“Perhaps not,” Rainbow Six answered, looking closely at the man.
“Very well, and in that case I propose that you have us taken to the local FBI office or some other secure place, so that I can give you the information you need under controlled circumstances. I require only your word that I will not be detained or arrested.”
“You would believe me if I were to say that?”
“Yes. You are CIA, and you know the rules of the game, do you not?”
Clark nodded. “Okay, you have my word-if you’re telling me the truth.”
“John Clark, I wish I were not,” Popov said. “Truly I wish I were not, tovarich. “John looked hard into his eyes, and in them he saw fear . . . no, something deeper than fear. This guy had just called him comrade. That meant something, particularly under these circumstances.
“Come on,” John told him, turning around and heading for Fifth Avenue.
“That’s our subject, guys,” a female agent said over the radio circuit. “That is subject Serov all gift-wrapped like a toy from F.A.O. Schwarz. Wait. They’re turning around, heading east to Fifth.”
“No shit?” Frank Chatham asked. Then he saw them walking very quickly to where the van was parked.
“You got a safe house around here?” Clark asked.
“Well, yeah, we do, but-”
“Get us there, right now!” Clark ordered. “You can terminate your cover operation at once, too. Get in, Dmitriy,” he said, opening the sliding door.
The safe house was only ten blocks away. Sullivan parked the van, and all four men went inside.
CHAPTER 37
DYING FLAME
The safe house was a four-story brownstone that had been given to the federal government decades before by a grateful businessman whose kidnapped son had been recovered alive by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. It was used mainly for interviewing UN diplomats who worked in one way or another for the U.S. government, and had been one of the places used by Arkady Schevchenko, still the highest-ranking Soviet defector of all time. Outwardly unremarkable, inside it had an elaborate security system and three rooms outfitted with recording systems and twoway mirrors, plus the usual tables, and more comfortable chairs than normal. It was manned around the clock, usually by a rookie agent in the New York field division whose purpose was merely that of doorman.
Chatham took them to the top-floor interview room and sat Clark and Popov down in the windowless cubicle. The microphone was set up, and the reel-to-reel tape recorder set to turning. Behind one of the mirrors, aTV camera and attendant VCR was set up as well.
“Okay,” Clark said, announcing the date, time, and place. “With me is Colonel Dmitriy Arkadeyevich Popov, retired, of the former Soviet KGB. The subject of this interview is international terrorist activity. My name is John Clark, and I am a field officer of the Central Intelligence Agency. Also here are-”
“Special Agent Tom Sullivan-”
“And-”
“Special Agent Frank Chatham-”
“Of the FBI’s New York office. Dimitriy, would you please begin?” John said.
It was intimidating as hell for Popov to do this, and it showed in the first few minutes of his narrative. The two FBI agents showed total incredulity on their faces for the first half hour, until he got to the part about his morning rides in Kansas.
“Maclean? What was his first name?” Sullivan asked. “Kirk, I think, perhaps Kurt, but I think it ended with a K,” Popov replied. “Hunnicutt told me that he’d kidnapped people here in New York to be used as guinea pigs for this Shiva sickness.”
“Fuck,” Chatham breathed. “What does this guy look like?”
Popov told them in very accurate terms,down to hair length and eye color.
“Mr. Clark, we know this guy. We’ve interviewed him in the disappearance of a young woman, Mary Bannister. And another woman, Anne Pretloe, disappeared under very similar circumstances. Holy shit, you say they were murdered?”
“No, I said they were killed as test subjects for this Shiva disease that they plan to spread at Sydney.”
“Horizon Corporation. That’s where this Maclean guy works. He’s out of town now, his coworkers told us.”
“Yes, you will find him in Kansas,” Popov told them, with a nod.
“You know how big Horizon Corporation is?” Sullivan asked.
“Big enough. Okay, Dmitriy,” Clark said, turning back, “exactly how do you think they will spread this virus?”
“Foster told me it was part of the air-cooling system at the stadium. That is all I know.”
John thought about the Olympic. They were running the marathon today, and that was the last event, to be followed by the closing ceremonies that evening. There wasn’t time to think very much further than that. He turned, lifted the telephone, and dialed England.Give me Stanley,” he told Mrs. Foorgate.
“Alistair Stanley,” the voice said next.
“Al, this is John. Get hold of Ding and have him call me here.” John read the number off the phone. “Right now-immediately, Al. I mean right the hell now.”
“Understood, John.”
Clark waited four and a half minutes by his watch before the phone rang.
“You’re lucky he got me, John. I was just getting dressed to leave and watch the mara-”
“Shut the hell up and listen to me, Domingo,” Clark said harshly.
“Yeah, John, go ahead,” Chavez answered, getting out a pad to take some notes. “Is this for real?” he asked after a few seconds.
“We believe it to be, Ding.”
“It’s like something from a bad movie.” Was this something concocted by SPECTRE? Chavez wondered. What was the potential profit in it for anybody?
“Ding, the guy giving this to me is named Serov, Iosef Andreyevich. He’s here with me now.”
“Okay, I hear you, Mr. C. When is this operation supposed to take place?”
“Around the time of the closingceremonies, supposedly. Is there anything else today besides the marathon?”
“No, that’s the last major event, and we ought not to be too busy ’til the race ends. We expect the stadium to start filling up around five this afternoon, and then they have the closing ceremonies, and everybody goes home.” Including me, he didn’t have to add.
“Well, that’s their plan, Ding.”
“And you want us to stop it.”
“Correct. Get moving. Keep this number. I’ll be here all day on the STU-4. From now on, all transmissions will be secure. Okay?”
“You got it. Let me get moving, John.”
“Move,” the voice told him. “Bye.”
Chavez hung up, wondering how the hell he’d do this. First he had to assemble his team. They were all on the same floor, and he went into the corridor, knocked on each door, and told the NCOs to come to his suite.
“Okay, people, we got a job to handle today. Here’s the deal,” he began, then spun the tale for about five minutes.
“Christ,” Tomlinson managed to say for all of them. The story was quite incredible, but they were accustomed to hearing and acting upon strange information.
“We have to find the control room for thefogging system. Once we do that, we’ll put people in there. We’ll rotate the duty. George and Homer, you start, then Mike and I will relieve you. Call it two-hour rotation inside and outside. Radios will be on at all times. Deadly force is authorized, people.”
Noonan had heard the briefing, too. “Ding, this whole thing sounds kinda unlikely.”
“I know, Tim, but we act on it anyway.”
“You say so, man.”
“Let’s move, people,” Ding told them, standing.
“This is the day, Carol,” John Brightling told his ex-wife. “Less than ten hours from now, the Project starts.”
She dropped Jiggs on the floor and came to embrace him. “Oh, John!”
“I know,” he told her. “It’s been a long time. Couldn’t have done it without you.”
Henriksen was there, too. “Okay, I talked with Wil Gearing twenty minutes ago. He’ll be hooking up the Shiva dispenser right before they start the closing ceremonies. The weather is working for us, too. It’s going to be another hot one in Sydney, temperature’s supposed to hit ninety-seven degrees. So,people’ll be camping out under the foggers.”
“And breathing heavily,” Dr. John Brightling confirmed. That was another of the body’s methods for shedding excess heat.
Chavez was in the stadium now, already sweating from the building heat and wondering if any of the marathon runners would fall over dead from this day’s race. So Global Security, with whose personnel he’d interfaced briefly, was part of the mission. He wondered if he could remember all the faces he’d seen in the two brief conferences he’d had, but for now he had to find Colonel Wilkerson. Five minutes later, in the security-reaction hut, he found the man.
“G’day, Major Chavez.”
“Hey, Frank. I got a question for you.”
“What’s that, Ding?”
“The fogging system. Where’s it come from?”
“The pumping room’s by Section Five, just left of the ramp.”
“How do I get in there?”