“Voice mail. But I’m tired of talking, you little fucker. What’ll it be?”
Makarov smiled. “You’re here all alone, you’re expecting no one, and if someone calls it’ll be rolled over to a voice mail. Could be awhile before someone comes looking for you. Which makes you even dumber than you look.”
“You son of a bitch.” Toivo grunted and he lumbered forward, batting a meaty fist at Makarov’s head as if he was swatting a fly.
Makarov easily sidestepped the charge, slammed a fist into the big man’s kidney once, and immediately a second time before he moved back out of range.
Toivo wasn’t affected in the least and he turned on a heel, again favoring his left leg, and he was grinning like a congenital idiot because Makarov was backed into a corner next to the still open duffle bag. “I would have settled for five grand because it’s no skin off my ass who you’re planning to shoot. But we’re fucking well past that now, aren’t we, you limey son of a bitch. Payback time for ’ninety-eight when I lost in Birmingham. It was a fucking fix and everybody knew it.”
Makarov pulled the Barrett’s thirty-inch heavy barrel out of the duffle bag, and held it in his right hand like a policeman’s nightstick. In Spetsnaz training they’d been taught to take down an opponent either by slamming the stick down on their shoulder blade, which would make that arm totally useless, or if the position was correct making the strike on the back of the man’s leg halfway between his buttocks and knee. The hydraulic shock would knock the man off his feet, and if the hit was a good one could even send the shock through the bloodstream, stopping the heart.
Toivo was suddenly wary, moving slowly on the balls of his feet. But he was still smiling. “Maybe if you put your toy together you’d have a chance to get out of here alive.”
“No need,” Makarov said, watching the big man, timing his movements, watching his left leg. It had probably been a knee injury.
Toivo rose up and lunged from five feet out. Turning slightly to his left, his left arm extending, expecting the blow to come from that side, he wanted to shorten the distance so that when the rifle barrel hit he could easily deflect it.
But Makarov stepped away, switched the barrel into his left hand, ducked beneath the former wrestler’s outstretched arm, and hit the man in the back of the right leg with every ounce of his strength.
Toivo grunted in pain but merely shifted his weight to his left leg which held for just a moment until he toppled like a massive bull in the ring, his huge head bouncing off the concrete floor.
Makarov straightened up and skipped backward toward the door and looked outside as the wrestler worked to get back on his feet. The man was no longer smiling.
As far as Makarov could see no one was coming, but this was a business establishment, someone would be showing up sooner or later.
He turned back as Toivo was just getting to a knee and trying to lever himself to his feet with one hand on the floor and the other on the wall. Blood trickled down the side of his neck from a gash in his skull.
“You should have minded your own business,” Makarov said, stepping toward him.
“In any stand-up fight you have two objectives,” the Spetsnaz instructors had drummed into their heads. “The first is to win, and the second is to make damned sure that the pizdec can’t recover and come after you later. Kill him.”
“Who the hell are you, and why was this shit brought here?” Toivo asked. He wasn’t so cocky any longer, but it was clear that he was waiting until his enemy got within reach of his massive arms.
“Did you tell anyone else what you found?”
Toivo just watched.
“I asked you a question, and your answer will determine whether I kill you, or merely injure you badly enough to send you to hospital.”
“I don’t share my business with anyone else, and that’s the God’s honest truth. But come on, you fucker, let’s talk it over like pals, if you’re man enough. ’Cause I’m going to jam that barrel up your ass.”
Makarov raised the barrel and brought it down as if he were intending on hitting Toivo in the head, and the big man reached for it. At the last instant Makarov hit the man in the larynx, driving him backward on his ass, his head bouncing off the concrete floor again.
Toivo could no longer draw air into his lungs, and as he struggled to sit up, his eyes began to bulge and his face began to turn red.
At the open door Makarov made sure that still no one was coming, and then came back and stood over to watch as the wrestler fought not to lose consciousness.
Toivo raised a hand and tried to say something, but then his chest convulsed a couple of times and he was still.
Makarov waited another couple of minutes and then placed two fingers on the man’s carotid artery at the side of the neck, and he could feel no pulse.
Five minutes later he had repacked the duffle bag, put it in the Chevy’s trunk, secured the storage locker, and was driving out the gate toward the ring highway that would take him to Interstate 94 west toward Fargo, North Dakota two hundred plus miles and then Bismarck one hundred fifty miles farther where he would spend part of the night.
Sometime in the early morning he would switch the Impala for a pickup truck that would be delivered to the Holiday Inn Express and continue west to a spot south of Dickinson where he would do his job and then leave.
To this point no one who had seen his face and who could connect him to the mission was alive. He meant to keep it that way. And he began to hum an old Russian folk song, the lyrics streaming in his mind, about a grandfather and grandmother; a favorite of his because his grandparents had raised him in Noginsk thirty kilometers east of Moscow.
Where are you about, my darling old man?
Working in the garden, my darling grandma!
What are we going to do, my darling old man?
We will make homemade vodka, my darling grandma!
They will put us in jail, my darling old man!
We will bribe the police, my darling grandma!
How are we going to bribe the police, my darling old man?
You will kiss the officer, my darling grandma!
4
IT WAS ONE in the afternoon when the phone on Whitney’s desk in the Research and Development Center rang and she picked up.
The press conference was over with, thank God, and at the moment Donna Marie, which was what they called the power plant itself, was burning a steady stream of methane from the well, which produced .250 megawatts of electricity. All that needed to be done for the next six weeks or so, was monitor the rate of gas production, and perhaps tweak the colony from time to time. It was one of the unpredictable problems that always cropped up in any complex system. Among engineers they were called unk-unks—or unknown-unknowns.
And she had been trying to convince herself all week that the problem with the microbes was solved and that they were home free. But after the attacks over the Christmas holidays she and just about everyone else on the project had been tense, waiting for the next ten-ton weight to drop on their heads.
“Dr. Lipton,” she said.
“You sound like you could use the weekend off.”
It was Ashley Borden, the reporter from the Bismarck Tribune who along with Jim Cameron, now dead, and Billings County Sheriff Nate Osborne had been right in the middle of their troubles. If it hadn’t been for them, especially Nate and Jim, the entire project would have been leveled, and even more people killed—herself included.
Coincidentally, Ashley’s father was General Forester, who was the chief administrator of the project that had started out six years ago as a top secret government endeavor that was concealed as a new system to communicate with U.S. submarines anywhere in the world, even when submerged as deep as one thousand feet. The three of them had become good friends; Nate and Ashley had become a thing, and current talk in Medora, which was the county seat north of the project, was that they would probably get married soon. And Ashley had asked Whitney to act as a witness.
Ashley was a service brat, a tomboy most of her life, and a brash, cocky, take-no-prisoners, opinionated woman of twenty-seven, to whom it was impossible to say no.
“Got a ton of work on my desk, and we’re still not sure about the output from the seam. Could seize any minute.”
“It’s not smart to lie to the press,” Ashley said. “Anyway Nate figured that you were way overdue for a weekend off. We want you to come up here this afternoon—right now if you can manage to drag yourself away. He’s making his special spaghetti and meatballs with homemade pasta.”
Ashley hesitated. She needed the weekend, yet she was almost afraid to leave.
“A crusty baguette I brought from Bismarck this morning. A couple bottles of really good Valpolicella. Fresh parmesan. Nice salad, oil and vinegar.”
Whitney found that she couldn’t help but laugh; it was one of the reasons she liked Ashley, the woman made her smile.
“I’ll be out of here in twenty minutes.”
“You’re staying here, so pack an overnight bag. Nate’s taking us up to the Roosevelt South Unit tomorrow. Weather’s supposed to stay good, and the park’s supposed to be spectacular this time of year.”
“Make it thirty minutes,” Whitney said. “May I bring something?”
“Just yourself,” Ashley said. “And Nate says he’ll have a special treat for us after dinner.”
“Like what?”
“I haven’t a clue. He wouldn’t tell me.”
“See you in a bit.”
Ashley didn’t hang up. “Things okay down there? No real trouble?”
“Nothing but a little science. But you’re right, I do need a break.”
* * *
THE TINY town of Medora, population just one hundred, was twelve miles as the crow flies directly north of the Initiative, but by dirt road east to U.S. 85, then north to the interstate, and finally back west, the highway distance was nearly three times as far.
Driving up, the entire western part of the state had from the beginning struck her as if it were the landscape on another planet where life was just possible but not easy. Yet just about every North Dakotan she’d met in her off and on six years here was friendly, though very often a little insular. Only the occasional rancher, especially the old bachelors, tended to be a little gnarly around the edges, but they generally didn’t smile for anybody, and she’d gotten used to them, and just about everything else out here. But she did miss the hustle and bustle of Atlanta and her lab at the Centers for Disease Control in Druid Hills just outside of the city.
Yet thinking about the Initiative—the project—her project—that had taken six years of her life, she knew that it was finally coming to an end, at least for her. If this latest round of tweaks held the colony together the project would go into the next phase—that of development on an industrial scale. And she was excited but a little sad.
Lee Mulholland, tall, lanky, a twenty-seven-year-old self-confessed geek, one of her postdocs in microbiology from the University of Wisconsin, had suggested just yesterday after it had become clear that they had cleared another hurdle, that Whitney should be thinking: first about what her next big project would be—something Whitney had been pondering for nearly a year—and secondly, writing her acceptance speech when she won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry or Medicine. It was a foregone conclusion in a lot of people’s minds because she had cracked the code for the quorum-sensing mechanism in which colonies of microbes could talk to each other to achieve a common goal—such as the six hundred different types in the human mouth that worked as a team to create plaque. She could actually talk to any type of microbial colony—and there were thousands, perhaps millions in the human body—with a lingua franca of her own design. Cure plaque which led to gum disease, or cure any of a myriad of other medical conditions.
The rumor was out that she would be on the cover of Time magazine as the scientist who had finally come up with the clean coal people had been promised for twenty years or more.
And all of that was just added pressure, away from which the coming weekend sounded very good.
The ranch Nate had inherited from his parents was just off the interstate about five miles east of Medora bordering the park they were going to see tomorrow. She’d been there once before and easily found her way to the dirt road that led back to the low-slung house, barn, and a few other outbuildings.
Ashley’s Toyota Tacoma pickup truck with the Bismarck Tribune magnetic decals on both doors was parked behind Nate’s Saturn SUV sheriff’s radio vehicle, and Whitney parked next to them.
Ashley came out as Whitney walked up to the porch. Like Whitney, she was dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt, a big grin crinkling the corners of her wide dark eyes. She was five inches shorter than Whitney, who had to bend down a little as they pecked each other on the cheeks.
“Project’s going to survive without you for a couple of days?” Ashley asked, ushering her inside.
“They know where I am if something comes up.”
“So does my newspaper. But maybe we won’t answer our phones.”
The house was old-fashioned but neat, with chintz curtains at the bowed windows in front, floral patterned wallpaper, dark oak wainscoting and chair rails in the dining room, doilies on the arms of the easy chairs, and a lot of photographs of Nate as a boy all the way up to his Marine FORECON graduation just a couple of months before his parents were killed in a car crash.
Last time she’d been here he’d explained that he’d always been too busy to change things, and now he liked the way the house was set up. Reminded him of growing up here. Stability was important. It was something Ashley totally agreed with. As a service brat the longest she’d ever been on one military base and in one school was three years.
In the kitchen Nate was stirring the pot of spaghetti sauce, and he turned around, a big, happy grin on his broad farmer’s face. At six-four he was built like a pro football player, and despite the titanium prosthesis on his left leg from the knee down he moved like a cross between the quarterback and a ballet dancer.
“Ash and I had a bet that you wouldn’t come,” he said.
“Who won?”
“I did,” Ashley said. She took Whitney’s jacket and overnight bag and brought them back to one of the spare bedrooms.
“How’s it going down there?” Osborne asked. “Heard you had a problem. Anything serious?”
“Just a little science. Looks like we might be over the hump.”
Osborne poured a glass of wine for her. A plate of torn-up pieces of baguette had been set out on the counter. He dipped a scoop of his tomato sauce from the pot, put it in a bowl, and brought it over. “Not quite developed yet, but it’s getting close.”
Whitney sat on one of the stools and dipped the bread in the sauce and drank wine. “Good,” she said.
“You’ll be going back to Atlanta soon?” Osborne asked.
Whitney nodded. “This was fun, but Atlanta’s home and I miss my lab.”
Osborne looked at her and shrugged. Something was bothering him, and it showed on his face, but he smiled.
“What?”
“We’ll miss you.”
“No, there’s something else.”
Ashley was at the door from the dining room. “Nate thinks that we’re not out of the woods yet. There might be another attack, because of what we did in Venezuela.”
Whitney didn’t want to think about it. Her plate was already full with the science, and for the past month or so she had been nearly successful in blocking out Jim Cameron’s image. He’d been shot by the Posse people who’d attacked the Initiative. He’d been trying to save her life, and the lives of Nate and Ashley, and the others back at the R&D Center and at Henry’s, the restaurant and bar that had been built in the main part of the Initiative’s compound well away from Donna Marie. And no science could bring him back, no matter how many times in her dreams she had fantasized about coming up with a controllable colony of death-eating microbes.
> She shook her head. “Have you shared this with Rapid City?” The Air Force at Ellsworth down in Rapid City had a Rapid Response team on full-time alert 24/7, and crises security was their job.
Osborne nodded. “And with Ashley’s dad. He thinks I might be right and so does the FBI. He’s convinced the National Security Agency to position a satellite to watch over the facility, at least until the end of the year. It’s the best he could do because according to him other plants are going to come online out here and in Wyoming and Back East starting in the Virginias.”
“So if they haven’t hit us by then, there’ll enough methane-burning power plants to make Donna Marie not so important,” Whitney said. She could feel her blood rise.
“Something like that.”
“But what about the people here? Aren’t they important, too?”
5
MAKAROV HAD MADE the new Holiday Inn Express just off I-94 last night around eight, had a hot pork sandwich with mashed potatoes and gravy at a nearby truck stop, and had taken a shower and gone directly to bed. Lying awake now just after four thirty in the morning, listening to the wind, he was brought back to his meeting in London with Colonel Delgado. The man’s mood had seemed as bleak as the wind across the plains outside.
That image had stuck and turning it over in his head, Makarov decided that when he was back in Sweden he would conduct a little more research than he’d already done. This job was entirely too simple for the one million euro fee, and the colonel’s exact words had been: “A small job of work first.”
Which meant more to come, and Makarov wanted to have some idea of what might be heading his way, what was ultimately at stake, who was behind this—who was providing the money—and something of even more importance: Who were his enemies?
The dark blue Dodge Ram pickup had been parked in the hotel’s lot last night, and he had transferred the duffle bag to it from the Impala’s trunk, and after wiping down the Chevy had taken his bag, plus one containing a change of clothes and an iPad that had been left for him in the big vehicle, and brought them into the hotel.
Gridlock Page 3