Rainbow Six (1997) (97 page)

Henriksen was being overly cautious, Dmitriy thought. What could the FBI possibly have on him? A name? From that they could perhaps develop—what? Credit cards, if they were very lucky, and from that his travel records, but none of them would have evidentiary value in any court of law. No, unless Sean Grady positively identified him as a conduit of information and funds, he was totally safe, and Popov thought he could depend on Grady not to cooperate with the British. He hated them too much to be cooperative. It was just a matter of crawling back into his hole and pulling it in after himself—an Americanism he admired. The money he’d stashed in the secondary Swiss account
might
be discoverable, but there were ways to handle that—attorneys were so useful as an institution, he’d learned. Working through them was better than all the KGB fieldcraft combined.

No, if there was any danger to him, it was to be found in his employer, who might not know the rules of the game—but even if he didn’t, Henriksen would help, and so Dmitriy relaxed and sipped his drink. He’d explore this place tomorrow, and from the way he was treated, he’d know—

—no, there was an even easier way. He lifted his phone, hit 9 to get an outside line, then dialed his apartment in New York. The call went through. The phone rang four times before his answering machine clicked in. So, he had phone access to the outside. That meant he was safe, but he was no closer to understanding what was going on than he’d been during that first meeting in France, chatting with the American businessman and regaling him with tales of a former KGB field intelligence officer. Now here he was, in
Kansas,
USA, drinking vodka and watching television, with over six million American dollars in two numbered accounts in Switzerland. He’d reached one goal. Next he had to meet another. What the hell was this adventure all about? Would he find out here? He hoped so.

 

 

The airplanes were crammed with people, all of them inbound to Kingsford Smith International Airport outside Sydney. Many of them landed on the runway, which stuck out like a finger into Botany Bay, so famous as the landing point for criminals and other English rejects sent halfway round the world on wooden sailing ships to start a new country, which, to the disbelief of those who’d dispatched them, they’d done remarkably well. Many of the passengers on the inbound flights were young, fit athletes, the pride and pick of the countries that had sent them dressed in uniform clothing that proclaimed their nations of origin. Most were tourists, people with ticket-and-accommodation packages expensively bought from travel agents or given as gifts from political figures in their home countries. Many carried miniature flags. The few business passengers had listened to all manner of enthusiastic predictions for national glory at the Olympic games, which would start in the next few days.

On arriving, the athletes were treated like visiting royalty and conveyed to buses that would take them up Highway 64 to the city, and thence to the Olympic Village, which had been expensively built by the Australian government to house them. They could see the magnificent stadium nearby, and the athletes looked and wondered if they’d find personal glory there.

 

 

“So, Colonel, what do you think?”

“It’s one hell of a stadium, and that’s a fact,” Colonel Wilson Gearing, U.S. Army Chemical Corps, retired, replied. “But it sure gets hot here in the summer, pal.”

“It’s that El Niño business again. The ocean currents off South America have changed again, and that’s associated with unusually hot temperatures here. It’ll be in the mid-thirties—nineties to you, I suppose—for the whole Olympiad.”

“Well, I hope this fogging system works, ’cuz if it doesn’t, you’ll have a lot of heat-stroke cases here, pal.”

“It works,” the Aussie cop told him. “It’s fully tested.”

“Can I take a look at it now? Bill Henriksen wants me to see if it could be used as a chemical-agent delivery system by the bad guys.”

“Certainly. This way.” They were there in five minutes. The water-input piping was contained in its own locked room. The cop had the key for this, and took the colonel inside.

“Oh, you chlorinate the water here?” Gearing asked in semisurprise. The water came in from the Sydney city water system, didn’t it?

“Yes, we don’t want to spread any germs on our guests, do we?”

“Not exactly,” Colonel Gearing agreed, looking at the plastic chlorine container that hung on the distribution piping beyond the actual pumps. Water was filtered through that before it went into the fogging nozzles that hung in all the concourses and ramps to the stadium bowl itself. The system would have to be flushed with unchlorinated water before delivery would work, but that was easily accomplished, and the false chlorine container in his hotel room was an exact twin of this one. The contents even looked like chlorine, almost, though the nano-capsules actually contained something called Shiva. Gearing thought about that behind blank brown eyes. He’d been a chemical weapons expert his whole professional life, having worked at the Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland and Dugway Proving Ground in Utah—but, well, this wasn’t really chemical warfare. It was bio-war, a sister science of the one he’d studied for over twenty uniformed years. “Is the door guarded?” he asked.

“No, but it is alarmed, and it takes some minutes to play with the system, as you can see. The alarm system reports to the command post, and we have an ample reaction force there.”

“How ample?” the retired colonel asked next.

“Twenty SAS members, plus twenty police constables, are there at all times, plus ten more SAS circulating in pairs around the stadium. The people at the CP are armed with automatic weapons. The ones on patrol with pistols and radios. There is also a supplementary reaction force a kilometer distant with light armored vehicles and heavy weapons, platoon strength. Beyond that, a battalion of infantry twenty kilometers away, with helicopters and other support.”

“Sounds good to me,” Colonel Gearing said. “Can you give me the alarm code for this facility?”

They didn’t even hesitate. He was a former staff-grade army officer, after all, and a senior member of the consulting team for security at the Olympic Games. “One-One-Three-Three-Six-Six,” the senior cop told him. Gearing wrote it down, then punched the numbers into the keypad, which armed and then disarmed the system. He’d be able to switch out the chlorine canister very quickly. The system was designed for rapid servicing. This would work just fine, just like the model they’d set up in Kansas, on which he and his people had practiced for several days. They’d gotten the swap-out time down to fourteen seconds. Anything under twenty meant that nobody would notice anything remiss in the fog-cooling system, because residual pressure would maintain the fogging stream.

For the first time, Gearing saw the place where he’d be doing it, and that generated a slight chill in his blood. Planning was one thing. Seeing where it would happen for-real was something else. This was the place. Here he would start a global plague that would take lives in numbers far too great to tally, and which in the end would leave alive only the elect. It would save the planet—at a ghastly price, to be sure, but he’d been committed to this mission for years. He’d seen what man could do to harm things. He’d been a young lieutenant at Dugway Proving Grounds when they’d had the well-publicized accident with GB, a persistent nerve agent that had blown too far and slaughtered a few hundred sheep—and neurotoxins were not a pretty death, even for sheep. The news media hadn’t even bothered to talk about the wild game that had died a similar, ugly death, everything from insects to antelope. It had shaken him that his own organization, the United States Army, could make so grave an error to cause such pain. The things he’d learned later had been worse. The binary agents he’d worked on for years—an effort to manufacture “safe” poisons for battlefield use . . . the crazy part was that it had all begun in Germany as insecticide research in the 1920s and 1930s. Most of the chemicals used to kill off insects were nerve agents, simple ones that attacked and destroyed the rudimentary nervous systems in ants and beetles, but those German chemists had stumbled upon some of the deadliest chemical compounds ever formulated. So much of Gearing’s career had been spent with the intelligence community, evaluating information about possible chemical-warfare plants in countries not trusted to have such things.

But the problem with chemical weapons had always been their distribution—how to spread them evenly across a battlefield, thus exposing enemy soldiers efficiently. That the same chemicals would travel downrange and kill innocent civilians had been the dirty secret that the organizations and the governments that ruled them had always ignored. And they didn’t even consider the wildlife that would also be exterminated in vast quantities—and worse still, the genetic damage those agents caused, because marginal doses of nerve gas, below the exposure needed to kill, invaded the very DNA of the victim, ensuring mutations that would last for generations. Gearing had spent his life knowing these things, and he supposed that it had desensitized him to the taking of life in large quantities.

This wasn’t quite the same thing. He would not be spreading organophosphate chemical poisons, but rather tiny virus particles. And the people walking through the cooling fog in the concourses and ramps to the stadium bowl would breathe them in, and their body chemistry would break down the nano-capsules, allowing the Shiva strands to go to work … slowly, of course … and they’d go home to spread the Shiva farther, and in four to six weeks after the ending of the Sydney Olympics, the plague would erupt worldwide, and a global panic would ensue. Then Horizon Corporation would announce that it had an experimental “A” vaccine that had worked in animals and primates—and was safe for human usage—ready for mass production, and so it would be mass-produced and distributed worldwide, and four to six weeks after injection, those people, too, would develop the Shiva symptoms, and with luck the world would be depopulated down to a fractional percentage of the current population. Disorders would break out, killing many of the people blessed by Nature with highly effective immune systems, and in six months or so, there would be just a few left, well organized and well equipped, safe in Kansas and Brazil, and in six months more they would be the inheritors of a world returning to its natural state. This wouldn’t be like Dugway, a purposeless accident. This would be a considered act by a man who’d contemplated mass murder for all of his professional life, but who’d only helped kill innocent animals … He turned to look at his hosts.

“What’s the extended weather forecast?”

“Hot and dry, old boy. I hope the athletes are fit. They’ll need to be.”

“Well, then, this fogging system will be a lifesaver,” Gearing observed. “Just so the wrong people don’t fool with it. With your permission, I’ll have my people keep an eye on this thing.”

“Fine,” the senior cop agreed. The American was really fixated on this fogging system, but he’d been a gas soldier, and maybe that explained it.

 

 

Popov hadn’t closed his shades the previous evening, and so the dawn awoke him rather abruptly. He opened his eyes, then squinted them in pain as the sun rose over the Kansas plains. The medicine cabinet in the bathroom, he found, had Tylenol and aspirin, and there were coffee grounds for the machine in the kitchen area, but nothing of value in the refrigerator. So he showered and had his coffee, then went out of the room looking for food. He found a cafeteria—a huge one—almost entirely empty of patrons, though there were a few people near the food tables, and there he went, got breakfast and sat alone, as he looked at the others in the cavernous room. Mainly people in their thirties and forties, he thought, professional-looking, some wearing white laboratory coats.

“Mr. Popov?” a voice said. Dmitriy turned.

“Yes?”

“I’m David Dawson, chief of security here. I have a badge for you to wear”—he handed over a white plastic shield that pinned to his shirt—“and I’m supposed to show you around today. Welcome to Kansas.”

“Thank you.” Popov pinned the badge on. It even had his picture on it, the Russian saw.

“You want to wear that at all times, so that people know you belong here,” Dawson explained helpfully.

“Yes, I understand.” So this place was pass-controlled, and it had a director of site security. How interesting.

“How was your flight in last night?”

“Pleasant and uneventful,” Popov replied, sipping his second coffee of the morning. “So, what is this place?”

“Well, Horizon set it up as a research facility. You know what the company does, right?”

“Yes.” Popov nodded. “Medicines and biological research, a world leader.”

“Well, this is another research-and-development facility for their work. It was just finished recently. We’re bringing people in now. It will soon be the company’s main facility.”

“Why here in the middle of nothing?” Popov asked, looking around at the mainly empty cafeteria.

“Well, for starters, it’s centrally located. You can be anywhere in the country in less than three hours. And nobody’s around to bother us. It’s a secure facility, too. Horizon does lots of work that requires protection, you see.”

“Industrial espionage?”

Dawson nodded. “That’s right. We worry about that.”

“Will I be able to look around, see the grounds and such?”

“I’ll drive you around myself. Mr. Henriksen told me to extend you the hospitality of the facility. Go ahead and finish your breakfast. I have a few things I have to do. I’ll be back in about fifteen minutes.”

“Good, thank you,” Popov said, watching him walk out of the room. This would be useful. There was a strange, institutional quality to this place, almost like a secure government facility . . . like a
Russian
facility, Popov thought. It seemed to have no soul at all, no character, no human dimension that he could identify. Even KGB would have hung a photo of Lenin on the huge, bare, white walls to give the place
some
human scale. There was a wall of tinted windows, which allowed him to see out to what appeared to be wheat fields and a road, but nothing else. It was almost like being on a ship at sea, he thought, unlike anything he’d ever experienced. The former KGB officer worked through his breakfast, all of his instincts on alert, hoping to learn more, and as quickly as he could.