“Excellent. What of the other matter, Joe?”
“I’ll be bringing that myself. I’ll be over in two days. I’m flying into Shannon on my business jet. I should get in about six-thirty in the morning.”
“I shall be there to see you,” Grady promised.
“Okay, my friend. I will see you then.”
“Good-bye, Joe.”
“Bye, Sean.” And the line went dead. Grady thumbed off the power and replaced the phone in his pocket. If anyone had overheard it—not likely, since he could see all the way to the horizon, and there were no parked trucks in evidence . . . and, besides, if anyone knew where he was, they would have come after him and his men with a platoon of soldiers and/or police—all they would have heard was a business chat, brief, cryptic, and to the point. He went back inside.
“Who was it, Sean?” Roddy Sands asked.
“That was Joe,” Grady replied. “He’s done what we asked. So, I suppose we get to move forward as well.”
“Indeed.” Roddy hoisted his pint glass in salute.
The Security Service, once called MI (Military Intelligence) 5, had lived for more than a generation with two high-profile missions. One was to keep track of Soviet penetration agents within the British government—a regrettably busy mission, since the KGB and its antecedents had more than once penetrated British security. At one point, they’d almost gotten their agent-in-place Kim Philby in charge of “Five,” thus nearly giving the Soviets control of the British counterintelligence service, a miscue that still sent a collective shiver throughout “Five.” The second mission was the penetration of the Irish Republican Army and other Irish terrorist groups, the better to identify their leaders and eliminate them, for this war was fought by the old rules. Sometimes, police were called in to make arrests, and other times, SAS commandos were deployed to handle things more directly. The differences in technique had resulted from the inability of Her Majesty’s Government to decide if the “Irish Problem” was a matter of crime or national security—the result of that indecision had been the lengthening of “The Troubles” by at least a decade, in the view of the American FBI.
But the employees of “Five” didn’t have the ability to make policy. That was done by elected officials, who often as not failed to listen to the trained experts who’d spent their lives handling such matters. Without the ability to make or affect policy, they soldiered on, assembling and maintaining voluminous records of known and suspected IRA operatives for eventual action by other government agencies.
This was done mainly by recruiting informers. Informing on one’s comrades was another old Irish tradition, and one that the British had long exploited for their own ends. They speculated on its origins. Part of it, they all thought, was religion. The IRA regarded itself as the protector of Catholic Irishmen, and with that identification came a price: the rules and ethics of Catholicism often spilled over into the hearts and minds of people who killed in the name of their religious affiliation. One of the things that spilled over was guilt. On the one hand, guilt was an inevitable result of their revolutionary activity, and on the other hand, it was the one thing they could not afford to entertain in their own consciences.
“Five” had a thick file on Sean Grady, as they did for many others. Grady’s was special, though, since they’d once had a particularly well-placed informer in his unit who had, unfortunately, disappeared, doubtless murdered by him. They knew that Grady had given up kneecapping early on and chosen murder as a more permanent way of dealing with security leaks, and one that never left bodies about for the police to find. “Five” had twenty-three informants currently working in various PIRA units. Four were women of looser morality than was usual in Ireland. The other nineteen were men who’d been recruited one way or another—though three of them didn’t know that they were sharing secrets with British agents. The Security Service did its collective best to protect them, and more than a few had been taken to England after their usefulness had been exhausted, then flown to Canada, usually, for a new, safer life. But in the main “Five” treated them as assets to be milked for as long as possible, because the majority of them were people who’d killed or assisted others in killing, and that made them both criminals and traitors, whose consciences had been just a little too late to encourage much in the way of sympathy from the case officers who “worked” them.
Grady, the current file said, had fallen off the face of the earth. It was possible, some supposed, that he’d been killed by a rival, but probably not, as that bit of news would have percolated through the PIRA leadership. Grady was respected even by his factional enemies in the Movement as a True Believer in the Cause and an effective operator who had killed more than his fair share of cops and soldiers in Londonderry. And the Security Service still wanted him for the three SAS troopers he’d somehow captured, tortured, and killed. Those bodies had been recovered, and the collective rage in SAS hadn’t gone away, for the 22nd Special Air Service Regiment never forgave and never forgot such things. Killing, perhaps, but never torture.
Cyril Holt, Deputy Director of the Security Service, was doing his quarterly review of the major case files, and stopped when he got to Grady’s. He’d disappeared from the scope entirely. If he’d died, Holt would have heard about it. It was also possible that he’d given up the fight, seen that his parent organization was finally ready to negotiate some sort of peace, and decided to play along by terminating his operations. But Holt and his people didn’t believe that either. The psychological profile that had been drawn up by the chief of psychiatry at Guy’s Hospital in London said that he’d be one of the last to set the gun down and look for a peaceful occupation.
The third possibility was that he was still lurking out there, maybe in Ulster, maybe in the Republic . . . more probably the latter, because “Five” had most of its informants in the North. Holt looked at the photos of Grady and his collection of twenty or so PIRA “soldiers,” for whom there were also files. None of the pictures were very good despite the computer enhancement. He had to assume he was still active, leading his militant PIRA faction somehow, planning operations that might or might not come off, but meanwhile keeping a low profile with the cover identities he had to have generated. All he could do was keep a watch on them. Holt made a brief notation, closed the file, placed it on his out pile and selected another. By the following day, the notations would be placed into the “Five” computer, which was slowly supplanting the paper files, but which Holt didn’t like to use. He preferred files he could hold in his hands.
“That quickly?” Popov asked.
“Why not?” Brightling responded.
“As you say, sir. And the cocaine?” he added distaste-fully.
“The suitcase is packed. Ten pounds in medically pure compounding condition from our own stores. The bag will be on the plane.”
Popov didn’t like the idea of transporting drugs at all. It wasn’t a case of sudden morality, but simply concern about customs officials and luggage-sniffing dogs. Brightling saw the worry on his face, and smiled.
“Relax, Dmitriy. If there is any problem, you’re transporting the stuff to our subsidiary in Dublin. You’ll have documents to that effect. Just try to make sure you don’t need to use them. It could be embarrassing.”
“As you say.” Popov allowed himself to be relieved. He’d be flying a chartered Gulfstream V private business jet this time, because bringing the drugs through a real airport on a real international flight was just a little too dangerous. European countries tended to give casual treatment to arriving Americans, whose main objective was to spend their dollars, not cause trouble, but everyone had dogs now, because every country in the world worried about narcotics.
“Tonight?”
Brightling nodded and checked his watch. “The plane’ll be at Teterboro Airport. Be there at six.”
Popov left and caught a cab back to his apartment. Packing wasn’t difficult but thinking was. Brightling was violating the most rudimentary security
considerations here. Chartering a private business jet linked his corporation with Popov for the first time, as did the protective documentation attached to the cocaine. There was no effort to cut Popov loose from his employer. Perhaps that meant that Brightling didn’t trust his employee’s loyalty, didn’t trust that if arrested he would keep his mouth shut . . . but, no, Dmitriy Arkadeyevich thought. If he wasn’t trusted, then the mission would not be undertaken. Popov had always been the link between Brightling and the terrorists.
So, the Russian thought, he does trust me. But he was also violating security . . . and that could only mean that in Brightling’s mind security didn’t matter. Why—how could it not matter? Perhaps Brightling planned to have him eliminated? That was a possibility, but he didn’t think so. Brightling was ruthless, but not sufficiently clever—rather, too clever. He would have to consider the possibility that Popov had left a written record somewhere, that his death would trigger the unveiling of his own part in the exploits. So he could discount that, the Russian thought.
Then what?
The former intelligence officer looked in the mirror at a face that still didn’t know what it needed to know. From the beginning, he’d been seduced by money. He’d turned into a hired agent of sorts, motivated by personal gain—the “M” of MICE—but was working for someone for whom money had no importance. Even CIA, rich as it had always been, measured the money it gave out to its agents. The American intelligence service paid a hundred times better than its Russian counterpart, but even that had to be justified, because CIA had accountants who ruled the field officers as the Czar’s courtiers and bureaucrats had once ruled over the smallest village. Popov knew from his research that Horizon Corporation had a huge amount of money, but one did not become wealthy from profligacy. In a capitalist society, one became wealthy by cleverness, perhaps ruthlessness, but not by stupidity, and throwing money about as Brightling did was stupid.
So, what is it? Dmitriy wondered, moving away from the mirror and packing his bag.
Whatever he’s planning, whatever his reason for these terrorist incidents—is close at hand?
That did make a little sense. You concealed as long as you had to, but when you no longer had to, then you didn’t waste the effort. It was an amateur’s move, though. An amateur, even a gifted one like Brightling, didn’t know, hadn’t learned from bitter institutional experience that you never broke tradecraft, even after an operation had been successfully concluded, because even then your enemy might find things out that he could use against you in your next one . . .
. . . unless there is not to be a next one? Dmitriy thought, as he selected his underwear. Is this the last operation to be run? No, he corrected himself, is this the last operation which I need to run?
He ran through it again. The operations had grown in magnitude, until now he was transporting cocaine to make a terrorist happy, after helping transfer six million dollars! To make the drug smuggling easier, he would have documentation to justify the drug shipment from one branch of a major corporation to another, tying himself and the drugs to Brightling’s company. Perhaps his false ID would hold up if the police showed interest in him—well, they would almost certainly hold up, unless the Garda had a direct line into MI-5, which was not likely, and neither was it likely that the British Security Service had his cover name, or even a photo, good or bad—and besides, he’d changed his haircut ages ago.
No, Popov decided as he finished packing, the only thing that made sense was that this was the last operation. Brightling would be closing things down. To Popov that meant that this was his last chance to cash in. And so he found himself hoping that Grady and his band of murderers would come to as shabby an end as all the others in Bern and Vienna—and even Spain, though he’d had no part in that one. He had the number and control code for the new Swiss account, and in that was enough money to support him for the rest of his life. All he needed to happen was for the Rainbow team to kill them off, and then he could disappear forever. With that hopeful thought in his mind, Popov went outside and flagged a cab to take him to Teterboro Airport.
He’d think about it all the way across the Atlantic.
CHAPTER 27
TRANSFER AGENTS
“It really is a waste of time,” Barbara Archer said at her seat in the conference room. “F4 is dead, just her heart’s still beating. We’ve tried everything. Nothing stops Shiva. Not a damned thing.”
“Except the -B vaccine antibodies,” Killgore noted.
“Except them,” Archer agreed. “But nothing else works, does it?”
There was agreement around the table. They had literally tried every treatment modality known to medicine, including things merely speculated upon at CDC, USAMRIID, and the Pasteur Institute in Paris. They’d even tried every antibiotic in the arsenal from penicillin to Keflex, and two new synthetics under experimentation by Merck and Horizon. The use of the antibiotics had merely been t-crossing and i-dotting, since not one of them helped viral infections, but in desperate times people tried desperate measures, and perhaps something new and unexpected might have happened—
—but not with Shiva. This new and improved version of Ebola hemorrhagic fever, genetically engineered to be hardier than the naturally produced version that still haunted the Congo River Valley, was as close to 100 percent fatal and 100 percent resistant to treatment as anything known to medical science, and absent a landmark breakthrough in infectious-disease treatment, nothing would help those exposed to it. Many would suffer exposure from the initial release, and the rest would get it from the -A vaccine Steve Berg had developed, and through both modalities, Shiva would sweep across the world like a slow-developing storm. Inside of six months, the people left alive would fall into three categories. First, those who hadn’t been exposed in any way. There would be few of them, since every nation on earth would gobble up supplies of the -A vaccine and inject their citizens with it, because the first Shiva victims would horrify any human with access to a television. The second group would be those rarest of people whose immune systems were sufficient to protect them from Shiva. The lab had yet to discover any such individuals, but some would inevitably be out there—happily, most of those would probably die from the collapse of social services in the cities and towns of the world, mainly from starvation or from the panicked lawlessness sure to accompany the plague or from the ordinary bacterial diseases that accompanied large numbers of unburied dead.
The third group would be the few thousand people in Kansas. Project Lifeboat, as they thought of it. That group would be composed of active Project members—just a few hundred of them—and their families, and other selected scientists protected by Berg’s -B vaccine. The Kansas facility was large, isolated, and protected by large quantities of weapons, should any unwelcome visitors approach.
Six months, they thought. Twenty-seven weeks. That’s what the computer projections told them. Some areas would go faster than others. The models suggested that Africa would go last of all, because they’d be the last to get the -A vaccine distributed, and because of the poor infrastructure for delivering vital services. Europe would go down first, with its socialized medical-care systems and pliant citizens sure to show up for their shots when summoned, then America, then, in due course, the rest of the world.
“The whole world, just like that,” Killgore observed, looking out the windows at the New York/New Jersey border area, with its rolling hills and green deciduous trees. The great farms on the plains that ran from Canada to Texas would go fallow, though some would grow wild wheat for centuries to come. The bison would expand rapidly from their enclaves in Yellowstone and private game farms, and with them the wolves and barren-ground grizzly bear, and the birds, and the coyotes and the prairie dogs. Nature would restore Her balance very quickly, the computer models told them; in less than five years, the entire earth would be transformed.
“Yes, John,” Barb Archer agreed. “But we’re not there yet. What do we do with the test subjects?”
Killgore knew what she’d be suggesting. Archer hated clinical medicine. “F4 first?”
“It’s a waste of air to keep her breathing, and we all know it. They’re all in pain, and we’re not learning anything except that Shiva is lethal—and we already knew that. Plus, we’re going to be moving out west in a few weeks, and why keep them alive that long? We’re not moving them out with us, are we?”
“Well, no,” another physician admitted.
“Okay, I am tired of wasting my time as a clinician for dead people. I move that we do what we have to do, and be done with it.”
“Second,” agreed another scientist at the table.
“In favor?” Killgore asked, counting the hands. “Opposed.” Only two of those. “The ayes have it. Okay. Barbara and I will take care of it—today, Barb?”
“Why wait, John?” Archer inquired tiredly.
“Kirk Maclean?” Agent Sullivan asked.
“That’s right,” the man said from behind the door.
“FBI.” Sullivan held up his ID. “Can we talk to you?”
“About what?” The usual alarm, the agents saw.
“Do we have to stand in the hall to talk?” Sullivan asked reasonably.
“Oh, okay, sure, come in.” Maclean stepped back and opened the door to let them in, then led them into his living room. The TV was on, some cable movie, the agents saw. Kung fu and guns mostly, it appeared.
“I’m Tom Sullivan, and this is Frank Chatham. We’re looking into the disappearance of two women,” the senior agent said, after sitting down. “We’re hoping that you might be able to help us.”
“Sure—you mean, like they were kidnapped or something?” the man asked.
“That is a possibility. Their names are Anne Pretloe and Mary Bannister. Some people have told us that you might have known one or both of them,” Chatham said next.