by Tom Clancy
“Nothing we can do for him,” he said. “And we have to get out of this damned hallway while we can.”
* * *
The lightest of sleepers, Kuhl answered the telephone in time to clip its first ring. “What is it?” he said.
He listened to the report from his security officer, then flung off his blanket.
“Where in the building?” he said.
He listened again.
“Send reinforcements to the area,” he said. He decided that he had best notify DeVane. “I’m coming immediately.”
* * *
“Doc, I’ve got to hear from you!” Ricci snapped over the comlink. His team was speeding along the corridor, away from the section where the firefight had broken out.
Silence.
“Come on, Doc, I mean now—”
“Tom, listen, it’s me.”
“Pete, where the hell is he? We’re running blind here.”
“I know. Eric saw the whole thing. The shooting. What happened to Grillo. He’s pretty shaken up.”
“Then pull him together—”
“Tom, for God’s sake, we know your situation.” It was Megan, her voice tense. “Give him half a second—”
“I’m all right,” Eric’s voice broke in. “Sorry. I… I just…”
“Later,” Ricci said. “We’re coming up to another cross hall. A bunch of signs. Can you read them?”
“No, you’re moving too fast, the picture’s blurry… jolting…”
“I’m going to stop and let you take a look. But we don’t have long. I don’t know who might’ve heard those guns.”
“Understood.”
Ricci signaled a halt, then craned his head toward the signs, turning it to allow the helmet’s digicam to pan across his visual path.
“You see them okay?” he said.
“Yes… Wait. The sign on your left. No, the next one over… okay, right there.”
Ricci’s eyes held on the sign. It said:
AQUEOUS PHASE SEPARATION
“Doc?” Ricci urged.
“That’s it. A synonym for the gelatin microencapsulation process,” Eric said. “The academic term.”
Ricci swung his gaze to the left. A steel door barred the way about three feet down the corridor junction. This had a biometric hand scanner rather than the swipe card reader. The level of security was escalating, itself a strong indication he was getting hot. And while he’d expected to encounter biometrics and come prepared with ways to fool them, the deceptions took time, and speed now took precedence over delicacy.
He turned to his men. “They know we’re here, no point tiptoeing,” he said. “We blow our way in.”
* * *
Johan Stuzinski was a specialist in the field of bioinformatics — the use of statistical and computational analytic techniques to predict the function of encoded proteins within genetic material, based solely on DNA sequence data. The applications of this discipline in terms of human genome research included the identification of proteins within chromosomes that caused inherited diseases and inherited predispositions toward diseases that might be triggered by environmental, dietary, and other external factors.
The fruits of this research promise to revolutionize modern medicine by helping scientists design drugs and therapies that target these culprit proteins, attacking or even eliminating the causes of health disorders at the cellular — in truth, the molecular — roots. If cures or vastly superior treatments for cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, the muscular dystrophies, Alzheimer’s, AIDS, and countless other maladies that have plagued mankind throughout history are found in the coming decades, it will be through application of genomic discoveries.
The very best in his field, Johan Stuzinski could have lent his expertise to any of hundreds of medical research establishments and pharmaceutical firms performing meaningful work toward improving the human condition in the twenty-first century and beyond. In January 2000, Stuzinski was offered a management position with a generous salary and benefit package by Sobel Genetics, a leader in the search for genome-based therapies. Though he came close to taking the job, Stuzinski had simultaneously received another proposal from Earthglow, a Canadian firm whose goals were considerably more obscure, even a bit irregular, as he chose to think of them. But its hiring executive had promised him various under-the-table, and thus nontaxable, financial perquisites that were communicated with subtle inferences. A nod and a wink, so to speak.
After some consideration, he had called Sobel to decline their proposition, packed his bags for Ontario, and gladly put on his moral blinders. He kept his eyes on his narrow portion of the work being conducted at the facility, rarely allowed himself to consider its eventual application, and very definitely never questioned the presence of the rather menacing armed guards who patrolled certain parts of the facility.
In that way, Stuzinski was exactly like hundreds of other top-caliber professionals who had come to lend their exceptional skills to Earthglow’s operations. He was like them in another way, as well: When the sounds of racing footsteps, dull claps that may have been gunfire, and something that could perhaps have been a small explosion distantly reached his apartment in the complex’s living quarters in the predawn hours of Thursday morning, rousing him from sleep, he got out of bed only to make sure his door was locked and then somewhat nervously stayed put.
Until and unless it became a direct threat to him, Johan Stuzinski’s attitude was that whatever might be happening outside was none of his personal business.
* * *
“You six stay here and cover the entry.” Ricci motioned to Barnes, Seybold, Beatty, Carlysle, Perry, and Newell. “Watch yourselves. That boom must’ve set off alarms everywhere. We don’t know what kind of manpower’s headed this way.”
The men nodded in unison. They were standing near the blown, broken remains of the security door in the smoke and haze left by the detonation of their breaching charges.
Ricci looked at their faces a moment, then turned to the other four members of his team. “Okay, here we go,” he said and led them through the ruptured entrance.
* * *
In Earthglow’s main security station, Kuhl studied the flashing light on his electronic display’s building schematic. The blast’s location supported what he had already construed about the goal of the intruders. And the connection between their goal and identity was like a match brightly struck in his mind.
His eyes went from the screen to his chief lieutenant. “Keep abreast of developments at the penetration site,” Kuhl said, thinking of the alternate path he could take to investigate the target area. “I will be in contact.”
He did not await the lieutenant’s nod of acknowledgment before leaving the room.
* * *
Looking up the corridor, Seybold realized he’d not only cut the opposition’s numeric advantage but dramatically shifted it to his own band.
It was a thing that gave him some relief, a thing he’d trained for, prepared for. But he was still human, and the violations combat weapons inflicted on human flesh sickened him.
Five or six of the guards were down in grotesque positions, sheeted in blood, the floor around them slick with blood. Some were screaming in pain. Another guard was pinned to the wall like an insect caught on a fly strip, drenched with superadhesive, his limbs tangled by the impact that hurled him against it, strips of skin flapping off his cheek where he’d torn himself from the concrete in a blind panic. Yet another guard stared dazedly on his knees at a baseball-sized hole in his abdomen.
Seybold had a bare moment to register the damage. The rest of the guards were advancing past the sprawl of bodies, their weapons stuttering, and it was his job to stop them.
He took a deep breath of air, slung the Benelli over his back, then gripped his baby VVRS in his hands and fired a tight burst. To his left and right, hunkered close to the walls on either side of the exploded steel door, his companions were also firing their weapons.
More guards went down, and then another came running forward in a kind of wrathful, aggressive hurtle, yelling at the top of his lungs, his gun blazing away. A couple of feet to Seybold’s left, Beatty grunted and was slammed back against the wall, smearing it with blood as he sank to the floor. Then bullets rippled from one of the other men’s VVRS rifles, and the charging guard spun around in a circle and fell dead, his weapon slipping from his fingers, clutching his chest with both hands.
That left two of them. One dove onto his belly to present a low target, skidding over the blood of his companions, sustained fire pouring from his weapon. Carlysle and Newell trained their guns on him and fired in concert, a brief chop. These were men whose partnership went back, and it showed in their expert performance. The guard jerked once on the floor and then ceased to move.
A single guard remained now, and he was unwilling to commit suicide. He turned down the hall, running, his uniform splashed with blood that may or may not have been his own.
“We gonna let him take off?” Carlysle asked Seybold.
Seybold looked at him. The question had sounded almost distant through the loud throbbing pulse beat in his ears.
“The son of a bitch isn’t important,” he said. Seybold rushed over to Beatty, on the floor now, propped into a sitting position with his back to the wall. Barnes and Newell were already huddled around him, getting their first-aid kits out of their packs. Perry had raised his helmet visor.
“How bad?” Seybold asked. His eyes went from Beatty’s bloodied shoulder to his face.
“Feels like a slug drilled through my arm, but I think I’ll be all right,” Beatty said. He licked his lips. “Can’t say I love it, though.”
Seybold breathed and nodded. “We’ll get you patched up,” he said.
* * *
“Wait,” Eric Oh said. “That one. No, no, you’re pulling the wrong disk. Count two up. Okay, that’s it.”
Ricci slid the gem case from the cabinet and turned it over in his hand so the print on its index label faced his helmet’s digital camera lens.
Silence over the comlink.
“Doc…”
“I need you to slip it into your wearable,” Eric said. “Send me its contents so I can have a look.”
Ricci bit his lip. He could hear gunfire somewhere in the direction of the blown security door.
Reaching down to the miniature computer on his belt, he ejected its CD-ROM tray, set in the disk, and pushed the tray shut. Then he hit the preset UpLink intranet key and uploaded the disk’s contents as a wireless E-mail attachment.
Tortured seconds passed.
“Well?”
“The data’s coming through now, I’m going to scan it on-line, give me a chance to—”
Ricci’s heart knocked. “Well…?”
“My God,” Eric said. “Oh my God, Ricci, this is unbelievable.”
* * *
His SIG-Sauer P220 in his hand should the enemy be waiting near its door, Kuhl rode the pneumatic elevator up from the biofarm sublevel. The underground passages he’d taken had enabled him to bypass the breached security entrance on Earthglow’s main floor. When the tubular car opened, he would be in the microencapsulation section, a few turns of the hall from the room that was the intruders’ certain objective.
He did not know the size of their invasion force or how far they had penetrated. If he determined that they could be prevented from accomplishing their mission, he would. But his survival had always rested on being a swift contingency planner.
The elevator stopped.
Outside in the corridor, Simmons and Rosander heard the whisper of the arriving car and raised their VVRS weapons.
Kuhl caught a glimpse of them before its door fully opened. His edge over them in speed might have been narrow. In his merciless capacity to kill without restraint, he was a creature alone.
Simmons was on the left of the elevator, and as he prepared to give its passenger a warning, Kuhl pivoted toward him, stepped in close under his gun arm, and brought his own pistol up to Simmons’s side, pushing the muzzle between his fourth rib and underarm, where he knew the straps of his soft ballistic vest would leave an unprotected gap. Three shots of Teflon-coated.45ACP rounds against his body, three muffled blats of sound as the snout of the gun discharged through layers of cold-weather clothing, and Simmons went down to the floor.
With the man who’d come out of the elevator pressed close against Simmons, Rosander had been unable to do anything but hold his fire, fearing he might accidentally hit his teammate. But as Simmons crumpled, he brought his weapon to bear.
He was almost fast enough.
In a streak, Kuhl spun toward Rosander on the ball of his foot, moved in at him, grabbed his wrist behind the outthrust VVRS, and twisted it sharply around, wrenching it, simultaneously slamming his powerful forearm up under Rosander’s chin to crush his windpipe.
His eyes rolling back in their sockets, Rosander sagged back against the wall and fell.
Kuhl crouched to take the VVRS from his hand, heard movement behind him, turned again to the left, in the direction of the laboratory where the inhibitor formulas were stored. His side sticky and wet from point-blank bullet wounds, the intruder Kuhl had shot still clung to life and was weakly raising himself onto his elbows, fingers fumbling for the grip of his own weapon. Kuhl bent, shoved his knee into the man’s diaphragm to crush the air out of him, lifted his helmet visor, and, looking directly down into his eyes, finished him with a shot to the center of his forehead.
Rising then, he heard footsteps down the hall.
Another enemy in winter camouflage was rapidly approaching from the lab area, his weapon ready to fire.
* * *
Hearing gunshots down the corridor to his right, knowing Ricci desperately needed more time in the room behind him, Nichols turned and rushed toward the sound of the reports.
All at a glance he saw a man he recognized as the Wildcat standing above Simmons’s blood-soaked form, saw Rosander slumped near the wall behind them, and with a surge of horror opened fire on the killer.
Cold-eyed, Kuhl triggered the VVRS he had taken from Rosander, aiming low, a right-to-left sweep of the barrel.
Nichols’s legs gave out underneath him, blood splashing from both knees. And then he felt the floor hard against his back.
Kuhl fired three accurate bursts into him, saw the body quiver as fifteen bullets ripped into it, and for an instant considered advancing farther up the hall.
His teeth clicked. Footsteps were coming from the penetration site behind him, four sets, the sound of their heavy boots distinct from those of his own men. His squad had apparently been held off, and he did not know how many more intruders were ahead of him.
Kuhl took an instant to consider and then made his decision.
He turned toward the elevator, pressed the call button, stepped through the opening, and retreated.
* * *
“… oh my God, Ricci, this is unbelievable.”
Ricci’s face was bathed in sweat.
“Talk fast, Doc,” he said. “Have we got what we need?”
“We have it, yes. We have it, we have it. Several different types of inhibitors. Stored as computer models rather than pills. Novelty cures for novelty viruses. They had no reason to preproduce them, not physically, and they didn’t. But Ricci, what we’ve stumbled onto is beyond what we expected. There are hundreds, maybe thousands of activators. The virus must be infinitely mutable. A potential doomsday bug, and we’ve found—”
Ricci’s attention broke away from whatever Oh was telling him. He’d heard the thud of what might have been pistol shots down the hall. Two, maybe three. A fourth. Fairly close by. Then, perhaps five seconds afterward, several controlled, staccato bursts from a semiautomatic weapon that sounded like a VVRS.
He turned abruptly, ran across the room, through the door, and into the corridor. Looked left, then right.
No sign of Nichols in either direction.
His heart
malleting in his chest again, he bounded down the hall, swung a corner past the microencapsulation lab, putting on speed. This was where the shots had come from.
Another turn, and then Ricci was met by the scene near the bottleneck elevator. It was a sight he would remember always.
Nichols was on the floor between him and the elevator door, sprawled on his back. Simmons and Rosander were down at the elevator itself. Seybold crouched over Nichols, cradling his head in his arms, the helmet off. Barnes, Newell, and Perry squatted over the other two fallen men, examining them, checking the severity of their wounds. And then Barnes looked up from the bodies at the sound of his approach, saw the question on his face, and shook his head no.
No.
Ricci dashed forward and knelt beside Seybold.
“How bad?” he asked.
Seybold glanced up from the young man in his arms, met Ricci’s gaze, held it. His long, pained look told him everything.
Then, weakly, Nichols’s hand came up from his side, and Ricci felt its touch on his arm. “Sir… I…” The thin, dry sound from his dying lips barely qualified as a whisper.
Ricci pushed his visor up from his face, swallowed, and leaned over him. “I hear you,” he said. “Go on.”
Nichols looked up at him, his lips still moving, shaping unintelligible words.
Ricci took his hand into his own, bent closer. Their faces were almost touching now.
“Go on,” he said. “Go on, I’m here with you.”
Nichols grimaced, struggled out a sound.
“Wildcat,” he rasped. “Wild…”
Ricci felt something turn inside him. Slowly, grindingly. Like a great stone wheel.
He held Nichols’s hand.
“Okay, I heard you. Try to be easy now.”
Nichols lowered his eyelids but was still trying to talk. “Did… did we…?”
Ricci nodded to his closed eyes. “We got it, Nichols. We—”
Nichols shuddered and produced a low rattle, and Ricci stopped talking, pulled in a breath that didn’t seem to reach his lungs.
The kid was gone. Gone before the answer to his question had left Ricci’s mouth.