Then what?
The former intelligence officer looked in the mirror at a face that still didn’t know what it needed to know. From the beginning, he’d been seduced by money. He’d turned into a hired agent of sorts, motivated by personal gain the “M” of MICE-but was working for someone for whom money had no importance. Even CIA, rich as it had always been, measured the money it gave out to its agents. The American intelligence service paid a hundred times better than its Russian counterpart, but even that had to be justified, because CIA had accountants who ruled the field officers as the Czar’s courtiers and bureaucrats had once ruled over the smallest village. Popov knew from his research that Horizon Corporation had a huge amount of money, but one did not become wealthy from profligacy. In a capitalist society, one became wealthy by cleverness, perhaps ruthlessness, but not by stupidity, and throwing money about as Brightling did was stupid.
So, what is it? Dmitriy wondered, moving away from the mirror and packing his bag.
Whatever he’s planning, whatever his reason for these terrorist incidents-is close at hand.?
That did make a little sense. You concealed as long as you had to, but when you no longer had to, then you didn’t waste the effort. It was an amateur’s move, though. An amateur, even a gifted one like Brightling, didn’t know, hadn’t learned from bitter institutional experience that you never broke tradecraft, even after an operation had been successfully concluded, because even then your enemy might find things out that he could use against you in your next one . . . . . unless there is not to be a next one? Dmitriy thought. as he selected his underwear. Is this the last operation to be run? No, he corrected himself, is this the last operation which I need to run?
He ran through it again. The operations had grown in magnitude, until now he was transporting cocaine to make a terrorist happy, after helping transfer six million dollars! To make the drug smuggling easier, he would have documentation to justify the drug shipment from one branch of a major corporation to another, tying himself and the drugs to Brightling’s company. Perhaps his false ID would hold up if the police showed interest in him-well, they would almost certainly hold up, unless the Garda had a direct line into MI-5, which was not likely, and neither was it likely that the British Security Service had his cover name, or even a photo, good or bad-and besides, he’d changed his haircut ages ago.
No, Popov decided as he finished packing, the only thing that made sense was that this was the last operation. Brightling would be closing things down. To Popov that meant that this was his last chance to cash in. And so he found himself hoping that Grady and his band of murderers would come to as shabby an end as all the others in Bern and Vienna-and even Spain, though he’d had no part in that one. He had the number and control code for the new Swiss account, and in that was enough money to support him for the rest of his life. All he needed to happen was for the Rainbow team to kill them off, and then he could disappear forever. With that hopeful thought in his mind, Popov went outside and flagged a cab to take him to Teterboro Airport.
He’d think about it all the way across the Atlantic.
CHAPTER 27
TRANSFER AGENTS
“It really is a waste of time,” Barbara Archer said at her seat in the conference room. “F4 is dead, just her heart’s still beating. We’ve tried everything. Nothing stops Shiva. Not a damned thing.”
“Except the -B vaccine antibodies,” Killgore noted.
“Except them,” Archer agreed. “But nothing else works, does it?”
There was agreement around the table. They had literally tried every treatment modality known to medicine, including things merely speculated upon at CDC, USAMRIID, and the Pasteur Institute in Paris. They’d even tried every antibiotic in the arsenal from penicillin to Keflex, and two new synthetics under experimentation by Merck and Horizon. The use of the antibiotics had merely been t-crossing and i-dotting, since not one of them helped viral infections, but in desperate times people tried desperate measures, and perhaps something new and unexpected might have happened–but not with Shiva. This new and improved version of Ebola hemorrhagic fever, genetically engineered to be hardier than the naturally produced version that still haunted the Congo River Valley, was as close to 100 percent fatal and 100 percent resistant to treatment as anything known to medical science, and absent a landmark breakthrough in infectious-disease treatment, nothing would help those exposed to it. Many would suffer exposure from the initial release, and the rest would get it from the -A vaccine Steve Berg had developed, and through both modalities, Shiva would sweep across the world like a slow-developing storm. Inside of six months, the people left alive would fall into three categories. First, those who hadn’t been exposed in any way. There would be few of them, since every nation on earth would gobble up supplies of the -A vaccine and inject their citizens with it, because the first Shiva victims would horrify human with access to a television. The second group would be those rarest of people whose immune systems were sufficient to protect them from Shiva. The lab had yet to discover any such individuals, but some would inevitably be out there-happily, most of those would probably die from the collapse of social services in the cities and towns of the world, mainly from starvation or from the panicked lawlessness sure to accompany the plague or from the ordinary bacterial diseases that accompanied large numbers of unburied dead
The third group would be the few thousand people in Kansas. Project Lifeboat, as they thought of it. That group would be composed of active Project members just a few hundred of them-and their families, and other selected scientists protected by Berg’s -B vaccine. The Kansas facility was large, isolated, and protected by large quantities of weapons, should any unwelcome visitors approach.
Six months, they thought. Twenty-seven weeks. That’s what the computer projections told them. Some areas would go faster than others. The models suggested that Africa would go last of all, because they’d be the last to get the -A vaccine distributed, and because of the poor infrastructure for delivering vital services. Europe would go down first, with its socialized medical-care systems and pliant citizens sure to show up for their shots when summoned, then America, then, in due course, the rest of the world.
“The whole world, just like that,” Killgore observed, looking out the windows at the New York/New Jersey border area, with its rolling hills and green deciduous trees. The great farms on the plains that ran from Canada to Texas would go fallow, though some would grow wild wheat for centuries to come. The bison would expand rapidly from their enclaves in Yellowstone and private game farms, and with them the wolves and barren-ground grizzly bear, and the birds, and the coyotes and the prairie dogs. Nature would restore Her balance very quickly, the computer models told them; in less than five years, the entire earth would be transformed.
“Yes. John,” Barb Archer agreed. “But we’re not there yet. What do we do with the test subjects?”
Killgore knew what she’d be suggesting. Archer hated clinical medicine. “F4 first?”
“It’s a waste of air to keep her breathing, and we all know it. They’re all in pain, and we’re not learning anything except that Shiva is lethal-and we already knew that. Plus, we’re going to be moving out west in a few weeks, and why keep them alive that long? We’re not moving them out with us, are we?”
“Well, no,” another physician admitted.
“Okay, I am tired of wasting my time as a clinician for dead people. I move that we do what we have to do, and be done with it.”
“Second,” agreed another scientist at the table.
“In favor?” Killgore asked, counting the hands. “Opposed.” Only two of those. “The ayes have it. Okay. Barbara and I will take care of it-today, Barb?”
“Why wait, John?” Archer inquired tiredly.
“Kirk Maclean?” Agent Sullivan asked.
“That’s right,” the man said from behind the door.
“FBI.” Sullivan held up his ID. “Can we talk to you?”
“About what?” The usual alarm, the agents saw.
“Do we have to stand in the hall to talk?” Sullivan asked reasonably.
“Oh, okay, sure, come in.” Maclean stepped back and opened the door to let them in, then led them into his living room. The TV was on, some cable movie, the agents saw. Kung fu and guns mostly, it appeared.
“I’m Tom Sullivan, and this is Frank Chatham. We’re looking into the disappearance of two women,” the senior agent said, after sitting down. “We’re hoping that you might be able to help us.”