CHAPTER 38
NATURE RESORT

   It was just too much for Wil Gearing. Nobody had told him what to do in a case like this. It had never occurred to him that security would be broken on the Project. His life was forfeit now-how could that have happened'.' He could cooperate or not. The contents of the canister would be examined anyway, probably at USAMRIID at Fort Detrick, Maryland, and it would require only a few seconds for the medical experts there to see what he'd carried into the Olympic stadium, and there was no explaining that away, was there? His life, his plans for the future, had been taken away from him. and his only choice was to cooperate and hope for the best.

   And so, as the C-17A Globemaster III transport climbed to its cruising altitude, he started talking. Noonan held a tape recorder in his hand, and hoped that the engine noise that permeated the cargo area wouldn't wash it all away. It turned out that the hardest part for him was to keep a straight face. He'd heard about extreme environmental groups, the people who thought killing baby seals in Canada was right up there with Treblinka and Auschwitz, and he knew that the Bureau had looked at some for offenses like releasing laboratory animals from medical institutions, or spiking trees with nails so that no lumber company would dare to run trees from those areas through their sawmills, but he'd never heard of those groups doing anything more offensive than that. This, however, was such a crime as to redefine "monstrous." And the religious fervor that went along with it was entirely alien to him, and therefore hard to credit. He wanted to believe that the contents of the chlorine canister really was just chlorine, but he knew that it was not. That and the backpack were now sealed in a mil-spec plastic container strapped down in a seat next to Sergeant Mike Pierce.

   "He hasn't called yet," John Brightling observed, checking his watch. The closing ceremonies were under way. The head of the International Olympic Committee was about to give his speech, summoning the Youth of the World to the next set of games. Then the assembled orchestra would play, and the Olympic Flame would be extinguished . . . just as most of humanity would be extinguished. There was the same sort of sadness to it, but also the same inevitability. There would be no next Olympiad, and the Youth of the World would not be alive to hear the summons? . . .

   "John, he's probably watching this the same as we are. Give him some time," Bill Henriksen advised.

   "You say so." Brightling put his arm around his wife's shoulders and tried to relax. Even now, the people walking in the stadium were being sprinkled with the nanocapsules bearing Shiva. Bill was right. Nothing could have gone wrong. He could see it in his mind. The streets and highways empty, farms idle, airports shut down. The trees would thrive without lumberjacks to chop them down. The animals would nose about, wondering perhaps where all the noises and the two-legged creatures were. Rats and of her carrion eaters would feast. Dogs and cats would return to their primal instincts and survive or not, as circumstances allowed. Herbivores and predators would be relieved of hunting pressure. Poison traps set out in the wild would continue to kill, but eventually these would run out of their poisons and stop killing game that farmers and others disliked. This year there would be no mass murder of baby harp seals for their lovely white coats. This year the world would be reborn ... and even if that required an act of violence, it was worth the price for those who had the brains and aesthetic to appreciate it all. It was like a religion for Brightling and his people. Surely it had all the aspects of a religion. They worshiped the great collective life system called Nature. They were fighting for Her because they knew that She loved and nurtured them back. It was that simple. Nature was to them if not a person, then a huge enveloping idea that made and supported the things they loved. They were hardly the first people to dedicate their lives to an idea, were they?

   "How long to Hickam?"

   "Another ten hours, the crew chief told me," Pierce said, checking his watch. "This is like being back in the Eight-Deuce. All I need's my chute, Tim," he told Noonan.

   "Huh?"

   "Eighty-Second Airborne, Fort Bragg, my first outfit. All the way, baby," Pierce explained for the benefit of this FBI puke. He missed jumping, but that was something special-ops people didn't do. Going in by helicopter was better organized and definitely safer, but it didn't have the rush you got from leaping out of a transport aircraft along with your squadmates. "What do you think of what this guy was trying to do?" Pierce asked, pointing at Gearing.

   "Hard to believe it's real."

   "Yeah, I know," Pierce agreed. "I'd like to think nobody's that crazy. It's too big a thought for my brain, man."

   "Yeah," Noonan replied. "Mine, too." He felt the mini tape recorder in his shirt pocket and wondered about the information it contained. Had he taken the confession legally? He'd given the mutt his rights, and Gearing said that he understood them, but any halfway competent attorney would try hard to have it all tossed, claiming that since they were aboard a military aircraft surrounded by armed men, the circumstances had been coercive-and maybe the judge would agree. He might also agree that the arrest had been illegal. But, Noonan thought, all of that was less important than the result. If Gearing had spoken the truth, this arrest might have saved millions of lives .... He went forward to the aircraft's radio compartment, got on the secure system, and called New York.

   Clark was asleep when his phone rang. He grabbed the receiver and grunted, "Yeah?"only to find that the security system was still handshaking. Then it announced that the line was secure. "What is it, Ding?"

   "It's Tim Noonan, John. I have a question."

   "What's that?"

   "What are you going to do when we get there? I have Gearing's confession on tape, the whole thing, just like what you told Ding a few hours ago. Word for fucking word, John. What do we do now?"

   "I don't know yet. We probably have to talk to Director Murray, and also with Ed Foley at CIA. I'm not sure the law anticipates anything this big, and I'm not sure this is something we ever want to put in a public courtroom, y'know?"

   "Well, yeah," Noonan's voice agreed from half a world away. "Okay, just so somebody's thinking about it."

   "Okay, yeah, we're thinking about it. Anything else?"

   "I guess not."

   "Good. I'm going back to sleep." And the line went dead, and Noonan walked back to the cargo compartment. Chavez and Tomlinson were keeping an eye on Gearing, while the rest of the people tried to get some sleep in the crummy USAF seats and thus pass the time on this most boring of flights. Except for the dreams, Noonan discovered in an hour. They weren't boring at all.

   "He still hasn't called," Brightling said, as the network coverage went through Olympic highlights.

   "I know," Henriksen conceded. "Okay, let me make a call." He rose from his seat, pulled a card from his wallet, and dialed a number on the back of it to a cellular phone owned by a senior Global Security employee down in Sydney.

   "Tony? This is Bill Henriksen. I need you to do something for me right now, okay? . . . Good. Find Wil Gearing and tell him to call me immediately. He has the number . . . Yes, that's the one. Right now, Tony . . . Yeah. Thanks." And Henriksen hung up. "That shouldn't take long. Not too many places he can be except maybe on the way to the airport for his flight up the coast. Relax, John," the security chief advised, still not feeling any chill on his skin. Gearing's cell phone could have a dead battery, he could be caught up in the crowds and unable to get a cab back to his hotel, maybe there weren't any cabs any one of a number of innocent explanations.

   Down in Sydney, Tony Johnson walked across the street to Wil Gearing's hotel. He knew the room already, since they'd met there, and took the elevator to the right room. Defeating the lock was child's play, just a matter of working a credit card into the doorjamb and flipping the angled latch, and then he was inside

   –and so were Gearing's bags, sitting there by the sliding mirror doors of the closet, and there on the desk-table was the folder with his flight tickets to the Northeast Coast of Australia, plus a map and some brochures about the Great Barrier Reef. This was odd. Wil's flight-he checked the ticket folder-was due to go off in twenty minutes, and he ought to be all checked in and boarding the aircraft by now, but he hadn't left the hotel. This was very odd. Where are you, Wil? Johnson wondered. Then he remembered why he was here, and lifted the phone.

   "Yeah, Tony. So, where's our boy?" Henriksen asked confidently. Then his face changed. "What do you mean? What else do you know? Okay, if you find out anything else, call me here. Bye." Henriksen set the phone down and turned to look at the other two. "Wil Gearing's disappeared. Not in his room, but his luggage and tickets are. Like he just fell off the planet."

   "What's that mean?" Carol Brightling asked.

   "I'm not sure. Hell, maybe he got hit by a car in the street-"

   "-Or maybe Popov spilled his guts to the wrong people and they bagged him," John Brightling suggested nervously.

   "Popov didn't even know his name--Hunnicutt couldn't have told him, he didn't know Gearing's name either." But then Henriksen thought, Oh, shit. Foster did know how the Shiva was supposed to be delivered, didn't he? Oh, shit.

   "What's the matter, Bill?" John asked, seeing the man's face and knowing that something was wrong.

   "John, we may have a problem," the former FBI agent announced.

   "What problem?" Carol asked. Henriksen explained and the mood in the room changed abruptly. "You mean, they might know?. . .Henriksen nodded. "That is possible, yes."

   "My God," the Presidential Science Advisor exclaimed. If they know that, then-then-then-"

   "Yeah." Bill nodded. "Then we're fucked."

   "What can we do about this?"

   "For starters, we destroy all the evidence. All the Shiva, all the vaccines, all the records. It's all on computer, so we just erase it. There shouldn't be much in the way of a paper trail, because we told people not to print anything up, and to destroy any paper notes they might make. We can do that from here. I can access all the company computers from my office and kill off all the records"

   "They're encrypted, all of them," John Brightling pointed out.

   "You want to bet against the code-breakers at Fort Meade? I don't," Henriksen told them. "No, those files all have to go, John. Look, you beat a criminal prosecution by denying evidence to the prosecutors. Without physical evidence, they can't hurt you."

   "What about witnesses?"

   "The most overrated thing in the world is an eyewitness. Any lawyer with half a brain can make fools out of them. No, when I was working cases for the Bureau, I wanted something I could hold in my hand, something you could pass over to the jury so they could see it and feel it. Eyewitness testimony is pretty useless in court, despite what you see on TV. Okay, I'm going to my office to get rid of the computer stuff." Henriksen left at once, leaving the two Brightlings behind him.

   "My God, John," Carol said in quiet alarm, "what if people find out, nobody'll understand . . ."

   "Understand that we were going to kill them and their families? No," her husband agreed dryly, "I don't think Joe Sixpack and Archie Bunker will understand that very well."

   "So, what do we do?"

   "We get the hell out of the country. We fly down to Brazil with everyone who knows what the Project is all about. We still have access to money-I have dozens of covert accounts we can access electronically-and they probably can't make a criminal case against us if Bill can trash all the computer files. Okay, they may have Wil Gearing under arrest, but he's just one voice, and I'm not sure they can come after us legally, in a foreign country, on the word of one person. There are only fifty or so people who really know what's happening-all of it, I mean and we have enough airplanes to get us all to Manaus."

   In his office, Henriksen lit up his personal computer and pulled open an encrypted file. It had telephone numbers and access codes to every computer in Horizon Corporation, plus the names of the files relating to the Project. He accessed them via modem, looked for the files that had to go, and moved them with mouse-clicks into trash cans that shredded the files completely instead of merely removing their electronic address codes. He found that he was sweating as he did so, and it took him thirty-nine minutes, but after that time was concluded, he was certain that he'd completely destroyed them all. He checked his list and his memory for the file names and conducted another global search, but no, those files were completely gone now. Good.

   Okay, he asked himself, what else might they have? They might have Gearing's Shiva-delivery canister. 'What would be hard to argue with, but what, really, did it mean? It would mean, if the right people looked at it,that Gearing had been carrying a potential bio-war weapon. Gearing could tell a U.S. attorney that it had come from Horizon Corporation, but no one working on that segment of the Project would ever admit to having done it, and so, no, there would be no corroborating evidence to back up the assertion.

   Okay, there were by his count fifty-three Horizon and Global Security employees who knew the Project from beginning to end. Work on the "A" and "B" vaccines could be explained away as medical research. The Shiva virus and the vaccine supplies would be burned in a matter of hours, leaving no physical evidence at all.

   This was enough-well, it was almost enough. They still had Gearing, and Gearing, if he talked-and he would talk, Henriksen was sure, because the Bureau had ways of choking information out of people-could make life very uncomfortable for Brightling and a lot of other people, including himself. They would probably avoid conviction, but the embarrassment of a trial-and the things that the revelations might generate,, casual comments made by Project members to others, would be woven together . . . and there was Popov, who could link John Brightling and himself to terrorist acts. But they could finger Popov for murdering Foster Hunnicutt, and that would pollute whatever case he might try to make. . . the best thing would be to be beyond their reach when they tried to assemble a case. That meant Brazil, and Project Alternate in the jungles west of Manaus. They could head down there, sheltered by Brazil's wonderfully protective extradition laws, and study the rain forest . . . yes, that made sense. Okay, he thought, he had a list of the full Project members, those who knew everything, those who, if the FBI got them and interrogated them, could hang them all. He printed this list of the True Believers and tucked the pages in his shirt pocket. With the work done and the alternatives analyzed, Henriksen went back to Brightling's penthouse office.

   "I've told the flight crews to get the birds warmed up," Brightling told him when he came in.

   "Good." Henriksen nodded. "I think Brazil looks pretty good right now. If nothing else, we can get all of our critical personnel fully briefed on how to handle this, how to act if anyone asks them some questions. We can beat this one, John, but we have to be smart about it."

   "What about the planet?" Carol Brightling asked sadly.

   "Carol," Bill replied, "you take care of your own ass first. You can't save Nature from inside Marion Federal Penitentiary, but if we play it smart, we can deny evidence to anyone who investigates us, and without that we're safe, guys. Now"-he pulled the list from his pocket-"these are the only people we have to protect. There's fifty-three of them, and you have four Gulfstreams sitting out there. We can fly us all down to Project Alternate. Any disagreement on that?"

   John Brightling shook his head. "No, I'm with you. Can this keep us in the clear legally?"

   Henriksen nodded emphatically. "I think so. Popov will be a problem, but he's a murderer. I'm going to report the Hunnicutt killing to the local cops before we fly off. That will compromise his value as a witness-make it look like he's just telling a tale to save his own ass from the gallows, whatever they use to execute murderers here in Kansas. I'll have Maclean and Killgore tape statements we can hand over to the local police. It may not be enough to convict him, but it will make him pretty uncomfortable. That's how you do this, break up the other guy's chain of evidence and the credibility of his witnesses. In a year, maybe eighteen months, we have our lawyers sit down and chat with the local U.S. attorney, and then we come home. Until then we camp out in Brazil, and you can run the company from there via the Internet, can't you?"

   "Well, it's not as good as what we planned, but . . ."

   "Yes," Carol agreed. "But it beats the hell out of life in a federal prison."

   "Get everything moving, Bill," John ordered.

   "So, what do we do with this?" Clark asked, on waking up.

   "Well," Tom Sullivan answered, "first we go to the Assistant Director in Charge of the New York office, and then we talk to a United States attorney about building a criminal case."

   "I don't think so," Clark responded, rubbing his eyes and reaching for the coffee.

   "We can't just put the arm on them and whack'em, you know. We're cops. We can't break the law," Chatham pointed out.

   "This can never see the light of day in a court. Besides, who's to say that you'll win the case? How hard will this be to cover up?"

   "I can't evaluate that. We have two missing girls they probably murdered-more, if our friend Popov is right-and that's a crime, both federal and state, and, Jesus, this other conspiracy . . . that's why we have laws, Mr. Clark."

   "Maybe so, but how fast do you see yourself driving out to this place in Kansas, whose location we don't know yet, with warrants to arrest one of the richest men in America?"

   "It will take a little time," Sullivan admitted.

   "A couple of weeks at least, just to assemble the case information," Special Agent Chatham said. "We'll need to talk with experts, to have that chlorine jar examined by the right people-and all the while the subjects will be working to destroy every bit of physical evidence. It won't be easy, but that's what we do in the Bureau, y'know?"

   "I suppose," Clark said dubiously. "But there won't be much element of surprise here. They probably know we have this Gearing guy. From that they know what he can tell us."

   "True," Sullivan conceded.

   "We might have to try something else."

   "What might that be?"

   "I'm not sure," Clark admitted.

   The videotaping was done in the Project's media center, where they'd hoped to produce nature tapes for those who survived the plague. The end of the Project as an operational entity hit its members hard. Kirk Maclean was especially downcast, but he acted his role well in explaining the morning rides that he, Serov, Hunnicutt, and Killgore had enjoyed. Then Dr. John Killgore told of how he'd found the horses, and then came Maclean's explanation of how the body was found, and the autopsy Killgore had personally performed, which had found the .44 bullet that had ended Foster Hunnicutt's life. With that done, the men joined the others in the lobby of the residence building, and a minibus ferried them to the waiting aircraft.

   It would be a 3,500-mile flight to Manaus, they were told on boarding, about eight hours, an easy hop for the Gulfstream V. The lead aircraft was nearly empty, just the doctors Brightling, Bill Henriksen, and Steve Berg, lead scientist for the Shiva part of the Project. The aircraft lifted off at nine in the morning local time. Next stop,the Amazon Valley of central Brazil.

   It turned out that the FBI did know where the Kansas site was. A car and two agents from the local resident agency drove out in time to see the jets lift off, which they duly reported to their base station, and from there to Washington. Then they just parked at the side of the road, sipped at their drinks, ate their McDonald's burgers and watched nothing happening at all at the misplaced buildings in the middle of wheat country.

   The C-17 switched crews at Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii, then refueled and lifted off for Travis in northern California. Chavez and his party never even departed the aircraft, but watched the new crew arrive with box lunches and drinks, and then settled in for the next six hours of air travel. Wilson Gearing was trying to explain himself now, talking about trees and birds and fish and stuff, Ding overheard. It was not an argument calculated to persuade the father of a newborn, and the husband of a physician, but the man rambled on. Noonan listened politely and recorded this conversation, too.

   The flight south was quiet on all the aircraft. Those who hadn't heard about the developments in Sydney guessed that something was wrong, but they couldn't communicate with the lead aircraft without going through the flight crews, and they had not been briefed in on the Project's objectives-like so many of the employees of Horizon Corporation, they had simply been paid to do the jobs for which they were trained. They flew now on a southerly course to a destination just below the equator. It was a trip they'd made before, when Project Alternate had been built the previous year. It, too, had its own runway sufficient for the business jets, but only VFR daylight capable, since it lacked the navigation aids in Kansas. If anything went wrong, they would bingo to the Manaus city airport, ninety-eight miles to the east of their destination, which had full services, including repairs. Project Alternate had spare parts, and every aircraft had a trained mechanic aboard, but they preferred to leave major repairs to others. In an hour, they were "feet-wet" over the Gulf of Mexico, then turned east to flythrough the international travel corridor over Cuba. The weather forecast was good all the way down to Venezuela, where they might have to dodge a few thunderheads, but nothing serious. The senior passengers in the lead aircraft figured that they were leaving the country about as fast as it could be done, disappearing off the face of the planet they'd hoped to save.

  "What's that?" Sullivan asked. Then he turned. "Four jets just left the Kansas location, and they headed off to the south."

   "Is there any way to track them?"

   Sullivan shrugged. "The Air Force maybe."

   "How the hell do we do that?" Clark wondered aloud. Then he called Langley.

   "I can try, John, but getting the Air Force hopping this quick won't be easy."

   "Try, will you, Ed? Four Gulfstream-type business jets heading south from central Kansas, destination unknown."

   "Okay, I'll call the NMCC."

   That was not a difficult thing for the Director of Central Intelligence to do. The senior duty officer in the National Military Command Center was an Air Force two-star recently rotated into a desk job aftercommanding the remaining USAF fighter force in NATO.

   "So, what are we supposed to do, sir?" the general asked.

   "Four Gulfstream-type business jets took off from central Kansas about half an hour ago. We want them tracked."

   "With what? All our air-defense fighters are on the Canadian border. Calling them down wouldn't work, they'd never catch up."

   "How about an AWACS?" Foley asked.

   "They belong to Air Combat Command at Langley ours, not yours-and well, maybe one's up for counterdrug surveillance or maybe training. I can check."

   "Do that," Ed Foley said. "I'll hold."

   The two-star in blue went one better than that, calling the North American Aerospace Defense Command in Cheyenne Mountain, which had radar coverage over the entire country, and ordering them to identify the four Gs. That took less than a minute, and a computer command was sent to the Federal Aviation Administration to check the flight plans that had to be filed for international flights. NORAD also told the general that there were two E-3B AWACS aircraft aloft at the moment, one 300 miles south of New Orleans doing counter-drug operations, and the other just south of Eglin Air Force Base, conducting routine training with some fighters based there in an exercise against a Navy flight out of Pensacola Naval Air Station. With that information, he called Langley Air Force Base in the Virginia Tidewater, got Operations, and told them about the DCI's request.

   "What's this for, sir?" the general asked Foley, once the phone lines were properly lashed up.

   "I can't tell you that, but it's important as hell."

   The general relayed that to Langley Operations, but did not relay the snarled response back to CIA. This one had to be kicked to the four-star who ran Air Combat Command, who, conveniently, was in his office rather than the F-16 that came with the job. The four-star grunted approval, figuring CIA wouldn't ask without good reason.

   "You can have it if you need it. How far will it be going

   "I don't know. How far can one of those Gulfstream jets go?"

   "Hell, sir, the new one, the G -V, can fly all the way to friggin' Japan. I may have to set up some tanker support."

   "Okay, please do what you have to do. Who do I call to keep track of the shadowing operation?"

   "NORAD." He gave the DCI the number to call.

   "Okay, thank you, General. The Agency owes you one."

   "I will remember that, Director Foley," the USAF major general promised.

   "We're in luck," Clark heard. "The Air Force is chopping an AWACS to us. We can follow them all the way to where they're going," Ed Foley said, exaggerating somewhat, since he didn't understand the AWACS would have to refuel on the way.

   The aircraft in question, a ten-year-old E-3B Sentry, got the word fifteen minutes later. The pilot relayed the information to the senior control officer aboard, a major, who in turn called NORAD for further information and got it ten minutes after the leading G departed U.S. airspace. The steer from Cheyenne Mountain made the tracking exercise about as difficult as the drive to the local 7Eleven. A tanker would meet them over the Caribbean, after lifting off from Panama, and what had been an interesting air-defense exercise reverted to total boredom.The E-3B Sentry, based on the venerable Boeing 707320B, flew at the identical speed as the business jets made in Savannah, and kept station from fifty miles behind. Only the aerial tanking would interfere with matters, and that not very much. The radar aircraft's call-sign was Eagle TwoNiner, and it had satellite radio capability to relay everything, including its radar picture, to NORAD in Colorado. Most of Eagle Two-Niner's crewmen rested in their comfortable seats, many of them dozing off while three controllers worked the four Gulfstreams they were supposed to track. It was soon evident that they were heading somewhere pretty straight, five minutes or about forty-one miles apart, attempting no deception at all, not even wavetop flying. But that, they knew, would only abuse the airframes and use up gas unnecessarily. It didn't matter to the surveillance aircraft, which could spot a trash bag floating in the water-something they regularly did in counter-drug operations, since that was one of the methods used by smugglers to transfer their cocaine-or even enforce the speed limit on interstate highways, since anything going faster than eighty miles per hour was automatically tracked by the radar-computer system, until the operator told the computer to ignore it. But now all they had to look at were commercial airliners going and coming in routine daily traffic, plus the four Gulfstreams, who were traveling so normal, straight, and dumb that, as one controller observed, even a Marine could have taken them out without much in the way of guidance.

   By this time, Clark was on a shuttle flight to Reagan National Airport across the river from Washington. It landed on time, and Clark was met by a CIA employee whose "company" car was parked outside for the twenty-minute ride to Langley and the seventh floor of the Old Headquarters Building. Dmitriy Popov had never expected to be inside this particular edifice, even wearing a VISITOR – ESCORT REQUIRED badge. John handled the introductions.

   "Welcome," Foley said in his best Russian. "I imagine you've never been here before."

   "As you have never been to Number 2 Dzerzhinsky Square."

   "Ah, but I have," Clark responded. "Right into Sergey Nikolay'ch's office, in fact."

   "Amazing," Popov responded, sitting down as guided.

   "Okay, Ed, where the hell are they now?"

   "Over northern Venezuela, heading south, probably for central Brazil. The FAA tells us that they filed a flight plan-it's required by law-for Manaus. Rubber-tree country, I think. A couple of rivers come together there."

   "They told me that there is a facility there, like the one in Kansas, but smaller," Popov informed his hosts.

   "Task a satellite to it?" Clark asked the DCI.

   "Once we know where it is, sure. The AWACS lost a little ground when it refueled, but it's only a hundred fifty miles back now, and that's not a problem. They say the four business jets are just flying normally, cruising right along."

   "Once we know where they're going . . . then what?"

   "Not sure," Foley admitted. "I haven't thought it through that far."

   "There might not be a good criminal case on this one, Ed."

   "Oh?"

   "Yeah," Clark confirmed with a nod. "If they're smart, and we have to assume they are, they can destroy all the physical evidence of the crime pretty easily. That leaves witnesses, but who, you suppose, is aboard those four Gs heading into Brazil?"

   "All the people who know what's been happening. You'd want to keep that number low for security reasons. wouldn't you-so, you think they're going down there for choir practice

   "What?" Popov asked.

   "They need to find and learn a single story to tell the FBI when the interrogations begin," Foley explained. "So, they all need to learn the same hymn, and learn to sing it the same way every time."

   "What would you do in their place, Ed?" Rainbow Six asked reasonably.

   Foley nodded. "Yeah, that's about it. Okay, what should we do?"

   Clark looked the DCI straight in the eye. "Pay them a little visit, maybe?"

   "Who authorizes that?" the Director of Central Intelligence asked.

   "I still draw my paychecks from this agency. I report to you, Ed, remember?"

   "Christ, John."

   "Do I have your permission to get my people together at a suitable staging point?"

   "Where?"

   "Fort Bragg, I suppose," Clark proposed. Foley had to yield to the logic of the moment.

   "Permission granted." And with that Clark walked down the narrow office to a table with a secure phone to call Hereford.

   Alistair Stanley had bounced back well from his wounds, enough so that he could just about manage a full day in his office without collapsing with exhaustion. Clark's trip to the States had left him in charge of a crippled Rainbow force, and he was facing problems now that Clark had not yet addressed, like replacements for the two dead troopers. Morale was brittle at the moment. There were still two missing people with whom the survivors had worked intimately, and that was never an easy thing for men to bear, though every morning they were out on the athletic field doing their daily routine, and every afternoon they fired their weapons to stay current and ready for a possible callup. This was regarded as unlikely, but, then, none of the missions that Rainbow had carried out had been, in retrospect, very likely. His secure phone started chirping, and Stanley reached to answer it."Yes, this is Alistair Stanley."

   "Hi, Al, this is John. I'm in Langley now."

   "What the bloody hell's been happening, John? Chavez and his people have fallen off the earth, and-"

   "Ding and his people are halfway between Hawaii and California now, Al. They arrested a major conspirator in Sydney."

   "Very well, what the devil's been going on?"

   "You sitting down, Al?"

   "Yes, John, of course I am, and-"

   "Listen up. I'll give you the short version," Clark commanded, and proceeded to do that for the next ten minutes.

   "Bloody hell," Stanley said when his boss stopped talking. "You're sure of this?"

   "Damned sure, Al. We are now tracking the conspirators in four aircraft. They seem to be heading for central Brazil. Okay, I need you to get all the people together and fly them to Fort Bragg-Pope Air Force Base, North Carolina-with all their gear. Everything, Al. We may be taking a trip down to the jungle to . . . to, uh, deal decisively with these people."

   "Understood. I'll try to get things organized here. Maxi mum speed'."

   ""That is correct. Tell British Airways we need an airplane," Clark went on.

   "Very well, John. Let me get moving here."

   In Langley, Clark wondered what would happen next, but before he could decide that he needed to get all of his assets in place. Okay, Alistair would try to get British Airways to release a spare, reserve aircraft to his people for a direct flight to Pope, and from there-from there he'd have to think some more. And he'd have to get there, too, to Special Operations Command with Colonel Little Willie Byron.

   "Target One is descending," a control officer reported over the aircraft's intercom. The senior controller looked up from the book he was reading, activated his scope, and confirmed the information. He was breaking international law at the moment. Eagle Two-Niner hadn't gotten permission to overfly Brazil, but the air-traffic control radar systems down there read his transponder signal as a civilian air-cargo flight-the usual ruse-and nobody had challenged them yet. Confirming that information, he got on his satellite radio to report this information to NORAD and, though he didn't know it, on to CIA. Five minutes later, Target Two started doing the same. Also both aircraft were slowing, allowing Eagle Two-Niner to catch up somewhat. The senior controller told the flight crew to continue on this heading and speed, inquired about fuel state, and learned that they had another eight hours of flight time, more than enough to return to their home at Tinker Air Force Base outside Oklahoma City.

   In England, the British Airways card was played, and the airline, after ten minutes of checking, assigned Rainbow a 737-700 airliner, which would await their pleasure at Luton, a small commercial airport north of London. They'd have to go there by truck, and those were whistled up from the British army's transport company at Hereford.

   It looked like a green sea, John Brightling thought, the top layer of the triple-canopy jungle. In the setting sun, he could see the silvery paths of rivers, but almost nothing of the ground itself. This was the richest ecosystem on the planet, and one that he'd never studied in detail-well, Brightling thought, now he'd be able to, for the next year or so. Project Alternate was a robust and comfortable facility with a maintenance staff of six people, its own power supply, satellite communications, and ample food. He wondered which of the people on the four aircraft might be good cooks. There would be a division of labor here, as at every other Project activity, with himself, of course, as the leader.

   At Binghamton, New York, the maintenance staff was loading a bunch of biohazard-marked containers into the incinerator. It was sure a big furnace, one of the men thought-big enough to cremate a couple of bodies at the same time-and, judging by the thickness of the insulation, a damned hot one. He pulled down the three-inch thick door, locked it in place, and punched the ignition button. He could hear the gas jetting it and lighting off from the sparkler things inside, followed by the usual voosh. There was nothing unusual about this. Horizon Corporation was always disposing of biological material of one sort or another. Maybe it was live AIDS virus, he thought. The company did a lot of work in that area, he'd read. But for the moment he looked at the papers on his clipboard. Three sheets of paper from the special order that had been faxed in from Kansas, and every line was checked off. All the containers specified were now ashes. Hell, this incinerator even destroyed the metal lids. And up into the sky went the only physical evidence of the Project. The maintenance worker didn't know that. To him container G7-89-98-OOA was just a plastic container. He didn't even know that there was a word such as Shiva. As required, he went to his desktop computer-everyone here had one-and typed in that he'd eliminated the items on the work order. This information went into Horizon Corporation's internal network, and, though he didn't know it, popped onto a screen in Kansas. There were special instructions with that, and the technician lifted his phone to relay the information to another worker, who relayed it in turn to the phone number identified on the electronically posted notice.

   "Okay, thank you," Bill Henriksen replied upon hearing the information. He replaced the cabin phone and made his way forward to the Brightlings.

   "Okay, guys, that was Binghamton. All the Shiva stuff, all the vaccines, everything's been burned up. There is now no real physical evidence that the Project ever existed."

   "We're supposed to be happy about that?" Carol demanded crossly, looking out her window at the approaching ground.

   "No, but I hope you'll be happier than you'd be if you were facing an indictment for conspiracy to commit murder, Doctor."

   "He's right, Carol," John said, sadness in his voice. So close. So damned close. Well, he consoled himself, he still had resources, and he still had a core of good people, and this setback didn't mean that he'd have to give up his ideals, did it? Not hardly, the chairman of Horizon told himself. Below, under the green sea into which they were descending, was a great diversity of life-he'd justified building Project Alternate to his board for that very reason, to find new chemical compounds in the trees and plants that grew only here-maybe a cure for cancer, who could say? He heard the flaps lower, and soon thereafter, the landing gear went down. Another three minutes, and they thumped down on the road-runway constructed along with the lab and residential buildings. The aircraft's thrust-reversers engaged, and it slowed to a gradual stop.

   "Okay, Target One is down on the ground." The controller read off the exact position, then adjusted his screen's picture. There were buildings there, too? Well, okay, and he told the computer to calculate their exact position, which information was immediately relayed to Cheyenne Mountain.

   "Thank you." Foley wrote the information down on a pad. "John, I have exact lat and longe for where they are. I'll task a satellite to get pictures for us. Should have that in, oh, two or three hours, depending on weather there."

   "So fast?" Popov asked, looking out the seventh-floor windows at the VIP parking lot.

   "It's just a computer command," Clark explained. "And the satellites are always up there." Actually, three hours struck him as a long time to wait. The birds must have been in the wrong places for convenience.

   Rainbow lifted off the runway at Lutonwell after midnight, British time, looping around to the right over the automobile assembly plant located just off the airport grounds and heading west for America. British Airways had assigned three flight attendants to the flight, and they kept the troopers fed and supplied with drink, which all the soldiers accepted before they settled down as best they could to sleep most of the way across. They had no idea why they were going to America. Stanley hadn't briefed them in on anything yet, though they wondered why they were packing all of their tactical gear.

   Skies were blessedly clear over the jungles of central Brazil. The first KH-11 D went over at nine-thirty in the night, local time. Its infrared cameras took a total of three hundred twenty frames, plus ninety-seven more in the visible spectrum. These images were immediately cross-loaded to a communications satellite, and from there beamed down to the antenna farm at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, near Washington. From there they went by landline to the National Reconnaissance Office building near Dulles Airport, and from there via another fiber-optic line to CIA headquarters."This looks pretty vanilla," the senior duty photoanalyst told them in Foley's office. "Buildings here, here, here, and this one here. Four airplanes on the ground, look like Gulfstream Vs-that one's got a longer wing. Private airfield, it's got lights but no ILS gear. I expect the fuel tanks are here. Power plant here. Probably a diesel generator system, by the look of this exhaust plume. This building looks residential from the window-light pattern. Somebody build a nature resort we're interested in?" the analyst asked.

   "Something like that," Clark confirmed. "What else?"

   "Nothing much for a ninety-mile radius. This here used to be a rubber-tree plantation, I'd say, but the buildings are not warmed up, and so I'd have to say it's inactive. Not much in the way of civilization. Fires down this way"he pointed-"campfires, maybe from indigenous people, Indian tribes or such-like. That's one lonely place, sir. Must have been a real pain in the ass to build this place, isolated as it is."

   "Okay, send us the Lacrosse images, too, and when we get good visual-light images, I want to see those, too," Foley said."We'll have a direct-overhead pass on another bird at about zero-seven-twenty Lima," he said, meaning local time. "Weather forecast looks okay. Ought to get good frames from that pass."

   "How wide is this runway?" Clark asked.

   "Oh, looks like seven thousand feet long by three hundred or so wide, standard width, and they've cut the trees down another hundred yards-meters, probably, on both sides. So, you could get a fair-sized airplane in there if the concrete's thick enough. There's a dock here on the river, it's the Rio Negro, actually, not the Amazon itself, but no boats. I guess that's left over from the construction process."

   "I don't see any telephone or power lines," Clark said next, looking closely at the photo.

   "No, sir, there ain't none. I guess they depend on satellite and radio comms from this antenna farm." He paused. "Anything else you need?"

   "No, and thanks," Clark told the technician.

   "Yes, sir, you bet." The analyst walked out to take the elevator for his basement office.

   "Learn anything?" Foley asked. He himself knew nothing about running around in jungles, but he knew that Clark did.

   "Well, we know where they are, and we know about how many of 'em there are."

   "What are you planning, John?"

   "I'm not sure yet, Ed" was the honest reply. Clark wasn't planning much, but he was starting to think.

   The C-17 thumped down rather hard at Travis Air Force Base in California. Chavez and his companions were rather seriously disoriented by all the travel, but the walk outside the aircraft was, at least, in pleasantly cool ail-. Chavez pulled out his cell phone and speed-dialed Hereford, then learned that John was in Langley. He had to dredge that number up from his memory, but remembered it after twenty seconds or so, and dialed.

   "Director's office."

   "This is Domingo Chavez calling for John Clark."

   "Hold, please," Foley's receptionist replied.

   "Where are you now, Ding?" John asked, when he got on the line.

   "Travis Air Force base, north of 'Frisco.Now where the hell are we supposed to go?"

   "There should be an Air Force VC-20 waiting for you at the DV terminal."

   "Okay, I'll get over that way. We don't have any of our gear with us, John. We left Australia in a hurry."

   "I'll have somebody take care of that. You get the hell back to D.C., okay?"

   "Yes, sir, Mr. C," Ding acknowledged.

   "Your guest, what's his name-Gearing?"

   "That's right. Noonan sat with him most of the way. He sang like a fuckin' canary, John. This thing they planned to do, I mean if it's real-Jesuchristo, jefe."

   "I know, Ding. They've bugged out, by the way."

   "Where to, do we know?"

   "Brazil. We know exactly where they are. I have Al bringing the team across to Fort Bragg. You get to Andrews, and we'll get organized."

   "Roge-o, John. Let me go find my airplane. Out." Chavez killed the phone and waved for a blue USAF van that took them to the Distinguished Visitors' lounge, where they found yet another flight crew waiting for them. Soon thereafter, they boarded the VC-20, the Air Force version of the Gulfstream business jet, and aboard they found out what time it was from the food that the sergeant served them. Breakfast. It had to be early morning, Chavez decided. Then he asked the sergeant for the correct time and reset his watch.

CHAPTER 39
HARMONY

   It struck Noonan as terribly odd that he was traveling with a confessed attempted-mass-murderer in an aircraft without the man's being in handcuffs or a straitjacket or some sort of restraint. But, as a practical matter, what was he going to do, and where was he going to go? It might be possible to open the door and jump out, but Gearing didn't strike the FBI agent as a suicide risk, and Noonan was damned sure he wasn't going to hijack this aircraft to Cuba. And so Tim Noonan just kept an eye on the prisoner, while considering that he'd arrested the mutt on another continent, in a different time zone and hemisphere. and on the far side of the International Dateline. He'd been in on the Fuad Yunis takedown in the Eastern-Mediterranean ten or eleven years before, but he figured this might be the FBI's all-time distance record for arresting a subject and bringing the mutt home. Close enough to twelve thousand miles. Damn. The price had been the air travel, which had his body thoroughly wrecked and crying out for exercise. He changed the time setting on his watch, then wondered if the day was the same-but, he decided, while you could ask the USAF sergeant flight attendant for the time, you'd look like a total fucking idiot to have to ask the date. Maybe he'd get it from a copy of USA Today back in the States, Noonan thought, pushing his seat back and locking his eyes on the back of Wil Gearing's head. Then he realized: He'd have to turn his prisoner in when they got to Washington, but to whom, and on what charge?

   "Okay," Clark said. "They get into Andrews in two hours, and then we'll take a puddle jumper to Pope and figure out what to do."

   "You've got a plan already, John," Foley observed. He'd known Clark long enough to recognize that look in his eyes.

   "Ed, is this my case to run or isn't it?" he asked the DCI.

   "Within reason, John. Let's try not to start a nuclear war or anything, shall we?"

   "Ed, can this ever come to trial? What if Brightling ordered the destruction of all the evidence? It's not hard to do, is it? Hell, what are we talking about? A few buckets of bio-gunk and some computer records. There're commercial programs that destroy files thoroughly enough that you can't recover them ever, right?"

   "True, but somebody might have printed stuff up, and a good search-"

   "And then what do we have? A global panic when people realize what a bio-tech company can do if it wants. What good will that do?"

   "Toss in a senior presidential advisor who violated security. Jesus, that would not be very helpful for Jack, would it?" Foley paused. "But we can't murder these people, John! They're U.S. citizens with rights, remember?"

   "I know, Ed. But we can't let them go, and we probably can't prosecute them, can we? What's that leave?" Clark paused. "I'll try something creative."

   "What?"

   John Clark explained his idea. "If they fight back, well, then, it makes things easier for us, doesn't it?"

   "Twenty men against maybe fifty?"

   "My twenty-actually, more like fifteen-against those feather merchants? Give me a break, Ed. It may be the moral equivalent of murder, but not the legal equivalent."

   Foley frowned mightily, worried about what would happen if this ever made the media, but there was no particular reason that it should. The special-operations community kept all manner of secrets, many of which would look bad in the public media. "John," he said finally.

   "Yeah, Ed?"

   "Make sure you don't get caught."

   "Never happened yet, Ed," Rainbow Six reminded him.

   "Approved," said the Director of Central Intelligence, wondering how the hell he'd ever explain this one to the president of the United States.

   "Okay, can I use my old office?" Clark had some phone calls to make.

   "Sure."

   "Is that all you need?" General Sam Wilson asked.

   "Yes, General, that should do it."

   "Can I ask what it's for?"

   "Something covert," he heard Clark reply.

   "That's all you're willing to say?"

   "Sorry, Sam. You can check this out with Ed Foley if you want."

   "I guess I will," the general's voice rumbled."Fine with me, sir." Clark hoped the "sir" part would assuage his hurt feelings.

   It didn't, but Wilson was a pro, and knew the rules. "Okay, let me make some phone calls."

   The first of them went to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, home of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, whose commanding officer, a colonel, made the expected objection, which was expectedly overridden. That colonel then lifted a phone of his own and ordered an MH-60K Night Hawk special-operations helicopter ferried to Pope Air Force Base, along with a maintenance crew for some TDY to a place he didn't know about. The next phone call went to an Air Force officer who took his notes and said, "Yes, sir," like the good airman he was. Getting the pieces in place was mainly an exercise in electronics, lifting encrypted phones and giving spooky orders to people who, fortunately, were accustomed to such things.

   Chavez reflected that he'd come three quarters of the way around the world, most of it in the last twenty-two hours, and was landing at an airfield he'd used only once before. There was Air Force One, the VC-25Aversion of the 747 painted in a scheme known all over the world, and with him was someone who'd planned to kill all the people who'd known it. He'd learned years before not to reflect too much on the things that he did for his country and the $82,450 per year that he now earned as a mid-level CIA employee. He had a master's degree in international relations, which he jokingly defined as one country fucking another-but now, it wasn't a country, it was a corporation. Since when did they start to think they could play games at this level? he wondered. Maybe it was the New World Order that President Bush had once talked about. If that's what it was, it didn't make sense to the commander of Team-2. Governments were selected, by and large, by the citizens, and answered to them. Corporations answered-if they did so at all-to their shareholders. And that wasn't quite the same thing. Corporations were supposed to be overseen by the governments of the countries in which they were domiciled, but everything was changing now. It was private corporations that developed and defined the tools that people across the world were using. The changing technological world had given immense power to relatively small organizations, and now he was wondering if that was a good thing or not. Well, if people depended on governments for progress, then they'd still be riding horses and steamships around the world. But in this New World Order things had little in the way of controls at all, and that was something somebody should think about, Chavez decided, as the aircraft came to a halt on the Andrews ramp. Yet another anonymous blue USAF van appeared at the stairs even before they were fully deployed.

   "Building up those frequent-flyer miles, Domingo?" John asked from the concrete.

   "I suppose. Am I sprouting feathers yet?" Chavez asked tiredly.

   "Only one more hop for now."

   "Where to?"

   "Bragg."

   "Then let's do it. I don't want to get too used to standing still if it's just temporary." He needed a shave and a shower, but that, too, would have to wait until Fort Bragg. Soon they were in yet another Air Force short-haul aircraft, lifting off and heading southwest. This hop was blessedly short, and ended at Pope Air Force Base, which adjoins the home of the 82nd Airborne Infantry Division at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, also home of Delta Force and other special-operations units.

   For the first time, someone had thought what to do with Wil Gearing, Noonan saw. Three military policemen carted him off to the base stockade. The rest of the people on the trip ended up in Bachelor Officers' Quarters, more colloquially known as "the Q."

   Chavez wondered if the clothing he stripped off would ever be clean enough to wear again. But then he showered, and set on the sink in the bathroom was a razor that allowed him to scrape off a full day's accumulation of black blur on his-he thought-manly face. He emerged to find clothing laid out.

   "I had the base people run this over."

   "Thanks, John." Chavez struggled into the white boxers and T-shirt, then selected the forest-pattern Battle Dress Uniform-BDU-items laid on the bed, complete to socks and boots.

   "Long day?"

   "Shit, John, it's been a long month coming back from Australia." He sat down on the bed, then on reflection lay down on the bedspread. "Now what?"

   "Brazil."

   "How come?"

   "That's where they all went. We tracked them down, and I have overheads of the place where they're camped out."

   "So, we're going to see them?"

   "Yes.

 "To do what, John?"

   "To settle this thing out once and for all, Domingo."

   "Suits me, but is it legal?"

   "When did you start worrying about that?"

   "I'm a married man, John, and a father, remember? I have to be responsible now, man."

   "It's legal enough, Ding," his father-in-law told the younger man.

   "Okay, you say so. What happens now?"

   "You get a nap. The rest of the team arrives in about half an hour."

   "The rest of what team?"

   "Everybody who can move and shoot, son."

   "Muy bien, jefe, " Chavez said, closing his eyes.

   The British Airways 737-700 was on the ground for as little time as possible, refueled from an Air Force fuel bowser and then lifted off for Dulles International Airport outside Washington, where its presence would not cause much in the way of comment. The Rainbow troopers were bused off to a secure location and allowed to continue their rest. That worried some of them slightly. Being allowed to rest implied that rest was something they'd need soon.

   Clark and Alistair Stanley conferred in a room at Joint Special Operations Command Headquarters, a nondescript building facing a small parking lot.

   "So, what gives here?" asked Colonel William Byron. Called "Little Willie" by his uniformed colleagues, Colonel Byron had the most unlikely sobriquet in the United States Army. Fully six-four and two hundred thirty pounds of lean, hard meat, Byron was the largest man in JSOC. The name dated back to West Point, where he'd grown six inches and thirty pounds over four years of exercise and wholesome food, and ended up a linebacker on the Army football team that had murdered Navy 35-10 in the autumn classic at Philadelphia's Veterans Stadium. His accent was still south Georgia despite his master's degree in management from Harvard Business School, which was becoming favored in the American military.

   "We're taking a trip here," Clark told him, passing the overheads across the table. "We need a helo and not much else."

   "Where the hell is this shithole?"

   "Brazil, west of Manaus, on the Rio Negro."

   "Some facility," Byron observed, putting on the reading glasses that he hated. "Who built it, and who's there now?"

   "The people who wanted to kill the whole fucking world," Clark responded, reaching for his cell phone when it started chirping. Again he had to wait for the encryption system to handshake with the other end. "This is Clark," he said finally.

   "Ed Foley here, John. The sample was examined by the troops up at Fort Detrick."

   "And?"

   "And it's a version of the Ebola virus, they say, modified – 'engineered' is the term they used, as a matter of fact-by the addition of what appears to be cancer genes. They say that makes the little bastard more robust. Moreover, the virus strands were encased in some sort of mini-capsules to help it survive in the open. In other words, John, what your Russian friend told you-it looks like it's fully confirmed."

   "What did you do with Dmitriy?" Rainbow Six asked.

   "A safe house out in Winchester," the DCI replied. It was the usual place to quarter a foreign national the CIA wanted to protect. "Oh, the FBI tells me that the Kansas State Police are looking for him on a murder charge. Supposedly he killed one Foster Hunnicutt from the state of Montana, or so he has been accused."

   "Why don't you have the Bureau tell Kansas that he didn't kill anybody. He was with me the whole time," Clark suggested. They had to take care of this man, didn't they? John had already made the conceptual leap of forgetting that Popov had instigated an attack on his wife and daughter. Business, in this case, was business, and it wasn't the first time a KGB enemy had turned into a valuable friend.

   "Okay, yes, I can do that." It was a little white lie. Foley agreed, set against a big black truth. In his Langley, Virginia, office, Foley wondered why his hands weren't shaking. These lunatics had not only wanted to kill the whole world, but they'd also had the ability to do so. This was a new development the CIA would have to study in detail, a whole new type of threat, and investigating it would be neither easy nor fun.

   "Okay, thanks, Ed." Clark killed the phone and looked at the others in the room.We just confirmed the contents of the chlorine canister. They created a modified form of Ebola for distribution."

   "What?" Colonel Byron asked. Clark gave him a ten-minute explanation. "You're serious, eh?" he asked finally.

   "As a heart attack," Clark replied. "They hired Dmitriy Popov to interface with terrorists to set up incidents throughout Europe. That was to increase the fear of terrorism, to get Global Security the consulting contract for the Australians, and-"

   "Bill Henriksen?" Colonel Byron asked. "Hell, I know that guy!"

   "Yeah? Well, his people were supposed to deliver the bug through the fogging-cooling system at the Olympic stadium in Sydney, Willie. Chavez was there in the control room when this Wil Gearing guy showed up with the container, and the contents were checked out by the USAMRIID guys at Fort Detrick. You know, the FBI could almost make a criminal case out of this. But not quite," Clark added.

   "So, you're heading down there to. . ."

   "To talk to them, Willie," Clark finished the statement for him. "They have the aircraft scrubbed yet?"Byron checked his watch. "Ought to."

   "Then it's time for us to get moving."

   "Okay. I have BDUs for all your people, John. Sure you don't need a little help?"

   "No, Willie. I appreciate the offer, but we want to keep this one tight, don't we?"

   "I suppose, John." Byron stood. "Follow me, guys. Those folks you're going to see in Brazil?"

   "Yeah?" Clark said.

   "Give them a special hello for JSOC, will ya?"

   "Yes, sir," John promised. "We'll do that."

   The major aircraft sitting on the Pope Air Force Base ramp was an Air Force C-5B Galaxy transport, which the local ground crew had been working on for several hours. All official markings had been painted over, with HORIZON CORPORATION painted in the place of the USAF roundels. Even the tail number was gone. The clamshell cargo doors in the rear were being sealed now. Clark and Stanley got there first. The rest of the troops arrived by bus, carrying their personal gear, and they climbed into the passenger compartment aft of the wing box. From that point on, it was just a matter of having the flight crew dressed in civilian clothing-climb up to the flight deck and commence start-up procedures as though they were a commercial flight. A KC-10 tanker would meet up with them south of Jamaica to top off their fuel tanks.

   "Okay, so that's what seems to have happened," John Brightling told the people assembled in the auditorium. He saw disappointment on the faces of the other fifty-two people here, but some relief was evident as well. Well, even true believers had consciences, he imagined. Too bad.

   "What do we do here, John?" Steve Berg asked. He'd been one of the senior scientists on the Project, developer of the "A" and "B" vaccines, who'd also helped to design Shiva. Berg was one of the best people Horizon Corporation had ever hired.

   "We study the rain forest. We have destroyed everything of evidentiary value. The Shiva supply is gone. So are the vaccines. So are all the computer records of our laboratory notes, and so forth. The only records of the Project are what you people have in your heads. In other words, if anybody tries to make a criminal case against us, you just have to keep your mouths shut, and there will be no case. Bill?" John Brightling gestured to Henriksen, who walked to the podium.

   "Okay, you know that I used to be in the FBI. I know how they make their criminal cases. Making one against us will not be easy under the best of circumstances. The FBI has to play by the rules, and they're strict rules. They must read you your rights, one of which is to have a lawyer present during questioning. All you have to say is, `Yes, I want my lawyer here.' If you say that, then they can't even ask you what the time is. Then you call us, and we get a lawyer to you, and the lawyer will tell you, right in front of the case agents, that you will not talk at all, and he'll tell the agents that you will not talk, and that if they try to make you talk then they've violated all sorts of statutes and Supreme Court decisions. That means that they can get into trouble, and anything you might say cannot be used anywhere. Those are your civil protections.

   "Next," Bill Henriksen went on, "we will spend our time here looking at the rich ecosystem around us, and formulating a cover story. That will take us some time and-"

   "Wait, if we can avoid answering their questions, then-"

   "Why concoct a cover story? That's easy. Our lawyers will have to talk some with the United States attorneys. If we generate a plausible cover story, then we can make them go away. If the cops know they can't win, they won't fight. A good cover story will help with that. Okay, we can say that, yes, we were looking at the Ebola virus, because it's a nasty little fucker, and the world needs a cure. Then, maybe, some loony employee decided to kill the world-but we had nothing to do with that. Why are we here? We're here to do primary medical research into chemical compounds in the flora and fauna here in the tropical rain forest. That's legitimate, isn't it?" Heads nodded.

   "Okay, we'll take our time to construct an ironclad cover story. Then we'll all memorize it. That way, when our lawyers let us talk to the FBI so that we can be cooperative, we give them only information which cannot hurt us, and will, in fact, help us evade the charges that they might hit us with. People, if we stand together and stick to our scripts, we can't lose. Please believe me on that. We can't lose if we use our heads. Okay?"

   "And we can also work on Project 2," Brightling said, resuming the podium. "You are some of the smartest people in the world, and our commitment to our ultimate goal has not changed. We'll be here for a year or so. It's a chance for us to study nature, and learn things we need to learn. It will also be a year of working to find a new way to achieve that to which we have dedicated our lives," lie went on, seeing nods. There were already alternate ideas he could investigate, probably. He was still the chairman of the world's foremost biotech company. He still had the best and brightest people in the world working for him. He and they still cared about saving the planet. They'd just have to find something else, and they had the resources and the time to do so.

   "Okay," Brightling told them, with a beaming smile. "It's been a long day. Let's all bed down and get some rest. Tomorrow morning, I'm going out in the forest to see an ecosystem that we all want to learn about."

   The applause moved him. Yes, all of these people cared as much as he did, shared his dedication-and, who knew, maybe there was away for Project 2 to happen.

   Bill Henriksen came up to John and Carol during the walk to their rooms. "There is one other potential problem."

   "What's that?"

   "What if they send a paramilitary team here?"

   "You mean like the Army?" Carol Brightling asked.

   "That's right."

   "We fight them," John responded. "We have guns here, don't we?"

   And that they did. The Project Alternate armory had no fewer than a hundred German-made G-3 military assault rifles, the real sort, able to go full-automatic, and quite a few of the people here knew how to shoot.

   "Yes. Okay, the problem with this is, they can't really arrest us legally, but if they do manage to apprehend us and get us back to America, then the courts won't care that the arrests were illegal. That's a point of American law once you're in front of the judge, that's all the judge cares about. So, if people show up, we just have to discourage them. I think-"

   "I think our people won't need much in the way of encouragement to fight back after what those bastards did to the Project!"

   "I agree, but we'll just have to see what happens. Damn, I wish we'd gotten some radar installed here."

   "Huh?" John asked.

   "They will come, if they come, by helicopter. Too far to walk through the jungle, and boats are too slow, and our people think in terms of helicopters. That's just how they do things."

   "How do they even know where we are, Bill? Hell, we skipped the country pretty fast and="

   "And they can ask the flight crews where they delivered us. They had to file flight plans to Manaus, and that narrows it down some, doesn't it?"

   "They won't talk. They're well paid," John objected. `How long before they can figure all that out?"

   "Oh, a couple of days at worst. Two weeks at best. I think we ought to get our people trained in defense. We can start that tomorrow," Henriksen proposed.

   "Do it," John Brightling agreed. "And let me call home and see if anybody's talked to our pilots."

   The master suite had its own communications room. Project Alternate was state-of-the-art in many ways, from the medical labs to communications. In the latter case the antenna farm next to the power-generating facility had its own satellite-phone system that also allowed e-mail and electronic access to Horizon Corp.'s massive internal computer network. Immediately upon arriving in his suite, Brightling flipped on the phone system and called Kansas. He left instructions for the flight crews, now most on the way back home, to inform Alternate if anyone tried to interrogate them regarding their most recent overseas trip. That done, there was little else left to do. Brightling showered and walked into the bedroom and found his wife there.

   "It's so sad," Carol observed in the darkness.

   "It's goddamned infuriating," John agreed. "We were so fucking close!"

   "What went wrong?"

   "I'm not sure, but I think our friend Popov found out what we were doing, then he killed the guy who told him about it and skipped. Somehow he told them enough to capture Wil Gearing down in Sydney. Damn, we were within hours of initiating Phase One!" he growled.

   "Well, next time we'll be more careful," Carol soothed, reaching to stroke his arm.Failure or not, it was good to lie in bed with him again. "What about Wil?"

   "He's going to have to take his chances. I'll get the best lawyers I can find for him," John promised. "And get him the word to keep his mouth shut."

   Gearing had stopped talking. Somehow arriving back in America had awakened in him the idea of civil rights and criminal proceedings, and now he wasn't saying anything to anybody. He sat in his aft-facing seat in the C-S, looking backward at the circular seal that led into the immense void area there in the tail, while these soldiers mainly dozed. Two of them were wide awake, however, and looking right at him all the way while they chatted about something or other. They were loaded for bear, Gearing saw, lots of personal weapons evident here and others loaded into the cargo area below. Where were they going? Nobody had told him that.

   Clark, Chavez, and Stanley were in the compartment aft of the flight deck on the massive air-lifter. The flight crew was regular Air Force-most such transports are actually flown by reservists, mainly airline pilots in civilian life-and they kept their distance. They'd been warned by their superiors, the warnings further reinforced by the alteration in the aircraft's exterior paint job. They were civilians now? They were dressed in civilian clothes so as to make the deception plausible to someone. But who would believe that a Lockheed Galaxy was civilian owned?

   "It looks pretty straightforward," Chavez observed. It was interesting to be an infantryman again, again a Ninja, Ding mused, again to own the night-except they were planning to go in the daylight. "Question is, will they resist?"

   "If we're lucky," Clark responded.

   "How many of them?"

   "They went down in four Gulfstreams, figure a max of sixteen people each. That's sixty-four, Domingo."

   "Weapons?"

   "Would you live in the jungle without them?" Clark asked. The answer he anticipated was, not very likely.

   "But are they trained?" Team-2's commander persisted.

   "Most unlikely. These people will be scientist-types, but some will know the woods, maybe some are hunters.

   I suppose we'll see if Noonan's new toys work as well as lie's been telling us."

   "I expect so," Chavez agreed. The good news was that his people were highly trained and well equipped. Daylight or not, it would be a Ninja job. "I guess you're in overall command?"

   "You bet your sweet ass, Domingo," Rainbow Six replied. They stopped talking as the aircraft jolted somewhat, as they flew into the wake-turbulence of the KC-10 for aerial refueling. Clark didn't want to watch the procedure. It had to be the most unnatural act in the world, two massive aircraft mating in midair.

   Malloy was a few seats farther aft, looking at the satellite overheads as well, along with Lieutenant Harrison.

   "Looks easy," the junior officer opined.

   "Yeah, pure vanilla, unless they shoot at us. Then it gets a little exciting," he promised his copilot.

   "We're going to be close to overloading the aircraft," Harrison warned.

   "That's why it's got two engines, son," the Marine pointed out.

   It was dark outside. The C-5's flight crew looked down at a surface with few lights after they'd topped off their tanks from the KC-10, but for them it was essentially an airliner flight. The autopilot knew where it was, and where it was going, with waypoints programmed in, and a thousand miles ahead the airport at Manaus, Brazil, knew they were coming, a special air-cargo flight from America which would need ramp space for a day or so, and refueling services-this information had already been faxed ahead.

   It wasn't yet dawn when they spotted the runway lights. The pilot, a young major, squirmed erect in his front-left seat and slowed the aircraft, making an easy visual approach while the first lieutenant copilot to his right watched the instruments and called off altitude and speed numbers. Presently, he rotated the nose up and allowed the C-5B to settle onto the runway, with only a minor jolt to tell those aboard that the aircraft wasn't flying anymore. He had a diagram of the airport, and taxied off to the far corner of the ramp, then stopped the aircraft and told the loadmaster that it was his turn to go to work.

  It took a few minutes to get things organized, but then the huge rear doors opened. Then the MH-60K Night Hawk was dragged out into the predawn darkness. Sergeant Nance supervised three other enlisted men from the 160th SOAR as they extended the rotor blades from their stowed position, and climbed atop the fuselage to make sure that they were safely locked in place for flight operations. The Night Hawk was fully fueled. Nance installed the M-60 machine gun in its place on the right side and told Colonel Malloy that the aircraft was ready. Malloy and Harrison preflighted the helicopter and decided that it was ready to go, then radioed this information to Clark.

   The last people off the C-5B were the Rainbow troopers, now dressed in multicolor BDU fatigues, their faces painted in green and brown camouflage makeup. Gearing came down last of all, a bag over his head so that he couldn't see anything.

   It turned out that they couldn't get everyone aboard. Vega and four others were left behind to watch the helicopter lift off just at first light. The blinking strobes climbed into the air and headed northwest, while the soldiers groused at having to stand in the warm, humid air close to the transport. About that time, an automobile arrived at the aircraft with some forms for the flight crew to fill out. To the surprise of everyone present, no special note was made of the aircraft type. The paint job announced that it was a large, privately owned transport, and the airport personnel accepted this, since all the paperwork seemed to be properly filled out, and therefore had to be true and correct.

   It was so much like Vietnam, Clark thought, riding in a helicopter over solid treetops of green. But he was not in a Huey this time, and it was nearly thirty years since his first exposure to combat operations. He couldn't remember being very afraid-tense, yes, but not really afraid-and that struck him as remarkable, looking back now. He was holding one of the suppressed MP-10s, and now, riding in this chopper to battle, it was as though his youth had returned-until he turned to see the other troops aboard and remarked on how young they all looked, then reminded himself that they were, in the main, over thirty years of age, and that for them to look young meant that he had to be old. He put that unhappy thought aside and looked out the door past Sergeant Nance and his machine gun. The sky was lightening up now, too much light for them to use their night-vision goggles, but not enough to see very well. He wondered what the weather would be like here. They were right on the equator, and that was jungle down there, and it would be hot and damp, and down there under the trees would be snakes, insects, and the other creatures for whom this most inhospitable of places was indeed home-and they were welcome to it, John told them without words, out the door of the Night Hawk.

   "How we doing, Malloy?" John asked over the intercom.

   "Should have it in sight any second-there, see the lights dead ahead!"

   "Got it." Clark waved for the troops in the back to get ready. "Proceed as planned, Colonel Malloy."

   "Roger that, Six." He held course and speed, on a heading of two-nine-six, seven hundred feet AGL-above ground level-and a speed of a hundred twenty knots. The lights in the distance seemed hugely out of place, but lights they were, just where the navigation system and the satellite photos said they would be. Soon the point source broke up into separate distinct sources.

   "Okay, Gearing," Clark was saying in the back. "We're letting you go back to talk to your boss."

   "Oh?" the prisoner asked through the black cloth bag over his head."Yes," John confirmed. "You're delivering a message. If he surrenders to us, nobody gets hurt. If he doesn't, things'll get nasty. His only option is unconditional surrender. Do you understand that?"

   "Yeah." The head nodded inside the black bag.

   The Night Hawk's nose came up just as it approached the west end of the runway that some construction crew had carved into the jungle. Malloy made a fast landing, without allowing his wheels to touch the ground-standard procedure, lest there be mines there. Gearing was pushed out the door, and immediately the helicopter lifted back off, reversing course to the runway's east end.

   Gearing pulled the bag from his head and oriented himself, spotted the lights for Project Alternate, a facility he knew about but had never visited, and headed there without looking back.

   At the east end, the Night Hawk again came in to hover a foot or so off the ground. The Rainbow troops leaped out, and the helicopter immediately climbed up for the return trip to Manaus, which would be made into the rising sun. Malloy and Harrison put on their sunglasses and held course, keeping a close watch on their fuel state. The 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment maintained its helos pretty well, the Marine thought, flexing his gloved hands on the controls. Just like the Air Force pukes in England.

   Noonan was the first to get set up. All the troops ran immediately into the thick cover a scant hundred yards from the thick concrete pavement of the runway and headed west, wondering if Gearing had noted their separate arrival here. It took fully half an hour for them to make their way over a distance that, had they run it, would have taken scarcely ten minutes. For all that, Clark thought it was good time-and now he remembered the creepy feeling that came from being in the jungle, where the very air seemed alive with things hoping to suck one's blood and give you whatever diseases would take your life as slowly and painfully as possible. How the hell had he endured the nineteen months he'd spent in Vietnam? Ten minutes here and he was ready to leave. Around him, massive hardwood trees reached two or three hundred feet to the sky to form the top canopy of this fetid place, with secondary trees reaching about a third that height, and yet another that stopped at fifty or so, with bushes and other plants at his feet. He could hear the sound of' movement--whether his own people or animals he couldn't be sure, though he knew that this environment supported all manner of life, most of it unfriendly to humans. His people spread out to the north, most of them plucking branches to tuck under the elastic bands that ran around their Kevlar helmets, the better to break up the outline of their unnatural shapes and improve their concealment.

   The front door of the building was unlocked, Gearing found, amazed that this should be so. He walked into what appeared to be a residential building, entered an elevator, punched the topmost button and arrived on the fourth floor. Once there, it was just a matter of opening one of the double doors on the corridor and flipping on a light in what had to be the master suite. The bedroom doors were open, and he walked that way.

   John Brightling's eyes reported the sudden blaze of light from the sitting room. He opened them and saw-

   "What the hell are you doing here, Wil?"

   "They brought me down, John."

   "Who brought you down?"

   "The people who captured me in Sydney," Gearing explained.

   "What?" It was a little much for so early in the morning. Brightling stood and put on the robe next to the bed.

   "John, what is it?" Carol asked from her side of the bed.

   "Nothing, honey, just relax." John went to the sitting room, pulling the doors closed as he did so.

   "What the fuck is going on, Wil?"

   "They're here, John."

   "Who's here?"

   "The counterterror people, the ones who went to Australia, the ones who arrested me. They're here, John!" Gearing told him, looking around the room, thoroughly disoriented by all the traveling he'd done and not sure of much of anything at the moment.

   "Here? Where? In the building?"

   "No." Gearing shook his head. "They dropped me off by helicopter. Their boss is a guy named Clark. He said to tell you that you have to surrender-unconditional surrender, John."

   "Or else what?" Brightling demanded.

   "Or else they're going to come in and get us!"

   "Really?" This was no way to be awakened. Brightling had spent two hundred million dollars to build this place – labor costs were low in Brazil – and he considered Project Alternate a fortress, and more than that, a fortress that would have taken months to locate. Armed men – here, right now – demanding his surrender? What was this?

   Okay, he thought. First he called Bill Henriksen's room and told him to come upstairs. Next he lit up his computer. There was no e-mail telling him that anyone had spoken with his flight crews. So, nobody had told anyone where they were. So, how the hell had anyone found out? And who the hell was here? And what the hell did they want? Sending someone he knew in to demand their surrender seemed like something from a movie.

   "What is it, John?" Henriksen asked. Then he looked at the other man in the room: "Wil, how did you get here?"

   Brightling held up his hand for silence, trying to think while Gearing and Henriksen exchanged information. He switched off the room lights, looked out the large windows for signs of activity, and saw nothing at all.

   "How many?" Bill was asking.

   "Ten or fifteen soldiers," Gearing replied. "Are you going to do what they-are you going to surrender to them?" the former colonel asked.

   "Hell, no!" John Brightling snarled. "Bill, what they're doing, is it legal?"

   "No, not really. I don't think it is, anyway."

   "Okay, let's get our people up and armed."

   "Right," the security chief said dubiously. He left the room for the main lobby, whose desk controlled the public address system in the complex.

   "Oh, baby, talk to me," Noonan said. The newest version of the DKL people-finding system was up and running now. He'd spotted two of the receiver units about three hundred yards apart. Each had a transmitter that reported to a receiving unit that was in turn wired to his laptop computer.

   The DKL system tracked the electromagnetic field generated by the beating of the human heart. This was, it had been discovered, a unique signal. The initial items sold by the company had merely indicated the direction of the signals they received, but the new ones had been improved with parabolic antennas to increase their effective range now to fifteen hundred meters, and, by triangulation. to give fairly exact positions-accurate to from two to four meters. Clark was looking down at the computer screen. It showed blips indicating people evenly spaced in their rooms in the headquarters/residential building.

   "Boy, this would have been useful in Eye-Corps back when I was a kid," John breathed. Each of the Rainbow troopers had a GPS locator built into his personal radio transceiver, and these, also, reported to the computer, giving Noonan and Clark exact locations for their own people, and locations also on those in the building to their left.

   "Yeah, that's why I got excited about this puppy," the FBI agent noted. "I can't tell you what floor they're on, but look, they've all started moving. I guess somebody woke them up."

   "Command, this is Bear," Clark's radio crackled.

   "Bear, Command. Where are you?"

   "Five minutes out. Where do you want me to make my delivery?"

   "Same place as before. Let's keep you out of the line of fire. Tell Vega and the rest that we are on the north side of the runway. My command post is a hundred meters north of the treeline. We'll talk them in from there."

   "Roger that, Command. Bear out."

   "This must be an elevator," Noonan said, pointing at the screen. Six blips converged on a single point, stayed together for half a minute or so, then diverged. A number of blips were gathering in one place, probably a lobby of some sort. Then they started moving north and converged again.

   "I like this one," Dave Dawson said, hefting his G3 rifle. The black German-made weapon had fine balance and excellent sights. He'd been the site-security chief in Kansas, another true believer who didn't relish the idea of flying back to America in federal custody and spending the rest of his life at Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary-apart of Kansas for which he had little love. "What do we do now, Bill?"

   "Okay, we split into pairs. Everybody gets one of these." Henriksen started passing over handheld radios. "Think. Don't shoot until we tell you to. Use your heads."

   "Okay, Bill. I'll show these bastards what a hunter can do," Killgore observed, liking the feel of his rifle as well and pairing off with Kirk Maclean.

   "These, too." Henriksen opened another door, revealing camouflage jackets and pants for them to wear.

   "What can we do to protect ourselves, Bill?" Steve Berg asked.

   "We can kill the fuckers!" Killgore replied. "They're not cops, they're not here to arrest us, are they, Bill?"

   "Well, no, and they haven't identified themselves, and so the law is-the law is unclear on this one, guys."

   "And we're in a foreign country anyway. So those guys are probably breaking the fucking law to be here, and it' people want to attack us with guns we can defend ourselves, right?" Ben Farmer asked.

   "You know what you're doing?" Berg asked Farmer.

   "Ex-Marine, baby. Light weapons, line-grunt, yeah, I know what's happening out there." Farmer looked confident, and was as angry as the rest of them at the upset of their plans."Okay, people, I am in command, okay?" Henriksen said to them. He had thirty armed men now. That would have to be enough. "We make them come to us. If you see somebody advancing toward you with a weapon, you take the bastard out. But be patient! Let them in close. Don't waste ammo. Let's see if we can discourage them. They can't stay here long without supplies, and they only– have one helicopter to-

   "Look!" Maclean said. A mile and a half away, the black helo landed at the far end of the runway. Three or four people ran from it into the woods.

   "Okay, be careful, people, and think before you act."

   "Let's do it," Killgore said aggressively, waving to Maclean to follow him out the door.

   "They're leaving the building," Noonan said. "Looks like thirty or so." He looked up to orient himself on the terrain. "They're heading into the woods-figuring to ambush us, maybe?"

   "We'll see about that. Team-2, this is Command," Clark said into his tactical radio.

   "-2 Lead here, Command," Chavez replied. I can see people running out of the building. They appear to be armed with shoulder weapons."

   "Roger that. Okay, Ding, we will proceed as briefed."

   "Understood, Command. Let me get organized here." Team-2 was intact, except for the absence of Julio Vega, who'd just arrived on the second helicopter delivery. Chavez got onto his radio and paired his people off with their normal partners, extending his line northward into the forest, and keeping himself at the hinge point on the southern end of the line. The Team-1 people would be the operational reserve, assigned directly to John Clark at the command post.

   Noonan watched the Team-2 shooters move. Each friendly blip was identified by a letter so that he'd know them by name. "John," he asked, "when do we go weapons free?"

   "Patience, Tim," Six replied.

   Noonan was kneeling on the damp ground, with his laptop computer sitting on a fallen tree. The battery was supposed to be good for five hours, and he had two spares in his pack.

   Pierce and Loiselle took the lead, heading half a kilometer into the jungle. It wasn't a first for either of them.

   Mike Pierce had worked in Peru twice, and Loiselle had been to Africa three separate times. The familiarity with the environmental conditions was not the same thing as comfort. Both worried about snakes as much as the armed people heading their way, sure that this forest was replete with them, either poisonous or willing to eat them whole. The temperature was rising, and both soldiers were sweating under their camo makeup. After ten minutes, they found a nice spot, with a standing tree and a fallen one next to it, with a decent field of fire.

   "They've got radios," Noonan reported. "Want me to take them away?" He had his jammer set up already.

   Clark shook his head. "Not yet. Let's listen in to the for a while."

   "Fair enough." The FBI agent flipped the radio scanner to the speaker setting.

   "This is some place," one voice said. "Look at these trees, man."

   "Yeah, big, ain't they?"

   "What kind of trees?" a third asked.

   "The kind somebody can hide behind and shoot your ass from!" a more serious voice pointed out. "Killgore and Maclean, keep moving north about half a mile, find a place, and sit still there!"

   "Yeah, yeah, okay, Bill," the third voice agreed.

   "Listen up everybody," "Bill's" voice told them. "Don't clutter up these radios, okay? Report in when I call you or when you see something important. Otherwise keep them clear!"

   "Yeah."

   "Okay."

   "You say so, Bill."

   "Roger."

   "I can't see shit," a fifth responded.

   "Then find a place where you can!" another helpful voice suggested.

   "They're in pairs, moving close together, most of 'em," Noonan said, staring down at his screen. "This pair is heading right for Mike and Louis."

   Clark looked down at the screen. "Pierce and Loiselle, this is Command. You have two targets approaching you from the south, distance about two-fifty meters."

   "Roger, Command. Pierce copies."Sergeant Pierce settled into his spot, looking south, letting his eyes sweep back and forth through a ninety-degree arc. Six feet away, Loiselle did the same, starting to relax as far as the environment was concerned, and tensing with the approach of enemies.

   Dr. John Killgore knew the woods and knew hunting. He moved slowly and carefully now, with every step looking down to assure quiet footing, then up and around to examine the landscape for a human shape. They'd be coming in to get us, he thought, and so he and Maclean would find good spots to shoot them from, just like hunting deer, picking a place in the shadows where you could belly up and wait for the game to come. Another couple of hundred yards, he thought, would be about right.

   Three hundred meters away, Clark used the computer screen and the radios to get his people moving to good spots. This new capability was incredible. Like radar, he could spot people long before he or anyone else could see or hear them. This new electronic toy would be an astounding blessing to every soldier who ever made use of it...

   "Here we go," Noonan said quietly, like a commentator at a golf tournament, tapping the screen.