Damn important, in fact.
Careful not to appear the least bit curious, Lathrop stood, told Quiros he’d be in touch, then turned and walked past the two bodyguards in the conference area and left the office.
He was eager to find out what was in the wind.
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SEVEN
VARIOUS LOCALES NOVEMBER 4, 2001
FOR BETTER OR WORSE, LATHROP SUPPOSED IT ALways
had been his nature to look at the dark side of things. Probably, he’d been born with that disposition … an “insufferable gloom,” wasn’t that the phrase in the Poe story? Always, always, he’d been compelled to poke around under the rug or lift up the rock and see whether some secret nastiness might be exposed underneath.
As he moved between the joggers and strollers on the path leading around the carousel in Balboa Park, Lathrop remembered reading somewhere-in his downtime he would go through stacks of books, gobbling them the way some people did potato chips-that in French, carrousel meant “tournament,” while the Italian word ca- rosello translated to “little war,” giving origin to the English carousel when one of the later crusading armies, composed of knights and mercenaries from throughout Europe, went marching off to relieve their boredom through a healthy dose of bloodshed and noticed that
BIO-STRIKE
Ottoman Turk and Arab cavalrymen would practice their lancemanship by charging toward a tree on horseback and trying to jab the weapon’s tip through a ring hung from a branch. When the industrious European warriors brought the idea back home-those who hadn’t been slaughtered because they were too wasted from drinking and debauchery to put up any kind of fight-the tree became a rotating pole, and the real horses became wooden mounts that got cranked around by a chain-and- mule contraption, but the purpose of the whole rigmarole was still a martial exercise.
So the merry-go-round had started out as a drill for impaling your enemy with lethal accuracy, and Lathrop had known it since he was writing book reports in grade school. Other kids would reach for the brass ring to win a free ride; he’d imagined somebody sticking it to his tender young gut if he didn’t make the grab. It was the same with everything. When other kids saw their pet kitties flip their rubber squeak toys up and over their heads with their paws, they thought Puss, Tabby, or Spooky was just the smartest and the cutest, a regular cat-baseball major leaguer. Lathrop, meanwhile, went and got a book from the library and discovered that the up-and-over move was an aspect of the hunter-killer instinct, how felines in the wild tossed fish out of a stream prior to making them a dinner course.
The lesson in this for Lathrop was that whenever you played, you had to know you were playing for keeps … which, on second thought, had definitely been learned for the better, since minus that invaluable insight, he would not have come away from Operations META and Impunity with all his vital organs in their proper relative positions.
97
Tom Clancy’s Power Plays
Ah, the glory days of a hot-shit deep-cover op.
Now Lathrop slowed to a halt at the edge of the path. He had a good view of the carousel from where he stood and didn’t need to get any closer. It was old-fashioned, dating back maybe a century, with a band organ, several rows of antique carved animals, and gondolas on the outside of the platform. Though this was a weekday, the warm, sunny weather had brought visitors to the park in droves, and the ride was filled.
Lathrop bent as if to tie his shoelaces and gazed covertly at the spinning platform through the lightweight, black-framed eyeglasses he’d donned in his car. An instant later, he pushed a tiny knob at the hinge of their left stem with his fingertip, and a rectangular augmented reality panel appeared on that side. Seeming to hover about two feet in front of him, the AR display was in fact being projected onto the upper half of the plain plastic lens by the microelectromechanical, or MEMS, optical systems embedded in the frame of the glasses.
A twist of the control knob focused the image reflector/magnifiers in the lens and smoothed the display’s borders.
“Profiler,” Lathrop whispered into the pickup mike clipped to his collar.
On his vocal command, an audio link through a slender cable running down under his windbreaker to his hidden wearable computer-the same device he’d had on his belt the night of the tunnel ambush-launched a bootleg version of the UpLink International face-finding application sold to him by Enrique Quiros. Talk about an intriguing turn of the wheel.
Lathrop waited as the software loaded. To conserve memory, he’d installed a minimized version that con98
BIOSTRIKK
tained a search index of ten thousand terrorists, criminals, and their known associates and would show the twenty closest matches in the AR panel. The program’s full-option setup on his desktop computer would have let him scan many times that number, and Lathrop knew he could have accessed its database resources over his wireless network connection. But that was a time- consuming distraction in the field, and the pinhole dig- icam in the bridge of his glasses would capture an image of his subject that he could review at his convenience.
He continued to watch the carousel’s jumpers slide up and down on their poles as it went around to the cycling pipe music. Most of the younger kids were belted onto the menagerie animals that made up the inner rows: spotted pigs, smiling fairy tale frogs, and brightly colored birds with long, arched necks that might have been fanciful cranes or ostriches. On the tall king’s horses behind the gondolas were their older brothers and sisters, some with their parents standing alongside the saddles to steady them. A group of whooping, overly giddy teens that Lathrop nailed as stoned on pot occupied the remaining painted ponies.
None of them was his concern.
Estimating he had about a minute to fiddle with his sneakers without attracting attention, Lathrop concentrated on the twosome sitting like sweethearts in a gondola at the perimeter. Except, he thought, this was no such snuggly interlude.
The man was Enrique Quiros. Lathrop didn’t recognize the blonde looker riding with him, but he’d been on enough tails in his day to read their body language and was positive that whatever was going on here was strictly business.
99
Tom Clancy’s Power Plays
This afternoon was proving to be much more interesting than he could have anticipated.
After leaving Quiros’s Golden Triangle front in La Jolla, Lathrop had pulled his Volvo out of the hourly garage around the corner, swung back toward the office building, and double-parked about halfway down the street, where he’d gotten a good view of its front entrance. That was the only way in or out besides the loading and emergency doors, and Enrique wouldn’t have seen any reason to leave through them.
Five minutes later, Quiros emerged alone onto the busy sidewalk, turned in the opposite direction from Lathrop, and walked a block to yet another of the neighborhood’s ubiquitous indoor garages.
Lathrop followed, stopped near the garage, and watched some more. It wasn’t long before Quiros came driving out in a custom Porsche Carrera 911, the vehicle of choice for ostentatious, drug-dealing slime crawlers. Probably he’d called ahead for the attendant to have it ready.
Lathrop allowed Quiros to get about two car lengths ahead of him and then angled his Volvo into the flow of traffic. The 911 made a left onto A Street and headed north on Twelfth Avenue, following the road to where it became Park Boulevard, moving along toward Balboa Park at a moderate speed. At the intersection beyond the overpass, Quiros waited at a red light, took a left on the green, drove a short distance, and then turned right into the macadam parking lot back of the Spanish Village Art Center.
There were plenty of available spaces, and Lathrop swung in five or six slots down the aisle from Quiros, between a Ford Excursion that could have carted around
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BIO-STRIKE
the entire Osmond clan and an only slightly less house-y minivan. As he’d watched Quiros step out of the 911 and walk north, away from the art center toward the carousel and zoo entrance, he got his jogging clothes out of the gym bag on the passenger seat and changed into them, stuffing the sport jacket, dress slacks, and cordovans he’d shed into the bag.
The concealment offered by his tinted windows and the large, unoccupied vehicles on either side convinced Lathrop nobody would be able to peek in on him, but he doubted it would have raised an eyebrow even if that were the case. Guys did stranger things in their cars. And all he’d have looked like to some busybody who might notice was a working stiff who’d sneaked away from his desk to play hooky in the springlike weather.