Porsche, using a custom van, and on the Route 50 bridge they'd pulled off a sweet little ambush, and later killed a state trooper in their escape. Dr. Ryan had been pregnant with SHORTSTOP then. SANDBOX had been far off into a future yet undreamed of at the time. All of this had a strange effect on Special Agent Marcella Hilton. Unmarried, again—she was twice divorced, with no kids of her own—being around kids had made her heart flutter a little, tough professional that she was. She figured it was part of her hormones, or the way the female brain was wired, or maybe she just liked kids and wished she had one of her own. Whatever it was, the thought that people would deliberately hurt little kids made her blood chill for a brief moment, like a blast of cold wind that came and went.
This place was too vulnerable. And there really were people out there who didn't care a rat's ass about hurting kids. And that 7-Eleven was still there. There were six agents on the SANDBOX detail now. That would be down to three or four in a couple of weeks. The Service wasn't the all-powerful agency people thought it was. Oh, sure, it had a lot of muscle, and investigative clout which few suspected. Alone of the federal police forces, the United States Secret Service could knock on somebody's door and walk in and conduct a «friendly» interview with someone who might represent a threat—an assumption based on evidence which might or might not be usable in a court of law. The purpose of such an interview would be to let the person know that he or she had an eye fixed firmly on him or her, and though that wasn't strictly true—the Service had only about 1,200 agents nationwide—the mere thought of it was enough to scare the hell out of people who'd said the wrong thing into the wrong ear.
But those people weren't the threat. As long as the agents did their job correctly, the casual threat wasn't a deadly one. Those people almost always tipped their hand, and people like her knew what to look for. It was the ones their intelligence division didn't hear about who constituted the real threat. Those could be deterred somewhat through a massive show of force, but the massive show was too expensive, too oppressive, too obvious not to attract notice and adverse comment. Even then—she remembered another event, months after the near death of SURGEON, SHADOW, and the yet unborn SHORTSTOP. A whole squad, she thought. It was a case study at the Secret Service Academy at Beltsville. The Ryan house had been used to film a re-creation of the event. Chuck Avery—a good, experienced supervisory agent—and his whole squad taken out. As a rookie she'd watched the taped analysis of what had gone wrong, and even then she'd chilled at how easy it had been for that team to make a small mistake, that to be compounded by bad luck and bad timing….
'Yeah, I know.' She turned to see Don Russell, sipping from a plastic coffee cup while he got some fresh air. Another agent was on post inside.
'Did you know Avery?'
'He was two years ahead of me at the academy. He was smart, and careful, and a damned good shot. He dropped one of the bad guys then, in the dark from thirty yards, two rounds in the chest.' A shake of the head. 'You don't make little mistakes in this business, Marci.'
That is when the second chill came, the one that made you want to reach for your weapon, just to be sure that it was there, to tell yourself that you were ready to get the job done. That's when you remembered, in this case, how cute a little kid could be, and how even if you took the hits you'd make damned sure your last conscious act on the planet would be to put every round through the bastard's X-ring. Then you blinked, and the image went away.
'She's a beautiful little girl, Don.'
'I've rarely seen an ugly one,' Russell agreed. This was the time when one was supposed to say, Don't worry, we'll take good care of her. But they didn't say that. They didn't even think it. Instead they looked around at the highway and the trees and the 7-Eleven across Ritchie Highway, wondering what they'd missed, and wondering how much money they could spend on surveillance cameras.
GEORGE WINSTON WAS used to being met. It was the ultimate perk, really. You got off the airplane—almost always an airplane in his case—and there was somebody to meet you and take you to the car whose driver knew the quickest way to where you were going. No hassles with Hertz and figuring the useless little maps out, and getting lost. It cost a lot of money, but it was worth it, because time was the ultimate commodity, and you were born with only so much to spend, and there was no passbook to tell you the exact amount. The Metroliner pulled into Union Station's track 6. He'd gotten some reading done, and had himself a nice nap between Trenton and Baltimore. A pity the railroad couldn't make money carrying passengers, but you didn't have to buy air to fly in. while it was necessary to build a right-of-way for ground transport. Too bad. He collected his coat and briefcase and headed for the door, tipping the first-class attendant on the way out.
'Mr. Winston?' a man asked.
'That's right.' The man held up a leather ID holder, identifying himself as a federal agent. He had a partner, Winston noted, standing thirty feet away with his topcoat unbuttoned.
'Follow me, please, sir.' With that they were merely three more busy people heading off to an important meeting.
THERE WERE MANY such dossiers, each of them so large that the data had to be edited so as not to overflow the file cabinets, and it was still more convenient to do it with paper than a computer, because it was hard to get a computer that worked well in his native language. Checking up on the data would not be difficult. For one thing, there would be more press coverage to confirm or alter what he had. For another, he could confirm a lot very simply, merely by having a car drive past a few places once or twice, or by observing roads. There was little danger in that. However careful and thorough the American Secret
Service might be, they were not omnipotent. This Ryan fellow had a family, a wife who worked, children who went to school; and Ryan himself had a schedule he had to keep. In their official home they were safe—reasonably so, he corrected himself, since no fixed place was ever truly safe—but that safety did not follow them everywhere, did it?
It was more than anything else a matter of financing and planning. He needed a sponsor.
'HOW MANY DO you need?' the dealer asked.
'How many do you have?' the prospective buyer asked.
'I can get eighty, certainly. Perhaps a hundred,' the dealer thought aloud, sipping at his beer.
'When?'
'A week will suffice?' They were in Nairobi, capital of Kenya, and a major center for this particular trade. 'Biological research?'
'Yes, my client's scientists have a rather interesting project under way.'
'What project might that be?' the dealer asked.
'That I am not at liberty to say,' was the not unexpected answer. Nor would he say who his client was. The dealer didn't react, and didn't particularly care. His curiosity was human, not professional. 'If your services are satisfactory, we may be back for more.' The usual enticement. The dealer nodded and commenced the substantive bargaining.
'You must understand that this is not an inexpensive undertaking. I must assemble my people. They must find a small population of the creature you desire. There are the problems of capture and transport, export licenses, the usual bureaucratic difficulties.' By which he meant bribes. Trade in African green monkeys had picked up in the last few years. Quite a few companies used them for various experimental purposes. That was generally bad for the monkeys, but there were a lot of monkeys. The African green was in no way endangered, and even if they were, the dealer didn't especially care. Animals were a national resource for his country, as oil was for the Arabs, to be marketed for hard currency. He didn't get sentimental about them. They bit and spat, and were generally unpleasant little beggars, «cute» though they might appear to the tourists at Treetops. They also ate the crops tended by the numerous small farmers in the country, and were thoroughly detested for that reason, whatever the game wardens might say.
'These problems are not strictly our concern. Speed is. You will find that we are willing to reward you handsomely in return for reliable service.'
'Ah.' The dealer finished his beer, and, lifting his hand, snapped his fingers for a refill. He named his price. It included his overhead, pay to the gatherers, the customs people, a policeman or two, and a mid-level government bureaucrat, plus his own net profit, which in the terms of the local economy was actually quite fair, he thought. Not everyone did.
'Agreed,' the buyer said without so much as a sip of his soft drink.
It was almost a disappointment. The dealer enjoyed haggling, so much a part of the African marketplace. He'd scarcely begun to depose on how difficult and involved his business was.
