“How quickly?”
“Balls-out.”
“Uh.” His fingers slammed on his auxiliary keyboard, the computer doing the number crunching.
“I can get you there in forty-nine minutes, but we’ll have to self-destruct right after we shoot.”
“Set it up. We’re just decrypting an intercept that they’re moving the shipment up.” She paused, doing her own calculations. “You’ll have only ten minutes to spare.”
“Okay. Listen, we’re going to need a precise target,” he told her, bringing up the greater Moscow area on the GPSASSISTED map screen. “I may be able to shave a minute off, depending on where we’re going.”
“Botkin Hospital. I’ll have a precise map for you in a few moments, with index numbers for your target.”
“Hospital?” said Malachi.
“The order is nine-thirteen-oh-three. I need you to acknowledge it and add your personal voice code.”
91
There was a guard in the hall and another on the door. Karr decided his best bet was the window.
The only problem was the window was twenty stories above the ground.
He knocked on the door of apartment 22D, directly above the one where Bai had told him Kegan was holed up. To his surprise, the door opened immediately.
“Hello,” he told the old woman who answered. “I’m here to wash the windows.”
He walked inside as the woman stood at the door looking at him, dumbfounded — obviously she didn’t speak English, much less need to have her windows cleaned.
Karr pulled off his backpack and pointed to the window.
“Got to take a look at it,” he told her.
The woman began talking to him in Thai. Karr ignored her, walking to the large plate glass window at the far end of the living room.
“Double-insulated. Figures.” He nodded at her, then took out the souped-up RotoZip cordless drill from his pack. The diamond tip on the bit quickly made it through the glass; he moved down as if he were working with a piece of plasterboard. He reached the bottom and turned left.
“Torque on these suckers makes it hard to get a perfect straight line, you know?” he said cheerfully. “But we’re in a little bit of a hurry here.”
As he turned the comer up, the bit broke.
“I hate that,” he said, pulling the drill out. “Don’t you hate that?”
The woman reached and picked up the phone.
“You got the phone, right, Rockman?”
“Cho’s taking the call right now.”
“Yeah, well, double-check, okay? You told me there was no one in this apartment.”
“Sorry. The image from the Kite looked clean.”
“You check on our guy?”
“I’m looking at the thermal image right now,” said Rockman. The feed was coming from a Kite robot aircraft Karr had launched before coming upstairs.
“You sure?”
“Yeah, I’m sure. Smile.”
Karr waved out the window at the Kite, then went back to work. He intended on using a suction gripper to pull the glass piece inside and left the right comer intact. But before he could put the gripper on — the device looked like the plunger end of a plumber’s helper — the glass broke and fell, fortunately into an open courtyard.
The old woman was now talking into the telephone to a translator at the Art Room, who was telling her that the “odd white giant” who had invaded her house was looking for marauding insects. Karr, meanwhile, set an anchor in the wall. He tugged, then tugged again.
“Ready for me?” he asked Rockman.
“Let’s go for it.”
Tommy edged through the window space, holding on to the ledge. The Kite, meanwhile, swooped below, zooming against the window of 20D. As it hit, the small charge of explosive in its nose exploded. Karr dropped the twenty feet or so to the window so quickly that he found himself in a cloud of dust as he kicked out the rest of the window and dropped inside.
“Your right, your right,” Rockman coached in his ear.
Karr swung up his A-2 as the door opened. The guard got off one shot before the fusillade of bullets from Tommy’s gun carried him back out into the hallway, dead. By the time Karr got out there, the other man had fled.
“He’s in the apartment, on the left. Alone,” said Rockman. But Karr had already seen Dr. Kegan, sitting with a blanket pulled around him in the large chair at the side of the room.
“Who are you?” asked Kegan calmly when Karr returned.
Karr stretched his arms and shoulders and began pulling off his knapsack. “Name’s Kjartan Magnor Karr. Most people, though, call me Tommy. Kind of a long story why.”
“How’d you find me?”
“I had some help. You missed your meeting, Doctor. CDC and FBI guys were worried about you.”
“Couldn’t be avoided.”
“That go for the rat-bite fever, too?”
Kegan frowned.
“Why’d you sell it?” asked Karr.
“I ran out of money.”
Karr pulled over a chair and sat down.
“Want to talk to me about it?” asked Karr.
“Not really.”
“Might as well, though.” Karr pointed at his stomach. “Pancreatic cancer?”
“How do you know about that?”
“Well, a friend of yours mentioned it. But he was under the impression it was cured.”
Kegan gave him a funny smile.
“You really don’t cure that, do you? One of our doctors mentioned there really isn’t a cure. Sooner or later you die. Sooner, right? You’ve lasted a long time.”
“I’m right in the probability curve,” said Kegan. “Funny how those things work.”
“You found out eighteen months ago.”
“Twenty-four. At first I did the treatments, you know? Not really because I thought they would work. Just because I didn’t know what else to do.”
“You came here for a cure?”
“No. Not really.”
Karr nodded. “So you wanted to take care of the people who’d killed your girlfriend in the seventies. Long time to hold a grudge.”
“They changed my life. They ruined it.” Kegan shifted in the chair, drawing his legs up under him. He’d lost a great deal of weight recently; the skin hung off his face. “Though I suppose it’s at least spared her this, seeing me waste away.”
“Sucks.”
“You don’t know the half of it. I can’t eat. I can barely drink.”
“Actually, I do know the feeling. Or at least something like it. I caught your disease.”
Kegan stared at him for a moment, trying to see if he was telling the truth or not. “You caught it?”
“From your cat.”
“Oh, Jesus.”
