Covert One 2 - The Cassandra Compact (10 page)

Howell did.

“Does the name Dionetti mean anything to you?”

Nichols shook his head. His eyes were glassy.

Howell knew that no one except Marco Dionetti--- the man who had opened his home and extended him his friendship--- knew that he was traveling to Palermo. Dionetti... with whom he would have to have a little chat.

“How were you to report that this mission was successful?” Howell asked Nichols.

“Drop off a message at another post office box--- no later than noon tomorrow. Number sixty-seven. Someone will come by.... Oh, Christ, it hurts!”

Howell brought his face very close to Nichols's lips. He needed one last thing from Nichols, and prayed that the soldier had enough strength left to give it up. He strained to hear as the soldier finally let slip his most precious secrets. Then he heard the soft gurgle of the death rattle.

Leaving the lamp where it was, Howell took a moment to compose himself. Finally he hoisted the corpse and dropped it over the side of the well. Quickly, so that he wouldn't have to listen to the rats, he pushed the heavy lid in place and locked it down.

___________________

CHAPTER

___________________

At first glance, the Bioaparat complex might have been mistaken for a small college campus. The slate-roofed, red-brick buildings were accented with white-trimmed doors and windows, and were connected to one another by flagstone walks. Dew sparkled in the grass beneath old-fashioned carriage lamps. There were several quadrangles with stone benches and precut concrete tables where employees could enjoy lunch or a game of chess.

The effect was slightly less bucolic during the day, when it was easy to see the razor wire topping the twelve-foot-high concrete wall encircling the compound. Then as now, guard patrols with machine guns and Dobermans were visible. Inside some of the buildings was more elaborate, sophisticated security.

There was a reason why no expense had been spared when it came to Bioaparat's appearance: the facility was open to international bioweapons inspectors. The consulting psychologists had recommended that the facility evoke a warm, familiar environment that was nonthreatening yet that commanded a level of respect. Many designs had been studied; in the end, a campus layout had been chosen. The psychologists had argued that most of the inspectors were or once had been academics. They would feel comfortable in such surroundings, which spoke of pure, benevolent research. Having been put at ease, the inspectors would be more likely to allow themselves to be guided along, rather than play medical detectives.

The psychologists had been right: the multinational teams who had visited Bioaparat were impressed as much by the ambience as by the state-of-the-art facilities. The illusion was fostered by familiarity. Almost all the equipment at Bioaparat had come from the West: American microscopes, French ovens and test tubes, German reactors, and Japanese fermenters. The inspectors associated such tools with specific research, primarily into Brucella melintensis, a bacterium that preys on livestock, and a milk protein called casein, which stimulates high growth in various seeds. Scores of workers dressed in starched white lab coats going about their business in pristine laboratories completed the desired effect. Having been lulled by the sense of order and efficiency, the inspectors were prepared to take what they saw in Building 103 at face value.

Building 103 was a Zone Two structure, built along the lines of a matryoshka doll. If the roof were removed, one would see a box-within-a-box complex. The outermost shell was reserved for administrative and security personnel who were directly responsible for the safekeeping of the smallpox samples. The first of the two inner shells was a “hot” area that contained animal cages, specially designed labs for work with pathogens, and giant, sixteen-ton fermenters. The second shell, the actual kernel, held not only the vaultlike refrigerator where the smallpox was stored, but rows of stainless steel centrifuges and drying and milling machines. There, experiments designed to ferret out the mystery of Variola major were conducted. The nature of the tests, their duration, the amount of smallpox used, and the results all were tabulated in a computer that only the international inspection teams could access. Such safeguards had been designed to prevent unauthorized use of smallpox in experiments such as gene splicing or replication.

The inspection teams had never found evidence of anything other than approved research in Building 103. Their reports praised the Russian scientists for their attempts to discover whether or not smallpox might hide the key to diseases that still plagued mankind. Finally, after reviewing the formidable security arrangements--- which relied almost exclusively on electronic and video surveillance, and so kept the need for human beings to a minimum--- the inspectors signed off on the integrity of Building 103. After all, not so much as a gram of variola had ever been unaccounted for.

__________

Russian President Potrenko's call to the Special Forces training unit outside Vladimir was logged in at 1:03 A.M. Six minutes later, one of the duty officers was knocking on the door to Colonel Vassily Kravchenko's cottage. At half past the hour, Kravchenko was in his office, listening to Potrenko's detailed orders to install an undetectable quarantine that would seal Bioaparat from the outside world.

A short, stocky man, Kravchenko was a veteran of Afghanistan, Chechnya, and other places where his Special Forces had been sent. Wounded in action, he'd been relieved of active duty and sent to Vladimir to oversee the training of new recruits. After hearing what Potrenko had to say, the timing of the call gratified him: he had two hundred soldiers who had just completed their field exercises. With them, he could seal off the entire town of Vladimir, much less the Bioaparat complex.

Kravchenko answered Potrenko's questions quickly and succinctly, assuring him that within the hour, he could have his men in position. No one inside the compound or in the town would be any the wiser.

“Mr. President,” he said. “What are my exact orders if someone attempts to exit Bioaparat after the quarantine is in place?”

“Give one warning, Colonel. Only one. If he resists or attempts to escape, use of deadly force is hereby authorized. I need not remind you why.”

“No, Mr. President.”

Kravchenko was all too familiar with the hellish concoctions stored in the ultrasecret holds of Bioaparat. He had also witnessed chemical warfare in Afghanistan, and its results were indelibly printed on his memory.

“I will execute your directive as ordered, Mr. President.”

“And I will expect to hear from you when the cordon is in place, Colonel.”

__________

While Kravchenko and Potrenko were finishing their call, Lieutenant Grigori Yardeni of the Bioaparat Security Detail (BSD) was in his office in Building 103. He was watching the bank of closed-circuit television monitors when the cell phone in his pocket went off.

The voice was garbled by a synthesizer and sounded like a strangled whisper. “Do it now. And prepare to use the Option Two. Do you understand?”

Yardeni managed to get the words out, barely: “Option Two.”

He sat there for a moment, frozen by the implications of what he'd just heard. So many nights he had imagined receiving the call that now, having come, it seemed unreal.

You've been waiting your whole life for this chance. Get on with it!

There were sixty cameras situated throughout Zones One and Two, all of them hooked up to video players. The machines themselves were in a fireproof cabinet equipped with a time lock that could be opened only at the end of a shift, and only by Yardeni's superiors. In addition, the video players were absolutely tamperproof. Yardeni had long ago realized that he had no options as to how to carry out the theft.

The lieutenant was a strapping young man, well over six feet, with curly blond hair and chiseled features. He was a favorite at the Little Boy Blue cabaret, a male strip club in Vladimir. Every Tuesday and Thursday, Yardeni and a few other BSD officers rubbed baby oil over their bulked-up frames and gyrated in front of screaming women. They made more money in those few hours than in a month working for the state.

But Yardem had always had bigger ambitions. A fanatical devotee of action films, his favorite star was Arnold Schwarzenegger, except that he was getting a little too old. Yardeni thought there was no reason why someone with his looks and physique couldn't replace Arnold. He'd heard that Hollywood was a mecca for tough, goodlooking hustlers with attitude.

For the past three years, Yardeni had been scheming to get to the West. A problem he had in common with thousands of other Russians was money: not only for the prohibitive exit taxes and air tickets, but enough to live on afterward. Yardeni had seen pictures of Bel Air; he had no intention of arriving in Los Angeles penniless, forced to live in the Russian-immigrant ghetto.

The lieutenant checked the clock above his desk and rose, his military-style tunic straining across his chest. It was after one o'clock, that time of night when the body is in its deepest slumber, when it is most vulnerable to death. Except for the human and animal patrols outside and the security inside, Bioaparat, too, slept.

Yardeni reviewed the procedures he already knew by heart, then steadied himself and opened the door. As he made his way through Zone One, he thought about the man who'd approached him almost a year ago. Contact had been made at the Little Boy Blue, and at first he had thought that the man, one of the very few in the audience, was a homosexual. That impression lasted only until the man revealed just how much he knew about Yardeni's life. He described his parents and sister, detailed his high school and army careers, how Yardeni had been his division's boxing champion only to be cashiered when in a fit of rage, he had almost killed a fellow soldier with his bare fists. The man had commented that for all intents and purposes, Yardeni's career would flatline here in Bioaparat, where he would sit daydreaming about what might have been while baby-sitting those who actually got to go to the shining cities.

Of course, one could always change one's destiny....

Trying not to think about the cameras, Yardem proceeded to Zone Two through a corridor that was referred to as a “sanitary passageway.” It was really a progression of small, sterile rooms linked by connecting doors equipped with coded locks. The locks did not hinder Yardeni; he had a key card and the master codes.

Entering the first cubicle, a changing room, he stripped and hit the red button on the wall. A fine decontamination mist enveloped him.

The next three cubicles held separate items of the antiplague suit: blue socks and long underwear; a hood and cotton smock; the respirator, goggles, booties, and safety glasses. Before leaving the last changing room, Yardeni reached for something that he had put in a locker at the beginning of his shift: a brushed aluminum Thermos-type container, the size of a flask.

He lifted the container in his gloved hand. It was a marvel of engineering. From the outside, it appeared to be nothing more than an expensive Western toy, functional but overly extravagant. Even if one unscrewed the top and looked inside, nothing would seem amiss. Only when the base was twisted counterclockwise would the container reveal its secret.

Carefully, Yardeni inched the base around until he heard the click. Inside the double walls, tiny canisters released their contents of nitrogen. Immediately, the container became cold to the touch, like a glass filled with shaved ice.

Slipping it into the pocket of his antiplague suit, Yardeni opened the door to the Zone Two lab. Inside, he made his way past stainless-steel worktables to what the researchers jokingly referred to as the Coke machine. It was actually a walk-in refrigerator with a door of specially constructed, hermetically sealed Plexiglas. It always reminded Yardeni of the bulletproof barriers at the cashiers' booths in the American Express office.

He slipped the coded key card into the slot, punched in the combination, and listened to the long, slow hiss as the door swung back. Three seconds later, it closed behind him.

Pulling open one of the drawers, Yardeni gazed down at row after row of vials made of tempered glass. Working quickly, he unscrewed the container at its midsection and placed the top half to one side. Set in the base were six slots, much like the chambers of a revolver. He placed one ampoule into each of the slots, then replaced the top section, making sure that it was tightly in place.

Using his key card, he exited the Coke machine and made his way out of the lab. The procedure in the changing rooms was reversed as he deposited parts of the suit into burn bags. After a second decontamination mist, he was ready to get dressed, except that this time he changed into casual clothes--- jeans, sweatshirt, and a baggy parka.

A few minutes later, Yardeni was outside, breathing deeply in the night air. A cigarette steadied him. Option Two, the voice had said. That meant something had gone wrong. Instead of Yardeni choosing his moment to purloin the variola, he had had to take it now. And quickly, too, because for some reason Moscow had become suspicious.

Yardeni knew all about the Special Forces command outside Vladimir. He'd befriended some of the trainees in town bars; they were tough and capable, not the kind of men that even he would ever want to tangle with. But the rounds of vodka had bought him valuable information. He knew exactly what kind of exercises the Special Forces went through and how long it took to execute them.

Yardeni crushed his cigarette under his boot and began walking away from Building 103, headed for one of the guard posts on the perimeter. Tonight, as every night for the past month, comrades from his old army unit would staff it. Yardeni would tell them he was going off-shift; they would joke that he could still do the last show at the Little Boy Blue. And if someone bothered to check the computerized roster, let him.

__________

For the past fifty minutes, Kravchenko had been working swiftly and silently. No lights had gone on in the training ground, no alarms had sounded. His soldiers were rousted and assembled under the cover of darkness. As soon as the troops had been mustered, the first armored personnel carriers rumbled through the gates. Kravchenko couldn't do anything about the engine noise and didn't pay it any mind. Both the citizens of Vladimir and the Bioaparat employees who worked the evening shifts were used to nighttime military exercises.

Riding in the command APC, Kravchenko guided his column down the two-lane highway that led out of his compound. His orders had been clear; if a traitor was on-site, he would be surrounded. The one thing Kravchenko, an eminently practical man, could guarantee was that no one could break the quarantine.