Bio-Strike

TWENTY-ONE

“There it is. About three blocks up ahead of us. That tall office building, see?” Ricci’s contact took a hand off the steering wheel and motioned to his right. “Quiros’s front company’s on the third floor. Golden Triangle Services.”

Ricci glanced out the passenger window.

“Guess it tickles his funny bone,” he said.

The driver crawled the car through rush-hour traffic. He was a guy in his early thirties named Derek Glenn with skin the color of roasted chestnuts, a close-cropped nap of black hair, and a toned, broad-shouldered physique.

“His outfit’s title, you mean?”

Ricci nodded.

“Golden Triangle. The heroin production and trafficking center of the world,” he said. “Thailand, Laos, Burma—”

“Myanmar,” Glenn said.

Ricci gave him a look.

“Is what Burma calls itself these days,” Glenn said. “Anyway, sure, it’s smirky of Quiros. But that’s how developers talk about the area north of the city where all the new Web shops have gone up, you know. Including ours.”

Ricci made a dismissive sound in his throat. Glenn was with a contingent of Sword personnel assigned to a locally based UpLink division specializing in the development of secure corporate and government intranet sites. He knew the territory and was trying to be helpful. But the lightning run of events that had swept Ricci from Palardy’s death room in Sunnydale to this strange city hundreds of miles down the coast within a span of ten hours had left him in an unpleasant and critical mood. He didn’t care whether the dope capital’s name was Burma, Myanmar, or Brigadoon. He didn’t care what sort of pitch the civil boosters were throwing prospective real-estate buyers about the neighborhood. He thought the smoked glass tower where Enrique Quiros was sitting pretty looked like a glassine envelope of heroin blown up to outrageous dimensions.

“Listen,” Glenn said. “My point’s that Enrique isn’t just some slick. Smooth, yeah. But there’s a difference. You have to respect him. He’s got an Ivy League business degree. He’s grounded in his family. And his main thing is to watch out for them. If it wasn’t for his old man asking him to take over the rackets before he died, he might have gone legit. But once that happened, he probably felt obliged—”

“I read his make on the flight over,” Ricci said.

Glenn was looking straight out the front window.

“The company Learjet doesn’t seem like a shoddy way to travel,” he said. “One of these days maybe I’ll get to check it out firsthand. Fly outside coach on a passenger jet. No screeching infant with diaper rash behind me. No bratty older brother popping chewing gum bubbles in my ear.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Glenn shrugged.

“I’ve been in San Diego a long time and figured you’d want to hear what I know,” he said. “You don’t, no problem. I meet your team at the airport, bring you here, job’s done. I can go have a beer someplace nice and quiet. That’s the best part of being an enlisted man.”

“And the worst?”

“Not anything worth a complaint. But it might be sensible for you to remember I went through the same training program as the San Jose glory boys.” He paused. “And maybe some other stuff before it.”

Ricci turned to him, then hesitated.

“Sorry I bit,” Ricci said. “I’m on the wrong side of lousy. Nothing to do with you.”

Glenn kept looking out the windshield.

“There’s been talk the skipper’s pretty bad off,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“He going to make it?”

“I don’t know. I’m hoping to dig up something that can assist the docs.”

Glenn shook his head and inched forward in silence.

“What’s Quiros been up to since I called?” Ricci asked after a minute.

“Not much,” Glenn said. “He left the building maybe three hours ago. Alone. Took a walk around. Then he went back inside and hasn’t gone anywhere since. It’s like he was clearing his head.”

“Think he smells you’ve got him covered?”

“Maybe, maybe not. We’re pretty good at it. Either way, he hasn’t tried to book.”

Ricci considered that. After pulling Quiros’s file out of the Sword database in San Jose, he’d gotten the phone number of the Golden Triangle front operation and decided to phone him directly. The call had been brief, and Ricci had done most of what little talking there was. It hadn’t crossed his mind for an instant to state his reasons or ask any questions. He had identified himself, told Quiros straight out that he was flying down to see him that afternoon, and strongly advised him to be waiting in his office. Though he’d had awful doubts about putting him on alert, it had seemed better than the alternative of making the hour-long trip by air only to miss him and have to hunt for him around town. Ricci had gambled Quiros would understand it was in his interest to know how much he had on him and what he wanted to say. That he would cooperate at least as far as agreeing to meet. And his thinking proved to be right on.

Still, Quiros knew he was in trouble, and he’d had several hours to guess at how much. Even if Palardy’s message had exaggerated his involvement in what looked like a deeply spun conspiracy to murder Roger Gordian — one that might be part of a broader plan if Thibodeau’s idea about the death of Alberto Colón bore out — it was hard to predict how he would act under pressure. Hard to tell how anyone would act. Ricci had been prepared to hear that he’d dropped from sight, keeper of the family flame or not.

Glenn swung to the right now, provoking aggravated horn honks as he cut across two lanes of heavy traffic to double-park in front of their destination. “Your stop,” he said.

Ricci nodded and reached for the door handle.

“Hey, Ricci.” From behind him.

He glanced over his shoulder.

“You want backup? I can pull this heap into a garage.”

Ricci looked at him a moment.

“No,” he said. “Think this might go easier for me solo. But I’d like to buy you that glass of suds later, if you don’t mind sitting with a Coke-drinking glory boy.”

Glenn grinned a little.

“Company’s company,” he said.

Ricci exited the car and strode toward the office tower, shouldering through a tumult of homebound office workers. In the lobby, an ornamental rent-a-cop asked his name, called upstairs on the intercom, and then waved him to the elevators. Ricci figured he was with the building’s legit security crew. Quiros’s personal bodyguards were certain to be waiting upstairs with him.

A few minutes later, he was in the corridor outside Golden Triangle. The door swung inward to admit him before he could buzz, his features running like liquid over the reflective gray-and-blue-toned letters across its front.

The big man who opened the door looked exactly the way Ricci had imagined one of Quiros’s people would. As did the other six or seven big, muscular guys planted around his office. Seated at his desk at the far end of the spacious room, only Enrique Quiros didn’t altogether conform to expectations, appearing even younger and more spruced than his file photo suggested.

Ricci stepped inside.

“Hold it,” the door-opener said. He moved into Ricci’s path, his hands outstretched to pat him down.

Ricci shook his head.

“Don’t ask, don’t tell,” he said, and gestured around the room. “My opinion, that might be the best policy for everybody here.”

The door-opener looked at him, glanced back at Quiros.

“Jorge’s just doing his job,” Quiros said in a calm voice.

“Course. I know there are all kinds of classy businesses that make a ritual of frisking people at the door.” Ricci was looking at Jorge. “But he touches me, he’s going on the disabled list with a groin injury.”

Jorge continued to stand there, flat-footed, blocking him. His expression was neutral.

Finally Quiros released a breath.

“You’ve come to talk,” he said. His tone fell midway between questioning and declarative.

Ricci nodded.

“Then I suppose we can make an exception to our usual security procedures if they’re bothering you,” he said. “Out of deference to your UpLink International credentials.”

His face still without expression, Jorge sidestepped to let Ricci pass. Ricci strode across to Quiros’s desk and took the seat across from him without waiting to be motioned into it.

Quiros was looking at him through his glasses.

“So,” he said. “I’ve been wondering what this is all about.”

“Sure,” Ricci said. “Bet my call came as a total surprise.”

Quiros said nothing.

Ricci let the silence string out a moment.

“Go ahead,” he said. “Say again that you don’t have an inkling why I’m here. Say it ten times fast, if that helps get it out of your system. Because I don’t intend to mess around.”

Quiros stared.

“Tell me what you want,” he said.

Ricci tipped his head back a little to indicate the men behind him.

“You rather we talk with or without them?” he said.

Quiros kept staring. “They stay.”

Ricci shrugged.

“I know Palardy infected Roger Gordian with a biological agent on your orders,” he said. “I know you had him killed to prevent him from ever talking about it if he was nailed or maybe had an attack of conscience. And I know you know he got his message to us anyway.”

Quiros’s face tightened.

“That’s quite a mouthful,” he said. “And not a word of it makes sense to me. I’ve never heard of anybody called Palardy. It’s all craziness.”

“Right. Crazy as hell. Because the agent isn’t anthrax or botulism or ricin or whatever else Saddam Hussein cultured in Muthanna and Al-Salman. It isn’t anything the old Soviet Biopreparat germ chefs might’ve auctioned off when they got pink-slipped after the breakup. And it definitely isn’t anything you could have whipped together with some kitchen fermenter in the rat holes where you process your crack, smack, and other drugs I’m getting too old to know by their street names. It’s a virus engineered with genomic biotechnology, one that isn’t supposed to be in the showroom yet. Which makes me wonder how and why you’d get mixed up in this deal.”

Quiros looked for a moment as if he was about to say something, then caught himself.

“I told you,” he said and shook his head. “I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about.”

Ricci looked at him.

“Think about it another second. Maybe there were rumors in the wind and you dismissed them. Because they were so screwball. Or because they came from pretty far outside your range. Something’s reached your ears that can help me and you pass it along, I might force myself to swallow your other denials. Move on from here. But you need to take the offer while it lasts, because it won’t be repeated.”

Ricci watched Quiros take a slow breath.

“No,” he said. “I’ve got nothing for you.”

Ricci was very still.

“Guess I should’ve counted on you being dumber than you look.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means you’re making a mistake. You think you’re a player, but you’re as much of a stooge as Palardy. And you’ll wind up like him. You, your business, your whole precious family. Down the hole. Buried in dirt.”

Quiros leaned forward, his hands on his desk, his shoulders very stiff.

“Get out of here,” he said. “Who do you think you are? I don’t need your insults. Your threats. Don’t need you coming to me with some insane story, bringing me problems.”

Ricci rose from his chair, got his card out of his wallet, and flipped it toward Quiros. It landed on the floor, close enough to the desk so it almost seemed like he hadn’t intended to miss.

“You want to reach me, I should be in town another couple of hours,” he said. “Whatever you decide, we’ll see each other again. I promise.”

He stood there looking at Quiros another second. Then he turned and walked past Jorge and the other guards, pushed through the door, and strode down the corridor to the elevator. He rode it down to the lobby and left the building without once looking back.

“Meg, finally, I thought we’d never connect today except through voice mail,” Bob Lang said over the line from Washington.

“Phone tag,” she said.

“It gets maddening.”

“Yes, it does,” she said.

“You calling from home?”

“The office.” She checked her watch, saw that it was almost six-thirty. “I was at the hospital most of the afternoon. Thought I’d come in and rake through some of what’s been sitting on my desk.”

“How’s Roger doing?”

“No better.” She steadied herself. “They’re saying the X-rays show his lungs are near whiteout. Without the ventilator… I don’t think he’d be able to breathe.”

“Hell,” he said. “How’s Ashley holding together?”

“She’s incredible, Bob. If you were there to see her, you’d be impressed. She seems absolutely aware of Gord’s condition but won’t surrender an inch to discouragement. She puts on a mask and gown, stands at his bedside, and talks to him whenever they allow. He doesn’t respond… it’s doubtful he knows she’s there with him… and she keeps pushing.”

“Does the medical team know anything more about what brought on the sickness?”

She hesitated. What had Ashley told her? I’m sure they wouldn’t be willing to disclose anything if they didn’t trust us to be discreet.

The wall came down.

“No,” she lied. “From what I understand, they’re still looking at a strain of hantavirus. Or something related.”

A pause.

“Meg, I know it’s got to be the last thing on your mind right now, but I rushed through your clearances on the NCIC 2000 database. Sword’s got full, unrestricted access, all levels of classification. I can send you the entry codes directly via secure E-mail.”

“Thanks, Bob, it means a lot.” She suddenly wondered what kind of person she was. “Pete Nimec’s still here, and he’ll be glad.”

“I kept thinking about what you said last weekend. About how inverted my reasoning has been. And it suddenly seemed ludicrous. Not trusting myself to make the right decision, when it involves someone I trust more than any other person in the world.”

“Bob, you don’t have to—”

“I love you, Meg. I probably should have waited to say that over champagne and candlelight. But under the circumstances… I don’t know how long it will be until we see each other. And I thought maybe it would make everything you’re going through a little easier.”

She opened her mouth, closed it, couldn’t find a meaningful word within reach.

“I–I’d better get those codes to Pete right away,” she stumbled.

And abruptly hung up the phone.

Lathrop waited until seven P.M. to transmit his E-mail. He’d calculated that would allow the final members of his cast to hastily make the show’s opening call but shave their rehearsal and preparation time to the barest minimum. That was how he liked things: improvisation within a structured framework, the full script in his sole possession, his assembled performers knowing only the bits and pieces relevant to their parts.

Gently lifting Missus Frakes from his lap and setting her onto the floor, he gave the E-mail he’d typed into his computer a quick review, nodded to himself with satisfaction, and sent it off into the wide, crackling electronic yonder with a click.

Shazam, he thought.

When Pete Nimec went to his computer for the NCIC access codes Meg had told him she’d forward, he was sideswiped by the header of an anonymous message in his mailbox. It had been sent to him just minutes before, and said:

He opened it.

Immediately.

And read it with astonishment.

“Well, we’re here,” Glenn said.

“Here we are,” Ricci said.

“Nice and quiet.”

“Yeah.”

“You uncomfortable being the only white guy in the joint?”

“Not unless you’re uncomfortable being the only black guy who’s sitting with a white guy.”

Glenn took a gulp of his beer. Ricci drank some of his soda. The cheeseburgers and fries they’d ordered had just been carried over from behind the counter.

The bar was on a rundown street in East San Diego, Nat King Cole crooning “Unforgettable” on the jukebox, the owner a black man in his late sixties with silver hair and a bristling handlebar mustache. The small handful of patrons was almost entirely male, and around the same age as the bartender. Behind the booth where Ricci and Glenn were seated, a chunky woman perhaps a year or two shy of the clientele’s actuarial mean was swaying to the music alone, her eyes closed, a cocktail glass in her hand.

“So what’s next?” Glenn asked.

Ricci shrugged.

“We eat our food, drink our drinks, I head back to my hotel room,” he said. “How long you figure our surveillance can stay on Quiros before he gets keen?”

Glenn thought a moment.

“It depends,” he said. “Give us some added manpower, and we’ll be okay for a while. Use two- and three-car teams. Leapfrog whenever we know his route.”

“The team that flew in with me enough support?”

“How many men in it? Ten or so?”

“An even dozen.”

“That should be plenty.”

“They’re yours,” Ricci said. He pulled his burger plate closer without enthusiasm. “For all it’ll be worth. Even if Quiros doesn’t make his tails, he’ll still figure we’re tracking his movements. And he’ll be careful about them.”

Glenn looked at him.

“Is Enrique your only lead to whoever did whatever nobody’s talking about to Gordian?”

“Yeah.”

“Meaning we need to get information out of him fast.”

“Yeah.”

Glenn picked up his burger.

“It’s a predicament. We go too easy on the son of a bitch, he’ll keep his mouth shut. We lean on him too hard, he could go underground. I doubt for good, but it’s sounding to me like we can’t afford to lose any time.”

Ricci nodded.

“Between us, Glenn, I figure we’ve got maybe twenty-four hours before it’s too late,” he said. “And other than making ourselves feel like we’re doing something, I don’t know what we’ve accomplished.”

“You have any sort of plan?”

Ricci stared down at his glass a while in silence. Then he looked at Glenn.

“You want to be friends?” he said.

Their eyes had met.

“Sure,” he said. “Just make good on your promise to pay the tab.”

Ricci was still looking straight into Glenn’s eyes.

“There’s leaning hard, and there’s leaning hard,” he said. “Nothing opens up for us by tomorrow morning, I’m on my own with Quiros. And he’s going to talk. It might cost me my job. Maybe more than that. A whole lot more. But he’ll talk. And he won’t have a chance to go anywhere.”

Glenn sat with his beer mug suspended below his chin, his fingers clenching the handle. He took in and released a long, tidal breath.

“If it’s got to be that way, there’s no other choice, I can give you a hand.”

“No,” Ricci said, his voice firm. “Nobody else involved. I—”

Ricci’s cellular bleeped in his jacket pocket. He raised a finger in a hold-on-a-minute gesture, reached for it, and answered.

Glenn waited. He saw Ricci ease upright in his chair, listening without comment, taking in whatever was being said to him with acute interest.

When Ricci returned the phone to his pocket, there was something very close to relief on his features.

“That was Pete Nimec in San Jose,” he said. “I think we might’ve been saved by the bell.”