Rainbow Six (1997) (16 page)

Immortality. Damn, all the pronghorns he might take, the doctor from Cody thought on, heading over to his wife. Dinner was about to start. The chicken had finished the vulcanization process.

 

 

The Valium helped. It wasn’t actually Valium, Killgore knew. That drug had become something of a generic name for mild sedatives, and this one had been developed by SmithKline, with a different trade name, with the added benefit that it made a good mix with alcohol. For street people who were often as contentious and territorial as junkyard dogs, this group of ten was remarkably sedate. The large quantities of good booze helped. The high-end bourbons seemed the most popular libations, drunk from cheap glasses with ice, along with various mixers for those who didn’t care to drink it neat. Most didn’t, to Killgore’s surprise.

The physicals had gone well. They were all healthy-sick people, outwardly fairly vigorous, but inwardly all with physical problems ranging from diabetes to liver failure. One was definitely suffering from prostate cancer—his PSA was off the top of the chart—but that wouldn’t matter in this particular test, would it? Another was HIV+, but not yet symptomatic, and so that didn’t matter either. He’d probably gotten it from drug use, but strangely, liquor seemed all he needed to keep himself regulated here. How interesting.

Killgore didn’t have to be here, and it troubled his conscience to look at them so much, but they were
his
lab rats, and he was supposed to keep an eye on them, and so he did, behind the mirror, while he did his paperwork and listened to Bach on his portable CD player. Three were—claimed to be—Vietnam veterans. So they’d killed their share of Asians—“gooks” was the word they’d used in the interview—before coming apart and ending up as street drunks. Well,
homeless people
was the current term society used for them, somewhat more dignified than
bums,
the term Killgore vaguely remembered his mother using. Not the best example of humanity he’d ever seen. Yet the Project had managed to change them quite a bit. All bathed regularly now and dressed in clean clothes and watched TV. Some even read books from time to time—Killgore had thought that providing a library, while cheap, was an outrageously foolish waste of time and money. But always they drank, and the drinking relegated each of the ten to perhaps six hours of full consciousness per day. And the Valium calmed them further, limiting any altercations that his security staff would have to break up. Two of them were always on duty in the next room over, also watching the group of ten. Microphones buried in the ceiling allowed them to listen in to the disjointed conversations. One of the group was something of an authority on baseball and talked about Mantle and Maris all the time to whoever would listen. Enough of them talked about sex that Killgore wondered if he should send the snatch team back out to get some female “homeless” subjects for the experiment—he would tell Barb Archer that. After all, they needed to know if gender had an effect on the experiment. She’d
have
to buy into that one, wouldn’t she? And there’d be none of the sisterly solidarity with them. There couldn’t be, even from the feminazi who joined him in running this experiment. Her ideology was too pure for that. Killgore turned when there came a knock at the door.

“Hey, doc.” It was Benny, one of the security guys.

“Hey, how’s it going?”

“Falling asleep,” Benjamin Farmer replied. “The kids are playing pretty nice.”

“Yeah, they sure are.” It was
so
easy. Most had to be prodded a little to leave the room and go out to the courtyard for an hour of walking around every afternoon. But they had to be kept fit—which was to say, to simulate the amount of exercise they got on a normal day in Manhattan, staggering from one dreary corner to another.

“Damn, doc, I never knew
anybody
could put it away the way these guys do! I mean, I had to bring in a whole case of Grand-Dad today, and there’s only two bottles left.”

“That their favorite?” Killgore asked. He hadn’t paid much attention to that.

“Seems to be, sir. I’m a Jack Daniel’s man myself—but with me, maybe two a night, say, for Monday Night Football, if it’s a good game. I don’t drink
water
the way the kids drink hard booze.” A chuckle from the ex-Marine who ran the night security shift. A good man, Farmer. He did a lot of things with injured animals at the company’s rural shelter. He was also the one who’d taken to calling the test subjects
the kids.
It had caught on with the security staff and from them to the others. Killgore chuckled. You had to call them something, and lab rats just wasn’t respectful enough. After all, they were human beings, after a fashion, all the more valuable for their place in this test. He turned to see one of them—#6—pour himself another drink, wander back to his bed, and lie down to watch some TV before he passed out. He wondered what the poor bastard would dream about. Some did, and talked loudly in their sleep. Something to interest a psychiatrist, perhaps, or someone doing sleep studies. They
all
snored, to the point that when all were asleep it sounded like an old steam-powered railroad yard in there.

Choo-choo,
Killgore thought, looking back down at his last bit of paperwork. Ten more minutes, and he could head home. Too late to put his kids to bed. Too bad. Well, in due course they would awaken to a new day and a new world, and wouldn’t that be some present to give them, however heavy and nasty the price for it might be. Hmph, the physician thought, I could use a drink myself.

 

 

“The future has never been so bright as this,” John Brightling told his audience, his demeanor even more charismatic after two glasses of a select California Chardonnay. “The bio-sciences are pushing back frontiers we didn’t even know existed fifteen years ago. A hundred years of basic research are coming to bloom even as we speak. We’re building on the work of Pasteur, Ehrlich, Salk, Sabin, and so many others. We see so far today because we stand on the shoulders of giants.

“Well,” John Brightling went on, “it’s been a long climb, but the top of the mountain is in sight, and we
will
get there in the next few years.”

“He’s smooth,” Liz Murray observed to her husband.

“Very,” FBI Director Dan Murray whispered back. “Smart, too. Jimmy Hicks says he’s the top guy in the world.”

“What’s he running for?”

“God, from what he said earlier.”

“Needs to grow a beard then.”

Director Murray nearly choked at that, then he was saved by the vibrating of his cellular phone. He discreetly left his seat to walk into the building’s large marble foyer. On flipping his phone open, it took fifteen seconds for the encryption system to synchronize with the base station calling him—which told him that it was FBI Headquarters.

“Murray.”

“Director, this is Gordon Sinclair in the Watch Center. So far the Swiss have struck out on ID-ing the other two. Prints are on their way to the BKA so they can take a look.” But if they hadn’t been printed somewhere along the line, that, too, would be a dry hole, and it would take a while to identify Model’s two pals.

“No additional casualties on the takedown?”

“No, sir, all four bad guys down for the count. All hostages safe and evacuated. They should all be back home now. Oh, Tim Noonan deployed on this operation, electronics weenie for one of the go-teams.”

“So, Rainbow works, eh?”

“It did this time, Director,” Sinclair judged.

“Make sure they send us the write-up on how the operation went down.”

“Yes, sir. I already e-mailed them about that.” Less than thirty people in the Bureau knew about Rainbow, though quite a few would be making guesses. Especially those HRT members who’d taken note of the fact that Tim Noonan, a third-generation agent, had dropped off the face of the earth. “How’s dinner going?”

“I prefer Wendy’s. More of the basic food groups. Anything else?”

“The OC case in New Orleans is close to going down, Billy Betz says. Three or four more days. Aside from that, nothing important happening.”

“Thanks, Gordy.” Murray thumbed the END button on his phone and pocketed it, then returned to the dining room after a look and a wave at two members of his protective detail. Thirty seconds later, he slid back into his seat, with a muted thump from his holstered Smith & Wesson automatic against the wood.

“Anything important?” Liz asked.

A shake of the head. “Routine.”

The affair broke up less than forty minutes after Brightling finished his speech and collected his award plaque. He held court yet again, albeit with a smaller group of fans this time, while drifting toward the door, outside of which waited his car. It was only five minutes to the Hay-Adams Hotel, across Lafayette Park from the White House. He had a corner suite on the top floor, and the hotel staff had thoughtfully left him a bottle of the house white in an ice bucket next to the bed, for his companion had come along. It was sad, Dr. John Brightling thought, removing the cork. He’d miss things like this, really miss them. But he had made the decision long before—not knowing when he’d started off that it could possibly work. Now he thought that it would, and the things he’d miss were ultimately of far less value than the things he’d get. And for the moment, he thought, looking at Jessica’s pale skin and stunning figure, he’d get something else that was pretty nice.

 

 

It was different for Dr. Carol Brightling. Despite her White House job, she drove her own car without even a bodyguard to her apartment off Wisconsin Avenue in Georgetown, her only companion there a calico cat named Jiggs, who, at least, came to the door to meet her, rubbing his body along her panty-hosed leg the moment the door was closed, and purring to show his pleasure at her arrival. He followed her into the bedroom, watching her change in the way of cats, interested and detached at the same time, and knowing what came next. Dressed only in a short robe, Carol Brightling walked into the kitchen, opened a cupboard, and got a treat, which she bent down to feed to Jiggs from her hand. Then she got herself a glass of ice water from the refrigerator door, and drank it down with two aspirin. It had all been her idea. She knew that all too well. But after so many years, it was still as hard as it had been at first. She’d given up so much more. She’d gotten the job she’d craved—somewhat to her surprise, as things had turned out, but she had the office in the right building, and now played a role in making policy on the issues that were important to her. Important policy on important topics. But was it worth it?

Yes!
She had to think that, and, truly, she believed it, but the price, the price of it, was often so hard to bear. She bent down to lift up Jiggs, cradling him like the child she’d never had and walking to the bedroom where, again, he’d be the only one to share it with her. Well, a cat was far more faithful than a man could ever be. She’d learned that lesson over the years. In a few seconds, the robe was on the chair next to the bed, and she under the covers, with Jiggs atop them and between her legs. She hoped sleep would come a little more quickly tonight than it usually did. But she knew it would not, for her mind would not stop thinking about what was happening in another bed less than three miles away.

Daily PT started at 0630 and concluded with the five-mile run, timed to last exactly forty minutes. This morning it ended at thirty-eight, and Chavez wondered if he and his team had an additional spring in their step from the successful mission. If so, was that good or bad? Killing fellow human beings wasn’t supposed to make you feel good, was it? A deep thought for a foggy English morning.

By the end of the run, everyone had a good sweat, which the hot showers took care of. Oddly, hygiene was a little more complicated for his team than for uniformed soldiers. Nearly everyone had longer hair than their respective armies permitted, so that they could look like grown-up, if somewhat shabby, businessmen when they donned their coats and ties for their first-class flights to wherever. Ding’s hair was the shortest, since at CIA he’d tried to keep it not too different from his time as staff sergeant in the Ninjas. It would have to grow for at least another month before it would be shaggy enough. He grunted at that thought, then stepped out of the shower. As Team-2 leader, he rated his own private facility, and he took the time to admire his body, always an object of pride for Domingo Chavez. Yeah, the exercise that had been so tough the first week had paid off. He hadn’t been much tougher than this in Ranger School at Fort Benning—and he’d been, what? Twenty-one then, just an E-4 and one of the smallest men in the class. It was something of an annoyance to Ding that, tall and rangy like her mom, Patsy had half an inch on him. But Patsy only wore flats, which kept it respectable—and nobody messed with him. Like his boss, he had the look of a man with whom one did not trifle. Especially this morning, he thought, while toweling off. He’d zapped a guy the previous night, just as fast and automatic an action as zipping his zipper. Tough shit, Herr Guttenach.

Back home, Patsy was already dressed in her greens. She was on an OB/GYN rotation at the moment, scheduled to perform—well, to assist on—a Cesarean section this morning at the local hospital where she was completing what in America would have been her year of internship. Next would be her pediatric rotation, which struck both of them as totally appropriate. Already on the table for him was bacon and eggs—the eggs in England seemed to have brighter yolks. He wondered if they fed their chickens differently here.

“I wish you’d eat better,” Patsy observed, again.

Domingo laughed, reaching for his morning paper, the
Daily Telegraph.
“Honey, my cholesterol is one-three-zero, my resting heart-rate is fifty-six. I am a lean, mean fighting machine, doctor!”

“But what about ten years from now?” Patricia Chavez, M.D., asked.