"Mr. Clark, we know this guy. We've interviewed him in the disappearance of a young woman, Mary Bannister. And another woman, Anne Pretloe, disappeared under very similar circumstances. Holy shit, you say they were murdered?"
"No, I said they were killed as test subjects for this Shiva disease that they plan to spread at Sydney."
"Horizon Corporation. That's where this Maclean guy works. He's out of town now, his coworkers told us."
"Yes, you will find him in Kansas," Popov told them, with a nod.
"You know how big Horizon Corporation is?" Sullivan asked.
"Big enough. Okay, Dmitriy," Clark said, turning back, "exactly how do you think they will spread this virus?"
"Foster told me it was part of the air-cooling system at the stadium. That is all I know."
John thought about the Olympic. They were running the marathon today, and that was the last event, to be followed by the closing ceremonies that evening. There wasn't time to think very much further than that. He turned, lifted the telephone, and dialed England.Give me Stanley," he told Mrs. Foorgate.
"Alistair Stanley," the voice said next.
"Al, this is John. Get hold of Ding and have him call me here." John read the number off the phone. "Right now-immediately, Al. I mean right the hell now."
"Understood, John."
Clark waited four and a half minutes by his watch before the phone rang.
"You're lucky he got me, John. I was just getting dressed to leave and watch the mara-"
"Shut the hell up and listen to me, Domingo," Clark said harshly.
"Yeah, John, go ahead," Chavez answered, getting out a pad to take some notes. "Is this for real?" he asked after a few seconds.
"We believe it to be, Ding."
"It's like something from a bad movie." Was this something concocted by SPECTRE? Chavez wondered. What was the potential profit in it for anybody?
"Ding, the guy giving this to me is named Serov, Iosef Andreyevich. He's here with me now."
"Okay, I hear you, Mr. C. When is this operation supposed to take place?"
"Around the time of the closingceremonies, supposedly. Is there anything else today besides the marathon?"
"No, that's the last major event, and we ought not to be too busy 'til the race ends. We expect the stadium to start filling up around five this afternoon, and then they have the closing ceremonies, and everybody goes home." Including me, he didn't have to add.
"Well, that's their plan, Ding."
"And you want us to stop it."
"Correct. Get moving. Keep this number. I'll be here all day on the STU-4. From now on, all transmissions will be secure. Okay?"
"You got it. Let me get moving, John."
"Move," the voice told him. "Bye."
Chavez hung up, wondering how the hell he'd do this. First he had to assemble his team. They were all on the same floor, and he went into the corridor, knocked on each door, and told the NCOs to come to his suite.
"Okay, people, we got a job to handle today. Here's the deal," he began, then spun the tale for about five minutes.
"Christ," Tomlinson managed to say for all of them. The story was quite incredible, but they were accustomed to hearing and acting upon strange information.
"We have to find the control room for thefogging system. Once we do that, we'll put people in there. We'll rotate the duty. George and Homer, you start, then Mike and I will relieve you. Call it two-hour rotation inside and outside. Radios will be on at all times. Deadly force is authorized, people."
Noonan had heard the briefing, too. "Ding, this whole thing sounds kinda unlikely."
"I know, Tim, but we act on it anyway."
"You say so, man."
"Let's move, people," Ding told them, standing.
"This is the day, Carol," John Brightling told his ex-wife. "Less than ten hours from now, the Project starts."
She dropped Jiggs on the floor and came to embrace him. "Oh, John!"
"I know," he told her. "It's been a long time. Couldn't have done it without you."
Henriksen was there, too. "Okay, I talked with Wil Gearing twenty minutes ago. He'll be hooking up the Shiva dispenser right before they start the closing ceremonies. The weather is working for us, too. It's going to be another hot one in Sydney, temperature's supposed to hit ninety-seven degrees. So,people'll be camping out under the foggers."
"And breathing heavily," Dr. John Brightling confirmed. That was another of the body's methods for shedding excess heat.
Chavez was in the stadium now, already sweating from the building heat and wondering if any of the marathon runners would fall over dead from this day's race. So Global Security, with whose personnel he'd interfaced briefly, was part of the mission. He wondered if he could remember all the faces he'd seen in the two brief conferences he'd had, but for now he had to find Colonel Wilkerson. Five minutes later, in the security-reaction hut, he found the man.
"G'day, Major Chavez."
"Hey, Frank. I got a question for you."
"What's that, Ding?"
"The fogging system. Where's it come from?"
"The pumping room's by Section Five, just left of the ramp."
"How do I get in there?"
"You get a key to the door and the alarm code from me. Why, old boy?"
"Oh, well, I just want to see it."
"Is there a problem, Ding?" Wilkerson asked.
"Maybe. I got to thinking," Chavez went on, trying to formulate a persuasive lie for the moment. "What if somebody wanted to use it to dispense a chemical agent, like? And I thought I might-"
"Check it out? One of the Global people beat you to that one, lad. Colonel Gearing. He checked out the entire installation. Same concern as you, but a bit earlier."
"Well, can I do it, too?"
"Why?"
"Call it paranoia," Chavez replied.
"I suppose." Wilkerson rose from his chair and pulled the proper key off the wall. "The alarm code is one-one-three-three-six-six."
Eleven thirty-three sixty-six, Ding memorized.
"Good. Thanks, Colonel."
"My pleasure, Major," the SAS lieutenant colonel replied.
Chavez left the room, rejoined his people outside, and headed rapidly back to the stadium.
"Did you tell 'em about the problem?" Noonan asked.
Chavez shook his head. "I wasn't authorized to do that. John expects us to handle it."
"What if our friends are armed?"
"Well, Tim, we are authorized to use necessary force, aren't we?"
"Could be messy," the FBI agent warned, worried about local laws and jurisdictions.
"Yeah, I suppose so. We use our heads, okay? We know how to do that, too."
Kirk Maclean's job at the Project was to keep an eye on the environmental support systems, mainly the air conditioning and the over-pressurization system, whose installation he didn't really understand. After all, everyone inside the buildings would have the "B" vaccine shot, and even if Shiva got in, there wasn't supposed to be any danger. But he supposed that John Brightling was merely being redundant in his protective systems thinking, and that was okay with him. His daily work was easily dealt with- it mainly involved checking dials and recording systems, all of which were stuck in the very center of normal Operating ranges-and then he felt like a ride. He walked into the transport office and took a set of keys for a Project Hummer, then headed out to the barn to get his horse. mother twenty minutes, and he'd saddled his quarter horse and headed north, cantering across the grassland. through the lanes in the wheat fields where the farm mac lines turned around, taking his time through one of the prairie-dog towns, and heading generally toward the Interstate highway that formed the northern edge of the Project's real estate. About forty minutes into the ride, he saw something unusual.
Like every rural plot of land in the American West, this one had a resident buzzard population. Here, as in most such places, they were locally called turkey buzzards, regardless of the actual breed, large raptors that ate carrion and were distinctive for their size and their ugliness - black feathers and naked red-skinned heads that carried large powerful beaks designed for ripping flesh off the carcasses of dead animals. They were Nature's garbage collectors or Nature's own morticians, as some put it important parts of the ecosystem, though distasteful to some. He saw about six of them circling something in the tall grass to the northeast. Six was a lot then he realized that there were more still, as he spotted the black angular shapes in the grass from two miles away. Something large had evidently died, and they had assembled to clean - eat - it up. They were careful, conservative birds. Their circling and examination was to ensure that whatever they saw and smelled wasn't still alive, and hence able to jump up and injure them when they came down to feed. Birds were the most delicate of creatures, made mostly for air, and needing to be in perfect condition to fly and survive.