“Just walked her home only that one time?”
“Right, just that one time,” Maclean confirmed, taking another pull on his drink and wishing these two inquisitors out of his home. Did they-could they know something? Why had they come back? Well, there was nothing in his apartment to confirm that he knew any female from the Turtle Inn. Well, just some phone numbers, but not so much as a loose sock from the women he’d occasionally brought here. “I mean, you guys looked around the first time you were here,” Maclean volunteered.
“No big deal. We always ask to do that. It’s just routine,” Sullivan told their suspect. “Well, we have another appointment in a few minutes up the street. Thanks for letting us talk to you. You still have my card?”
“Yeah, in the kitchen, stuck on the refrigerator.”
“Okay. Look, this case is kinda hard for us. Please think it over and if you come up with anything-anything at all, please call me, okay?”
“Sure will.” Maclean stood and walked them to the door, then came back to his drink and took another swallow.
“He’s nervous,” Chatham said, out on the street.
“Sure as hell. We have enough to do a background check on him?”
“No problem,” Chatham replied. “Tomorrow morning,” the senior agent said.
It was his second trip to Teterboro Airport, in New Jersey, across the river from Manhattan, but this time it was a different aircraft, with HORIZON CORP. painted on the rudder fin. Dmitriy played along, figuring that he could escape from any place in the United States, and knowing t fiat Henriksen would warn Brightling not to try anything drastic. There was an element of anxiety to the trip, but no greater than his curiosity, and so Popov settled into his seat on the left side and waited for the aircraft to start its engines and taxi out. There was even a flight attendant, a pretty one, to give him a shot of Finlandia vodka, which lie sipped as the Gulfstream V started rolling. Kansas, he thought, a state of wheat fields and tornadoes, less than three hours away.
“Mr. Henriksen?”
“Yeah, who’s this?”
“Kirk Maclean.”
“Anything wrong?” Henriksen asked, alerted by the tone of his voice.
CHAPTER 31
MOVEMENT
The darkness hid the landscape. Popov stepped off the aircraft, and found a large military-type automobile waiting for him. Then he noticed the lines painted on the pavement and wondered if he’d landed on an airport runway or a country road of some sort. But, no, in the distance was a huge building, partially lit. More curious than ever, Dmitriy got into the vehicle and headed off toward it. His eyes gradually got accustomed to the darkness. The surrounding land seemed very flat, with only gentle rolls visible. Behind him he saw a fuel truck had pulled up to the business jet, perhaps to send it back to New Jersey. Well, they were expensive, and doubtless Brightling and his people wanted it back where he could use it. Popov didn’t know that Horizon Corporation owned many of them; their number just increased by three from the factory. outside Savannah, Georgia. He was still jet-lagged, he found on entering the building. A uniformed security guard walked him to the elevator and then to his fourth-floor room, which was not unlike a medium-decent hotel room, complete with cooking facilities and a refrigerator. There was a TV and VCR, and all the tapes in the adjacent storage cupboard were-nature tapes, he saw. Lions, bears, moose, spawning salmon. Not a single feature film. The magazines on the bedside table were similarly nature oriented. How odd. But there was also a complete bar, including Absolut vodka, which was almost as good as the Russian kind he preferred. He poured himself a drink and switched on the TV to CNN.
Henriksen was being overly cautious, Dmitriy thought. What could the FBI possibly have on him? A name? From that they could perhaps develop-what? Credit cards, if they were very lucky, and from that his travel records, but none of them would have evidentiary value in any court of law. No, unless Sean Grady positively identified him as a conduit of information and funds, he was totally safe, and Popov thought he could depend on cooperate not to cooperate with the British. He hated them too much to be cooperative. It was just a matter of crawling back into his hole and pulling it in after himself-an Americanism he admired. The money he’d stashed in the secondary Swiss account might be discoverable, but there were ways to handle that – attorneys were so useful as an institution, he’d learned. Working through them was better than all the KGB fieldcraft combined.
No, if there was any danger to him, it was to be found in his employer, who might not know the rules of the game-but even if he didn’t, Henriksen would help, and so Dmitriy relaxed and sipped his drink. He’d explore this place tomorrow, and from the way he was treated, he’d know-
-no, there was an even easier way. He lifted his phone. hit 9 to get an outside line, then dialed his apartment ill New York. The call went through. The phone rang four times before his answering machine clicked in. So, he had phone access to the outside. That meant he was safe, but he was no closer to understanding what was going on than he’d been during that first meeting in France, chatting with the American businessman and regaling him with tales of a former KGB field intelligence officer. Now here he was, in Kansas, USA, drinking vodka and watching television, with over six million American dollars in two numbered accounts in Switzerland. He’d reached one goal. Next he had to meet another. What the hell was this adventure all about? Would he find out here? He hoped so.
The airplanes were crammed with people, all of them inbound to Kingsford Smith International Airport outside Sydney. Many of them landed on the runway, which stuck out like a finger into Botany Bay, so famous as the landing point for criminals and other English rejects sent halfway round the world on wooden sailing ships to start a new country, which, to the disbelief of those who’d dispatched them, they’d done remarkably well. Many of the passengers on the inbound flights were young, fit athletes. the pride and pick of the countries that had sent them dressed in uniform clothing that proclaimed their nations of origin. Most were tourists, people with ticket-and-accommodation packages expensively bought from travel agents or given as gifts from political figures in their home countries. Many carried miniature flags. The few business passengers had listened to all manner of enthusiastic predictions for national glory at the Olympic games, which would start in the next few days.
On arriving, the athletes were treated like visiting royalty and conveyed to buses that would take them up Highway 64 to the city, and thence to the Olympic Village, which had been expensively built by the Australian government to house them. They could see the magnificent stadium nearby, and the athletes looked and wondered if they’d find personal glory there.
“So, Colonel, what do you think?”
“It’s one hell of a stadium, and that’s a fact,” Colonel Wilson Gearing, U.S. Army Chemical Corps, retired, replied. “But it sure gets hot here in the summer, pal.”
“It’s that El Nino business again. The ocean currents off South America have changed again, and that’s associated with unusually hot temperatures here. It’ll be in the mid thirties-nineties to you, I suppose-for the whole Olympiad.”
“Well, I hope this fogging system works; ‘cuz if it doesn’t, you’ll have a lot of heat-stroke cases here, pal.”
“It works,” the Aussie cop told him. “It’s fully tested.”
“Can I take a look at it now? Bill Henriksen wants me to see if it could be used as a chemical-agent delivery system by the bad guys.”
“Certainly. This way.” They were there in five minutes. The water-input piping was contained in its own locked room. The cop had the key for this, and took the colonel inside.
“Oh, you chlorinate the water here?” Gearing asked in semi surprise. The water came in from the Sydney city water system, didn’t it?
“Yes, we don’t want to spread any germs on our guests, do we?”
“Not exactly,” Colonel Gearing agreed, looking at the plastic chlorine container that hung on the distribution piping beyond the actual pumps. Water was filtered through that before it went into the fogging nozzles that lung in all the concourses and ramps to the stadium bowl itself. The system would have to be flushed with unchlorinated water before delivery would work, but that was easily accomplished, and the false chlorine container in his hotel room was an exact twin of this one. The contents given looked like chlorine, almost, though the nano-capsules actually contained something called Shiva. Gearing thought about that behind blank brown eyes. He’d been a chemical weapons expert his whole professional life, having worked at the Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland and Dugway Proving Ground in Utah-but, well, this wasn’t really chemical warfare. It was bio-war, a sister science of the one he’d studied for over twenty uniformed ears. “Is the door guarded?” he asked.