Rainbow Six

CHAPTER 24

One of the differences between Europe and America was that the former's countries truly welcomed foreigners, while America, for all her hospitality, made entering the country remarkably inconvenient. Certainly the Irish erected no barriers, Popov saw, as his passport was stamped and he collected his luggage for an "inspection" so cursory that the inspector probably hadn't noticed if the person carrying it was male or female. With that, Dmitriy Arkadeyevich walked outside and flagged a cab for his hotel. His reservation gave him a one-bedroom suite overlooking a major thoroughfare, and he immediately undressed to catch a few more hours of sleep before making his first call. His last thought before closing his eyes on this sunny morning was that he hoped the contact number hadn't been changed, or compromised. If the latter, then he'd have to do some explaining to the local police, but he had a cover story, if necessary. While it wasn't perfect, it would be good enough to protect a person who'd committed no crimes in the Republic of Ireland.

"Airborne, Airborne, have you heard?" Vega sang, as they began the final mile. "We're gonna jump from the big-ass bird!"

It surprised Chavez that as bulky as First Sergeant Julio Vega was, he never seemed to suffer from it on the runs. He was a good thirty pounds heavier than any other Team-2 member. Any bigger across the chest and he'd have to get his fatigue shirts custom-made, but despite the ample body, his legs and wind hadn't failed him yet. And so, today, he was taking his turn leading the morning run… In another four minutes they could see the stop line, which they all welcomed, though none of them would admit it.

"Quick time march!" Vega called, as he crossed the yellow line, and everyone slowed to the usual one hundred-twenty steps per minute. "Left, left, your left your right your left!" Another half minute and: "Detail… halt!" And everyone stopped. There was a cough or two from those who'd had a pint or two too many the night before, but nothing more than that.

Chavez walked to the command position in front of the two lines of troopers. "Fallout," he ordered, allowing Team-2 to walk to their building for a shower, having stretched and exercised all their muscles for the day. Later today they'd have another run through the shooting house for a live-fire exercise. It would be boring in content, since they'd already tried just about every possible permutation of hostages and bad guys. Their shooting was just about perfect. Their physical condition was perfect, and their morale was so high that they seemed bored. They were so confident in their abilities, they'd demonstrated them so convincingly in the field, firing real bullets into real targets. Even his time with the 7th Light Infantry Division had not given him such confidence in his people. They'd gotten to the point that the British SAS troopers, who had a long, proud history of their own, and who'd initially looked upon the Rainbow teams with a great degree of skepticism, now welcomed them into the club and even admitted they had things to learn from them. And that was quite a stretch, since the SAS had been the acknowledged world masters at special operations.

A few minutes later, showered and dressed, Chavez came out to the squad bay, where his people were at their individual desks, going over intelligence information from Bill Tawney and his crew, and checking out photos, many of them massaged by the computer systems to allow for the years since they'd originally been taken. The systems seemed to get better on a daily basis as the software evolved. A picture taken from an angle was now manipulated by the computer into a straight-on portrait shot, and his men studied them as they might examine photos of their own children, along with whatever information they had of who was suspected to be where, with what known or suspected associates, and so forth. It seemed a waste of time to Chavez, but you couldn't run and shoot All day, and knowing the faces wasn't a total waste of time. They had identified Furchtner and Dortmund that way on their Vienna deployment, hadn't they?

Sergeant Major Price was going over budget stuff, which he'd toss onto Ding's desk for later examination, so that his boss could justify expenditures, and then maybe request some new training funds for some new idea or other. Tim Noonan was working away with his new electronic toys, and Clark was always, so it seemed, fighting money battles with CIA and other American agencies. That struck Chavez as a total waste of effort. Rainbow had been pretty bulletproof from the very beginning Presidential sponsorship never hurt-and their missions hadn't exactly diminished the credibility from which their funding derived. In another two hours, they'd go to the range for their daily expenditure of one hundred rounds of pistol and SMG ammunition, followed by the live-five exercise… another routine day. For "routine," Ding often substituted "boring," but that couldn't be helped, and it was a hell of a lot less boring than it had been on field missions for CIA, most of which time had been spent sitting down waiting for a meet and/or filling out forms to describe the field operation for the Langley bureaucrats who demanded full documentation of everything that happened in the field because-because that was one of the rules. Rules at best enforced by people who'd been out there and done that a generation before and thought they still knew all about it, and at worst by people who didn't have a clue, and were all the more demanding for that very reason. But the government, which tossed away billions of dollars every day, could often be so niggardly over a thousand or so, and nothing Chavez could do would ever change that.

Colonel Malloy now had his own office in the headquarters building, since it had been decided that he was a Rainbow division commander. A staff-grade officer in the United States Marine Corps, he was accustomed to such nonsense, and he thought about hanging a dartboard on the wall for amusement when he wasn't working. Work for him was driving his chopper - which, he reminded himself, he didn't really have, since the one assigned to him was, at the moment, down for maintenance. Some widget was being replaced with a new and improved widget that would enhance his ability to do something of which he was not yet fully informed, but which, he was sure, would be important, especially to the civilian contractor, which had conceived of, designed, and manufactured the new and improved widget.

It could have been worse. His wife and kids liked it here, and Malloy liked it, as well. His was a skill position rather than a dangerous one. There was little hazard in being a helicopter pilot in a special-operations outfit. The only thing that worried him was hitting power lines, since Rainbow mainly deployed to operations in built-up areas, and in the past twenty years more helicopters had been lost to electrical power lines than to all known antiaircraft weapons around the world. His MH-60K didn't have cable cutters, and he'd written a scathing memo on that fact to the commander of the 24th Special Operations Squadron, who had replied contritely with six photocopies of memos he'd dispatched to his parent-unit commander on the same issue. He'd explained further on that some expert in the Pentagon was considering the modification to the existing aircraft-which, Malloy thought, was the subject of a consulting contract worth probably $300,000 or so to some Beltway Bandit whose conclusion would be, Yes, that's a good idea, couched in about four hundred pages of stultifying bureaucratic prose, which nobody would ever read but which would be enshrined in some archive or other for all time. The modification would cost all of three thousand dollars in parts and labor-the labor part would be the time of a sergeant who worked full-time for the Air Force anyway, whether actually working or sitting in his squad bay reading Playboy-but the rules were, unfortunately, the rules. And who knew, maybe in a year the Night Hawks would have the cable cutters.

Malloy grimaced and wished for his darts. He didn't need to see the intelligence information. The faces of known or suspected terrorists were of no use to him. He never got close enough to see them. That was the job of the shooters, and division commander or not he was merely their chauffeur. Well, it could have been worse. At least he was able to wear his "bag," or flight suit, at his desk, almost as though this were a proper organization of' aviators. He got to fly four days or so out of seven, and that wasn't bad, and after this assignment, his detailer had hinted, he might go on to command of VMH-1, and maybe fly the president around. It would be dull, but career enhancing. It surely hadn't hurt his old friend, Colonel Hank Goodman, who had just appeared on the star list, a fairly rare achievement for a rotor-head, since naval aviation, which was mainly helicopter drivers, was run, and run ruthlessly, by fast movers in their jet powered fixed-wing fighter bombers. Well, they all had prettier scarves. To amuse himself before lunch, Malloy pulled out his manual for the MH-60K and started to memorize additional information on engine performance, the kind of thing usually done by an engineering officer or maybe his crew chief, Sergeant Jack Nance.

The initial meeting took place in a public park. Popov had checked the telephone book and called the number for one Patrick X. Murphy just before noon.

"Hello, this is Joseph Andrews. I'm trying to find Mr. Yates," he'd said.

That statement was followed by silence, as the man on the other end of the phone had searched his memory for the code phrase. It was an old one, but after ten seconds or so, he'd fished it out.

"Ah, yes, Mr. Andrews. We haven't heard from you in some time."

"I just arrived in Dublin this morning, and I'm looking forward to seeing him. How quickly. can we get together?"

"How about one this afternoon?" And then had come the instructions.

So, here he was now, wearing his raincoat and wide brimmed fedora hat, carrying a copy of the Irish Times in his right hand, and sitting on a particular bench close to an oak tree. He used the downtime to read the paper and catch up on what was happening in the world-it wasn't very different from what he'd seen on CNN the previous day in New York… international news had gotten so dull since the demise of the Soviet Union, and he wondered how the editors of major newspapers had learned to deal with it. Well, people in Rwanda and Burundi were still slaughtering one another with obscene gusto, and the Irish were wondering aloud if soldiers from their army might be sent down as peacekeepers. Wasn't that odd? Popov thought. They'd proven singularly unable to keep the peace at home, so why, then, send them elsewhere to do it?

"Joe!" a happy voice said out of his field of vision. He looked up to see a fortyish man with a beaming smile.

"Patrick!" Popov responded, standing, going over to shake hands. "It's been a long time." Very long, as he'd never met this particular chap before, though they exchanged greetings like old friends. With that, they walked off to O'Connell Street, where a car was waiting. Popov and his new friend got in the back, and the driver took off at once, not speeding, but checking his rearview mirror carefully as he took several random turns. "Patrick" in the back looked up for helicopters. Well, Dmitriy thought, these PIRA soldiers hadn't lived to their current ages by being careless. For his part, Popov just sat back and relaxed. He might have closed his eyes, but that would have been overly patronizing to his hosts. Instead, he just stared forward. It was not his first time in Dublin, but except for a few obvious landmarks, he remembered little of the city. His current companions would not have believed that, since intelligence officers were supposed to have trained, photographic memories-which was true, but only to a point. It took forty minutes of weaving through the city until they came to a commercial building and looped around into an alley. There the car stopped, and they got out to enter a door in a blank brick wall.

"Iosef Andreyevich," a voice said calmly in the darkness. Then a face appeared.

"Sean, it has been a long time." Popov stepped forward, extending his hand.

"Eleven years and six months, to be exact," Sean Grady agreed, taking the hand and shaking it warmly.

"Your trade-craft remains excellent." Popov smiled. "I have no idea where we are."

"Well, one must be careful, Iosef." Grady waved. "Come this way, if you would."

Grady directed him to a small room with a table and a few chairs. There was tea brewing. The Irish hadn't lost their sense of hospitality, Dmitriy Arkadeyevich saw, removing his coat and dumping it on an armchair. Then he sat down.

"What can we do for you?" Grady asked. He was nearing fifty, Popov saw, but the eyes retained their youth and their dedicated look, narrow, overtly without passion, but intense as ever.

"Before we get to that, how are things going for you, Sean?"

"They could be better," Grady admitted. "Some of our former colleagues in Ulster have committed themselves to surrendering to the British Crown. Unfortunately, there are many who share those leanings, but we are working to persuade others to a more realistic point of view."

"Thank you," Popov said to the one who gave him a cup of tea. He took a sip before speaking. "Sean, you know, from the first time we met in Lebanon, I have respected your commitment to your ideals. I am surprised that so many others have wavered."

"It's been a long war, Iosef, and I suppose that not everyone can maintain his dedication. And more is the pity, my friend." Again his voice was singularly devoid of emotion. His face wasn't so much cruel as blank. He would have made a superb field intelligence officer. the Russian thought. He gave away nothing, not even the satisfaction he occasionally felt when he accomplished a mission. He'd probably showed as little passion when he'd tortured and murdered two British SAS commandos who'd made the mistake of letting down their guard just once. Such things had not happened often, but Sean Grady had achieved that most difficult of goals twice-at the cost, truth be told, of a bloody vendetta between the British Army's most elite unit and Grady's own cell of the PIRA. The SAS had killed no fewer than eight of his closest associates, and on one other occasion some seven years before they'd missed Grady only because his car had broken down on the way to a meeting-a meeting crashed by the SAS, who had killed three senior PIRA officials there. Sean Grady was a marked man, and Popov was certain that the British Security Service had spent hundreds of thousands of pounds in their attempt to track him down and target him for another commando raid. This, like intelligence operations, was a very dangerous game for all the players, but most of all for the revolutionaries themselves. And now his own leadership wasselling out, or so Grady must have thought. This man would never make peace with the British. He believed too firmly in his vision of the world, warped though it was. Josef Vissarionovich Stalin had possessed a face like this one, and the same single-mindedness of purpose, and the same total inability to compromise on strategic issues.

"There is a new counter-terror team operating in England now," Dmitriy told him.

"Oh?" Grady hadn't known that, and the revelation surprised him.

"Yes. It is called Rainbow. It is a joint effort of the British and Americans, and it was they who handled the jobs at Worldpark, Vienna, and Bern. They have not yet been committed to this particular mission, but that is only, I think, a matter of time."

"What do you know about this new group?"

"Quite a lot." Popov handed over his written summary.

"Hereford," Grady observed. "We've been there to look, but it is not a place one can easily attack."

"Yes, I know that, Sean, but there are additional vulnerabilities, and with proper planning, we think it possible to strike a hard blow on this Rainbow group. You see, both the wife and daughter of the group commander, this American, John Clark, work at the nearby community hospital. They would be the bait for the mission="

"Bait?" Grady asked.

"Yes, Sean." And then Popov went on to describe the mission concept. Grady, as ever, didn't react, but two of his people did, shifting in their chairs and trading looks while waiting for their commander to speak. This he finally did, rather formally.

"Colonel Serov, you propose that we undertake a major risk."

Dmitriy nodded. "Yes, that is true, and it is for you to decide if the risk is worth the rewards." Popov didn't have to remind the IRA chieftain that he'd helped them in the past-in a minor way to be sure, but these were not people to forget assistance-but neither did he have to point out that this mission, if successful, would not only catapult Grady to the forefront of IRA commanders, but also, perhaps, poison the peace process between the British government and the "official" faction of the PIRA. To be the man who humbled the SAS and other special-operations teams on their own turf would win him such prestige as no Irish revolutionary had enjoyed since 1920. That was always the weakness of such people, Popov knew. Their dedication to ideology made them hostage to their egos, to their vision, not only of their political objectives, but of themselves.

"Iosef Andreyevich, unfortunately, we do not have the resources to consider such a mission as this."

"I understand that. What resources do you require, Sean?"

"More than you can offer." From his own experience, and from speaking with others in the community of world terrorists, Grady knew how tight the KGB was with its cash. But that only set him up for the next surprise.

"Five million American dollars, in a numbered and codeword-controlled Swiss account," Popov said evenly, and this time he saw emotion on Grady's face. The eyes blinked. The mouth opened slightly, as though to voice an objection, but then he restored his self-control.

"Six," Grady said, just to take control of the agenda.

That suited Popov just fine. "Very well, then, I suppose I can offer as much as six million. How quickly will you need it?"

"How quickly can you deliver it?"

"A week, I think. How long for you to plan the operation?" Grady thought for a few seconds. "Two weeks." He already knew much of the area around Hereford. That he had not been able to conduct an attack in earlier days hadn't prevented him from thinking-dreaming-about it. and gathering the needed intelligence. He had also tried to gather information on SAS operations, but had found that the SAS didn't talk very much, even afterward, except within their own community. A few covert photographs had been generated, but they hadn't proven very useful in the field. No, what they'd needed and hadn't had in previous years was a combination of people willing to undertake a huge risk and the resources to obtain the items the mission would require.

"One other thing," Grady said.

"Yes?"

"How good are your contacts with drug dealers?" Grady asked.

Popov allowed himself to be shocked, though he didn't react visibly. Grady wanted drugs to sell? That was a huge change in the PIRA's ethos. In earlier years, the Provos had made a point of killing or kneecapping drug dealers as a means of showing that they were worthy of community support. So, this had changed, too?

"I have some indirect contacts, I suppose. What would you require?"

"Cocaine, a large quantity of it, preferably pure."

"To sell here?"

"Yes. Money is money, losef," Grady pointed out. ".And we need a continuing income to maintain operations."

"I make no promises, but I will see what I can do."

"Very well. Let me know about the money. When it is available to us, I will let you know if the mission can be carried out, and when we might be able to do it."

"Weapons?"

"That is not a concern," Grady assured him.

"I need a telephone number to call."

Grady nodded, took a pad from the table, and wrote it out for him. It was clearly a cellular phone. The Russian pocketed the note. "That should be good for another few weeks. Is that sufficient to your needs?"

"Yes, it is." Popov stood. There was nothing else to be said. Popov was led out of the building and back to the car he had arrived in. The meeting had gone well, Dmitriy told himself on the drive back to his hotel.

"Sean, this is a suicide mission!" Roddy Sands warned back in the warehouse.

"Not if we control the situation, Roddy," Grady replied. "And we can do that if we have the proper resources. We'll have to be careful, and very quick, but we can do it." And when we do, Grady didn't have to go on, then the entire movement will see who really represents the people of Ireland. "We'll need fifteen men or so. We can get the right fifteen men, Roddy." Then Grady stood and walked out the other door in the room and got his own car for the drive to his safe house. There he had work to do, the sort of work he always did alone.

Henriksen was assembling his team. He figured ten men total, all experienced, and all briefed in on the Project. Foremost among them would be Lieutenant Colonel Wilson Gearing, formerly of the United States Army Chemical Corps. A genuine expert on chemical weapons, he would be the deliveryman. The rest would consult with the local security forces, and tell them things they already knew, establishing and enforcing the international rule that an Expert Was Somebody From Out Of Town. The Australian SAS would listen politely to everything his people said, and maybe even learn a thing or two, especially when his people brought down the new radio gear from E-Systems and Dick Voss trained the Aussies up on them. The new radios for special operations troops and SWAT cops were a thing of beauty. After that, they'd merely strut around with special ID to get them through all the security checkpoints, and even onto the track-and field grounds of the huge stadium. They'd be able to watch the Olympics close up, which would be an interesting fringe benny for his people, some of whom, he was sure, were real sports fans who would enjoy seeing the last Olympics.

He selected his best people, and then had the corporation's travel agent set up the flights and accommodations - the latter through the Australian police, which had reserved a block of hotel suites close to the stadium for their own use throughout the Olympic games. Henriksen wondered if there would be media attention for his company. Ordinarily, he would have insisted on it, just as advertising, but not this time, he decided. There wasn't much point in advertising his company anymore, was there? So, this project was done. Hollister looked over the buildings, the roads, parking lots, and the ersatz airplane runway whose construction he'd supervised here in the Kansas plains. The final stuff had been the usual confusion of niggling little details, but all the subcontractors had responded well to his browbeating, especially since their contracts all had incentive clauses as well.

The company car pulled up to his four-by-four and stopped, and then Hollister was surprised. The guy who got out was the big boss, John Brightling himself. He'd never met the chairman of the corporation, though he knew the name, and had seen the face on TV once or twice. He must have flown in this very morning on one of his corporate jets, and the construction superintendent was somewhat disappointed that he hadn't used the approach road, which could have easily accommodated the Gulfstream.

"Mr. Hollister, I presume?"

"Yes, sir." He took the extended hand and shook it. "It's all done, as of today, sir."

"You beat your promise by two and a half weeks," Brightling observed.

"Well, the weather helped us out some. I can't take credit for that."

Brightling laughed. "I would."

"The toughest part was the environmental systems. That's the most demanding set of specifications I've ever seen. What's the big deal, Dr. Brightling?"

"Well, some of the things we work with demand full isolation Level Four, we call it in the business. Hot Lab stuff, and we have to treat it very carefully, as you might imagine. Federal rules on that we have to follow."

"But the whole building?" Hollister asked. It had been like building a ship or an aircraft. Rarely was any large structure designed to be completely airtight. But this one was, which had forced them to do air-pressure tests when each module had been completed, and driven his window contractors slightly crazy.

"Well, we just wanted it done our way."

"Your building, Doc," Hollister allowed. That one specification had added five million dollars of labor costs to the project, all of it to the window contractor, whose workers had hated the detail work, though not the extra pay to do it. The old Boeing plant down the road at Wichita had hardly been called upon to do such finely finished work. "You picked a pretty setting for it, though."

"Didn't we, though?" All around, the land was covered with a swaying green carpet of wheat, just about a quarter way into its growing cycle. There were some farm machines visible, fertilizing and weeding the crop. Maybe not as pretty as a golf course, but a lot more practical. The complex even had its own large institutional bakery to bake its own bread, maybe from the wheat grown right here on the campus? Hollister wondered. Why hadn't he thought about that one before? The farms that had been bought along with the land even included a feedlot for fattening up cattle, and other land used for truck-farm vegetables. This whole complex could be self-sustaining if somebody ever wanted it to be. Well, maybe they just wanted it to fit in with the area. This part of Kansas was all farms, and though the steel-and-glass buildings of the project didn't exactly look like barns and equipment sheds, their surroundings somehow muted their invasiveness. And besides, you could hardly see them from the interstate highway to the north, and only from a few public roads closer than that, and the gatehouses for limiting access were stout buildings, almost like pillboxes - to protect against tornadoes, the specifications had said, and sure enough no tornado could hurt them -hell, even some loony farmer with a.50-caliber machine gun couldn't hurt those security huts.

"So, you've earned your bonus. The money will be in your account by the close of business tomorrow," Dr. John Brightling promised.

"Suits me, sir." Hollister fished in his pocket and pulled out the master key, the one that would open any door in the complex. It was a little ceremony he always performed when he finished a project. He handed it over. "Well, sir, its your building complex now."

Brightling looked at the electronic key and smiled. This was the last major hurdle for the Project. This would be the home of nearly all of his people. A similar but much smaller structure in Brazil had been finished two months earlier, but that one barely accommodated a hundred people. This one could house three thousand-somewhat crowded, but comfortably even so-for some months, and that was about right. After the first couple of months, he could sustain his medical research efforts here with his best people-most of them not briefed in on the Project, but worthy of life even so because that work was heading in some unexpectedly promising directions. So promising that he wondered how long he himself might live here. Fifty years? A hundred? A thousand, perhaps? Who could say now?

Olympus, he'd call it, Brightling decided on the spot. The home of the gods, for that was exactly what he expected it to be. From here they could watch the world, study it, enjoy it, appreciate it. He would use the call-sign OLYMPUS-1 on his portable radio. From here he'd be able to fly all over the world with picked companions, to observe and learn how the ecology was supposed to work. For twenty years or so, they'd be able to use communications satellites no telling how long they'd last, and after that they'd be stuck with long-wire radio systems. That was an inconvenience for the future, but launching his own replacement satellites was just too difficult in terms of manpower and resources, and besides, satellite launchers polluted like nothing else humankind had ever invented.

Brightling wondered how long his people would choose to live here. Some would scatter quickly, probably drive all over America, setting up their own enclaves, reporting back by satellite at first. Others would go to Africa-that seemed likely to be the most popular destination. Still others to Brazil and the rain forest study area. Perhaps some of the primitive tribes down there would be spared the Shiva exposure, and his people would study them as well and how Primitive Man lived in a pristine physical environment, living in full harmony with Nature. They'd study them as they were, a unique species worthy of protection and too backward to be a danger to the environment. Might some African tribes survive as well? His people didn't think so. The African countries allowed their primitives to interface too readily with city folk, and the cities would be the focal centers of death for every nation on earth-especially when Vaccine-A was distributed. Thousands of liters of it would be produced, flown all over the world, and then distributed, ostensibly to preserve life, but really to take it… slowly, of course.

Progress was going well. Back at his corporate headquarters the fictional documentation for -A was already fully formulated. It had been supposedly tested on over a thousand monkeys who were then exposed to Shiva, and only two of them had become symptomatic, and only one of those had died over the nineteen month trial that existed only on paper and computer memories. They hadn't yet approached the FDA for human trials, because that wasn't necessary-but when Shiva started appearing all over the world, Horizon Corporation would announce that it had been working quietly on hemorrhagic fever vaccines ever since the Iranian attack on America, and faced with a global emergency and a fully documented treatment modality, the FDA would have no choice but to approve human use, and so officially bless the Project's goal of global human extermination. Not so much the elimination, John Brightling thought more precisely, as the culling back of the most dangerous species on the planet, which would allow Nature to restore Herself, with just enough human stewards to watch and study and appreciate the process. In a thousand or so years, there might be a million or so humans, but that was a small number in the great scheme of things, and the people would be properly educated to understand and respect nature instead of destroying her. The goal of the Project wasn't to end the world. It was to build a new one, a new world in the shape that Nature Herself intended. On that he would put his own name for all eternity. John Brightling, the man who saved the planet.

Brightling looked at the key in his hand, then got back into his car. The driver took him to the main entrance, and there he used the key, surprised and miffed to see that the door was unlocked. Well, there were still people going in and out. He took the elevator to his office-apartment atop the main building. That door, he saw, was locked as it was supposed to be, and he opened it with a kind of one-person ceremony, and walked into the seat of Olympus's chief,o d. No, that wasn't right. Insofar as there was a god, it was Nature. From his office windows, he could see out over the plains of Kansas, the swaying young wheat… it was so beautiful. Almost enough to bring tears to his eyes. Nature. She could be cruel to individuals, but individuals didn't matter. Despite all the warnings, humankind hadn't learned that.

Well, learn it they would, the way Nature taught all Her lessons. The hard way.

Pat O'Connor made his daily report to the ASAC in the evening. Coatless, he slid into the chair opposite Ussery's desk with his folder in hand. It was already fairly thick." Bannister case," Chuck Ussery said. "Anything shaking loose yet, Pat?"

"Nothing," the supervisory special agent replied. 'We've interviewed fourteen friends in the Gary area. None of them had any idea what Mary was doing in New Fork. Only six of them even knew she was there, and she.ever discussed jobs or boyfriends, if any, with them. So, nothing at all has happened here."

"New York?" the ASAC asked next.

"Two agents on the case there, Tom Sullivan and Frank Chatham. They've established contact with a NYPD detective lieutenant named d'Allessandro. Forensics has been through her apartment-nothing. Latent prints are all hers, not even a maid. Neighbors in the building knew her by sight, but no real friendships established, and therefore no known associates. The New York idea is to print up some flyers and pass them out via the NYPD. The local detective is worried there might be a serial killer loose. He has another missing female, same age, roughly the same appearance and area of residence, fell off the world about the same time."

"Behavioral Sciences?" Ussery asked at once.

O'Connor nodded. "They've looked over the facts we have to date. They wonder if the e-mail was sent by the victim or maybe by a serial killer who wants to fuck over the family. Style differences on the message that Mr. Bannister brought in-well, we both saw that it appeared to have been written by a different person, or someone on drugs, but she was evidently not a drug user. And we can't trace the e-mail back anywhere. It went into an anonymous- remailer system. That sort of thing is designed to protect the originator of electronic mail, I guess so people can swap porno over the Net. I talked with Eddie Morales in Baltimore. He's the technical wizard in Innocent Images" - that was an ongoing FBI project to track down, arrest, and imprison those who swapped kiddie porn over their computers - "and Bert said they're playing with some technical fixes. They have a hacker on the payroll who thinks he can come up with a way to crack through the anonymity feature, but he's not there yet, and the local U.S. Attorney isn't sure it's legal anyway."

"Shit." Ussery thought of that legal opinion. Kiddie porn was one of the Bureau's pet hates, and Innocent Images had turned into a high-priority nationwide investigation, run from the Baltimore Field Division.

O'Connor nodded. "That's exactly what Bert said, Chuck."

"So, nothing happening yet?"

"Nothing worthwhile. We have a few more of Mary's friends to interview-five are set up for tomorrow, but if anything breaks loose, my bet's on New York. Somebody must have known her. Somebody must have dated her. But not here, Chuck. She left Gary and didn't look back."

Ussery frowned, but there was no fault to be found with O'Connor's investigative procedures, and there was a total of twelve agents working the Bannister case. Such cases ran and broke at their own speed. If James Bannister called, as he did every day, he'd just have to tell him that the Bureau was still working on it, then ask him for any additional friends he might have forgotten to list for the Gary team of agents.