‘Oh… oh, please…’ The phone receiver was slippery in his hand.
Adrianna said, ‘I know you’ve been under a lot of pressure, Victor. We all have. But you most of all. I want you to turn off your pager, switch off your phone, and take a week off. All right? I don’t want to see you in the office. Hell, I don’t want you to even think about going into the office. You just take your time and enjoy yourself. Relax. Okay?’
It felt like the kitchen floor was gently quivering under his feet. Oh… how sweet, how sweet…
Adrianna said, ‘Victor? Are you all right?’
He switched the phone receiver to his other hand. ‘All right? I’m great… I’m… I… thank you, Adrianna. Thank you for calling. This is the best news… well, the best news I’ve ever received…’
She chuckled. ‘Glad I could make your day. Now. You do what I told you, all right?’
‘Yes. Yes, of course.’
‘Good. See you in a week.’
And she hung up.
Victor hung up as well, turned — and the next thing he knew he was staring up at the kitchen ceiling. At first he thought he must have slipped, but as he sat up and checked the time he realized that he had fainted.
Which was fine. He got to his feet, swayed some, and pulled the phone jack free. He stumbled into the bedroom, found the pager, and not only switched it off but took the batteries out and threw them in a wicker wastebasket. Then he collapsed into bed and slept for almost twenty hours.
Adrianna looked at her watch. Two down, two more to go, and back home that little automated program that was running on the stolen CIA laptop should have uplinked the signal… now.
Good.
Montgomery Zane was in the parking lot in front of Callaghan Consulting, their Tiger Team home, when the page came in. He toggled the side switch of his pager and read the text message:
CODE CARLYLE CODE CARLYLE
CODE CARLYLE
M. ZANE DETACHED & TRAVEL SOONEST FOR:
ANDREWS/LAKENHEATH/AVIANO/AL-UDEID
AWAIT ORDERS AL-UDEID
CODE CARLYLE
CODE CARLYLE
CODE CARLYLE
So there you go. This time of the month, any three-code group line that began with the letter C and ended with the letter E was legitimate. And the itinerary looked standard. From Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland to Lakenheath Royal Air Force Base in Great Britain, and from there to Aviano in Italy, and ending up in Al-Udeid in Qatar. Monty liked Qatar, had a number of friends there, and looked forward to that part of the trip at least.
And what waited for him in Qatar? Well, he would know when he got there. No time to get worried about that particular. All he knew was that he hoped the job was going to be brief and bloody, like that little whirlwind trip last week that had taken him to Britain, Bali and Pakistan. He hoped this trip was a one-fer — in and out with one little mission. These long missions were getting to be a bear…
And speaking of long missions, there was a good chance that he would be overseas when Final Winter started up in a few days. Not a problem, not with the wife and kids now safely tucked away in rural Georgia — and God, wasn’t that a positive comment on the times, when the white wife of a black man and their mixed-race kids would find peace and security in rural Georgia, when just a couple of generations ago they would have been targeted for a beating or a lynching — but there was still a bit of business to attend to.
Monty looked at the pager readout again. ‘Soonest’ was what it said and ‘Soonest’ was what it meant. Which meant leaving here and driving hard-ass to Andrews. He was supposed to have met with Darren Coover this morning, to go over those funny bits of information that he and the NSA guy had gathered on Final Winter and what was — or wasn’t — going down. But he was sure he could talk from Andrews to the little guy, find a secure phone there, and find out more about what was going on.
In the meantime, time to leave.
Monty backed out of the spot and left Callaghan Consulting.
Adrianna felt the little glow of good news starting to mellow through her. Brian was on his way back to his beloved New York. Victor was probably getting drunk or getting laid or just staying in bed, reading those pulp magazines he was so in love with. Monty was going to be on a plane shortly. And Darren… soon enough, she would meet with him and send him on some stupid assignment to Toronto or some such. Then the board would be clear and she would leave here and go back to Memphis, to oversee the installation of the canisters, and she wouldn’t have any worries about what her Tiger Team members might be doing or learning or questioning while she was away.
She reached for the phone to make a call to Darren when there was knock on the door frame.
And wouldn’t you know it, there he was.
Darren Coover stood in her doorway, face set, holding some papers in his hand.
‘Adrianna,’ he said. ‘We need to talk.’
The little glow of triumph was gone.
‘All right… well, my schedule is pretty tight this morning, but maybe we could—’
He shook his head, stepped in. ‘You don’t understand. We have to talk. Now.’
Complications, she always knew complications would come up, but at this very moment…
‘Very good, Darren. Come in and close the door.’
He stepped in, closed the door, and then sat down.
Earlier Darren had been in his office, scratching at his chin, viewing and re-viewing the computer screen before him. Things weren’t making sense, weren’t making sense at all. After his talk yesterday with Monty he had gone back into GATEKEEPER, trying to find out more information about Final Winter. There had been a new reference, from an FBI operative working for AirBox. A routine report to his field office, stating that he had overheard a machinist supervisor talk about something called Final Winter that was going to be implemented at the airfreight company within the next few days. All right, then, that at least made sense. And the fact that he hadn’t been seeing any other Final Winter references hadn’t concerned him all that much, despite what he had told Monty. Lots of classified ops went under different names, depending on what groups were involved. Tiger Team Seven and its members might know the vaccination program as Final Winter, and other agencies involved could call it Ocean Foam or Mountain Breeze or some other damn thing.
Still… where was the urgency? Where were the alerts? Where was the heightened security within the major cities? Why in hell hadn’t Homeland Security bumped up the Threat Level?
Then there was the other thing he had learned, just this morning…
The Princess had been a naughty girl, using her home phone to make a call that should have been secured. Adrianna had contacted a CDC facility in the wilds of northern Alabama that had been cooking up the experimental vaccine for the Final Winter project and she had told them that Final Winter had been canceled.
Fair enough.
But the FBI guy had stated — six hours after Adrianna had made the phone call — that Final Winter was proceeding and that a delivery associated with Final Winter was expected that day.
Hell, the government was slow. The government was always slow! But for something like Final Winter…there was no way any type of delivery was going to take place if the entire operation had been canceled.
And another thing. Monty Zane was supposed to have been here about a half-hour ago. They were going to match intelligence and then go into Adrianna’s office to find out what the hell was going on, and now he wasn’t here. And Victor wasn’t here. And Brian wasn’t here.