“Well, we have a flight leaving in fifteen minutes for Kansas City, and from there you can connect to a US Airways flight to La Guardia, Mr.?. . . ”
“Demetrius,” Popov replied, remembering the name on his single remaining credit card. “Joseph Demetrius,” he said, taking out his wallet and handing the card over. He had a passport in that name in a safe-deposit box in New York, and the credit card was good, with a high limit and nothing charged on it in the past three months. The desk clerk probably thought he was working quickly, but Popov also needed to visit a men’s room and did his best not to show that urgent requirement. It was at that moment he realized he had a loaded revolver in the saddlebags he was carrying, and he had to get rid of that at once.
“Okay, Mr. Demetrius, here’s your ticket for now, Gate 1, and here’s the one for the Kansas City flight. It will be leaving from Gate A-34, and it’s a first-class aisle seat, 2C. Any questions, sir?”
“No, no, thank you.” Popov took the tickets and tucked them in his pocket. Then he looked for the entrance to the departure concourse, and headed that way, stopped by a waste bin and, after quickly looking around,very carefully took the monster handgun out of the bags, wiped it, and dumped it into the trash. He checked the terminal again. No, no one had noticed. He checked the saddlebags for anything else they might contain, but they were completely empty now. Satisfied, he headed through the security checkpoint, whose magnetometer blessedly didn’t beep at his passage. Collecting the leather saddle bags off the conveyor system, he looked for and found a men’s room, to which he headed directly, emerging in another minute feeling far better.
This regional airport, he saw, had but two gates, but it did have a bar, to which Popov went next. He had fifty dollars of cash in his wallet, and five of those paid for a double vodka, which he gulped down before taking the next hundred steps to the gate. Handing the ticket to the next clerk, he was directed out the door. The aircraft had propellers, and he hadn’t traveled on one of those for years. But for this flight he would have settled for rubber bands, and Popov clambered aboard the Saab 340B short-haul airliner. Five minutes later, the propellers started turning, and Popov started to relax. Thirty-five minutes to Kansas City, a forty-five-minute layover, and then off to New Yorkon a 737, in first class, where the alcohol was free. Best of all, he sat alone on the left side of the aircraft, with nobody to engage him in conversation. Popov needed to think, very carefully, and though quickly, not too quickly.
He closed his eyes as the aircraft started its takeoff roll, the noise of the engines blotting out all extraneous noise. Okay, he thought, what have you learned, and what should you do with that knowledge? Two simple questions, perhaps, but he had to organize the answer to the first before he knew how to answer the second. He almost started praying to a God in whose existence he did not believe, but instead he stared out the window at the mainly dark ground while his mind churned away in a darkness of its own.
Clark awoke with a start. It was three in the morning at Hereford, and he’d had a dream whose substance retreated away from his consciousness like a cloud of smoke, shapeless and impossible to grab. He knew it had been an unpleasant dream, and he could only estimate the degree of unpleasantness by the fact that it had awakened him, a rareoccurrence even when on a dangerous field assignment. He realized that his hands were shaking-and he didn’t know why. He dismissed it, rolled back over, and closed his eyes for more sleep. He had a budgeting meeting today, the bane of his existence as commander of Rainbow group, playing goddamned accountant. Maybe that had been the substance of his dream, he thought with his head on the pillow. Trapped forever with accountants in discussions of where the money came from and how it would be spent . . .
The landing at Kansas City was a smooth one, and the Saab airliner pulled up to the terminal, where, presently, the propellers stopped. A ground-crewman came up and attached a : ape to the propeller tip to keep it from turning while the passengers debarked. Popov checked his watch. They were a few minutes early as he walked out the door into the clean air, then into the terminal. There, three gates away from his flight at A-34-he checked to make sure it was the correct flight-he found a bar again. They even allowed smoking in here, which was unusual for an American airport, and he sniffed in the secondhand fumes, remembering the youthin which he’d smoked Trud cigarettes, and almost asked one of these Americans for a smoke. But he stopped short of it and merely drank his next double vodka in a corner booth, facing the wall, wanting no one to have a reason to remember him here. After thirty minutes, his flight was called. He left ten dollars on the table and walked off, carrying the empty saddlebags, then asked himself why he was bothering. But it would appear unusual for a person to board a flight carrying nothing, and so he retained them, and tucked them into the overhead bin. The best news of this flight was that 2-D was not occupied, and he took that, facing the window to make it harder for the stewardess to see his face. Then the Boeing 737 backed away from the gate and took off into the darkness. Popov declined the drink offered to him. He’d had enough for the moment, and though some alcohol helped him to organize his thoughts, too much of it muddled them. He had enough in his system to relax, and that was all he wanted.
What exactly had he learned this day? How did it fit in with all the other things he’d learned at the building complex in western Kansas? The answer to the second question was easier than the first: whatever hard datahe’d learned today contradicted nothing about the project’s nature, location, or even its decor. It hadn’t contradicted the magazines by his bedside, nor the videotapes next to the TV, nor the conversations he’d overheard in the corridors or in the building’s cafeteria. Those maniacs were planning to end the world in the name of their pagan beliefs-but how the hell could he persuade anyone that this was so? And exactly what hard data did he have to give to someone elseand to which someone else? It had to be someone who would both believe him and be able to take action. But who? There was the additional problem that he’d murdered Foster Hunnicutt-he’d had no choice in the matter; he’d had to get away from the Project, and that had been his only chance to do so covertly. But now they could accuse him rightfully of murder, which meant that some police force might try to arrest him, and then how could he get the word out to stop those fucking druids from doing what they said they’d do? No policeman in the known world would believe his tale. It was far too grotesque to be absorbed by a normal mind-and surely those people in the Project had a cover story or legend which had been carefully constructed to shunt aside any sort of official inquiry. That was the mostrudimentary security concern, and that Henriksen fellow would have worked on that himself.
Carol Brightling stood in her office. She’d just printed up a letter to the chief of staff saying that she’d be taking a leave of absence to work on a special scientific project. She’d discussed this matter with Arnie van Damm earlier in the day and gotten no serious objection to her departure. She would not be missed, his body language had told her quite clearly. Well, she thought with a cold look at the computer screen, neither would he, when it came to that.
Dr. Brightling tucked the letter in an envelope, sealed it, and left it on her assistant’s desk for transfer into the White House proper the next day. She’d done her job for the Project and for the planet, and it was now time for her to leave. It had been so long, so very long, since she’d felt
John’s arms around her. The divorce had been well publicized. It had had to be: She would never have gotten the White House job if she’d been married to one of the country’srichest men. And so, she’d forsworn him, and he’d publicly forsworn the movement, the beliefs they’d both held ten years before when they’d formulated the idea for the Project, but he’d never stopped believing, any more than she had. And so she’d gotten all the way inside the government, and gotten a security clearance that gave her access to literally everything, even operational intelligence, which she then forwarded to John when he needed it. Most especially, she’d gotten access to biological-warfare information, so that they knew what USAMRIID and others had done to protect America, and so knew how to engineer Shiva in such a way as to defeat any proposed vaccine except those which Horizon Corporation had formulated.