Bio-Strike

FIVE

“Any success convincing lang to pay for his chits?” Nimec asked, and held up his punch mitt.

“You’re starting to sound like Roger.” Megan threw an off-balance left jab that barely nicked the padded leather.

“Shit,” she muttered, winded. Her face was glistening with perspiration.

“Let’s go, keep your rhythm.”

“We’ve been at this for almost an hour, might be a good time to call it quits—”

“Uh-uh.”

“Pete, I’m bushed. It isn’t coming together for me this morning, and I still have to get showered for work—”

“What I hear, you were tired in Kaliningrad when you took down an armed assailant. Way before you started these lessons.”

“I had no choice then.”

“You don’t now, either,” he said, sidestepping to the right. “Breathe deep. And stay on me!”

Megan opened her mouth and swooped in some air. Keeping her left foot in front of her right, she pivoted toward him and took another shot. It landed more solidly, closer to the white target dot in the center of the mitt.

“Better,” he said. “Again.”

Her fist snapped out, caught the edge of the dot.

“Again! Keep that arm in line with your lead foot!”

Her next punch was precisely on the spot.

“Good,” Nimec said. He stepped in closer, pressing her, flicking the mitt past the side of her cheek. “Cover up, I could’ve nailed you right there. And what do you mean ‘like Roger’?”

Megan raised her arms, tucked her chin low to her collarbone. Her hair pulled back in a tight ponytail, she was wearing a white sweatband around her head, a white tank top with an Everlast logo in front, black bike shorts, and Adidas sneakers.

“I mean that you’re both assuming Bob feels he owes us,” she said.

Bob, Nimec thought.

“Doesn’t he?”

“I think he thinks we’re even.”

“With regard to what? The time we saved a nuclear sub from being hijacked with the President aboard? Or found out who did the Times Square bombing after his people got steered down the garden path?”

Megan let his question ride, bouncing on her knees to stoke her energy. They were in a regulation fight ring on the top level of his San Jose triplex condominium, the entire floor a sprawling rec/training facility that included, in addition to the professionally equipped boxing gym, a martial arts dojo, a soundproofed firing range, and an accurate-down-to-the-reek-of-cigarette-butts-awash-in-beer reproduction of the South Philadelphia pool hall where the blush of youthful innocence was slapped off Nimec’s cheeks by the harsh red glare of neons when he was fourteen or so. Megan had never spoken to him about that period of his life at any length, never gotten the gist of why he looked back on a past that included being the junior member of a father-son hustling team, a borderline juvenile delinquent, and, by her standards, a victim of child exploitation — what else would you call being kept truant from school to hold a cue stick in a dive full of chronic gamblers? — with such obvious fondness. Whether this was because her own upbringing was so different from his, she couldn’t really say for sure, but Ridgewood, New Jersey, might as well have been worlds away from downtown Philly, and while she’d taken courses on Old and Middle English at Groton prep, there had been nary a mention of draw, follow, left, or right English in the offered curriculum.

She concentrated on her workout now, measuring Nimec with repeated flicks of her outthrust fist as he continued side-shuffling to her right, protecting the outside margin of the defensive circle he’d taught her to imagine around herself.

“Back to Lang,” he said. “We have to utilize the NCIC database if we’re going to get the intelligence we need.”

“And his inclination is to ask the director to okay us,” she said. “Right up to the highest classification levels.”

“Up to,” he said.

She nodded.

“But not including.”

She nodded again.

“That won’t cut it,” he said. “Your average uniformed cop can input the overall system from his prowl if it’s got an onboard computer. I want Lang to arrange for unrestricted access.”

Nimec lifted both mitts in the air. She threw a one-two combination, followed through with a straight left, and blocked another swipe at her head without surrendering any canvas.

“It gets sort of complicated,” she said. “National security’s foremost with him.”

Nimec looked confused.

“He doesn’t trust us?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Then complicated how?”

“I’d rather not explain it right now.”

She saw his frown of confusion deepen.

“Leave it alone, Pete. I’m flying to D.C. again in a couple of days. We’ll see what Bob’s got to say.”

Nimec looked at her a moment.

Bob again, he thought.

Then he gave a little shrug and shifted direction, dropping his right mitt to take an uppercut. Megan swung and made only glancing contact.

“You pulled that one. Again.”

She brought her arm up smoothly, throwing her shoulder into the blow, and felt the satisfying impact of her fist thumping the leather dead on.

“Okay, that was perfect. Relax a minute,” he said, coming to a flat-footed halt. “Now listen, this is important.” He patted the middle of his rib cage with his mitt. “A guy comes at you, here’s where you hit him. Do it hard and clean, and it’ll collapse his diaphragm, doesn’t matter how big he is. And he won’t have expected it from a woman. People who don’t know how to fight will generally make the same mistakes. They either aim for the nose or chin, which aren’t easy to tag, or the gut, where there’s more muscle, fat, whatever sort of insulation, than anywhere else.” He lifted the other mitt to the side of his neck, just below the ear. “If you don’t have an opening for the upper body, and you think you have the reach, you’ll want to pop him right here. At the pressure point. Got it?”

“The chest or the neck,” Megan said, the words spaced between long gulps of breath. She brushed a trickle of sweat from her eye with her glove. “You’ve told me that at least a dozen times.”

“Reinforcement’s never hurt anyone I’ve trained.” He wiggled the mitt in front of his ribs. “Quick, let me have some—”

“Pete—”

“And we’ll be through for today.”

She let him have some.

Ten minutes later, they were outside the ropes, towels draped over their shoulders, their T-shirts splotched with perspiration and clinging to their bodies. Nimec went over to his supply locker, put away his target mitts, then helped Megan to unlace her gloves.

“There’s another item of business we need to discuss,” he said, hanging the gloves on a peg inside the locker.

“Concerning?

“Ricci’s brain flash about establishing RDTs,” he said. “I’ve been mulling it over and feel it ought to be done.”

Megan stood undoing her hand wraps, her open gym bag on a bench against the wall behind her.

“I agree,” she said. “Provisionally.”

“Your provisions being…?”

“It would have to be on an experimental basis and subject to constant review. And I’d want everybody on board. Meaning Gord and Rollie.” She looked at him. “You seem surprised, Pete.”

Nimec shrugged.

“You didn’t seem too enthused about the suggestion when it was offered,” he said. “I figured I’d run into more resistance.”

Megan considered how to respond. She finished removing the linen wraps, wound them up neatly, then turned to the bench and dropped them into her bag.

“Ricci’s aptitude isn’t anything that I question,” she said finally, looking back at Nimec. “I just don’t enjoy his contentious solo flier routine. And sometimes I need to be where he isn’t to get past it.”

Nimec shrugged a little, his hand on the locker’s open door.

“Sounds like some kind of solution, anyway.”

“You could call it that,” she said. “I think of it as keeping my sights on the bigger picture.”

He gave her a questioning glance.

“Whoever attacked us in Brazil last spring killed a lot of our people and would have caused even more destruction… would have been able to blackmail every country on earth… if we hadn’t gotten in the way of their plans,” she said. “Put me in our enemy’s shoes, I’d be carrying one serious grudge. And the thought of not being ready if and when it’s acted upon worries the hell out of me, Pete.”

He kept looking at her for several long seconds and then swung the locker door inward. It shut with a dull, metallic clang.

“Makes two of us,” he said.

Some months earlier in Madrid, in the Villanueva building of the Museo del Prado, he had gone to view Brueghel the Elder’s painting The Triumph of Death, and even now was unsure how long he had stood before it. It was as if time had stilled around him. As if his innermost visions had been projected onto the wall of the gallery.

He had not known where to rest his eye. On the molten orange landscape with its pools of fire, its spewing clouds of black, volcanic smoke? Or the medieval village besieged by an exterminating army of skeletons, banners of war hoisted above their skull heads, the hollow sockets of their eyes showing only a pitiless adherence to their single objective? Here they hacked at the living with broadswords. Here they impaled them on the points of spears. There a cadaverous looter knelt over his prostrate victim, holding knife to throat to deliver the finishing stroke. In the right foreground, a peasant woman who had fallen atop a pile of twisted corpses raised her arms in a futile plea for mercy as a bone soldier stood with one conquering foot planted on her body, his battle-ax swinging inexorably downward. Where to rest the eye? On which scene of fabulous annihilation? The death barge advancing over a mire of crushed bodies and blood, its skeletal crew wrapped in the white cerements of the grave? The townsman hanging, limp, from the single forking limb of a shattered tree? The emaciated dog, all skin and protruding ribs, sniffing hungrily at the child in its fallen mother’s embrace? Or the revelers in peacock finery scattering from their dinner table in helpless panic as a swarm of cadaverous marauders closed ranks around them?

Where, indeed, to rest the eye?

The painting had been remarkable. Absorbed in its sweeping infernal beauty, Siegfried Kuhl might have believed its creator had reached a hand across the centuries and tapped deep into his mind for inspiration. His umbilical connection to it had been overwhelming. It had at once seemed to draw its energy from him and infuse him with its own.

Until that unforgettable experience, Kuhl had never been moved by a work of art. He had gone to the museum out of curiosity and nothing more, compelled by Harlan DeVane’s remark that he might find it of interest. Six months ago, it had been. After the debacle in Kazakhstan, where only a chance diversion had allowed him to break away from the Sword operative with whom he’d grappled in the launch center’s cargo-processing facility.

The man’s features were framed in his mind in photographic detail. Whenever he pictured the sharply angular jut of his cheekbones, the set of his mouth, he would feel the restless desire for vengeance slide coldly through his intestines. As he felt it now, six months later and a continent away, sitting at a window table in a brasserie called La Pistou, opposite the Champs de Bataille Pare, in Quebec City. Watching the entrance to the park, waiting for his lovely courier to arrive.

Kuhl’s failure at the Cosmodrome had been a severe blow. Driven underground, wishing to get far ahead of his pursuers, he had altered his appearance, obtaining colored contact lenses, darkening his hair, filling out his lips with collagen injections, even growing a short beard. Then, in his global migrations, he had found himself in Spain for a time, and he realized it was no accident that brought him there.

DeVane had understood how it would be for him to see Brueghel’s masterpiece, reflecting, as it did, the grim sensibility of an age when the Black Death had raged across continents, an indiscriminate scourge exempting no man or authority, no civilized institution, from being laid to waste. An age when none knew whether to blame Heaven or Hell for their miseries.

What power a man who let neither hold sway over his conscience, a man of iron and will, could have seized amid such upheaval. In violent action Kuhl was calm. In chaos he was whole. In the storm amid cries of turmoil he was strongest. And in strength he achieved fulfillment.

DeVane had understood, yes. And it seemed in retrospect that his comments had been as revealing as they were insightful — most probably by design. He found it amusing to lay out enigmatic, far-winding paths for others to untangle.

At any rate, his Sleeper Project must have been well along at that point. Kuhl was not a scientist, but he had sufficient knowledge of the basics of genetic engineering to be certain it would have taken years to produce a pathogenic agent of the type generated at the Ontario facility. The procurement of recombinant DNA technology and raw biological materials would have been a difficult, expensive undertaking. As would the search for top experts in the field from around the world. And preliminary challenges of that sort would have paled to insignificance before those that emerged in the later developmental stages.

The complexities of manipulating a viral organism’s genetic blueprint were manifold. Given the additional requirement that its infectiousness be keyed to a particular genetic trait — blue eyes, left-handedness, familial diabetes, ethnic and racial characteristics, the possibilities were endless — the difficulty of the task became even more considerable. Still, the techniques needed to create such a microbe had been the focus of widespread experimentation in both private and government laboratories in the most advanced nations. And DeVane had gone several steps beyond. His criteria had been that the Sleeper pathogen respond to an unlimited range of inherited human characteristics on demand, laying dormant until activated by a chemical trigger or set of triggers. That it could, therefore, bring about symptoms in targets ranging from specific individuals to entire populations, depending entirely on which trigger was selected for dispersal.

In effect, he had overseen the successful creation of a microscopic time bomb. It could be customized to order, residing harmlessly in one host, hatching explosive malignancy in another. It could be as precise as an assassin’s bullet or as widespread in its capacity for devastation as the Plague itself.

It was, Kuhl thought now, nothing less than the ultimate biological weapon.

He looked out the window and saw her emerge from the park, his lovely pale rider, punctual as always, crossing the Grande Allée to the brasserie, her blonde hair tossing in the wind, the collar of her dark, knee-length coat pulled up around her neck against the inclement weather. Though still a month off by the calendar, winter had made an early intrusion into the region, and spits of snow were blowing from a dark gray sky over the bare, rolling fields and ragged trees west of the Citadel.

Kuhl was glad of this. In the long spread of park fringing the cliffs above the Saint Lawrence River, the armies of France and Britain had fought their climactic battle for domination of the region. Yet in the warm seasons, flowers bedecked the soil where the blood of generals had been spilled, and strollers sniffed the perfumed air in the smothering tameness of landscaped gardens.

Those floral blankets scattered to the wind now, the harsh contours of nature were uncovered, appealing to something in the stony fastness of Kuhl’s heart.

She spotted him from outside on the sidewalk, their eyes making contact through the window, a smile tracing at her lips. She entered the restaurant and strode directly toward his table, walking ahead of the punctilious maitre d’ who approached her at the door, motioning to indicate she’d already found her party. Kuhl rose to greet her, touching his lips to the soft white skin below her ear as he came around and helped her out of her coat, she lightly touching the back of his hand with her fingertips, he allowing his kiss to linger on her neck a moment before turning to give the coat to the maitre d’.

They sat. Kuhl had been drinking mineral water, and he waved for the waiter, a quick snap of his hand. She ordered wine, an American Pinot Noir. The waiter hovered beside the table as she tasted it and nodded her approval to him, then hurried off, noticing the impatience in Kuhl’s glance, giving them their privacy.

“Did you have a pleasant trip?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“And your lodging?” he said.

“It’s fine,” she said, her English bearing the faint, indeterminate accent characteristic of those who have lived in various parts of the world. “I’ve missed you.”

He nodded silently.

“Will you be joining me at the hotel tonight?” she asked. Turning her wineglass in her hands.

He leaned slightly forward over the table.

“I would like nothing better,” he said. “But we have other dictates.”

“Which can’t be postponed, even for a short while?”

“I leave Quebec before sundown,” he said. “And your flight to the States is scheduled for early tomorrow morning.”

“There have been so many flights lately.” She hesitated. “I’m tired.”

He met her gaze. She was a receptive sexual partner, and he enjoyed her more than any of his other women. Exploring and penetrating her body was like opening a series of catches, one after another after another, unlocking progressively greater measures of her passion until she was his fully and without inhibition. There was exquisite power in reaching to the core of such lust. In being able to control its tornadic outpouring. And power was ever a temptation.

“We will be together. Very soon,” he said. “But…”

“Dictates.” She fell silent, lowering her eyes to her glass. After a few seconds she looked back up at him. “I understand.”

Kuhl nodded and reached into the inside pocket of his sport coat, producing a black enameled gift box of the sort that might hold a bracelet, along with a small card envelope. He held both out to her across the table.

“I’ve gotten you something very unique,” he said. “The rarest of items.”

Anyone happening by the table would have seen her smile as she took them from him, their fingers making the briefest contact.

“Thank you,” she said.

He leaned his face closer to hers, dropped his voice to a near whisper.

“In San Diego you will be meeting with someone named Enrique Quiros,” he said, his lips scarcely moving at all. “The note I’ve written in the card will tell you the rest.”

She nodded with understanding and carefully placed the box and envelope into her purse.

“I’ll be sure to read it back in my room.” She was looking into his eyes again, her own eyes shining, the smile on her lips no longer contrived for the benefit of idle viewers. “I wish you could be with me.”

Kuhl acknowledged a stirring inside him.

“Soon,” he said.

“Tell me when—”

“After this is done, I promise,” Kuhl said. “We can go to Madrid, if you’d like.” He paused a moment. “It is special to me.”

She looked at him.

“Madrid,” she said, raising the wineglass again, touching its rim to her bottom lip, letting it rest there a moment before taking a sip. “Yes, I would like that very much. Would like it to become special to both of us.”

Kuhl watched her and nodded.

“Surely,” he said, “it will.”

“How long you been sitting on this?” Lucio Salazar said, the fingers of his right hand digging into the arm of his fleecy burgundy sofa, his other hand holding the last of the digital prints Lathrop had given him to scrutinize, the rest of the infrared photos on the coffee table in front of him.

“What do you mean?” Lathrop said, answering Salazar’s question with one of his own, knowing damn well what he meant. This asshole had the balls to think he was going to interrogate him. It was pretty funny. “Your load was grabbed last night, I’m here today.”

Salazar looked at him. He was a large man in his late fifties wearing a cream-colored tropical suit, a pale blue shirt open at the collar, and tan Gucci loafers. There was a Rolex with an enormous diamond-crusted gold band on his right hand, a diamond ring on his left pinkie, a diamond stud in his right earlobe. A gold figure of some saint or other hung from a chain around his thick neck.

“I was asking when you found out these fucking maricónes were going to make a move on me,” he said. “If I had known sooner, I’d have been able to do something about it.”

Lathrop’s expression was calmly businesslike.

“You can get furnished with bad information from any weasel on the street and wind up chasing your own tail.” He leaned forward and tapped one of the snapshots on the coffee table with his finger. It showed Felix Quiros and his men cutting the knapsacks off the backs of Salazar’s massacred Indian couriers outside the smoking ruin of the tunnel entrance. “I get a tip, I check it out before coming to you with it. That’s quality, Lucio. And it’s what I provide.”

“Value for the dollar, eh?”

Lathrop grinned.

“Believe it,” he said.

Salazar fell silent again. His gold and jewels twinkled in the sunlight pouring through the glass wall that faced the beachfront below and behind him. These days, Lathrop thought, the base price of a Del Mar home with an ocean view was maybe six, seven hundred grand, and that was if you were talking about something the size of Monopoly board real estate, where you had to stand tip-toe on the roof with a set of binoculars just to catch a glimpse of the water. A place like Salazar’s sin citadel here — built to his specs on a bluff, sprawling enough to contain the entire population of whatever burro shit Mexican village had spawned his proud ancestral line of cutthroat thieves, highwaymen, and pimps — a place like this had to have cost him in excess of three mil.

After perhaps twenty seconds, Salazar leaned forward over the table and studied another of the pictures, his eyebrows knitted in brooding thought, slowly shaking his head from side to side as he recognized the body of the coyote Guillermo.

“El muerto nada se lleva y todo se acaba,” he said in an undertone.

The dead take nothing with them and everything comes to an end.

He glanced back up at Lathrop. “You know if Felix was being stupid on his own, or does the stupidity go up the line?” he asked.

“Felix? Come on,” Lathrop said, preparing to stir in the lie. “He might have his boys glom car computers, shake down bodega owners, nickel-dime stuff, on his own string. Might even get away with laying an extra cut on a key before he delivers it, skimming a few ounces for himself. But his big cousins are just letting him run off the leash so he feels a player instead of a punk, and even Felix isn’t brainless enough not to realize how far to take it before he smacks into a brick wall. What happened at the tunnel — he’d never in his miserable life try it without their endorsement.”

Lathrop watched the thought lines on Salazar’s forehead deepen. He was seething, and with very good reason. In tight with the old-line South American growers and processors from the days when his father headed the clan, Lucio’s organization had been smuggling contraband across the U.S.-Mexico border for over half a century, starting with hot cars back in the fifties, and here in California was the principal polydrug distribution outfit along the Pacific coast, carrying cocaine, dope, pot, methamphetamine, name your favorite poison, from Chula Vista clear on up to Los Angeles and Frisco. The Quiroses were way down the hierarchy, with transit routes inland from northern Sonora into south Texas and sections of New Mexico, and until recently hadn’t done anything to challenge the Salazar empire, sticking to a relatively insignificant share of the coke market. New drug money, you might call them. But since they’d gotten tied in with El Tío’s network a year or so back — it was hard for Lathrop to believe he’d still been with the El Paso special field division at the time, my oh my how things had changed — there had been signs they were looking to make inroads into Salazar’s territory. What was now causing Lucio such profound and well-warranted distress was the sheer nerviness of the act — not only stealing some heavy dope, but intentionally humiliating him in the process, smearing his couriers all over the arroyo, killing his drivers, and leaving them with their mouths chock-full of their own privates.

You go dissing someone like Lucio Salazar with that kind of impunity, you’re sending a big, bold-faced message that there’s major juice behind you.

Salazar was still shaking his head with combined anger and dismay.

“I can’t accept this,” he said.

Which, Lathrop thought, was absolutely right on, assuming he wanted to stay in business.

“It’s got to be fixed,” Salazar said.

Which, Lathrop thought, equaled taking serious retaliation.

Salazar looked at him.

“You find out how the Quiroses knew when my shipment was coming, anything else about their setup, I give you my word of honor it’ll be worth a jackpot,” he said.

Lathrop nodded, making an effort not to smile. He often wondered if guys like Salazar copped their dialogue from television and the movies or vice versa. Or whether it was some weird kind of self-perpetuating loop. Reality mimicking fiction mimicking reality.

“I’ll see what I can do,” he said and rose from his chair feeling mightily satisfied with his performance… and just as strongly convinced it would lead to the results he desired.

Next stop on the road, Enrique Quiros.

“I’m leaning in favor of Ricci’s idea,” Gordian said to Nimec from behind his desk.

He reached for the container of rolled wafers in front of him, opened it, slipped a wafer out of the container, and stirred it in his coffee so the drink would pick up the flavor of its hazelnut praline filling. This new morning ritual was in observance of his wife’s latest dietary commandment: Thou shalt not drink hazelnut coffee. Her prohibition of his favorite blend rose from her theory that its hidden calories and fatty oils were responsible for the five-pound weight gain and slightly elevated cholesterol level revealed by his latest routine checkup.

The flavored coffee of which he’d been drinking three to five cups a day for the past year, therefore, was gone and out, per spouse’s orders, replaced on her shopping list by the cream-filled wafers he was allowed to dip, stir, and consume twice a day to satisfy his hazelnut craving, the equivalent of nicotine chewing gum to a smoker trying to quit the habit.

Admittedly, though, the sweet sticks were tasty, if not to say addictive, in their own right.

“My primary reservations concern the delicacy of placing our RDTs in host countries that might feel threatened by their activities, perhaps with some justification,” he said, letting the wafer steep in his coffee. “Or, trickier still, inserting them into hostile countries where we know in advance that their presence would be unwelcome.”

Across the immense desk from him, Nimec was trying not to betray his delight at now having gotten his second “yes” of the day — albeit another qualified one — with a fair and highly unexpected degree of ease.

“I can relay your concerns to Tom, see that he addresses them in a formal written proposal,” he said.

Gordian pulled the wafer stick out of his coffee and took a bite.

“That would be a reasonable start,” he said, looking happy as he chewed.

Nimec started to lift himself off his seat, eager to make his exit while the going was good.

Gordian raised a hand.

“One last thing before you go,” he said.

Nimec settled back down, waited.

“I’m with Megan that Rollie Thibodeau has to accept the plan, at least in theory, before we take it any further.”

Nimec considered that a moment, then nodded.

“I’ll ask her to talk to him,” he said.

“No,” Gordian said.

Nimec looked at him.

“No?”

Gordian shook his head.

“You do it,” he said.

Nimec kept looking at him.

“She’s better with Rollie than I am, two of them go way back,” he said. “They’ve got a rapport.”

“And that’s precisely why it’s going to be you and he who have the conversation,” Gordian said. He took a gulp of coffee, the wafer back in his cup like a swizzle stick. “The fractiousness I saw aboard the yacht last week troubles me. If it continues, our organization is going to split into separate camps, and once that happens, we’ll cease to be a functional team. Think about it, Pete. It has to stop.”

Nimec ballooned his cheeks, slowly released a breath.

“Ought to be an interesting chat,” he said.

Gordian smiled.

“Ought to be,” he said and munched down the rest of his treat.