That meant that the Project needed airplanes and pilots. Horizon already had its own collection of G-V business jets, capable of spanning most of the world, and so they’d also need small teams of people to manage and maintain a few airports—Zambia, for instance. He wanted to see Africa wild and free. That would take perhaps ten years to come about, Killgore estimated, and it wasn’t all that big a deal. AIDS was killing off that continent at a nasty pace, and Shiva would only make it go faster, and so the Dark Continent would again be free of man, and he’d be able to go there and observe nature in all her glory . . . and maybe shoot a lion to make a rug for his home in Kansas? Some of the people in the Project would raise pure fucking hell over that, but what was one lion more or less? The Project would be saving hundreds of thousands of them, perhaps millions, free to roam and hunt in their prides. What a beautiful New World it would be, once you eliminated the parasitic species that was working so hard to destroy it.
A beeper went off. He turned to look at the control panel. “It’s Ernie, M5—looks like cardiac arrest,” he said.
“What are you going to do?” Barbara Archer asked.
Killgore stood. “Make sure he’s dead.” He bent down to select a camera for the big monitor on his desk. “Here, you can watch.”
Two minutes later, he appeared on the screen. An orderly was already there, but did little more than watch. She saw Killgore check the man’s pulse, then check his eyes. Despite having the -B vaccine, Killgore used gloves and a mask. Well, that made sense. Then he stood back up and switched off the monitoring equipment. The orderly detached the IV lines and covered the body with a sheet. Killgore pointed to the door, and soon the orderly wheeled the gurney out, heading off for the incinerator. Killgore took the time to look at other subjects, and even appeared to speak with one before leaving the screen for good.
“I figured that,” he said, returning to the control room without his protective gear. “Ernie’s heart wasn’t all that good, and Shiva went right after it. Wendell’s going to be next, M2. Maybe tomorrow morning. Liver function’s off the chart, and he’s bleeding out big-time in the upper GI.”
“What about the control group?”
“Mary, F4, two more days she’s going to be in frank symptoms.”
“So the delivery system works?” Archer asked.
“Like a charm.” Killgore nodded, getting some coffee before he sat back down. “It’s all going to work, Barb, and the computer projections look better than our requirement parameters. Six months from initiation, the world is going to be a very different place,” he promised her.
“I still worry about those six months, John. If anybody figures out what’s happened—their last conscious act will be to try and kill us all.”
“That’s why we have guns, Barb.”
“It’s called ‘Rainbow,’ ” he told them, having gotten the best information of the day. “It’s based in England. It was set up by a CIA guy named John Clark, and he’s evidently the boss of the outfit.”
“That makes sense,” said Henriksen. “Multinational, right?”
“I think so,” John Brightling confirmed.
“Yes,” Dmitriy Popov said, picking at his Caesar salad. “That is all sensible, some sort of NATO unit, I imagine, based at Hereford?”
“Correct,” said Henriksen. “By the way, nice job figuring out who they were.”
Popov shrugged. “It was simple, really. I ought to have made the guess sooner. My question now, what do you want me to do about it?”
“I think we need to learn more,” Henriksen said, with a glance at his boss. “A lot more.”
“How do you do that?” Brightling asked.
“It is not difficult,” Popov assured him. “Once you know where to look—that is most of the battle. Once you know that, you merely go there and look. And I already have one name, do I not?”
“You want to take it?” John asked the Russian.
“Certainly.” If you pay me to do so. “There are dangers, but—”
“What kind of dangers?”
“I once worked in England. There is the possibility that they have a photograph of me, under a different name, but I do not think that likely.”
“Can you fake the accent?” Henriksen asked.
“Most certainly, old boy,” Popov replied with a grin. “You were FBI once?”
A nod. “Yep.”
“Then you know how it is done. A week, I think.”
“Okay,” Brightling said. “Fly over tomorrow.”
“Travel documents?” Henriksen asked.
“I have several sets, all current, and all perfect,” the intelligence officer assured him.
It was nice to have a pro on the payroll, Henriksen thought to himself. “Well, I have an early flight, and I haven’t packed yet, guys. See you next week when I get back.”
“Easy on the jet lag, Bill,” John advised.
The former FBI agent laughed. “You got a drug that works on that?”
CHAPTER 18
LOOKS
Popov boarded the morning Concorde flight. He’d never flown the Concorde before, and found the interior of the aircraft cramped, though the legroom was all right. He settled into seat 4-C. Meanwhile, at another terminal, Bill Henriksen was in a first-class seat in an American DC-10 for his trip to Los Angeles.
William Henriksen, Dmitriy Arkadeyevich Popov thought. Formerly of the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team, and an expert on counterterrorism, president of an international security-consulting company now headed off to Australia to seek a consulting contract for the next Olympics. . . . How did that factor into what Popov had been doing for John Brightling’s Horizon Corporation? What, exactly, was he doing—more properly, what idea was he serving? What task? He was certainly being paid top dollar—he hadn’t even raised the money issue over dinner, because he was sure he’d get whatever he asked for. He was thinking in terms of $250,000 for this job alone, even though it held few dangers, aside from driving an automobile in British traffic. $250,000? Maybe more, Popov told himself. After all, this mission seemed pretty important to them.
How did an expert on the mission side of terrorism and an expert on counterterrorism factor into the same plan? Why had they so rapidly seized on his discovery that there was a new international counterterror organization? It was important to them—but why? What the hell were they up to? He shook his head. He was so smart, yet he didn’t have a clue. And he wanted to know, now more than ever.
Again, it was the not-knowing that worried him. Worried? Yes, he was worried now. The KGB had never encouraged curiosity, but even they knew that you had to tell intelligent people something, and so with mission orders had usually come some kind of explanation—and at the least he’d always known that he was serving the interests of his country. Whatever information he’d gathered, whatever foreign national he’d recruited, it had all been aimed at making his nation more secure, more knowledgeable, more strong. That the entire effort had failed was not his fault. The KGB had never failed the State. It had been the State that had failed the KGB. He’d been part of the world’s finest intelligence service, and he remained proud of its abilities and his own.
But he didn’t know what he was doing now. He was supposed to gather information, and it was quite easy for him, but he still didn’t know why. The things he’d learned at dinner the night before had merely opened another door into another mystery. It seemed so like some Hollywood movie of conspiracy or some detective book whose ending he could not yet discern. He’d take the money and do the job, but for the first time he was uneasy, and the feeling was not a pleasant one, as the aircraft raced down the runway and took off into the rising sun for London Heathrow.
“Any progress, Bill?”
Tawney leaned back in his chair. “Not much. The Spanish have identified two of the terrorists as Basque separatists, and the French think they have a line on another of their citizens at the park, but that’s all. I suppose we could ask Carlos for some information, but
it’s rather doubtful that he’d cooperate—and who’s to say that he even knew the buggers in the first place?”
“True.” Clark took a seat. “You know, Ding’s right. One of these incidents was probably to be expected, but three all in the brief time we’ve been here seems like a lot. Is it possible that somebody is setting them loose somehow, Bill?”
“I suppose it’s possible, but who would do it—and why would he do it?” Tawney asked.
“Back up. Stay with the ‘who’ part first. Who has the ability?”
“Someone who had access to them back in the seventies and eighties—that means someone well inside the movement or someone who controlled them, ‘influenced’ them, from the outside. That would mean a KGB type. Notionally this chap would be known to them, would have means to contact them, and thus the ability to activate them.”
“All three groups have been heavily ideological. . . .”
“That’s why the contact would have to be former—or maybe active?—KGB. He’d have to be someone they trust—more than that, a person with the kind of authority they would recognize and respect.” Tawney sipped at his tea. “That has to mean an intelligence officer, perhaps a fairly senior one with whom they’d worked back in the old days, someone who interfaced with them for their training and support in the old East Bloc.”
“German, Czech, Russian?”
“Russian,” Tawney said. “Remember that KGB let the other Bloc countries support them only under their close direction—the standoff nature of the arrangement was always paper-thin, John. It was meant more for their own comfort than for anyone else’s. ‘Progressive elements,’ and all that rubbish. They were usually trained outside of Moscow, and then quartered in safe houses in Eastern Europe, mainly East Germany. We got a good deal of material from the old East German Stasi when the DDR collapsed. I have some colleagues at Century House going back over the information right now. That will take time. It was, unfortunately, never computerized or even properly cross-referenced. Funding problems,” Tawney explained.
“Why not go straight to KGB? Hell, I’ve met Golovko.”
Tawney didn’t know that. “You’re kidding.”
“How do you think Ding and I got into Iran so quick with a Russian cover? You think CIA can pull off an operation that fast? I wish, Bill. No, Golovko set it up, and Ding and I were in his office before we flew down.”
“Well, then, if you can, why not give it a try?”
“I’d have to get authorization from Langley.”
“Will Sergey actually cooperate?”
“Not sure,” John admitted. “Even money at best. But before I do such a thing, I’d need a good idea of exactly what I want. It can’t be a fishing expedition. It has to be well directed.”
“I can see what we might have on the name of an intelligence officer who worked with them. . . . Problem is, it won’t be a real name, will it?”
Clark nodded. “Probably not. You know, we have to try harder to get one of these people alive. Kinda hard to interrogate a corpse.”
“That opportunity hasn’t presented itself yet,” Tawney pointed out.
“Maybe,” Clark thought. And even if you got one alive, who was to say that he’d know what was needed? But you had to start somewhere.
“Bern was a bank robbery. Vienna was an attempted kidnapping, and from what Herr Ostermann said, the subjects were after something that doesn’t exist—private, insider computer codes into the international trading system. The most recent incident was something right out of the seventies.”
“Okay, two out of three were about money,” Clark agreed. “But the terrorists in both those cases were supposed to be ideological, right?”
“Correct.”
“Why the interest in money? In the first one, okay, maybe it was a straight robbery. But the second one was more sophisticated—well, both sophisticated and dumb, ’cuz they were after something that doesn’t exist, but as ideological operators they would not have known that. Bill, somebody told them to go after it. They didn’t start that one by themselves, did they?”
“I agree, your supposition is likely,” the spook said. “Very likely, perhaps.”
“So, in that case we have two ideological operators, technically fairly competent, but going after something that doesn’t really exist. The combination of operational cleverness and objective stupidity just seems to cry out to us, doesn’t it?”
“But what of Worldpark?”
Clark shrugged. “Maybe Carlos knows something they need. Maybe he has a stash somewhere that they want, or information, or contact numbers, maybe even cash—there’s no telling, is there?”
“And I think it unlikely that he can be persuaded to cooperate with us.”
Clark grunted. “Damned skippy.”
“What I can do is talk with the chaps at ‘Five,’ too. Perhaps this Russian shadow fellow worked with the PIRA. Let me do some nosing around, John.”
“Okay, Bill, and I’ll talk things over with Langley.” Clark stood, wandered out of the room, and headed back to his own, still groping for the idea he needed before he could do something useful.
It didn’t start well, and Popov nearly laughed about it. On reaching his rental car he opened the left-side door instead of the right side. But he figured it out in as few seconds as it took him to load his luggage into the trunk—boot—and get in the driver’s side. From that point he opened the map book he’d purchased in the terminal and made his way away from Heathrow’s Terminal Four onto the motorway that would lead him to Hereford.
“So, how does this thing work, Tim?”
Noonan moved his hand away, but the pointer stayed right on Chavez. “Damn, this is slick. It’s supposed to track the electromagnetic field generated by the human heart. It’s a unique low-frequency signal . . . doesn’t even get confused by gorillas and animals. . . .”
The gadget looked like a ray-gun pistol from a ’30s science-fiction movie, with a slim antenna wire out the front and a pistol grip underneath. It swung on a frictionless bearing, drawn to the signal it received. Noonan moved away from Chavez and Covington, and headed for the wall. There was a secretary sitting right . . . there. The gadget locked on her. As he walked, it stayed pointed at her, through the blank wall.
“It’s like a bloody divining rod,” Peter observed, no small amount of wonder in his voice. “Like finding water. . . .”
“Does look that way, doesn’t it? Damn, no wonder the Army wants this baby. Forget about being ambushed. This thing’s supposed to find people underground, behind trees, in the rain—whenever they’re there, this thing’ll pick them up.”
Chavez thought about that. He thought especially about his operation in Colombia so many years before, walking point in the weeds, looking and listening for people who might have worried his ten-man team. Now this thing replaced all the skills he’d learned in the 7th Light. As a defensive tool, it could put the ninjas out of business. As an offensive tool, it could tell you where the bad guys were long before you could see or hear them, and allow you to get close enough to . . .
“What’s it for—what’s the manufacturer say, I mean?”
“Search and rescue—firemen in a burning building, avalanche victims, lots of things, Ding. As a counter-intruder tool, this puppy’s going to be hard to beat. They’ve been playing with it at Fort Bragg for a couple of weeks. The Delta Guys have fallen in love with it. Still a little hard to use, and it can’t tell range yet, but all they have to do is modify the antenna for greater gain, then link two of the detectors with GPS, and triangulate. . . . The ultimate range this thing can achieve hasn’t been determined yet. They say this one can lock onto a person at five hundred meters.”
“Bloody hell,” Covington observed. But the instrument still looked like some sort of an expensive small-boy’s toy.
“What good will it be for us? It can’t tell a hostage from a terrorist,” Chavez pointed out.
“Ding, you never know, do you? Damned sure it can tell you
where the bad guys are not,” Noonan pointed out. He’d be playing with this thing all day, getting a feel for how to use it effectively. He hadn’t felt like a kid with a new toy in quite a while, but this gadget was so new and so unexpected that it should have arrived under a decorated pine tree.
The Brown Stallion was the name of the pub right next door to his motel. It was only half a kilometer from the main gate at Hereford, and seemed like a good place to start, and better yet to have a beer. Popov ordered a pint of Guinness and sipped at it, surveying the room. A television was on, carrying a soccer match—live or taped, he couldn’t tell at the moment—between Manchester United and Rangers from up in Scotland, and that attracted the attention of the pub’s patrons, and the barman, as it turned out. Popov watched as well, sipping at his pint and listening to the chitchat around the room. He was trained to be patient, and knew from experience that patience was usually rewarded in the business of intelligence, all the more so in this culture, where people came to their regular pub every night to chat with their friends, and Popov had unusually good hearing.
The football game ended in a 1-1 tie around the time Popov ordered a second pint.
“Tie, bloody tie,” one man observed at the bar seat next to Popov’s.
“That’s sport for you, Tommy. At least the chaps down the road never tie, and never bloody lose.”