Rainbow Six

  “Get your stuff packed. We’ll move you out to the Project tonight.” What the hell, it would be starting soon anyway. Very soon, in fact.

  “Good,” Maclean responded, finishing his egg salad. Henriksen was eating pastrami, he saw. Not a vegan. Well, maybe someday.

  Artwork was finally going up on some of the blank walls. So, Popov thought, the facility wasn’t to be entirely soulless. It was nature paintings—mountains, forests, and animals. Some of the pictures were quite good, but most of them were ordinary, the kind of thing you found on the walls of cheap motels. How strange, the Russian thought, that with all the money they’d spent to build this monstrous facility in the middle of nowhere, that the artwork was second-rate. Well, taste was taste, and Brightling was a technocrat, and doubtless uneducated in the finer aspects of life. In ancient times he would have been a druid, Dmitriy thought, a bearded man in a long white robe who worshiped trees and animals and sacrificed virgins on stone altars to his pagan beliefs. There were better things to do with virgins. There was such a strange mixture of the old and the new in this man—and his company. The director of security was a “vegan,” who never ate meat? What rubbish! Horizon Corporation was a world leader in several vital new technological areas, but it was peopled by madmen of such primitive and strange beliefs. He supposed it was an American affectation. Such a huge country, the brilliant coexisting with the mad. Brightling was a genius, but he’d hired Popov to initiate terrorist incidents—

  —and then he’d brought Popov here. Dmitriy Arkadeyevich thought about that as he chewed his dinner. Why here? What was so special about this place?

  Now he could understand why Brightling had shrugged off the amount he’d transferred to the terrorists. Horizon Corporation had spent more paving one of the access roads than all the money Popov had taken from the corporate coffers and translated into his own. But this place was important. You could see that in every detail, down to the revolving doors that kept the air inside—every doorway he’d seen was like some sort of air lock, and made him think of a spacecraft. Not a single dollar had been spared to make this facility perfect. But perfect for what?

  Popov shook his head and sipped at his tea. The quality of the food was excellent. The quality of everything was excellent, except the absurdly pedestrian artwork. There was, therefore, not a single mistake here. Brightling was not the sort of man to compromise on anything, was he? Therefore, Dmitriy Arkadeyevich told himself, everything here was deliberate, and everything fit into a pattern, from which he could discern the purpose of the building and the man who’d erected it. He’d allowed himself to be beguiled this day with his tour—and his physical examination? What the hell was that all about? The doctor had given him an injection. A “booster” he’d called it. But what for? Against what?

  Outside this shrine to technology was a mere farm, and outside that, wild animals, which his driver of the day had seemed to worship.

  Druids, he thought. In his time as a field officer in England he’d taken the time to read books and learn about the culture of the English, played the tourist, even traveled to Stonehenge and other places, in the hope of understanding the people better. Ultimately, though, he found that history was history, and though highly interesting, no more logical there than in the Soviet Union—where history had mainly been lies concocted to fit the ideological pattern of Marxism-Leninism.

  Druids had been pagans, their culture based on the gods supposed to live in trees and rocks, and to which human lives had been sacrificed. That had doubtless been a measure exercised by the druid priesthood to maintain their control over the peasants … and the nobility, too, in fact, as all religions tended to do. In return for offering some hope and certainty for the greatest mysteries of life—what happened after death, why the rain fell when it did, how the world had come to be—they extracted their price of earthly power, which was to tell everyone how to live. It had probably been a way for people of intellectual gifts but ignoble birth to achieve the power associated with the nobility. But it had always been about power—earthly power. And like the members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the druid priesthood had probably believed that which they said and that which they enforced because—they had to believe it. It had been the source of their power, and you had to believe in that.

  But these people here weren’t primitives, were they? They were mainly scientists, some of them world leaders in their fields. Horizon Corporation was a collection of geniuses, wasn’t it? How else had Brightling accumulated so much money?

  Popov frowned as he piled his plates back on the tray, then walked off to deposit them on the collection table. This was oddly like the KGB cafeteria at Number 2 Dzerzhinsky Square. Good food and anonymity. Finished, he made his way back to his room, still in the dark as to what the hell had taken place in his life over the past months. Druids? How could people of science be like that? Vegans? How could people of good sense not want to eat meat? What was so special about the gray-brown antelopes that lived on the margins of the property? And that man, he was the director of security here, and therefore he was supposedly a man with the highest personal trust. A fucking vegetarian in a land that produced beef in quantities the rest of the world could only dream about.

  What the hell was that shot for? Popov wondered again as he flipped on the television. “Booster”? Against what? Why had he been examined at all? The deeper he went, the more information he found, the more perplexing the puzzle became.

  But whatever this was all about, it had to be commensurate in scope to the investment Brightling and his company had made—and that was vast! And whatever it was about, it didn’t shrink at causing the death of people unknown and clearly unimportant to John Brightling. But what possible pattern did all of that fit?

  Popov admitted yet again that he still didn’t have a clue. Had he reported on this adventure to his KGB superiors, they would have thought him slightly mad, but they would have ordered him to pursue the case further until he had some sort of conclusion to present, and because he was KGB-trained, he could no more stop pursuing the facts to their conclusion than he could stop breathing.

  At least the first-class seats were comfortable, Chavez told himself. The flight would be a long one—about as long as a flight could be, since the destination was 10,500 miles away, and the whole planet was only 24,000 miles around. British Airways Flight 9 would be leaving at 10:15 P.M., go eleven and three quarters hours to Bangkok, lay over for an hour and a half, then another eight hours and fifty minutes to Sydney, by which time, Ding thought, he’d be about ready to pull out his pistol and shoot the flight crew. All this, plus not having his wife and son handy, just because the fucking Aussies wanted him to hold their hand during the track meet. He’d arrive at 5:20 A.M. two days from now due to the vagaries of the equator and the International Dateline, with his body clock probably more scrambled than the eggs he had for breakfast. But there was nothing he could do about it, and at least BA had stopped smoking on their flights—those people who did smoke would probably be going totally nuts, but that wasn’t his problem. He had four books and six magazines to pass the time, plus a private TV screen for movies, and decided that he had to make the best of it. The flight attendants closed the doors, the engines started, and the captain came on the intercom to welcome them aboard their home for the next day—or two days, depending on how you looked at it.

  CHAPTER 32

  BLOOD WORK

  “Was that a good idea?” Brightling asked.

  “I think so. Kirk was on the travel list anyway. We can have his coworkers tell anybody who asks that he was called out of town on company business,” Henriksen said.

  “What if the FBI agents go back to see him?”

  “Then he’s out of town, and they’ll just have to wait,” Henriksen answered. “Investigations like this last for months, but there won’t be months, will there?”

  Brightling nodded. “I suppose. How’s Dmitriy doing out there?”

  “Dave Daw
son says he’s doing okay, asking a lot of touristy questions, but that’s all. He had his physical from Johnny Killgore, and he’s gotten his ‘B’ shot.”

  “I hope he likes being alive. From what he said, he might turn out to be our kind of people, you know?”

  “I’m not so sure about that, but he doesn’t know squat, and by the time he finds out, it’ll be too late anyway. Wil Gearing is in place, and he says everything’s going according to plan, John. Three more weeks, and then it’ll all be under way. So, it’s time to start moving our people to Kansas.”

  “Too bad. The longevity project’s really looking good at the moment.”

  “Oh?”

  “Well, it’s pretty hard to predict breakthroughs, but the research threads all look very interesting at the moment, Bill.”

  “So we might have lived forever? . . .” Henriksen asked, with a wry smile. For all the time he’d been associated with Brightling and Horizon Corporation, he had trouble believing such predictions. The company had caused some genuine medical miracles, but this was just too much to credit.

  “I can think of worse things to happen. I’m going to make sure that whole team gets the ‘B’ shot,” Brightling said.

  “Well, take the whole team out there and put ’em to work in Kansas, for crying out loud,” Bill suggested. “What about the rest of the company?”

  Brightling didn’t like that question, didn’t like the fact that more than half of the Horizon employees would be treated like the rest of humanity—left to die at best, or to be murdered by the “A” vaccine at worst. John Brightling, M.D., Ph.D., had some lingering morality, part of which was loyalty to the people who worked for him—which was why Dmitriy Popov was in Kansas with the “B”-class antibodies in his system. So, even the Big Boss wasn’t entirely comfortable with what he was doing, Henriksen saw. Well, that was conscience for you. Shakespeare had written about the phenomenon.

  “That’s already decided,” Brightling said, after a second’s discomfort. He’d be saving those who were part of the Project, and those whose scientific knowledge would be useful in the future. Accountants, lawyers, and secretaries, by and large, would not be saved. That he’d be saving about five thousand people—as many as the Kansas and Brazil facilities could hold—was quite a stretch, especially considering that only a small fraction of those people knew what the Project was all about. Had he been a Marxist, Brightling would have thought or even said aloud that the world needed an intellectual elite to make it into the New World, but he didn’t really think in those terms. He truly did believe that he was saving the planet, and though the cost of doing so was murderously high, it was a goal worth pursuing, though part of him hoped that he’d be able to live through the transition period without taking his own life from the guilt factor that was sure to assault him.

  It was easier for Henriksen. What people were doing to the world was a crime. Those who did it, supported it, or did nothing to stop it, were criminals. His job was to make them stop. It was the only way. And at the end of it the innocent would be safe, as would Nature. In any case, the men and the instruments of the Project were now in place. Wil Gearing was confident that he could accomplish his mission, so skillfully had Global Security insinuated itself into the security plan for the Sydney Olympics, with the help of Popov and his ginned-up operations in Europe. So, the Project would go forward, and that was that, and a year from now the planet would be transformed. Henriksen’s only concern was how many people would survive the plague. The scientific members of the Project had discussed it to endless length. Most would die from starvation or other causes, and few would have the capacity to organize themselves enough to determine why the Project members had also survived and then take action against them. Most natural survivors would be invited into the protection of the elect, and the smart ones would accept that protection. The others—who cared? Henriksen had also set up the security systems at the Kansas facility. There were heavy weapons there, enough to handle rioting farmers with Shiva symptoms, he was sure.

  The most likely result of the plague would be a rapid breakdown of society. Even the military would rapidly come apart, but the Kansas facility was a good distance from the nearest military base, and the soldiers based at Fort Riley would be sent to the cities first to maintain order until they, too, came down with symptoms. Then they’d be treated by the military doctors—for what little good it would do—and by the time unit cohesion broke down, it would be far too late for even the soldiers to take any organized action. So, it would be a twitchy time, but one that would pass rapidly, and so long as the Project people in Kansas kept quiet, they ought not to suffer organized attack. Hell, all they had to do was to let the world believe that people were dying there, too, maybe dig a few graves and toss bags into them for the cameras—better yet, burn them in the open—and they could frighten people away from another focal center of the plague. No, they’d considered this one for years. The Project would succeed. It had to. Who else would save the planet?

  The cafeteria theme today was Italian, and Popov was pleased to see that the cooks here were not “vegans.” The lasagna had meat in it. Coming out with his tray and glass of Chianti, he spotted Dr. Killgore eating alone and decided to walk over that way.

  “Ah, hello, Mr. Popov.”

  “Good day, Doctor. How did my blood work turn out?”

  “Fine. Your cholesterol is slightly elevated, and the HDL/LDL ratio is a little off, but I wouldn’t get very upset about it. A little exercise should fix it nicely. Your PSA is fine—”

  “What’s that?”

  “Prostate-Specific Antibody, a check for prostate cancer. All men should check that out when they turn fifty or so. Yours is fine. I should have told you yesterday, but I got piled up. Sorry about that—but there was nothing important to tell you, and that’s a case where no news really is good news, Mr. Popov.”

  “My name is Dmitriy,” the Russian said, extending his hand.

  “John,” the doctor replied, taking it. “Ivan to you, I guess.”

  “And I see you are not a vegan,” Dmitriy Arkadeyevich observed, gesturing to Killgore’s food.

  “Oh? What? Me? No, Dmitriy, I’m not one of those. Homo sapiens is an omnivore. Our teeth are not those of vegetarians. The enamel isn’t thick enough. That’s sort of a political movement, the vegans. Some of them won’t even wear leather shoes because leather’s an animal product.” Killgore ate half a meatball to show what he thought of that. “I even like hunting.”

  “Oh? Where does one do that here?”

  “Not on the Project grounds. We have rules about that, but in due course I’ll be able to hunt deer, elk, buffalo, birds, everything I want,” Killgore said, looking out the huge windows.

  “Buffalo? I thought they were extinct,” Popov said, remembering something he’d heard or read long before.

  “Not really. They came close a hundred years ago, but enough survived to thrive at Yellowstone National Park and in private collections. Some people even breed them with domestic cattle, and the meat’s pretty good. It’s called beefalo. You can buy it in some stores around here.”

  “A buffalo can breed with a cow?” Popov asked.

  “Sure. The animals are very close, genetically speaking, and cross-breeding is actually pretty easy. The hard part,” Killgore explained with a grin, “is that a domestic bull is intimidated by a bison cow, and has trouble performing his duty, as it were. They fix that by raising them together from infancy, so the bull is used to them by the time he’s big enough to do the deed.”

  “What about horses? I would have expected horses in a place like this.”

  “Oh, we have them, mainly quarter horses and some Appaloosas. The barn is down in the southwest part of the property. You ride, Dmitriy?”

  “No, but I have seen many Western movies. When Dawson drove me around, I expected to see cowboys herding cattle carrying Colt pistols on their belts.”

  Killgore had a good chuckle at that. “I guess you’r
e a city boy. Well, so was I once, but I’ve come to love it out here, especially on horseback. Like to go for a ride?”

  “I’ve never sat on a horse,” Popov admitted, intrigued by the invitation. This doctor was an open man, and perhaps a trusting one. He could get information from this man, Dmitriy Arkadeyevich thought.

  “Well, we have a nice gentle quarter horse mare—Buttermilk, would you believe?” Killgore paused. “Damn, it’s nice to be out here.”

  “You are a recent arrival?”

  “Just last week. I used to be in the Binghamton lab, northwest of New York City,” he explained.

  “What sort of work do you do?”

  “I’m a physician—epidemiologist, as a matter of fact. I’m supposed to be an expert on how diseases riffle through populations. But I do a lot of clinical stuff, too, and so I’m one of the designated family practitioners. Like a GP in the old days. I know a little bit about everything, but I’m not really an expert in any field—except epidemiology, and that’s more like being an accountant than a doc, really.”

  “I have a sister who is a physician,” Popov tried.

  “Oh? Where?”

  “In Moscow. She’s a pediatrician. She graduated Moscow State University in the 1970s. Her name is Maria Arkadeyevna. I am Dmitriy Arkadeyevich. Our father was Arkady, you see.”

  “Was he a doctor, too?” Killgore asked.