Rainbow Six

  And so, as the C-17A Globemaster III transport climbed to its cruising altitude, he started talking. Noonan held a tape recorder in his hand, and hoped that the engine noise that permeated the cargo area wouldn’t wash it all away. It turned out that the hardest part for him was to keep a straight face. He’d heard about extreme environmental groups, the people who thought killing baby seals in Canada was right up there with Treblinka and Auschwitz, and he knew that the Bureau had looked at some for offenses like releasing laboratory animals from medical institutions, or spiking trees with nails so that no lumber company would dare to run trees from those areas through their sawmills, but he’d never heard of those groups doing anything more offensive than that. This, however, was such a crime as to redefine “monstrous.” And the religious fervor that went along with it was entirely alien to him, and therefore hard to credit. He wanted to believe that the contents of the chlorine canister really was just chlorine, but he knew that it was not. That and the backpack were now sealed in a mil-spec plastic container strapped down in a seat next to Sergeant Mike Pierce.

  “He hasn’t called yet,” John Brightling observed, checking his watch. The closing ceremonies were under way. The head of the International Olympic Committee was about to give his speech, summoning the Youth of the World to the next set of games. Then the assembled orchestra would play, and the Olympic Flame would be extinguished . . . just as most of humanity would be extinguished. There was the same sort of sadness to it, but also the same inevitability. There would be no next Olympiad, and the Youth of the World would not be alive to hear the summons? . . .

  “John, he’s probably watching this the same as we are. Give him some time,” Bill Henriksen advised.

  “You say so.” Brightling put his arm around his wife’s shoulders and tried to relax. Even now, the people walking in the stadium were being sprinkled with the nano-capsules bearing Shiva. Bill was right. Nothing could have gone wrong. He could see it in his mind. The streets and highways empty, farms idle, airports shut down. The trees would thrive without lumberjacks to chop them down. The animals would nose about, wondering perhaps where all the noises and the two-legged creatures were. Rats and other carrion eaters would feast. Dogs and cats would return to their primal instincts and survive or not, as circumstances allowed. Herbivores and predators would be relieved of hunting pressure. Poison traps set out in the wild would continue to kill, but eventually these would run out of their poisons and stop killing game that farmers and others disliked. This year there would be no mass murder of baby harp seals for their lovely white coats. This year the world would be reborn … and even if that required an act of violence, it was worth the price for those who had the brains and aesthetic to appreciate it all. It was like a religion for Brightling and his people. Surely it had all the aspects of a religion. They worshiped the great collective life system called Nature. They were fighting for Her because they knew that She loved and nurtured them back. It was that simple. Nature was to them if not a person, then a huge enveloping idea that made and supported the things they loved. They were hardly the first people to dedicate their lives to an idea, were they?

  “How long to Hickam?”

  “Another ten hours, the crew chief told me,” Pierce said, checking his watch. “This is like being back in the Eight-Deuce. All I need’s my chute, Tim,” he told Noonan.

  “Huh?”

  “Eighty-Second Airborne, Fort Bragg, my first outfit. All the way, baby,” Pierce explained for the benefit of this FBI puke. He missed jumping, but that was something special-ops people didn’t do. Going in by helicopter was better organized and definitely safer, but it didn’t have the rush you got from leaping out of a transport aircraft along with your squadmates. “What do you think of what this guy was trying to do?” Pierce asked, pointing at Gearing.

  “Hard to believe it’s real.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Pierce agreed. “I’d like to think nobody’s that crazy. It’s too big a thought for my brain, man.”

  “Yeah,” Noonan replied. “Mine, too.” He felt the mini tape recorder in his shirt pocket and wondered about the information it contained. Had he taken the confession legally? He’d given the mutt his rights, and Gearing said that he understood them, but any halfway competent attorney would try hard to have it all tossed, claiming that since they were aboard a military aircraft surrounded by armed men, the circumstances had been coercive—and maybe the judge would agree. He might also agree that the arrest had been illegal. But, Noonan thought, all of that was less important than the result. If Gearing had spoken the truth, this arrest might have saved millions of lives. . . . He went forward to the aircraft’s radio compartment, got on the secure system, and called New York.

  Clark was asleep when his phone rang. He grabbed the receiver and grunted, “Yeah?” only to find that the security system was still handshaking. Then it announced that the line was secure. “What is it, Ding?”

  “It’s Tim Noonan, John. I have a question.”

  “What’s that?”

  “What are you going to do when we get there? I have Gearing’s confession on tape, the whole thing, just like what you told Ding a few hours ago. Word for fucking word, John. What do we do now?”

  “I don’t know yet. We probably have to talk to Director Murray, and also with Ed Foley at CIA. I’m not sure the law anticipates anything this big, and I’m not sure this is something we ever want to put in a public courtroom, y’know?”

  “Well, yeah,” Noonan’s voice agreed from half a world away. “Okay, just so somebody’s thinking about it.”

  “Okay, yeah, we’re thinking about it. Anything else?”

  “I guess not.”

  “Good. I’m going back to sleep.” And the line went dead, and Noonan walked back to the cargo compartment. Chavez and Tomlinson were keeping an eye on Gearing, while the rest of the people tried to get some sleep in the crummy USAF seats and thus pass the time on this most boring of flights. Except for the dreams, Noonan discovered in an hour. They weren’t boring at all.

  “He still hasn’t called,” Brightling said, as the network coverage went through Olympic highlights.

  “I know,” Henriksen conceded. “Okay, let me make a call.” He rose from his seat, pulled a card from his wallet, and dialed a number on the back of it to a cellular phone owned by a senior Global Security employee down in Sydney.

  “Tony? This is Bill Henriksen. I need you to do something for me right now, okay? . . . Good. Find Wil Gearing and tell him to call me immediately. He has the number . . . Yes, that’s the one. Right now, Tony . . . Yeah. Thanks.” And Henriksen hung up. “That shouldn’t take long. Not too many places he can be except maybe on the way to the airport for his flight up the coast. Relax, John,” the security chief advised, still not feeling any chill on his skin. Gearing’s cell phone could have a dead battery, he could be caught up in the crowds and unable to get a cab back to his hotel, maybe there weren’t any cabs—any one of a number of innocent explanations.

  Down in Sydney, Tony Johnson walked across the street to Wil Gearing’s hotel. He knew the room already, since they’d met there, and took the elevator to the right room. Defeating the lock was child’s play, just a matter of working a credit card into the doorjamb and flipping the angled latch, and then he was inside—

  —and so were Gearing’s bags, sitting there by the sliding mirror-doors of the closet, and there on the desk-table was the folder with his flight tickets to the Northeast Coast of Australia, plus a map and some brochures about the Great Barrier Reef. This was odd. Wil’s flight—he checked the ticket folder—was due to go off in twenty minutes, and he ought to be all checked in and boarding the aircraft by now, but he hadn’t left the hotel. This was very odd. Where are you, Wil? Johnson wondered. Then he remembered why he was here, and lifted the phone.

  “Yeah, Tony. So, where’s our boy?” Henriksen asked confidently. Then his face changed. “What do you mean? What else do you know? Okay, if you find out anything else,
call me here. Bye.” Henriksen set the phone down and turned to look at the other two. “Wil Gearing’s disappeared. Not in his room, but his luggage and tickets are. Like he just fell off the planet.”

  “What’s that mean?” Carol Brightling asked.

  “I’m not sure. Hell, maybe he got hit by a car in the street—”

  “—Or maybe Popov spilled his guts to the wrong people and they bagged him,” John Brightling suggested nervously.

  “Popov didn’t even know his name—Hunnicutt couldn’t have told him, he didn’t know Gearing’s name either.” But then Henriksen thought, Oh, shit. Foster did know how the Shiva was supposed to be delivered, didn’t he? Oh, shit.

  “What’s the matter, Bill?” John asked, seeing the man’s face and knowing that something was wrong.

  “John, we may have a problem,” the former FBI agent announced.

  “What problem?” Carol asked. Henriksen explained, and the mood in the room changed abruptly. “You mean, they might know? . . .”

  Henriksen nodded. “That is possible, yes.”

  “My God,” the Presidential Science Advisor exclaimed. “If they know that, then—then—then—”

  “Yeah.” Bill nodded. “Then we’re fucked.”

  “What can we do about this?”

  “For starters, we destroy all the evidence. All the Shiva, all the vaccines, all the records. It’s all on computer, so we just erase it. There shouldn’t be much in the way of a paper trail, because we told people not to print anything up, and to destroy any paper notes they might make. We can do that from here. I can access all the company computers from my office and kill off all the records—”

  “They’re encrypted, all of them,” John Brightling pointed out.

  “You want to bet against the code-breakers at Fort Meade? I don’t,” Henriksen told them. “No, those files all have to go, John. Look, you beat a criminal prosecution by denying evidence to the prosecutors. Without physical evidence, they can’t hurt you.”

  “What about witnesses?”

  “The most overrated thing in the world is an eyewitness. Any lawyer with half a brain can make fools out of them. No, when I was working cases for the Bureau, I wanted something I could hold in my hand, something you could pass over to the jury so they could see it and feel it. Eyewitness testimony is pretty useless in court, despite what you see on TV. Okay, I’m going to my office to get rid of the computer stuff.” Henriksen left at once, leaving the two Brightlings behind him.

  “My God, John,” Carol said in quiet alarm, “what if people find out, nobody’ll understand . . .”

  “Understand that we were going to kill them and their families? No,” her husband agreed dryly, “I don’t think Joe Sixpack and Archie Bunker will understand that very well.”

  “So, what do we do?”

  “We get the hell out of the country. We fly down to Brazil with everyone who knows what the Project is all about. We still have access to money—I have dozens of covert accounts we can access electronically—and they probably can’t make a criminal case against us if Bill can trash all the computer files. Okay, they may have Wil Gearing under arrest, but he’s just one voice, and I’m not sure they can come after us legally, in a foreign country, on the word of one person. There are only fifty or so people who really know what’s happening—all of it, I mean—and we have enough airplanes to get us all to Manaus.”

  In his office, Henriksen lit up his personal computer and pulled open an encrypted file. It had telephone numbers and access codes to every computer in Horizon Corporation, plus the names of the files relating to the Project. He accessed them via modem, looked for the files that had to go, and moved them with mouse-clicks into trash cans that shredded the files completely instead of merely removing their electronic address codes. He found that he was sweating as he did so, and it took him thirty-nine minutes, but after that time was concluded, he was certain that he’d completely destroyed them all. He checked his list and his memory for the file names and conducted another global search, but no, those files were completely gone now. Good.

  Okay, he asked himself, what else might they have? They might have Gearing’s Shiva-delivery canister. That would be hard to argue with, but what, really, did it mean? It would mean, if the right people looked at it, that Gearing had been carrying a potential bio-war weapon. Gearing could tell a U.S. attorney that it had come from Horizon Corporation, but no one working on that segment of the Project would ever admit to having done it, and so, no, there would be no corroborating evidence to back up the assertion.

  Okay, there were by his count fifty-three Horizon and Global Security employees who knew the Project from beginning to end. Work on the “A” and “B” vaccines could be explained away as medical research. The Shiva virus and the vaccine supplies would be burned in a matter of hours, leaving no physical evidence at all.

  This was enough—well, it was almost enough. They still had Gearing, and Gearing, if he talked—and he would talk, Henriksen was sure, because the Bureau had ways of choking information out of people—could make life very uncomfortable for Brightling and a lot of other people, including himself. They would probably avoid conviction, but the embarrassment of a trial—and the things that the revelations might generate, casual comments made by Project members to others, would be woven together . . . and there was Popov, who could link John Brightling and himself to terrorist acts. But they could finger Popov for murdering Foster Hunnicutt, and that would pollute whatever case he might try to make . . . the best thing would be to be beyond their reach when they tried to assemble a case. That meant Brazil, and Project Alternate in the jungles west of Manaus. They could head down there, sheltered by Brazil’s wonderfully protective extradition laws, and study the rain forest . . . yes, that made sense. Okay, he thought, he had a list of the full-Project members, those who knew everything, those who, if the FBI got them and interrogated them, could hang them all. He printed this list of the True Believers and tucked the pages in his shirt pocket. With the work done and the alternatives analyzed, Henriksen went back to Brightling’s penthouse office.

  “I’ve told the flight crews to get the birds warmed up,” Brightling told him when he came in.

  “Good.” Henriksen nodded. “I think Brazil looks pretty good right now. If nothing else, we can get all of our critical personnel fully briefed on how to handle this, how to act if anyone asks them some questions. We can beat this one, John, but we have to be smart about it.”

  “What about the planet?” Carol Brightling asked sadly.

  “Carol,” Bill replied, “you take care of your own ass first. You can’t save Nature from inside Marion Federal Penitentiary, but if we play it smart, we can deny evidence to anyone who investigates us, and without that we’re safe, guys. Now”—he pulled the list from his pocket—“these are the only people we have to protect. There’s fifty-three of them, and you have four Gulfstreams sitting out there. We can fly us all down to Project Alternate. Any disagreement on that?”

  John Brightling shook his head. “No, I’m with you. Can this keep us in the clear legally?”

  Henriksen nodded emphatically. “I think so. Popov will be a problem, but he’s a murderer. I’m going to report the Hunnicutt killing to the local cops before we fly off. That will compromise his value as a witness—make it look like he’s just telling a tale to save his own ass from the gallows, whatever they use to execute murderers here in Kansas. I’ll have Maclean and Killgore tape statements we can hand over to the local police. It may not be enough to convict him, but it will make him pretty uncomfortable. That’s how you do this, break up the other guy’s chain of evidence and the credibility of his witnesses. In a year, maybe eighteen months, we have our lawyers sit down and chat with the local U.S. attorney, and then we come home. Until then we camp out in Brazil, and you can run the company from there via the Internet, can’t you?”

  “Well, it’s not as good as what we planned, but . . .”

  “Yes,” Caro
l agreed. “But it beats the hell out of life in a federal prison.”

  “Get everything moving, Bill,” John ordered.

  “So, what do we do with this?” Clark asked, on waking up.

  “Well,” Tom Sullivan answered, “first we go to the Assistant Director in Charge of the New York office, and then we talk to a United States attorney about building a criminal case.”

  “I don’t think so,” Clark responded, rubbing his eyes and reaching for the coffee.

  “We can’t just put the arm on them and whack ’em, you know. We’re cops. We can’t break the law,” Chatham pointed out.

  “This can never see the light of day in a court. Besides, who’s to say that you’ll win the case? How hard will this be to cover up?”

  “I can’t evaluate that. We have two missing girls they probably murdered—more, if our friend Popov is right—and that’s a crime, both federal and state, and, Jesus, this other conspiracy . . . that’s why we have laws, Mr. Clark.”

  “Maybe so, but how fast do you see yourself driving out to this place in Kansas, whose location we don’t know yet, with warrants to arrest one of the richest men in America?”

  “It will take a little time,” Sullivan admitted.

  “A couple of weeks at least, just to assemble the case information,” Special Agent Chatham said. “We’ll need to talk with experts, to have that chlorine jar examined by the right people—and all the while the subjects will be working to destroy every bit of physical evidence. It won’t be easy, but that’s what we do in the Bureau, y’know?”

  “I suppose,” Clark said dubiously. “But there won’t be much element of surprise here. They probably know we have this Gearing guy. From that they know what he can tell us.”