“Domingo, I need you to take this one,” John said.
“It’s a long way to go, John, and I just became a daddy,” Chavez objected.
“Sorry, pal, but Covington is down. So’s Chin. I was going to send you and four men. It’s an easy job, Ding. The Aussies know their stuff, but they asked us to come down and give it a look-and the reason for that is the expert way you handled your field assignments, okay?”
“When do I leave?”
“Tonight, 747 out of Heathrow.” Clark held up the ticket envelope.
“Great,” Chavez grumbled.”Hey, at least you were there for the delivery, pop.”
“I suppose. What if something crops up while we’re away?” Chavez tried as a weak final argument.
“We can scratch a team together, but you really think somebody’s going to yank our chain anytime soon? After we bagged those IRA pukes? I don’t,” Clark concluded.
“What about the Russian guy, Serov?”
“The FBI’s on it, trying to run him down in New York. They’ve assigned a bunch of agents to it.”
One of them was Tom Sullivan. He was currently in the post office. Box 1453 at this station belonged to the mysterious Mr. Serov. It had some junk mail in it, and a Visa bill, but no one had opened the box in at least nine days, judging by the dates on the envelopes, and none of the clerks professed to know what the owner of Box 1453 looked like, though one thought he didn’t pick up his mail very often. He’d given a street address when obtaining the box, but that address, it turned out, was to an Italian bakery several blocks away, and the phone number was a dud, evidently made up for the purpose.
“Sure as hell, this guy’s a spook,” Sullivan thought aloud, wondering why the Foreign Counterintelligence group hadn’t picked up the case.
“Sure wiggles like one,” Chatham agreed. And their assignment ended right there. They had no evidence of a crime for the subject, and not enough manpower to assign an agent to watch the P.O. box around the clock.
Security was good here, Popov thought, as he rode around in another of the military-type vehicles that Dawson called a Hummer. The first thing about security was to have defensive depth. That they had. It was ten kilometers at least before you approached a property line.
“It used to be a number of large farms, but Horizon bought them all out a few years ago and started building the research lab. It took a while, but it’s finished now.”
“You still grow wheat here?”
“Yeah, the facility itself doesn’t use all that much of the land, and we try to keep the rest of it the way it was. Hell, we grow almost enough wheat for all the people at the lab, got our own elevators an’ all over that way.” He pointed to the north.
Popov looked that way and saw the massive concrete structures some distance away. It was amazing how large America was, Dmitriy Arkadeyevich thought, and this part seemed so flat, not unlike the Russian steppes. The land had some dips and rises, but all they seemed to do was emphasize the lack of a real hill anywhere. The Hummer went north, and eventually crossed a rail line that evidently led to the grain silos-elevators, Dawson had called them? Elevators? Why that word? Farther north and lie could barely make out traffic moving on a distant highway.
“That’s the northern border,” Dawson explained, as they passed into non-farm land.
“What’s that?”
“Oh, that’s our little herd of pronghorn antelopes.” Dawson turned the wheel slightly to go closer. The Hummer bumped over the grassy land.
“They’re pretty animals.”
“That they are, and very fast. We call ’em the speed-goat. Not a true antelope at all, genetically closer to goats. Those babies can run at forty miles an hour, and do it for damned near an hour. They also have superb eyesight.”
“Difficult to hunt, I imagine. Do you hunt?”
“They are, and I’m not. I’m a vegan.”
‘What?”
“Vegetarian. I don’t eat meat or other animal products,” Dawson said somewhat proudly. Even his belt was made of canvas rather than leather.
“Why is that, David?” Popov asked. He’d never come across anyone like him before.
“Oh, just a choice I made. I don’t approve of killing animals for food or any other reason”-he turned-“not everybody agrees with me, not even here at the Project, but I’m not the only one who thinks that way. Nature is something to be respected, not exploited.”
“So, you don’t buy your wife a fur coat,” Popov said, with a smile. He had heard about those fanatics.
“Not hardly!” Dawson laughed.
“I’ve never hunted,” Popov said next, wondering what response he’d get. “I never saw the sense in it, and in Russia they’ve nearly exterminated most game animals.”
“So I understand. That’s very sad, but they’ll come back someday,” Dawson pronounced.
“How, with all the state hunters working to kill them?” That institution hadn’t ended even with the demise of Communist rule.
Dawson’s face took on a curious expression, one Popov had seen many times before at KGB. The man knew something he was unwilling to say right now, though what he knew was important somehow. “Oh, there’s ways, pal. There’s ways.”
The driving tour required an hour and a half, at the end of which Popov was mightily impressed with the size of the facility. The approach road to the building complex was an airport, he saw, with electronic instruments to guide airplanes in and traffic lights to warn autos off when flight operations were in progress. He asked Dawson about it.
“Yeah, it is kinda obvious, isn’t it? You can get a G in and out of here pretty easy. They say you can bring in real commercial jets, too, medium-sized ones, but I’ve never seen that done.”
“Dr. Brightling spent a lot of money to build this establishment.”
“That he did,” Dawson agreed. “But it’s worth it, trust me.” He drove up the highway/runway to the lab building and stopped. “Come with me.”
Popov followed without asking why. He’d never appreciated the power of a major American corporation. This could and should have been a government facility. with all the land and the huge building complex. The hotel building in which he’d spent the night could probably hold thousands of people and why build such a place here? Was Brightling going to move his entire corporation here, all his employees? So far from major cities, airports, all the things that civilization offered. Why here? Except. of course, for security. It was also far from large police agencies, from news media and reporters. For the purposes of security, this facility might as easily have been on the moon.
The lab building was also larger than it needed to be. Dmitriy thought, but unlike the others, it appeared to be functioning at the moment. Inside was a desk, and a receptionist who knew David Dawson. The two men proceeded unimpeded to the elevators, then up to the fourth floor, and right to an office.
“Hi, Doc,” Dawson said. “This is Dmitriy. Dr. Brightling sent him to us last night. He’s going to be here awhile,” the security chief added.
“I got the fax.” The physician stood and extended his hand to Popov. “Hi, I’m John Killgore. Follow me.” And the two of them went through a side door into an examining room, while Dawson waited outside. Killgore told Popov to disrobe down to his underwear, and proceeded to give him a physical examination, taking blood pressure, checking eyes and ears and reflexes, prodding his belly to make sure that the liver was non-palpable, and finally taking four test tubes of blood for further examination. Popov submitted to it all without objection, somewhat bemused by the whole thing, and slightly intimidated by the physician, as most people were. Finally, Killgore pulled a vial from the medicine cabinet and stuck a disposable syringe into it.
“What’s this?” Dmitriy Arkadeyevich asked.
“Just a booster shot,” Killgore explained, setting the vial down.
Popov picked it up and looked at the label, which read “B2100 11-21-00” and nothing else. Then he winced when the needle went into his upper arm. He’d never enjoyed getting shots.
“There, that’s done,” Killgore said. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow about the blood work.” With that done, he pointed his patient to the hook his clothing hung on. It was a pity, Killgore thought, that the patient couldn’t be appreciative for having his life saved.
“He might as well not exist,” Special Agent Sullivan told his boss. “Maybe somebody comes in to check his mail, but not in the past nine or ten days.”
“What can we do about that?”
“If you want, we can put a camera and motion sensor inside the box, like the FCI guys do to cover dead-drops. We can do it, but it costs money and manpower to keep an agent or two close if the alarm goes off. Is this case that important?”