"Good." The eyes opened, and saw someone wearing a surgical mask and cap, but he couldn't focus well, and the image was a blur. The room . . . yes, it was a hospital . . . the ceiling, rectangular tiles held in a metal rack . . . the lighting, fluorescent. His throat was dry and a little sore from the intubation, but it didn't matter. He was living inside a dream, and none of this was actually happening. He was floating on a white, awkward cloud, but at least Jimmy Carr was here.

   "Roddy, where's Roddy?"

   "Roddy's dead, Sean," Bellow answered. "Sorry, but he didn't make it."

   "Oh, damn . . ." Grady breathed. "Not Roddy . . ."

   "Sean, we need some information, we need it quickly."

   "What.. . information?"

   "The chap who got us the information, we need to contact him, but we don't know how to find him."

   "Iosef, you mean?"

   Bingo, Paul Bellow thought. "Yes. Sean, Iosef, we need to get in touch with him. . ."

   "The money? I have that in my wallet, lad."

   Oh, Clark thought, turning. Bill Tawney had all of Grady's personal possessions sitting on a portable table. In the wallet, he saw, were two hundred and ten British pounds, one hundred seventy Irish pounds, and several slips of paper. On one yellow Post-it note were two numbers, six digits each, with no explanation. A Swiss or other numbered account? the spook wondered.

   "How do we access it, Sean? We need to do that at once, you see, my friend."

   "Swiss Commercial Bank in Bern . . . call . . . account number and control number in . . . in my wallet."

   "Good, thank you, Sean . . . and Iosef, what's the rest of his name . . . how do we get in touch with him, Sean? Please, we need to do that right away, Sean." Bellow's false Irish accent wasn't good enough to pass muster with a drunk, but Grady's current condition was far beyond anything alcohol could do to the human mind.

   "Don't . . . know. He contacts us, remember. Iosef Andreyevich contacts me through Robert . . . through the network . . . never gave me a way to contact him."

   "His last name, Sean, what is it, you never told me."

   "Serov, Iosef Andreyevich Serov . . . Russian . . . KGB chap . . . Bekaa Valley . . . years ago."

   "Well, he gave us good information on this Rainbow mob. didn't he, Sean?"

   "How many did we . . . how many . . . ?'

   "Ten, Sean, we killed ten of them, and we got away, but you were shot on the escape in your Jaguar, remember? But we hurt them, Sean, we hurt them badly," Bellow assured him. "Good . . . good . . . hurt them . . . kill them . . . kill them all," Grady whispered from his gurney.

   "Not quite, asshole," Chavez observed quietly, from a few feet away.

   "Did we get the two women? . . . Jimmy, did we get them?"

   "Oh, yes, Sean, I shot them myself. Now, Sean, this Russian chap. I need to know more about him."

   "Iosef? Good man, KGB, got the money and the drugs for us. Lots of money . . . six million . . . six . . . and the cocaine," Grady added for the TV Minicam that sat on a tripod next to the bed. "Got it for us, at Shannon, remember? Flew in on the little jet, the money and the drugs from America . . . well, think it was America . . . must have been . . . the way he talks now, American accent like the television, funny thing for a Russian, Jimmy. . . '

   "Iosef Andreyevich Serov?"

   The figure on the bed tried to nod. "That's how they do names, Jimmy. Joseph, son of Andrew."

   "What does he look like, Sean?"

   "Tall as me . . . brown hair, eyes . . . round face, speaks many languages . . . Bekaa Valley . . . nineteen eighty-six . . . good man, helped us a lot. . ."

   "How we doing, Bill?" Clark whispered to Tawney.

   "Well, none of this can be used in court, but-"

   "Fuck the courts, Bill! How good is this? Does it match with anything?"

   "The name Serov doesn't ring a bell, but I can check with our files. We can run these numbers down, and there will be a paper trail of some sort, but"-he checked his watch= "it will have to wait until tomorrow."

   Clark nodded. "Hell of an interrogation method."

   "Never seen this before. Yes, it is."

   Just then Grady's eyes opened more. He saw the others around the bed, and his face twisted into a question. "Who are you?" he asked groggily, finding a strange face in this dream.

   "My name is Clark, John Clark, Sean."

   The eyes went wide for a second. "But you're . . ."

   "That's right, pal. That's who I am. And thanks for spilling your guts. We got all of you, Sean. All fifteen dead or captured. I hope you like it here in England, boy. You're going to be here a long, long time. Why don't you go back to sleep now, lad'?" he asked with grossly overdone courtesy. I've killed better men than you, punk, he thought, behind a supposedly impassive mien that in fact proclaimed his feelings.

   Dr. Bellow pocketed his tape recorder and his notes. It rarely failed. The twilight state following general anesthesia made any mind vulnerable to suggestion. That was why people with high security clearances never went to the hospital without someone from their parent agencies nearby. In this case he'd had ten minutes or so to dive deep inside and come back out with information. It could never be used in a court of law, but then, Rainbow wasn't composed of cops.

   "Malloy got him, eh?" Clark asked on his way to the door.

   "Actually it was Sergeant Nance," Chavez answered.

   "We have to get him something nice for this job," Rainbow Six observed. "We owe him for this. We got a name now, Domingo. A Russian name."

   "Not a good one, it's gotta be a cover name."

   "Oh?"

   "Yeah, John, don't you recognize it? Serov, former chairman of KGB, back in the60s, I think, fired a long time ago because he screwed something up."

   Clark nodded. It wouldn't be the name on the guy's real passport, and that was too bad, but it was a name, and names could be tracked. They walked out of the hospital into the cool British evening. John's car was waiting, with Corporal Mole looking rather pleased with himself. He'd get a nice ribbon for the day's work and probably a very nice letter from this American pseudo-general. John and Ding got in, and the car drove to the base stockade, where the others were being kept for the time being, because the local jail wasn't secure enough. Inside, they were guided to an interrogation room. Timothy O'Neil was waiting there, handcuffed to a chair.

   "Hello," John said. "My name is Clark. This is Domingo Chavez."

   The prisoner just stared at them.

   "You were sent here to murder our wives," John went on. That didn't make him so much as blink either. "But you fucked it all up. There were fifteen of you. There are six now. The rest won't be doing much of anything. You know, people like you make me ashamed to be Irish. Jesus, kid, you're not even an effective criminal. By the way, Clark is just my working name. Before that, it was John Kelly, and my wife's maiden name was O'Toole. So, now you IRA pukes are killing Irish-Catholic Americans, eh?" It's not going to look good in the papers, punk."

   "Not to mention selling coke, all that coke the Russian brought in," Chavez added.

   "Drugs? We don't-"

   "Sure you do. Sean Grady just told us everything, sang like a fucking canary. We have the number of the Swiss bank account, and this Russian guy-"

   "Serov," Chavez added helpfully, "Iosef Andreyevich Serov, Sean's old pal from the Bekaa Valley."

   "I have nothing to say." Which was more than O'Neil had planned to say. Sean Grady talked. Sean? That was not possible – but where else could they have gotten that information? Was the world totally mad?

   "'Mano," Ding continued, "that was my wife you wanted to kill, and she's got my baby in her belly. You think you're going to be around much longer? John, this guy ever going to get out of prison?"

   "Not anytime soon, Domingo."

   "Well, Timmy, let me tell you something. Where I come from, you mess with a man's lady, there's a price that has to be paid. And it ain't no little price. And where I come from, you never, ever mess with a man's kids. The price for that's even worse, you little fuck. Little fuck?" Chavez wondered. "No, I think we can fix that, John. I can fix him so he ain't never gonna fuck anything." From the scabbard on his belt, Ding extracted a Marine-type KBar fighting knife. The blade was black except for the gleaming quarter-inch edge.

   "Not sure that's a good idea, Ding," Clark objected weakly.

   "Why not? Feels pretty good to me right now, man." Chavez got out of his chair and walked up to O'Neil. Then he lowered his knife hand to the chair. "Ain't hard to do, man, just flick, and we can start your sex-change operation. I ain't a doc, you understand, but I know the first part of the procedure, y'know?" Ding bent down to press his nose against O'Neil's. "Man, you don't ever, EVER mess with a Latino's lady! Do you hear me?"

   Timothy O'Neil had had a bad enough day to this point. He looked in the eyes of this Spanish man, heard the accent, and knew that this was not an Englishman, not even an American of the type he thought he knew.

   "I've done this before, man. Mainly I kill with guns, but I've taken bastards down with a knife once or twice. It's funny how they squirm – but I ain't gonna kill you, boy. I'm just gonna make you a girl." The knife moved tight up against the crotch of the man cuffed to the chair.

   "Back it off, Domingo!" Clark ordered.

   "Fuck you, John! That's my wife he wanted to hurt, man. Well, I'm gonna fix this little fuck so he never hurts no more girls, 'mano." Chavez turned to look at the prisoner again. "I'm gonna watch your eyes when I cut it all off, Timmy. I want to see your face when you start to turn into a girl."

   O'Neil blinked, as he looked deep into the dark, Spanish eyes. He saw the rage there, hot and passionate-but as bad as that was, so was the reason for it. He and his mates had planned to kidnap and maybe kill a pregnant woman, and there was shame in that, and for that reason there was justice in the fury before his face.

   "It wasn't like that!" O'Neil gasped. "We didn't-we didn't-"

   "Didn't have the chance to rape her, eh? Well, ain't that a big fuckin' deal?" Chavez observed.

   "No, no, not rape – never, nobody in the unit ever did that, we're not-"

   "You're fucking scum, Timmy-but soon you're just gonna be scum, 'cuz ain't no more fuckin' in your future." The knife moved a little. "This is gonna be fun, John. Like the guy we did in Libya two years ago, remember?"

   "Jesus, Ding, I still have nightmares about that one," Clark acknowledged, looking away. "I'm telling you, Domingo, don't do it!"

   "Fuck you, John." His free hand reached to loosen O'Neil's belt, then the button at the top of his slacks. Then he reached inside. "Well, shit, ain't much to cut off. Hardly any dick here at all."

   "O'Neil, if you have anything to tell us, better say it now. I can't control this kid. I've seen him like this before and-"

   "Too much talk, John. Shit. Grady spilled his guts anyway. What does this one know that we need? I'm gonna cut it all off and feed it to one of the guard dogs. They like fresh meat."

   "Domingo, we are civilized people and we don't--"

   "Civilized? My ass, John, he wanted to kill my wife and my baby!"

   O'Neil's eyes popped again. "No, no, we never intended to-"

   "Sure, asshole," Chavez taunted. "You had those fucking guns 'cuz you wanted to win their hearts and minds, right? Woman killer, baby-killer." Chavez spat.

   "I didn't kill anybody, didn't even fire my rifle. I-"

   "Great, so you're incompetent. You think you deserve to have a dick just 'cuz you're fucking incompetent?"

   "Who's this Russian guy?" Clark asked.

   "Sean's friend, Serov, Iosef Serov. He got the money and the drugs-"

   "Drugs? Christ, John, they're fucking druggies, too!"

   "Where's the money?" John persisted.

   "Swiss bank, numbered account. Iosef set it up, six million dollars-and-and, Sean asked him to bring us ten kilos of cocaine to sell for the money, we need the money to continue operations."

   "Where are the drugs, Tim?" Clark demanded next.

   "Farm-farmhouse." O'Neil gave them a town and road description that went into Chavez's pocketed tape recorder.

   "This Serov guy, what's he look like?" And he got that, too.

   Chavez backed off and let his visible temper subside. Then he smiled. "Okay, John, let's talk to the others. Thanks, Timmy. You can keep your dick, 'mano."

   It was late afternoon over Canada's Quebec province. The sun reflected off the hundreds of lakes, some of them still covered with ice. Popov had been sleepless for the entire flight, the only wakeful passenger in first class. Again and again his mind went over the same data. If the British had captured Grady, then they had his primary cover name, which was in his travel documents. Well, he'd dispose of them that very day. They had a physical description, but he looked not the least bit remarkable. Grady had the number of the Swiss account that Dmitriy had set up, but he'd already transferred the funds to another account, one not traceable to him. It was theoretically possible that the opposition could pursue the information Grady was sure to give them-Popov had no illusions about that-perhaps even secure a set of fingerprints from . . . no, that was too unlikely to be considered a danger, and no Western intelligence service would have anything to cross-match. No Western service even knew anything about him if they had, he would have been arrested long before. So, what did that leave? A name that would soon evaporate, a description that fitted a million other men, and a bank account number for a defunct account. In short, very little. He did need to check out, though, very quickly, the procedures by which Swiss banks transferred funds, and whether that process was protected by the anonymity laws that protected the accounts themselves. Even that the Swiss were not paragons of integrity, were they? No, there would be an arrangement between the banks and the police. There had to be, even if the only purpose was to enable the Swiss police to lie effectively to other national police forces. But the second account was truly a shadow one. He'd set it up through an attorney who didn't have the ability to betray him, because they'd only met over the telephone. So, there was no path from the information Grady had to where he was now, and that was good. He'd have to think very carefully about ever accessing the 5.7 million dollars in the second account, but there might well be a way to do it. Through another attorney, perhaps, in Liechtenstein, where banking laws were even stricter than in Switzerland? He'd have to look into it. An American attorney could guide him in the necessary procedures, also under total anonymity.

   You're safe, Dmitriy Arkadeyevich, Popov told himself. Safe and rich, but it was time to stop taking risks. He'd initiate no more field operations for John Brightling. Once he got into O'Hare, he'd catch the next flight to New York, get back to his apartment, report in to Brightling, and then look for an elegant escape route. Would Brightling let him go?

   He'd have to, Popov told himself. He and Henriksen were the only men on the planet who could link the executive to mass murder. He might think about killing me, but Henriksen would warn him not to. Henriksen was also a professional, and he knew the rules of the game. Popov had kept a diary, which was in a safe place, the vault of a law firm in New York, with carefully written handling instructions. So, no, that was not a real danger, so long as his "friends" knew the rules-and Popov would remind them, just in case.

   Why go back to New York at all? Why not simply disappear? It was tempting . . . but, no. If nothing else, he had to tell Brightling and Henriksen to leave him alone from now on and explain why it was in their interest to do so. Besides, Brightling had an unusually good source in the American government and Popov could use that person's information as additional protection. You never had too much protection.

   With all that decided, Popov finally allowed himself to relax. Another ninety minutes to Chicago. Below him was a vast world, with plenty of room to disappear in, and now lie had the money for it. It had all been worth it.

   "Okay, what do we have?" John asked his senior executives.

   "This name, Iosef Serov. It's not on our computer in London," said Cyril Holt of the Security Service. "What about CIA?"

   Clark shook his head. "We have two guys named Serov on the books. One's dead. The other one's in his late sixties and retired in Moscow. What about the description?"

   "Well, it fits this chap." Holt passed a photo across the table.

   "I've seen this one before."

   "He's the chap who met with Ivan Kirilenko in London some weeks ago. That fits the rest of the puzzle, John. We believe he was involved in the leak of information on your organization, as you will recall. For him, then, to show up with Grady-well, it does fit, almost too well, as a matter of fact."

  "Any way to press this?"

   "We can go to the RVS-both we and CIA have relatively good relations with Sergey Golovko, and perhaps they can assist us. I will lobby very hard for that," Holt promised.

   "What else?"

   "These numbers," Bill Tawney put in. "One is probably a bank account identification number, and the other is probably the control-activation code number. We'll have their police look into it for us. That will tell us something, if the money hasn't been laundered, of course, and if the account is still active, which it ought to be."

   "The weapons," the senior cop present told them, "judging by the serial numbers, are of Soviet origin, from the factory in Kazan. They're fairly old, at least ten years, but none of them had ever been fired before today. On the drug issue, I forwarded the information to Dennis Maguire-he's chief of the Garda. It will be on the telly in the morning. They found and seized ten pounds of pure cocaine-by `pure' I mean medicinal quality, almost as though it had been purchased from a pharmaceutical house. The street value is enormous. Millions," the chief superintendent told them. "It was found in a semi abandoned farmhouse on the Irish West Coast."

   "We have identification on three of the six prisoners. One has not yet been able to talk to us because of his injuries. Oh, they were using cellular phones to communicate, like walkie-talkies. Your Noonan chap did very well indeed to close the phone cells down. God only knows how many lives that saved," Holt told them.

   At the far end of the table, Chavez nodded and shivered at the news. If they'd been able to coordinate their actions . . . Jesus. It would not have been a good day for the good guys. What they'd had was bad enough. There would be funerals. People would have to put on their Class-A uniforms and line up and fire off the guns . . . and then they'd have to replace the men who were gone. Not far away, Mike Chin was in a bed, a cast on one of his wounded legs because a bone was broken. Team-1 was out of business for at least a month, even as well as they'd fought back. Noonan had come through big-time, having killed three of them with his pistol, along with Franklin, who'd just about decapitated one with his big MacMillan .50, then used his monster rifle to kill the little brown truck and keep the five terrorists in it from getting away. Chavez was looking down at the conference table and shaking his head when his beeper went off. He lifted it and saw that it was his home number. He rose from his seat and called on the wall phone.

   "Yeah, honey?"

   "Ding, you want to come over here. It's started," Patsy told him calmly. Ding's response was a sudden flip of his heart.

   "On the way, baby." Ding hung up. "John, I gotta get home. Patsy says it's started."

   "Okay, Domingo." Clark managed a smile, finally. "Give her a kiss for me."

   "Roge-o, Mr. C." And Chavez headed for the door.

   "The timing on this thing is never good, is it?" Tawney observed.

   "Well, at least something good is happening today." John rubbed his eyes. He even accepted the idea of becoming a grandfather. It beat the hell out of losing people, a fact that had yet to hammer all the way into his consciousness. His people. Two of them, dead. Several Tore wounded. His people.

   "Okay," Clark went on. "What about the information leak? People, we've been set up and hit. What are we going to do about it?"

   "Hello, Ed, it's Carol," the President's Science Advisor said.

   "Hi, Dr. Brightling. What can I do for you?"

   "What the hell happened in England today? Was it our people our Rainbow team, I mean?"

   "Yes, Carol, it was."

   "How did they do? The TV wasn't very clear, and--

   "Two dead, four or so wounded," the DCI answered. °' Nine terrorists dead, six captured, including their leader."

   "The radios we got to them, how'd they work?"

   "Not sure. I haven't seen the after-action report yet, but I know the main thing they're going to want to know."

   "What's that, Ed?"

   "Who spilled the beans. They knew John's name, his wife and daughter's names, identities, and place of work. They had good intel, and John isn't very happy about that."

   "The family members, are they okay?"

   "Yeah, no civilians hurt, thank God. Hell, Carol, I know Sandy and Patricia. There's going to be some serious fallout over this one."

   "Anything I can do to help?"

   "Not sure yet, but I won't forget you asked."

   "Yeah, well, I want to know if those radio gadgets worked. I told the guys at E-Systems to get them out pronto, 'cuz these guys are important. Gee, I hope they helped some."

   "I'll find out, Carol," the DCI promised.

   "Okay, you know where to reach me."

   "Okay, thanks for the call."

CHAPTER 30
VISTAS

   It was everything he'd expected-not knowing what to expect-and more, and at the end of it Domingo Chavez held his son in his hands.

   "Well," he said, looking down at the new life that would be his to guard, educate, and in time present to the world. After a second that seemed to last into weeks, he handed the newborn to his wife.

   Patsy's face was bathed in perspiration, and weary from the five-hour ordeal of delivery, but already, as such things went, the pain was forgotten. The goal had been achieved, and she held her child. The package was pink, hairless, and noisy, the last part assuaged by the proximity of Patsy's left breast, as John Conor Chavez got his first meal. But Patsy was exhausted, and in due course a nurse removed the child to the nursery. Then Ding kissed his wife and walked alongside her bed as she was wheeled to her room. She was already asleep when they arrived. He kissed her one last time and walked outside. His car took him back onto the Hereford base, and then to the official home of Rainbow Six.

   "Yeah?" John said, opening the door.

   Chavez just handed over a cigar with a blue ring. "John Conor Chavez, seven pounds eleven ounces. Patsy's doing fine, granpop," Ding said, with a subdued grin. After all. Patsy had done the hard part.

   There are moments to make the strongest of men weep, and this was one of them. The two men embraced. "Well," John said, after a minute or so, reaching into the pocket of his bathrobe for a handkerchief with which he rubbed his eyes. "Who's he look like?"

   "Winston Churchill," Domingo replied with a laugh. "Hell, John, I've never been able to figure that one out, but John Conor Chavez is a confusing enough name, isn't it? The little bastard has a lot of heritage behind him. I'll start him off on karate and guns about age five . . . maybe six," Ding mused.

   "Better golf and baseball, but he's your kid, Domingo. Come on in."

   "Well?" Sandy demanded, and Chavez gave the news for the second time while his boss lit up his Cuban cigar. He despised smoking, and Sandy, a nurse, hardly approved of the vice, but on this one occasion, both relented. Mrs. Clark gave Ding a hug. "John Conor?"

   "You knew?" John Terrence Clark asked.

   Sandy nodded. "Patsy told me last week."

   "It was supposed to be a secret," the new father objected.

   "I'm her mother, Ding!" Sandy explained. "Breakfast?"

   The men checked their watches. It was just after four in the morning, close enough, they all agreed.

   "You know, John, this is pretty profound," Chavez said. His father-in-law noted how Domingo switched in and out of accents depending on the nature of the conversation. The previous day, interrogating the PIRA prisoners he'd been pure Los Angeles gang kid, his speech redolent with Spanish accent and street euphemisms. But in his reflective moments, he reverted to a man with a university master's degree, with no accent at all. "I'm a papa. I've got a son." Followed by a slow, satisfied, and somewhat awestruck grin. "Wow."

   "The great adventure, Domingo," John agreed, while his wife got the bacon going. He poured the coffee.

   "Huh?"

   "Building a complete person. That's the great adventure, sonny boy, and if you don't do it right, what the hell good are you?"

   "Well, you guys've done okay."

   "Thanks, Domingo," Sandy said from the stove. "We worked at it pretty hard."

   "More her than me," John said. "I was away so damned much, playing field-spook. Missed three Christmases, goddamnit. You never forgive yourself for that,°" he explained. "That's the magic morning, and you're supposed to be there."

   "Doing what?"

   "Russia twice, Iran once-getting assets out every time. Two worked, but one came apart on me. Lost that one, and he didn't make it. Russians have never been real forgiving on state treason. He bit the big one four months liter, poor bastard. Not a good Christmas," Clark concluded, remembering just how bleak that had been, seeing the KGB scoop the man up not fifty meters from where he'd been standing, seeing the face turned to him, the look of despair on the doomed face, having to turn away to make his own escape down the pipeline he'd set up for two, knowing there was nothing else he might have done, but feeling like shit about it anyway. Then, finally, he'd had to explain to Ed Foley what had happened-only to learn later that the agent had been burned-"shopped" was the euphemism-by a KGB mole inside CIA's own headquarters building. And that fuck was still alive in a federal prison, with cable TV and central heating.

   "It's history, John," Chavez told him, understanding the look. They'd deployed on similar missions, but the Clark Chavez team had never failed, though some of their missions had been on the insane side of hairy. "You know the funny part about this?"

   "What's that?" John asked, wondering if it would be the same feeling he'd had.

   "I know I'm gonna die now. Someday, I mean. The little guy, he's gotta outlive me. If he doesn't, then I've screwed it up. Can't let that happen, can I? JC is my responsibility. While he grows up, I grow old, and by the time he's my age, hell, I'll be in my sixties. Jesus, I never planned to be old, y'know?"

   Clark chuckled. "Yeah, neither did I. Relax, kid. Now I'm a"-he almost said "fucking," but Sandy didn't like that particular epithet "goddamned grandfather. I never planned on that, either."

   "It's not so bad, John," Sandy observed, cracking open the eggs. "We can spoil him and hand him back. And we will." It hadn't happened that way with their kids, at least not on John's side of the family. His mother was long dead from cancer, and his father from a heart attack on the job, while rescuing some children from a dwelling fire in Indianapolis, back in the late 1960s. John wondered if they knew that their son had grown up, and then grown old. and was now a grandfather. There was no telling, was there? Mortality and its attendant issues were normal at times like this, he supposed. The great continuity of life. What would John Conor Chavez become? Rich man, poor man, beggarman, thief, doctor, lawyer, Indian chief? That was mainly Domingo and Patsy's job, and he had to trust them to do it properly, and they probably would. He knew his daughter and knew Ding almost as well. From the first time he'd seen the kid, in the mountains of Colorado, he'd known that this boy had something special in him, and the younger man had grown, blossoming like a flower in a particularly tough garden. Domingo Chavez was a younger version of himself, a man of honor and courage, Clark told himself, and therefore he'd be a worthy father, as he'd proven to be a worthy husband. The great continuity of life, John told himself again, sipping his coffee and puffing on the cigar, and if it was yet one more milestone on the road to death, then so be it. He'd had an interesting life, and a life that had mattered to others, as had Domingo, and as they all hoped would, John Conor. And what the hell, Clark thought, his life wasn't over yet, was it?

   Getting a flight to New York had proven more difficult than expected. They were all fully booked, but finally Popov had managed to get himself a coach seat in the back of an old United 727. He disliked the tight fit, but the flight was short. At La Guardia, he headed for a cab, on the way out checking his inside coat pocket and finding the travel documents that had gotten him across the Atlantic. They had served him well, but they had to go. Emerging into the evening air, he surreptitiously dumped them into a trash container before walking to the cabstand. He was a weary man. His day had started just after midnight, American East Coast time, and he hadn't managed much sleep on the transatlantic flight, and his body was-how did the Americans put it?-running on empty. Maybe that explained the break with fieldcraft.

   Thirty minutes later, Popov was within blocks of his downtown apartment, when the waste-disposal crew circulated past the United Airlines terminal to change the trash bags. The routine was mechanical and fairly strenuous physical labor for the mostly Puerto Rican work crew. One at a time, they lifted the metal tops off the cans and reached in to remove the heavy-gauge plastic garbage hags, then turned to dump them into wheeled containers that would later be tipped into trucks for transport to a landfill on Staten Island. The routine was good upper-body exercise, and most of the men carried portable radios to help themselves deal with the boredom of the work.

   One can, fifty yards from the cabstand, didn't sit properly in its holder. When the cleanup man lifted the bag, it caught on a metallic edge and ripped, spilling its contents onto the concrete sidewalk. That generated a quiet curse from the worker, who now had to bend down and pick up a bunch of objects with his gloved hands. He was halfway through when he saw the crimson cardboard cover of what appeared to be a British passport. People didn't throw those things away, did they? He flipped it open and saw two credit cards inside, stamped with the same name on the passport. Serov, he saw, an unusual name. He dropped the whole package into the thigh pocket of his coveralls. He'd bring it by the lost-and found. It wasn't the first time he'd discovered valuable stuff in the trash. Once he'd even recovered a fully loaded 9-mm pistol!

   By this time Popov was in his apartment, too tired even to unpack his bags. Instead he merely undressed and collapsed on the bed without even a vodka to help him off to sleep. By reflex, he turned on the TV and caught yet another story about the Hereford shootout. The TV was,ovno, shit, he thought. There was the TV truck whose reporter had come close and tried to interview him. They hadn't used it, but there he was, in profile, from twenty feet away, while the reporter gave a stand-up. All the more reason to clear out now, he thought, as he drifted off. He didn't even have the energy to switch the TV off, and he slept with it on, the recurring stories entering his mind and giving him confused and unpleasant dreams throughout the night. The passport, credit cards, and a few other items of apparent value arrived at the waste-disposal company's Staten Island office actually a trailer that had been towed to the spot-after the close of regular business hours. The trash collector tossed it on the correct desk and punched his time card on the way out for his drive back to Queens and his usual late dinner.

   Tom Sullivan had worked late, and was now in the bar the FBI agents frequented, a block from the Jacob Javits Federal Building in lower Manhattan. His partner Frank Chatham was there, too, and the two agents sat in a booth, sipping at their Sam Adams beers.

   "Anything happening on your end?" Sullivan asked. He'd been in court all day, waiting to testify in a fraud case, but had never gotten to the witness stand because of procedural delays.

   "I talked with two girls today. They both say they know Kirk Maclean, but neither one actually dated him," Chatham replied. "Looks like another dry hole. I mean, he was cooperative, wasn't he?"

   "Any other names associated with the missing girls?" Chatham shook his head. "Nope. They both said they saw him talking to the missing one and he walked one out once, like he told us, but nothing special about it. Just the usual singles bar scene. Nothing that contradicts anything he said. Neither one likes Maclean very much. They say he comes on to girls, asks some questions, and usually leaves them."

   "What kind of questions?"

   "The usual-name, address, work, family stuff. Same stuff we ask, Tom."

   "The two girls you talked to today," Sullivan asked thoughtfully. "Where they from?"

   "One's a New Yorker, one's from across the river in Jersey"

   "Bannister and Pretloe are from out of town," Sullivan minted out.

   "Yeah, I know. So?"

   "So, if you're a serial killer, it's easier to take down victims with no close family members, isn't it?"

   "Part of the selection process? That's a stretch, Tom."

   "Maybe, but what else we got?" The answer was, not very much. The flyers handed out by the NYPD had turned up fifteen people who'd said they recognized the faces, but they were unable to provide any useful information. "I agree, Maclean was cooperative, but if he approaches girls, dumps those who grew up near here and have family here, then walks our victim home, hell, it's more than we have on anyone else."

   "Go back to talk to him?"

   Sullivan nodded. "Yeah." It was just routine procedure. Kirk Maclean hadn't struck either agent as a potential serial killer-but that was the best-disguised form of criminal, both had learned in the FBI Academy at Quantico, Virginia. They also knew that the dullest of routine investigative work broke far more cases than the miracles so beloved of mystery novels. Real police work was boring, mind-dulling repetition, and those who stuck with it won. Usually.

   It was strange that morning at Hereford. On the one hand, Team-2 was somewhat cowed by what had happened the day before. The loss of comrades did that to any unit. But on the other hand, their boss was now a father, and that was always the best thing to happen to a man. On the way to morning PT, a somewhat strung out Team-2 Leader, who'd had no sleep at all the night before, had his hand shaken by every member of the team, invariably with a brief word of congratulations and a knowing smile, since all of them were fathers already, even those younger than their boss. Morning PT was abbreviated, in acknowledgment of his physical condition, and after the run, Eddie Price suggested to Chavez that he might as well drive home for a few hours of sleep, since he'd be of little use to anyone in his current condition. This Chavez did, crashing and burning past noon, and wakening with a screaming headache.

   As did Dmitriy Popov. It hardly seemed fair, since he'd had little to drink the day before. He supposed it was his body's revenge on him for all the travel abuse on top of a long and exciting day west of London. He awoke to CNN his bedroom TV, and padded off to the bathroom for the usual morning routine, plus some aspirin, then to the kitchen to make coffee. In two hours, he'd showered and dressed, unpacked his bags, and hung up the clothes he'd taken to Europe. The wrinkles would stretch out in a day or two, he thought. Then it was time for him to catch a cab for midtown. On Staten Island, the lost-and-found person was a secretary who had this as one of her additional duties, and hated it. The items dropped on her desk were always smelly, sometimes enough to make her gag. Today was no exception, and she found herself wondering why people had to place such noxious items in the trash instead of – what? she never thought to wonder. Keep them in their pockets? The crimson passport was no exception. Joseph A. Serov. The photo was of a man about fifty, she thought, and about as remarkable to look at as a McDonald's hamburger. But it was a passport and two credit cards and it belonged to somebody. She lifted the phone book from her desk and called the British Consulate in Manhattan, told the operator what it was about, and got the passport control officer as a result. She didn't know that the passport control office had for generations been the semisecret cover job for field officers of the Secret Intelligence Service. After a brief conversation, a company truck that was headed for Manhattan anyway dropped off the envelope at the consulate, where the door guard called to the proper office, and a secretary came down to collect it. This she dropped on the desk of her boss, Peter Williams.

   Williams really was a spook of sorts, a young man on his first field assignment outside his own country. It was typically a safe, comfortable job, in a major city of an allied country, and he did work a few agents, all of them diplomats working at the United Nations. From them, he sought and sometimes got low-level diplomatic intelligence, which was forwarded to Whitehall to be examined and considered by equally low-level bureaucrats in the Foreign Office.

   This smelly passport was unusual. Though his job was supposed to handle things like this, in fact he most often arranged substitute passports for people who'd somehow lost them in New York, which was not exactly a rare occurrence, though invariably an embarrassing one for the people who needed the replacements. The procedure was for Williams to fax the identification number on the document to London to identify the owner properly, and then call him or her at home, hoping to get a family member or employee who would know where the passport holder might be.

   But in this case, Williams got a telephone call from Whitehall barely thirty minutes after sending the information.

   "Peter?"

   "Yes, Burt?"

   "This passport, Joseph Serov– rather strange thing just happened."

   "What's that?"

   "The address we have for the chap is a mortuary, and the telephone number is to the same place. They've never heard of Joseph Serov, alive or dead."

   "Oh? A false passport?" Williams lifted it from his desk blotter. If it were a fake, it was a damned good one. So was something interesting happening for a change?

   "No, the computer has the passport number and name in it, but this Serov chap doesn't live where he claims to live. I think it's a matter of false papers. The records show that he is a naturalized subject. Want us to run that down, as well?"

   Williams wondered about that. He'd seen false papers before, and been trained on how to obtain them for himself at the SIS training academy. Well, why not? Maybe he'd uncover a spy or something. "Yes, Burt, could you do that for me?"

   "Call you tomorrow," the Foreign Office official promised. For his part, Peter Williams lit up his computer and sent an email to London, just one more routine day for a young and very junior intelligence officer on his first posting abroad. New York was much like London, expensive, impersonal, and full of culture, but sadly lacking in the good manners of his hometown.

   Serov, he thought, a Russian name, but you could find them everywhere. Quite a few in London. Even more in New York City, where so many of the cabdrivers were right off the boat or plane from Mother Russia and knew neither the English language nor where to find the landmarks of New York. Lost British passport, Russian name.

   Three thousand four hundred miles away, the name "Serov" had been input onto the SIS computer system. The name had already been run for possible hits and nothing of value had been found, but the executive program had many names and phrases, and it scanned for all of them. The name "Serov" was enough-it had also been entered spelled as Seroff and Serof – and when the e-mail from New York arrived, the computer seized upon and directed the message to a desk officer. Knowing that Iosef was the Russian version of Joseph, and since the passport description gave an age in the proper range, he flagged the message and forwarded it to the computer terminal of the person who had originated the enquiry on one Serov, Iosef Andreyevich.

   In due course, that message appeared as e-mail on the desktop computer of Bill Tawney. Bloody useful things, computers, Tawney thought, as he printed up the message. New York. That was interesting. He called the number of the Consulate and got Peter Williams.

   "This passport from the Serov chap, anything else you can tell me?" he asked, after establishing his credentials.

   "Well, yes, there are two credit cards that were inside it, a MasterCard and a Visa, both platinum." Which, he didn't have to add, meant that they had relatively large credit limits.

   "Very well. I want you to send me the photo and the credit card numbers over secure lines immediately." Tawney gave him the correct numbers to call.

   "Yes, sir. I'll do that at once," Williams replied earnestly, wondering what this was all about. And who the devil was William Tawney? Whoever it was, he was working late, since England was five hours ahead of New York, and Peter Williams was already wondering what he'd have for dinner.

   "John?"

   "Yeah, Bill?" Clark replied tiredly, looking up from his desk and wondering if he'd get to see his grandson that day.

   "Our friend Serov has turned up," the SIS man said next. That got a reaction. Clark's eyes narrowed at once.

   "Oh? Where?"

   "New York. A British passport was found in a dustbin pit La Guardia Airport, along with two credit cards. Well," he amended his report, "the passport and credit cards were in the name of one Joseph A. Serov."

   "Run the cards to see if-"

   "I called the legal attaché in your embassy in London to have the accounts run, yes. Should have some information within the hour. Could be a break for us, John," Tawney added, with a hopeful voice.

   "Who's handling it in the U.S.?"

   "Gus Werner, assistant director, Terrorism Division. Ever met him?"

   Clark shook his head. "No, but I know the name."

   "I know Gus. Good chap."

   The FBI has cordial relationships with all manner of businesses. Visa and MasterCard were no exceptions. An FBI agent called the headquarters of both companies from his desk in the Hoover Building, and gave the card numbers to the chiefs of security of both companies. Both were former FBI agents themselves-the FBI sends many retired agents off to such positions, which creates a large and diverse old-boy network-and both of them queried their computers and came up with account information, including name, address, credit history, and most important of all, recent charges. The British Airways flight from London Heathrow to Chicago O'Hare leaped off the screen-actually the faxed page-at the agent's desk in Washington.

   "Yeah?" Gus Werner said, when the young agent came into his office.

   "He caught a flight from London to Chicago late yesterday, and then a flight from Chicago to New York, about the last one, got a back-room ticket on standby. Must have dumped the ID right after he got in. Here." The agent handed over the charge records and the flight information. Werner scanned the pages.

 

   "No shit," the former chief of the Hostage Rescue Team observed quietly. "This looks like a hit, Johnny."

   "Yes, sir," replied the young agent, fresh in from the Oklahoma City field division. "But it leaves one thing out-how he got to Europe this time. Everything else is documented, and there's a flight from Dublin to London, but nothing from here to Ireland," Special Agent James Washington told his boss.

   "Maybe he's got American Express. Call and find out," Werner ordered the junior man.

   "Will do," Washington promised.

   "Who do I call on this?" Werner asked.

   "Right here, sir." Washington pointed to the number on the covering sheet.

   "Oh, good, I've met him. Thanks, Jimmy." Werner lifted his phone and dialed the international number. "Mr. Tawney, please," he told the operator. "It's Gus Werner calling from FBI Headquarters in Washington."

   "Hello, Gus. That was very fast of you," Tawney said, half in his overcoat and hoping to get home.

   "The wonders of the computer age, Bill. I have a possible hit on this Serov guy. He flew from Heathrow to Chicago yesterday. The flight was about three hours after the fracas you had at Hereford. I have a rental car, a hotel hill, and a flight from Chicago to New York City after he got here."

   "Address?"

   "We're not that lucky. Post office box in lower Manhattan," the Assistant Director told his counterpart. "Bill, how hot is this?"

   "Gus, it's bloody hot. Sean Grady gave us the name, and one of the other prisoners confirmed it. This Serov chap delivered a large sum of money and ten pounds of cocaine shortly before the attack. We're working with the Swiss to track the money right now. And now it appears that this chap is based in America. Very interesting."

   "No shit. We're going to have to track this mutt down if we can," Werner thought aloud. There was ample jurisdiction for the investigation he was about to open. American laws on terrorism reached across the world and had draconian penalties attached to them. And so did drug laws.

   "You'll try?" Tawney asked.

   "You bet your ass on that one, Bill," Werner replied positively. "I'm starting the case file myself. The hunt is on for Mr. Serov."

   "Excellent. Thank you, Gus."

   Werner consulted his computer for a codeword. This case would be important and classified, and the codeword on the file would read . . . no, not that one. He told the machine to pick another. Yes. PREFECT, a word he remembered from his Jesuit high school in St. Louis.

   "Mr. Werner?" his secretary called. "Mr. Henriksen on line three."

   "Hey, Bill," Werner said, picking up the phone.

   "Cute little guy, isn't he?" Chavez asked.

   John Conor Chavez was in his plastic crib-tray, sleeping peacefully at the moment. The name card in the slot on the front established his identity, helped somewhat by an armed policeman in the nursery. There would be another on the maternity floor, and an SAS team of three soldiers on the hospital grounds-they were harder to identify, as they didn't have military haircuts. It was, again, the horse-gone-lock-the-door mentality, but Chavez didn't mind that people were around to protect his wife and child.

   "Most of 'em are," John Clark agreed, remembering what Patsy and Maggie had been like at that age-only yesterday, it so often seemed. Like most men, John always thought of his children as infants, never able to forget the first time he'd held them in their hospital receiving blankets. And so now, again, he basked in the warm glow, knowing exactly how Ding felt, proud and a little intimidated by the responsibility that attended fatherhood. Well, that was how it was supposed to be. Takes after his mother, John thought next, which meant after his side of the family, which, he thought, was good. But John wondered, with an ironic smile, if the little guy was dreaming in Spanish, and if he learned Spanish growing up, well, what was the harm in being bilingual? Then his beeper went off. John grumbled as he lifted it from his belt. Bill Tawney's number. He pulled his shoe-phone from his pants pocket and dialed the number. It took five seconds for the encryption systems to synchronize.

   "Yeah, Bill?"

   "Good news. John, your FBI are tracking down this Serov chap. I spoke with Gus Werner half an hour ago. They've established that he took a flight from Heathrow to Chicago yesterday, then on to New York. That's the address for his credit cards. The FBI are moving very quickly on this one."

   The next step was checking for a driver's license, and that came up dry, which meant they were also denied a photograph of the subject. The FBI agents checking it out in Albany were disappointed, but not especially surprised. The next step, for the next day, was to interview the postal employees at the station with the P.O. box.

   So, Dmitriy, you got back here in a hurry," Brightling observed.

   "It seemed a good idea," Popov replied. "The mission was a mistake. The Rainbow soldiers are too good for such an attack on them. Sean's people did well. Their planning struck me as excellent, but the enemy was far too proficient. The skill of these people is remarkable, as we saw before."

   "Well, the attack must have shaken them up," his employer observed.

   "Perhaps," Popov allowed. Just then, Henriksen walked in.

   "Bad news," he announced.

   "What's that?"

   "Dmitriy, you goofed up some, son."

   "Oh? How did I do that?" the Russian asked, no small amount of irony in his voice.

   "Not sure, but they know there was a Russian involved in cueing the attack on Rainbow, and the FBI is working the case now. They may know you're here."

   "That is not possible," Popov objected. "Well . . . yes, they have Grady, and perhaps he talked . . . yes, he did know that I flew in from America, or he could have figured that out, and he knows the cover name I used, but that identity is gone-destroyed."

   "Maybe so, but I was just on the phone with Gus Werner. I asked him about the Hereford incident, if there was anything I needed to know. He told me they've started a case looking for a Russian name, that they had reason to believe a Russian, possibly based in America, had been in contact with the PIRA. That means they know the name, Dmitriy, and that means they'll be tracking down names on airline passenger lists. Don't underestimate the FBI, pal," Henriksen warned.

   "I do not," Popov replied, now slightly worried, but only slightly. It would not be all that easy to check every transatlantic flight, even in the age of computers. He also decided that his next set of false ID papers would be in the name of Jones, Smith, Brown, or Johnson, not that of a disgraced KGB chairman from the 1950s. The Serov ID name had been a joke on his part. Not a good one, he decided now. Joseph Andrew Brown, that would be the next one, Dmitriy Arkadeyevich Popov thought, sitting there in the top-floor office.

   "Is this a danger to us?" Brightling asked.

   "If they find our friend here," Henriksen replied.

   Brightling nodded and thought quickly. "Dmitriy, have you ever been to Kansas?"

   "Hello, Mr. Maclean," Tom Sullivan said.

   "Oh, hi. Want to talk to me some more?"

   "Yes, if you don't mind," Frank Chatham told him.

   "Okay, come on in," Maclean said, opening the door all the way, walking back to his living room, and telling himself to be cool. He sat down and muted his TV. "So, what do you want to know?"

   "Anyone else you remember who might have been close to Mary Bannister?" The two agents saw Maclean frown, then shake his head.

   "Nobody I can put a name on. I mean, you know, it's a singles bar, and people bump into each other and talk, and make friends and stuff, y'know?" He thought for a second more. "Maybe one guy, but I don't know his name . . . tall guy, 'bout my age, sandy hair, big guy, like he works out and stuff .. . but I don't know his name, sorry. Mary danced with him and had drinks with him, I think, but aside from that, hey, it's too dark and crowded in there."

   "And you walked her home just that one time?"

   "'Fraid so. We talked and joked some, but we never really hit it off. Just casual. I never, uh, made a move on her, if you know what I mean. Never got that far, like. Yeah, sure, I walked her home, but didn't even go in the building, didn't kiss her good night, even, just shook hands." He saw Chatham taking notes. Was this what he'd told them before? He thought so, but it was hard to remember with two federal cops in his living room. The hell of it was he didn't remember much about her. He'd selected her, loaded her into the truck, but that was all. He had no idea where she was now, though he imagined she was probably dead. Maclean knew what that part of the project was all about, and that made him a kidnapper and accessory to murder, two things he didn't exactly plan to give to these two FBI guys. New York had a death penalty statute now, and for all he knew so did the federal government. Unconsciously, he licked his lips and rubbed his hands on his slacks as he leaned back on the couch. Then he stood and faced toward the kitchen. "Can I get you guys anything?"

   "No, thanks, but you go right ahead," Sullivan said. he'd just seen something he hadn't noticed in their first interview. Tension. Was it the occasional flips people got talking to FBI agents, or was this guy trying to conceal something? They watched Maclean build a drink and come back.

   "How would you describe Mary Bannister?" Sullivan asked.

   "Pretty, but no knockout. Nice, personable-I mean, pleasant, sense of humor, sense of fun about her. Out-of-town girl in the big city for the first time-I mean, she's just a girl, y'know?"

   "But nobody really close to her, you said?"

   "Not that I know of, but I didn't know her that well. What do other people say?"

   "Well, people from the bar said you were pretty friendly with her . . ."

   "Maybe, yeah, but not that friendly. I mean, it never went anywhere. I never even kissed her." He was repeating himself now, as he sipped at his bourbon and water. "Wish I did, but I didn't," he added.

   "Who at the bar are you close to?" Chatham asked. "Hey, that's kinda private, isn't it?" Kirk objected.

   "Well, you know how it goes. We're trying to get a feel for the place, how it works, that sort of thing."

   "Well, I don't kiss and tell, okay? Not my thing."

   "I can't blame you for that," Sullivan observed with a smile, "but it is kinda unusual for the singles bar crowd."

   "Oh, sure, there's guys there who put notches on their guns, but that's not my style."

   "So, Mary Bannister disappeared, and you didn't notice?"

   "Maybe, but I didn't think much about it. It's a transient community, y'know? People come in and out, and some you never see again. They just disappear, like."

   "Ever call her?"

   Maclean frowned. "No, I don't remember that she gave me her number. I suppose she was in the book, but, no, I never called her."

   "Just walked her home only that one time?"

   "Right, just that one time," Maclean confirmed, taking another pull on his drink and wishing these two inquisitors out of his home. Did they-could they know something? Why had they come back? Well, there was nothing in his apartment to confirm that he knew any female from the Turtle Inn. Well, just some phone numbers, but not so much as a loose sock from the women he'd occasionally brought here. "I mean, you guys looked around the first time you were here," Maclean volunteered.

   "No big deal. We always ask to do that. It's just routine," Sullivan told their suspect. "Well, we have another appointment in a few minutes up the street. Thanks for letting us talk to you. You still have my card?"

   "Yeah, in the kitchen, stuck on the refrigerator."

   "Okay. Look, this case is kinda hard for us. Please think it over and if you come up with anything-anything at all, please call me, okay?"

   "Sure will." Maclean stood and walked them to the door, then came back to his drink and took another swallow.

   "He's nervous," Chatham said, out on the street.

   "Sure as hell. We have enough to do a background check on him?"

   "No problem," Chatham replied. "Tomorrow morning," the senior agent said.

   It was his second trip to Teterboro Airport, in New Jersey, across the river from Manhattan, but this time it was a different aircraft, with HORIZON CORP. painted on the rudder fin. Dmitriy played along, figuring that he could escape from any place in the United States, and knowing t fiat Henriksen would warn Brightling not to try anything drastic. There was an element of anxiety to the trip, but no greater than his curiosity, and so Popov settled into his seat on the left side and waited for the aircraft to start its engines and taxi out. There was even a flight attendant, a pretty one, to give him a shot of Finlandia vodka, which lie sipped as the Gulfstream V started rolling. Kansas, he thought, a state of wheat fields and tornadoes, less than three hours away.

   "Mr. Henriksen?"

   "Yeah, who's this?"

   "Kirk Maclean."

   "Anything wrong?" Henriksen asked, alerted by the tone of his voice.

CHAPTER 31
MOVEMENT

   The darkness hid the landscape. Popov stepped off the aircraft, and found a large military-type automobile waiting for him. Then he noticed the lines painted on the pavement and wondered if he'd landed on an airport runway or a country road of some sort. But, no, in the distance was a huge building, partially lit. More curious than ever, Dmitriy got into the vehicle and headed off toward it. His eyes gradually got accustomed to the darkness. The surrounding land seemed very flat, with only gentle rolls visible. Behind him he saw a fuel truck had pulled up to the business jet, perhaps to send it back to New Jersey. Well, they were expensive, and doubtless Brightling and his people wanted it back where he could use it. Popov didn't know that Horizon Corporation owned many of them; their number just increased by three from the factory. outside Savannah, Georgia. He was still jet-lagged, he found on entering the building. A uniformed security guard walked him to the elevator and then to his fourth-floor room, which was not unlike a medium-decent hotel room, complete with cooking facilities and a refrigerator. There was a TV and VCR, and all the tapes in the adjacent storage cupboard were-nature tapes, he saw. Lions, bears, moose, spawning salmon. Not a single feature film. The magazines on the bedside table were similarly nature oriented. How odd. But there was also a complete bar, including Absolut vodka, which was almost as good as the Russian kind he preferred. He poured himself a drink and switched on the TV to CNN.

   Henriksen was being overly cautious, Dmitriy thought. What could the FBI possibly have on him? A name? From that they could perhaps develop-what? Credit cards, if they were very lucky, and from that his travel records, but none of them would have evidentiary value in any court of law. No, unless Sean Grady positively identified him as a conduit of information and funds, he was totally safe, and Popov thought he could depend on cooperate not to cooperate with the British. He hated them too much to be cooperative. It was just a matter of crawling back into his hole and pulling it in after himself-an Americanism he admired. The money he'd stashed in the secondary Swiss account might be discoverable, but there were ways to handle that – attorneys were so useful as an institution, he'd learned. Working through them was better than all the KGB fieldcraft combined.

   No, if there was any danger to him, it was to be found in his employer, who might not know the rules of the game-but even if he didn't, Henriksen would help, and so Dmitriy relaxed and sipped his drink. He'd explore this place tomorrow, and from the way he was treated, he'd know-

   –no, there was an even easier way. He lifted his phone. hit 9 to get an outside line, then dialed his apartment ill New York. The call went through. The phone rang four times before his answering machine clicked in. So, he had phone access to the outside. That meant he was safe, but he was no closer to understanding what was going on than he'd been during that first meeting in France, chatting with the American businessman and regaling him with tales of a former KGB field intelligence officer. Now here he was, in Kansas, USA, drinking vodka and watching television, with over six million American dollars in two numbered accounts in Switzerland. He'd reached one goal. Next he had to meet another. What the hell was this adventure all about? Would he find out here? He hoped so.

   The airplanes were crammed with people, all of them inbound to Kingsford Smith International Airport outside Sydney. Many of them landed on the runway, which stuck out like a finger into Botany Bay, so famous as the landing point for criminals and other English rejects sent halfway round the world on wooden sailing ships to start a new country, which, to the disbelief of those who'd dispatched them, they'd done remarkably well. Many of the passengers on the inbound flights were young, fit athletes. the pride and pick of the countries that had sent them dressed in uniform clothing that proclaimed their nations of origin. Most were tourists, people with ticket-and-accommodation packages expensively bought from travel agents or given as gifts from political figures in their home countries. Many carried miniature flags. The few business passengers had listened to all manner of enthusiastic predictions for national glory at the Olympic games, which would start in the next few days.

   On arriving, the athletes were treated like visiting royalty and conveyed to buses that would take them up Highway 64 to the city, and thence to the Olympic Village, which had been expensively built by the Australian government to house them. They could see the magnificent stadium nearby, and the athletes looked and wondered if they'd find personal glory there.

   "So, Colonel, what do you think?"

   "It's one hell of a stadium, and that's a fact," Colonel Wilson Gearing, U.S. Army Chemical Corps, retired, replied. "But it sure gets hot here in the summer, pal."

   "It's that El Nino business again. The ocean currents off South America have changed again, and that's associated with unusually hot temperatures here. It'll be in the mid thirties-nineties to you, I suppose-for the whole Olympiad."

   "Well, I hope this fogging system works; 'cuz if it doesn't, you'll have a lot of heat-stroke cases here, pal."

   "It works," the Aussie cop told him. "It's fully tested."

   "Can I take a look at it now? Bill Henriksen wants me to see if it could be used as a chemical-agent delivery system by the bad guys."

   "Certainly. This way." They were there in five minutes. The water-input piping was contained in its own locked room. The cop had the key for this, and took the colonel inside.

   "Oh, you chlorinate the water here?" Gearing asked in semi surprise. The water came in from the Sydney city water system, didn't it?

   "Yes, we don't want to spread any germs on our guests, do we?"

   "Not exactly," Colonel Gearing agreed, looking at the plastic chlorine container that hung on the distribution piping beyond the actual pumps. Water was filtered through that before it went into the fogging nozzles that lung in all the concourses and ramps to the stadium bowl itself. The system would have to be flushed with unchlorinated water before delivery would work, but that was easily accomplished, and the false chlorine container in his hotel room was an exact twin of this one. The contents given looked like chlorine, almost, though the nano-capsules actually contained something called Shiva. Gearing thought about that behind blank brown eyes. He'd been a chemical weapons expert his whole professional life, having worked at the Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland and Dugway Proving Ground in Utah-but, well, this wasn't really chemical warfare. It was bio-war, a sister science of the one he'd studied for over twenty uniformed ears. "Is the door guarded?" he asked.

   "No, but it is alarmed, and it takes some minutes to play with the system, as you can see. The alarm system reports to the command post, and we have an ample reaction force there."

   "How ample?" the retired colonel asked next.

   "Twenty SAS members, plus twenty police constables, are there at all times, plus ten more SAS circulating in pairs around the stadium. The people at the CP are armed with automatic weapons. The ones on patrol with pistols and radios. There is also a supplementary reaction force a kilometer distant with light armored vehicles and heavy weapons, platoon strength. Beyond that, a battalion of infantry twenty kilometers away, with helicopters and other support."

   "Sounds good to me," Colonel Gearing said. "Can you give me the alarm code for this facility?"

   They didn't even hesitate. He was a former staff-grade army officer, after all, and a senior member of the consulting team for security at the Olympic Games. "One-One-Three-Three-Six-Six," the senior cop told him. Clearing wrote it down, then punched the numbers into the keypad, which armed and then disarmed the system. He'd be able to switch out the chlorine canister very quickly.

   The system was designed for rapid servicing. This would work just fine, just like the model they'd set up in Kansas, on which he and his people had practiced for several days. They'd gotten the swap-out time down to fourteen seconds. Anything under twenty meant that nobody would notice anything remiss in the fog cooling system, because residual pressure would' maintain the fogging stream.

   For the first time, Gearing saw the place where he'd be doing it, and that generated a slight chill in his blood. Planning was one thing. Seeing where it would happen for real was something else. This was the place. Here he would start a global plague that would take lives in numbers far too great to tally, and which in the end would leave alive only the elect. It would save the planet-at a ghastly price, to be sure, but he'd been committed to this mission for years. He'd seen what man could do to harm things. He'd been a young lieutenant at Dugway Proving Grounds when they'd had the well-publicized accident with GB, a persistent nerve agent that had blown too far and slaughtered a few hundred sheep-and neurotoxins were not a pretty death, even for sheep. The news media hadn't even bothered to talk about the wild game that had died a similar, ugly death, everything from insects to antelope. It had shaken him that his own organization, the United States Army, could make so grave an error to cause such pain. The things he'd learned later had been worse. The binary agents he'd worked on for years-an effort to manufacture "safe" poisons for battlefield use . . . the crazy part was that it had all begun in Germany as insecticide research in the 1920s and 1930s. Most of the chemicals used to kill off insects were nerve agents, simple ones that attacked and destroyed the rudimentary nervous systems in ants and beetles, but those German chemists had stumbled upon some of the deadliest chemical compounds ever formulated. So much of Gearing's career had been spent with the intelligence community, evaluating information about possible chemical-warfare plants in countries not trusted to have such things.

   But the problem with chemical weapons had always been their distribution-how to spread them evenly across a battlefield, thus exposing enemy soldier sufficiently. That the same chemicals would travel downrange and kill innocent civilians had been the dirty secret that the organizations and the governments that ruled them had always ignored. And they didn't even consider the wildlife that would also be exterminated in vast quantities-and worse still, the genetic damage those agents caused, because marginal doses of nerve gas, below the exposure needed to kill, invaded the very DNA of the victim, ensuring mutations that would last for generations. Gearing had spent his life knowing these things, and he supposed that it had desensitized him to the taking of life in large quantities.

   This wasn't quite the same thing. He would not be spreading organophosphate chemical poisons, but rather tiny virus particles. And the people walking through the cooling fog in the concourses and ramps to the stadium bowl would breathe them in, and their body chemistry would break down the nano-capsules, allowing the Shiva strands to go to work ... slowly, of course ... and they'd go home to spread the Shiva farther, and in four to six weeks after the ending of the Sydney Olympics, the plague would erupt worldwide, and a global panic would ensue. Then Horizon Corporation would announce that it had an experimental "A" vaccine that had worked in animals and primates-and was safe for human usage-ready for mass production, and so it would be mass-produced and distributed worldwide, and four to six weeks after injection, those people, too, would develop the Shiva symptoms, and with luck the world would be depopulated down to a fractional percentage of the current population. Disorders would break out, killing many of the people blessed by Nature with highly effective immune systems, and in six months or so, there would be just a few left, well organized and well equipped, safe in Kansas and Brazil, and in six months more they would be the inheritors of a world returning to its natural state. This wouldn't be like Dugway, a purposeless accident. This would be a considered act by a man who'd contemplated mass murder for all of his professional life, but who'd only helped kill innocent animals ... He turned to look at his hosts.

   "What's the extended weather forecast?"

   "Hot and dry, old boy. I hope the athletes are fit. They'll need to be."

   "Well, then, this fogging system will be a lifesaver," Gearing observed. "Just so the wrong people don't fool with it. With your permission, I'll have my people keep an eye on this thing."

   "Fine," the senior cop agreed. The American was really fixated on this fogging system, but he'd been a gas soldier, and maybe that explained it.

   Popov hadn't closed his shades the previous evening, and so the dawn awoke him rather abruptly. He opened his eyes, then squinted them in pain as the sun rose over the Kansas plains. The medicine cabinet in the bathroom, he found, had Tylenol and aspirin, and there were coffee grounds for the machine in the kitchen area, but nothing of value in the refrigerator. So he showered and had his coffee, then went out of the room looking for food. He found a cafeteria-a huge one-almost entirely empty of patrons, though there were a few people near the food tables, and there he went, got breakfast and sat alone, as he looked at the others in the cavernous room. Mainly people in their thirties and forties, he thought, professional looking, some wearing white laboratory coats."Mr. Popov?" a voice said. Dmitriy turned.

   "Yes?

   "I'm David Dawson, chief of security here. I have a badge for you to wear"-he handed over a white plastic shield that pinned to his shirt "and I'm supposed to show you around today. Welcome to Kansas."

   "Thank you." Popov pinned the badge on. It even had his picture on it, the Russian saw.

   "You want to wear that at all times, so that people know you belong here," Dawson explained helpfully.

   "Yes, I understand." So this place was pass-controlled, and it had a director of site security. How interesting.

   "How was your flight in last night?"

   "Pleasant and uneventful," Popov replied, sipping his second coffee of the morning. "So, what is this place?"

   "Well, Horizon set it up as a research facility. You know what the company does, right?"

   "Yes." Popov nodded. "Medicines and biological research, a world leader."

   "Well, this is another research-and-development facility for their work. It was just finished recently. We're bringing people in now. It will soon be the company's main facility."

   "Why here in the middle of nothing?" Popov asked, looking around at the mainly empty cafeteria.

   "Well, for starters, it's centrally located. You can be anywhere in the country in less than three hours. And nobody's around to bother us. It's a secure facility, too. Horizon does lots of work that requires protection, you see."

   "Industrial espionage?"

   Dawson nodded. "That's right. We worry about that."

   "Will I be able to look around, see the grounds and such?"

   "I'll drive you around myself. Mr. Henriksen told me to extend you the hospitality of the facility. Go ahead and finish your breakfast. I have a few things I have to do. I'll be back in about fifteen minutes."

   "Good, thank you," Popov said, watching him walk out of the room. This would be useful. There was a strange, institutional quality to this place, almost like a secure government facility . . . like a Russian facility, Popov thought. It seemed to have no soul at all, no character, no human dimension that he could identify. Even KGB would have hung a photo of Lenin on the huge, bare, white walls to give the place some human scale. There was a wall of tinted windows, which allowed him to see out to what appeared to be wheat fields and a road, but nothing else. It was almost like being on a ship at sea, he thought, unlike anything he'd ever experienced. The former KGB officer worked through his breakfast, all of his instincts on alert, hoping to learn more, and as quickly as he could.

   "Domingo, I need you to take this one," John said.

   "It's a long way to go, John, and I just became a daddy," Chavez objected.

   "Sorry, pal, but Covington is down. So's Chin. I was going to send you and four men. It's an easy job, Ding. The Aussies know their stuff, but they asked us to come down and give it a look-and the reason for that is the expert way you handled your field assignments, okay?"

   "When do I leave?"

   "Tonight, 747 out of Heathrow." Clark held up the ticket envelope.

   "Great," Chavez grumbled."Hey, at least you were there for the delivery, pop."

   "I suppose. What if something crops up while we're away?" Chavez tried as a weak final argument.

   "We can scratch a team together, but you really think somebody's going to yank our chain anytime soon? After we bagged those IRA pukes? I don't," Clark concluded.

   "What about the Russian guy, Serov?"

   "The FBI's on it, trying to run him down in New York. They've assigned a bunch of agents to it."

   One of them was Tom Sullivan. He was currently in the post office. Box 1453 at this station belonged to the mysterious Mr. Serov. It had some junk mail in it, and a Visa bill, but no one had opened the box in at least nine days, judging by the dates on the envelopes, and none of the clerks professed to know what the owner of Box 1453 looked like, though one thought he didn't pick up his mail very often. He'd given a street address when obtaining the box, but that address, it turned out, was to an Italian bakery several blocks away, and the phone number was a dud, evidently made up for the purpose.

   "Sure as hell, this guy's a spook," Sullivan thought aloud, wondering why the Foreign Counterintelligence group hadn't picked up the case.

   "Sure wiggles like one," Chatham agreed. And their assignment ended right there. They had no evidence of a crime for the subject, and not enough manpower to assign an agent to watch the P.O. box around the clock.

   Security was good here, Popov thought, as he rode around in another of the military-type vehicles that Dawson called a Hummer. The first thing about security was to have defensive depth. That they had. It was ten kilometers at least before you approached a property line.

   "It used to be a number of large farms, but Horizon bought them all out a few years ago and started building the research lab. It took a while, but it's finished now."

   "You still grow wheat here?"

   "Yeah, the facility itself doesn't use all that much of the land, and we try to keep the rest of it the way it was. Hell, we grow almost enough wheat for all the people at the lab, got our own elevators an' all over that way." He pointed to the north.

   Popov looked that way and saw the massive concrete structures some distance away. It was amazing how large America was, Dmitriy Arkadeyevich thought, and this part seemed so flat, not unlike the Russian steppes. The land had some dips and rises, but all they seemed to do was emphasize the lack of a real hill anywhere. The Hummer went north, and eventually crossed a rail line that evidently led to the grain silos-elevators, Dawson had called them? Elevators? Why that word? Farther north and lie could barely make out traffic moving on a distant highway.

   "That's the northern border," Dawson explained, as they passed into non-farm land.

   "What's that?"

   "Oh, that's our little herd of pronghorn antelopes." Dawson turned the wheel slightly to go closer. The Hummer bumped over the grassy land.

   "They're pretty animals."

   "That they are, and very fast. We call 'em the speed-goat. Not a true antelope at all, genetically closer to goats. Those babies can run at forty miles an hour, and do it for damned near an hour. They also have superb eyesight."

   "Difficult to hunt, I imagine. Do you hunt?"

   "They are, and I'm not. I'm a vegan."

   'What?"

   "Vegetarian. I don't eat meat or other animal products," Dawson said somewhat proudly. Even his belt was made of canvas rather than leather.

   "Why is that, David?" Popov asked. He'd never come across anyone like him before.

   "Oh, just a choice I made. I don't approve of killing animals for food or any other reason"-he turned-"not everybody agrees with me, not even here at the Project, but I'm not the only one who thinks that way. Nature is something to be respected, not exploited."

   "So, you don't buy your wife a fur coat," Popov said, with a smile. He had heard about those fanatics.

   "Not hardly!" Dawson laughed.

   "I've never hunted," Popov said next, wondering what response he'd get. "I never saw the sense in it, and in Russia they've nearly exterminated most game animals."

   "So I understand. That's very sad, but they'll come back someday," Dawson pronounced.

   "How, with all the state hunters working to kill them?" That institution hadn't ended even with the demise of Communist rule.

   Dawson's face took on a curious expression, one Popov had seen many times before at KGB. The man knew something he was unwilling to say right now, though what he knew was important somehow. "Oh, there's ways, pal. There's ways."

   The driving tour required an hour and a half, at the end of which Popov was mightily impressed with the size of the facility. The approach road to the building complex was an airport, he saw, with electronic instruments to guide airplanes in and traffic lights to warn autos off when flight operations were in progress. He asked Dawson about it.

   "Yeah, it is kinda obvious, isn't it? You can get a G in and out of here pretty easy. They say you can bring in real commercial jets, too, medium-sized ones, but I've never seen that done."

  "Dr. Brightling spent a lot of money to build this establishment."

   "That he did," Dawson agreed. "But it's worth it, trust me." He drove up the highway/runway to the lab building and stopped. "Come with me."

   Popov followed without asking why. He'd never appreciated the power of a major American corporation. This could and should have been a government facility. with all the land and the huge building complex. The hotel building in which he'd spent the night could probably hold thousands of people and why build such a place here? Was Brightling going to move his entire corporation here, all his employees? So far from major cities, airports, all the things that civilization offered. Why here? Except. of course, for security. It was also far from large police agencies, from news media and reporters. For the purposes of security, this facility might as easily have been on the moon.

   The lab building was also larger than it needed to be. Dmitriy thought, but unlike the others, it appeared to be functioning at the moment. Inside was a desk, and a receptionist who knew David Dawson. The two men proceeded unimpeded to the elevators, then up to the fourth floor, and right to an office.

   "Hi, Doc," Dawson said. "This is Dmitriy. Dr. Brightling sent him to us last night. He's going to be here awhile," the security chief added.

   "I got the fax." The physician stood and extended his hand to Popov. "Hi, I'm John Killgore. Follow me." And the two of them went through a side door into an examining room, while Dawson waited outside. Killgore told Popov to disrobe down to his underwear, and proceeded to give him a physical examination, taking blood pressure, checking eyes and ears and reflexes, prodding his belly to make sure that the liver was non-palpable, and finally taking four test tubes of blood for further examination. Popov submitted to it all without objection, somewhat bemused by the whole thing, and slightly intimidated by the physician, as most people were. Finally, Killgore pulled a vial from the medicine cabinet and stuck a disposable syringe into it.

   "What's this?" Dmitriy Arkadeyevich asked.

   "Just a booster shot," Killgore explained, setting the vial down.

   Popov picked it up and looked at the label, which read "B2100 11-21-00" and nothing else. Then he winced when the needle went into his upper arm. He'd never enjoyed getting shots.

   "There, that's done," Killgore said. "I'll talk to you tomorrow about the blood work." With that done, he pointed his patient to the hook his clothing hung on. It was a pity, Killgore thought, that the patient couldn't be appreciative for having his life saved.

   "He might as well not exist," Special Agent Sullivan told his boss. "Maybe somebody comes in to check his mail, but not in the past nine or ten days."

   "What can we do about that?"

   "If you want, we can put a camera and motion sensor inside the box, like the FCI guys do to cover dead-drops. We can do it, but it costs money and manpower to keep an agent or two close if the alarm goes off. Is this case that important?"

   "Yes, it is now," the Assistant Special Agent in charge of the New York field division told his subordinate. "Gus Werner started this one off, and he's keeping a personal eye on the case file. So, talk to the FCI guys and get them to help you cover the P.O. box."

   Sullivan nodded and concealed his surprise. "Okay, will do."

   "Next, what about the Bannister case?"

   "That's not going anywhere at the moment. The closest thing to a hit we've gotten to this point is the second interview with this Kirk Maclean guy. He acted a little antsy. Maybe just nerves on his part, maybe something else-we have nothing on him and the missing victim, except that they had drinks and talked together at this bar uptown. We ran a background on him. Nothing much to report. Makes a good living for Horizon Corporation he's a biochemist by profession, graduated University of Delaware, master's degree, working toward a doctorate at Columbia. Belongs to some conservation groups, including Earth First and the Sierra Club, gets their periodicals. His main hobby is backpacking. He has twenty-two grand in the bank, and he pays his bills on time. His neighbors say he's quiet and withdrawn, doesn't make many friends in the building. No known girlfriends. He says he knew Mary Bannister casually, walked her home once, no sexual involvement, and that's it, he says."

   "Anything else?" the ASAC asked.

   "The flyers the NYPD handed out haven't developed into anything yet. I can't say that I'm very hopeful at this point."

   "What's next, then?"

   Sullivan shrugged. "In a few more days we're going back to Maclean to interview him again. Like I said, he looked a little bit hinky, but not enough to justify coverage on him."

   "I talked to this Lieutenant d'Allessandro. He's thinking there might be a serial killer working that part of town."

   "Maybe so. There's another girl missing, Anne Pretloe's her name, but nothing's turning on that one either. Nothing for us to work with. We'll keep scratching away at it," Sullivan promised. "If one of them's out there, sooner or later he'll make a mistake." But until he did, more young women would continue to disappear into that particular black hole, and the combined forces of the NYPD and the FBI couldn't do much to stop it. "I've never worked a case like this before."

   "I have," the ASAC said. "The Green River killer in Seattle. We put a ton of resources on that one, but we never caught the mutt, and the killings just stopped. Maybe he got picked up for burglary or robbing a liquor store, and maybe he's sitting it out in a Washington State prison, waiting to get paroled so he can take down some more hookers. We have a great profile on how his brain works, but that's it, and we don't know what brain the profile fits. These cases are real head-scratchers."

   Kirk Maclean was having lunch just then, sitting in one of the hundreds of New York delicatessens, eating egg salad and drinking a cream soda.

   "So?" Henriksen asked.

   "So, they came back to talk to me again, asking the same fuckin' questions over and over, like they expect me to change my story."

   "Did you?" the former FBI agent asked.

   "No, there's only one story I'm going to tell, and that's the one I prepared in advance. How did you know that they might come to me like this?" Maclean asked.

   "I used to be FBI. I've worked cases, and I know how the Bureau operates. They are very easy to underestimate, find then they appear-no, then you appear on the scope, and they start looking, and mainly they don't stop looking until they find something," Henriksen said, as a further warning to this kid.

   "So, where are they now?" Maclean asked. "The girls, I mean."

   "You don't need to know that, Kirk. Remember that. You do not need to know."

   "Okay." Maclean nodded his submission. "Now what?"

   "They'll come to see you again. They've probably done ii background check on you and-"

   "What's that mean?"

   "Talk to your neighbors, coworkers, check your credit history, your car, whether you have tickets, any criminal convictions, look for anything that suggests that you could be a bad guy," Henriksen explained.

   "There isn't anything like that on me," Kirk said.

   "I know." Henriksen had done the same sort of check himself. There was no sense in having somebody with a criminal past out breaking the law in the name of the Project. The only black mark against him was Maclean's membership in Earth First, which was regarded by the Bureau almost as a terrorist-well, extremist organization. But all Maclean did with that bunch was to read their monthly newsletter. They had a lot of good ideas, and there was talk in the Project about getting some of them injected with the "B" vaccine, but they had too many members whose ideas of protecting the planet were limited to driving nails into trees, so that the buzz saws would break. That sort of thing only chopped up workers in sawmills and raised the ire of the ignorant public without teaching them anything useful. That was the problem with terrorists, Henriksen had known for years. Their actions never matched their aspirations. Well, they weren't smart enough to develop the resources they needed to be effective. You had to live in the economic eco-structure to believe that, and they just couldn't compete on that battlefield. Ideology was never enough. You needed brains and adaptability, too. To be one of the elect, you had to be worthy. Kirk Maclean wasn't really worthy, but he was part of the team. And now he was rattled by the attention of the FBI. All he had to do was stick to his story. But he was shook up, and that meant he couldn't be trusted. So, they'd have to do something about it.

   "Get your stuff packed. We'll move you out to the Project tonight." What the hell, it would be starting soon anyway. Very soon, in fact.

   "Good," Maclean responded, finishing his egg salad. Henriksen was eating pastrami, he saw. Not a vegan. Well, maybe someday.

   Artwork was finally going up on some of the blank walls. So, Popov thought, the facility wasn't to be entirely soulless. It was nature paintings-mountains, forests, and animals. Some of the pictures were quite good, but most of them were ordinary, the kind of thing you found on the walls of cheap motels. How strange, the Russian thought, that with all the money they'd spent to build this monstrous facility in the middle of nowhere, that the artwork was second-rate. Well, taste was taste, and Brightling was a technocrat, and doubtless uneducated in the finer aspects of life. In ancient times he would have been a druid, Dmitriy thought, a bearded man in a long white robe who worshiped trees and animals and sacrificed virgins on stone altars to his pagan beliefs. There were better things to do with virgins. There was such a strange mixture of the old and the new in this man-and his company. The director of security was a "vegan," who never ate meat? What rubbish! Horizon Corporation was a world leader in several vital new technological areas, but it was peopled by madmen of such primitive and strange beliefs. He Supposed it was an American affectation. Such a huge country, the brilliant coexisting with the mad. Brightling was a genius, but he'd hired Popov to initiate terrorist incidents-

   –and then he'd brought Popov here. Dmitriy Arkadeyevich thought about that as he chewed his dinner. Why here? What was so special about this place?