“You get a key to the door and the alarm code from me. Why, old boy?”
“Oh, well, I just want to see it.”
“Is there a problem, Ding?” Wilkerson asked.
“Maybe. I got to thinking,” Chavez went on, trying to formulate a persuasive lie for the moment. “What if somebody wanted to use it to dispense a chemical agent, like? And I thought I might-”
“Check it out? One of the Global people beat you to that one, lad. Colonel Gearing. He checked out the entire installation. Same concern as you, but a bit earlier.”
“Well, can I do it, too?”
“Why?”
“Call it paranoia,” Chavez replied.
“I suppose.” Wilkerson rose from his chair and pulled the proper key off the wall. “The alarm code is one-one-three-three-six-six.”
Eleven thirty-three sixty-six, Ding memorized.
“Good. Thanks, Colonel.”
“My pleasure, Major,” the SAS lieutenant colonel replied.
Chavez left the room, rejoined his people outside, and headed rapidly back to the stadium.
“Did you tell ’em about the problem?” Noonan asked.
Chavez shook his head. “I wasn’t authorized to do that. John expects us to handle it.”
“What if our friends are armed?”
“Well, Tim, we are authorized to use necessary force, aren’t we?”
“Could be messy,” the FBI agent warned, worried about local laws and jurisdictions.
“Yeah, I suppose so. We use our heads, okay? We know how to do that, too.”
Kirk Maclean’s job at the Project was to keep an eye on the environmental support systems, mainly the air conditioning and the over-pressurization system, whose installation he didn’t really understand. After all, everyone inside the buildings would have the “B” vaccine shot, and even if Shiva got in, there wasn’t supposed to be any danger. But he supposed that John Brightling was merely being redundant in his protective systems thinking, and that was okay with him. His daily work was easily dealt with- it mainly involved checking dials and recording systems, all of which were stuck in the very center of normal Operating ranges-and then he felt like a ride. He walked into the transport office and took a set of keys for a Project Hummer, then headed out to the barn to get his horse. mother twenty minutes, and he’d saddled his quarter horse and headed north, cantering across the grassland. through the lanes in the wheat fields where the farm mac lines turned around, taking his time through one of the prairie-dog towns, and heading generally toward the Interstate highway that formed the northern edge of the Project’s real estate. About forty minutes into the ride, he saw something unusual.
Like every rural plot of land in the American West, this one had a resident buzzard population. Here, as in most such places, they were locally called turkey buzzards, regardless of the actual breed, large raptors that ate carrion and were distinctive for their size and their ugliness – black feathers and naked red-skinned heads that carried large powerful beaks designed for ripping flesh off the carcasses of dead animals. They were Nature’s garbage collectors or Nature’s own morticians, as some put it important parts of the ecosystem, though distasteful to some. He saw about six of them circling something in the tall grass to the northeast. Six was a lot then he realized that there were more still, as he spotted the black angular shapes in the grass from two miles away. Something large had evidently died, and they had assembled to clean – eat – it up. They were careful, conservative birds. Their circling and examination was to ensure that whatever they saw and smelled wasn’t still alive, and hence able to jump up and injure them when they came down to feed. Birds were the most delicate of creatures, made mostly for air, and needing to be in perfect condition to fly and survive.
What are they eating? Maclean wondered, heading his horse over that way at a walk, not wanting to spook the birds any more than necessary, and wondering if they were afraid of a horse and rider. Probably not, he thought, but he’d find out about this little bit of Nature’s trivia.
Whatever it was, he thought five minutes later, the birds liked it. It was an ugly process, Maclean thought, but no more so than when he ate a burger, at least as far as the cow was concerned. It was Nature’s way. The buzzards ate the dead and processed the protein, then excreted it out, returning the nutrients back to the soil so that the chain of life could proceed again in its timeless cycle of life death-life. Even from a hundred yards away, there were too many birds for him to determine what they were feasting on.Probably a deer or pronghorn antelope, he thought, from the number of birds and the way they bobbed their heads up and down, consuming the creature that Nature had reclaimed for Herself. What did pronghorns die of? Kirk wondered. Heart attacks? Strokes? Cancer? It might be interesting to find out in a few years, maybe have one of the Project physicians do a postmortem on one-if they got there ahead of the buzzards, which, he thought with a smile, ate up the evidence. But at fifty yards, he stopped his horse. Whatever they were eating seemed to be wearing a plaid shirt. With that he urged his horse closer, and at ten yards the buzzards took notice, first swiveling their odious red heads and cruel black eyes, then hopping away a few feet, then, finally, flapping back into the air.
“Oh, fuck,” Maclean said quietly, when he got closer. The neck had been ripped away, leaving the spine partly exposed, and in some places the shirt had been shredded, too, by the powerful beaks. The face had also been destroyed, the eyes gone and most of the skin and flesh, but the hair was fairly intact, and
“Jesus . . . Foster? What happened to you, man?” It required a few more feet of approach to see the small red circle in the center of the dark shirt. Maclean didn’t dismount his horse. A man was dead, and, it appeared, had been shot dead. Kirk looked around and saw the hoofprints of one or two horses right here . . . probably two, he decided.
Backing away, he decided to get back to the Project as quickly as his horse could manage. It took fifteen minutes, which left his quarter horse winded and the rider shaken. He jumped off, got into his Hummer and raced back to the Project and found John Killgore.
The room was grossly nondescript, Chavez saw. Just pipes, steel and plastic, and a pump, which was running, as the fogging-cooling system had started off from its timer a few minutes before, and Chavez’s first thought was, what if the bug’s already in the system? I just walked through it, and what if I breathed the fucking thing in?
But here he was, and if that were the case . . . but, no, John had told him that the poisoning was to start much later in the day, and that the Russian was supposed to know what was going on. You had to trust your intelligence sources. You just had to. The information they gave you was the currency of life and death in this business.
Noonan bent down to look at the chlorine canister that hung on the piping. “It looks like a factory product, Ding,” the FBI agent said, for what that was worth. “I can see how you switch them out. Flip off the motor here”he pointed-“close this valve, twist this off with a wrench like the one on the wall there, swap on the new one, reopen the valve and hit the pump motor. Looks like a thirty-second job, maybe less. Boom-boom-boom, and you’re done.”
“And if it’s already been done?” Chavez asked.
“Then we’re fucked,” Noonan replied. “I hope your intel’s good on this, partner.”‘
The fog outside had the slight smell of chlorine, Chavez told himself hopefully, like American city water, and chlorine was used because it killed germs. It was the only element besides oxygen that supported combustion, wasn’t it? He’d read that somewhere, Domingo thought.
“What do you think, Tim?”
“I think the idea makes sense, but it’s one hell of a big operation for somebody to undertake, and it’s – Ding, who the hell would do something like this? And why, for Christ’s sake?”
“I guess we have to figure that one out. But for now, we watch this thing like it’s the most valuable gadget in the whole fucking world. Okay.” Ding turned to look at his men. “George and Homer, you guys stay here. If you gotta take a piss, do it on the floor.” There was a drainage pit there, they all saw. “Mike and I will handle things outside. Tim, you stay close, too. We got our radios, and that’s how we communicate. Two hours on, two hours off, but never more than fifty yards from this place. Questions?”