Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan Books 7-12 (391 page)

“Based on this letter, yes, I think it’s a possibility, and we will treat this case as a kidnapping investigation.” Ussery lifted his phone. “Send Pat O’Connor in, will you?” he told his secretary.

Supervisory Special Agent Patrick D. O’Connor was one of the Gary office’s squad supervisors. Thirty-eight, red-haired, fair-skinned, and very fit, O’Connor headed the office kidnapping squad. “Yeah, Chuck?” he said coming in.

“This is Mr. James Bannister. He has a missing daughter, age twenty-one, disappeared in New York about a month ago. Yesterday he got this on his e-mail.” Ussery handed it over.

O’Connor scanned it and nodded. “Okay, Chuck.”

“Pat, it’s your case. Run with it.”

“You bet, Chuck. Mr. Bannister, would you come with me, please?”

“Pat runs these cases for us,” Ussery explained. “He will take charge of it, and report to me on a daily basis. Mr. Bannister, the FBI treats kidnappings as major felonies. This will be a top-priority case until we clear it. Ten men, Pat?”

“For starters, yes, more in New York. Sir,” he said to their guest, “we all have kids. We know how you feel. If there’s a way to locate your daughter for you, we’ll find it. Now I need to ask you a bunch of questions so that we can get started, okay?”

“Yeah.” The man stood and followed O’Connor out into the office bay. He’d be there for the next three hours, telling everything he knew about his daughter and her life in New York to this and other agents. First of all he handed over a recent photograph, a good one as it turned out. O’Connor looked at it. He’d keep it for the case file. O’Connor and his squad hadn’t worked a kidnapping in several years. It was a crime the FBI had essentially extinguished in the United States—kidnapping for money, in any case. There was just no percentage in it. The FBI
always
solved them, came down on the perps like the Wrath of God. Today’s kidnappings were generally of children, and, parental kidnappings aside, were almost always by sexual deviants who most often used them for personal gratification, and often as not killed them thereafter. If anything, that merely increased the FBI’s institutional rage. The Bannister Case, as it was already being called, would have the highest priority in manpower and resources in every office it might touch. Pending cases against organized crime families would be set aside for this one. That was just part of the FBI’s institutional ethos.

Four hours after Skip Bannister’s arrival in the Gary office, two agents from the New York field division in the Jacob Javits Building downtown knocked on the door of the superintendent of Mary Bannister’s dingy apartment building. The super gave them the key and told them where the apartment was. The two agents entered and commenced their search, looking first of all for notes, photographs, correspondence, anything that might help. They’d been there an hour when a NYPD detective showed up, summoned by the FBI office to assist. There were 30,000 policemen in the city, and for a kidnapping, they could all be called upon to assist in the investigation and canvassing.

“Got a picture?” the detective asked.

“Here.” The lead agent handed over the one faxed from Gary.

“You know, I got a call a few weeks ago from somebody in Des Moines, girl’s name was . . . Pretloe, I think. Yeah, Anne Pretloe, mid-twenties, legal secretary. Lived a few blocks from here. Just up and disappeared. Didn’t show up for work—just vanished. Roughly the same age and sex, guys,” the detective pointed out. “Connection, maybe?”

“Been checking Jane Does?” the junior agent asked. He didn’t have to go further. Their instant thought was the obvious one: Was there a serial killer operating in New York City? That sort of criminal nearly always went after women between eighteen and thirty years of age, as selective a predator as there was anywhere in nature.

“Yeah, but nothing that fit the Pretloe girl’s description, or this one for that matter.” He handed the photo back. “This case is a head-scratcher. Find anything?”

“Not yet,” the senior agent replied. “Diary, but nothing useful in it. No photos of men. Just clothes, cosmetics, normal stuff for a girl this age.”

“Prints?”

A nod. “That’s next. We have our guy on the way now.” But they all knew that this was a thin reed, after the apartment had been vacant for a month. The oils that made fingerprints evaporated over time, though there was some hope here, in a climate-controlled and sealed apartment.

“This one’s not going to be easy,” the NYPD detective observed next.

“They never are,” the senior FBI agent replied.

“What if there’s more than two?” the other FBI agent asked.

“Lots of people turn up missing in this town,” the detective said. “But I’ll run a computer check.”

Subject F5 was a hot little number, Killgore saw. And she liked Chip, too. That wasn’t very good news for Chip Smitton, who hadn’t been exposed to Shiva by injection, vaccine testing, or the fogging system. No, he’d been exposed by sexual contact only, and now his blood was showing antibodies, too. So, that means of transmission worked also, and better yet, it worked female-to-male, not just male-to-female. Shiva was everything they’d hoped it would be.

It was distasteful to watch people making love. Not the least bit arousing for him, playing voyeur. Anne Pretloe, F5, was within two days of symptoms, judging by her blood work, eating, drinking, and being very merry right before his eyes on the black-and-white monitor. Well, the tranquilizers had lowered every subject’s resistance to loose behavior, and there was no telling what she was like in real life, though she certainly knew the techniques well enough.

Strangely, Killgore had never paid attention to this sort of thing in animal tests. Rats, he imagined, came into season, and when they did, the boy rats and girl rats must have gotten it on, but somehow he’d never noticed. He respected rats as a life-form, but didn’t find their sexual congress the least bit interesting, whereas here, he had to admit to himself, he
did
find his eyes returning to the screen every few seconds. Well, Pretloe, Subject F5, was the cutest of the bunch, and if he’d found her in a singles bar, he might have offered her a drink and said hello and . . . let things develop. But she was doomed, too, as doomed as white, bred-for-the-purpose lab rats. Those cute little pink-eyed creatures were used all over the world because they were genetically identical, and so test results in one country would match the test results generated anywhere else in the world. They probably didn’t have the wherewithal to survive in the wild, and that was too bad. But their white color would work against them—cats and dogs would spot them far more easily, and that was not a good thing in the wild, was it? And they were an artificial species anyway, not part of Nature’s plan, but a work of Man, and therefore unworthy of continuance. A pity they were cute, but that was a subjective, not objective, observation, and Killgore had long since learned to differentiate between the two. After all, Pretloe, F5, was cute, too, and his pity for her was a lingering atavistic attitude on his part, unworthy of a Project member. But that got him thinking as he watched Chip Smitton screw Anne Pretloe. This was the kind of thing Hitler might have done with Jews, saved a small number of them as human lab rats, maybe as crash-test dummies for auto-safety tests. . . . So, did that make
him
a Nazi? Killgore thought. They were using F5 and M7 as such . . . but, no, they didn’t discriminate on race or creed, or gender, did they? There were no politics involved, really—well, maybe, depending on how one defined the term, not in the way
he
defined the term. This was science, after all. The whole Project was
about
science and love of Nature. Project members included all races and categories of people, though not much in the way of religions, unless you considered love of Nature to be a religion . . . which in a way it was, the doctor told himself. Yes, surely it was.

What they were doing on his TV screen was natural, or nearly so—as it
had
been largely instigated by mood depressants—but the mechanics certainly were. So were their instincts, he to spread his seed as far as possible, and she to receive his seed—and
his own,
Killgore’s mind went on, to be a predator, and through his depredations to decide which members of that species would live and which would not.

These two would not live, attractive as both were . . . like the lab rats with their cute white hair and cute pink eyes and twitching white whiskers. Well, none of them would be around much longer, would they? It was aesthetically troubling, but a valid choice in view of the future that they all beheld.

CHAPTER 22

COUNTERMEASURES

“So, nothing else from our Russian friend?”Bill Tawney asked.

“Nothing,” Cyril Holt confirmed. “Tapes of Kirilenko show that he walks to work the same way every day and at exactly the same time, when the streets are crowded, stops in his pub for a pint four nights out of five, and bumps into all manner of people. But all it takes is a minor attempt at disguise and a little knowledge of trade-craft to outfox us, unless we really tighten our coverage, and there’s too great a chance that Ivan Petrovich would notice it and simply upgrade his own efforts to remain covert. It’s a chance we’d prefer not to take.”

“Quite so,” Tawney had to agree, despite his disappointment. “Nothing from other sources?”

“Other sources” meant whomever the Security Service might have working for them inside the Russian Embassy. There almost had to be someone there, but Holt would not discuss it over a telephone line, encrypted or not, because if there was one thing you had to protect in this business, it was the identity of your sources. Not protecting them could get them killed.

“No, Bill, nothing. Vanya hasn’t spoken over his phone line to Moscow on this subject. Nor has he used his secure fax line. Whatever discussions developed from this incident, well, we do not have even a confirmed face, just that chap in the pub, and that might well have been nothing. Three months ago, I had one of my chaps strike up a conversation with him at the pub, and they talked about football—he’s a serious fan, and he knows the game quite well, and never even revealed his nationality. His accent is bloody perfect. So that chap in the photo might well be nothing at all, just another coincidence. Kirilenko is a professional, Bill. He doesn’t make many mistakes. Whatever information came out of this was doubtless written up and couriered off.”

“So we probably have a KGB RIF prowling around London still, probably with whatever information Moscow has on our Mr. Clark, and doing what, we do not know.”

“Correct, Bill,” Holt agreed. “I can’t say that I like it either, but there you are.”

“What have you turned up on KGB-PIRA contacts?”

“We have a few things. One photo of someone else from a meeting in Dublin eight years ago, and oral reports of other contacts, with physical description. Some might be the chap in the photo, but the written descriptions fit about a third of male humanity, and we’re leery of showing the photos around quite yet.” Tawney didn’t need to be told why. It was well within the realm of possibility that some of Holt’s informants were indeed double-agents, and showing them the photos of the man in the pub might well do nothing more than alert the target of the investigation to the fact that someone knew who he was. That would cause
him
to become more cautious, perhaps change his appearance, and the net result would be to make things worse instead of better. This
was
the most complex of games, Tawney reminded himself. And what if the whole thing was nothing more than curiosity on the part of the Russians, merely keeping track of a known intelligence officer on the other side? Hell,
everyone
did that. It was just a normal part of doing business.

The bottom line was that they knew what they didn’t know—no, Tawney thought. They didn’t even know that much. They knew
that
they didn’t know something, but they didn’t even know what it was that they wanted to find out. What was the significance of this blip of information that had appeared on the scope?

“What’s this for?” Henriksen asked innocently.

“A fog-cooling system. We got it from your chaps,” Aukland said.

“Huh? I don’t understand,” the American replied.

“One of our engineers saw it in—Arizona, I think. It sprays a very fine water mist. The tiny droplets absorb heat energy and evaporate into the atmosphere, has the same effect as air-conditioning, but with a negligible energy expenditure.”

“Ahh,” Bill Henriksen said, doing his best to act surprised. “How widely distributed is the system?”

“Just the tunnels and concourses. The architect wanted to put it all over the stadium, but people objected, said it would interfere with cameras and such,” Aukland answered, “too much like a real fog.”

“Okay, I think I need to look at that.”

“Why?”

“Well, sir, it’s a hell of a good way to deliver a chemical agent, isn’t it?” The question took the police official seriously aback.

“Well . . . yes, I suppose it would be.”

“Good. I have a guy in the company, former officer in the U.S. Army Chemical Corps, expert on this sort of thing, degree from MIT. I’ll have him check it out ASAP.”

“Yes, that is a good idea, Bill. Thank you,” Aukland said, kicking himself for not thinking of that on his own. Well, he was hiring expertise, wasn’t he? And this Yank certainly seemed to be an expert.

“Does it get that hot here?”

“Oh, yes, quite. We expect temperatures in the nineties—Fahrenheit, that is. We’re supposed to think in Celsius nowadays, but I never did learn that.”

“Yeah, me neither,” Henriksen noted.

“Anyway, the architect said that this was an inexpensive way to cool the spectators down, and quite reasonable to install. It feeds off the fire-sprinkler system. Doesn’t even use much water for what it does. It’s been installed for over a year. We test it periodically. American company, can’t recall the name at the moment.”