Biowar (10 page)

“I’m not getting any audio,” said Rockman. He backed the grid map out one level, getting a larger view of the city. The subway and rail lines as well as the streets were marked. “Maybe he took his glasses off.”

“They’re definitely doing something in the station,” said Telach. “There’s another rail line here, Docklands. They may be taking that.”

“Get Lia over there,” said Rubens. “She can pick up the trail from there.”

Telach glared at him as Rockman gave the order. It wasn’t that she disagreed—she would have said so—it was that the direction should have come from her.

Not a time to be temperamental.

The green diamond showing Dean began to move to the left of the screen, following the ghosted gray map of the Docklands light-rail line. Rockman brought up a screen showing the line’s path, looking for a place where Lia might be able to get on. She was too far away to get to the rail line quickly enough to take the same train; she’d have to follow along as best she could.

“Get back on the Tube,” Telach said, giving her directions to the line. “Call us when you get to Monument.”

“Dean’s audio’s back,” announced Rockman.

“Conference it,” said Rubens.

The sound of machinery flooded through the speakers, then faded.

“I don’t think so,” said Dean, his voice muffled slightly.

“Oh yes,” said someone with a light German accent. “You will or you will be killed.”

There was a muffled sound, and then the audio died again.

13

Lia jumped from the train, striding quickly to the left up a short flight of stairs that led to the escalators. They were out of order, and the only way to the surface from here was the stairs or the elevators at the far end, which already had a thick queue from an earlier train. She pushed through the doors to the stairway, ordinarily used only in emergencies. Even Lia, who was in exceptional shape, started to lose her breath about midway up the seemingly endless spiral of metal stairs. Her legs started to stiffen, but she pushed on, angry not so much at choosing the steps or even at losing Dean but at being so out of whack about it. If she were just following someone else, even Tommy Karr, she’d be her normal calm, disgusted self. But Dean—she liked the son of a bitch and was truly worried about him.

Loved, maybe.

Lia emerged from an emergency access closet into the station vestibule, striding across the pedestrian tunnel just ahead of a surge from the nearby elevator.

“Well?” she asked Rockman. “Which way?”

“Get on the light-rail. You have to hurry. It’s coming.”

“Which direction?”

“Take a left.”

“I mean, the train.”

“East.”

“How far? Moscow?”

“If I tell you to,” snapped the runner uncharacteristically. Telach or Rubens must be on his back because they’d lost track of Dean.

A bobby eyed Lia as she went to one of the kiosks to buy her ticket. Lia forced herself to smile for the clerk at the window, then sauntered toward the train. The policeman’s interest seemed to wane; obviously his interest had been purely prurient.

“Shuttle bus—he’s going to London City Airport,” said Rockman in her ear.

“Mmmm,” said Lia, silently cursing. The city airport had connections with much of Europe.

“All right, go along. We’ll work up the flight—there’s something up with his com system. We think one of the thugs hit him with a shot of something, because he’s not talking, just breathing.”

“Mmmm,” said Lia again.

Charlie should have gotten the stinking implant.

Sissy. This would show him.

As she turned toward the track area, two women in rather dowdy polyester pants cut her off.

“Excuse us,” said one of the women, pulling out an ID card. “We’d like to speak with you a minute.”

“Oh?” said Lia.

“What?” asked Rockman.

“Who exactly are you?” Lia asked.

“We’ll discuss that with you,” said the other woman.

“I think you ought to do that right now,” said Lia.

“Scotland Yard,” said the woman.

“Oh, bull,” said Lia.

“MI-5,” said Rockman.

The woman on the right took hold of Lia’s purse.

“You’re going to let go of that right now,” said Lia.

“You’re going to come with us,” said the woman.

As they’d been speaking, Lia had shifted her right arm up against her shoulder, which allowed a small canister of pepper spray to slide down her sleeve. She moved her other hand on the bag as a distraction, and when the second woman came close to her, she pulled her right hand up and palmed the dispenser,

Then she raised her arm and nailed the evil sisters in the eyes.

With two strides, Lia reached a small group of tourists. By the time the two British agents reacted to the pepper spray—one screamed; the other cursed and grabbed for the radio in her purse—Lia was almost to the station doorway.

“You hit them with the pepper spray?” asked Rockman.

“Ground decision,” said Lia. “Which way is the taxi stand?”

“Left,” said Rockman.

Lia saw a policeman starting for her as she reached the door. She turned right on the street, took three steps, then broke into a run. Another entrance to the Tube was just ahead, but as she reached it a double-decker bus loomed on the left. Lia leaped onto it.

“Where am I?” she asked the Art Room.

“In the wrong place at the wrong time,” answered Rubens. “Why did you gas the MI-5 people?”

“Because they were there?”

“I don’t appreciate inappropriate sarcasm.”

“I’m here to display initiative, right? Besides, why did they stop me?”

“It appears you were acting eccentrically and caught their attention,” said Rubens. “In any event, they’re our allies.”

“Then you can apologize,” said Lia. “In the meantime, get someone to tell me the best way to the airport.”

14

The blow to the side of Dean’s head had been meant to persuade him to cooperate, not to knock him out. But Dean decided that he might learn more about what was going on by playing possum and had collapsed against the side of the railcar. This generated an argument between his two abductors in what Dean thought must be German. The thug who had hit him propped him up and tried reviving him; Dean remained slumped over even when the car stopped. After a brief discussion, his abductors produced a bottle of whiskey and poured some onto a cloth, rubbing it in Dean’s face. The sharp stench turned Dean’s stomach, and he began mumbling, then decided the time was ripe to come to before they drenched his clothes.

“Cooperate,” hissed one of the men as Dean shook himself. “You won’t be harmed.”

“Let go of me.” Dean pushed his shoulders back and walked on his own. They took a turn and headed onto a moving walkway. At the edge of the terminal was a bus, just taking on passengers.

“Where are we going?” asked Dean.

“No questions.”

Dean hadn’t heard from the Art Room since his abduction. He reached up and adjusted his glasses, pressing the right side rim twice, which was supposed to send an alert back to the runner—basically asking for instructions. But nothing happened. Dean tried again.

“My glasses,” said Dean out loud.

“What about your glasses?” said one of the thugs.

“They seem crooked or something.”

“Get on the bus,” said the man.

Dean climbed up, shuffling toward the back. He tried to think about the character he was supposed to be. How would a lifelong lab assistant act?

Geeky. Scared, or at least apprehensive.

Geeky was tough, but he could do apprehensive. He got on the bus, jerking his head back and forth, wondering how close Lia was.

While Lia made her way to the airport by taxi, Rockman worked on figuring out where Dean was heading. He located the booking by guessing that it had been made in a block of three seats; he tapped into the reservation systems at the airport and got an answer so quickly Lia suggested it was a ruse: a Lufthansa flight to Hamburg boarding in ten minutes.

“If it’s a blind, at least I have a credit card and names,” said Rockman. She could hear him pounding the keys, entering different databases at will—some with permission, some decidedly not. The men came up as Irish nationals with no known files at Interpol or anywhere else, but the credit card they used was from an active account in Austria, and Rockman began plumbing for information about it.

“They’re going to Alitalia,” said Telach.

Lia, stuck in traffic a good distance from the airport, fumed.

“Wait—here they go over to Lufthansa,” said Rockman. “You owe me five bucks, Marie.”

“Just tell me where to go and shut up,” Lia snapped.

The taxi driver turned around.

“I wasn’t talking to you,” she told him. “I’m Joan of Arc. I hear voices. Now get me to the airport before you start hearing them, too.”

Lia arrived at the terminal ten minutes after the plane cleared the runway. She booked a seat on the next flight to Hamburg, which didn’t leave for another two hours.

She started to walk away, then came up with another idea. Lia reached into her pocketbook and pulled out her satellite phone, pretending to use it so she wouldn’t be grabbed as a bag lady.

“I can take a flight into Austria,” she told Rockman. “It boards in ten minutes.”

“Austria?”

“That’s where they’re going.”

“How do you know that?”

“The credit card.”

“I doubt it,” said Rockman.

“They probably chose Austria because of the banking laws,” explained Telach. “The records are held in strict confidence. The red tape’s incredible.”

“If I’m wrong, I can catch another plane from Vienna. It’ll be faster than waiting around here.”

“Not necessarily,” said Rockman. “By the time you change planes and—”

“I got to go,” she said, spotting a bobby at the other end of the waiting area.

The policeman walked off in the other direction without noticing her, but Lia realized there was no way in the world she could wait here for two hours. Taking a chance on Austria seemed to be a better idea than getting detained in London. So she went to the counter and bought a ticket, handing over a credit card. She was relieved to get it back—she had half-expected Rockman to kill the account on her so she couldn’t take off.

15

Lia’s run-in with MI-5 had several consequences. Not the least of these, as far as Rubens was concerned, was the need to personally brief the National Security Advisor first thing in the morning. Since it was already past 4.00 A.M., Rubens had to wait until George Hadash was awake.

Rubens gave him until 4:55, knowing from experience that Hadash’s alarm was just about to ring.

“I need to go over the biology problem,” said Rubens. Both men preferred euphemisms even though they were on a secure phone.

“William.” His name in Hadash’s mouth sounded halfway between a sigh and a lament. “You woke me up.”

“Yes.”

“This is the Kegan project?”

“Some very important tangential issues. I can tell you now or—”

“Meet me for breakfast at the White House,” said Hadash. “Six-thirty.”

Hadash’s office was located two doors down from the Oval Office, with only the room used by the President’s appointments secretary intervening. Not even this physical proximity caught the actual closeness of the President and Hadash, who as National Security Advisor ran the National Security Council (NSC) and shaped much of the administration’s foreign and military policy. The two men had worked together in various capacities for more than twenty years. Hadash’s background was split between government and academia, while the President’s had been exclusively political. Their personalities, however, couldn’t be more different. Rubens saw Hadash as something of a nervous Nellie, while the President—a naval officer in his salad days—was the sort of man who would stand calmly on the bow of a destroyer as it dodged through a minefield at flank speed.

Hadash was on the phone when Rubens came in. A tray of coffee sat atop the papers on the National Security Advisor’s desk; Hadash gestured for Rubens to sit, then poured him a cup of coffee as he continued the conversation.

To Rubens’ surprise and consternation—much more the latter—the conversation appeared to be about the Internet biometrics proposal. Even worse, Hadash seemed to think it was a good idea.

“Well, thank you, Senator, I appreciate hearing from you,” said Hadash finally. “Yes, we’ll speak later on in the week:”

Hadash hung up the phone, then rose and refilled Rubens’ cup.

“So what went wrong?” asked Hadash. The blunt greeting was completely in keeping with his usual style; he would play the distracted host one second and the impatient taskmaster the next.

“Nothing,” said Rubens. “But the situation appears considerably more complicated than we first believed.”

The opening statement was necessary to lay the background for the real purpose of his appearance—damage control for Lia’s run-in with MI-5. The overall context must be firmly established before the diplomatic incident was trotted onto the stage and shown to be the ridiculous diversion it was.

“How complicated?” asked Hadash. He sat down in his seat, his brow beginning to knit.

“Well, they’ve kidnapped our operative for one thing,” said Rubens. “Mr. Dean.”

“Kidnapped?”

“Dean is fine. I was told on the way over that he’s on a flight to Vienna from Hamburg. We’ve lost direct contact with him, but we have one of our best people on his tail. After some difficulties.”

That was meant as a cue for Hadash’s sympathies, but the National Security Advisor didn’t take the bait.

“Vienna? I thought you connected this to a Polish arms dealer.”

Radoslaw Dlugsko operated throughout the world, and there was no reason he couldn’t be in Austria. But pointing that out would do nothing to help Rubens ultimately—and besides, the fact was Vienna didn’t exactly bolster the theory that Dlugsko or UKD was involved. In truth, there was much, much work to be done.

“We’re still gathering information,” said Rubens mildly.

“The programs that Kegan was working on—were they compromised?” asked Hadash.