Tom Clancy's Power Plays 5 - 8

by Tom Clancy

  “I hope that doesn’t mean there’s a supply of disposable cats at the center.”

  “Nope. Only an ornery old calico named Leona that the people who run this place got from the ASPCA,” Julia said. “They keep her safe and overfed for her unfaltering dedication to the cause, don’t you fret.”

  “As long as you tell me not to,” Gordian said. “Anyway, if you’re busy with things, I can call back—”

  “No, believe me, I really was just waiting around for man and beast to get acquainted,” Julia said. “What’s up?”

  “Well, your mother and I were hoping we could see you this weekend,” Gordian said. “You could come for dinner tomorrow, naturally bring Jack and Jill, and the three of you sleep over at the house. If you want, of course. Then stick around with us Sunday for brunch and pampering—”

  “Sounds tempting, Dad. Especially that last part about getting the princess treatment. But the timing’s rotten,” she said. “Rob . . . Rob Howell, that is . . .”

  “He’s your boss, right?”

  “Right, sorry,” Julia said. “Anyway, Rob works the graveyard shift at a hotel called the Fairwinds, I think it’s somewhere on Highway 1. He mainly does audits there, but every so often handles the switchboard and reception desk, too, and I guess he’s offered to sub for one of the day clerks for the next couple of weekends—they’re buddies and the guy has a family emergency. Besides, Rob has a newborn and could use the extra money.”

  “Which leaves you running the show at the center.”

  “All by my lonesome. I wish there was somebody else. Rob’s looking for more help. With his wife busy taking care of the baby, though, I can’t exactly lay too much on her lap.” She paused. “Any chance of us getting together during the week? I’m off Monday and Wednesday, and could meet you at your office for one of those father- daughter lunches where you lecture me about how I need to find an honest paying job.”

  “Now there’s what I call a real temptation,” Gordian said. “Unfortunately, I’m out of town from Monday morning until Thursday or Friday. Washington, D.C. You remember Dan Parker?”

  Julia smiled. Was it only her parents, or were all of them always asking their adult children whether they could remember people they’d known their entire lives? With her father, the person in question was very often Dan, whom Julia had practically grown up around and even invited to her wedding. Her mom was likewise constantly astounded that she had any recollection of her Uncle Will, who had been one of Julia’s most dearly loved relatives, and was a frequent visitor to the Gordian home until his death from a sudden heart attack when she was eighteen or nineteen years old. What were they thinking? That their kids went through childhood and adolescence with their memory banks set on auto-delete? That they were oblivious to everything around them until they were, oh, say, forty-five, fifty, or so? Or were these supposed to be trick questions?

  “Hmm, Dan Parker,” she said, deliberately keeping any trace of sarcasm out of her voice. “He’s that buddy of yours from Vietnam, no? The one who used to be a congressman in San Jose?”

  “That’s right, he was at your wedding reception,” Gordian replied, sounding pleased by her name-recognition ability. “These days Dan’s an executive with Sedco, the energy firm, and we’ll be meeting with the rest of its board to negotiate the final points of a fiberoptic deal.”

  Julia looked out the window, saw the Wurmans were leading Viv back from the parking lot. “Guess we’d better hold off on making plans till next week,” she said.

  “I guess.”

  The shop’s front door opened.

  “Have to run,” Julia said. “Good luck with your trip, Dad. I love you.”

  “Love you, too, honey,” Gordian said. “Oh . . . and l’chiam, by the way,” he added.

  And then hung up.

  Julia looked at the phone and blinked in surprise, a grin of colossal amusement breaking across her face.

  Parents, she thought.

  The wonders truly, truly never did cease.

  The same yet different was how Rollie Thibodeau had been trying to characterize the overall facility security picture at UpLink International, and particularly UpLink HQ SanJo, since Ricci’s departure.

  The same, more or less, insofar as its requirements and policies.

  Different, slightly, insofar as their implementation, with heightened emphasis on incident readiness and management.

  There had also been some modifications to the electronic security systems—what amounted to minor tinkering in the area of general surveillance and countersurveillance operations, with more significant enhancements regarding the detection and control of chemical and biological threats.

  “Some of it’s these times we’re living in. Everything going on around the world, you got to take extra precautions,” Thibodeau said now, looking across his desk at Ricci. “Plus we been bitten once, you know.”

  Ricci sat motionless. When he answered, it was in an odd, clipped tone.

  “Tell me about the techware,” he said.

  “There’s operational gear big and small, but we’ll start with the onsite basics,” Thibodeau said. “We got new concealed weapon detectors in most of our buildings. And not just at entries. We been thinking about indoor environments. Walk around any floor here and you’ll pass through a hidden magnetic scanner.”

  “I’ve noticed them at the hallway corners,” Ricci said. “I can see where some door frames have been replaced.”

  “Figured you would,” Thibodeau said. “Later on, I’m gonna walk you down to the monitoring station, show you right where they all are—”

  “Don’t bother,” Ricci said. “They’re okay. Most people won’t spot them. The ones who do would be good enough to make any kind of scanners we install. I just want to know how they perform.”

  Thibodeau shifted in his chair. He was suddenly conscious of his uniform’s too-snug fit, of the too-tight waistband of his trousers around his middle, of the chair’s armrests pressing into his fleshy sides. If he pulled up his shirt, he would find little irritated patches of red on his flanks, wouldn’t he?

  He wondered what it was about Tom Ricci that had set off the heightened sense of his own ungainliness. Or maybe he was just projecting. Ricci hadn’t said or done anything that could be taken as a reaction to his size. But Ricci was also just as whipcord lean as he’d been a year ago. While he himself had put on half a hundred pounds.

  Thibodeau remembered the rattle and bang of the scale when he’d stepped off it. He adjusted his position behind the desk again.

  “The scanners,” he said. “They’re . . . how can I say it? . . . more discriminating. Walkthroughs we had before weren’t no better than what they using at commercial airports. You know the problems with them. Can’t tell the difference between an Uzi and a set of keys or some pocket change. Can’t find where something is on a person’s body. And they be screwed up easy by electrical fields. Too many computers or cell phones working around them, we get false alarms. Waste time and resources. These CWD systems we installed can tell the object’s size and shape, and pinpoint where it’s located. Whether it be under somebody’s left arm, strapped around his ankles, or stuffed where the sun don’t shine.”

  Ricci’s head went up and down.

  “All right,” he said. “What else is there?”

  “Hate to think about it, but we put a whole response system in place for biochemical incidents,” Thibodeau said. “This whole building been outfitted with sensors. Every room. Every office. Rooftop to basement.”

  Ricci looked at him.

  “Hell,” he said.

  “I know,” Thibodeau said. “Cost us a fortune.”

  Ricci kept looking steadily at him.

  “I wasn’t talking about what it cost,” he said. “I meant this world of ours is fucking hell.”

  Thibodeau was silent. He’d never much liked Ricci, but had developed a certain trust in him. In his abilities, his self-command in tough spots. Now he didn’t know w
hat to think. Ricci hadn’t changed on the outside, it was true. Inside, though, something was very different. It was as if those hard, unsharing eyes of his were mirrored glass surfaces. Thibodeau didn’t know what was going on behind them.

  “The sensors,” Ricci said. “They mass spec?”

  Thibodeau nodded yes.

  “The spectrometry units I’ve seen look like U-Haul trailers,” Ricci said. “They’re too big to cart around offices—the military tows them around with Humvees.”

  Thibodeau shrugged.

  “Be true for most of them,” he said. “Think it’s because of all the air they got to suck in for accurate samples. There’s hoses, plus a vacuum collector and a separate laser chromatography unit in the housing. Adds up to a lot of space. The laser machine shoots beams of light through the air sample, and that light bends off whatever particles get caught with it. Then a computer tell us what those particles are, depending on the angle it bends at, sort of how our eyes see color.” He paused, pulling at his beard some more. “Far’s the system goes, you’d have to ask our R and D noggins for every detail of how it works. The handle I got is that it’s like an invisible electronic nose, sniffs for germs and chemicals just the way our noses . . . or to put it better, the nose of a trained bloodhound . . . can pick up the smell of things in the air. Special cells in the nose, what the noggins call receptors, they be connected to nerves that can tell the brain what those things are. Then the brain translates the info as smells. Our invisible nose, now, it uses them sensors I told you about—microsensors, they called, made of different polymers—exactly like the receptors. But instead of having nerve connections, they attach to optical fibers. Coat ’em, actually. One coated fiber maybe pick up anthrax or smallpox. Another can recognize the sleeper bug that almost killed the boss. A third can catch a whiff of cyanide, sarin gas, or some other nerve agent that been released—”

  Ricci made a slicing gesture to check him.

  “Let’s skip ahead,” he said. “Say we’re attacked. The invisible nose twitches, we evacuate, get emergency medical treatment for people we know were exposed, make sure everybody else that might’ve been affected is examined. That’s our immediate response. Now how do we conduct decontamination and site inspection? Who takes charge of the investigation? The feebs and CDC? FEMA? Or homeland security people? We supposed to let them walk right on in, go clomping all over each other’s tracks like they did at Gordian and his daughter’s homes a couple years ago? Or when they mucked up that anthrax mail probe in ’01?”

  Thibodeau blew a breath out his pursed lips. “Be quite a bunch of questions,” he said. “I guess what happens far as outside agencies depends on the particulars. If there’s a threat of public infection, we need to let them know . . . and where chembio’s the problem, you have to expect that’s going to be the case. But ain’t nobody can beat us comes to dealing with problems of multiple jurisdiction. So we try to coordinate, hope they have the sense to work with us and not around us. That way we don’t have hassle figuring out how to work around them.”

  “What about the first part of what I asked you?” Ricci said. “Same example. The sensors find a trace of something bad. A strain of virus. Bacteria. Is there some way we can clean the place up before it spreads?”

  Thibodeau expelled another breath. He really did hate to think about this subject.

  “We installed decon fog dispensers with the capacity to wipe out certain bugs,” he said. “Anthrax, that’s one of them. Got a long list of others I can show you . . . be dozens of others. Once we know the premises’re empty, the fog’s released, goes all the places the bioweapon would. Air vents, the spaces between computer keys, wherever. They tell me the fog particles are ultra-fine, smaller than the spores. Kills them by breaking ’em down right to their DNA.”

  “And the bugs it can’t kill?”

  “Brings us back around to the issue of readiness, an’ how we apply policies that’re already in place. Somebody walks into the building and we don’t like the looks of him, I want him checked out. That’s whether he’s wearin’ a mail deliverer’s uniform, got his name on a visitor list, or be the head of a senate delegation. He can walk on air right before our eyes, heal the blind and crippled, say he’s Jesus Christ himself in a hurry to announce his Second Coming. We think he looks suspicious, he ain’t getting past the guard station unless he’s ready to wait for us to feel convinced. And if that means we want to search-wand his robes and examine his sandals for plastic explosives, maybe ask him to give us phone numbers so we can call The Blessed Mother an’ Holy Father in Heaven to verify his identity, suite. So be it.”

  “There are going to be complaints,” Ricci said.

  Thibodeau shrugged.

  “Israeli security been handling things that way for years at their airports and main office buildings, and they don’t catch no grief,” he said. “Ain’t nobody’s freedoms bein’ violated. A person does want to object, it’s his or her right to leave. The fancy tech’s great. I’m glad we got it. But me, I’m lettin’ our people be guided by their own eyes, ears, and noses more’n any electronic ones. Puttin’ my stock in the human element.”

  “You didn’t hear me argue.” Ricci stared into his face. “I just want to know which element you mean.”

  The remark surprised Thibodeau, and his expression showed it.

  “Afraid I don’t understand,” he said.

  “I think maybe you do,” Ricci said. “We can pick and choose our options, or lay them out across the board. I’m curious how it’ll be for you when the heat’s on.”

  Thibodeau was silent. He wasn’t sure how to answer, truly wasn’t sure he’d even gotten Ricci’s inference. But his fixed stare and strange tone of voice were unsettling.

  Ricci sat watching him a while longer. Thibodeau was almost glad when he finally rose in front of the desk.

  “I guess we’re done,” Ricci said.

  Thibodeau looked at him. Done sounds fine, he thought. Except they weren’t.

  “We never did talk about the personal field equipment,” he said.

  “No,” Ricci said. “Maybe we’ll make some time later.”

  Thibodeau wasn’t sure why he found himself opening his desk drawer and reaching into it. He supposed that uncertainty was, in its way, a fitting note on which to end their little let’s-get-reacquainted talk, which had left him wondering about a lot of things . . . foremost among them the point Ricci had been trying to make, and now his own.

  “Might want to keep these handy,” he said, and tossed a couple of aluminum squeeze tubes from the drawer onto his desktop. They were about two inches long—the size of toothpaste samplers.

  Ricci picked them up.

  “What’s inside?” he said.

  “Guy from special development got them to me a couple days ago,” Thibodeau said. “It’s wound closure gel. We’re getting ready to deliver a ton of it to the military—they already issue something like it to their forward combat troops, but this’s supposed to seal the skin better’n any other kind of dressing, keep it clean and breathing until an injured soldier get to a MASH unit. The idea’s for all our field personnel to carry the stuff, too. Case somebody gets his hide perforated way I did a few years back.”

  “How come you’re giving them to me now?”

  “I got to read over the test reports this week, decide whether to approve ’em for issue,” Thibodeau said. It was a truth that felt like a lie. “Thought you might want to have your say.”

  Ricci examined the tubes in his palm a moment, then dropped them indifferently into the pocket of his sport jacket.

  “Decide whatever you want,” he said. “I’ll stick them inside my shaving kit in case I nick myself.”

  Thibodeau shrugged without response, watched Ricci leave the office, then sat looking at its closed door in silence for long minutes afterward, trying to figure out for sure what had passed between them.

  In the end, however, he was only positive that it scared the living daylights o
ut of him.

  “Looks like we’re ready to go,” Julia Gordian was saying. “If anyone has questions for me, I’ll be glad to answer them after explaining how this works.”

  This being the cat test, which was about to commence in a restrictively small back room at the Peninsula Adoption Center. Besides a couple of plastic chairs and wicker kitty bed in which Leona the Grouch was now curled, it was occupied by Vivian the Grey, the Wurmans, and Julia herself—a close-quarters environment that was no fluke whatsoever, since forcing Viv and Leona to invade each other’s private space would give Julia a very good idea how the dog would behave in a similar, but uncontrolled, household situation.

  “There are two parts to the test,” Julia continued, holding Viv close beside her on a short leash. She looked alternately from Mr. Wurman to Mrs. Wurman. “In the first, I’m going to bring Vivian right up to the kitty bed and see whether she displays any aggressive tendencies toward cats, which is pretty rare. Most greys are either curious, indifferent, or, believe it or not, even afraid of them, like my own two babies at home. Occasionally they even get frisky—”

  “How come you put that bad thing on Vivian’s mouth so she can’t open it or breathe?” said Junior Wurman . . . whose name, Julia had learned, was actually Thomas.

  Julia glanced over at his accusing face.

  “A muzzle isn’t really a bad thing, and Viv can breathe through it just fine,” she said. “Greyhounds are used to wearing them when they race, and I’ve only put it on now to make sure Leona doesn’t get hurt in case she’s snapped at.”

  Thomas looked mistrustful. “But you told us that wasn’t gonna happen.”

  “I said it probably won’t,” Julia said, and offered a reassuring smile. “We need to be careful, ’kay?”

  A halfhearted nod from Thomas. He wedged himself back against his seated parents, still regarding Julia with critical mistrust.

  She returned her attention to the adults, feeling a bit like Cruella DeVille. With vampire fangs.

  “If all goes well, our next step is to see whether Vivian shows overly possessive traits when one of you holds the cat,” she said. “Some jealousy’s normal between them, and no different, really, from human sibling rivalry. Viv might show it by starting to whimper or getting down in a play position to catch your eye. If that happens, you need to be aware of it, spread around the affection, and everybody’s going to be happy. But it’s important to realize we’re talking about a big, muscular seventy-five-pound dog that can sprint almost as fast as a Thoroughbred horse, compared to an animal that weighs maybe a tenth as much, and is also a whole lot smaller. A cat that gets caught in a dog’s jaws is in serious trouble, and we want to help spare you that kind of unhappy incident—”