by Tom Clancy
He turned his attention from the car windows to those on the near side of the clinic. All except the first of three or four running toward the back had their blinds raised. Glenn saw an overnight attendant in lab whites filling out paper forms at a desk behind the last window. Insofar as he could tell through his lenses, they were charts comparable to the sort nurses and doctors would hang from beds in hospitals that treated patients of the human variety. There was, he noticed, bluish light flickering from somewhere in the room . . . probably a television set. It wouldn’t hurt if the attendant had its sound up.
“Okay,” Ricci said. “You ready?”
Glenn nodded.
“Give me exactly two minutes.” Ricci tapped the face of his WristLink. “Remember . . . anything goes wrong, head straight for the car and take off.”
Glenn hesitated. This had been another point of disagreement between them, but Ricci had been relentless in his insistence on drawing the heat if there was a foul-up.
Ricci stared at him in the dark, waiting for his second nod. He gave it with slow reluctance.
“I thought it’d be ‘In for a penny, in for a pound.’ ”
“Bullshit,” Ricci said. Then he slipped away toward the left, bent low under the ponderous boughs of the hardwoods.
Hoping the cops would continue to lean back in their seats a bit longer, an eye on the tritium dial of his own watch—not quite as jazzed as Ricci’s, but accurate—Glenn knelt into position with the rifle.
Ninety seconds later he sighted through its night scope, counted down the final half minute to himself, and then pulled the trigger with a silent prayer.
The muted crack of the subsonic round leaving his weapon was no louder than the hammer click of a dry-fired revolver. It traveled straight through the cruiser’s open window, skimmed between the cops and the windshield, and struck the interior of the passenger door’s frame.
The startled cops jerked in their seats as the sabot burst open on impact to release its superconcentrated fill of dimethyl sulfoxide and zolpidem—a soporific aerosol formulated to be instantly absorbed into the bloodstream on contact with skin or mucous membranes. Glenn knew a microscopic amount of the agent would be enough to knock out someone the size of a pro-basketball center within moments, and neither of the cops was built like Shaquille O’Neal.
They dropped off into unconsciousness, spilling over each other in the front seat of the car. The two probably hadn’t had time to wonder what was happening to them. Their exposure to the chemical incapacitant would leave them with pounding heads, queasy stomachs, and a whole lot of confusion when they recovered. But they would be alive and well.
Glenn produced a long exhalation of relief, slung the rifle over his shoulder, and looked out past the treeline with his binocs.
Ricci had emerged from the woods and was hurriedly moving across the parking lot toward the patrol car.
Extending a gloved hand through its partially open window, Ricci unlocked the passenger door of the cruiser, pulled the senseless cop in the shotgun seat upright, and propped his weight against the backrest to ensure he’d remain in that position. Then he reached down between the seats for the prone driver’s dislodged cap, careful not to lean too far inside. Any residual trace of the DMSO/ zolpidem agent that hadn’t been biologically absorbed should have become inactive within seconds of its release into the air, but he did not want to take unnecessary chances.
He started toward the front of the clinic. At the entrance Ricci donned the uniform cap, knocked, and waited with his head bowed almost against the peephole. Moments later, he heard footsteps on the other side of the door.
“Back already?” The night attendant. Standing there behind the door. “Fella, the way that coffee passes through you, you’re gonna have to start drinking a weaker blend.”
“Or less of it,” Ricci said from the shadows, speaking quietly, his face still turned down so all the attendant would see through the peephole was the peak of the officer’s cap.
He heard the snap of the turning lock, braced himself. The door began to swing inward, light from the clinic’s vestibule filling the open space.
Then the night attendant spoke again as the space widened: “C’mon in before y—”
Ricci quickly shoved through the door and locked his arms around the attendant, a full body tackle that landed him on his back, the wind leaving his mouth with a grunt of mixed pain and surprise as he struck the floor. Down on top of him, Ricci grabbed hold of his arm, wrenched it hard, got him onto his side, twisted the arm some more to make him flip onto his stomach, then pressed a knee into his spine below the shoulder blades. Another pained grunt escaped the attendant. He tried to lift himself up, pushing his free hand against the floor. Ricci dug his knee in deeper to keep him still, got a spray canister of DMSO/ zolpidem out of his belt holster, held it to his face, and thumbed the nozzle.
The guy went limp. Pain gone; one, two, three.
Ricci rose to his feet, hustled across the vestibule and waiting area, and then passed through a swing door into the rear section of the building. There was a short hallway. Two examining rooms to his left, an operating room, a cubbyhole office beyond them, then a fourth room near the end of the hall to the right. All were doorless.
He hooked into the last room and immediately saw the cluttered desk where the attendant had been working on his charts. On a table beside it, the television that had cast a flickering glow through the window was tuned to a late-night talk show, its host mugging at his viewers. Otherwise the area was very sparse. There was a steel gurney in the middle of the floor. Some file cabinets stood against one wall. Another wall was lined with a dozen or so boarding kennels, the four largest on the floor, the rest above them on wide metal shelves.
Ricci scanned the kennels from just inside the entryway. Most were vacant. Each of the few containing animals was tagged with a case number and what was presumably the pet-owner’s surname. He saw a house cat watching him curiously from an eye-level shelf. Several kennels apart from it on the same shelf, a small furry dog was curled up into a sleeping ball.
In a big kennel on the floor, a greyhound lay on its side facing him, its bandaged flank rising and falling with its slow, heavy breaths, an IV tube running into it from a drip bag mounted above the kennel’s wire-mesh door. The dog’s eyes were open, staring, and blank. Ricci couldn’t be certain whether it was aware of his presence.
The tag below the door read: 03-756A-HOWELL CENTER.
Ricci’s gaze held on the dog a long moment, went to the file cabinets. No, he thought. Not there. Case is too fresh, too outstanding.
He turned toward the desk and noticed a rack holding several plastic clipboards, their neatly labeled tops facing outward. The board with the number and name matching those on the greyhound’s kennel jumped out at his eyes almost at once.
Ricci pulled it from the rack, hastily inspecting the notations on the attached sheets of paper.
His eyes widening, he heard his own sharp intake of breath.
Ricci needed under a minute to take digital snapshots of every handwritten page with his WristLink. After he was finished, he replaced the clipboard, went through the desk drawers, located the tray that held the sealed glass vials and transparent evidence bags referenced in the vet’s notes, and photoed them as well before returning them to the drawer in which they’d been found.
He had taken a half step toward the entryway when he paused, turned to look back at the wall of kennels, and went over to crouch in front of the wounded greyhound.
His fingers reached through the mesh and gently, gently touched its snout.
“Good girl,” he whispered. “You’re a good girl.”
Then Ricci was up on his feet again, racing from the clinic into the night.
TWELVE
VARIOUS LOCALES
THE CHIMERA’S MASTER BEDROOM. WEARING A SILK robe dyed the shaded grays of twilight by the handloom weavers of Andhra Pradesh, Harlan DeVane sat at his computer in the depths of
the African night and appraised the second e-mail to his enemy. He wanted to carefully reread the words he had written and view the animation his technicians had embedded with graphic image files, assuring himself that each component enriched the other, that the entire product met his every criterion.
In his intense, unmoving concentration, DeVane’s tightened lips were the same noncolor as the rest of his features. He almost could have been a waxwork figure, showing no outward sign of his satisfaction with the message’s wording and form.
Yet, satisfied he was.
Here was an example of manipulative power wielded with brilliance. Here was real wallop. How often was a hoodwink conceived to smack the eyes with its falsity . . . make one aware he was being toyed with?
It brought a symmetry to things that DeVane did not believe he could have manufactured, but could only have wrested from existing circumstance.
Pain did indeed cut many different ways; the child that was loved could bring about the father’s fall as surely as the child shunned and hated.
Locked onto this thought, fascinated by its many ironies, DeVane fired his ultimatum into electronic space.
Palo Alto. Morning. A downcast brow of clouds over the hills threatened another day of chill rain and mist.
In the Gordian home, Megan Breen had been running on coffee and nervous energy for hours and found her caffeine level in increasingly frequent need of a recharge. She had spent the greater part of the night doing what she could to comfort and support Ashley, and the rest of it conferring with the Sword ops who’d turned the living room into an ad-hoc base of operations. Inside, their surveillance techware occupied every available surface. Outside, their vehicles had crowded the entire drive. The thirty-acre estate had been secured by armed patrols to ensure Ashley Gordian was as safe from physical harm as anybody on earth . . . but Megan knew her heart could not be protected in similar fashion, and that very deeply worried her.
The e-mail arrived at the precise tick of eight o’clock. Ash had fallen off into a doze that not even total exhaustion would sustain for too long. Megan was in the kitchen dumping a soggy coffee filter into the waste bin with one hand and scooping fresh grinds into the maker’s basket with another.
One of the ops—Lehane—thrust his head into the entry.
“Ms. Breen,” he said. “Something’s jumped into your queue. We think it could be—”
Megan didn’t hear the rest as she ran past him into the living room.
The subject line of the e-mail read:
Aria di Bravura: A Song of Love and Sacrifice
Megan dropped into a chair, started to reach for the computer mouse, and then realized she’d carried the heaping plastic coffee spoon from the kitchen.
“Will somebody take this damned thing from me?” She passed it off to one of the men without turning her eyes from the display. “Thanks.”
The op stood with his hand out and glanced downward with mild surprise.
She had let go of the coffee spoon before he’d managed to reach for it, spilling a small heap of dark roast on top of his shoe.
Roger Gordian watched the e-mail open on the screen of the notebook computer he’d set up in his guest suite at Thomas Sheffield’s place.
The image that filled most of the display was of a large upraised hand of fire, its glowing orange fingers spread wide. Gradually materializing across its open palm in black text was this message:
The conditions of Julia’s release are simple. We demand no ransom, no portion of the father’s wealth. Only a promise made to all the ears of the world—and has not reaching them been his lifelong goal?
At nine o’clock tonight aboard the Sedco oil platform, Roger Gordian is to renounce his dream of freedom through information, declare UpLink International and its subsidiaries utterly and permanently dissolved, and require that its stockholders forsake their shares by legal agreement without any form of compensation, including financial reimbursement from insurers.
All UpLink’s corporate operations will then cease. All personnel must be evacuated from its facilities worldwide. All its projects must be abandoned, its communications networks dismantled.
Full implementation of these terms is to occur within a time frame not exceeding 48 hours after the announcement or Julia Gordian will be executed.
The black text remained in place for thirty seconds and then coalesced into a rotating sphere that rapidly underwent another smooth transformation against the fiery palm, changing colors, reshaping itself into the UpLink logo: an Earth globe surrounded by intersecting satellite bandwidth lines.
Another half minute passed. The hand clenched into a fist, morphed into an red-orange fireball, and brightened. Then it suddenly plunged to the bottom of the screen like a falling comet, leaving behind an empty white void.
Gordian turned from the screen and looked over at Pete Nimec in the chair beside him.
“What’s this about?” Gordian said. His face was ashen. “Say I complied with the declaration to pull up stakes, how could anyone think I’d be able to go about convincing our investors to do the same thing? It’s inconceivable. You’re talking about fortunes. There are thousands of our employees alone who have their life savings attached to our stock. Tens of thousands. They’d be wiped out. I’m not even sure what they’d be expected to do with their shares.” He paused a moment, running a hand through his thin hair. “But I don’t know why I think I can apply sane reasoning to these demands. Not one of them is grounded in reality. There’s no way they can be met . . . not if I had months available.”
Nimec took a breath.
“Nobody expects you to meet them,” he said. “The whole thing’s outrageous. It’s meant to put you through your paces.”
Gordian was shaking his head. “But if that’s the case—”
Gordian fell silent. Nimec waited. They exchanged glances.
“If that’s the case, Pete . . . and this is all about taunting me . . . causing me heartache . . . then what’s going to happen to my daughter?” Gordian stared at Nimec. “What are the people who took Julia planning to do to her?”
Nimec hesitated, dismissing every hollow word of encouragement that came to mind. Gord deserved better from him.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I really don’t know.”
His name was Fred Gilbert, and he was vocally irate about someone ringing his telephone off the hook at seven o’clock in the morning. According to what he’d already told Glenn three or four times during his lengthy rebuke, the fact that it was a business call only worsened his unhappiness.
“This is an outrageous imposition,” he said. “Or don’t we agree a man has a right to choose his own schedule?”
“Of course, sir,” Glenn said at his end of the line. “And I apologize for having disrupted your routine—”
“My sleep.”
“Yes, sir. Your sleep—”
“Of which I require eight full hours,” Gilbert said. “You took my contact information off the club’s home page, is that correct?”
“Yes,” Glenn said. That much of his story, at least, had been true. “Mr. Gilbert, I’ve tried to explain—”
“If the times I’m available weren’t posted on the site, you might have some excuse. But they’re quite clear for anyone to read.”
“Understood, Mr. Gilbert. Again, though, I did mention—”
“I know. I have listened. You are here in California on overnight business, flying out to Baltimore at ten o’clock, and need to leave for the airport in an hour,” Gilbert said. “It is still no justification for discourtesy. Rules cannot be ignored simply because they may be inconvenient. Whether you are in town for a day, a month, or a decade, respect and discipline must be observed.” A pause. “Canines no less than humans learn by example, and I suggest you foster these qualities in yourself if you mean to own a Schutzhund trained dog.”
Glenn sat across the kitchen table from Ricci looking wearily frustrated. Having gone the entire night without shutting hi
s eyes except to blink the crust from them, it was hard for him to commiserate with Gilbert. In the long hours since their arrival at Ricci’s apartment, the two men had worked steadily to upload the digital photos of forensic evidence and notes from the Parkville clinic to a desktop computer, sort through what they’d learned, and decide how to move forward with it. Both had centered on the items that first caught Ricci’s attention at the clinic—a numbered and labeled vial containing strands of black fur, and a cross-indexed handwritten entry on Moore’s notepad that read:
9/03
7:00 p.m.
Canine fur & dermal matter extracted from greyhound’s subgingival maxilla and mandible. Primarily lodged bet. right and left upper canines and lateral incisors, lesser quantity collected from inner cheek and anterior premolar surface (see accomp. dental chart). Prelim: grey inflicted bite wound upon another dog. Unusual, follow w/DNA workup of blood at scene. Visual & microanalysis of fur samples (detailed breakdown t.c.) match shepherd characteristics. Prelim: black longhair possible. Rare. (Attack dog?) Follow w/comparison test. Reference specimen needed (FBI Hair & Fiber File?)
Showing Glenn the notes, Ricci had pointed to the phrase “attack dog,” gotten an oddly distant expression on his face, and shaken his head.
“That’s close, but not right,” he had said. “It’d be a Schutzhund. An animal he could totally control.”
“He?”
Ricci had glanced at Glenn, looking almost surprised by the question.