“She does,” Patsy assured her husband.
“Okay, I need to talk to your dad again-business stuff. Love ya, baby.”
“Love you, too, Ding.”
“Domingo, I think you’re going to be okay as a son-in-law,” the male voice said three seconds later. “I’ve never seen Patricia smile so much, and I guess that’s your doing.”
“Gee, thanks, Pop,” Chavez replied, checking his U.K. watch. It was just after seven in the morning there, whereas in Sydney it was four in the hot afternoon.
“Okay, how are things there?” Clark asked.
“Good,” Chavez told Rainbow Six. “Our point of contact is a short colonel named Frank Wilkerson. Solid troop. His people are pretty good, well trained, confident, nice and loose. Their relationship with the police is excellent. Their reaction plans look good to me-short version, John, they don’t need us here any more than they need a few more kangaroos in the outback I flew over this morning.”
“So, what the hell, enjoy the games.” Bitch as he might, Chavez and his people were getting about ten grand worth of free holiday, Clark thought, and that wasn’t exactly a prison sentence.
“It’s a waste of our time, John,” Chavez told his boss.
“Yeah, well, you never know, do you, Domingo?”
“I suppose,” Chavez had to agree. They’d just spent several months proving that you never really knew.
“Your people okay?”
“Yeah, they’re treating us pretty nice. Good hotel rooms, close enough to walk to the stadium, but we have official cars for that. So, I guess we’re just paid tourists, eh?”
“Yep, like I said, Ding, enjoy the games.”
“How’s Peter doing?”
“Bouncing back okay, but he’ll be out of business for at least a month, more like six weeks. The docs here are okay. Chin’s legs are going to be a pain in the ass. Figure two and a half months for him to get back in harness.”
“He must be pissed.”
“Oh, he is.”
“What about our prisoners?”
“Police are interrogating them now,” Clark answered. “We’re hearing more about this Russian guy, but nothing we can really use yet. The Irish cops are trying to ID the cocaine by manufacturer it’s medical quality, from a real drug company. Ten pounds of pure coke. Street value would buy a friggin’ airliner. The Garda is worried that it might be the start of a trend, the IRA splinter groups getting into drugs big-time, but that’s not our problem.”
“This Russian guy-Serov, right?-he’s the guy who gave them the intel on us?”
“That’s affirmative, Domingo, but where he got it we don’t know, and our Irish guests aren’t giving us anything more than what we already have-probably all they know. Grady isn’t talking at all. And his lawyer’s bitching about how we interrogated him in the recovery room.”
“Well, isn’t that just a case of tough shit?”
“I hear you, Ding,” Clark chuckled. It wasn’t as though they’d be using the information in a trial. There was even a videotape of Grady’s leaving the scene from the BBC news crew that had turned up at Hereford. Sean Grads would be imprisoned for a term defined by “the Queen’s pleasure,” which meant life plus forever, unless the European Union treaty interfered with it. Timothy O’Neil and the people who’d surrendered with him might get out around the time they turned sixty, Bill Tawney had told him the previous day. “Anything else?”
“Nope, everything’s looking good here, John. I’ll report in the same time tomorrow.”
“Roger that, Domingo.”
“Kiss Patsy for me.”
“I’ll even manage a hug if you want.”
“Yeah, thanks, Grandpa,” Ding agreed with a smile.
“Bye,” he heard, and the line went dead.
“Not a bad time to be away from home, boss,” Mike Pierce observed from a few feet away. “The first two weeks can be a real pain in the ass. This way, by the time you get back home, the little guy’ll be sleeping four, five hours. Maybe more if you’re really lucky,” predicted the father of three sons.
“Mike, you see any problems here?”
“Like you told Six, the Aussies have it under control. They look like good people, man. Us bein’ here’s a waste of time, but what the hell, we get to see the Olympics.”
“I suppose so. Any questions?”
“Do we carry?” Pierce asked.
“Pistols only, and casual clothes. Your security pass will take care of that. We pair off, you with me, and George with Homer. We take our tactical radios, too, but that’s all.”
“Yes, sir. Works for me. How’s the jet lag?”
“How’s it with you, Mike?”
“Like I been put in a bag and beat with a baseball bat.” Pierce grinned. “But it’ll be better tomorrow. Shit, I’d hate to think that gutting it through today won’t help some tomorrow. Hey, tomorrow morning, we can work out with the Aussies, do our running on the Olympic track. Pretty cool, eh?”
“I like it.”
“Yeah, it would be nice to meet up with some of those pussy athletes, see how fast they can run with weapons and body armor.” At his best and fully outfitted, Pierce could run a mile in thirty seconds over four minutes, but he’d never broken the four minute mark, even in running shoes and shorts. Louis Loiselle claimed to have done it once, and Chavez believed him. The diminutive Frenchman was the right size for a distance runner. Pierce was too big in height and across the shoulders. A Great Dane rather than a greyhound.
“Be cool, Mike. We have to protect them from the bad guys. That tells us who the best men are,” Chavez observed through the jet lag.
“Roge-o, Sir.” Pierce would remember that one.
Popov awoke for no particular reason he could see, except that yes, another Gulfstream jet had just landed. He imagined that these were the really important ones for this project thing. The junior ones, or those with families, either drove out or flew commercial. The business jet sat there in the lights, the stairs deployed from their bay in the aircraft, and people walked out to the waiting cars that swiftly drove away from the aircraft and toward the hotel building. Popov wondered who it was, but he was too far :sway to recognize faces. He’d probably see them in the cafeteria in the morning. Dmitriy Arkadeyevich got a drink of water from the bathroom and returned to his bed. This facility was filling up rapidly, though he still didn’t know why.
Colonel Wilson Gearing was in his hotel room only a few floors above the Rainbow troops. His large bags were in the closet, and his clothing hung. The maids and other staff who serviced his room hadn’t touched anything, merely checked the closet and proceeded to make up the beds and scrub the bathroom. They hadn’t checked inside the bags-Gearing had telltales on them to make sure of that-inside one of which was a plastic canister with “Chlorine” painted on it. It was outwardly identical with the one on the fogging system at the Olympic stadium it had, in fact, been purchased from the same company that had installed the fogging system, cleaned out and refilled with the nano-capsules. He also had the tools he Needed to swap one out, and had practiced the skill in Kansas, where an identical installation was to be found. I le could close his eyes and see himself doing it, time and again, to keep the downtime for the fogging system to a minimum. He thought about the contents of the container. Never had so much potential death been so tightly contained. Far more so than in a nuclear device, because unlike one of those, the danger here could replicate it, many times instead of merely detonating once. The way the fogging system worked, it would take about thirty minutes for the nanocapsules to get into the entire fogging system. Both computer models and actual mechanical tests proved that the capsules would get everywhere the pipes, and spray out the fogging nozzles, invisible in the gentle, cooling mist. People walking through the tunnels leading to the stadium proper and in the concourse would breathe it in, an average of two hundred or so nano-capsules in four minutes of breathing, and that was well above the calculated mean lethal dose. The capsules would enter through the lungs, be transported into the blood, and there the capsules would dissolve, releasing the Shiva. The engineered virus strands would travel in the bloodstream of the spectators and the athletes, soon find the liver and kidneys, the organs for which they had the greatest affinity, and begin the slow process of multiplication. All this had been established at Binghamton Lab on the ‘normal’ test subjects. Then it was just a matter of weeks until the Shiva had multiplied enough to do its work. Along the way, people would pass on the Shiva through kisses and sexual contact, through coughs and sneezes. This, to had been proven at the Binghamton Lab. Starting in about four weeks, people would think themselves mildly ill. Some would see their personal physicians, and be diagnosed as flu victims, told to take aspirin, drink fluids, and rest in front of the TV. They would do this, and feel better-because seeing a doctor usually did that to people-for a day or so. But they would not be getting better. Sooner or later, they’d develop the internal bleeds that Shiva ultimately caused, and then, about five weeks after the initial release of the nano-capsules, some doctor would run an antibody test and be aghast to learn that something like the famous and feared Ebola fever was back. A good epidemiology program might identify the Sydney Olympics as the focal center, but tens of thousands people would have come and gone. This was a perfect avenue for distributing Shiva, something the Project’s senior members had determined years before-even before the attempted plague launched by Iran against America, which had predictably failed because the virus hadn’t been the right one, and the method of delivery too haphazard. No, this plan was perfection itself. Every nation on earth sent athletes and judges to the Olympic games, and all of them would walk through the cooling fog in this hot stadium, lingering there to shed excess body heat, breathe deeply, and relax in this cool place. Then they’d all return to their homes, from America to Argentina, from Russia to Rwanda, there to spread the Shiva and start the initial panic.