Lessing used the opportunity to kick out with both feet as though just waking up.
Goddard let out a satisfying yelp and leaped off the bed. “Christ! You kick your little Indian chicky like that and you’ll break all her bones!”
Lessing yawned in his face. Goddard wasn’t worth hating. “Mulder’s coming. He wants to see you.” “I’m here.” He got up, found his gear had been stored in the almirah, and dug out his shaving things. “Make out with that blonde?”
He let the plumbing answer for him. The faucet belched, hiccoughed, and gushed a stream of brown fluid that slowly changed into steaming-hot water. He shut the door in Goddard’s beefy face so that he could use the facilities.
When he emerged, Herman Mulder was sitting in the one chair. Wrench occupied the foot of the bed, and Goddard now leaned against the wall by the window.
Mulder waited in Buddha-esque silence until Lessing had settled down again at the head of the bed. When he spoke it was just one word:
“Pacov.”
“Sir… I….”
“Please don’t lie.”
Lessing had no intention of lying; he had been about to suggest that a mercenary’s jobs were as privileged as a priest’s confessional or a psychiatrist’s couch. More. A mere could get thumbed for a breach of security. Opfoes and employers alike frowned upon loose lips. He shut his mouth with an audible snap.
Mulder appeared not to notice. “You’re alive because of us, Alan. Very few know who or what we represent, but everybody knows that we protect our people, particularly in the Third World.”
“Sir
“Hear me out Only a very determined foe would attack you while you’re with us. Yet somebody is willing to risk lives to get at you. That foe may believe that we sent you to get… and that we have… Pacov. Which endangers us. Do you see?”
“The raid to get the books doesn’t seem to have been connected with you at all,” Goddard added. “Maybe some other supercorp sniffing around to see what they could find… and almost hitting the jackpot. It’s possible they were Israelis or the Vigilantes for Zion. The Izzies and the Vizzies have come close before.”
“Never this close!” Wrench protested. “How did they know the diaries were here?”
“All under control now.” Mulder wiped his naked, pink forehead with an old-fashioned handkerchief. “The last raid… the local ‘scholars’ and their friends… was not directed at us. They were looking for you again, Alan. It was lucky that Miss Husaini was over at the main office. Two of their non-Indian agitators got into your quarters and made a thorough search. Hitting Indoco was a diversion: nothing seriously damaged, just yelling and burning and prancing around, and a lot of pretending to find ‘dangerous pollutants’ and ‘killer chemicals.’ They didn’t even try to wreck the computer that controls our agro-chemical mixes.”
Lessing said, “Mr. Mulder, I can’t… won’t… tell you more than you know. The name you mentioned is my business, privileged info. It has nothing to do with you or Indoco. I’ll swear to that.”
Wrench struck a heroic pose. “The Code of the West! The Masked Merc rides again!”
Lessing had an insanely funny urge to match nun and cry, Bring on your Gestapo! I’ll never talk!” Mulder, however, had little sense of humor, and Goddard even less.
“Shall I tell you then, Alan?” Mulder held up a thick hand, as pale and hairless as a baby’s. “You went on a mission for one Senhor Gomez, a Goanese ‘mere broker.’ You traveled to the United States, to an installation with the code-name ‘Marvelous Gap,’ located in New Mexico. It was built just after the turn of the century, during the worst period of Born Again paranoia. Then it was officially ‘lost’: closed down, no mention, no records. The place would be an embarrassment to President Rubin’s peace initiative if the Russians found out it still existed. There’d be hell to pay in Geneva, and the United Nations would make a TV sitcom out of it. The present U.S. government thinks it’s better to let Marvelous Gap stay marvelously
^Lessing saw no reason to tell Mulder of Hoeykens’ information and the reason for his precipitous flight from South Africa. Mulder and his SS might decide he was more trouble than he was worth. He said, “I’m a soldier. Politics isn’t my job. I follow orders.” I Mulder sighed. “They didn’t accept that excuse at Nuremberg. He saw that Lessing hadn’t understood. “That was before your time. Never mind. While you were in Pretoria I sent a coded cable to Washington Our people there have been investigating Pacov and other Born Again projects for some time. They punched some buttons, and now I know all there is to know… outside of some top-secret data in the National Security Agency. The movement has friends in Washington, friends with access to the government’s biggest data-banks. The Pacov formulae were all destroyed, as were the administrative records, right down to the mess-hall grocery lists. But they missed one document here, another there. That’s the virtue of computers: once you find a clue, you get the computer itself to hunt for more. It collates everything, patches it together, and hands it to you in a printout.’
Lessing shook his head. “Still nothing to do with me. I’m only the errand boy. I don’t care what’s in the package.”
“Yes. Well. ‘Pacov’ stands for ‘Pandemic Communicable Virus,’ one of the uglier results of military experimentation with recombinant DNA. Do you know what that is?”
“I’ve read. Magazines….”
“Do you want to read what technical details we have? The cable’s on my desk.”
“I’m no scientist.” Actually, he would probably understand most of it. Lessing kept up on military developments as part of his trade.
“Very well, let me tell you in layman’s terms.” Mulder extended a hand to shush Wrench, who had started to speak. “Pacov consists of two separate reworkings of the DNA chains of existing viruses. It’s a piggyback weapon, a two-stage operation. You send in the first stage. The vectors… agents of transmission… for Pacov-1 are extensive: it travels through the air, the water, or directly from person to person and is highly contagious. It spreads for hundreds of miles if conditions are optimal. Pacov-1 causes only a mild, flu-like infection that disappears within a day or two. Public health authorities would overlook it, never consider it a serious epidemic, and even if they did they’d have to look carefully to isolate it. Once a victim is over the ‘flu,’ Pacov-1 becomes dormant and almost undetectable. A month or two later you send in the second stage: Pacov-2 is also a virus, just as contagious as the first, and just as harmless by itself. It reacts with Pacov-1, however, to produce a powerful coagulant. A coagulant, Alan, a substance that turns your blood to thick jelly! Your heart isn’t made to pump strawberry jam, and you die within three minutes. No warning, no vaccine, no cure. Those not exposed to both stages remain unharmed. There might be a few immunes, but they didn’t do a lot of testing, as you can imagine. Pacov-2 goes inert like Pacov-1 within a week or two. Then you get your victim’s country, all his property… in undamaged condition… and a lot of corpses to bury.”
Mulder paused. “Does this convince you, Alan?”
It did.
“Pacov terrified the Born Agains. They had opened the gate and come eyeball to eyeball with the worst nightmares of Hell. They ripped out the installation at Marvelous Gap and scattered its personnel around to other projects. Maybe they even killed those most closely involved; they were no more ‘noble’ than any government before or since. It wouldn’t surprise me.”
“What would happen if somebody… used… Pacov today?”
Mulder inspected the halfmoons of his tiny, salmon-pink fingernails. “No idea. No data. Perhaps the stuff is too old and has gone inert. Perhaps it never would have worked. All we know is that it was intended as a last resort, the checkmate move, the Doomsday weapon. No, worse. More like the last tantrum of a very bad loser: leap up, shoot your opponent, and kick the chessboard to smithereens! Pacov was meant to destroy nations, Alan… millions… perhaps hundreds of millions of people.”