Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan Books 7-12 (381 page)

“It’s about Rainbow. That was some operation they ran in Spain last night.”

“Are you in on that?” Ed asked.

“How else would I know the name, Ed? I know one of your people set it up. Can’t remember the name, the guy the President likes so much.”

“Yeah, John Clark. He was my training officer once, long time ago. Solid citizen. He’s been there and done that even more than Mary Pat and I have. Anyway, what’s your interest?”

“The new tactical-radio encryption systems NSA is playing with. Do they have it yet?”

“I don’t know,” the DCI admitted. “Are they ready for prime time yet?”

“Should be in another month. E-Systems will be the manufacturer, and I thought they ought to be fast-tracked into Rainbow. I mean, they’re out there at the sharp end. They ought to get it first.”

On the other end of the line, the Director of Central Intelligence reminded himself that he should pay more attention to the work done at the National Security Agency. He’d allowed himself to forget, moreover, that Brightling had the “black card” clearance that admitted her into that Holy of Holies at Fort Meade.

“Not a bad idea. Who do I talk to about that?”

“Admiral McConnell, I suppose. It’s his agency. Anyway, just a friendly suggestion. If this Rainbow team is so hot, they ought to have the best toys.”

“Okay, I’ll look into it. Thanks, Carol.”

“Anytime, Ed, and maybe get me fully briefed into the program someday, eh?”

“Yeah, I can do that. I can send a guy down to get you the information you need.”

“Okay, whenever it’s convenient. See you.”

“Bye, Carol.” The secure line was broken. Carol smiled at the phone. Ed would never question her about the issue, would he? She’d known the name, said nice things about the team, and offered to help, just like a loyal bureaucrat should. And she even had the name of the team leader now. John Clark. Ed’s own training officer, once upon a time. It was so easy to get the information you needed if you spoke the right language. Well, that’s why she’d gone after this job, frustrations and all.

One of his people did the math and estimated the travel times, and the answer came up England, just as he’d suspected. The triangle of time for both Bern and Vienna both apexed at London, or somewhere close to it. That made sense, Henriksen told himself. British Airways went everywhere, and it had always had a cordial relationship with the British government. So, whoever it was, the group had to be based . . . Hereford, almost certainly there. It was probably multinational . . . that would make it more politically acceptable to other countries. So, it would be American and British, maybe other nationalities as well, with access to American hardware like that Sikorsky helicopter. Gus Werner knew about it—might it have some FBI people in the team? Probably, Henriksen thought. The Hostage Rescue Team was essentially a police organization, but since its mission was counterterrorism, it practiced and played with other such organizations around the world, even though those were mainly military. The mission was pretty much the same, and therefore the people on the mission were fairly interchangeable—and the FBI HRT members were as good as anyone else in the world. So probably, someone from HRT, perhaps even someone he knew, was on the team. It would have been useful to find out who, but for now, that was too much of a stretch.

The important thing at the moment was that this national counterterror outfit was a potential danger. What if they deployed to Melbourne? Would that hurt anything? It surely wouldn’t help, especially if there was an FBI agent on the team. He’d spent fifteen years in the Bureau, and Henriksen was under no illusions about those men and women. They had eyes that could see and brains that could think, and they looked into everything. And so, his strategy to raise the world’s consciousness of the terrorist threat, and so help himself get the Melbourne job, might have gone an unplanned step further. Damn. But the Law of Unintended Consequences could hit anyone, couldn’t it? That’s why he was in the loop, because it was his job to deal with the unintended things. And so here he was, still in the intelligence-gathering mode. He needed to learn more. The really bad news was that he had to fly off to Australia in less than a day, and would himself be unable to do any more gathering. Well. He’d have dinner tonight with his boss to pass along what he knew, and maybe that ex-KGB guy on the payroll could take it a little further. Damned sure he’d performed pretty well to this point. A pipe smoker. It never ceased to amaze Henriksen how such little things could break open a case. You just had to keep your head up and eyes open.

“The Interleukin isn’t doing anything,” John Killgore said, looking away from the monitor. The screen of the electron microscope was clear. The Shiva strands were reproducing merrily away, devouring healthy tissue in the process.

“So?” Dr. Archer asked.

“So, that’s the only treatment option I was worried about: -3a is an exciting new development, but Shiva just laughs at it and moves on. This is one scary little mother of a bug, Barb.”

“And the subjects?”

“I was just in there. Pete’s a goner, so are the rest. The Shiva’s eating them up. They all have major internal bleeds, and nothing is stopping the tissue breakdown. I’ve tried everything in the book. These poor bastards wouldn’t be getting better treatment at Hopkins, Harvard, or the Mayo Clinic, and they’re all going to die. Now,” he allowed, “there will be some whose immune systems can deal with it, but that’s going to be pretty damned rare.”

“How rare?” she asked the epidemiologist.

“Less than one in a thousand, probably, maybe one in ten thousand. Even the pneumonic variant of plague doesn’t kill everybody,” he reminded her. That was about the most lethal disease on the planet, and allowed only one in ten thousand to survive. Some people, she knew, had immune systems that killed everything that didn’t belong. Those were the ones who lived to a hundred years of age or so. It had nothing to do with smoking, not smoking, having a drink in the morning, or any of the other rubbish they published in the papers as the secret of living forever. It was all in the genes. Some were better than others. It was that simple.

“Well, that’s not really something to worry about, is it?”

“World population is between five and six billion now. That’s a little more than five times ten to the ninth people, subtract four orders from that and you have something on the order of five times ten to the fifth survivors. Figure a few hundred thousand who might not like us very much.”

“Spread all over the world,” Barbara told him. “Not organized, needing leadership and scientific knowledge to help them survive. How will they even connect? The only eight hundred people surviving in New York? And what about the diseases that come with all those deaths? The best immune system in the world can’t protect you against them.”

“True,” Killgore conceded. Then he smiled. “We’re even improving the breed, aren’t we?”

Dr. Archer saw the humor of that. “Yes, John, we are. So, Vaccine-B is ready?”

He nodded. “Yes, I had my injection a few hours ago. Ready for yours?”

“And -A?”

“In the freezer, ready for mass production as soon as people need it. We’ll be able to turn it out in thousand-liter lots per week when we have to. Enough to cover the planet,” he told her. “Steve Berg and I worked that out yesterday.”

“Can anybody else—”

“No way. Not even Merck can move that fast—and even if they did, they’d have to use our formula, wouldn’t they?”

That was the ultimate hook. If the plan to spread Shiva around the globe didn’t work as well as hoped, then the entire world would be given Vaccine-A, which Antigen Laboratories, a division of The Horizon Corp., just happened to be working on as part of its corporate effort to help the Third World, where all the hemorrhagic fevers lived. A fortunate accident, albeit one already known in the medical literature. Both John Killgore and Steve Berg had published papers on these diseases, which had been made quite high-profile by the big scare America and the world had gone through not so long before. So, the medical world knew that Horizon/Antigen was working in this area, and wouldn’t be surprised to learn that there was a vaccine in the works. They’d even test the vaccines in laboratories and find that, sure enough, the liquid had all manner of antibodies. But they’d be the wrong antibodies, and the live-virus vaccine would be a death sentence to anyone who had it enter his system. The time from injection to onset of frank symptoms was programmed at four to six weeks, and, again, the only survivors would be those lucky souls from the deepest end of the gene pool. One hundred such people out of a million would survive. Maybe less. Ebola-Shiva was one nasty little bastard of a bug, three years in the making, and how odd, Killgore thought, that it had been
that
easy to construct. Well, that was science for you. Gene manipulation was a new field, and those things were unpredictable. The sad part, maybe, was that the same people in the same lab were charging along a new and unexpected path—human longevity— and reportedly making real progress. Well, so much the better. An extended life to appreciate the new world that Shiva would bring about.

And the breakthroughs wouldn’t stop. Many on the select list to receive Vaccine-B were scientists. Some of them wouldn’t like the news, when they were told, but they’d have little choice, and being scientists, they’d soon get back to their work.

Not everyone in the Project approved. Some of the radical ones actually said that bringing physicians along was contrary to the nature of the mission—because medicine didn’t allow nature to take her course. Sure, Killgore snorted to himself. Fine, they’d let those idiots have their babies in farm fields after a morning’s plowing or hunter-gathering, and soon enough those ideologues would breed themselves out. He planned to study and enjoy nature, but he’d do so wearing shoes and a jacket to keep the chill out. He planned to remain an educated man, not revert to the naked ape. His mind wandered. . . . There’d be a division of labor, of course. Farmers to grow the food and tend the cattle they’d eat—or hunters to shoot the buffalo, whose meat was healthier, lower in cholesterol. The buffalo should come back pretty fast, he thought. Wheat would continue to grow wild in the Great Plains, and they’d grow fat and healthy, especially since their predators had been so ruthlessly hunted down that they’d be slower to catch up. Domestic cattle would thrive also, but they’d ultimately be edged out by the buffalo, a much hardier breed better suited to free life. Killgore wanted to see that, see the vast herds that had once covered the West. He wanted to see Africa, too.

That meant that the Project needed airplanes and pilots. Horizon already had its own collection of G-V business jets, capable of spanning most of the world, and so they’d also need small teams of people to manage and maintain a few airports—Zambia, for instance. He wanted to see Africa wild and free. That would take perhaps ten years to come about, Killgore estimated, and it wasn’t all that big a deal. AIDS was killing off that continent at a nasty pace, and Shiva would only make it go faster, and so the Dark Continent would again be free of man, and he’d be able to go there and observe nature in all her glory . . . and maybe shoot a lion to make a rug for his home in Kansas? Some of the people in the Project would raise pure fucking hell over that, but what was one lion more or less? The Project would be saving hundreds of thousands of them, perhaps millions, free to roam and hunt in their prides. What a beautiful New World it would be, once you eliminated the parasitic species that was working so hard to destroy it.

A beeper went off. He turned to look at the control panel. “It’s Ernie, M5—looks like cardiac arrest,” he said.

“What are you going to do?” Barbara Archer asked.

Killgore stood. “Make sure he’s dead.” He bent down to select a camera for the big monitor on his desk. “Here, you can watch.”

Two minutes later, he appeared on the screen. An orderly was already there, but did little more than watch. She saw Killgore check the man’s pulse, then check his eyes. Despite having the -B vaccine, Killgore used gloves and a mask. Well, that made sense. Then he stood back up and switched off the monitoring equipment. The orderly detached the IV lines and covered the body with a sheet. Killgore pointed to the door, and soon the orderly wheeled the gurney out, heading off for the incinerator. Killgore took the time to look at other subjects, and even appeared to speak with one before leaving the screen for good.

“I figured that,” he said, returning to the control room without his protective gear. “Ernie’s heart wasn’t all that good, and Shiva went right after it. Wendell’s going to be next, M2. Maybe tomorrow morning. Liver function’s off the chart, and he’s bleeding out big-time in the upper GI.”

“What about the control group?”

“Mary, F4, two more days she’s going to be in frank symptoms.”

“So the delivery system works?” Archer asked.

“Like a charm.” Killgore nodded, getting some coffee before he sat back down. “It’s all going to work, Barb, and the computer projections look better than our requirement parameters. Six months from initiation, the world is going to be a very different place,” he promised her.

“I still worry about those six months, John. If anybody figures out what’s happened—their last conscious act will be to try and kill us all.”

“That’s why we have guns, Barb.”

“It’s called ‘Rainbow,’ ” he told them, having gotten the best information of the day. “It’s based in England. It was set up by a CIA guy named John Clark, and he’s evidently the boss of the outfit.”

“That makes sense,” said Henriksen. “Multinational, right?”

“I think so,” John Brightling confirmed.

“Yes,” Dmitriy Popov said, picking at his Caesar salad. “That is all sensible, some sort of NATO unit, I imagine, based at Hereford?”

“Correct,” said Henriksen. “By the way, nice job figuring out who they were.”