The bottom line was that they knew what they didn’t know no, Tawney thought. They didn’t even know that much. They knew that they didn’t know something, but they didn’t even know what it was that they wanted to find out. What was the significance of this blip of information that had appeared on the scope?
“What’s this for?” Henriksen asked innocently.
“A fog-cooling system. We got it from your chaps,” Aukland said.
“Huh? I don’t understand,” the American replied.
“One of our engineers saw it in – Arizona, I think. It sprays a very fine water mist. The tiny droplets absorb heat energy and evaporate into the atmosphere, has the same effect as air-conditioning, but with a negligible energy expenditure.”
“Ahh,” Bill Henriksen said, doing his best to act surprised. “How widely distributed is the system?”
“Just the tunnels and concourses. The architect wanted to put it all over the stadium, but people objected, said it would interfere with cameras and such,” Aukland answered, “too much like a real fog.”
“Okay, I think I need to look at that.”
“Why?”
“Well, sir, it’s a hell of a good way to deliver a chemical agent, isn’t it?” The question took the police officer seriously aback.
“Well . . . yes, I suppose it would be.”
“Good. I have a guy in the company, former officer in the U.S. Army Chemical Corps, expert on this sort of thing, degree from MIT. I’ll have him check it out ASAP
“Yes, that is a good idea, Bill. Thank you,” Aukland said, kicking himself for not thinking of that on his own Well, he was hiring expertise, wasn’t he? And this man certainly seemed to be an expert.
“Does it get that hot here?”
“Oh, yes, quite. We expect temperatures in the nineties Fahrenheit, that is. We’re supposed to think Celsius nowadays, but I never did learn that.”
“Yeah, me neither,” Henriksen noted.
“Anyway, the architect said that this was an inexpensive way to cool the spectators down, and quite reasonable to install. It feeds off the fire-sprinkler system. Doesn’t even use much water for what it does. It’s been install, for over a year. We test it periodically. American company, can’t recall the name at the moment.”
Cool-Spray of Phoenix, Arizona, Henriksen thought He had the plans for the system in the file cabinet in his office. It would play a crucial role in the Project’s plat and had been seen as a godsend from the first moment. Here was the place. Soon would come the time.
“Heard anything more from the Brits?”
“We have an inquiry in, but no reply yet.” Aukland answered. “It is a very hush-hush project, evidently.”
Henriksen nodded. “Politics, always gets in the way.” And with luck it would stay that way.
“Quite,” Aukland agreed, with a nod.
Detective Lieutenant Mario d’Allessandro punched up his computer and accessed the NYPD central-records file. Sure enough, Mary Bannister was in there, as was Anne Pretloe. Then he set up a search routine, picking gender WOMEN, age eighteen to thirty for starters, and picking the RUN icon with his mouse. The system generated forty-six names, all of which he saved to a file he created for the purpose. The system didn’t have photos built in. He’d have to access the paper files for those. He de-selected ten names from Queens and Richmond boroughs for the moment, saving for the moment only Manhattan missing girls. That came down to twenty-one. Next he de-selected African-American women, because if they were dealing with a serial killer, such criminals usually selected clones as victims – the most famous of them, Theodore Bundy, had almost exclusively picked women who parted their hair down the middle, for instance. Bannister and Pretloe were white, single, reasonably attractive, ages twenty-one and twenty-four, and dark-haired. So, eighteen to thirty should be a good straddle, he thought, and he further deselected the names that didn’t fit that model.
Next he opened the department’s Jane Doe file, to look up the recovered bodies of murder victims who had not yet been identified. He already knew all of these cases from his regular work. Two fit the search parameters, but neither was Bannister or Pretloe. So this was, for the moment, a dry hole. That was both good and bad news. The two missing women were not definitely dead, and that was the good news. But their bodies could have been cleverly disposed of the Jersey marshes were nearby, and that area had been a prime dumping site for bodies since the turn of the century.
Next he printed up his list of missing women. He’d want to examine all the paper files, including the photos, with the two FBI agents. Both Pretloe and Bannister had brown hair of roughly the same length, and maybe that was enough of a commonality for a serial killer-but, no, Bannister was still alive, or so the e-mail letter suggested . . . unless the serial killer was the kind of sick person who wanted to taunt the families of his victims. D’Allessandro had never come across one of those before, but serial killers were seriously sick bastards, and you could never really predict the things they might do for personal amusement. If one of those fucks were loose in New York, then it wasn’t just the FBI who’d want his ass. Good thing the state of New York finally had a death-penalty statute . . .
“Yes, I’ve seen him,” Popov told his boss.
“Really?” John Brightling asked. “How close?”
“About as close as we are, sir,” the Russian replied. “It was not intentional, but it happened. He’s a large, powerful man. His wife is a nurse at the local community hospital, and his daughter is a medical doctor, married to one of the other team members, working at the same hospital. She is Dr. Patricia Chavez. Her husband is Domingo Chavez, also a CIA field officer, now assigned to this Rainbow group, probably as a commando leader. Both Clark and Chavez are CIA field officers. Clark was involved in the rescue of the former KGB chairman’s wife and daughter from Soviet territory some years ago-you’ll recall the story made the press recently. Well, Clark was the officer who got them out. He was also involved in the conflict with Japan, and the death of Mahmoud Hagi Daryaei in Iran. He and Chavez are highly experienced and very capable intelligence officers. It would be very dangerous to underestimate either of them,” Popov concluded.
“Okay, what does that tell us?”
“It tells us that Rainbow is what it appears to be, a multinational counterterror group whose activities spread all across Europe. Spain is a NATO member, but Austria and Switzerland are not, you will recall. Could they expand their operations to other countries? Certainly, yes. They are a very serious threat to any terrorist operation. It is not,” Popov went on, “an organization I would like to have in the field against me. Their expertise in actual ‘combat’ operations we have seen on television. Behind that will be excellent technical and intelligence support as well. The one cannot exist without the other.”
“Okay. So we know about them. Is it possible that they know about us?” Dr. Brightling asked.
“Possible, but unlikely,” Popov thought. “If that were the case, then you would have agents of your FBI in here to arrest you – and me – for criminal conspiracy. I am not being tracked or followed – well, I do not think that I am. I know what to look for, and I have seen nothing of the sort, but, I must also admit, it is possible that a very careful and expert effort could probably follow me without my noticing it. That is difficult – I have been trained in counter surveillance – but theoretically possible.”
That shook his employer somewhat, Popov saw. He’d just made an admission that he was not perfect. His former supervisors in KGB would have known it beforehand and accepted it as a normal risk of the intelligence trade . . . but those people never had to worry about being arrested and losing their billions of dollars of personal worth.
“What are the risks?”
“If you mean what methods can be used against you?. . .” He got a nod. “That means that your telephones could be tapped, and-”
“My phones are encrypted. The system is supposed to be break-proof. My consultants on that tell me-”
Popov cut him off with a raised hand. “Sir, do you really think that your government allows the manufacture of encryption systems that it cannot itself break?” he asked, as though explaining something to a child. “The National Security Agency at Fort Meade has some of the brightest mathematicians in the world, and the world’s most powerful computers, and if you ever wonder how hard they work, you need only look at the parking lots.”
“Huh? What do you mean?”
“If the parking lots are filled at seven in the evening, that means they are hard at work on something. Everyone has a car in your country, and parking lots are generally too large to be enclosed and protected from even casual view. It’s an easy way for an intelligence officer to see how active one of your government agencies is.” And if you were really interested, you found out a few names and addresses, so as to know the car types and tag numbers. The KGB had tracked the head of NSA’s “Z” group – the people tasked both to crack and to create encryption systems and codes – that way for over a decade, and the reborn RVS was doubtless doing the same. Popov shook his head. “No, I would not trust a commercially available encoding system. I have my doubts about the systems used by the Russian government. Your people are very clever at cracking cipher systems. They’ve been so for over sixty years, well before World War Two, and they are allied with the British, who also have a tradition of excellence in that area of expertise. Has no one told you this?” Popov asked in surprise.