Bio-Strike pp-4 Read online

  She regarded him steadily.

  “No,” she said. “No trouble.”

  “Then I think I’ll go below, pack away the damn rod, an’ enjoy the boss’s luxury accommodations.”

  She nodded.

  Thibodeau bent to pick up the angling rod and then strode off across the hundred-footer’s deck, passing Nimec without a hint of acknowledgment.

  Nimec came to stand beside Megan.

  “I’ve never seen him act like that before,” he said. “You?”

  “No,” she said, watching Thibodeau climb down into the stairwell under the vessel’s flying bridge. “And we’ve been friends a lot of years.”

  “You think it was his tug-of-war with the fish that got to him, or the one with Ricci at the meeting?”

  “Maybe both. I’m not sure.” She sighed, her gaze drifting toward the vessel’s prow. “Speaking of our other global field supervisor, he appears to be in a mood of his own.”

  Nimec turned to look. His serious face visible in profile, Tom Ricci stood gazing out over the water.

  “I have to wonder if the cooperative arrangement we worked out for those two wasn’t good chemistry,” he said.

  “Almost seven months down the road seems kind of late for us to second-guess our decision. We have to make it good.” She put a hand on each of his shoulders. “Your guy,” she said, “your ball.”

  Nimec let her aim him toward Ricci and shove him off.

  Tall, lean, and dark-haired, his angular features several sharp cuts of the chisel from handsome, Ricci kept staring across the water through his sunglasses as Nimec approached.

  “The ragin’ Cajun get over losing the big one?” he said, moving not at all.

  Pete stood next to him, his arms crossed over the rail.

  “Didn’t think you were paying attention,” he said.

  Ricci remained still.

  “Old cop habits,” he said. “I pay attention to everything.”

  They were quiet. Some yards aft, Megan had settled into a deck chair, reclining it to bathe in the afternoon sun, her long legs stretched out in front of her. Ricci tilted his head slightly in her direction without seeming to take his eyes off the water.

  “Those Levi’s, for example,” he said. “They say snug jeans are out, baggies are in. Convinces me they haven’t seen snug on Megan Breen.”

  Nimec smiled a little.

  “Got you,” he said.

  They stood viewing the calm blue iridescence of the bay in silence.

  “There’s been a ban on landing giant bass since the eighties,” Ricci said after a couple of minutes. “Thibodeau would’ve had to let it swim, anyway.”

  “The payoff’s in the catching, not the keeping.”

  “Let me hear you argue that to the fishermen I knew up in Maine,” Ricci said. “Funny thing, you won’t find one of those guys who’ll ever describe the sea in terms of its beauty. For them it stands for waking up in the cold before sunrise and long hours hauling nets on damp, leaky tubs. But it’s the source of their livelihood, and there’s a different kind of appreciation for it.”

  Nimec looked over at him. “I’m not sure what you’re getting at.”

  Ricci leaned forward over the rail.

  “Me neither, exactly,” he said, shrugging. “I’m an East Coast boy, Pete. Grew up ten minutes from the Boston shipyards. I’ve always thought of the Atlantic as a workingman’s ocean. Might not be reasonable, but to me the Pacific coast is catamarans, blond surfer dudes, and blonder Baywatch girls.”

  “Ah,” Nimec said. “And you think you might be constitutionally unsuited to temperate waters, that it?”

  Ricci started to answer, hesitated, then slowly turned to face him.

  “I wasn’t looking to get into it with Thibodeau at the meeting,” he said at last.

  “Nobody said you were.”

  Ricci shook his head.

  “That’s not the point,” he said. “What anyone did or didn’t say isn’t important to me. I don’t need that kind of bullshit.”

  Nimec’s expression was reflective.

  “Agreed,” he said. “The question is how you choose to handle it.”

  Ricci stood in the breeze, his shirtsleeves flapping around his sinewy arms.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Everybody who was at the meeting… except for me… has been with Gordian for years. You’ve all got similar ideas about what Sword ought to be. You’re all used to sticking to certain operational guidelines. You developed them.”

  “Sounds to me like you’ve already decided you don’t fit,” Nimec said. “Or can’t — or won’t.”

  Ricci looked at him.

  “I’m trying to be realistic,” he said. “Come on, Pete. Tell me you don’t have your doubts after what happened today.”

  Nimec thought about it. Sword was the intelligence and security arm of his employer’s globe-spanning corporation, its title derived from a reference to the ancient legend of the Gordian knot, which had defied every attempt at unraveling its complicated twists and turns until Alexander the Great cast subtlety aside and split it apart with a definitive stroke of his blade. This illustrated Roger Gordian’s own no-nonsense attitude toward the modern day problems that might jeopardize his interests, utilizing country-specific political and economic profiles to help anticipate the vast majority of them before they became full-blown crises, and tackling the unpredictable emergencies that cropped up to endanger UpLink personnel with the most highly trained and well-equipped counterthreat force he could assemble.

  Every twelve months before the happy distractions of the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays kicked into high gear, Gordian gathered Sword’s leadership aboard his yacht for a sort of informal year-end review and freewheeling blue-sky session, an open forum at which they could examine the organization’s recent accomplishments and shortcomings, evaluate its current state of preparedness, and hopefully reach a consensus of opinion about its future direction.

  This year’s roundtable, however, had produced less in the way of common understanding than acrimonious confrontation, at least between two of its key participants.

  The session had convened before lunch amid the plush carpeting and rich mahogany furnishings of the Pomona ’s spacious main salon. Besides Nimec, Megan, Ricci, Thibodeau, and Gordian himself, it had been attended by Vince Scull, UpLink’s chief risk-assessment analyst, freshly returned from a long stint in the South Pacific, where he’d been scouting out locales for new satellite ground facilities and had very noticeably added inches to his belly roll, as well as a tiny but expert helical tattoo to the back of his right hand that, he explained, had been applied by a Malaitan tribeswoman as a lasting souvenir of their acquaintance.

  Scull had kicked things off with an endorsement of French Polynesia as a potentially excellent site for a monitoring and relay station, scarcely needing to refer to his copious notes while offering detailed facts and figures about the country’s natural and industrial resources, trade statistics, governmental structure, etc. After taking several questions about his recommendation, he had moved on to a broader overview of UpLink’s international standing.

  Given his deserved reputation for crankiness, Scull’s sanguine tone was remarkable.

  “All in all, we can knock wood,” he’d said in summation, rapping his fist twice against the tabletop. “It’s been peace and quiet since that nasty affair last spring. There hasn’t been a single territorial or ethnic flare-up anywhere we’ve committed our resources that couldn’t be defused before it got out of hand, thanks as much to our company’s pull as diplomatic massages. And lots of places that were giving me worries about their internal stability have managed to avoid the coups, genocidal bloodbaths, even your garden variety power plays that usually bite us in the ass.” He had smoothed an errant strand of hair over his increasingly bald pate. “Take Russia as a for instance. With our old drook President Starinov resigning and the nationalist opposition coming on strong again, I figured we might be looking
at payback for helping him hang onto his Kremlin office suite awhile back. But what we’re worth in jobs and cash inflow seems to have gotten us past any vendettas.”

  “And your forecast?” Gordian asked. “I’m talking about Russia and elsewhere.”

  Scull shrugged. “Nothing lasts forever, I guess, but I don’t see any major blips on my screen, bumps on the road, pick your favorite metaphor. Name a spot on the map that hosts an UpLink bureau or is linked to our satcom net, and you’ll see people with a better quality of life. And not even the most balls-on tyrant wants to be known as the Grinch who’d mess with prosperity. Goes to show free market democratization works, folks.”

  “And that the fear of political backlash is a viable substitute for conscience with most heads of state,” Megan said. She glanced at Scull. “You’ll notice, Vince, I made my point without a single mention of the lower anatomy.”

  Gordian smiled thinly.

  “I’m pleased in either case,” he said, sipping from a glass of Coke.

  More discussion had followed across a range of subjects. How was the Sword hiring drive in India going? In South Africa? Where were they in terms of testing that new firearm developed by the nonlethal weapons division? The implementation of intranet software upgrades? What about those negotiations with Poland? And the possible ramifications of the sudden death of Bolivian president-elect Alberto Colon? The tragedy of it went beyond his youth. His humanitarian values and aggressive challenge to the minicartels had promised to spark a regional trend and led to preliminary talks with UpLink about joint commercial initiatives with his country. What were the prospects for those efforts without Colón at the young administration’s helm?

  And so on and so forth. At noon they broke for a lunch of cold poached salmon with hollandaise, and capers and cucumber salad, freshly prepared in the Pomona ’s galley, brought in with decorum by a pair of adept servers, and eaten with corresponding appreciation.

  It was not by chance that they had waited until after their meal to bring up the previous spring’s sabotage of a NASA space shuttle carrying UpLink orbital technology, and Sword’s presumably connected encounters with paid terrorists in southern Brazil and Kazakhstan — the “nasty affair” to which Scull had alluded. A number of solved, and Gordian had wanted everything else on the agenda out of the way so they could devote the latter half of the meeting to them without digression.

  The empty dishes carried off, he’d turned his penetrating blue eyes toward Rollie Thibodeau.

  “Okay,” he said. “Any progress to report?”

  Thibodeau pursed his lips.

  “Some,” he said. “Got to do with Le Chaut Sauvage.”

  Nimec would later recall seeing Ricci tense with something between edginess and anger at Thibodeau’s mention of the tag he’d given the terrorists’ otherwise nameless field commander, Cajun French for “The Wildcat.” A man who had twice eluded their efforts to capture him, the second time after tearing away from Ricci during a fierce hand-to-hand struggle at the Baikonur Cosmodrome.

  “Up till a few days ago, we didn’t have anythin’ would give us a firm lead on him,” Thibodeau had continued. “Was plenty for guesswork, though, startin’ with what we knew about that American botanist in Peru got kidnapped and ransomed for seven million back in ‘97. He say the guy callin’ the shots with the narco-guerrillas who did the snatch was tall, blond, an’ light-skinned, body like a weight lifter. Ordered him returned to his family minus both eyes.”

  Gordian shook his head in horror. “Making a positive ID by the victim close to impossible, if any of his abductors were ever captured,” he said. “The cold-blooded logic certainly fits our man.”

  Thibodeau nodded. “Ain’t the worst of it, either. Word out of the Sudan was that someone with the same looks headed up mercenary extermination squads in the south, part of the country they call the triangle of death. This’d be two years ago, when the civil war heated up. Wiped out entire villages hostile to the radicals in Khartoum. Men, women, children, the old an’ sick, wasn’t no difference to him.” He scowled. “Son of a bitch ain’t just cold-blooded. Be a monster.”

  “And he gets around,” Nimec said. “Remember the Air Paris flight that was hijacked in Morocco last year? Another hostage situation, another large payoff. The Algerians who took responsibility threatened to start killing the children first and convinced the authorities it wasn’t a bluff. They were provided with a private jet as a condition of the hostage release, flew off to an unknown location, and got away clean with twenty million francs. Or mostly clean.” He leaned forward. “This one has a silver lining, Gord.”

  Gordian had waited.

  “The hijacker giving the orders never removed his stocking mask on the tarmac outside the plane. But inside with the air-conditioning down, no ventilation, it was another story,” Nimec said. “Take one guess how he was described by the passengers who saw his face when the mask came off.”

  Gordian looked at him. “Blond, light-complected.”

  “And a heavy lifter,” Nimec said, nodding. “Definitely wasn’t Algerian, spoke with an accent that might’ve been either Swiss or German.” He paused. “I prepared a brief on the incident when it happened, but because we didn’t have any involvement, it had kind of escaped my mind. Then I came across my thumbnail on the computer while reviewing data for our own investigation, and got to thinking the blond guy responsible might be the same guy we’re after. So I went back into the files and out popped the most crucial detail as far as we’re concerned. Namely, a French ambassador being held on board managed to get a photo of him when he wasn’t paying attention. He was so traumatized, it was months before he remembered the film and had it developed.”

  Gordian had raised his eyebrows.

  “Did you actually see a copy of the photo?”

  “Not then, I didn’t,” Nimec said. “But thanks to Rollie, I have.”

  Thibodeau minimized this accomplishment with a wave of his hand.

  “Couldn’t beat Pete’s source for the info, a unit commander in the Gendarmerie National crisis intervention team at the airport,” he said. “Only trouble was that he gave it off the record and uncorroborated. No GIGN official would admit there was a snapshot for a couple reasons. One, they’re supposed to be the best, and it embarrassed ‘em that the hijackers escaped. They wanted to save face, make it harder for competin’ agencies to run ’em down before they did. Two, the ambassador got scared, pulled strings to make the picture disappear. Figured the terrorists might take revenge on him or his family if it was ever used as evidence in court and they found out who took it. I was in his spot, maybe I’d feel that way, too.”

  “Tell me how you got hold of it,” Gordian said.

  Thibodeau shrugged. “The ambassador ain’t the only one has contacts. I called in an IOU with somebody in Europol, who did the same with somebody else. Like that, soit. Took a while for anything to shake. Then one morning last week, I turn on my computer, and there’s the photo attached to an encrypted E-mail. Right away I recognize our man from that airstrip in the Pantanal, but I punch up the satellite image the Hawkeye-I got of him just to be a hundred percent sure. Forwarded the pair of ‘em to Ricci, since he actually seen him up close.”

  Gordian glanced across the table at Ricci.

  “And?”

  “It’s him,” Ricci said. “No question.”

  Gordian looked thoughtful.

  “Got another thing in the works,” Thibodeau said into the momentary silence. “Might turn out to be important, gonna have to see.”

  Gordian gave him his attention. “Let’s hear it,” he said.

  “Wasn’t no small favor I used up with that friend of mine, but my whole nest egg,” Thibodeau said. “Besides wantin’ the picture, I asked to tap into Europol’s database of known terrorists. Took longer for him to swing that, but he say it could happen any day. I’m gonna run every at-large be a general match for Le Chaut Sauvage through that new Profiler system the techies been workin’
on, see if we get any hits.”

  “The software’s designed to recognize suspects hiding behind full-face masks or disguises, even ones who’ve had plastic surgery, by comparing digital file images with each other and a checklist of hard-to-alter physical characteristics,” Nimec said. “When it started to look like the Europeans might open up for Rollie, Megan and I became mildly optimistic about getting some cooperation from domestic security agencies. We’ve been trying to convince them to let us input their intelligence tech.”

  “Any luck?”

  “CIA’s my albatross,” Nimec said. “I’m still being routed through channels.”

  Gordian glanced at Megan. “What about the FBI? Have you gotten in touch with Bob Lang in D.C.?”

  She nodded. “He’s sympathetic to my request, and I seem to be making headway.” A shrug. “We’ve arranged a face-to-face meeting for early next week.”

  “Try to goose him along,” Gordian said. He jotted a notation on the yellow pad in front of him. “Meanwhile, I’ll place a call to Langley. We should stick to our game plan, at least as far as this aspect of the probe’s concerned—”

  “That isn’t close to good enough.”

  In retrospect, Nimec guessed Ricci’s interruption had surprised him less than the fact that he hadn’t spoken up much sooner. He’d been at constant odds with his colleagues over how the probe was being handled and had expressed his unhappiness to Nimec on a multitude of occasions.

  Gordian turned toward Ricci, as had Nimec and everyone else in the room.

  “What bothers you about it?” he asked in a level voice.

  “I was asked to join this team because you wanted somebody to help retool it, make it more proactive, not tinker with the status quo,” Ricci said. “That was what I heard when I got the hiring pitch, anyway. And here we are talking about putting in phone calls to the Euros and feebs.”

  Gordian regarded him steadily a moment.

  “You believe we should be doing something different,” he said.

  “A whole lot of somethings,” Ricci answered. “I think we need a special task force on the job twenty-four/ seven. I think it should have a separate command center with the capability to send rapid deployment teams after the people that hit us in Cuiabá and the Russian launch site. I think we have to be willing to dig them out from under rocks, pull them out of the trees, whatever it takes, wherever they’re laying low or being protected. They killed our people without provocation, and we’ve lost months that should have been spent running them down. We have to go on the offensive.”