite knowing how to respond, Salazar got off the phone and sat quietly as his driver turned toward the highway. In a way, the brief conversation had left him more confused than before. Looking back upon everything that had happened in the past half hour, remembering Quiros’s words to him, he had to admit that Quiros had seemed to genuinely believe it was the Salazar family that off’ed his bastardo nephew. And then there were his comments about making amends, which in hindsight also had sounded like they might have been sincere. On the other hand, Quiros had set a trap for him along the path, assuming the sniper boss had been on the level… and what would he have to gain from bullshitting about that?

  The lines on Salazar’s forehead grew deeper. He supposed it didn’t pay to start entertaining second thoughts at this late stage. The best thing for him was probably to be thankful he was still in one piece, and move on. But questions of what Quiros had or hadn’t known — or done — kept gnawing at him. Because if there was even a speck of truth in the words he’d spoken before he was killed, it would cast serious doubt upon the reliability of Lathrop’s information. And then you’d have to start asking how Lathrop could have gotten it so wrong, and wondering about his motivations, his intentions…

  The Cadillac was swinging onto the entrance ramp to I-5, heading north to Del Mar, where the timed explosive charge beneath its fuel tank suddenly detonated with a crumping blast, sending a burst of flame through its interior, its force punching out metal, blowing out both windshields and three of its four side windows, instantly killing Lucio Salazar, his driver, and the bodyguards who had been riding inside with them — leaving Salazar’s questions to vaporize in the smoke and superheated air.

  But then, in matters of life and death, one could very rarely expect to receive all the answers.

  * * *

  Ricci’s hand went to his Five-Seven, drew the pistol from its holster even as he turned fast at the hip and looked behind him.

  The man standing there was dressed entirely in black, regarding him with sharp, intelligent eyes. His hands were straight down at his sides. One was empty. The other held a square, flat object that Ricci would have immediately recognized as a CD gem case had the setting been different. In the context of his present situation, it took him a second or two.

  He studied the man’s face. If the gun Ricci was pointing at him gave him any fear, he showed no sign of it.

  “Who are you?” Ricci said.

  The man tilted his head up a little, his lips parting, seeming for the briefest of moments to gaze past Ricci into the night sky. Then he locked eyes with him. “One Who Knows,” he said. “But I’ll bet you already have that figured out.”

  Ricci’s gun was steady in his grip. But it felt suddenly cold. “Tell me what the hell you want.”

  The man shook his head. “It’s what you want that’s important, and I’ve got it right in my hand.” He lifted the gem case from his side, held it out toward Ricci. “Take it. Poor Enrique here’s a dead end, so you’d might as well. What’s there to lose? Maybe you’ll feel you owe me one. But that will be up to you.”

  Silence.

  Ricci did not move for a long moment. Then he slowly reached out to the man and took the case from him, keeping his gun trained on his chest.

  The man’s hand dropped back to his side. “I’m going to steal away into the night now,” he said. “Just tell me I don’t have to worry about you putting a slug into me for some odd reason.”

  Ricci was still watching his eyes. “You already have that figured,” he said.

  The man smiled and dipped his head in a gesture that almost resembled a bow.

  “Be careful now,” he said.

  Then the man turned and walked into the darkness, heading toward a nearby footpath, disappearing into the shadows beneath the trees rising tall on either side of it, leaving Ricci crouched over the body of Enrique Quiros, alone in the silent green, one hand around his gun, the other holding tightly on to a mystery.

  TWENTY-THREE

  VARIOUS LOCALES NOVEMBER 17, 2001

  The capacity to balance emotions that would seem bound for shattering collision is a wonder of the human heart.

  They had gathered in this room more times than any of them could recall. UpLink International was a vast organization with interests in many countries that were only an armed or political power play away from disintegration, and its very presence in those unstable regions often threw it into the center of violent conflict. In this room, they had plotted strategies and determined their reactions to swiftly unfolding crises in Afghanistan, Turkey, Russia, Malaysia, Brazil… even to a terrorist strike that had killed thousands in America’s largest metropolis. In this room, with its steel-reinforced concrete walls, its embedded sound-masking equipment, its bug detectors, phone and fax encryptors, and myriad other surveillance countermeasure systems, they had felt able to deliberate and exchange intelligence with an unexceeded level of privacy. Reserved for UpLink’s inner circle, it had been their closed chamber, their sanctum sanctorum. But, though their minds told them to trust Phil Hernandez’s assurances that its security remained intact, their hearts would permit no such confidence. How could they, after a hands-on custodian of their privacy had become their worst betrayer?

  In the confines of this windowless room one level below the lobby of their San Jose headquarters, UpLink’s inner circle had gathered around Roger Gordian like knights at a modern round table, dedicated to helping him shape his dream of a freer, better world, offering him the sum of their insight, expertise, and counsel at moments of urgent decision. Now his chair at the table was vacant, and their hearts ached from his absence. How could they not, when it was his vision and strength of character that gave them inspiration? Yet somehow the members of this group took comfort in simply being here together, with their wide diversity of backgrounds and personalities, consolidated around a shared goal, determined to prevail over the challenges they faced. And stirring in the hearts of several of them — deeper in some than others — was an embryonic awareness that if the unthinkable did happen to Roger Gordian and his chair were to remain
empty, one of their number had the attributes to pick up his fallen standard and guide them on toward the further realization of his dream.

  “Now that everybody’s arrived, I think we’d better get the meeting under way,” Megan Breen said. She looked around the large conference table at Nimec, Scull, Ricci, Thibodeau, and finally at the morning’s unexpected visitor. “Alex, it’s good to see you back, these god-awful circumstances aside.”

  He gave her a somber but genuine smile. A lean, fit, smartly dressed man in his late forties whose corrective laser eye surgery had made his once-familiar wire glasses a memory, Nordstrum had been UpLink’s chief foreign affairs consultant before his retirement for personal reasons the year before.

  “I just wish I could have returned sooner,” he said. “Gord’s fighting for his life, and I’m off trekking in Morocco, footloose and oblivious.”

  “Bad things can happen, Alex,” she said, “whether you’re here or gone. That’s life.”

  “Maybe,” he said. “And maybe I’m finished with being gone.”

  Megan’s was less of a true response than a signal she wanted to get down to business. They had much to cover, and the clock was ticking.

  “We’ve all seen the information on the compact disk Tom brought back from San Diego, and it’s an incredible amount to digest,” she said. “I’d hoped to organize the material in a report or have something ready on the digital projector. But there wasn’t a chance, so I had to settle for an old-fashioned chalkboard and pointer.” Megan paused and gestured at the transparent clamp binders she’d given to each of them. “As everyone can see, I did manage to make up printed transcripts of the audio portion of the carousel surveillance and the conversation between Quiros and Palardy.”

  “We don’t need to get too fancy,” Ricci said. “With what Nameless gave me in Balboa Park, the threads are pretty easy to follow.”

  “Some blanks gonna have to be filled in before we can do the boss any good,” Thibodeau said. “Otherwise it une cargaison. Not a cargo, but a load, y‘hear what I’m sayin’.”