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doesn’t respond … it’s doubtful he knows she’s there with him … and she keeps pushing.”
“Does the medical team know anything more about what brought on the sickness?”
She hesitated. What had Ashley told her? I’m sure they wouldn ‘t be willing to disclose anything if they didn ‘t trust us to be discreet.
The wall came down.
“No,” she lied. “From what I understand, they’re still looking at a strain of hantavirus. Or something related.”
A pause.
“Meg, I know it’s got to be the last thing on your mind right now, but I rushed through your clearances on the NCIC 2000 database. Sword’s got full, unrestricted access, all levels of classification. I can send you the entry codes directly via secure Email.”
“Thanks, Bob, it means a lot.” She suddenly wondered what kind of person she was. “Pete Nimec’s still here, and he’ll be glad.”
“I kept thinking about what you said last weekend. About how inverted my reasoning has been. And it suddenly seemed ludicrous. Not trusting myself to make the right decision, when it involves someone I trust more than any other person in the world.”
“Bob, you don’t have to-”
“I love you, Meg. I probably should have waited to say that over champagne and candlelight. But under the circumstances … I don’t know how long it will be until we see each other. And I thought maybe it would make everything you’re going through a little easier.”
She opened her mouth, closed it, couldn’t find a meaningful word within reach.
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BIO-STRIKE
7
“I-I’d better get those codes to Pete right away,” she H stumbled.
And abruptly hung up the phone.
Lathrop waited until seven p.m. to transmit his Email. He’d calculated that would allow the final members of his cast to hastily make the show’s opening call but shave their rehearsal and preparation time to the barest minimum. That was how he liked things: improvisation I within a structured framework, the full script in his sole possession, his assembled performers knowing only the bits and pieces relevant to their parts.
Gently lifting Missus Frakes from his lap and setting her onto the floor, he gave the E-mail he’d typed into his computer a quick review, nodded to himself with satisfaction, and sent it off into the wide, crackling electronic yonder with a click.
Shazam, he thought.
When Pete Nimec went to his computer for the NCIC access codes Meg had told him she’d forward, he was sideswiped by the header of an anonymous message in his mailbox. It had been sent to him just minutes before, and said:
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SHAZAM! OPEN IMMEDIATELY FOR THE LIFE OF ROGER GORDIAN.
He opened it. Immediately. And read it with astonishment.
Tom Clancy’s Power Plays
“Well, we’re here,” Glenn said.
“Here we are,” Ricci said.
“Nice and quiet.”
“Yeah.”
“You uncomfortable being the only white guy in the joint?”
“Not unless you’re uncomfortable being the only black guy who’s sitting with a white guy.”
Glenn took a gulp of his beer. Ricci drank some of his soda. The cheeseburgers and fries they’d ordered had just been carried over from behind the counter.
The bar was on a rundown street in East San Diego, Nat King Cole crooning “Unforgettable” on the jukebox, the owner a black man in his late sixties with silver hair and a bristling handlebar mustache. The small handful of patrons was almost entirely male, and around the same age as the bartender. Behind the booth where Ricci and Glenn were seated, a chunky woman perhaps a year or two shy of the clientele’s actuarial mean was swaying to the music alone, her eyes closed, a cocktail glass in her hand.
“So what’s next?” Glenn asked.
Ricci shrugged.
“We eat our food, drink our drinks, I head back to my hotel room,” he said. “How long you figure our surveillance can stay on Quiros before he gets keen?”
Glenn thought a moment.
“It depends,” he said. “Give us some added manpower, and we’ll be okay for a while. Use two- and three-car teams. Leapfrog whenever we know his route.”
“The team that flew in with me enough support?”
“How many men in it? Ten or so?”
“An even dozen.”
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“That should be plenty.”
“They’re yours,” Ricci said. He pulled his burger plate closer without enthusiasm. “For all it’ll be worth. Even if Quiros doesn’t make his tails, he’ll still figure we’re tracking his movements. And he’ll be careful about them.”
Glenn looked at him.
“Is Enrique your only lead to whoever did whatever nobody’s talking about to Gordian?”
“Yeah.”
“Meaning we need to get information out of him fast.”
“Yeah.”
Glenn picked up his burger.
“It’s a predicament. We go too easy on the son of a bitch, he’ll keep his mouth shut. We lean on him too hard, he could go underground. I doubt for good, but it’s sounding to me like we can’t afford to lose any time.”
Ricci nodded.
“Between us, Glenn, I figure we’ve got maybe twenty- four hours before it’s too late,” he said. “And other than making ourselves feel like we’re doing something, I don’t know what we’ve accomplished.”
“You have any sort of plan?”
Ricci stared down at his glass a while in silence. Then he looked at Glenn.
“You want to be friends?” he said.
Their eyes had met.
“Sure,” he said. “Just make good on your promise to pay the tab.”
Ricci was still looking straight into Glenn’s eyes.
“There’s leaning hard, and there’s leaning hard,” he said. “Nothing opens up for us by tomorrow morning,
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I’m on my own with Quiros. And he’s going to talk. It might cost me my job. Maybe more than that. A whole lot more. But he’ll talk. And he won’t have a chance to go anywhere.”
Glenn sat with his beer mug suspended below his chin, his fingers clenching the handle. He took in and released a long, tidal breath.
“If it’s got to be that way, there’s no other choice, I can give you a hand.”
“No,” Ricci said, his voice firm. “Nobody else involved. I-”
Ricci’s cellular bleeped in his jacket pocket. He raised a finger in a hold-on-a-minute gesture, reached for it, and answered.
Glenn waited. He saw Ricci ease upright in his chair, listening without comment, taking in whatever was being said to him with acute interest.
When Ricci returned the phone to his pocket, there was something very close to relief on his features.
“That was Pete Nimec in San Jose,” he said. “I think we might’ve been saved by the bell.”
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TWENTY-TWO
SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA NOVEMBER 16, 2001
IT WAS TEN P.M. WHEN ENRIQUE QUIROS DROVE HIS
moon-gray Fiat Coupe from the grounds of his Rancho Santa Fe mansion through an electric gate in its eight- foot-high wrought-iron perimeter fence, accompanied by two Lincoln Town Cars that flanked him front and rear.
Much of the short trip from the rarefied North County community to Balboa Park in San Diego proper would be on Interstate 5, alternately known as the San Diego Freeway. Their route to the southbound entry ramp went along a loose braid of quiet, palm-lined streets and county roads and then skirted the cluster of specialty shops and gourmet restaurants in and around the small downtown.
As they passed one of the busier eateries, a dark green Saab 9-5 wagon drew away from the curb a few yards farther up the street, easing in front of Quires’s lead car.
At the same instant, a young man and woman chatting beside a Cherokee parked near the restaurant’s outdoor cafe suspended their conversation and climbed into the
Tom Clancy’s Power Plays
SUV, looking to all eyes like an attractive couple who had gone to dine out on this pleasantly cool November night. The man at the wheel and his companion next to him in the passenger’s seat took their place following Quires’s small procession, hanging back a little to remain inconspicuous.
Just before they reached the first of several signs guiding traffic to the freeway entrance, a Toyota Prius gasoline/electric emerged into the intersection from a cross street where it had idled in the shadow of a tall, spray- leafed royal palm and then swung between the Cherokee and the Lincoln immediately behind Quiros.
The Cherokee’s driver glanced at the woman to his right. “What’s up with the electric razor?” he said.
“Could be its pilot wants to prove you can be fuel- efficient and an asshole.”
“Or could be that he’s trying to queer our tail.”
The woman frowned. “We’d better play it safe and inform Glenn,” she said.
A moment after the Prius cut in behind the Lincoln, its driver tilted his head unnoticeably upward to speak into the hands-free, trunked-band radio mounted on its roof. “Very good, we are in position,” he said in Castilian Spanish.
On a sleepy residential block southwest of Balboa Park, a customized Town and Country minivan sat in a parking space where it apparently had been left for the night. Its extended cargo area was partitioned from the front section. The bar lock on the steering wheel and blinking burglar alarm light on the dash were meant to convince anyone who might take a close-up look through the