Rainbow Six (1997) (79 page)

 

 

Getting the weapons was the easiest part. It struck outsiders as comical—Irishmen with guns were like squirrels with nuts, always stashing them, and sometimes forgetting where the hell they’d been stashed. For a generation, people had shipped arms to the IRA, and the IRA had cached them, mainly burying them for the coming time when the entire Irish nation would rise up under Provo leadership and engage the English invaders, driving them forever from the sacred soil of Ireland . . . or something like that, Grady thought. He’d personally buried over three thousand weapons, most of them Russian-made AKMS assault rifles, like this stash in a farm field in County Tipperary. He’d buried this shipment forty meters west of a large oak tree, over the hill from the farmhouse. They were two meters—six feet—down, deep enough that the farmer’s tractor wouldn’t hurt or accidentally unearth them, and shallow enough that getting them took only an hour’s spadework. There were a hundred of them, delivered in 1984 by a helpful soul he’d first met in Lebanon, along with pre-loaded plastic magazines, twenty per rifle. It was all in a series of boxes, the weapons and the ammunition wrapped in greased paper, the way the Russians did it, to protect them against moisture. Most of the wrappings were still intact, Grady saw, as he selected carefully. He removed twenty weapons, tearing open each one’s paper to check for rust or corrosion, working the bolts back and forth, and in every case finding that the packing grease was intact, the same as when the weapons had left the factory at Kazan. The AKMS was the updated version of the AK-47, and these were the folding-stock version, which were much easier to conceal than the full-size military shoulder weapon. More to the point, this was the weapon his people had trained on in Lebanon. It was easy to use, reliable, and concealable. Those characteristics made it perfect for the purpose intended. The fifteen he took, along with three hundred thirty-round magazines, were loaded into the back of the truck, and then it was time to refill the hole. After three hours, the truck was on its way to yet another farm, this one on the seacoast of County Cork, where there lived a farmer with whom Sean Grady had an arrangement.

 

 

Sullivan and Chatham were in the office before seven in the morning, beating the traffic and finding decent parking places for once. The first order of business was to use a computerized crisscross directory to track down the names and addresses from the phone numbers. That was quick. Next up was to meet with the three men who were reported to have known Mary Bannister and Anne Pretloe and interview them. It was possible that one of them was a serial killer or kidnapper. If the first, he would probably be a very clever and circumspect criminal. A serial killer was a hunter of human beings. The smart ones acted strangely like soldiers, first scouting out their victims, discerning their habits and weaknesses, and then moving in to use them as entertaining toys until the fun faded, and it was time to kill them. The homicide aspects of a serial killer’s activities were not, strictly speaking, in the purview of the FBI, but the kidnapping was, if the killer had moved his victims across state lines, and since there was a state line only a few hundred yards from Manhattan, that was enough to allow the agents to look into it. They’d have to ask their questions carefully, and remember that a serial killer almost always had an elegant disguise, the better to win the trust of his victims. He’d be kind, maybe handsome, friendly, and totally nonthreatening—until it was too late, and at that point his victim was doomed. He was, both agents knew, the most dangerous of criminals.

 

 

Subject F4 was progressing rapidly. Neither the Interferon nor the Interleukin-3a had touched her Shiva strands, which were replicating with gusto, and in her case attacking her liver with ferocious speed. The same was true of her pancreas, which was disintegrating, causing a serious internal bleed. Strange, Dr. Killgore thought. The Shiva had taken its time to assert itself, but then once it had started affecting the test subject’s body, it had gone to town, eating away like a glutton at a feast. Mary Bannister, he decided, had about five days left.

M7, Chip Smitton, was little better off. His immune system was doing its best, but Shiva was just too malignant for him, working more slowly than in F4, but just as inexorably.

F5, Anne Pretloe, was from the deep end of the gene pool. He’d bothered to take full medical histories of all the current crop of test subjects. Bannister had a family history of cancer—breast cancer had claimed her mother and grandmother, and he saw that Shiva was working rapidly in her. Might there be a correlation between vulnerability to cancer and infectious disease? Could that indicate that cancer was fundamentally a disease of the immune system, as many physician-scientists suspected? It was the stuff of a paper for the
New England Journal of Medicine,
might get himself some additional standing in his community—but he didn’t have the time, and anyway, by the time he published, there’d be few to read it. Well, it would be something to talk about in Kansas, because they’d still be practicing medicine there, and still working on the Immortality Project. Most of Horizon’s best medical researchers were not really part of the Project, but they couldn’t kill
them,
could they? And so, like many others, they’d find themselves beneficiaries of the Project’s largesse. They would be allowing far more people than necessary to live—oh, sure, they needed the genetic diversity, and why not pick smart people who’d eventually understand why the Project had done what it had? And even if they didn’t, what choice would they have but to live? All of them were earmarked for the -B vaccine Steve Berg had developed along with the lethal -A variant. In any case, his speculation had scientific value, even though it was singularly useless for the test subjects who now filled every available room in the treatment area. Killgore gathered his notes and started rounds, beginning with F4, Mary Bannister.

Only the heavy morphine dose made life tolerable for her. The dosage might have killed a healthy person, and would have been enough to delight the most hardened IV-drug user.

“How are we feeling this morning?” the doctor asked brightly.

“Tired . . . weak . . . crummy,” Mary Bannister replied.

“How’s the pain, Mary?”

“It’s there, but not so bad . . . mainly my stomach.” Her face was deathly pale from the internal bleeding, and the petechiae were sufficiently prominent on her face that she couldn’t be allowed to use a mirror, lest the sight panic her. They wanted all the subjects to die comfortably. It would be far less trouble for everyone that way—a kindness not shown to other test subjects, Killgore thought. It wasn’t fair, but it was practical. The lower animals they tested didn’t have the capacity to make trouble, and there were no useful data on how to medicate them against pain. Maybe he’d develop some in Kansas. That would be a worthy use of his abilities, he thought, as he made another upward adjustment in F4’s morphine drip . . . just enough to . . . yes, make her stuporous. He could show her the mercy he would have liked to have shown rhesus monkeys. Would they do animal experimentation in Kansas? There would be practical difficulties. Getting the animals to the labs would be very difficult in the absence of international air-freight service, and then there was the aesthetic issue. Many of the project members would not approve, and they had a point. But, damn it, it was
hard
to develop drugs and treatment modalities without
some
animal testing. Yes, Killgore thought, leaving one treatment room for another, it was tough on the conscience, but scientific progress had a price, and they
were
saving literally millions of animals, weren’t they? They’d needed thousands of animals to develop Shiva, and nobody had really objected to that. Another subject for discussion at the staff conference, he decided, entering M7’s room.

“How are we feeling, Chip?” he asked.

 

 

They collectively thanked Providence for the lack of Garda in this part of County Cork. There was little crime, after all, and therefore little reason for them. The Irish national police were as efficient as their British colleagues, and their intelligence section unfortunately cooperated with the “Five” people in London, but neither service had managed to find Sean Grady—at least not after he’d identified and eliminated the informers in his cell. Both of them had vanished from the face of the earth and fed the salmon, or whatever fish liked the taste of informer flesh. Grady remembered the looks on their faces as they protested their innocence right up until the moment they’d been thrown into the sea, fifteen miles offshore, with iron weights on their legs. Protested their innocence? Then why had the SAS never troubled his cell again after three serious attempts to eliminate them all? Innocence be damned.

They had half-filled a delightful provincial pub called The Foggy Dew, named after a favored rebel song, after several hours of weapons practice on the isolated coastal farm, which was too far from civilization for people to hear the distinctive chatter of automatic-weapons fire. It had required a few magazines each for his men to reassert their expertise with the AKMS assault rifles, but shoulder weapons were easily mastered, and that one more easily than most. Now they talked about nonbusiness matters, just a bunch of friends having a few pints. Most watched the football game on the wall-hung telly. Grady did the same, but with his brain in neutral, letting it slide over the next mission, examining and reexamining the scene in his mind, thinking about how quickly the British or this new Rainbow group might arrive. The direction of their approach was obvious. He had that all planned for, and the more he went over his operational concept, the better he seemed to like it. He might well lose some people, but that was the cost of doing business for the revolutionary, and looking around the pub at his people, he knew that they accepted the risks just as readily as he did.

He checked his watch, subtracted five hours, and reached into his pocket to turn on his cell phone. He did this three times per day, never leaving it on for more than ten minutes at a time, as a security measure. He had to be careful. Only that knowledge—and some luck, he admitted to himself—had allowed him to carry on the war this long. Two minutes later, it rang. Grady rose from his seat and walked outside to take the call.

“Hello.”

“Sean, this is Joe.”

“Hello, Joe,” Grady said pleasantly. “How are things in Switzerland?”

“Actually, I’m in New York at the moment. I just wanted to tell you that the business thing we talked about, the financing, it’s done,” Popov told him.

“Excellent. What of the other matter, Joe?”

“I’ll be bringing that myself. I’ll be over in two days. I’m flying into Shannon on my business jet. I should get in about six-thirty in the morning.”

“I shall be there to see you,” Grady promised.

“Okay, my friend. I will see you then.”

“Good-bye, Joe.”

“Bye, Sean.” And the line went dead. Grady thumbed off the power and replaced the phone in his pocket. If anyone had overheard it—not likely, since he could see all the way to the horizon, and there were no parked trucks in evidence . . . and, besides, if anyone knew where he was, they would have come after him and his men with a platoon of soldiers and/or police—all they would have heard was a business chat, brief, cryptic, and to the point. He went back inside.

“Who was it, Sean?” Roddy Sands asked.

“That was Joe,” Grady replied. “He’s done what we asked. So, I suppose we get to move forward as well.”

“Indeed.” Roddy hoisted his pint glass in salute.

 

 

The Security Service, once called MI (Military Intelligence) 5, had lived for more than a generation with two high-profile missions. One was to keep track of Soviet penetration agents within the British government—a regrettably busy mission, since the KGB and its antecedents had more than once penetrated British security. At one point, they’d almost gotten their agent-in-place Kim Philby in charge of “Five,” thus nearly giving the Soviets control of the British counterintelligence service, a miscue that still sent a collective shiver throughout “Five.” The second mission was the penetration of the Irish Republican Army and other Irish terrorist groups, the better to identify their leaders and eliminate them, for this war was fought by the old rules. Sometimes, police were called in to make arrests, and other times, SAS commandos were deployed to handle things more directly. The differences in technique had resulted from the inability of Her Majesty’s Government to decide if the “Irish Problem” was a matter of crime or national security—the result of that indecision had been the lengthening of “The Troubles” by at least a decade, in the view of the American FBI.

But the employees of “Five” didn’t have the ability to make policy. That was done by elected officials, who often as not failed to listen to the trained experts who’d spent their lives handling such matters. Without the ability to make or affect policy, they soldiered on, assembling and maintaining voluminous records of known and suspected IRA operatives for eventual action by other government agencies.

This was done mainly by recruiting informers. Informing on one’s comrades was another old Irish tradition, and one that the British had long exploited for their own ends. They speculated on its origins. Part of it, they all thought, was religion. The IRA regarded itself as the protector of
Catholic
Irishmen, and with that identification came a price: the rules and ethics of Catholicism often spilled over into the hearts and minds of people who killed in the name of their religious affiliation. One of the things that spilled over was guilt. On the one hand, guilt was an inevitable result of their revolutionary activity, and on the other hand, it was the one thing they could not afford to entertain in their own consciences.

“Five” had a thick file on Sean Grady, as they did for many others. Grady’s was special, though, since they’d once had a particularly well-placed informer in his unit who had, unfortunately, disappeared, doubtless murdered by him. They knew that Grady had given up kneecapping early on and chosen murder as a more permanent way of dealing with security leaks, and one that never left bodies about for the police to find. “Five” had twenty-three informants currently working in various PIRA units. Four were women of looser morality than was usual in Ireland. The other nineteen were men who’d been recruited one way or another—though three of them didn’t know that they were sharing secrets with British agents. The Security Service did its collective best to protect them, and more than a few had been taken to England after their usefulness had been exhausted, then flown to Canada, usually, for a new, safer life. But in the main “Five” treated them as assets to be milked for as long as possible, because the majority of them were people who’d killed or assisted others in killing, and that made them both criminals and traitors, whose consciences had been just a little too late to encourage much in the way of sympathy from the case officers who “worked” them.