by Tom Clancy
Now the sound of movement in the hall grew louder, nearer. Suddenly the door to the room swung open, and Gordian was rolled inside, surrounded by a bustle of orderlies, plainclothes guards, his wife, and the other woman who had been with him when the infiltrator radioed his firing command to the nearby rooftop.
He stepped back from the entry as the bed was pushed through, urgently waved the orderlies toward a nest of monitoring and life-support equipment.
Easy, so easy.
“Over here!” he said, raising his voice above the clamor. “Let’s get him hooked up!”
* * *
Megan was thinking that it didn’t make sense.
She reached the fallback room and was hurried inside by guards and hospital staffers, Gordian’s bed wheeled ahead of her, pushed toward the attending intern who’d checked his drip bag right before the gunfire broke out. Somebody in the press of bodies dabbed her open cut with something cool and moist, slapped on a stitch bandage, put a gauze pad over it and a strip of tape to hold the dressing in place, and then left her to join the activity around the bed. Ventilator hoses were connected to pumps in the wall, waiting machines activated, the depleted IV bag unhooked, replaced with a fresh one by the attending, and still Megan was thinking it made no sense, none at all, who had the sniper been shooting at? Gordian had been out of harm’s way, she’d been out of sight, and Ashley could have been hit when she was standing in front of the window if she’d been the intended target. So why pull the trigger?
The question gnawed at her as she waited by the door with Ashley, both women standing clear of the busy professionals, watching the handful of guards that accompanied them pour back into the corridor to seal off access, watching the cluster of orderlies dissolve as they completed their tasks, all of them and filing out of the room now, leaving the intern to start the IV….
An image from moments ago suddenly came into Megan’s head, came into it in a flash. The intern. Waiting here in the room. Alone. The drip bag in his hand as Gordian was jostled through the door.
Waiting.
She had seen the intern a number of times over the past several days, moving about the corridor with a clipboard in hand, but never in Gordian’s room. He was not one of the regulars on his case, she was sure of that. Yet somehow he had known about the fallback, known where it was situated though that was privileged information, and moreover had been the first person inside it, giving orders to the orderlies as they entered.
She looked at him. He had moved the IV stand close to the bed, run the catheter over the safety rail, and was leaning over Gordian, about to work the needle into his wrist.
“Hold on,” she said. Stepping toward him. Her mouth dry, her heart pounding away in her chest. “What are you doing?”
The intern turned his face toward her.
“The fluid bag needs to be connected,” he said. “It won’t take a minute.”
She took another step closer to him, another, quickly crossing the room, leaving Ashley standing at the door in confusion.
“No,” she said. Shaking her head. “What are you doing here?”
He straightened up, looked at her without any response.
His eyes boring into her eyes.
Reading them.
“Ashley,” she said. Not turning from him for an instant. “Open the door and call for help, this guy doesn’t belong in—”
His hand released the feeding tube, simply let it drop over the rail, and went under his white hospital coat. Megan couldn’t see what he was reaching for, didn’t need to see, what she had to do was stop him.
She moved in fast, bringing up her hands, ducking her head under his arms, remembering what Pete had told her in the training ring. Her fist jabbed out, aimed at the middle of his chest, her shoulder rolling behind the motion, her entire back in it, her knuckles digging between his ribs as they made solid contact.
He produced a grunt of pain and surprise, doubled over, gasping for breath, his hand appearing from inside the coat, an automatic pistol spilling from his fingers to hit the floor.
Megan heard Ashley shouting into the hallway at the top of her lungs, and a split second later heard the hurried pounding of feet behind her, and a male voice ordering the guy in the intern’s coat to stay put, telling him not to even think about reaching for the gun, and he kept hugging himself and coughing, trying to catch his breath….
And then the Sword security team came in the doorway and were all over him.
TWENTY-SIX
VARIOUS LOCALES NOVEMBER 23, 2001
“… Stirring for the past hour. One of the nurses on shift noticed… about to regain consciousness. I phoned you right away.”
“I thought it would be yesterday, Elliot. I was sure. He seemed to be trying so hard.”
“It helps that you’re here. Talking to him. Bringing him along. His response to the inhibitor’s been tremendous…. You shouldn’t be discouraged if it doesn’t happen right now…”
Gordian opened his eyes. The room was very bright with sunlight. Ashley stood at his bedside, in the brightness, looking down at him. Elliot Lieberman was next to her in his white doctor’s coat.
“If what… doesn’t happen?” he asked.
Ashley looked at him, an almost startled expression on her face, and then leaned over the bed rail.
“This,” she replied into his ear. “Oh Gord, Gord, this, right here. Right now.”
He slowly raised a hand off his sheet, touched her cheek, felt its moistness.
“Knew I had an angel on my shoulder,” he said. “Didn’t know angels cry.”
She kissed his face, kissed it again, and again, and then raised her head, smiling, her fingers clasped around his, her tears flowing freely over the smile, spilling onto their joined hands, tears of gratitude for the blessing she’d been granted, tears of heartbreaking sorrow for those who had paid the ultimate price for it.
“They let us,” she said. “One day each year, they let us.”
He looked at her. “When?”
“Thanksgiving,” she said.
* * *
Tom Ricci sat alone at his kitchen table, its surface bare except for the quart bottle of Black Label he had bought at the liquor store the previous night, last sale date before the holiday, a Thanksgiving dinner he aimed to remember.
It was five o’clock in the afternoon, the window shades drawn in every room of his apartment, phone off the hook, and he was about to dive into his liquid meal, swallow down as much forbidden nectar as his belly could hold. One hundred percent malt, twelve-step program be damned.
Yes sir, he thought. Yes sir, Tom. Gobble, gobble.
He stared at the bottle, his hand on the table, slowly reaching across it, slipping and sliding across the table to close around that smooth, cool curvature of glass.
Ricci closed his eyes, tightly holding the bottle. In his mind’s eye he saw a scale, like the kind you saw in pictures of blindfolded Lady Justice. Nichols, Grillo, Simmons, and Rosander on one side. Roger Gordian and the rest of the planet on the other.
The whole damned planet, yes. Billions of possible victims of a germ that, in the end, because of the sacrifices of those he had led on his mission, had claimed only one good man in a small corner of Latin America.
The balance seemed to tip lopsidedly in favor of the mission having been a success… and for Ricci it would have been no less successful if he himself had perished with the men who had bled out their lives behind the gray concrete walls of Earthglow.
World’s end. Last stop on the civilization express.
Ricci gripped the bottle. He could handle the losses, handle giving up the measure of blood that seemed periodically due to keep whatever was good and worthwhile about existence from falling into darkness. Harsh and unfair as he sometimes found the bill was, he’d always made his payments with a kind of bitter, uncomplaining dependability.
The problem for him now, though, was that the scale had been jiggered. Somebody had fooled with the weights,
tampered with the balance, thrown the whole damned system of measurement into question.
The killer…
Ricci would never again call him by the name Wildcat, would never again lend him the dignity or power that name endowed….
The killer was free, out there somewhere beyond the drawn shades of his apartment, breathing air that his victims could no longer breathe, feeling the sunlight that was warming the ground atop their graves.
The killer… and whatever nameless, faceless, task-master he served.
Happy Thanksgiving, Ricci thought, and pulled the bottle closer, pulled it right to the edge of the table, right up against his chest.
I start out hugging a drink, three hours later wind up wrestling with one. Like that Bible story, when Christ wrestles with the Devil in the desert….
He looked at the bottle, held the bottle in both his hands, and moistened his lips with his tongue. Thirsty, so thirsty, so eager to wash the grinding pain from inside him.
But the killer was still free. Breathing the air. Out there in the light. Free.
Ricci sat at the table a while longer… he wasn’t exactly sure how long. Then he sighed, pushed back his chair, rose to his feet, lifted his quart of expensive pure malt whiskey off the table, and strode across the kitchen to carefully set it into the wastebasket beside the sink.
What the hell, he thought. What the hell.
He had work to begin after the long weekend was over, work that might finally set the balance right, and it wasn’t the sort of thing that would be easy to pull off with a hangover.
Wondering what he was going to eat for dinner with all the supermarkets closed and not a scrap of food in his fridge, Ricci went to the window and opened the shade to let in what remained of the day.
* * *
In one corner of Breugel’s painting on the main floor of the Prado, a cart ridden by the servants of Death is shown rolling implacably toward a woman who has fallen across the path of its wheels, her hands clinging to a distaff and spindle. These tools of the spinner represent the unpredictable drawing out and twisting of life’s threads. They are also symbols of femininity, for in antiquity spinning had been a woman’s craft.
Unable to make himself leave Spain without once again viewing the masterwork, Kuhl stood before it now and thought of his lover, of the softness and delicacy of her body, and then sharply recalled their last moments together.
He had not wanted to let go of her.
Hours before he’d taken her to the countryside southwest of the city, they had been pressed together in their hotel room, sharing splendid intimacies behind its closed door. He had touched her eagerly, greedily, wanting his flesh to remember. And then, afterward, he had suggested they take the long drive down into the Castilla y León, where the old churches and castles stood upon the hills.
On a lonely and beautiful stretch of road, Kuhl had pulled over and sat beside her for a long length of time. Then he’d asked her to walk with him under trees brown with autumn, his arm around her waist as they left the car.
It had been an exquisite place for her to die.
Kuhl had done it quickly, not wishing the pain to last, one hand over her mouth to muffle her cries, his other hand tightening on her throat.
He remembered her straining against him, and then feeling the pulse in her neck quiet under his fingertips.
The struggle had been brief.
There had been tears in her eyes, he remembered.
Even after life was extinguished, and her surprise and fear turned to emptiness, there were tears.
Bearing her to a thickly wooded notch in the hills, he had covered her body so the animals would find her before any man ever could. And then he’d left her, and gone back to Madrid.
He had not wanted to let go of her, but she had known too much. He saw that. What if she had been caught?
The danger to him had been great.
Unacceptably great.
Now Kuhl took a snatch of breath, studied the Bruegel painting for a short while longer, then turned away from it and strode down the hall toward the museum exit.
The world offered hard choices, but it was still under his feet.
In the end, for him, that was what truly mattered.
EPILOGUE
BOLIVIA NOVEMBER 23, 2001
He had spent millions. Tens upon tens of millions. And every last dollar had been wasted.
Harlan DeVane sat on the veranda of his expansive Spanish ranch house in the Chapare region of Bolivia, staring out at the cattle fields in silence, watching his imported heifers graze on the grass with plodding bovine contentment. Once, perhaps, some primal forerunner of the beasts must have had at least a spark of driving fire in its breast. But that had been bred out of the species when their free-roaming herds became livestock, their migrations became limited by the corral fence, and their inborn fear of the predator was dulled to a birth promise of certain slaughter.
DeVane watched them, thinking that he could walk across the pasture to where they were gathered in a patch of green, put a gun to one of their heads at random, and fire, and that the others were apt to go on chewing lazily or produce some lowing sound of momentary bafflement as the victim dropped in a heap among them with what little brains it possessed leaching deep into the dirt. All of them unaware of the fate that had narrowly missed being theirs. All incapable of appreciating that they lived by a simple fluke.
His eyes at once motionless and searching, his thin features caught in the ever-still space between thought and expression, DeVane suddenly recalled a string of words from an old leather-bound volume in his library: What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?
He breathed, as always, without a sound.
These were idle musings, and there were far more important matters to occupy his mind. Matters from which he could only divert himself temporarily, for they were bound to catch up with him, tearing at his false peace like the swipe of claws in the night.
The Sleeper virus that was to have gained him a fortune beyond any ever amassed, prestige beyond any imaginable height — given him the power to steer the sun across the sky — had brought him instead to abject humiliation. With the inhibitors now as commonly available as aspirin, his customers had paid vast sums for genetic triggers that were worth less to them than dust. Some had targeted victims by the hundreds, the thousands, and more. He had wanted only the death of a single man, Roger Gordian… and none had gotten the thing for which they had put their good money down.
So what was left for him now? What goddamned pipes and timbrels?
Humiliation. Ignominy. Clients who had become enemies by the score.
And because of Siegfried Kuhl’s ineffectiveness, his failure to eliminate Gordian even by brute, overt force of hand, the very strong chance that the careful screens that ensured his anonymity, that allowed him to roam the world free, would begin to be peeled away.
DeVane closed his eyes and slowly, slowly bent his head back so it was exposed in full to the strong, tropical sun. The rays stung his pale, almost colorless skin, and he knew it would not take long before he burned.
He sat there and did not move.
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