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headed off to his own special fiefdom in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. CDC (“and P” had never been added to the acronym) was one of the government’s crown jewels, an elite agency that was one of the world’s important centers of medical research–many would say the most important. For that reason the center in Atlanta attracted the best of the profession. Some stayed. Some left to teach at the nation’s medical schools, but all were forever marked as CDC people, as others might boast of having served their time in the Marine Corps, and for much the same reason. They were the first people their country sent to trouble spots. They were the first to fight diseases, instead of armed enemies, and that cachet engendered an esprit de corps which more often than not retained the best of them despite the capped government salaries.
“Morning, Melissa,” Lorenz said to his chief lab assistant–she had a master’s and was finishing up her doctorate in molecular biology at nearby Emory University, after which she’d get a sizable promotion.
“Good morning, Doctor. Our friend is back,” she added.
“Oh?” The specimen was all set up on the microscope. Lorenz took his seat, careful as always to take his time. He checked the paperwork to identify the proper sample against the record he’d had on his desk: 98-3-063A. Yes, the numbers matched. Then it was just a matter of zooming in on the sample . . . and there it was, the Shepherd’s Crook.
“You’re right. Got the other one set up?”
“Yes, Doctor.” The computer screen split into two vertical halves, and next to the first was a specimen from 1976. They weren’t quite identical. The curve at the bottom of the RNA chain was seemingly never the same way twice, as snowflakes had almost infinite patterns, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was the protein loops at the top, and those were–
“Mayinga strain.” He spoke the words matter-of-factly.
“I agree,” Melissa said from just behind him. She
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leaned across to type on the keyboard, calling up -063B. “These were a lot harder to isolate, but–”
“Yes, identical again. This one’s from the child?” “A little girl, yes.” Both voices were detached. One can only bear so much exposure to sadness before the mind’s defense mechanism kicks in, and the samples become samples, disembodied from the people who donated them. “Okay, I have some calling to do.”
THE TWO GROUPS were kept separate for obvious reasons, and in fact neither knew of the existence of the other. Badrayn spoke to one group of twenty. The Movie Star spoke to the second group, composed of nine. For both groups there were similarities of preparation. Iran was a nation-state, with the resources of a nation-state. Its foreign ministry had a passport office, and its treasury had a department of printing and engraving. Both allowed the printing of passports from any number of countries and the duplication of entry-exit stamps. In fact such documents could be prepared in any number of places, mostly illegally, but this source made for somewhat higher quality without the risk of revealing the place of origin.
The more important of the two missions was, perversely, the safer in terms of actual physical danger–well, depending on how one looked at it. Badrayn could see the looks on their faces. The very idea of what they were doing was the sort of thing to make a person’s skin crawl, though in the case of these people, it was merely one more example of the vagaries of human nature. The job, he told them, was simple. Get in. Deliver. Get out. He emphasized that they were completely safe, as long as they followed the procedures on which they would be fully briefed. There would be no contacts on the other side. They needed none, and doing without them just made things safer. Each had a choice of cover stories, and such were the parameters of the mission that having more than one of the group select the same one didn’t matter. What did matter was that the stories could be plausibly presented, and so each traveler would pick a field of business activity in which he had
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some knowledge. Nearly all had a university degree, and those who didn’t could talk about trading or machine tools or some field better known to them than any customs official asking questions out of mere boredom.
The Movie Star’s group was far more comfortable with their task. He supposed it was some flaw in the character of his culture that this was so. This group was younger and less experienced, and part of it was that the young simply know less of life, and therefore less of death. They were motivated by passion, by a tradition of sacrifice, and by their own hatreds and demons, all of which clouded their judgment in a way that pleased the masters, who always felt free to expend the hatreds and the passions, along with the people who bore them. This briefing was more detailed. Photographs were displayed, along with maps and diagrams, and the group drew closer, the better to see the details. None of them remarked on the character of the target. Life and death was so simple a question to those who didn’t know the ultimate answers–or who thought they did, even if they did not–and that was better for all, really. With an answer to the Great Question fixed in their minds, the lesser ones would not even occur to them. The Movie Star had no such illusions. He asked the questions within his own mind, but never answered them. For him the Great Question had become something else. For him it was all a political act, not a matter of religion, and one didn’t measure one’s destiny by politics. At least not willingly. He looked at their faces, knowing that they were doing exactly that, but without realizing it. They were the best sort of people for the task, really. They thought they knew everything, but in reality they knew very little, only the physical tasks.
The Movie Star felt rather like a murderer, but it was something he’d done before, at secondhand, anyway. Doing it firsthand was dangerous, and this promised to be the most dangerous such mission in years.
How remarkable that they didn’t know better. Each of them inwardly styled himself the stone in Allah’s own sling, without reflecting that such stones are by their very nature thrown away. Or maybe not. Perhaps they would be lucky, and for that eventuality he gave them the best
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data he’d managed to generate, and that data was pretty good. The best time would be afternoon, just before people got out from work, the better to use crowded highways to confuse their pursuers. He himself would go into the field again, he told them, to facilitate their ultimate escape–he didn’t tell them, if it came to that.
“OKAY, ARNIE, WHAT’S going on?” Ryan asked. It was just as well that Cathy didn’t have any procedures scheduled for today. She had seethed all night and was not in a proper mental state to do her normal work. He wasn’t feeling much better, but there was neither justice nor much point in snapping at his chief of staff.
“Well, for damned sure there’s a leak at CIA, or maybe in the Hill, somebody who knows about some of the things you did.”
“Colombia, the only people who know are Fellows and Trent. And they also know that Murray wasn’t there–not exactly, anyway. The rest of that operation is locked up tight.”
“What actually happened?” And need-to-know applied to Arnie now. The President gestured and spoke as one explaining something to a parent:
“There were two operations, SHOWBOAT and RECIPROCITY. One of them involved putting troops into Colombia, the idea was to bird-dog drug flights. Those flights were then splashed–”
“What?”
“Shot down, by the Air Force–well, some were intercepted, the crews arrested and processed quietly. Some other things happened, and then Emil Jacobs got killed, and RECIPROCITY got laid on. We started dropping bombs on places. Things got a little out of hand. Some civilians got killed, and it all started coming apart.”
“How much did you know?” van Damm asked.
“I didn’t know jack shit until late in the game. Jim Greer was dying then, and I was handling his work, but that was mostly NATO stuff. I was cut out of it until after the bombs started falling–I was in Belgium when that happened. I saw it on TV, would you believe? Cutter was
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actually running the operation. He suckered Judge Moore and Bob Ritter into starting it, and then he tried to close it down. That’s when things got crazy. Cutter tried to cut off the soldiers–the idea was that they’d just disappear. I found out. I got into Ritter’s personal records vault. So I went down into Colombia with the rescue crew, and we got most of them out. It wasn’t much fun,” Ryan reported. “There was some shooting involved, and I worked one of the guns on the chopper. A crewman, a sergeant named Buck Zimmer, got killed on the last extraction, and I’ve been looking after his family ever since. Liz Elliot got a hold of that and tried to use it against me a while later.”