Just like poor Hamad Suseel of Palestine. Brought over to the United States for one purpose, to raid the offices of Tiger Team Five. Things had been too quiet the past several months. She needed something to shake up the increasing complacency, to make the higher-ups and her own Tiger Team members fearful of the hard-core men out there who wanted to kill for the sake of their God.
Of course she felt bad about the deaths in Connecticut. Two of the Tiger Team members she had counted as friends.
But it had had to be done.
Just like now, with what was going to happen to the men from Bali, Britain and Pakistan.
Adrianna wrote up a file protocol, with information and JPEG photos of the three, plus their home addresses and habits. All placed into a file which was compressed and encoded.
There. Done.
She disconnected the laptop’s power cord, picked the machine up, and left the cubbyhole underneath the stairs. Walking back out to the cellar, she left the door open and walked upstairs, carrying the laptop, her bathrobe still fastened around her waist.
Now she was in the small dining room where she had dined the other night with Brian, that good-looking, interesting young man from—-
Cut it out, she thought harshly. No time for that.
She placed the laptop on the table, moved the screen around so she could look at it properly.
Took a breath.
Pressed a key.
A quick dialogue box appeared.
FILE TRANSFER COMPLETED.
There. It was now in somebody else’s capable hands. Just a second or two earlier, a compressed chunk of data had been uplinked from her CIA laptop to a satellite 23,000 miles overhead in geosynchronous orbit. The transmission had lasted less than a second, if that. Any type of surveillance being conducted at her home — quite unlikely — would have registered, if the watchers were very, very lucky, a tiny burst of static. That would’ve been all. But the data package squirted up to the CIA satellite had been received and the information was being extracted and expanded, and with the proper code phrases and authorizations the data now stored in the memory banks of the overhead satellite would be rebroadcast to certain individuals back on the ground.
And the satellite’s own data-processing software would indicate only that it had received a burst of data from a certain point in Maryland, where dozens and dozens of offices that could have been the source of the information were located.
Quite simple, quite delicate — and quite deadly.
Especially for those three men.
Adrianna powered down the laptop and then looked outside. It was a sunny afternoon and there were children at play on the lawn outside her window. About half a dozen children, maybe six or seven years of age, playing with a couple of large rubber balls. They were laughing and yelling and bouncing into each other, and she smiled at their energy and youth. How wonderful. How purely joyful, to see them at play, and she looked at them…
And thought of something else.
Adrianna thought of these children, their parents. How much love their parents had for them. How much work their parents did to feed and clothe them and keep them safe. How they had chosen this comfortable suburban condo complex as their own little shelter, to keep their loved ones — My God, with such hope, dreams and love invested in those tiny little bodies — safe from the ravages of the outside world.
Safe. So safe.
And she thought of what it would be like, in just a few weeks, when the illness came, for she had no doubt this place would be one of the blighted ones.
At first it would start like any other respiratory illness. Fever, chills. Then labored breathing. Frantic phone calls to the doctor’s office. The doctor’s office crowded. The ER overwhelmed. Patients lining up outside for treatment. Television and radio reports, breathless and shrieking in their reporting of what was going on in New York and DC and Los Angeles and elsewhere…
These poor children out there. Would they die in their perfect little bedrooms, choking to death, with their parents watching them? Or would they wander through their pretty condo units, wondering why mommy and daddy weren’t waking up, and why wouldn’t somebody feed them or take care of them…
What would happen to them?
She knew what would happen. She knew because she was going to do it.
Adrianna looked again at the laughing children.
Odd, when you got right down to it, it was easy to plot and plan for years and years to take your revenge. But when she looked right at those pretty faces, the faces of the children who would play on the sidewalk outside, or ring the doorbell at Halloween, she had to ask herself, could she do it? Could she kill them, just like that?
Adrianna snapped the laptop cover shut.
Of course she could.
In a war, there was always collateral damage.
Just like mama and papa.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Vladimir Zhukov stood in the motel parking lot outside Bellingham, Washington State, sipping a cup of coffee, hating the taste but knowing he needed the caffeine to stay awake. He would have preferred to have a cup of tea, ah, now that would have been something. A nice freshly brewed pot of tea in a samovar, pulling the little toggle, letting it settle in a china cup. Drink it in the old way, a cube of sugar tucked inside your cheek, my God, how many cups of tea he had swallowed over the years, back at the Institute, back when…
He sipped at the coffee. Back when things made sense. Back when things worked. Back when he was privileged, was someone, was part of the elite, the
And to be betrayed. By Gorbachev and the rest of the lackeys who had rolled over on their backs and spread their legs, like whores or whipped dogs, begging for mercy, begging for hard currency credits from the West so they could buy Sony or Chrysler or any other damn thing. And he… he had left, had peddled his wares to various shit- holes around the world, knowing in those dark places in his soul at two a.m. that he was a veteran, like one of those Japanese bastards hanging out in an island jungle decades later, never knowing the war was over.
Well, that was the truth. The war might have been over for everyone else, but not for him, not for Vladimir Zhukov, he who had the same last name as the famed Marshal of the Soviet Union, Giorgiy Konstantinovich Zhukov, who had led millions of Red Army soldiers to crush Hitler and destroy the fascists…and whose own people, decades later, would allow the Germans to reunite and become one again. And who would later toss in their lot with the capitalists, with the West, with those who would have crushed them if the spirit had moved them.
He looked around at the buildings, the roadways, at all the hustle and bustle of what appeared as progress. Some progress.
Vladimir finished the coffee, tossed the cup to the ground. One more piece of garbage to join the others. And speaking of garbage, here he came, his comrade, his partner, who was to help him in this very last battle. A Freightliner tractor-trailer truck, bright red, with no trailer behind it, roared its way into the parking lot, Imad sitting proudly behind the wheel, smiling like a trained chimp from the famed Moscow State Circus, showing off his talents. Imad parked the truck and switched off its engine. Vladimir went over to join him. Imad opened the cab door, leapt out, still grinning.
