“Okay.” The boss nodded.
“Did you know of this team? Did you know they existed?”
A shake of the head. “No.” Then he turned to pour a cup of coffee.
“Is it possible for you to find out some things about them?”
A shrug. “Maybe. Why is it important?”
“That depends on another question—why are you paying me to incite terrorists to do things?” Popov asked.
“You do not have a need to know that, Dmitriy.”
“Yes, sir, I do have such a need. One cannot stage operations against sophisticated opposition without having some idea of the overall objective. It simply cannot be done, sir. Moreover, you have applied significant assets to these operations. There must be a point. I need to know what it is.” The unspoken part, which got through the words, was that he wanted to know, and in due course, he might well figure it out, whether he was told or not.
It also occurred to his employer that his existence was somewhat in pawn to this Russian ex-spook. He could deny everything the man might say in an open public forum, and he even had the ability to make the man disappear, an option less attractive than it appeared outside of a movie script, since Popov might well have told others, or even left a written record.
The bank accounts from which Popov had drawn the funds he’d distributed were thoroughly laundered, of course, but there was a trail of sorts that a very clever and thorough investigator might be able to trace back closely enough to him to cause some minor concern. The problem with electronic banking was that there was always a trail of electrons, and bank records were both time-stamped and amount-specific, enough to make some connection appear to exist. That could be an embarrassment of large or small order. Worse, it wasn’t something he could easily afford, but a hindrance to the larger mission now under way in places as diverse as New York, Kansas, and Brazil. And Australia, of course, which was the whole point of what he was doing.
“Dmitriy, will you let me think about that?”
“Yes, sir. Of course. I merely say that if you want me to do my job effectively, I need to know more. Surely you have other people in your confidence. Show these tapes to those people and see if they think the information is significant.” Popov stood. “Call me when you need me, sir.”
“Thanks for the information.” He waited for the door to close, then dialed a number from memory. The phone rang four times before it was answered:
“Hi,” a voice said in the earpiece. “You’ve reached the home of Bill Henriksen. Sorry, I can’t make it to the phone right now. Why don’t you try my office.”
“Damn,” the executive said. Then he had an idea, and picked up the remote for his TV. CBS, no, NBC, no . . .
“But to kill a sick child,” the host said on ABC’s Good Morning, America.
“Charlie, a long time ago, a guy named Lenin said that the purpose of terrorism was to terrorize. That’s who they are, and that’s what they do. It’s still a dangerous world out there, maybe even more so today that there are no nation-states who, though they used to support terrorists, actually imposed some restraints on their behavior. Those restraints are gone now,” Henriksen said. “This group reportedly wanted their old friend Carlos the Jackal released from prison. Well, it didn’t work, but it’s worth noting that they cared enough to try a classic terrorist mission, to secure the release of one of their own. Fortunately, the mission failed, thanks to the Spanish police.”
“How would you evaluate the police performance?”
“Pretty good. They all train out of the same playbook, of course, and the best of them cross-train at Fort Bragg or at Hereford in England, and other places, Germany and Israel, for example.”
“But one hostage was murdered.”
“Charlie, you can’t stop them all,” the expert said sadly. “You can be ten feet away with a loaded weapon in your hands, and sometimes you can’t take action, because to do so would only get more hostages killed. I’m as sickened by that murder as you are, my friend, but these people won’t be doing any more of that.”
“Well, thanks for coming in. Bill Henriksen, president of Global Security and a consultant to ABC on terrorism. It’s forty-six minutes after the hour.” Cut to commercial.
In his desk he had Bill’s beeper number. This he called, keying in his private line. Four minutes later, the phone rang.
“Yeah, John, what is it?” There was street noise on the cellular phone. Henriksen must have been outside the ABC studio, just off Central Park West, probably walking to his car.
“Bill, I need to see you in my office ASAP. Can you come right down?”
“Sure. Give me twenty minutes.”
Henriksen had a clicker to get into the building’s garage, and access to one of the reserved spaces. He walked into the office eighteen minutes after the call.
“What gives?”
“Caught you on TV this morning.”
“They always call me in on this stuff,” Henriksen said. “Great job taking the bastards down, least from what the TV footage showed. I’ll get the rest of it.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah, I have the right contacts. The video they released was edited down quite a bit. My people’ll get all the tapes from the Spanish—it isn’t classified in any way—for analysis.”
“Watch this,” John told him, flipping his office TV to the VCR and running the released tape of Worldpark. Then he had to rise and switch to the cassette of Vienna. Thirty seconds of that and then Bern. “So, what do you think?”
“The same team on all three?” Henriksen wondered aloud. “Sure does look like it—but who the hell are they?”
“You know who Popov is, right?”
Bill nodded. “Yeah, the KGB guy you found. Is he the guy who twigged to this?”
“Yep.” A nod. “Less than an hour ago, he was in here to show me these tapes. It worries him. Does it worry you?”
The former FBI agent grimaced. “Not sure. I’d want to know more about them first.”
“Can you find out?”
This time he shrugged. “I can talk to some contacts, rattle a few bushes. Thing is, if there is a really black special-ops team out there, I should have known about it already. I mean, I’ve got the contacts throughout the business. What about you?”
“I can probably try a few things, quietly. Probably mask it as plain curiosity.”
“Okay, I can check around. What else did Popov say to you?”
“He wants to know why I’m having him do the things.”
“That’s the problem with spooks. They like to know things. I mean, he’s thinking, what if he starts a mission and one of the subjects gets taken alive. Very often they sing like fucking canaries once they’re in custody, John. If one fingers him, he could be in the shitter. Unlikely, I admit, but possible, and spooks are trained to be cautious.”
“What if we have to take him out?”
Another grimace. “You want to be careful doing that, in case he’s left a package with a friend somewhere. No telling if he has, but I’d have to assume he’s done it. Like I said, they’re trained to be cautious. This operation is not without its dangers, John. We knew that going in. How close are we to having the technical—”
“Very close. The test program is moving along nicely. Another month or so and we’ll know all we need to know.”
“Well, all I have to do is get the contract for Sydney. I’m flying down tomorrow. These incidents won’t hurt.”
“Who will you be working with?”
“The Aussies have their own SAS. It’s supposed to be small—pretty well-trained, but short on the newest hardware. That’s the hook I plan to use. I got what they need, at cost,” Henriksen emphasized. “Run that tape again, the one of the Spanish job,” he said.
John rose from his desk, inserted the tape, and rewound it back to the beginning of the released TV coverage. It showed the assault team zip-lining down from the helicopter.
“Shit, I missed that!” the exper
t admitted.
“What?”
“We need to have the tape enhanced, but that doesn’t look like a police chopper. It’s a Sikorsky H-60.”
“So?”
“So, the -60 has never been certified for civilian use. See how it’s got POLICE painted on the side? That’s a civilian application. It isn’t a police chopper, John. It’s military . . . and if this is a refueling probe,” he said, pointing, “then it’s a special-ops bird. That means U.S. Air Force, man. That also tells us where these people are based—”
“Where?”
“England. The Air Force has a special-ops wing based in Europe, part in Germany, part in England . . . MH-60K, I think the designation of the chopper is, made for combat search-and-rescue and getting people into special places to do special things. Hey, your friend Popov is right. There is a special bunch of people handling these things, and they’ve got American support at least, maybe a lot more. Thing is, who the hell are they?”
“It’s important?”
“Potentially, yes. What if the Aussies call them in to help out on the job I’m trying to get, John? That could screw up the whole thing.”
“You rattle your bushes. I’ll rattle mine.”
“Right.”
CHAPTER 17
BUSHES
Pete now had six friends in the treatment center. Only two of the subjects felt well enough now to remain in the open bay with the TV cartoons and the whiskey, and Killgore figured they’d be in here by the end of the week, so full was their blood with Shiva antibodies. It was odd how the disease attacked different people in such different ways, but everyone had a different immune system. That was why some people got cancer, and others did not despite smoking and other methods of self-abuse.
Aside from that, it was going easier than he’d expected. He supposed it was due to the high doses of morphine that had all of them pretty well zonked out. It was a relatively new discovery in medicine that there really wasn’t a maximum safe dosage of painkillers. If the patient still felt pain, you could give more until it went away. Dose levels that would cause respiratory arrest in healthy people were perfectly safe for those in great pain, and that made his job far easier. Every drug-dispensing machine had a button the subjects could hit if they needed it, and so they were medicating themselves into peaceful oblivion, which also made things safer for the staffs, who didn’t have to do all that many sticks. They hung nutrients on the trees, checked to make sure the IVs were secure, and avoided touching the subjects as much as possible. Later today, they’d all get injected with Vaccine-B, which was supposed to safeguard them against Shiva with a high degree of reliability—Steve Berg said 98 to 99 percent. They all knew that wasn’t the same as 100 percent, though, and so the protective measures would be continued.
Agreeably, there was little sympathy for the subjects. Picking winos off the street had been a good call. The next set of test subjects would appear more sympathetic, but everyone in this side of the building had been fully briefed. Much of what they did might be distasteful, but it would still be done.
“You know, sometimes I think the Earth First people are right,” Kevin Mayflower said in the Palm restaurant.
“Oh? How so?” Carol Brightling asked.
The president of the Sierra Club looked into his wine. “We destroy everything we touch. The shores, the tidal wetlands, the forests—look at what ‘civilization’ has done to them all. Oh, sure, we preserve some areas—and that’s what? A hot three percent, maybe? Big fucking deal. We’re poisoning everything, including ourselves. The ozone problem is really getting worse, according to the new NASA study.”
“Yeah, but did you hear about the proposed fix?” the President’s science advisor asked.
“Fix? How?”
She grimaced. “Well, you get a bunch of jumbo jets, fill them up with ozone, fly them out of Australia, and release ozone at high altitude to patch it up. I have that proposal on my desk right now.”
“And?”
“And it’s like doing abortions at half-time in a football game, with instant replay and color commentary. No way it can possibly work. We have to let the planet heal herself—but we won’t, of course.”
“Any more good news?”
“Oh, yeah, the CO2 issue. There’s a guy up at Harvard who says if we dump iron filings into the Indian Ocean, we can encourage the growth of phytoplankton, and that will fix the CO2 problem almost overnight. The math looks pretty good. All these geniuses who say they can fix the planet, like she needs fixing—instead of leaving her the hell alone.”
“And the President says what?” Mayflower asked.
“He says for me to tell him if it’ll work or not, and if it looks like it’s going to work, then test it to make sure, then try it for real. He hasn’t got a clue, and he doesn’t listen.” She didn’t add that she had to follow his orders whether she liked them or not.
“Well, maybe our friends at Earth First are right, Carol. Maybe we are a parasitic species on the face of the earth, and maybe we’re going to destroy the whole damned planet before we’re done.”
“Rachel Carson come to life, eh?” she asked.
“Look, you know the science as well as I do—maybe better. We’re doing things like—like the Alvarez Event that took the dinosaurs out, except we’re doing it willfully. It took how long for the planet to recover from that?”
“Alvarez? The planet didn’t recover, Kevin,” Carol Brightling pointed out. “It jump-started mammals—us, remember? The preexisting ecological order never returned. Something new happened, and that took a couple of million years just to stabilize.” Must have been something to see, she told herself. To watch something like that in progress, what a scientific and personal blessing it must have been, but there’d probably been nobody back then to appreciate it. Unlike today.
“Well, in a few more years we’ll get to see the first part of it, won’t we? How many more species will we kill off this year, and if the ozone situation keeps getting worse—my God, Carol, why don’t people get it? Don’t they see what’s happening? Don’t they care?”
“Kevin, no, they don’t see, and, no, they don’t care. Look around.” The restaurant was filled with important people wearing important-looking clothes, doubtless discussing important things over their important dinners, none of which had a thing to do with the planetary crisis that hung quite literally over all their heads. If the ozone layer really evaporated, as it might, well, they’d start using sunblock just to walk the streets, and maybe that would protect them enough . . . but what of the natural species, the birds, the lizards, all the creatures on the planet who had no such option? The studies suggested that their eyes would be seared by the unblocked ultraviolet radiation, which would kill them off, and so the entire global ecosystem would rapidly come apart. “Do you think any of these people know about it—or give a damn if they do?”
“I suppose not.” He sipped down some more of his white wine. “Well, we keep plugging away, don’t we?”
“It’s funny,” she went on. “Not too long ago we fought wars, which kept the population down enough that we couldn’t damage the planet all that much—but now peace is breaking out all over, and we’re advancing our industrial capacity, and so, peace is destroying us a lot more efficiently than war ever did. Ironic, isn’t it?”
“And modern medicine. The anopheles mosquito was pretty good at keeping the numbers down—you know that Washington was once a malarial swamp, diplomats deemed it a hazardous-duty post! So then we invented DDT. Good for controlling mosquitoes, but tough on the peregrine falcon. We never get it right. Never,” Mayflower concluded.
“What if? . . .” she asked wistfully.
“What if what, Carol?”
“What if nature came up with something to knock the human population back?”
“The Gaea Hypothesis?” That made him smile. The idea was that the earth was itself a thinking, self-correcting organism that found ways to regulate the numerous living species that
populated the planet. “Even if that’s valid—and I hope it is, really—I’m afraid that we humans move too fast for Gaea to deal with us and our work. No, Carol, we’ve created a suicide pact, and we’re going to take down everything else with us, and a hundred years from now, when the human population worldwide is down to a million or so people, they’ll know what went wrong and read the books and look at the videotapes of the paradise we once had, and they’ll curse our names—and maybe, if they’re lucky, they’ll learn from it when they crawl back up from the slime. Maybe. I doubt it. Even if they try to learn, they’ll worry more about building nuclear-power reactors so they can use their electric toothbrushes. Rachel was right. There will be a Silent Spring someday, but then it’ll be too late.” He picked at his salad, wondering what chemicals were in the lettuce and tomatoes. Some, he was sure. This time of year, the lettuce came up from Mexico, where farmers did all sorts of things to their crops, and maybe the kitchen help had washed it off, but maybe not, and so here he was, eating an expensive lunch and poisoning himself as surely as he was watching the whole planet being poisoned. His quietly despairing look told the tale.
He was ready to be recruited, Carol Brightling thought. It was time. And he’d bring some good people with him, and they’d have room for them in Kansas and Brazil. Half an hour later, she took her leave, and headed back to the White House for the weekly cabinet meeting.
“Hey, Bill,” Gus said from his office in the Hoover Building. “What’s happening?”
“Catch the TV this morning?” Henriksen asked.
“You mean the thing in Spain?” Werner asked.
“Yep.”
“Sure did. I saw you on the tube, too.”
“My genius act.” He chuckled. “Well, it’s good for business, you know?”
“Yeah, I suppose it is. Anyway, what about it?”
“That wasn’t the Spanish cops, Gus. I know how they train. Not their style, man. So, who was it, Delta, SAS, HRT?”
Gus Werner’s eyes narrowed. Now Assistant Director of the FBI, he’d once been the special agent in charge of the FBI’s elite Hostage Rescue Team. Promoted out, he’d been Special Agent in Charge of the Atlanta field division, and now was the AD in charge of the new Terrorism Division. Bill Henriksen had once worked for him, then left the Bureau to start his own consulting company, but once FBI always FBI, and so now, Bill was fishing for information.