Bio-Strike

ELEVEN

“I can’t do what you’re asking. It isn’t an option.”

“I’m sorry you feel that way, Palardy,” Enrique Quiros said. “Because, as a matter of fact, it’s your only option.”

“Don’t use my name. It isn’t safe—”

Quiros shook his head and indicated the portable bug detector on the seat between them.

“There’s where you’re mistaken again,” he said. “Because this is my Safe Car. Honestly, that’s what I call it, just as some people might give their cars endearing little names like Bessie, Marie, or whatever.”

Palardy let out a sigh. The Safe Car in which they sat was a Fiat Coupé that Quiros had driven into the parking lot outside the cruise ship terminal on Harbor Drive. It was six P.M., the upper rim of the sun sinking into San Diego Bay, the area outside the terminal crosshatched with dusky shadows. Palardy had left his own Dodge Caravan several aisles away when he’d reluctantly arrived in answer to Quiros’s summons.

“Those pocket units aren’t reliable,” he said. “Their bandwidth sensitivity’s limited. And certain kinds of listening devices operate in modes that won’t scan. It’s my job to know this sort of thing, my goddamned job, or did you forget—”

“Settle down. I haven’t forgotten anything,” Quiros interrupted. “This vehicle is garaged on my property, and the grounds are under constant video surveillance. There are alarms. Canine patrols. Unless I happen to be inside it, as now, it’s never parked anywhere else.”

They looked at each other, Palardy seeing his own features reflected in Quiros’s dark green Brooks Brothers sunglasses. He’d always found it offensive when a man wore tinted lenses during a talk with somebody who wasn’t wearing them, in this instance himself, the concealment of the eyes a blatant means of gaining distance and position. State troopers, paranoiacs, egotistical movie stars — so many personality types, and yet that desire to set themselves apart was an attribute they all shared.

“Open areas are hard to secure; even the military has problems with them, I don’t care how many watchdogs or alarms you’ve got.” Palardy sighed heavily again. “Listen, I’m not trying to argue. My point’s just that it doesn’t hurt to be careful.”

Plainly tired of the subject, Quiros reached into the inner pocket of his sport jacket and produced a zippered leather case.

“Let’s make this short so we can both move on,” he said, holding the case out to Palardy. “Everything you’ll need is in here.”

“I told you I can’t do this. It’s too dangerous. It’s too much for me.”

Quiros looked at him in silence for several moments. Then he nodded to himself, turned toward the front of the car, and leaned back against his headrest.

“Okay,” he said, staring straight ahead with the case still in his hand. “Okay, here’s how it is. I’m not interested in what you have to tell me. When you wanted money to pay off your gambling debts in Cuiabá, you were glad to sell off confidential information about the layout and security of an installation that it was your job to protect. When you were rotated back to the States and found yourself in hock again, loan sharks riding all over you, you became more than eager to slink into your employer’s office and collect material for a genetic blueprint that you knew would be—”

“Please, I don’t feel comfortable talking about—”

Quiros raised his hand. The gesture was slow and without anger, but something about it instantly quieted Palardy.

“If I were you, I wouldn’t feel comfortable, either. Because you’ve done worse than break bonds with every professional trust that’s been placed in you. You’ve been an accessory to acts of murder and sabotage. And if that information were to surface, it could put you away in prison for the rest of your life.”

There was a brief silence. Palardy swallowed spitlessly. It made a clicking sound in his throat.

“A decision’s been made for you,” Quiros said. “It’s too late for objections or disavowals. And my advice is to drop them right now. Or I promise you’ll regret it.”

Palardy swallowed again. Click.

“I didn’t want to get involved in anything like this,” he said hoarsely.

Quiros stared out at the terminal in the deepening pool of shadows near the harbor’s edge.

“It could be we have that in common,” he said, his voice quiet. And paused a beat. “You’ll do what you have to do.”

He extended the case across the seat without turning from the windshield.

This time, Palardy took it.

In a rental van on the opposite side of the parking aisle, Lathrop began to pack his remote laser voice monitoring system into its black hardshell camera case. From the rear window panel of the van, the invisible beam of the device’s near-infrared semiconductor laser diode had been aimed at a ninety-degree angle through the back windshield at the Fiat’s rearview mirror.

It is a basic rule of optics that the angle of incidence is equal to the angle of reflection. What this means in practical application is that a beam of coherent light — that is, a beam in which all light waves are in phase, the defining and essential quality of a laser transmission — will bounce back to its source at the same angle at which it strikes a reflecting surface, unless that surface creates some sort of modulation, or interference, to throw the waves out of phase, causing some to bounce back at different angles than others. Vibrating infinitesimally from the conversation inside the Fiat — perhaps a thousandth of an inch or less with each utterance — the window glass had caused corresponding fluctuations in the optical beam reflecting off it, which were then converted into electronic pulses by the eavesdropping unit’s receiver, filtered from background noise, enhanced, and digitally recorded.

Lathrop had gotten every word spoken inside the car. And though he wasn’t yet certain what they all meant, one thing was eminently clear to him.

After days of following Enrique Quiros in a succession of rentals and disguises, days of following his instincts, his patience finally had been rewarded with a deeper and richer load of pay dirt than he could have imagined.