“Cheer up, Ding,” Stanley observed, noting the exchange. “Could have been worse. I’ve yet to see anyone seriously harmed by an electron.”
And you’re supposed to learn from training exercises, Ding added for himself. But learn what from this one? Shit happens? Something to think about, he supposed, and in any case, Team-2 was now on standby, with Peter Covington’s Team-1 on the ready line. Tomorrow they’d do some more shooting, aimed at getting the shots off a little faster, maybe. Problem was, there just wasn’t any room for improvement—not much anyway—and pushing too hard might have the effect of dulling the sharp edge already achieved. Ding felt as though he were the head coach of a particularly good football team. The players were all excellent, and hard-working . . . just not quite perfect. But how much of that could be corrected by training, and how much merely reflected the fact that the other side played to win, too? The first job had been too easy. Model and his bunch had cried aloud to be killed. It wouldn’t always be that easy.
CHAPTER 6
TRUE BELIEVERS
The problem was environmental tolerance. They knew the baseline organism was as effective as it needed to be. It was just so delicate. Exposed to air, it died far too easily. They weren’t sure why, exactly. It might have been temperature or humidity, or too much oxygen—that element so essential to life was a great killer of life at the molecular level—and the uncertainty had been a great annoyance until a member of the team had come up with a solution. They’d used genetic-engineering technology to graft cancer genes into the organism. Specifically, they’d used genetic material from colon cancer, one of the more robust strains, and the results had been striking. The new organism was only a third of a micron larger and far stronger. The proof was on the electron microscope’s TV screen. The tiny strands had been exposed to room air and room light for ten hours before being reintroduced into the culture dish, and already, the technician saw, the minute strands were active, using their RNA to multiply after eating, replicating themselves into millions more little strands, which had only one purpose—to eat tissue. In this case it was kidney tissue, though liver was just as vulnerable. The technician—who had a medical degree from Yale—made the proper written notations, and then, because it was her project, she got to name it. She blessed the course in comparative religion she’d taken twenty years before. You couldn’t just call it anything, could you?
Shiva, she thought. Yes, the most complex and interesting of the Hindu gods, by turns the Destroyer and the Restorer, who controlled poison meant to destroy mankind, and one of whose consorts was Kali, the goddess of death herself. Shiva. Perfect. The tech made the proper notations, including her recommended name for the organism. There would be one more test, one more technological hurdle to hop before all was ready for execution. Execution, she thought, a proper word for the project. On rather a grand scale.
For her next task, she took a sample of Shiva, sealed in a stainless-steel container, and walked out of her lab, an eighth of a mile down the corridor, and into another.
“Hi, Maggie,” the head of that lab said in greeting. “Got something for me?”
“Hey, Steve.” She handed the container over. “This is the one.”
“What are we calling it?” Steve took the container and set it on a countertop.
“Shiva, I think.”
“Sounds ominous,” Steve observed with a smile.
“Oh, it is,” Maggie promised him. Steve was another M.D., Ph.D., both of his degrees from Duke University, and the company’s best man on vaccines. For this project he’d been pulled off AIDS work that had begun to show some promise.
“So, the colon cancer genes worked like you predicted?”
“Ten hours in the open, it shows good UV tolerance. Not too sure about direct sunlight, though.”
“Two hours of that is all we need,” Steve reminded her. And really one hour was plenty, as they both knew. “What about the atomization system?”
“Still have to try it,” she admitted, “but it won’t be a problem.” Both knew that was the truth. The organism should easily tolerate passage through the spray nozzles for the fogging system—which would be checked in one of the big environmental chambers. Doing it outside would be better still, of course, but if Shiva was as robust as Maggie seemed to think, it was a risk better not run.
“Okay, then. Thanks, Maggie.” Steve turned his back, and inserted the container into one of the glove-boxes to open it, in order to begin his work on the vaccine. Much of the work was already done. The baseline agent here was well-known, and the government had funded his company’s vaccine work after the big scare the year before, and Steve was known far and wide as one of the best around for generating, capturing, and replicating antibodies to excite a person’s immune system. He vaguely regretted the termination of his AIDS work. Steve thought that he might have stumbled across a method of generating broad-spectrum antibodies to combat that agile little bastard—maybe a 20 percent change, he judged, plus the added benefit of leading down a new scientific pathway, the sort of thing to make a man famous . . . maybe even good enough for a flight to Stockholm in ten years or so. But in ten years, it wouldn’t matter, would it? Not hardly, the scientist told himself. He turned to look out the triple-windows of his lab. A pretty sunset. Soon the night creatures would come out. Bats would chase insects. Owls would hunt mice and voles. Cats would leave their houses to prowl on their own missions of hunger. He had a set of night-vision goggles that he often used to observe the creatures doing work not so very different from his own. But for now he turned back to his worktable, pulled out his computer keyboard, and made some notations for his new project. Many used notebooks for this, but the Project allowed only computers for record-keeping, and all the notes were electronically encrypted. If it was good enough for Bill Gates, then it was good enough for him. The simple ways were not always best. That explained why he was here, part of the newly named Shiva Project, didn’t it?
They needed guys with guns, but they were hard to find—at least the right ones, with the right attitudes—and the task was made more difficult by government activities with similar, but divergent aims. It helped them keep away from the more obvious kooks, though.
“Damn, it’s pretty out here,” Mark observed.
His host snorted. “There’s a new house right the other side of that ridge line. On a calm day, I can see the smoke from their chimney.”
Mark had to laugh. “There goes the neighborhood. You and Dan’l Boone, eh?”
Foster adopted a somewhat sheepish look. “Yeah, well, it is a good five miles.”
“But you know, you’re right. Imagine what it looked like before the white man came here. No roads ’cept for the riverbanks and deer trails, and the hunting must have been pretty spectacular.”
“Good enough you didn’t have to work that hard to eat, I imagine.” Foster gestured at the fireplace wall of his log cabin, covered with hunting trophies, not all of them legal, but here in Montana’s Bitterroot Mountains, there weren’t all that many cops, and Foster kept pretty much to himself.
“It’s our birthright.”
“Supposed to be,” Foster agreed. “Something worth fighting for.”
“How hard?” Mark asked, admiring the trophies. The grizzly bear rug was especially impressive—and probably illegal as hell.
Foster poured some more bourbon for his guest. “I don’t know what it’s like back East, but out here, if you fight—you fight. All the way, boy. Put one right ’tween the running lights, generally calms your adversary down a mite.”
“But then you have to dispose of the body,” Mark said, sipping his drink. The man bought only cheap whiskey. Well, he probably couldn’t afford the good stuff.
A laugh: “Ever hear of a backhoe? How ’bout a nice fire?”
It was believed by some in this part of the state that Foster had killed a fish-and-game cop. As a result, he was leery of local police—and the highway patrol people didn’t like him to go a mile over the limit. But tho
ugh the car had been found—burned out, forty miles away—the body of the missing officer had not, and that was that. There weren’t many people around to be witnesses in this part of the state, even with a new house five miles away. Mark sipped his bourbon and leaned back in the leather chair. “Nice to be part of nature, isn’t it?”
“Yes, sir. It surely is. Sometimes I think I kinda understand the Indians, y’know?”
“Know any?”
“Oh, sure. Charlie Grayson, he’s a Nez Percé, hunting guide, got my horse off o’ him. I do that, too, to make some cash sometimes, mainly take a horse into the high country, really, meet people who get it. And the elk are pretty thick up there.”
“What about bear?”
“Enough,” Foster replied. “Mainly blacks, but some grizz’.”
“What do you use? Bow?”
A good-natured shake of the head. “No, I admire the Indians, but I ain’t one myself. Depends on what I’m hunting, and what country I’m doing it in. Bolt-action .300 Winchester Mag mainly, but in close country, a semiauto slug shotgun. Nothing like drillin’ three-quarter-inch holes when you gotta, y’know?”
“Handload?”
“Of course. It’s a lot more personal that way. Gotta show respect for the game, you know, keep the gods of the mountains happy.”
Foster smiled at the phrase, in just the right sleepy way, Mark saw. In every civilized man was a pagan waiting to come out, who really believed in the gods of the mountains, and in appeasing the spirits of the dead game. And so did he, really, despite his technical education.
“So, what do you do, Mark?”
“Molecular biochemistry, Ph.D., in fact.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Oh, figuring out how life happens. Like how does a bear smell so well,” he went on, lying. “It can be interesting, but my real life is coming out to places like this, hunting, meeting people who really understand the game better than I do. Guys like you,” Mark concluded, with a salute of his glass. “What about you?”
“Ah, well, retired now. I made some of my own. Would you believe geologist for an oil company?”
“Where’d you work?”
“All over the world. I had a good nose for it, and the oil companies paid me a lot for finding the right stuff, y’know? But I had to give it up. Got to the point—well, you fly a lot, right?”
“I get around,” Mark confirmed with a nod.
“The brown smudge,” Foster said next.
“Huh?”
“Come on, you see it all over the damned world. Up around thirty thousand feet, that brown smudge. Complex hydrocarbons, mainly from passenger jets. One day I was flying back from Paris—connecting flight from Brunei, I came the wrong way ’round ’cuz I wanted to stop off in Europe and meet a friend. Anyway, there I was, in a fuckin’ 747, over the middle of the fucking Atlantic Ocean, like four hours from land, y’know? First-class window seat, sitting there drinking my drink, lookin’ out the window, and there it was, the smudge—that goddamned brown shit, and I realized that I was helpin’ make it happen, dirtyin’ up the whole fuckin’ atmosphere.
“Anyway,” Foster went on, “that was the moment of my . . . conversion, I guess you’d call it. I tendered my resignation the next week, took my stock options, cashed in half a mil worth, and bought this place. So, now, I hunt and fish, do a little guide work in the fall, read a lot, wrote a little book about what oil products do to the environment, and that’s about it.”
It was the book that had attracted Mark’s attention, of course. The brown-smudge story was in its poorly written preface. Foster was a believer, but not a screwball. His house had electricity and phone service. Mark saw his high-end Gateway computer on the floor next to his desk. Even satellite TV, plus the usual Chevy pickup truck with a gun-rack in the back window . . . and a diesel-powered backhoe. So, maybe he believed, but he wasn’t too crazy about it. That was good, Mark thought. He just had to be crazy enough. Foster was. Killing the fish-and-game cop was proof of that.
Foster returned the friendly stare. He’d met guys like this during his time in Exxon. A suit, but a clever one, the kind who didn’t mind getting his hands dirty. Molecular biochemistry. They hadn’t had that major at the Colorado School of Mines, but Foster also subscribed to Science News, and knew what it was all about. A meddler with life . . . but, strangely, one who understood about the deer and elk. Well, the world was a complex place. Just then, his visitor saw the Lucite block on the coffee table. Mark picked it up.
“What’s this?”
Foster grinned over his drink. “What’s it look like?”
“Well, it’s either iron pyrite or it’s—”
“Ain’t iron. I do know my rocks, sir.”
“Gold? Where from?”
“Found it in my stream, ’bout three hundred yards over yonder.” Foster pointed.
“That’s a fair-sized nugget.”
“Five and a half ounces. About two thousand dollars. You know, people—white people—been living right on this ranch on this spot for over a hundred years, but nobody ever saw that in the creek. One day I’ll have to back-track up, see if it’s a good formation. Ought to be, that’s quartz on the bottom of the big one. Quartz-and-gold formations tend to be pretty rich, ’cuz of the way the stuff bubbled up from the earth’s core. This area’s fairly volcanic, all the hot springs and stuff,” he reminded his guest. “We even get the occasional earth tremor.”
“So, you might own your own gold mine?”
A good laugh. “Yep. Ironic, ain’t it? I paid the going rate for grazing land—not even that much ’cuz o’ the hills. The last guy to ranch around here bitched that his cattle lost every pound they gained grazin’ by climbing up to where the grass was.”
“How rich?”
A shrug. “No tellin’, but if I showed that to some guys I went to school with, well, some folks would invest ten or twenty million finding out. Like I said, it’s a quartz formation. People gamble big-time on those. Price of gold is depressed, but if it comes out of the ground pretty pure—well, it’s a shitload more valuable than coal, y’know?”
“So, why don’t you? . . .”
“ ’Cuz I don’t need it, and it’s an ugly process to watch. Worse ’n drilling oil, even. You can pretty much clean that up. But a mine—no way. Never goes away. The tailing don’t go away. The arsenic gets into the ground water and takes forever to leach out. Anyway, it’s a pretty coupla rocks in the plastic, and if I ever need the money, well, I know what to do.”
“How often you check the creek?”
“When I fish—brown trout here, see?” He pointed to a big one hanging on the log wall. “Every third or fourth time, I find another one. Actually, I figure the deposit must have been uncovered fairly recently, else folks would have spotted it a long time ago. Hell, maybe I should track it down, see where it starts, but I’d just be tempting myself. Why bother?” Foster concluded. “I might have a weak moment and go against my principles. Anyway, not like it’s gonna run away, is it?”
Mark grunted. “Guess not. Got any more of these?”
“Sure.” Foster rose and pulled open a desk drawer. He tossed a leather pouch over. Mark caught it, surprised by the weight, almost ten pounds. He pulled the drawstring and extracted a nugget. About the size of a half-dollar, half gold, half quartz, all the more beautiful for the imperfection.
“You married?” Foster asked.
“Yeah. Wife, two kids.”
“Keep it, then. Make a pendant out of it, give it to her for her birthday or something.”
“I can’t do that. This is worth a couple of thousand dollars.”
Foster waved his hand. “Shit, just takin’ up space in my desk. Why not make somebody happy with it? ’Sides, you understand, Mark. I think you really do.”
Yep, Mark thought, this was a recruit. “What if I told you there was a way to make that brown smudge go away? . . .”
A quizzical look. “You talking about some organism to eat
it or something?”
Mark looked up. “No, not exactly . . .” How much could he tell him now? He’d have to be very careful. It was only their first meeting.
“Getting the aircraft is your business. Where to fly it, that we can help with,” Popov assured his host.
“Where?” the host asked.
“The key is to become lost to air-traffic-control radar and also to travel far enough that fighter aircraft cannot track you, as you know. Then if you can land in a friendly place, and dispose of the flight crew upon reaching your destination, repainting the aircraft is no great task. It can be destroyed later, even dismantled for sale of the important parts, the engines and such. They can easily disappear into the international black market, with the change of a few identity plates,” Popov explained. “This has happened more than once, as you know. Western intelligence and police agencies do not advertise the fact, of course.”
“The world is awash with radar systems,” the host objected.
“True,” Popov conceded, “but air-traffic radars do not see aircraft. They see the return signals from aircraft radar transponders. Only military radars see the aircraft themselves, and what African country has a proper air-defense network? Also, with the addition of a simple jammer to the aircraft’s radio systems, you can further reduce the ability of anyone to track you. Your escape is not a problem, if you get as far as an international airport, my friend. That,” he reminded them, “is the difficult part. Once you disappear over Africa—well, that is your choice then. Your country of destination can be selected for ideological purity or for a monetary exchange. Your choice. I recommend the former, but the latter is possible,” Popov concluded. Africa was not yet a hotbed of international law and integrity, but it did have hundreds of airports capable of servicing jetliners.
“A pity about Ernst,” the host said quietly.
“Ernst was a fool!” his lady friend countered with an angry gesture. “He should have robbed a smaller bank. All the way in the middle of Bern. He was trying to make a statement,” Petra Dortmund sneered. Popov had known her only by reputation until today. She might have been pretty, even beautiful, once, but now her once-blond hair was dyed brown, and her thin face was severe, the cheeks sunken and hollow, the eyes rimmed in dark circles. She was almost unrecognizable, which explained why European police hadn’t snatched her up yet, along with her longtime lover, Hans Fürchtner.