“What’s that mean?” Carol Brightling asked.
“I’m not sure. Hell, maybe he got hit by a car in the street-”
“-Or maybe Popov spilled his guts to the wrong people and they bagged him,” John Brightling suggested nervously.
“Popov didn’t even know his name–Hunnicutt couldn’t have told him, he didn’t know Gearing’s name either.” But then Henriksen thought, Oh, shit. Foster did know how the Shiva was supposed to be delivered, didn’t he? Oh, shit.
“What’s the matter, Bill?” John asked, seeing the man’s face and knowing that something was wrong.
“John, we may have a problem,” the former FBI agent announced.
“What problem?” Carol asked. Henriksen explained and the mood in the room changed abruptly. “You mean, they might know?. . .Henriksen nodded. “That is possible, yes.”
“My God,” the Presidential Science Advisor exclaimed. If they know that, then-then-then-”
“Yeah.” Bill nodded. “Then we’re fucked.”
“What can we do about this?”
“For starters, we destroy all the evidence. All the Shiva, all the vaccines, all the records. It’s all on computer, so we just erase it. There shouldn’t be much in the way of a paper trail, because we told people not to print anything up, and to destroy any paper notes they might make. We can do that from here. I can access all the company computers from my office and kill off all the records”
“They’re encrypted, all of them,” John Brightling pointed out.
“You want to bet against the code-breakers at Fort Meade? I don’t,” Henriksen told them. “No, those files all have to go, John. Look, you beat a criminal prosecution by denying evidence to the prosecutors. Without physical evidence, they can’t hurt you.”
“What about witnesses?”
“The most overrated thing in the world is an eyewitness. Any lawyer with half a brain can make fools out of them. No, when I was working cases for the Bureau, I wanted something I could hold in my hand, something you could pass over to the jury so they could see it and feel it. Eyewitness testimony is pretty useless in court, despite what you see on TV. Okay, I’m going to my office to get rid of the computer stuff.” Henriksen left at once, leaving the two Brightlings behind him.
“My God, John,” Carol said in quiet alarm, “what if people find out, nobody’ll understand . . .”
“Understand that we were going to kill them and their families? No,” her husband agreed dryly, “I don’t think Joe Sixpack and Archie Bunker will understand that very well.”
“So, what do we do?”
“We get the hell out of the country. We fly down to Brazil with everyone who knows what the Project is all about. We still have access to money-I have dozens of covert accounts we can access electronically-and they probably can’t make a criminal case against us if Bill can trash all the computer files. Okay, they may have Wil Gearing under arrest, but he’s just one voice, and I’m not sure they can come after us legally, in a foreign country, on the word of one person. There are only fifty or so people who really know what’s happening-all of it, I mean and we have enough airplanes to get us all to Manaus.”
In his office, Henriksen lit up his personal computer and pulled open an encrypted file. It had telephone numbers and access codes to every computer in Horizon Corporation, plus the names of the files relating to the Project. He accessed them via modem, looked for the files that had to go, and moved them with mouse-clicks into trash cans that shredded the files completely instead of merely removing their electronic address codes. He found that he was sweating as he did so, and it took him thirty-nine minutes, but after that time was concluded, he was certain that he’d completely destroyed them all. He checked his list and his memory for the file names and conducted another global search, but no, those files were completely gone now. Good.
Okay, he asked himself, what else might they have? They might have Gearing’s Shiva-delivery canister. ‘What would be hard to argue with, but what, really, did it mean? It would mean, if the right people looked at it,that Gearing had been carrying a potential bio-war weapon. Gearing could tell a U.S. attorney that it had come from Horizon Corporation, but no one working on that segment of the Project would ever admit to having done it, and so, no, there would be no corroborating evidence to back up the assertion.
Okay, there were by his count fifty-three Horizon and Global Security employees who knew the Project from beginning to end. Work on the “A” and “B” vaccines could be explained away as medical research. The Shiva virus and the vaccine supplies would be burned in a matter of hours, leaving no physical evidence at all.
This was enough-well, it was almost enough. They still had Gearing, and Gearing, if he talked-and he would talk, Henriksen was sure, because the Bureau had ways of choking information out of people-could make life very uncomfortable for Brightling and a lot of other people, including himself. They would probably avoid conviction, but the embarrassment of a trial-and the things that the revelations might generate,, casual comments made by Project members to others, would be woven together . . . and there was Popov, who could link John Brightling and himself to terrorist acts. But they could finger Popov for murdering Foster Hunnicutt, and that would pollute whatever case he might try to make. . . the best thing would be to be beyond their reach when they tried to assemble a case. That meant Brazil, and Project Alternate in the jungles west of Manaus. They could head down there, sheltered by Brazil’s wonderfully protective extradition laws, and study the rain forest . . . yes, that made sense. Okay, he thought, he had a list of the full Project members, those who knew everything, those who, if the FBI got them and interrogated them, could hang them all. He printed this list of the True Believers and tucked the pages in his shirt pocket. With the work done and the alternatives analyzed, Henriksen went back to Brightling’s penthouse office.
“I’ve told the flight crews to get the birds warmed up,” Brightling told him when he came in.
“Good.” Henriksen nodded. “I think Brazil looks pretty good right now. If nothing else, we can get all of our critical personnel fully briefed on how to handle this, how to act if anyone asks them some questions. We can beat this one, John, but we have to be smart about it.”
“What about the planet?” Carol Brightling asked sadly.
“Carol,” Bill replied, “you take care of your own ass first. You can’t save Nature from inside Marion Federal Penitentiary, but if we play it smart, we can deny evidence to anyone who investigates us, and without that we’re safe, guys. Now”-he pulled the list from his pocket-“these are the only people we have to protect. There’s fifty-three of them, and you have four Gulfstreams sitting out there. We can fly us all down to Project Alternate. Any disagreement on that?”
John Brightling shook his head. “No, I’m with you. Can this keep us in the clear legally?”
Henriksen nodded emphatically. “I think so. Popov will be a problem, but he’s a murderer. I’m going to report the Hunnicutt killing to the local cops before we fly off. That will compromise his value as a witness-make it look like he’s just telling a tale to save his own ass from the gallows, whatever they use to execute murderers here in Kansas. I’ll have Maclean and Killgore tape statements we can hand over to the local police. It may not be enough to convict him, but it will make him pretty uncomfortable. That’s how you do this, break up the other guy’s chain of evidence and the credibility of his witnesses. In a year, maybe eighteen months, we have our lawyers sit down and chat with the local U.S. attorney, and then we come home. Until then we camp out in Brazil, and you can run the company from there via the Internet, can’t you?”
“Well, it’s not as good as what we planned, but . . .”
“Yes,” Carol agreed. “But it beats the hell out of life in a federal prison.”
“Get everything moving, Bill,” John ordered.
“So, what do we do with this?” Clark asked, on waking up.
“Well,” Tom Sullivan answered, “first we go to the Assistant Director in Charge of the New York office, and then we talk to a United States attorney about building a criminal case.”
“I don’t think so,” Clark responded, rubbing his eyes and reaching for the coffee.
“We can’t just put the arm on them and whack’em, you know. We’re cops. We can’t break the law,” Chatham pointed out.
“This can never see the light of day in a court. Besides, who’s to say that you’ll win the case? How hard will this be to cover up?”