A Time for War (41 page)

The man dropped the lighter. It burned on the ground, casting its dull glow upward. Jack saw him reach for the chess piece with his free hand.

He was going to snap it.

Jack was on him in two great strides, grabbing the man's right arm with both hands, yanking it from the chess piece. He succeeded, but the man surprised him by putting the queen's head in his mouth.

“God
damn
you!” Jack yelled.

He was trying to bite the thing. Jack released the man's right arm and tried to grab the piece, realized that it might just as easily break in the struggle. Snarling with animal ferocity, Jack put his palm against the back of the man's hand, closed his fingers around those of the terrorist, and pushed hard. The chess piece was shoved into the man's mouth. Jack kept both his hand and that of his opponent against the man's chin, preventing it from opening. Teeth crunched, plastic cracked; all that stood between Jack and death was the man's closed lips.

Grunting, Jack dug his fingernails into the terrorist's flesh, squeezed, pushed him against the wall to pin him there. He bent the man's head back. He couldn't choke him, didn't want the man to lose consciousness. He had to
swallow
the damn thing.

His cheeks,
Jack thought.

While Jack fought off the man's free hand with his own, he shifted his thumb and index finger so they pressed against his two cheeks. It was a trick he remembered from survival training: you could generate saliva by constricting the mouth.

The man shook his head violently as Jack pushed his cheeks in, hard. He could hear the man gagging. He was going to have to swallow or choke.

The man swallowed. He coughed inside his closed mouth, tried to retch, but Jack held him firm.

Within moments there was a change over the entirety of the man's body. He began to spasm, as though he were possessed. Jack heard bubbling sounds. They were not coming from the man's stomach but from inside his throat. His veins were erupting. Even in the dim light Jack could see the darkening of the skin on his neck. His limbs jerking helplessly, the terrorist was no longer resisting him. Jack put both hands against his mouth to keep it shut.

The man's cheeks bloated. He gagged, drowning in blood. It seeped from between his lips. Jack had a feeling that the airborne toxins were secure now, embedded in bodily tissues and fluids. Jack slid him along the wall to the floor, stepped back, picked up the flickering lighter. There was a spot of blood on his hand and his first thought was to use the flame to burn it off. He stopped, realizing that that might aerosolize any bacterium, and simply wiped it on the man's shirt.

He looked down at the figure convulsing on the earth. Spots of blood were soaking through his clothes. They were beading on his forehead, thin streams were running from his nose, and there were ugly, dark blue lines under his face and in the whites of his eyes. The veins began to burst like hot dogs on a grill, some of them releasing blood under the skin, some over it. The man continued to twitch even after life had left him, the blood reacting to whatever pathology was feeding on it.

That medical minds, trained to heal, could conceive of and execute a weaponization project like this was the greatest horror Jack had ever faced. That wasn't just hate, like Islamic terrorists trying to explode a dirty bomb. It was cool calculation, the result of rational thought.

There is your fear,
Jack thought.
There is hopelessness.
The fact that minds smart enough to create such a thing were cold enough to use it.

The cigarette lighter winked out. As it did, Jack became aware of movement and light to his left. He looked over at beams poking here and there in the dark.

Carl Forsyth shone a light on his face.

“Hi, Jack,” he said.

“Hey.”

“Everything secure down here?” he asked.

“It is now,” Jack said, as he backed unsteadily from the dead man.

Several beams played across the dead man.

“You sure about that?” Forsyth asked.

Jack took a moment. He did a quick catalogue of his own bodily functions. He didn't taste blood. He looked at his hands, felt his cheeks, forehead. “Yeah,” he said.

Forsyth stayed back as men in the white, Level A Positive Pressure Personnel suits filed around him. They looked like lunar explorers, their air cylinders and breathing apparatus inside the garments for protection. Three of them went to the bomb, one cuffed the other terrorist who was just coming to, and one came over to Jack carrying handheld electronics. He was testing the air, Jack's breath. Jack couldn't see his face in the dark behind the visor. It was like a medical exam where you didn't think you had anything to worry about until they actually started doing tests.

“Prelim AC,” Jack heard from Forsyth's radio.

That was the technician, muted inside his suit, letting the field director know that everything seemed to be all clear.

Forsyth moved forward, shone his light on the dead man.

“What happened?”

Jack told him. He was in reporter mode, reciting facts concisely. In the telling, it felt as though the struggle had happened to someone else.

When he was finished, Forsyth nodded.

“We're just going to call this a suicide, OK?” Forsyth asked. “Saves me having to arrest you for murder.”

Jack nodded, and an instant later he laughed.

There could
be
no other response to the absurdity of the truth Forsyth had just uttered.

Forsyth wasn't sure how to respond. He just backed away and motioned at EMTs to bring the oxygen over. Jack accepted the breather but declined a stretcher.

Unlike the genocidal son of a bitch at his feet, he had earned the right to leave here with his head high and upright.

*   *   *

The sun was warm on the window of Field Director Forsyth's office as Jack and Dover were shown in. Forsyth stood behind his desk and a young man rose, smiling, from a vinyl-covered couch against the wall.

“You must be Agent Fitzpatrick,” Jack said as he walked in. “I hear we all owe you our lives.”

“It was a team effort,” he replied. “And that's not sunshine I'm blowing. It truly was.”

“I can go along with that,” Jack said.

He introduced Dover Griffith then shook Forsyth's hand. “Sorry that Doc Matson couldn't make it,” Jack said. “He's out diving around Abe Cohen's boat with a speargun. Looking for something.”

“I want to meet this man,” the field director said. “Sounds like someone I should have in my Rolodex.”

“Do you still use a Rolodex?” Jack asked.

“Now more than ever. You never know when the power will go out,” he grinned as he sat. “Anyway, I wanted you all to meet. An official commendation will follow for Agent Fitzpatrick, but I wanted to thank him and the two of you for everything you did—and to tell you what else we've learned. Your friend Mr. Hawke came clean and named his contacts. As far as we can tell he didn't do anything illegal, though the State Department has been in touch with Beijing about the attacks on military and civilian targets by Mr. Sammo Yang, who is presently in custody and will remain so at an unspecified location. Beijing has asked for us to turn him over, but in light of the other events of this week they are not in a position to make demands. One way or another, we will find out who in the Chinese military authorized this program.”

“We understand it was in retaliation for us attacking their satellites,” Jack said.

Forsyth's mouth twisted. “Jack, we're doing good here. Let's keep the detente going.”

“It's just a question.”

“I know. But I'm liking you right now. Save the story-gathering for some other time.”

“Fair enough,” Jack said. His submission reeked of insincerity. “But here's a story you might enjoy. Right before coming over, I heard that the FCC is revoking the permission it gave for Hawke Industries to run its mobile broadband service. The FCC said its decision was based on a report from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration that ‘there is no practical way to mitigate the potential interference at this time' caused by the global positioning devices that relay the satellite signals. They had evidence that it affected everything from aircraft landing gear to weather prediction technology.”

“I saw the NTIA report,” Forsyth said. “What does that have to do with the price of an EMP in China?”

“It supports what I was saying from the start,” Jack said, “that Hawke was hiding the deadly facts about his technology. I'm going to expose that cover-up.”

“Once a truth teller, always a truth teller,” Forsyth remarked helplessly.

“What really ticks me off is that Hawke not only knew the danger, he had his scientists perfect it. What was the effective range of the device?”

“We were at twenty-one-hundred-feet distant with moderate-porous interference. Within specs. And that's for your ears only.”

“Longer range than Squarebeam,” Jack said. “The bastard. That's what he had them doing in Murrieta. Figuring out how to put more bite in those destructive teeth.”

“Moving on,” Forsyth said pointedly, “they've promised to deal with whoever released the pneumonic plague specimens. They didn't deny that they have a germ warfare program but it doesn't do anyone any good when those germs get out. Beijing said they know nothing about that part of it and Washington believes them.”

“Do we know who was behind that project?”

“We're still trying to get the lay of the land from the folks we rounded up, the ones from Eastern Rim and also the fellows Doc trussed up at their office. All fingers point to their consulate and to the ranking official in their consulate, Mr. Jing Jintao. Harbor patrol saw him in the harbor last night, on a powerboat, headed out to sea. They stopped him because the boat was traveling without lights. He turned around a few minutes later and went back to shore.”

“He probably heard that his plan had failed.”

“That's our guess,” Forsyth said. “The Coast Guard spotted a yacht out by the Farallons around the same time. Before they could contact it, the vessel headed back out to sea.”

“A hire?”

“Possibly,” Forsyth said. “We don't have any ID on it yet. Now,” he looked at Dover, “I also understand that you're currently between positions.”

“You could say that.”

“We've got a pretty good intel division, but we lack Chinese intelligence resources. I have a feeling that's going to be a growth market. Would you consider relocating to San Francisco and coming to work for us? I think you'll find the city a little more exciting than Suitland.”

“It hasn't let me down yet,” she beamed.

“So that's a yes?” Forsyth asked.

“It is. Thank you, sir.”

“Go easy on the ‘sir,'” Jack said. “You don't work for him yet.”

Forsyth regarded Jack. “You did great work here. Again.”

“Thanks.”

“What was the line in the movie? Something about this being the start of a beautiful friendship?”

“It was Humphrey Bogart to Claude Rains in
Casablanca,
” Jack said. “And like I just told Dover, let's not get carried away. This is a big story. I'm going to cover it.”

“You just can't help yourself, can you?” Forsyth asked.

“Hawke told me I would always be a lonely man because ideals were more important to me than anything,” Jack said. “Well, this is still a country with a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, as Mr. Lincoln so aptly put it. They have a right to know what has happened on
both
sides of the globe.”

Forsyth stood and offered his hand. “To be continued, then.”

Jack shook it. The handshake lasted a little longer than it needed to and Forsyth's eye contact was unwavering. There was respect, at least, in that.

Dover did not hug Jack in front of her new boss; her broad smile was embrace enough. She stayed to fill out paperwork, Agent Fitzpatrick went back to work, and Jack walked alone into the beautiful San Francisco morning.

Not quite alone,
he thought. And definitely not lonely, as Hawke had once described him.

He still had his big, vibrant, beautiful city.

*   *   *

Consul General Jing Jintao sat at his desk, thinking about pride and about disgrace.

The night before, watching the video images from the crawler on his cell phone, he was stirred by the risk and loyalty of his partners. He was on his way to the boat at the time, looking forward to joining them at sea, waiting for news of the impact of their work.

That had not happened.

The boat left without him, on his orders, against Liu Tang's protestations. As Liu Tang journeyed back to China, Jintao spent the night in his rooms at the consulate, waiting to see if any of the strands of the operation threaded their way back to him. He did not believe the members of the cell would talk. They were loyal. He did not think Sammo Yang would say anything about his own mission, which came from Beijing, not the consulate.

He had waited until the morning news reports spoke of a plot hatched by anarchists but thwarted by the FBI and informants—a plot to release a toxin through holes blown in the streets of the Financial District.

“They are said to be Chinese nationals,” said one newscast, “but neither the Bureau nor the State Department will confirm this information, which was provided by controversial former talk show host Jack Hatfield. The Chinese consulate in San Francisco has not returned any of our requests for comment.”

In fact, Jintao had his own plan for countering these reports. He had spoken with several ministers and fellow diplomats during the night, denying any knowledge of these actions. Today, he had called for a press conference at the consulate this morning to express outrage at the unfounded allegations and reliance on the word of a “disgraced” conspiracy theorist for information.