Biowar (32 page)

“Wow,” said Karr. “I’m dizzy as hell.”

Gidrey said something that Karr couldn’t quite decipher. He slid down against the tree, trying to focus his thoughts. His body felt as if it had been pummeled.

“I can carry Foster but not you,” said Gidrey. “Maybe you’d better rest awhile.”

“If I rest I don’t know that I’m getting back up,” said Karr. He held out his hand; Gidrey pulled him to his feet.

“I’m no doctor, but I’d say you got a monster fever.”

“Really? I feel like horseshit.”

“You shoulda taken a flu shot, man. Flu shots keep that crap from happening.”

“Yeah, next time.” Karr exhaled as slowly as he could, trying to force his body into concentrating. The tiny hamlet he’d pointed them toward lay down the slope at about three o’clock, roughly two miles off. He thought of sending Gidrey there by himself but decided that wasn’t the best solution ; the Art Room would be tracking him, not the Marine.

“All right, let’s go,” said Karr. “We got to get to that field near the village before nightfall.”

“Christ, it better not take us that long,” said Gidrey.

“At this point, if we get there this year I’ll be happy,” said Karr. He tried to smile but couldn’t quite pull it off.

60

Johnny Bib stared at the Escher print in Dr. Kegan’s kitchen, trying to work out the topographical solution to the visual puzzle. Two spheres seemed to exist within each other, but the mathematician knew this was just a metaphor for the formula that allowed a five-dimensional space to be conjured into a three-dimensional object.

Unless it was supposed to be a two-holed doughnut in four dimensions. In that case, it would be a clever reference to the Poincaré Conjecture.

Or was the artist simply depicting a doughnut and a sphere coexisting: a metaphor for the universe stated in its two essential shapes?

The secure sat phone rang as Johnny debated the point.

“Johnny Bibleria.”

“Yes, Johnny, I was hoping it would be you.”

Johnny sensed that Rubens was being satirical, but he wasn’t quite sure.

“Are you familiar with Escher?” Johnny asked him.

“Of course. Listen, Johnny, I need you to come back to Fort Meade and help out your team. We’ve been trying to link the man found there with UKD and we’re having a devil of a time. It was hard enough linking the Greek that met Charlie Dean with them, but this man. I need more information on the Dulugsko group—”

“Dlugsko,”
said Johnny, correcting Rubens’ pronunciation. “It’s Polish.”

“Since you’re not coming up with anything further there,” said Rubens, “I’d like you to get back. I have a helicopter en route.”

“I was just examining this Escher print,” said Johnny. “I realize it’s a metaphor.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Poincaré.”

Poincaré was a famous mathematician who had posed a simple—or seemingly simple—question about spheres. No one had been able to prove that his guess about the answer was right. It remained one of math’s great problems—but Rubens couldn’t imagine what its relevance was here. “What the hell are you getting at?”

“Two essential shapes, sphere and doughnut. They don’t go into each other.”

“I don’t need a lesson on topology, for christsakes.”

“Unrelated. Is that the metaphor? Yet they coexist.”

Baffled, Rubens said nothing.

“Was the man meant to poison him? But then it couldn’t have been our Polish friend, since he wanted something,” said Johnny, gazing at the print.

“I’m going to send a helicopter, Johnny. I want you back here.”

“A helicopter? I don’t want to fly.”

“You must. There is no other option.”

Johnny Bib closed his eyes. There was no arguing with Rubens when he spoke in that sort of tone..

“Okay,” said Johnny Bib. “But...”

“But what?”

“Would anyone mind if I brought the Escher print?”

“Take the whole wall if you have to. Just get down here.”

61

It took two hours to walk the two miles to the village but seemed considerably longer to Karr. The pain in his body surged and then dropped off, only to surge again. His fever likewise seemed to wax and wane, occasionally replaced by violent chills. He started shaking uncontrollably as they reached the edge of the field.

“Gotta rest,” he told Gidrey. He went to sit and sprawled on the ground.

“You okay?”

“I’m real thirsty.”

“I’ll be back,” said the Marine. “Give me your gun.”

“Uh-huh.”

Karr closed his eyes, resting his head in the thick weeds. Warmth seemed to wrap itself over his face, a blanket covering his body.

His mind drifted; he thought he heard Lia calling to him.

“Hey, princess, what the hell are you doing?”

“Looking for you, asshole.”

“That’s sweet.”

“You’re dying, Tommy Karr.”

“Screw that,” said Karr, the wave of heat once more rushing up from his chest. “Just taking a nap.”

62

“They’re in a small village about seventy kilometers from the border,” said Sandy Chafetz. “One group of guerrillas seems to be following their trail, but it’s not clear.”

Rubens pressed his arms together in front of his chest. “Let’s get them out of there,” said Rubens.

Chafetz looked up at Telach, who was leaning against the runner’s consoles. The Art Room supervisor looked spent, as tired as Rubens had ever seen her.

“I’m working on it, chief,” said Telach. “The Army has all the resources over in the other end of the country.”

“What other resources are available?” asked Rubens, knowing the inevitable answer.

“CIA has some contract people. But I have to talk to Deputy Director Collins.”

The one thing that Rubens hated more than having to draw on CIA assets was having to go through Collins to get them. Collins, who headed the Operations Directorate, had been in the running to head Deep Black and still felt she should have had the job—and that the organization should have been part of the CIA.

“Boss?”

“Yes, of course, go ahead.”

“I have the Puff/1 en route. It’ll keep an eye on them until we can get in there.”

“How long?”

“Few hours maybe. I’ll know soon.”

“It’ll be nightfall.”

Telach pursed her lips.

“Why isn’t his radio working anyway?” Rubens asked.

“Most likely the battery died. The charge isn’t indefinite and he didn’t have a place to recharge in camp. Obviously, we’ll have to look into it.”

“Oh, very well,” said Rubens. “I have to go upstairs. Keep me informed.”

“Yes, boss.”

Rubens ignored her tone and left the Art Room, passing through the elaborate security chamber and the manned checkpoints to return to his office. While Desk Three operations tended to consume a major portion of his time, Rubens had a large number of other responsibilities as the number-two man in the agency. Nearly two dozen phone messages and twice as many E-mails were waiting for him on the secure systems. Several had to do with meetings he’d had to blow off and there were a fair number of useless updates on projects that were going nowhere, but nonetheless it took time to wade through them all.

One of Rubens’ administrative assistants, meanwhile, had organized a queue of reports in his secure computer system—urgent, more urgent, and ridiculously urgent. Rubens was just starting to take a look at the items in the last category when his outside phone buzzed. He picked it up and heard Sandra Marshall tell him things had gone well with the media.

“A home run,” she said.

“That’s very good,” said Rubens.

“Are you going to make the working group meeting in the morning?”

“It looks tight,” he answered. He’d already decided he’d rather try getting some sleep downstairs than sit through the session, but he was suddenly feeling as if he didn’t want to disappoint her.

“We are going to be preparing a final report on the Internet DNA,” she said. “Are you still opposed?”

It truly did pain him to have to disagree. This was, of course, uncharacteristic. Rubens examined the emotion—partly it was because, politically, it was never a good idea to step on someone’s pet project, which this obviously had become. But partly—
good God
—he was having actual feelings for her.

A very dangerous area.

Why should he oppose the report? The President liked the idea; it would be floated out to Congress whatever William Rubens said. All the committee wanted to do was authorize a study, after all. Why draw a line in the sand on something that surely would die eventually on its own?

Because it was the right thing to do?

“I was thinking maybe we would have dinner,” she suggested. “And I could explain my position.”

Rubens started to object.

“I had in mind my place later this evening, if that is convenient,” said Marshall. Her tone was formal, but then she added, in a voice that seemed to come from someone else, “Please?”

A strange weakness came over him. Fatigue? Misplaced lust or, worse, sympathy? Interest?

“What time should I be there?” he asked.

63

The path toward Tommy Karr’s locator took Puff/1 over the helicopter wreckage, and Malachi slowed momentarily to let the sensors get a good look at the site. It took all of twenty seconds, but it threw off the ReVeeOp’s rhythm; the slow aircraft just couldn’t synch with G*ng*f*x. He started flipping through his Mp3 index to find a better beat, heading down toward the golden oldie section before settling on Beck.

The helicopter seemed to have been taken down by a shot on the rear engine area; that argued for a heat-seeking missile. Several bodies lay near the wreckage. The guerrillas had split into two groups. One continued to harass what was left of the Thai Army unit moving in the direction of the border. The other, about a dozen men, shadowed toward Karr’s locator.

“We got what we need,” said Telach from the Art Room.

“Yeah, roger that,” said Malachi, pushing his speed control back up to max, such as it was. The robot airplane had a tendency to nose down slightly as the engines revved, but he was 12,000 feet above ground level and had plenty of room to deal with it. Careful not to overcorrect—the drone would gallop up and down like a roller coaster if he did—Malachi pushed his joystick to the right, nudging the remote aircraft into an arc aimed at giving him a good position between the guerrillas and the NSA op.

“Satellite has those guerrillas getting close,” warned Sandy Chafetz, Karr’s runner. “I’m losing sat coverage in about ninety seconds.”

“Roger that. I’m still about zero-three minutes from the area,” said Malachi. “If I can find my rhythm.”

“You’d better find it,” snapped Telach. The Art Room supervisor was edgier than normal, not a good sign.

A blue dagger marked out Tommy Karr’s position near an open area beyond a small hill. Malachi started to swing south of it, toward the red dots that the computer had used to mark the guerrillas’ position as they followed.

The marked positions were actually about 205 seconds behind real time. That was the overhead imposed by the system as it transposed data from one set of sensors to another, integrating the satellite information with the other inputs, in this case primarily the robot aircraft. A three-and-a-half-minute gap didn’t seem like much, but a well-conditioned runner could cover more than a half-mile in that time, and even an armed soldier in rough terrain could move a quarter-mile without breaking much of a sweat. For that reason, Malachi would rely on Puff’s native sensors as his primary indicators once he was inside the target area.

The ReVeeOp pushed Puff/1 through some unexpected turbulence as he continued on course. There was some speculation among the jocks at Space Command—the Air Force unit that controlled some of Deep Black’s remote aircraft—that the next generation of remote gunships would be designed to stay airborne for twelve to eighteen hours and that there would be enough of them to provide global coverage twenty-four/seven. The idea wasn’t necessarily popular, however—blanket coverage on that order would require even more automation than currently employed, which meant computers, not ReVeeOps, would be controlling most of the flights.

Malachi had a better solution—space vessels with rail-guns, fueled by plasma gases heated in reentry. That looked to be ten years down the road, at least.

He’d be in his thirties. Ready to hang it up.

Wow.

“Got some action coming out of that village toward our guy,” Malachi told Sandy, going over to Puff’s sensors. “Uh, three, four people. One of ’em with a gun.”

“Yeah, we’re looking at it,” said Sandy.

“You want me to stay on them or check out the guerrillas?”

“Line up a shot,” said Telach. “I don’t want to take any chances.”

“May be one of the people who were with Karr earlier,” suggested Chafetz.

“You sure?” asked Malachi.

“Just line up the shot,” said Telach. “We’ll make the call.”

Karr heard someone calling to him. He thought the voice was coming from the Art Room; he snapped up, put his hand to his ear.

No, it was outside, a real voice—back from the village.

His Marine.

Karr heard something else, the light fanlike noise of a robot gunship. The Art Room had obviously tracked him here.

They wouldn’t know Gidrey was on his side.

“Gidrey!” he yelled. He pushed himself to his feet. Blood flew from his brain and he felt himself tremble.

“Karr!”

“Stay where you are,” said Karr.

“What?”

“Stay there.”

“I got some help.”

Karr took a few steps toward Gidrey, his balance precarious. How the hell could he tell them Gidrey was on his side? With his radio out, there was no way to communicate with them.

Of course there was. He knew there was. He just couldn’t remember it.

Marie Telach stared at the large screen at the front of the Art Room showing the radar image from the belly of Puff/1. Karr was between two groups of people. The one to the south was almost definitely a guerrilla force; they were now about a half-mile away. To the immediate northeast, less than a hundred yards from him, was a second group. The vegetation made it impossible to use the optical camera to see them.