"Fine operation," Bill Tawney said, joining the group.
"Anything develop?"
"We have a possible identification on one of them, the chap who killed the child. The French ran the photo through some police informants, and they think it night be an Andre Herr, Parisian by birth, thought to be a stringer for Action Directe once upon a time, but nothing definite. More information is on the way, they say. The whole set of photos and fingerprints from Spain is on its way to Paris now for follow-up investigation. Not all of the photos will be very useful, I am told."
"Yeah, well, a burst of hollowpoints will rearrange a guy's face, man," Chavez observed with a chuckle. "Not a hell of a lot we can do about that."
"So, who initiated the operation?" Clark asked.
Tawney shrugged. "Not a clue at this point. That's for the French police to investigate."
"Would be nice to know. We've had three incidents since we got here. Isn't that a lot?" Chavez asked, suddenly very serious.
"It is," the intelligence officer agreed. "It would not have been ten or fifteen years ago, but things had quieted down recently." Another shrug. "Could be mere coincidence, or perhaps copycatting, but-"
"Copycat? I shouldn't think so, sir," Eddie Prise observed. "We've given bloody little encouragement to any terr' who has ambitions, and today's operation ought to have a further calming effect on those people."
"That makes sense to me," Ding agreed. "Like Mike Pierce said, there's a new sheriff in town, and the word on the street ought to be `don't fuck with him' even if people think we're just local cops with an attitude. Take it a step further, Mr. C."
"Go public?" Clark shook his head. "That's never been part of the plan, Domingo."
"Well, if the mission's to take the bastards down in the field, that's one thing. If the mission is to make these bastards think twice about raising hell-to stop terrorist incidents from happening at all-then it's another thing entirely. The idea of a new sheriff in town might just take the starch out of their backs and put them back to washing cars, or whatever the hell they do when they're not being bad. Deterrence, we call it, when nation-states do it. Will it work on a terrorist mentality? Something to talk with Doc Bellow about, John," Chavez concluded.
And again Chavez had surprised him, Clark realized. Three straight successes, all of them covered on the TV news, might well have an effect on the surviving terrorists in Europe or elsewhere with lingering ambitions, mightn't it? And that was something to talk to Paul Bellow about. But it was much too soon for anyone on the team to be that optimistic… probably, John told himself with a thoughtful sip. The party was just beginning to break up. It had been a very long day for the Rainbow troopers, and one by one they set their glasses down on the bar, which ought to have closed some time before, and headed for the door for the walk to their homes. Another day and another mission had ended. Yet another day had already b.-gun, and in only a few hours, they'd be awakened to run and exercise and begin another day of routine training. "Were you planning to leave us?" the jailer asked Inmate Sanchez in a voice dripping with irony.
"What do you mean?" Carlos responded.
"Some colleagues of yours misbehaved yesterday," the prison guard responded, tossing a copy of Le Figaro through the door. "They will not do so again."
The photo on the front page was taken off the Worldpark video, the quality miserably poor, but clear enough to show a soldier dressed in black carrying a child, and the first paragraph of the story told the tale. Carlos scanned it, sitting on his prison bed to read the piece in detail, then felt a depth of black despair that he'd not thought possible. Someone had heard his plea, he realized, and it had come to nothing. Life in this stone cage beckoned as he looked up to the sun coming in the single window. Life. It would be a long one, probably a healthy one, and certainly a bleak one. His hands crumpled the paper when he'd finished the article. Damn the Spanish police. Damn the world.
"Yes, I saw it on the news last night," he said into the phone as he shaved.
"I need to see you. I have something to show you, sir," Popov's voice said, just after seven in the morning.
The man thought about that. Popov was a clever bastard who'd done his jobs without much in the way of questions… and there was little in the way of a paper:rail, certainly nothing his lawyers couldn't handle if it cane to that, and it wouldn't. There were ways of dealing with Popov, too, if it came to that.
"Okay, be there at eight-fifteen."
"Yes, sir," the Russian said, hanging up.
Pete was in real agony now, Killgore saw. It was tine to move him. This he ordered at once, and two orderlies came in dressed in upgraded protective gear to goal the wino onto a gurney for transport to the clinical side. Killgore followed them and his patient. The clinical side was essentially a duplication of the room in which the street bums had lounged and drunk their booze, waiting unknowingly for the onset of symptoms. He now had hem all, to the point that booze and moderate doses of morphine no longer handled the pain. The orderlies loaded Pete onto a bed, next to which was an electronically operated "Christmas tree" medication dispenser. Kilgore handled the stick, and got the IV plugged into Pete's major vein. Then he keyed the electronic box, and seconds later, the patient relaxed with a large bolus of medication The eyes went sleepy and the body relaxed while the Shiva continued to eat him alive from the inside out. Another IV would be set up to feed him with nutrients to keep his body going, along with various drugs to see if any of them had an unexpectedly beneficial effect on the Shiva. They had a whole roomful of such drugs, ranging from antibiotics-which were expected to be useless against this viral infection-to Interleukin-2 and a newly developed -3a, which, some thought, might help, plus tailored Shiva antibodies taken from experimental animals. None were expected to work, but all had to be tested to make sure they didn't, lest there be a surprise out there when the epidemic spread. Vaccine-B was expected to work, and that was being tested now with the new control group of people kidnapped from Manhattan bars, along with the notional Vaccine A, whose purpose was rather different from -B. The nanocapsules developed on the other side of the house would come in very handy indeed. As was being demonstrated even as he had the thought, looking down at Pete's dying body. Subject F4, Mary Bannister, felt sick to her stomach, just a mild queasiness at this point, but didn't think much of it. That sort of thing happened, and she didn't feel all that bad, some antacids would probably help, and those she got from her medicine cabinet, which was pretty well stocked with over the-counter medications. Other than that, she felt pretty mellow, as she smiled at herself in the mirror and liked what she saw, a youngish, attractive woman wearing pink silk jammies. With that thought, she walked out of her room, her hair glossy and a spring in her step. Chip was in the sitting room, reading a magazine slowly on the couch, and she made straight for him and sat down beside him
"Hi, Chip." She smiled.
"Hi, Mary." He smiled back, reaching to touch her hand.
"I upped the Valium in her breakfast," Barbara Archer said in the control room, zooming the camera in. "Along with the other one." The other one was an inhibition reducer. "You look nice today," Chip told her, his words imperfectly captured by the hidden shotgun microphone.
"Thank you." Another smile.
"She looks pretty dreamy."
"She ought to be," Barbara observed coldly. "There's enough in her to make a nun shuck her habit and get it on."
"What about him?"
"Oh, yeah, didn't give him any steroids." Dr. Archer had a little chuckle at that.