“But we don't know where the lab is.”
“Berlinson couldn't tell you?”
“He'd heard of it. He'd been associated with Wilson. But he had never been to the lab.”
“And you haven't put a tail on Wilson?”
McAlister laid his pipe in the ashtray and smiled grimly. “Can't do that, I'm afraid. He's dead.”
“I see.”
“He was electrocuted while making his breakfast toast.”
“Quaint.”
“Seems there was a nasty short in the toaster's wiring. Brand-new toaster, too.”
“The Underwriters' Laboratories would be surprised to hear about that,” Canning said.
“I daresay.”
“When did this happen?”
“The day after Roger Berlinson came to my home and offered to tell me what he knew about The Committee, exactly sixteen hours after I first heard Olin Wilson's name.”
“How coincidental.”
“It's for Ripley.”
“And convenient.”
“Of course, Berlinson couldn't give me the names of any of the other scientists who are working at this lab. But from that moment on, I never talked with him in my own home or in my car or anywhere else that might be electronically monitored.”
“What more did Berlinson tell you?”
Early in 1971, while he was still employed by the Department of Defense, Dr. Wilson, with the aid of a hundred researchers, made several important breakthroughs in his work. He really did not strike out into any new territory, but he refined substances, pro-esses, and techniques that were already in use, refined them in the sense that an electric light bulb is merely a refinement of a wax candle, which, of course, it is, although it is much more than that. First of all he developed a petro-plastic spansule that was airtight, one hundred percent resistant to osmosis, neutral to body tissues, free of surface condensation, not even fractionally biodegradable — yet which was quite rubbery, unbreakable, and resilient. Second, he discovered a way to store deadly microorganisms within this spansule — a way to store them without the organisms losing more than five percent of their fertility, virility, and toxicity, no matter how long they were sealed up. Next, he worked out a procedure for implanting one of these spansules inside a human body in such a way that the carrier could not sense it, X-rays could not expose it, and only the most unlikely of accidents could open it before it was meant to be opened. Finally, he went outside of his specialty and applied other disciplines — surgery, psychology, pharmacology, espionage — to the problem until he perfected a way of turning any man into an unwitting, undetectable biological time bomb.
“Which is Dragonfly,” McAlister said.
“And now you're going to tell me how it actually works.”
“It's achingly simple.”
“I believe it,” Canning said. “Just from what you've told me so far, I think I can figure it out myself.”
“So you tell me.”
“First there's one thing I need to get straight.”
McAlister waited.
“The Dragonfly project was never meant to decimate the Chinese population, was it?”
“No.” McAlister picked up his pipe. “According to Berlinson, Dragonfly is carrying a severely mutated virus, something manufactured in the laboratory and essentially artificial in nature. It won't respond to any known drug; however, it was designed to have a poor rate of reproduction and a short life span. Seventy-two hours after the spansule is broken, the microorganisms in it and ninety percent of their progeny will be dead. In ninety-six hours, none of the microbes will exist. The threat is limited to four days. There isn't time for it to spread throughout China.”
“Wilson never intended to kill tens of millions.”
“Just tens of thousands. The stuffs apparently so toxic that a hundred to a hundred and fifty thousand people will die in four days. But that will be the extent of it. Although I must say that this apparent concern for human life is not the product of any moral sensibility. It's a matter of logistics. If you kill millions of your enemy in a few days, you have an impossible logistics problem when you take over their country: how to get rid of the corpses.”
McAlister's eyes suddenly seemed to have become a bit more gray than blue.
Shaking his head in disgust, Canning said, “If the kill target is so low, then the intent is to destroy the political and military elite — all of the highest officers of the Party, their possible successors, and their families. In the turmoil and confusion, a relative handful of men could take control of Peking, the strategic ports, and all of China's nuclear weapons.”
“And it looks as if the Committeemen have more than a handful of men at their disposal,” McAlister said. “We think they've made a deal with the Nationalist Chinese. For over a month there have been reports of frantic military preparations on Formosa. In the oh-so-glorious memory of Chiang Kai-shek, they evidently intend to reconquer the homeland.”
“Jesus!” The implications became more staggering by the moment. In twenty years of day-to-day contact with the world of high-power espionage, Canning had never heard, had never conceived, of the agency's getting involved in an operation as crazy as this one. Blackmail of domestic and foreign politicians, yes. The overthrow of a small South American or African nation, yes. Political assassination at home and abroad, yes. But he had never imagined that any element within the agency, no matter how fascistic and fanatical, would try to upset the delicate balance of world power all on its own hook. “But even if the operation were a success and the Nationalists reoccupied the mainland—”
“We'd be on the brink of World War Three,” McAlister finished for him. “The Russians would figure that if we used that sort of weapon against China, we'd use it against them too. They'd be very tense. And rightfully so. The first time that Moscow suffered an epidemic of ordinary influenza, the first time a high Party official got a bad cold, they'd think they were under attack. They'd strike back at us with biological and nuclear weapons. No doubt about it.” Beneath his Palm Beach tan, his pallor deepened. “We have to stop Dragonfly.”
Canning went to the bar in the living room and came back with a bottle of Scotch and two glasses. He got four ice cubes from the refrigerator, popped them into the glasses, and poured two or three shots into each glass.
Picking up his Scotch, McAlister said, “I'm really not that much of a drinking man.”
“Neither am I.”
They both drank.
Canning sat down again.
The rain continued to snap against the windows. Lightning cracked across the black sky and threw flickering shadows onto the top of the kitchen table.
When he had nearly finished his Scotch, McAlister said, “You said you thought you knew how Dragonfly, the Chinese carrier, had been chosen and set up.”
Clearing his throat on the first few words, Canning said, “If only the Party elite is to be killed, then Dragonfly has to be someone who has contact with a number of men at the top of the Chinese government. He has to be someone who would spread the plague in the right circles.”
“That really doesn't narrow it down too much. Fully half the Chinese who visit the U.S. and Canada are high Party officials themselves.”
Canning said, “I'm not trying to pinpoint a suspect. I'm just trying to see if I can reconstruct the way Wilson set it up.” He folded his hands on the table in front of him. He never gestured when he talked. Outwardly, except for the cleaning and polishing and lint-picking, he was not a nervous man. “To start with, Wilson needed a carrier. For the purpose of this discussion, let's say he picked someone from that group of trade negotiators you mentioned a while ago.”