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  “I am not permitted to say.” Which was the obvious reply. It could mean anything, but in the context of their former organization, it meant that Popov was still a player of some sort. What sort, Kirilenko didn’t know, though he’d heard that Dmitriy Arkadeyevich had been RIF’d from the organization. That had been a surprise to him. Popov still enjoyed an excellent service reputation as a field spook. “I am living between worlds now, Vanya. I work for a commercial business, but I perform other duties as well,” he allowed. The truth was so often a useful tool, in the service of lies.

  “You did not appear here by accident,” Kirilenko pointed out.

  “True. I hoped to see a colleague here.” The pub was too close to the Embassy on Palace Green, Kensington, for serious work, but it was a comfortable place, for casual meets, and besides, Kirilenko believed his status as rezident to be entirely secret. Showing up in a place like this enhanced that. No real spook, everybody knew, would take the chance. “I need some help with something.”

  “What might that be?” the intelligence officer asked, over a sip of bitter.

  “A report on a CIA officer who is probably known to us.”

  “The name?”

  “John Clark.”

  “Why?”

  “He is now, I believe, the leader of a black operation based here in England. I would like to offer the information I have on the man in return for whatever information you might have. I can perhaps add a few things to that dossier. I believe my information will be of interest,” Popov concluded mildly. In context, it was a large promise.

  “John Clark,” Kirilenko repeated. “I will see what I can do for you. You have my number?”

  Popov slipped a piece of paper on the bar unseen. “Here is my number. No. Do you have a card?”

  “Certainly.” The Russian pocketed the scrap of paper and pulled out his wallet and handed the card over. I. P. Kirilenko, it said, Third Secretary, Russian Embassy, London. 0181-946-0001, with -9009 as the fax number. Popov pocketed the card. “Well, I must get back. Good to see you, Dmitriy.” The rezident set his glass down and walked out onto the street.

  “Get the picture?” one “Five” man said to the other on the way out the door, about forty seconds behind their surveillance target.

  “Well, not good enough for the National Portrait Gallery, but . . .” The problem with covert cameras was that the lenses were too small to make a really good photo. They were usually good enough for identification purposes, however, and he’d gotten eleven exposures, which, combined with computer-enhancement, should be entirely adequate. Kirilenko, they knew, thought his cover to be adequate. He didn’t and couldn’t know that “Five,” once called MI-5, and now officially called the Security Service, had its own source inside the Russian Embassy. The Great Game was still ongoing in London and elsewhere, new world order or not. They hadn’t caught Kirilenko in a compromising act yet, but he was the rezident, after all, and therefore not given to such action. But you tracked such people anyway, because you knew who they were, and sooner or later, you got something on them, or from them. Like the chap he’d just had a beer with. Not a regular for this pub—they knew who they were. No name. Just some photos that would be compared with the library of photos at “Five’s” new headquarters building, Thames House, right on the river near Lambeth Bridge.

  Popov stepped outside, turned left, and walked past Kensington Palace to catch a cab to the train station. Now, if only Kirilenko could get him something of use. He should be able to. He’d offered something juicy in return.

  CHAPTER 19

  SEARCHING

  Three of the winos died that day, all from internal bleeds in the upper GI. Killgore went down to check them. Two had died in the same hour, the third five hours later, and the morphine had helped them expire either unconscious or in a painless, merciful stupor. That left five out of the original ten, and none of them would see the end of the week. Shiva was every bit as deadly as they’d hoped, and, it would seem, just as communicable as Maggie had promised. Finally, the delivery system worked. That was proven by Mary Bannister, Subject F4, who’d just moved into the treatment center with the onset of frank symptoms. So, the Shiva Project was fully successful to this point. Everything was nominal to the test parameters and the experimental predictions.

  “How bad is the pain?” he asked his doomed patient.

  “Cramping, pretty bad,” she replied. “Like flu, plus something else.”

  “Well, you do have a moderate fever. Any idea where you may have caught it? I mean, there is a new strain of flu out of Hong Kong, and looks like you have it.”

  “Maybe at work . . . before I came here. Can’t remember. I’m going to be okay, right?” The concern had fought its way through the Valium-impregnated food she got every day.

  “I think so.” Killgore smiled around his surgical mask. “This one can be dangerous, but only to infants and the elderly, and you’re not either one of those, are you?”

  “I guess not.” She smiled, too, at the reassurance from the physician, which was always comforting.

  “Okay, what we’re going to do is get an IV started to keep you properly hydrated. And we’ll work on the discomfort a little with a little morphine drip, okay?”

  “You’re the doctor,” Subject F4 replied.

  “Okay, hold your arm still. I have to make a stick, and it will hurt a little bit . . . there,” he said, on doing it. “How was that?”

  “Not too bad.”

  “Okay.” Killgore punched in the activation number on the Christmas tree. The morphine drip started instantly. About ten seconds later, it got into the patient’s bloodstream.

  “Ohhhh, oh yes,” she said, eyes closed when the initial rush of the drug hit her system. Killgore had never experienced it himself, but he imagined it to be almost a sexual feeling, the way the narcotic soothed her entire body. The tension in her musculature all went away at once. You could see the body relax. Her mouth changed most of all, from tension to the slackness of sleep. It was too bad, really. F4 wasn’t exactly beautiful, but she was pretty in her way, and judging from what he’d watched on the control-room TV monitor, she was a sexual treat for her partners, even though that had been caused by the tranquilizers. But, good lay or not, she would be dead in five to seven days, despite the best efforts he and his people would render. On the tree was a small drip-bottle of Interleukin- 3a, recently developed by SmithKline’s excellent collection of research scientists for cancer treatment—it had also shown some promise in countering viruses, which was unique in the world of medicine. Somehow it encouraged the body’s immune system, though through a mechanism that was not yet understood. It would be the most likely treatment for Shiva victims once the disease became widespread, and he had to confirm that it wouldn’t work. That had been the case with the winos, but they also needed to test it in fundamentally healthy patients, male and female, just to make sure. Too bad for her, he thought, since she had a face and a name to go along with her number. It would also be too bad for millions—actually billions—of others. But it would be easier with them. He might see their faces on TV, but TV wasn’t real, was it? Just dots on a phosphor screen.

  The idea was simple enough. A rat was a pig was a dog, was a boy—woman in this case. All had an equal right to life. They’d done extensive testing of Shiva on monkeys, for whom it had proved universally lethal, and he’d watched all those tests, and shared the pain of the sub-sentient animals who felt pain as real as what F4 felt, though in the case of the monkeys morphine hadn’t been possible, and he’d hated that—hated inflicting pain on innocent creatures with whom he could not talk and to whom he could not explain things. And though it was justifiable in the big-picture sense—they would be saving millions, billions of animals from the depredations of humans—to see an animal suffer was a lot for him and his colleagues to bear, for they all empathized with all creatures great and small, and more for the small, the innocent, and the helpless than for the larger two-legged creatures wh
o cared not a whim about them. As F4 probably did not, though they’d never asked. Why confuse the issue, after all? He looked down again. F4 was already stuporous from the narcotic he’d administered. At least she, unlike the experimental monkeys, was not in pain. That was merciful of them, wasn’t it?

  “What black operation is that?” the desk officer asked over the secure phone link.

  “I have no idea, but he is a serious man, remember? A colonel of the Innostrannoye Upravleniye, you will recall, Division Four, Directorate S.”

  “Ah, yes, I know him. He spent much time at Fensterwalde and Karlovy Vary. He was RIF’d along with all those people. What is he doing now?”

  “I do not know, but he offers us information on this Clark in return for some of our data. I recommend that we make the trade, Vasily Borissovich.”

  “Clark is a name known to us. He has met personally with Sergey Nikolay’ch,” the desk officer told the rezident. “He’s a senior field officer, principally a paramilitary type, but also an instructor at the CIA Academy in Virginia. He is known to be close to Mary Patricia Foleyeva and her husband. It is also said that he has the ear of the American President. Yes, I think we would be interested in his current activities.”

  The phone they spoke over was the Russian version of the American STU-3, the technology having been stolen about three years before by a team working for Directorate T of the First Chief Directorate. The internal microchips, which had been slavishly copied, scrambled the incoming and outgoing signals with a 128-bit encryption system whose key changed every hour, and changed further with the individual users whose personal codes were part of the insertable plastic keys they used. The STU system had defied the Russians’ best efforts to crack it, even with exact knowledge of the internal workings of the system hardware, and they assumed that the Americans had the same problems—after all, for centuries Russia had produced the world’s best mathematicians, and the best of them hadn’t even come up with a theoretical model for cracking the scrambling system.

  But the Americans had, with the revolutionary application of quantum theory to communications security, a decryption system so complex that only a handful of the “Directorate Z” people at the National Security Agency actually understood it. But they didn’t have to. They had the world’s most powerful supercomputers to do the real work. These were located in the basement of the sprawling NSA headquarters building, a dungeonlike area whose roof was held up with naked steel I-beams because it had been excavated for just this purpose. The star machine there was one made by a company gone bankrupt, the Super-Connector from Thinking Machines, Inc., of Cam-bridge, Massachusetts. The machine, custom-built for NSA, had sat largely unused for six years, because nobody had come up with a way to program it efficiently, but the advent of quantum theory had changed that, too, and the monster machine was now cranking merrily away while its operators wondered who they could find to make the next generation of this complex machine.

  All manner of signals came into Fort Meade, from all over the world, and one such source included GCHQ, Britain’s General Communications Headquarters at Cheltenham, NSA’s sister service in England. The British knew what phones were whose in the Russian Embassy—they hadn’t changed the numbers, even with the demise of the USSR—and this one was on the desk of the rezident. The sound quality wasn’t good enough for a voice-print, since the Russian version of the STU system digitized signals less efficiently than the American version, but once the encryption was defeated, the words were easily recognizable. The decrypted signal was cross-loaded to yet another computer, which translated the Russian conversation to English with a fair degree of reliability. Since the signal was from the London rezident to Moscow, it was placed on the top of the electronic pile, and cracked, translated, and printed less than an hour after it had been made. That done, it was transmitted to Cheltenham immediately, and at Fort Meade routed to a signals officer whose job it was to send intercepts to the people interested in the content. In this case, it was routed straight to the Director of Central Intelligence and, because it evidently discussed the identity of a field spook, to the Deputy Director (Operations), since all the field spooks worked for her. The former was a busier person than the latter, but that didn’t matter, since the latter was married to the former.

  “Ed?” his wife’s voice said.

  “Yeah, honey?” Foley replied.

  “Somebody’s trying to ID John Clark over in U.K.”

  Ed Foley’s eyes went fully open at that news. “Really? Who?”

  “The station chief in London talked with his desk officer in Moscow, and we intercepted it. The message ought to be in your IN pile, Eddie.”

  “Okay.” Foley lifted the pile and leafed through it. “Got it. Hmmm,” he said over the phone. “The guy who wants the information, Dmitriy Arkadeyevich Popov, former Colonel in—a terrorism guy, eh? I thought they were all RIF’d . . . Okay, they were, at least he was.”

  “Yeah, Eddie, a terrorism guy is interested in Rainbow Six. Isn’t that interesting?”

  “I’d say so. Get this out to John?”

  “Bet your sweet little tushie,” the DO replied at once.

  “Anything on Popov?”

  “I ran the name through the computer. Zip,” his wife responded. “I’m starting a new file on the name. Maybe the Brits have something.”

  “Want me to call Basil about it?” the DCI asked.

  “Let’s see what we develop first. Get the fax off to John right away, though.”

  “It’ll go out soon as I get the cover note done,” Mary Pat Foley promised.

  “Hockey game tonight.” The Washington Capitals were closing in on the playoffs, and tonight was a grudge match with the Flyers.

  “I haven’t forgotten. Later, honey-bunny.”

  “Bill,” John said over the office phone forty minutes later. “You want to come into my office?”

  “On the way, John.” He walked through the door in about two minutes. “What’s the news?”

  “Check this out, pal.” Clark handed over the four pages of transcript.

  “Bloody hell,” the intelligence officer said, as soon as he got to page two. “Popov, Dmitriy Arkadeyevich. Doesn’t ring a bell—oh, I see, they don’t know the name at Langley either. Well, one cannot know them all. Call Century House about it?”

  “I think we cross-index our files with yours, but it can’t hurt. It would appear that Ding was right on this one. How much you want to bet that this is our guy? Who’s your best friend in the Security Service?”

  “Cyril Holt,” Tawney said at once. “Deputy Director. I’ve known Cyril back to Rugby. He was a year behind me there. Outstanding chap.” He didn’t have to explain to Clark that old school ties were still a major part of British culture.

  “Want to get him into this?”

  “Bloody right, John.”

  “Okay, let’s make the call. If we decide to go public, I want us to make the decision, not the fucking Russians.”

  “They know your name, then?”

  “More than that. I’ve met Chairman Golovko. He’s the guy who got Ding and me into Tehran last year. I’ve run a couple of cooperative operations with ’em, Bill. They know everything down to my dick size.”

  Tawney didn’t react. He was learning how Americans talked, and it was often very entertaining. “You know, John, we ought not to get too excited about this information.”

  “Bill, you’ve been in the field as much as I have, maybe a little more. If this doesn’t make your nose twitch, get something to clean your sinuses out, will you?” Clark paused for a second. “We got somebody who knows me by name, and is hinting that he can tell the Russians what I’m doing now. He’s gotta know, man. He picked the London rezident to tell, not the one in Caracas. A terrorism guy, maybe a guy who knows names and numbers, and we’ve had three incidents since we got here, and we’ve agreed that’s a lot for so short a time, and now this guy comes up on the scope, asking about me. Bill, I think it’s time to ge
t a little excited, okay?”

  “Quite so, John. I’ll get Cyril on the phone.” Tawney left the room.

  “Fuck,” John breathed, when the door closed. That was the problem with black operations. Sooner or later, some bastard flipped the light switch, and it was generally somebody you didn’t even want in the room. How the hell has this one leaked? His face darkened as he looked down at his desk, acquiring an expression that those who knew it considered very dangerous indeed.

  “Shit,” Director Murray said at his desk in FBI Headquarters.

  “Yeah, Dan, that about covers it,” Ed Foley agreed from his seventh-floor office in Langley. “How the hell did this leak?”

  “Beats the hell out of me, man. You have anything on this Popov that I don’t know about?”

  “I can check with Intelligence and Terrorism divisions, but we cross-deck everything to you. What about the Brits?”

  “If I know John, he’s already on the phone to ‘Five’ and ‘Six.’ His intel guy is Bill Tawney, and Bill’s top-drawer in any outfit. Know him?”

  “Rings a vague bell, but I can’t put a face on it. What’s Basil think of him?”

  “Says he’s one of his best analysts, and was a primo field-spook until a few years ago. He’s got a good nose,” the DCI told Murray.

  “How big a threat is this?”

  “Can’t tell yet. The Russians know John pretty well from Tokyo and Tehran. Golovko knows him personally—called me about the Tehran job to compliment him on the job he and Chavez pulled off. I gather they hit it off, but this is business, not personal, y’know?”

  “I hear you, Don Corleone. Okay, what do you want me to do?”