Rainbow Six

  “Perhaps not,” Rainbow Six answered, looking closely at the man.

  “Very well, and in that case I propose that you have us taken to the local FBI office or some other secure place, so that I can give you the information you need under controlled circumstances. I require only your word that I will not be detained or arrested.”

  “You would believe me if I were to say that?”

  “Yes. You are CIA, and you know the rules of the game, do you not?”

  Clark nodded. “Okay, you have my word—if you’re telling me the truth.”

  “John Clark, I wish I were not,” Popov said. “Truly I wish I were not, tovarich.”

  John looked hard into his eyes, and in them he saw fear . . . no, something deeper than fear. This guy had just called him comrade. That meant something, particularly under these circumstances.

  “Come on,” John told him, turning around and heading for Fifth Avenue.

  “That’s our subject, guys,” a female agent said over the radio circuit. “That is subject Serov all gift-wrapped like a toy from F.A.O. Schwarz. Wait. They’re turning around, heading east to Fifth.”

  “No shit?” Frank Chatham asked. Then he saw them walking very quickly to where the van was parked.

  “You got a safe house around here?” Clark asked.

  “Well, yeah, we do, but—”

  “Get us there, right now!” Clark ordered. “You can terminate your cover operation at once, too. Get in, Dmitriy,” he said, opening the sliding door.

  The safe house was only ten blocks away. Sullivan parked the van, and all four men went inside.

  CHAPTER 37

  DYING FLAME

  The safe house was a four-story brownstone that had been given to the federal government decades before by a grateful businessman whose kidnapped son had been recovered alive by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. It was used mainly for interviewing UN diplomats who worked in one way or another for the U.S. government, and had been one of the places used by Arkady Schevchenko, still the highest-ranking Soviet defector of all time. Outwardly unremarkable, inside it had an elaborate security system and three rooms outfitted with recording systems and two-way mirrors, plus the usual tables, and more comfortable chairs than normal. It was manned around the clock, usually by a rookie agent in the New York field division whose purpose was merely that of doorman.

  Chatham took them to the top-floor interview room and sat Clark and Popov down in the windowless cubicle. The microphone was set up, and the reel-to-reel tape recorder set to turning. Behind one of the mirrors, a TV camera and attendant VCR was set up as well.

  “Okay,” Clark said, announcing the date, time, and place. “With me is Colonel Dmitriy Arkadeyevich Popov, retired, of the former Soviet KGB. The subject of this interview is international terrorist activity. My name is John Clark, and I am a field officer of the Central Intelligence Agency. Also here are—”

  “Special Agent Tom Sullivan—”

  “And—”

  “Special Agent Frank Chatham—”

  “Of the FBI’s New York office. Dmitriy, would you please begin?” John said.

  It was intimidating as hell for Popov to do this, and it showed in the first few minutes of his narrative. The two FBI agents showed total incredulity on their faces for the first half hour, until he got to the part about his morning rides in Kansas.

  “Maclean? What was his first name?” Sullivan asked.

  “Kirk, I think, perhaps Kurt, but I think it ended with a K,” Popov replied. “Hunnicutt told me that he’d kidnapped people here in New York to be used as guinea pigs for this Shiva sickness.”

  “Fuck,” Chatham breathed. “What does this guy look like?”

  Popov told them in very accurate terms, down to hair length and eye color.

  “Mr. Clark, we know this guy. We’ve interviewed him in the disappearance of a young woman, Mary Bannister. And another woman, Anne Pretloe, disappeared under very similar circumstances. Holy shit, you say they were murdered?”

  “No, I said they were killed as test subjects for this Shiva disease that they plan to spread at Sydney.”

  “Horizon Corporation. That’s where this Maclean guy works. He’s out of town now, his coworkers told us.”

  “Yes, you will find him in Kansas,” Popov told them, with a nod.

  “You know how big Horizon Corporation is?” Sullivan asked.

  “Big enough. Okay, Dmitriy,” Clark said, turning back, “exactly how do you think they will spread this virus?”

  “Foster told me it was part of the air-cooling system at the stadium. That is all I know.”

  John thought about the Olympics. They were running the marathon today, and that was the last event, to be followed by the closing ceremonies that evening. There wasn’t time to think very much further than that. He turned, lifted the telephone, and dialed England. “Give me Stanley,” he told Mrs. Foorgate.

  “Alistair Stanley,” the voice said next.

  “Al, this is John. Get hold of Ding and have him call me here.” John read the number off the phone. “Right now—immediately, Al. I mean right the hell now.”

  “Understood, John.”

  Clark waited four and a half minutes by his watch before the phone rang.

  “You’re lucky he got me, John. I was just getting dressed to leave and watch the mara—”

  “Shut the hell up and listen to me, Domingo,” Clark said harshly.

  “Yeah, John, go ahead,” Chavez answered, getting out a pad to take some notes. “Is this for real?” he asked after a few seconds.

  “We believe it to be, Ding.”

  “It’s like something from a bad movie.” Was this something concocted by SPECTRE? Chavez wondered. What was the potential profit in it for anybody?

  “Ding, the guy giving this to me is named Serov, Iosef Andreyevich. He’s here with me now.”

  “Okay, I hear you, Mr. C. When is this operation supposed to take place?”

  “Around the time of the closing ceremonies, supposedly. Is there anything else today besides the marathon?”

  “No, that’s the last major event, and we ought not to be too busy ’til the race ends. We expect the stadium to start filling up around five this afternoon, and then they have the closing ceremonies, and everybody goes home.” Including me, he didn’t have to add.

  “Well, that’s their plan, Ding.”

  “And you want us to stop it.”

  “Correct. Get moving. Keep this number. I’ll be here all day on the STU-4. From now on, all transmissions will be secure. Okay?”

  “You got it. Let me get moving, John.”

  “Move,” the voice told him. “Bye.”

  Chavez hung up, wondering how the hell he’d do this. First he had to assemble his team. They were all on the same floor, and he went into the corridor, knocked on each door, and told the NCOs to come to his suite.

  “Okay, people, we got a job to handle today. Here’s the deal,” he began, then spun the tale for about five minutes.

  “Christ,” Tomlinson managed to say for all of them. The story was quite incredible, but they were accustomed to hearing and acting upon strange information.

  “We have to find the control room for the fogging system. Once we do that, we’ll put people in there. We’ll rotate the duty. George and Homer, you start, then Mike and I will relieve you. Call it two-hour rotation inside and outside. Radios will be on at all times. Deadly force is authorized, people.”

  Noonan had heard the briefing, too. “Ding, this whole thing sounds kinda unlikely.”

  “I know, Tim, but we act on it anyway.”

  “You say so, man.”

  “Let’s move, people,” Ding told them, standing.

  “This is the day, Carol,” John Brightling told his ex-wife. “Less than ten hours from now, the Project starts.”

  She dropped Jiggs on the floor and came to embrace him. “Oh, John!”

  “I know,” he told her. “It’s been a long time. C
ouldn’t have done it without you.”

  Henriksen was there, too. “Okay, I talked with Wil Gearing twenty minutes ago. He’ll be hooking up the Shiva dispenser right before they start the closing ceremonies. The weather is working for us, too. It’s going to be another hot one in Sydney, temperature’s supposed to hit ninety-seven degrees. So, people’ll be camping out under the foggers.”

  “And breathing heavily,” Dr. John Brightling confirmed. That was another of the body’s methods for shedding excess heat.

  Chavez was in the stadium now, already sweating from the building heat and wondering if any of the marathon runners would fall over dead from this day’s race. So Global Security, with whose personnel he’d interfaced briefly, was part of the mission. He wondered if he could remember all the faces he’d seen in the two brief conferences he’d had, but for now he had to find Colonel Wilkerson. Five minutes later, in the security-reaction hut, he found the man.

  “G’day, Major Chavez.”

  “Hey, Frank. I got a question for you.”

  “What’s that, Ding?”

  “The fogging system. Where’s it come from?”

  “The pumping room’s by Section Five, just left of the ramp.”

  “How do I get in there?”

  “You get a key to the door and the alarm code from me. Why, old boy?”

  “Oh, well, I just want to see it.”

  “Is there a problem, Ding?” Wilkerson asked.

  “Maybe. I got to thinking,” Chavez went on, trying to formulate a persuasive lie for the moment. “What if somebody wanted to use it to dispense a chemical agent, like? And I thought I might—”

  “Check it out? One of the Global people beat you to that one, lad. Colonel Gearing. He checked out the entire installation. Same concern as you, but a bit earlier.”

  “Well, can I do it, too?”

  “Why?”

  “Call it paranoia,” Chavez replied.

  “I suppose.” Wilkerson rose from his chair and pulled the proper key off the wall. “The alarm code is one-one-three-three-six-six.”

  Eleven thirty-three sixty-six, Ding memorized.

  “Good. Thanks, Colonel.”

  “My pleasure, Major,” the SAS lieutenant colonel replied.

  Chavez left the room, rejoined his people outside, and headed rapidly back to the stadium.

  “Did you tell ’em about the problem?” Noonan asked.

  Chavez shook his head. “I wasn’t authorized to do that. John expects us to handle it.”

  “What if our friends are armed?”

  “Well, Tim, we are authorized to use necessary force, aren’t we?”

  “Could be messy,” the FBI agent warned, worried about local laws and jurisdictions.

  “Yeah, I suppose so. We use our heads, okay? We know how to do that, too.”

  Kirk Maclean’s job at the Project was to keep an eye on the environmental support systems, mainly the air-conditioning and the over-pressurization system, whose installation he didn’t really understand. After all, everyone inside the buildings would have the “B” vaccine shot, and even if Shiva got in, there wasn’t supposed to be any danger. But he supposed that John Brightling was merely being redundant in his protective-systems thinking, and that was okay with him. His daily work was easily dealt with—it mainly involved checking dials and recording systems, all of which were stuck in the very center of normal operating ranges—and then he felt like a ride. He walked into the transport office and took a set of keys for a Project Hummer, then headed out to the barn to get his horse. Another twenty minutes, and he’d saddled his quarter horse and headed north, cantering across the grassland, through the lanes in the wheat fields where the farm machines turned around, taking his time through one of the prairie-dog towns, and heading generally toward the interstate highway that formed the northern edge of the Project’s real estate. About forty minutes into the ride, he saw something unusual.

  Like every rural plot of land in the American West, this one had a resident buzzard population. Here, as in most such places, they were locally called turkey buzzards, regardless of the actual breed, large raptors that ate carrion and were distinctive for their size and their ugliness—black feathers and naked red-skinned heads that carried large powerful beaks designed for ripping flesh off the carcasses of dead animals. They were Nature’s garbage collectors—or Nature’s own morticians, as some put it—important parts of the ecosystem, though distasteful to some. He saw about six of them circling something in the tall grass to the northeast. Six was a lot—then he realized that there were more still, as he spotted the black angular shapes in the grass from two miles away. Something large had evidently died, and they had assembled to clean—eat—it up. They were careful, conservative birds. Their circling and examination was to ensure that whatever they saw and smelled wasn’t still alive, and hence able to jump up and injure them when they came down to feed. Birds were the most delicate of creatures, made mostly for air, and needing to be in perfect condition to fly and survive.

  What are they eating? Maclean wondered, heading his horse over that way at a walk, not wanting to spook the birds any more than necessary, and wondering if they were afraid of a horse and rider. Probably not, he thought, but he’d find out about this little bit of Nature’s trivia.

  Whatever it was, he thought five minutes later, the birds liked it. It was an ugly process, Maclean thought, but no more so than when he ate a burger, at least as far as the cow was concerned. It was Nature’s way. The buzzards ate the dead and processed the protein, then excreted it out, returning the nutrients back to the soil so that the chain of life could proceed again in its timeless cycle of life-death-life. Even from a hundred yards away, there were too many birds for him to determine what they were feasting on. Probably a deer or pronghorn antelope, he thought, from the number of birds and the way they bobbed their heads up and down, consuming the creature that Nature had reclaimed for Herself. What did pronghorns die of? Kirk wondered. Heart attacks? Strokes? Cancer? It might be interesting to find out in a few years, maybe have one of the Project physicians do a postmortem on one—if they got there ahead of the buzzards, which, he thought with a smile, ate up the evidence. But at fifty yards, he stopped his horse. Whatever they were eating seemed to be wearing a plaid shirt. With that he urged his horse closer, and at ten yards the buzzards took notice, first swiveling their odious red heads and cruel black eyes, then hopping away a few feet, then, finally, flapping back into the air.

  “Oh, fuck,” Maclean said quietly, when he got closer. The neck had been ripped away, leaving the spine partly exposed, and in some places the shirt had been shredded, too, by the powerful beaks. The face had also been destroyed, the eyes gone and most of the skin and flesh, but the hair was fairly intact, and—

  “Jesus . . . Foster? What happened to you, man?” It required a few more feet of approach to see the small red circle in the center of the dark shirt. Maclean didn’t dismount his horse. A man was dead, and, it appeared, had been shot dead. Kirk looked around and saw the hoofprints of one or two horses right here . . . probably two, he decided. Backing away, he decided to get back to the Project as quickly as his horse could manage. It took fifteen minutes, which left his quarter horse winded and the rider shaken. He jumped off, got into his Hummer and raced back to the Project and found John Killgore.

  The room was grossly nondescript, Chavez saw. Just pipes, steel and plastic, and a pump, which was running, as the fogging-cooling system had started off from its timer a few minutes before, and Chavez’s first thought was, what if the bug’s already in the system—I just walked through it, and what if I breathed the fucking thing in?

  But here he was, and if that were the case . . . but, no, John had told him that the poisoning was to start much later in the day, and that the Russian was supposed to know what was going on. You had to trust your intelligence sources. You just had to. The information they gave you was the currency of life and death in this business.

  No
onan bent down to look at the chlorine canister that hung on the piping. “It looks like a factory product, Ding,” the FBI agent said, for what that was worth. “I can see how you switch them out. Flip off the motor here”—he pointed—“close this valve, twist this off with a wrench like the one on the wall there, swap on the new one, reopen the valve and hit the pump motor. Looks like a thirty-second job, maybe less. Boom-boom-boom, and you’re done.”

  “And if it’s already been done?” Chavez asked.

  “Then we’re fucked,” Noonan replied. “I hope your intel’s good on this, partner.”

  The fog outside had the slight smell of chlorine, Chavez told himself hopefully, like American city water, and chlorine was used because it killed germs. It was the only element besides oxygen that supported combustion, wasn’t it? He’d read that somewhere, Domingo thought.

  “What do you think, Tim?”

  “I think the idea makes sense, but it’s one hell of a big operation for somebody to undertake, and it’s—Ding, who the hell would do something like this? And why, for Christ’s sake?”

  “I guess we have to figure that one out. But for now, we watch this thing like it’s the most valuable gadget in the whole fucking world. Okay.” Ding turned to look at his men. “George and Homer, you guys stay here. If you gotta take a piss, do it on the floor.” There was a drainage pit there, they all saw. “Mike and I will handle things outside. Tim, you stay close, too. We got our radios, and that’s how we communicate. Two hours on, two hours off, but never more than fifty yards from this place. Questions?”