Ward shook his head as the import of the messages sorted out. Had the men who'd come into the lab cut the power? Was that why the guard had opened the cubes? Did they come in and open the inner containment from the computer and the outer containment when they went downstairs? But that didn't make any sense. Why not just come in and do everything from the computer themselves? Unless they had cut the power to get to the guard, Ward reasoned somewhat doubtfully. The computer controlled everything in the building, from security to power. When it went down, everything went down.
Ward cleared the screen and opened the termination program. Accessing the program automatically switched on the long-range antenna located on the roof. New words appeared on the screen:
TERMINATION REQUIRES LEVEL FOUR AUTHORIZATION.
ENTER LEVEL FOUR CODE:
Ward typed in his personal password:
CASINO GAMBIT.
TARGETS ARE ON AZIMUTH OF 202 DEGREES MAGNETIC.
ENTER TERMINATION CODE WORD:
Ward licked his lips. Two years of painstaking work would be destroyed by typing one word. He slowly tapped in the code word, filling the eight spaces, and poised his finger over the ENTER key. It hung there for half a minute while a fierce internal debate raged in Ward's mind. Finally the doctor shook his head. Instead of the ENTER key, he hit the BACKSPACE key, erasing the code word.
Bradford Freeman ducked his head as the Bell Jet Ranger helicopter descended onto the landing pad that crowned the federal building in Nashville. He ran forward and entered the aircraft, settling into the left front seat. Freeman was a big man, almost six and a half feet tall. A former defensive lineman for Vanderbilt, Freeman still carried his weight well, fifteen years after his last tackle on the field. The light reflecting off the puddles on the landing pad highlighted the small beads of perspiration that glistened on the black skin of his face despite the morning's chill. The phone call from site seven had shaken him.
As Freeman buckled his seat belt, the pilot lifted the aircraft. The helicopter was from a local civilian company — one of several that Freeman's office kept on file for contract work and the one that had responded this morning in the shortest amount of time. Freeman was using the helicopter as the quickest means to go the sixty miles to site seven. Once there, he would have to go secure and use the military for any further transportation.
"Where we heading, sir?"
"Head north for Land Between the Lakes. I'll direct you once we get closer."
Freeman switched attention to his briefcase, opening it and pulling out the contingency plan for site seven. Freeman was the only man in the regional office who really knew what went on at the site. His position as head of the Nashville Regional Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) section meant that he had to be a jack-of-all-trades. Not only was he the man responsible for emergency responses to any security problems at military installations in a four-state area surrounding Tennessee, but he had also been burdened with the immediate security response for thirteen classified federal research facilities in those four states.
The DIA was tied heavily into the security and operation of all of the Pentagon's Black Budget research projects. Since the DIA's inception in 1961, it had been involved in much of the shadowy work that appeared to be a requisite for maintaining national security. There were numerous DIA-supported research projects being conducted at the behest of the Pentagon, some more sensitive than others.
Freeman knew that the DIA had earned a bad reputation over the years when word about some of those classified projects had leaked. The use of LSD on human subjects to test its effectiveness as an interrogation device was one of the more glaring examples. From what Freeman was presently reading in the file, this could be another potentially embarrassing episode. There were two critical aspects to Freeman's job — prevention and then reaction. This was the first time he was in the reaction mode.
Fifteen years ago, there wouldn't have been a contingency plan for either mode. In a weird twist, it had been a Russian disaster that had spurred the development of this arm of the DIA. In 1979 an outbreak of anthrax in the Soviet Union was widely suspected in the intelligence community to have come from a breach in containment at the Sverdlovsk biological weapons facility. The specter of any such occurrence in the United States had driven the requirement for both tighter containment plans at all research facilities, regardless of the type of research, and the writing of DIA response plans to limit collateral damage for every facility funded by the Black Budget. An overall national DIA damage-control response force had also been formed and was headquartered in D.C.
Despite the plan, Freeman didn't like the present situation at all. His area of expertise was counterespionage. Who were the men who had entered the installation and how had they found out about the Synbat project? His predecessor had prepared the required contingency plan for reaction to a compromise at site seven, and Freeman had made the required quarterly inspection visits there, but reacting was uncharted territory, especially since Doctor Ward sounded as though he wasn't really sure what had happened.
From what Freeman had seen when he'd visited site seven, the escape of the Synbats could turn into a major disaster. Fortunately, with termination accomplished, it was now simply a case of tracking down the remains and then doing cleanup. The means to accomplish the first were already in motion due to a quick phone call that Freeman had made to the post staff duty officer at nearby Fort Campbell prior to departure. The means to the second had required a phone call to Washington.
Chapter 2
Ward was waiting at the front door when Robin Merrit's car rolled into the parking lot. The Volkswagen Beetle pulled into its slot next to his BMW and the engine died with a clatter and a few coughs.
Merrit was a small, young, mousy-looking woman with straight dark hair cut short. Ward had never seen her wear makeup, nor did it appear that she had any fashion sense. Her present outfit of loose-fitting jeans and a flannel shirt was typical of what she wore to work every day.
Although she was not worldly, Merrit was one of the most brilliant bioengineers that Ward had ever worked with — probably the most brilliant — which was one of the reasons that he had pressured the DIA watchdogs to grant her a security clearance and bring her into the program. Although Ward would never admit it publicly, Merrit had provided many of the keys to the breakthroughs that had enabled the Biotech Engineering project to make the jump from the theories in Ward's mind to the reality of the present generation of Synbats.
Ward knew that there were two reasons why Merrit was working for the government; they were the same two reasons he had. First, the Pentagon was one of the few institutions left that had the funds to do this type of research. Federal funding for research at universities and private institutions had all but dried up as the deficit noose tightened. Second, and even more important for Ward, working for the Pentagon released them from the stringent federal guidelines that severely limited private research. It was ironic that federal research guidelines, especially for such things as experimentation with animals or dangerous viruses, applied only to non-federally funded, unclassified research. Biotech was one of the few places where the talents of as qualified and brilliant a person as Merrit could be fully used. It was a means to an end.