The scientist couldn’t take his gaze off the bottle. Already the fumes were making his eyes water. “Fallen… is gone.”
“He has Chimera?”
Lee did not answer. Derek spilled a drop of the concentrated acid on the Korean’s forehead. It smoked.
Lee grimaced and writhed in agony.
“I tell you, I tell you…. It’s too late for you to stop it.”
Derek put the bottle aside.
“It’s burning! Make it stop! Please, make it stop!”
Derek snatched a bottle of water off the counter and rinsed the acid off Lee’s face. There was a red burned mark on the man’s forehead.
“Talk.”
Lee took a deep breath. “We are going to start over. We are going to start what you call Armageddon.”
“How?
“Chimera.”
“Where is Fallen? How many have been sent out? Where?”
“Fallen first. Just a little while ago. Then one at a time over the next day. Each with an aerosol canister that looks like a Coke can.”
Derek waited. Lee looked triumphant, smug at being able to talk of their plan. He continued. “International flights. Different countries. We are to release the virus in the airplanes just before we land in the new countries. Then we catch a flight to our… meeting place.”
“Which is where?”
Lee shook his head. “You cannot stop our plan. But you have been vaccinated. You can join us. But only if we trust you. And we don’t trust you. I don’t trust you.”
Derek considered forcing the issue, but didn’t want to get sidetracked. “Which airport? Where is Coffee — Fallen — flying to?”
Lee smiled, a dreamy look in his eyes. “It will start in France.”
“Which airport?”
Lee smiled again, the expression in his face unsettling.
“Which airport?” Derek repeated.
Lee shoved him away with all his strength. Before Derek could stop him the Korean seized the bottle of sulfuric acid and poured it down his throat. With a shriek the bottle dropped the floor and splintered into a million pieces. Lee thrashed on the floor, spewed blood and held still.
53
Irina Khournikova slipped into the back of a diner only five blocks from the Hoover Building. She didn’t completely understand what had happened back there, but she was thankful. It had been a mistake to agree to come with the FBI agent, Unrau. Unrau had told them that their expertise on this Russian national was required, a woman called Irina Khournikova of the ‘T’ Directorate. Of course she had come, but it should have set off alarm bells. Somehow Coffee — Andarbek is how she still thought of him — had set her up. A house of mirrors. Andarbek had set up traps for everyone. For her, for this man Stillwater, whoever he was. But Andarbek must have feared him because so much of this operation seemed designed to ensnare Stillwater. She wondered who he was… and where he was.
There was a pay phone at the back of the diner. The diner was filling up with breakfast eaters, what seemed to mostly be midnight workers coming off their shift, grabbing breakfast before they went home to bed. She liked this place. It reminded her of Moscow. Good solid people working, going about their lives.
She didn’t have money, but it didn’t matter. She had phone card numbers memorized. She dialed a number and waited for someone to answer. It was answered by a seven digit series of numbers spoken in Russian.
Vosem. Devyat. Shest. Pyat. Tree. Dva. Odeen. 8965321.
She recited a series of numbers in response. Tree. Dva. Dva. Shest. Vosem. Shest. Vosem. 3226868.
“What do you need?”
“I need a pickup.” She gave the current code word for an emergency—”v pizdu”—and recited her address. Then, “I need information on the leasing information for an apartment.” She explained about the safe house where the false Irina Khournikova had been staying. “The FBI is probably looking into it as well, so be careful.”
“Anything else?”
“No…. Yes. A weapon.”
She hung up and slipped into the women’s room. She had no identification, no gun and, she realized, precious little time. Andarbek had gone crazy. He wanted to destroy the world. And he had the means to do it.
Her stomach churned. She turned the tap on cold and splashed water on her face, thinking of all the years she had spent trying to track down this man, the terrorist who had assassinated her lover. Each time she got close, he slipped away. Each round of investigations turned up more information, often conflicting. First he was a Chechen leader. Then he was an American CIA operative. Then he was dead. Then he was alive, running arms. Then he was a cult figure, his followers fanatically devoted to him. Each turn of the crank wound this mysterious terrorist tighter. His actions became more unpredictable, his attacks more vicious. It was no longer clear who his allegiances were to.
Well now you know, she thought. To himself.
To his own brand of madness.
She left the women’s room and slipped into a booth, the seats done in red vinyl. When the waitress came she ordered coffee and bacon and scrambled eggs and toast, hoping that the food would get delivered before her pickup arrived. The coffee came almost instantly and she sipped it, welcoming the revivifying effects. There was a TV above the counter turned to CNN. She watched it out of the corner of her eyes. Talk about the attack on the White House, how the President was on Air Force One, how the alleged assassin, Samuel Dalton, had been found killed near Rock Creek Park. The anchor speculated that Dalton had been working for someone. They did not make a connection to The Fallen Angels. No mention was made of the shootings at the J. Edgar Hoover Building, though she thought it was only a matter of time before they did.
Just as the waitress brought her breakfast, an ice-blond man in a navy blue suit came in carrying a calfskin briefcase. He surveyed the crowd, then sidled toward her and slipped into the booth. He first placed the briefcase next to her and slid a set of car keys across the Formica tabletop.
“White Ford Taurus. D.C. plate, ED47LF. Parked just up the street on this side.” He pointed. “Everything you asked for is in the briefcase, including a cell phone. Is there anything else?”
“Money and ID?”
“Taken care of.”
“Good,” she said.
The man, whose English was perfect, said, “There is a message I’m supposed to give you personally. From the T Directorate.”
She eyed him.”Yes?”
“They would very much like this matter with Andarbek to end. For good.”
“Fine. I’ll see what I can do.”
“Good.” He nodded, got up and left. She finished her breakfast, took the briefcase to the women’s room and emptied it. A wallet with appropriate identification: driver’s license, credit cards, and cash. Everything was made out to Irene Kramer, a resident of Washington, D.C. with an address at the Watergate Hotel. There was a 9mm Glock in a belt holster with an extra magazine and a silencer. There was a passport, U.S., which she hoped she wouldn’t need, given tightened security during the crisis. There was a sheaf of papers backgrounding the safe house where Derek Stillwater had tortured the fake Irina Khournikova to death.
Included was the M.E.’s preliminary report on the fake Khournikova and the Russian embassy’s analysis of the woman’s background. While Irina had been a guest of the Federal Bureau of Investigation her people had gotten somebody over to the morgue and taken fingerprints. They had faxed the prints back to Moscow to the Directorate to run on their own database.
Nadia Kosov. A Russian citizen, a former government computer programmer in Moscow. She had died in what had been called a Chechen terrorist bombing in Moscow that had killed eleven people in a bus station. At the time nobody had suspected that she was either involved or been targeted. Her remains had been identified by a driver’s license.