Biowar (33 page)

They had the synthesized view in a window in the comer. The northeast group wasn’t on it.

Friends or foes?

One of the people who’d been with Karr earlier was missing from the synthesized screen. But there was no way to know until it was too late if he was with the other group.

It wasn’t the computer’s call anyway. It was hers.

Karr had to be protected at all costs.

“Marie?” asked Sandy.

Better to kill allies or even friendly civilians than to lose her man.

“Malachi, target the group at the northeast.”

“Got ’em. I’m locked.”

“Fire on my signal,” she said, staring at the screen.

Karr could hear the Puff/1 banking above them, undoubtedly ready to shoot.

He had to talk to them somehow.

He pulled out his handheld computer. The unit had to be plugged into his com system for instant messaging and serious downloading; at the moment it was just another handheld—albeit one on steroids.

They’d see it, though.

“Yo, Marine,” said Karr.

“What?”

“Catch,” he said, throwing the computer in the direction of the shout.

Malachi moved his thumb back and forth across the red button at the top of the thick joystick controller, waiting to fire. The target designator was locked on, the gear constantly computing the exact angle as the gunship circled overhead. He had the option of giving a verbal order but liked the old-fashioned trigger better; it was faster.

He leaned toward the screen, waiting for Telach’s order.

The group was moving toward his man.

Something flickered on the infrared feed.

“Fire,” said Telach.

But Malachi didn’t. Karr had thrown something toward the other group.

“Magnify object,” he told the computer.

Grenade?

No. Karr’s handheld computer.

“Don’t fire! Don’t fire!” yelled Telach.

“I’m with you,” Malachi said, drawing a breath and staring down at his hand, making sure it obeyed.

64

Dean looked away from the small computer screen, his eyes starting to cross with the bad light. The Art Room had downloaded information about the target they were heading toward, along with instructions on how to operate the spectrometer and other gear that had met them at the airport in Italy. The tech manual seemed to have been written in Chinese, then translated into Russian before being put into English.

Lia claimed to already know it all. Which confirmed for Dean that he’d better struggle with the instructions.

She was sitting two rows in front of him. They had different covers for the mission. He was supposedly a Canadian archaeology professor; she was a French tourist with a shadowy past linking her to arms dealers. His was by far the more dangerous cover.

Their target was a prep school favored by foreigners in the northern area near the coast of the Mediterranean, about five miles from Latakia. Dean would visit the school as a prospective parent. According to his back story, he was working on a book on hunter-gatherers, which included the Nafutfians, who’d inhabited Syria somewhere around 10,000 B.C.

How could Keys have done this? And where was he?

“Something to drink, sir? Wine perhaps?”

Dean looked up into the smile of a stewardess.

“Sure,” he said, but when he felt his stomach rumble, he changed his mind. “Maybe just some water,” he told the young woman. “Or better, coffee.”

He’d need some sort of artificial stimulation to get through all this reading material.

65

Marie Telach felt a tremor run through her body as the gunship circled south.

She’d nearly killed one of the Marines.

“God, help me,” she whispered to herself. “Thank you.”

“Marie, that helicopter we were counting on is still on the ground,” said Sandy Chafetz from her station. “They have some sort of mechanical problem.”

Telach turned to the runner, not quite comprehending. Fatigue and shock over what had nearly happened had temporarily blanked her head; she couldn’t think straight.

But she had to.

“What sort of problem are they having?” Telach asked.

“Bad oil pressure or something. I don’t know if it’s bullshit or not, but they refuse to budge. What should we do?”

“Where’s the asset we had as backup?”

“Navy helicopter. Won’t get there until nightfall. Might be safer to wait until morning, when we get the Special Forces people in. They said they’d have a Blackhawk ready to go at first light.”

Another decision she had to make. Could she trust her judgment?

“Marie?”

“I want him out of there as soon as possible,” Telach told the runner. “ASAP. Have them get in there even though it’s dark.”

“Your call.”

“Yes, it is,” she said, but it was only a whisper.

66

Gidrey had managed to find what passed for a doctor in the Burmese outback: an old woman who seemed to have been trained as a nurse or maybe as a witch doctor. She and another man in the party that had come out from the small hamlet seemed to know a few English words, including
Red Cross.
Between that and their gestures, they made it clear that Foster’s wounds had to be cleaned. Karr brought them with him to the field, where he waved his arms and made sure the Puff/1 got a good visual on him and the group so the Art Room knew these were friends. Then, drained and tired and sick, he let the others help him to the village.

With one exception, the huts were made of some sort of straw or vegetation. The lone exception was a metal shack with a Buddhist statue at the front; it served as a temple and a common building, and it was there that the Americans were brought. The old woman pulled a small piece of shrapnel from Foster’s leg, then prepared to pour liquid on it. Gidrey stopped her, taking a whiff from the bottle to see what it was.

“Smells wicked,” he told Karr. “What do you think?”

“I think if they were going to kill us they would have been a hell of a lot more direct about it,” said Karr. He shrugged. “She seems to know what she’s doing.”

Gidrey nodded. The woman poured the liquid, which had an immediate effect—the Marine practically jumped from the bed where he’d been laid.

“Nothing like ol’-fashion’ medicine,” said Karr.

A bedroll was laid out for him on the floor. He lay down, gazing at the odd mix of items near the wall—carved drinking gourds and an empty television set, its picture tube gone.

The woman bent over him and started talking in rapid-fire Burmese. Karr shook his head. She repeated what she had said, a little slower and louder. He smiled, then held up his hands. She put her hand on his forehead.

Karr put his hand over hers, gently removing it.

“Thanks. I’ll be okay,” he told her.

She pointed at his stomach.

He looked down. “You telling me to lay off the nachos?” He glanced up at Gidrey. “Man, these doctors are all alike.”

The woman disappeared for a few minutes; when she came back she had a small bottle, which she obviously wanted him to drink. When Karr didn’t take it, the woman began talking very quickly again, no doubt urging him to be a big boy and swallow it down. She reminded him of his Scandinavian grandmother, whose words were similarly indecipherable yet just as obvious.

“How much?” he asked, taking the bottle.

She put her finger on the bottle. Karr took a slug. The taste of the medicine—if that’s what it was—nearly killed him.

“Whoa,” he said. His throat constricted and his eyes watered.

There was gunfire in the distance.

“What the hell?” said Gidrey.

“Wait,” said Tommy. “That’s just the Puff, taking out the guerrillas.”

“I’d better go check.”

“Not unless I go with you. They may not know it’s you.”

“I think you ought to rest.”

Karr tried to push up from the seat, but there was no way he was moving.

“All right, listen—take my handheld computer,” Karr told Gidrey. “Keep it out where they can see it.”

“Where who can see it?”

“The Puff—the UAV gunship. Or the Kite they took over or there’s a satellite overhead or something. They’re watching us, believe me.”

“All right,” said Gidrey reluctantly.

“Make sure they can see the computer clearly. And don’t try turning it on,” added Karr. “If you do, it’ll check your thumbprint and it’ll blow itself up.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

67

Sandra Marshall lived in what passed for a modest condominium development in suburban Virginia—though anywhere else it would have seemed opulent indeed. Green marble slabs, walnut-stained wainscoting, embossed wallpaper, and two-tone paint on the walls; chandeliers and recessed lighting; cool Italian marble and elaborate oak inlays on the floor—the materials alone would have paid several government workers’ pensions for a lifetime. Rubens, who had grown up with wealth, wasn’t impressed by the setting, but he was somewhat surprised when Marshall greeted him in an apron. It wasn’t for show, either—there were some light stains, and her face was flushed from working over the stove.

“I’m glad you could come,” said Marshall, taking his arm. Her perfume wafted through the air as they walked through the corridor past the library and parlor, down toward the kitchen.

“My pleasure.”

“I thought we’d eat in the kitchen,” she said. “If that’s okay? The dining room is too formal, and it’s just the two of us. All right?”

“Of course,” said Rubens.

So she really was in love with him, he realized. He’d been trying to fight off the idea—banish the possibility—the whole way over. Perhaps he’d been trying to fight it off from the moment they first met.

Rubens ordinarily did not trust love. It made one vulnerable. Oh, far worse than that. Far, far worse.

“Cocktails first, or should we start with wine?”

“I don’t like to drink too much,” he said.

“I agree.” She went to the island in the kitchen, which stood under a collection of enough copper pots that the Treasury could tap her supply for a year if the Mint ran short of pennies. She produced a bottle of cabernet. It was Chester Valley—an inexpensive and not very well-known label that Rubens himself had come across only recently.

He dismissed this as a coincidence, though a very promising one. He sipped the wine as Marshall presented an
amusegueule,
a mini-appetizer in this case made of foie gras and caviar served with poached pheasant eggs.

From there, dinner got involved; Marshall even flamed the beef medallions with a touch of port. Rubens ate well when he ate, but rarely had he tasted a dinner like this—and surely no one had cooked one for him under such circumstances.

She
was
in love.

And he?

“What a dinner,” he said as he finished.

“I thought the meat slightly overdone,” she fretted.

That was obviously a put-on, but Rubens couldn’t ignore his cue.

“Nonsense. Perfect,” he said.

“Really?”

Her voice was sincere. The poor creature was actually insecure.

“You could open up a restaurant, I assure you,” said Rubens.

She got up, pulling the plates away.

She was in love, but he wasn’t, he decided. And his duty was to reject the Internet biometric DNA proposal.

“So. You wanted to discuss business?” he asked.

“Oh, we can put that off.”

“I really have to get back to my office,” Rubens told her.

Marshall reached behind her back for her apron. For a second Rubens thought she was going to pull off her skirt as well.

“Let’s have a little cognac in the library, shall we? It’s so much more comfortable.”

“I can’t really drink much.”

“A small glass? You only had half a glass of the wine.”

It was true, and Rubens did like cognac. He got up and went inside, even though he knew he should leave. He was torturing her, really—he had to say no.

Actually, he was torturing himself. She might not be a knockout beauty, but she was attractive. She was a good cook, much smarter and deeper than he had thought ...

Rubens slid into one of the leather club seats. Marshall presented him with a tray and two small cognac glasses.

“To Homeland Security,” he offered.

As the words escaped his mouth, he realized that if he wasn’t in love he was at least in trouble. Never in his life had he said something so lame and ridiculous.

She smiled and clinked his glass gently.

Rubens took a sip. At the first taste, he knew he had been had.

The cognac was clearly Luc Ugni, the distinctive product of a tiny chateau in the heart of the region. The bottle would have been one of 300 the tiny vintner allowed on the market each year—a fact Rubens knew because his family was allotted two.

Son of a bitch! I’m being played like a violin. What a fool I am!

“Do you like the cognac?” she asked, playing the unsure hostess again.

“Of course I do,” he said. “And I can’t support the ID proposal under any circumstances. It’s not a good idea.”

“Oh, you don’t think that’s why I invited you, do you?” She started to laugh.

Rubens did his best to smile back.

“Well, your support would be useful,” she said: “But that’s all right.”

He waited, watching her.

“On the other hand, if you decided to actually oppose it...”

She let the sentence hang there.

“I’ve already expressed my views, and will if asked,” he told her.

“As a cabinet member—”

“I’m not a cabinet member.”

“I was referring to myself,” she said. “I would be in a position to push for your elevation. You do want State, don’t you?”

Finally she had dropped all pretense. They were two animals confronting each other in the jungle, tiger and tigress. Rubens felt himself relax. This was so much easier to deal with than love.

“If I were offered the position to serve our country in that capacity, I would certainly welcome it,” he said.

“I can guarantee you’ll be offered it,” she said. “Unless you’re my enemy.”

“And I’d be the enemy if I spoke out loudly in opposition of the study?”