“How bad is the pain?” he asked his doomed patient.
“Cramping, pretty bad,” she replied. “Like flu, plus something else.”
“Well, you do have a moderate fever. Any idea where you may have caught it? I mean, there is a new strain of flu out of Hong Kong, and looks like you have it.”
“Maybe at work . . . before I came here. Can’t remember. I’m going to be okay, right?” The concern had fought its way through the Valium-impregnated food she got every day.
“I think so.” Killgore smiled around his surgical mask. “This one can be dangerous, but only to infants and the elderly, and you’re not either one of those, are you?”
“I guess not.” She smiled, too, at the reassurance from the physician, which was always comforting.
“Okay, what we’re going to do is get an IV started to keep you properly hydrated. And we’ll work on the discomfort a little with a little morphine drip, okay?”
“You’re the doctor,” Subject F4 replied.
“Okay, hold your arm still. I have to make a stick, and it will hurt a little bit . . . there,” he said, on doing it. “How was that?”
“Not too bad.”
“Okay.” Killgore punched in the activation number on the Christmas tree. The morphine drip started instantly. About ten seconds later, it got into the patient’s bloodstream.
“Ohhhh, oh yes,” she said, eyes closed when the initial rush of the drug hit her system. Killgore had never experienced it himself, but he imagined it to be almost a sexual feeling, the way the narcotic soothed her entire body. The tension in her musculature all went away at once. You could see the body relax. Her mouth changed most of all, from tension to the slackness of sleep. It was too bad, really. F4 wasn’t exactly beautiful, but she was pretty in her way, and judging from what he’d watched on the control-room TV monitor, she was a sexual treat for her partners, even though that had been caused by the tranquilizers. But, good lay or not, she would be dead in five to seven days, despite the best efforts he and his people would render. On the tree was a small drip-bottle of Interleukin-3a, recently developed by SmithKline’s excellent collection of research scientists for cancer treatment-it had also shown some promise in countering viruses, which was unique in the world of medicine. Somehow it encouraged the body’s immune system, though through a mechanism that was not yet understood. It would be the most likely treatment for Shiva victims once the disease became widespread, and he had to confirm that it wouldn’t work. That had been the case with the winos, but they also needed to test it in fundamentally healthy patients, male and female, just to make sure. Too bad for her, he thought, since she had a face and a name to go along with her number. It would also be too bad for millions-actually billions-of others. But it would be easier with them. He might see their faces on TV, but TV wasn’t real, was it? Just dots on a phosphor screen.
The idea was simple enough. A rat was a pig was a dog, was a boy – woman in this case. All had an equal right to life. They’d done extensive testing of Shiva on monkeys, for whom it had proved universally lethal, and he’d watched all those tests, and shared the pain of the subsentient animals who felt pain as real as what F4 felt, though in the case of the monkeys morphine hadn’t been possible, and he’d hated that hated inflicting pain on innocent creatures with whom he could not talk and to whom he could not explain things. And though it was justifiable in the big-picture sense – they would be saving millions, billions of animals from the depredations of humans – to see an animal suffer was a lot for him and his colleagues to bear, for they all empathized with all creatures great and small, and more for the small, the innocent, and the helpless than for the larger two-legged creatures who cared not a whim about them. As F4 probably did not, though they’d never asked. Why confuse the issue, after all? He looked down again. F4 was already stuporous from the narcotic he’d administered. At least she, unlike the experimental monkeys, was not in pain. That was merciful of them, wasn’t it?
“What black operation is that?” the desk officer asked over the secure phone link.
“I have no idea, but he is a serious man, remember? A colonel of the Innostrannoye Upravleniye, you will recall, Division Four, Directorate S.”
“Ah, yes, I know him. He spent much time at Fensterwalde and Karlovy Vary. He was RIF’d along with all those people. What is he doing now?”
“I do not know, but he offers us information on this Clark in return for some of our data. I recommend that we make the trade, Vasily Borissovich.”
“Clark is a name known to us. He has met personally with Sergey Nikolay’ch,” the desk officer told the rezident. “He’s a senior field officer, principally a paramilitary type, but also an instructor at the CIA Academy in Virginia. He is known to be close to Mary Patricia Foleyeva and her husband. It is also said that he has the ear of the American President. Yes, I think we would be interested in his current activities.”
The phone they spoke over was the Russian version of the American STU-3, the technology having been stolen about three years before by a team working for Directorate T of the First Chief Directorate. The internal microchips, which had been slavishly copied, scrambled the incoming and outgoing signals with a 128-bit encryption system whose key changed every hour, and changed further with the individual users whose personal codes were part of the insertable plastic keys they used. The STU system had defied the Russians’ best efforts to crack it, even with exact knowledge of the internal workings of the system hardware, and they assumed that the Americans had the same problems – after all, for centuries Russia had produced the world’s best mathematicians, and the best of them hadn’t even come up with a theoretical model for cracking the scrambling system.
But the Americans had, with the revolutionary application of quantum theory to communications security, a decryption system so complex that only a handful of the “Directorate 2” people at the National Security Agency actually understood it. But they didn’t have to. They had the world’s most powerful supercomputers to do the real work. These were located in the basement of the sprawling NSA headquarters building, a dungeon like area whose roof was held up with naked steel I-beams because it had been excavated for just this purpose. The star machine there was one made by a company gone bankrupt, the Super-Connector from Thinking Machines, Inc., of Cambridge, Massachusetts. The machine, custom-built for NSA, had sat largely unused for six years, because nobody had come up with a way to program it efficiently, but the advent of quantum theory had changed that, too, and the monster machine was now cranking merrily away while its operators wondered who they could find to make the next generation of this complex machine.
All manner of signals came into Fort Meade, from all over the world, and one such source included GCHQ, Britain’s General Communications Headquarters at Cheltenham, NSA’s sister service in England. The British knew what phones were whose in the Russian Embassy-they hadn’t changed the numbers, even with the demise of the USSR-and this one was on the desk of the rezident. The sound quality wasn’t good enough for a voice-print, since the Russian version of the STU system digitized signals less efficiently than the American version, but once the encryption was defeated, the words were easily recognizable. The decrypted signal was cross-loaded to yet another computer, which translated the Russian conversation to English with a fair degree of reliability. Since the signal was from the London rezident to Moscow, it was placed on the top of the electronic pile, and cracked, translated, and printed less than an hour after it had been made. That done, it was transmitted to Cheltenham immediately, and at Fort Meade routed to a signals officer whose job it was to send intercepts to the people interested in the content. In this case, it was routed straight to the Director of Central Intelligence and, because it evidently discussed the identity of a field spook, to the Deputy Director (Operations), since all the field spooks worked for her. The former was a busier person than the latter, but that didn’t matter, since the latter was married to the former.
“Ed?” his wife’s voice said.
“Yeah, honey?” Foley replied. “Somebody’s trying to ID John Clark over in U.K.”
Ed Foley’s eyes went fully open at that news. “Really? Who?”
“The station chief in London talked with his desk officer in Moscow, and we intercepted it. The message ought to be in your IN pile, Eddie.”