They looked at each other, Palardy seeing his own features reflected in Quiros’s dark green Brooks Brothers sunglasses. He’d always found it offensive when a man wore tinted lenses during a talk with somebody who wasn’t wearing them, in this instance himself, the concealment of the eyes a blatant means of gaining distance and position. State troopers, paranoiacs, egotistical movie stars-so many personality types, and yet that desire to set themselves apart was an attribute they all shared.
“Open areas are hard to secure; even the military has problems with them, I don’t care how many watchdogs or alarms you’ve got.” Palardy sighed heavily again. “Listen, I’m not trying to argue. My point’s just that it doesn’t hurt to be careful.”
Plainly tired of the subject, Quiros reached into the inner pocket of his sport jacket and produced a zippered leather case.
“Let’s make this short so we can both move on,” he said, holding the case out to Palardy. “Everything you’ll need is in here.”
178
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“I told you I can’t do this. It’s too dangerous. It’s too ch for me.”
Quiros looked at him in silence for several moments. l-Then he nodded to himself, turned toward the front of I’the car, and leaned back against his headrest.
“Okay,” he said, staring straight ahead with the case Hftill in his hand. “Okay, here’s how it is. I’m not inter- in what you have to tell me. When you wanted Kjtooney to pay off your gambling debts in Cuiaba, you tewere glad to sell off confidential information about the pfcyout and security of an installation that it was your job pta protect. When you were rotated back to the States and |found yourself in hock again, loan sharks riding all over Byou, you became more than eager to slink into your em- K|ioyer’s office and collect material for a genetic blue- pprint that you knew would be-”
“Please, I don’t feel comfortable talking about-” Quiros raised his hand. The gesture was slow and ^Without anger, but something about it instantly quieted IPalardy.
“If I were you, I wouldn’t feel comfortable, either. i Because you’ve done worse than break bonds with every Kfjtofessional trust that’s been placed in you. You’ve been jlf an accessory to acts of murder and sabotage. And if that ‘ffteilifbrmation were to surface, it could put you away in ffeprison for the rest of your life.”
; There was a brief silence. Palardy swallowed spit- ftlessly.’lt made a clicking sound in his throat. H “A decision’s been made for you,” Quiros said. “It’s 1000 late for objections or disavowals. And my advice is |;to drop them right now. Or I promise you’ll regret it.” Palardy swallowed again. Click.
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Tom Claney’s Power Plays
“I didn’t want to get involved in anything like this,” he said hoarsely.
Quiros stared out at the terminal in the deepening pool of shadows near the harbor’s edge.
“It could be we have that in common,” he said, his voice quiet. And paused a beat. “You’ll do what you have to do.”
He extended the case across the seat without turning from the windshield.
This time, Palardy took it.
In a rental van on the opposite side of the parking aisle, Lathrop began to pack his remote laser voice monitoring system into its black hardshell camera case. From the rear window panel of the van, the invisible beam of the device’s near-infrared semiconductor laser diode had been aimed at a ninety-degree angle through the back windshield at the Fiat’s rearview mirror.
It is a basic rule of optics that the angle of incidence is equal to the angle of reflection. What this means in practical application is that a beam of coherent light- that is, a beam in which all light waves are in phase, the defining and essential quality of a laser transmission- will bounce back to its source at the same angle at which it strikes a reflecting surface, unless that surface creates some sort of modulation, or interference, to throw the waves out of phase, causing some to bounce back at different angles than others. Vibrating infinitesimally from the conversation inside the Fiat-perhaps a thousandth of an inch or less widi each utterance-the window glass had caused corresponding fluctuations in the optical beam reflecting off it, which were then converted into electronic pulses by the eavesdropping unit’s re180
BIO-STRIKE
leaver, filtered from background noise, enhanced, and
jpKgitally recorded.
Lathrop had gotten every word spoken inside the car.
I And though he wasn’t yet certain what they all meant, ip&Be thing was eminently clear to him.
After days of following Enrique Quiros in a succes|j”on of rentals and disguises, days of following his in-
fjstincts, his patience finally had been rewarded with a lyfeeper and richer load of pay dirt than he could have
Imagined.
181
TWELVE
SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA NOVEMBER 11, 2001
the instant palardy entered roger gordian’s
office, a strange feeling came over him. Everything seemed the same yet different, like in one of those dreams that was so close to real life you awoke confused about whether its events had actually occurred. The setting of the dream might be the place you grew up, the home you lived in, the park across the street, it didn’t matter. You knew you were somewhere familiar, but things weren’t quite the way they should be. Both inside and outside yourself.
It was like that for him this morning. The same yet different.
He tried to shake that floaty, disoriented sensation as he strode across the carpet toward Gordian’s desk.
“You’ll do what you have to do,” Quiros had insisted. And Palardy thought now that he could.
He could do it.
Because this was only a day after his regular countersurveillance sweep, Palardy was not carrying the Big
BIO-STRIKE
Sniffer or any of its accompanying equipment, which made him a bit more conspicuous than he otherwise might be. But once Enrique Quiros had forced this thing upon him, he’d known he would want to get it done i| ‘right away. That zippered case he took from Quiros, it I had felt so heavy in his hand, so heavy in his pocket. Like some superdense piece of lead being drawn toward the earth’s magnetic core, pulling him down with it. Every minute he held onto it, that downward pull grew harder to resist. Palardy needed to get the thing over with before he sank into the ground.
He’d arrived at work a little before seven o’clock, the usual time for countersurveillance personnel-their sweeps were always conducted before the corporate workday began so as not to interfere with business-and men had gone straight up to Gordian’s office suite, prepared with an excuse, should anybody be around. And it had turned out someone was. Though the boss almost never came in before seven-thirty, a quarter of eight, Palardy knew his administrative assistant, Norma, would often arrive much earlier to get a jump on her filing, |r scheduling, whatever other duties admins performed. And sure enough, she’d been at her desk in the outer office today when Palardy stepped out of the elevator.
Damn good thing he’d had that story ready.
“Morning, Norma,” he said, amazed that he could stand there and smile while feeling like he was about to plunge through a hole in the ground. “How goes?”
She’d looked up at him from her computer screen with mild surprise.
“Hi, Don,” she said. “Don’t tell me it was your twin brother I saw here yesterday with that fancy bag of j tricks?”
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Tom Clancy’s Power Plays
“Nope, sorry to report there’s just one of me to go around,” he said.
“I’m crushed on behalf of all womankind,” she said with a mock frown. “So what brings you back to us?”
“Actually, I think I must’ve misplaced one of the fancy little gizmos that go in my bag when I made the rounds.” Palardy’s words seemed to reach his ears from a far corner of the room. “Maintenance tells me it isn’t in the lost and found, so I’m retracing my steps.”
Part of his mind had expected Norma to be suspicious. To sit there with her eyes boring into him, discerning something was amiss. Though the rest of him had known that was irrational. Known the reason he’d given for his encore appearance would sound perfectly ordinary and believable.
And, of course, it did. She had waved him toward the door to the inner office.
“Be my guest,” she said.
Now Palardy stood over Gordian’s big mahogany desk, his back to the door, and hurriedly put on the white cotton gloves he’d brought in his pocket. Just to the right of the blotter was a can of rolled wafers. A month or so before, Palardy had been running behind schedule with his sweep, and the boss had come in and waited at the desk as it was completed. Swirling a wafer in the cup of coffee he’d poured for himself, Gordian had complained in a kind of lighthearted way about having to swear off flavored coffee, and the two-per-day wafer stick allowance his wife had insisted upon instead.