“Do we know what this guy Gearing looks like?” Noonan asked.”No,” Chavez said. “Nobody told me. I suppose Colonel Wilkerson knows, but I didn’t want to ask him.”
“Christ, Ding, is this whole thing possible?” the FBI agent asked next.
“I guess we’ll know in a few hours, man. I know something like this happened once before, and I know John and I helped take out the bastard who did it to us. On the technical side, I’d have to ask Patsy about it. I don’t know biology. She does.”
“Jesus,” Noonan concluded, looking over at the entrance to the pump room. The three of them headed over to a concession area and got half-liter cups of Coca-Cola, then sat down to watch the blue-painted door. People walked past it, but nobody actually approached it.
“Tim?”
“Yeah, Ding?”
“Do you have arrest powers for this?”
The FBI agent nodded. “I think so, conspiracy to commit murder, the crime originated in America, and the subject is an American citizen, so, yes, that should hold up. I can take it a step further. If we kidnap his ass and bring him to America, the courts don’t care how somebody got there. Once he’s in front of a United States District Court judge, how he came to be there doesn’t interest the court at all.”
“How the hell do we get him out of the country?” Chavez wondered next. He activated his cell phone.
Clark picked up the STU-4’s receiver. It took five seconds for Ding’s encryption system to handshake with his. A computerized voice finally said Line is secure, followed by two beeps. “Yeah?”
“John, it’s Ding. I got a question.”
“Shoot.”
“If we bag this Gearing guy, then what? How the hell do we get him back to America?”
“Good question. Let me work on that.”
“Right.” And the line went dead. The logical place to call was Langley, but, as it turned out, the DCI was not in his office. The call was routed to his home.
“John, what the hell is going on down there, anyway?” Ed Foley asked from his bed.
Clark told the DCI what he knew. That took about five minutes. “I have Ding staking out the only place this can be done, and-”
“Jesus Christ, John, is this for real?” Ed Foley asked, somewhat breathlessly.
“We’ll know if this Gearing guy shows up with a package containing the bug, I suppose,” Clark replied. “If he does, how do we get Ding, his people, and this Gearing guy back to the States?”
“Let me work on that. What’s your number?” John gave it to him and Ed Foley wrote it down on a pad. “How long have you known about this?”
“Less than two hours. The Russian guy is right here with me. We’re in an FBI safe house in New York City.”
“Is Carol Brightling implicated in this?”
“I’m not sure. Her ex-husband sure as hell is,” Clark answered.
Foley closed his eyes and thought. “You know, she called me about you guys a while back, asked a couple of questions. She’s the one who shook the new radios loose from E-Systems. She talked to me as though she was briefed in on Rainbow.”
“She’s not on my list, Ed,” John pointed out. He’d personally approved all of the people cleared into the Rainbow compartment.
“Yeah, I’ll look at that, too. Okay, let me check around and get back to you.”
“Right.” Clark replaced the receiver. “We have an FBI guy with the Sydney team,” he told the others.
“Who?” Sullivan asked.”Tim Noonan. Know him?”
“Used to be tech support with HRT?”
Clark nodded. “That’s the guy.”
“I’ve heard about him. Supposed to be pretty smart.”
“He is. He saved our ass in Hereford, probably my wife and daughter, too.”
“So, he can arrest this Gearing mutt, nice and legal.”
“You know, I’ve never worried all that much about enforcing the law-mainly I enforce policy, but not law.”
“I suppose things are a little different with the Agency, eh?” Sullivan asked, with a smile. The James Bond factor never really goes away, even with people who are supposed to know better.
“Yeah, some.”
Gearing left his hotel, carrying a backpack like many of the other people on the street, and flagged a cab just outside. The marathon was about half an hour from its conclusion. He found himself looking around at the crowded sidewalks and all the people on them. The Australians seemed a friendly people, and what he’d seen of their country was pleasant enough. He wondered about the aborigines, and what might happen to them, and the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert, and other such tribal groupings around the world, so removed from normal life that they wouldn’t be exposed to Shiva in any way. If fate smiled upon them, well, he decided, that was okay with him. These kinds of people didn’t harm Nature in any way, and they were insufficiently numerous to do harm even if they wanted to, which they didn’t, worshipping the trees and the thunder as the Project members did. Were there enough of them to be a problem? Probably not. The Bushmen might spread out, but their folkways wouldn’t allow them to change their tribal character very much, and though they’d increase somewhat in number, they’d probably not even do much of that. The same with the “abos” of Australia. There hadn’t been many of them before the Europeans had arrived, after all, and they’d had millennia to sweep over the continent. So the Project would spare many people, wouldn’t it? It was vaguely comforting to the retired colonel that Shiva would kill only those whose lifestyles made them the enemies of Nature. That this criterion included everyone he could see out the cab windows troubled him little.
The taxi stopped at the regular drop-off point by the stadium. He paid his fare plus a generous tip, got out, walked toward the massive concrete bowl. At the entrance, he showed his security pass and was waved through. There came the expected creepy feeling. He’d be testing his “B” vaccine in a very immediate way, first admitting the Shiva virus into the fogging system, and then walking through it, breathing in the same nano-capsules as all the other hundred-thousand-plus tourists, and if the “B” shot didn’t work, he’d be condemning himself to a gruesome death–but he’d been briefed in on that issue a long time ago.
“That Dutchman looks pretty tough,” Noonan said. Willem terHoost was currently in the lead, and had picked up the pace, heading for a record despite the weather conditions. The heat had taken its toll of many runners. A lot of them slowed their pace to get cold drinks, and some ran through pre-spotted water showers to cool off, though the TV commentators said that these had the effect of tightening up the leg muscles and were therefore not really a good thing for marathoners to do. But they took the relief anyway, most of them, or grabbed the offered icewater drinks and poured them over their faces.
“Self-abuse,” Chavez said, checking his watch and reaching for his radio microphone. “Command to Tomlinson.”
“I’m here, boss,” Chavez heard in his earpiece.
“Coming in to relieve you.”
“Roger that, fine with us, boss,” the sergeant replied from inside the locked room.
“Come on.” Ding stood, waving for Pierce and Noonan to follow. It was just a hundred feet to the blue door. Ding twisted the knob and went inside.
Tomlinson and Johnston had hidden in the shadows in the corner opposite the door. They came out when they recognized their fellow team members.
“Okay, stay close and stay alert,” Chavez told the two sergeants.
“Roge-o,” Homer Johnston said on his way out. He was thirsty and planned to get himself something to drink, and on the way out he placed his hands over his ears,popping them open to rid himself of the pump noise.
The sound was annoying, Chavez realized in the first few minutes. Not overly loud, but constant, a powerful deep whirring, like a well-insulated automobile engine. It hovered at the edge of your consciousness and didn’t go away, and on further reflection made him think of a beehive. Maybe that was the annoying part of it.
“Why are we leaving the lights on?” Noonan asked.
“Good question.” Chavez walked over and flipped the switch. The room went almost totally dark, with just a crack of light coming in from under the steel fire door Chavez felt his way to the opposite wall, managed to get there without bumping his head, and leaned against the concrete wall, allowing his eyes to adjust to the darkness.
Gearing was dressed in shorts and low-cut hiking boots, with short socks as well. It seemed the form of dress the locals had adopted for dealing with the heat, and it was comfortable enough, as was his backpack and floppy hat. The stadium concourses were crowded with fans coming in early for the closing ceremonies, and he saw that many of them were standing in the fog to relieve themselves from the oppressive heat of the day. The local weather forecasters had explained ad nauseam about how this version of the El Nino phenomenon had affected the global climate and inflicted unseasonably hot weather on their country, for which they all felt the need to apologize. He found it all rather amusing. Apologize for a natural phenomenon? How ridiculous. With that thought he headed to his objective. In doing so, he walked right past Homer Johnston, who was standing, sipping his Coke.