The Hades Factor c-1 Read online

  Admiral Brose agreed ominously: “It's blown the lid off. I'd declared the matter top secret after the first four deaths because my exec, General Caspar, reported too many amateurs were bumbling around in what could be a critical situation. I was concerned about public panic.” He paused for confirmation of the correctness of his decision. Everyone nodded, even the president. The general inhaled, relieved. “But the police were called to General Kielburger's and his secretary's homes when they were discovered dead. The hospital recognized the same virus that'd killed the first USAMRIID scientist. So now the newspeople have it. I've had to open it up, but the media knows it's got to get its information only from the Pentagon. Period.”

  “Sounds like a good step,” Nancy Petrelli, the HHS secretary, agreed. “There's also a scientist who appears to have gone AWOL from Detrick. That concerns me, too.”

  “He's missing? You know why?”

  “No, sir,” Jesse Oxnard admitted. “But the circumstances are suspicious.”

  “He disappeared soon before Kielburger and his secretary died,” the Joint Chiefs chairman explained. “We've got the army, the FBI, and the local police alerted. They'll find him. Right now we're saying it's for questioning.”

  The president nodded. “That sounds reasonable. And I agree with Nancy. Let's see what the private sector can offer. Meanwhile, everyone keep me informed. A lethal virus no one knows anything about scares the hell out of me. It should scare the hell out of all of us.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  9:22 A.M.

  Washington, D.C.

  The multiethnic neighborhood of Adams-Morgan is a bustling district of rooftop restaurants with sweeping views of the city. Its main arteries ― Columbia Road and Eighteenth Street ― offer a lively potpourri of sidewalk cafés, neighborhood bars and clubs, new and secondhand bookstores, record stores, funky used-clothing shops, and trendy boutiques. Newcomers in the exotic dress of Guatemala and El Salvador, Colombia and Ecuador, Jamaica and Haiti, both Congos, and Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam add color to an already picturesque neighborhood.

  At a rear table in a coffee shop just off Eighteenth, where coffee mugs had made circular brands that looked so old they might have been there since the days Indians trod local ridges, Special Agent Lon Forbes, FBI, waited for Lt. Col. Jonathan Smith to come to the point. He knew little personal detail about Smith except he claimed to be a friend of Bill Griffin's. That made Forbes both interested and wary.

  Since he had had no time to research Smith's background beyond finding out that he was assigned to Fort Detrick as a research scientist, Agent Forbes had suggested they meet in this grungy coffee shop. He had arrived early and watched from across the street as late breakfast seekers strolled past. Then Smith had arrived.

  In his drab-green officer's uniform, the lieutenant colonel had stopped to glance around outside, observed the interior from the door, and finally entered. The FBI man noticed the impressive physique of the man and a sense of repressed power. At least from an initial impression, Smith neither looked nor acted like an egghead research scientist in the arcane field of cell and molecular biology.

  Smith sipped coffee, chatted about the weather ― unseasonably, warm ― asked if Forbes wanted a pastry ― Forbes declined ― and tapped his foot under the minuscule table. Forbes watched and listened. The lieutenant colonel's high-planed face was strong, faintly American Indian, and his black hair was swept neatly back. He had navy blue eyes that seemed full of a darkness that had nothing to do with their inky color. Forbes sensed violence that ached to explode. This officer was not only on edge, he was wound as tight as a steel spring.

  “I need to get in touch with Bill,” Smith finally announced.

  “Why?”

  Smith pondered the wisdom of answering. At last he decided he would have to take the chance and reveal something of what he knew. After all, he had come here to get help. “A few days ago Bill contacted me, arranged a clandestine meeting in Rock Creek park, and warned me I might be in danger. Now I am in danger, and I need to know more about how he knew and what he knows now.”

  “That's plain enough. You care to tell me what the danger is?”

  “Someone wants to kill me.”

  “But you don't know who?”

  “In a nutshell, no, I don't.”

  Forbes looked around at the empty tables. “The circumstances, what we call the environment of the danger, you don't want to get into that?”

  “Right now, no. I just need to find Bill.”

  “It's a big Bureau. Why me?”

  “I remembered Bill saying you were about his only friend there. The only one he'd trust, anyway. You'd be on his side if the chips were down.”

  Which was true, Forbes knew, as far as it went, and another plus for Smith. Bill would have told that only to another person he trusted.

  “Okay. Now tell me about you and Bill.”

  Smith described their childhood together, high school and college, and Forbes listened, comparing it to what Griffin had said and what he knew from the personnel file he had studied after Griffin disappeared. It all appeared to match.

  Forbes drank coffee. He leaned forward in the somnolent café and contemplated his hands cupped around the mug. His voice was low and serious. “Bill saved my life. Not once, but twice. We were partners and friends and a lot more. Much, much more.” He looked up at Smith. “Okay?”

  As Forbes looked up at him, Smith tried to see behind his eyes. There was a world of meaning in that single word with a question mark: Okay? Did it mean they were so close there were things between him and Bill the Bureau didn't know? Broken rules together? Covered each other's backs? Bent laws? We did things, okay? Don't ask. Not the details. Just say, when it comes to Griffin, I can be trusted to help. Can you be trusted, too?

  Smith tried, “You know where he is.”

  “No.”

  “Can you get in touch with him?”

  “Maybe.” Forbes drank the coffee more as a time filler than because he wanted it. “He's not with the Bureau anymore. I guess you didn't know that.”

  “I knew. He told me when we met. What I don't know is whether I should believe him. He could be working undercover.”

  “He's not undercover.” Forbes hesitated. Finally he continued, “He came from freewheeling army intelligence, and the Bureau has rules. Rules for everything. Questions about every move you make no matter how good the result. Paperwork that has to be filled out for everything. Bill was too much of a self-starter. Initiative does not go down well with the brass. Not to mention secret initiative. The Bureau likes agents to report every breath they breathe in triplicate. That never sat well with Bill.”

  Smith smiled. “No, it wouldn't have.”

  “He got into trouble. Insubordination. Not a team player. I took plenty of that myself. But Bill went farther. He cut rules and corners, and he didn't always account for his actions or expenses. He got accused of misappropriating funds. When he made deals to close cases, the Bureau refused to honor some that involved particularly bad characters. They made it hard for Bill, and he finally got disgusted.”

  “He quit?”

  Forbes reached into his jacket for a handkerchief. Smith saw the big 10mm Browning in his shoulder holster. The Bureau still believed in its agents being the men with the bigger guns. Forbes mopped his face. He was clearly worried. But not for himself. For Bill Griffin.

  He said, “Not exactly. He'd met someone on a tax-fraud case, someone with money and power. I never knew who. Bill started missing meetings and staying away from the Hoover Building between assignments. When he was sent to work with a field office, sometimes he didn't show up for days. Then he blew an assignment, and there were signs of high living ― too much money, the usual. The director found evidence Bill was secretly moonlighting for the tax-fraud guy and that some of what he was doing skated pretty close to the edge ― intimidation, using his badge to lean on people, that sort of thing. In the Bureau, if you work for the Bureau, you represent
the Bureau. Period. They fired him. He went to work for someone. I had the feeling it was the tax-fraud guy he'd been moonlighting for.” He shook his head regretfully. “I haven't seen him in more than a year.”

  Smith tried to watch the street outside the front windows, but there were too many signs taped to the dirty glass. “I can see where he'd be frustrated, even disgusted. But to work for someone like that? To intimidate others? That doesn't sound like Bill.”

  “Call it disgust, disillusion, principles betrayed.” Forbes shrugged. “As far as he was concerned, no one at the Bureau really cared about justice. It was all about the rules. The law. And, yeah, I think he wanted money and power, too. No one flips sides like a believer who loses his belief.”

  “And that's okay with you?”

  “It's not okay, and it's not not-okay. It's what Bill wants, and I don't ask questions. He's my man regardless.”

  Smith considered everything. His position was similar to what Bill's had been. Instead of the Bureau, it was the army that was betraying Smith, and how far from going rogue was he right now? In the Pentagon's eyes, he probably already was rogue. Certainly AWOL. Was he the one to judge Bill? Was this FBI man a better friend of Smith's old friend than was Smith?

  Moral actions were not always as absolute as we liked to think.

  “You don't know where he is? Or who the man he's working for, or with, is?”

  Forbes said, “I don't know where he is, or if he's even working for the same guy. It's only a hunch, and I never knew who the guy was.”

  “But you can get in touch with Bill?”

  Forbes's eyes blinked slowly. “Let's say I can. What would you want me to say?”

  Smith had already worked that out. “That I took the warning. That I survived, but they murdered Sophia. That I know they have the virus. But I don't know what they're planning, and I need to talk to him.”

  Forbes studied the big soldier-scientist. The FBI had been briefed days ago on the worrisome situation with the unknown virus, including the death of Dr. Sophia Russell. Then an army memo had arrived this morning declaring Smith AWOL, a danger to the integrity of the investigation, the facts of which had been declared top secret by the White House. It asked the Bureau to look for Smith and, if they found him, to return him to Fort Detrick under guard.

  But a lifetime of learning to assess people, sometimes in a matter of seconds with his life hanging on the outcome, had made Forbes trust himself. Smith was not the enemy. If anything threatened the integrity of the investigation, it was the paranoid order that took the scientific investigators out of the field. The Pentagon didn't want any more headlines about bacteriological warfare agents and our soldiers' possible exposure during Desert Storm. They were covering their sedentary butts as usual.

  “If I can contact him, I'll give him your message, Colonel.” Forbes stood up. “A tip. Be careful who you talk to, and watch your back, whatever you plan to do. There's an arrest order out for you ― AWOL and a fugitive. Don't try to contact me again.”

  Smith's chest contracted as he listened to the news. He was not surprised, but the confirmation was still a blow. He felt betrayed and violated, but that was the pattern since he had returned from London. First he had lost Sophia, and now he was losing his profession, his career. It stuck in his throat like broken glass.

  As the FBI man walked to the door, Smith glanced around the café with its scattering of patrons bent over their exotic coffees and teas. He looked up just in time to see Forbes push through the doorway and scan the bustling street with a long-accustomed eye. Then he was gone, vanishing like the steam from his coffee. Smith put money on the table and slipped out the back door. He saw no one suspicious outside and no dark sedans parked with people in them. His pulse beating a wary tattoo, he walked away briskly toward the distant Woodley Metro station.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  10:03 A.M.

  Washington, D.C.

  At Dupont Circle, Smith left the Metro. The morning sun radiated down bright and warm on the thick traffic as it circled the park. He glanced casually around and began to walk, joining the throngs of business and government people taking early coffee breaks. His gaze constantly moved as he headed off through the maze of streets that hosted cafés, cocktail lounges, bookstores, and boutiques. The shops here were snore upscale than in Adams-Morgan, and even though it was October, tourists were pulling out their billfolds to make purchases.

  Several times as he examined faces, he had bittersweet feelings of deja vu, and for a few exciting moments it seemed as if he had just caught sight of Sophia…

  She was not dead.

  She was alive and vital. Just a few steps away.

  There was one brunette who had the same swinging, sexy gait. He had to fight himself from rushing past so he could turn and stare. Another woman had her long blond hair pulled back in the same kind of loose ponytail that Sophia always wore to keep her hair from her face when she worked. Then there was the woman who breezed past leaving a scent so much like Sophia's that his stomach knotted with anguish.

  He had to get over this, he told himself sternly.

  He had work to do. Crucial work that would give some meaning to Sophia's tragic death.

  He inhaled and kept at it. He made himself watch all around for tails. He walked north up Massachusetts Avenue toward Sheridan Circle and Embassy Row. Halfway to Sheridan, he made one last move to assure himself that he had left behind any surveillance: He stepped quickly into the main entrance of the just-opened Phillips Collection, hurried through empty rooms of remarkable Renoirs and Cezannes, provocative Rothkos and O'Keeffes, and slipped out a side fire door. He paused, leaned back against the building, and studied pedestrians and cars.

  At last he was satisfied. No one was watching him. If there had been a tail, he had lost him or her. So he hurried back to Massachusetts Avenue and his Triumph parked on a side street.

  After hearing the telecast last night about Kielburger, Melanie Curtis, and the AWOL charge against him, he had intensified these evasive maneuvers. Before dawn he had awakened in Gaithersburg on the inner alarm of all combat surgeons in the field. He had been drenched in a cold, sad sweat following a night of dreaming about Sophia. He forced himself to eat a solid breakfast, and he studied the morning traffic as it increased on the highway and the traffic helicopters that monitored it. Showered, shaved, and determined, he was on the road by seven.

  He had called Special Agent Forbes from a pay phone and driven across the Potomac into Washington. He had cruised around for a time before parking the Triumph off Embassy Row and hopping on the Metro to meet Forbes.

  After retrieving the Triumph, he drove sedately to a busy residential street between Dupont and Washington Circles where a prominent sign marked the entrance to a narrow driveway bordered by a high, unruly hedge: PRIVATE PROPERTY — KEEP OUT! Beneath it hung smaller signs: NO TRESPASSING. NO SALESMEN. NO SOLICITING. NO COLLECTORS. GO AWAY!

  Smith ignored the signs and pulled into the driveway. There was a small white clapboard bungalow with black trim hidden behind the hedge. He parked in front of a brick walk that led from the drive to the front door.

  As soon as he stepped out, a mechanical voice announced: “Halt! State your name and purpose of visit. Failure to do so within five seconds will result in defensive measures.” The deep voice appeared to emanate from the sky with the authority of the heavens.

  Smith grinned. The bungalow owner was an electronic genius, and the driveway surface was booby-trapped with a catalog of nasty discomforts, from a cloud of eye-stinging gas to a mercaptan spray that bathed victims in a foul stench. The owner ― Smith's old friend Marty Zellerbach ― had been hauled into court a few times many years ago by irate salesmen, meter readers, postal officials, and delivery people.

  But Marty had two Ph.D.s, and he always appeared mild and responsible, if a little naive. That he was also extremely wealthy and bought the best defense attorneys did not hurt. Their arguments were passionate and convincing: His
victims could not have missed his signs. They had to know they were trespassing. They had been asked to perform a perfectly reasonable act of identification by a disabled man who lived alone. And they had been warned.

  His security, while annoying, was neither lethal nor seriously injurious. He had always won his cases, and after a few times the police gave up charging him and advised complainants to settle for compensation and quit trespassing.

  “Come on, Marty,” Smith said, amused, “it's your old pal, Jonathan Smith.”

  There was a surprised hesitation. Then: “Approach the front door using the brick path. Do not step off the path. That would activate further defensive measures.” The stilted voice disappeared, and suddenly the words were concerned. “Careful, Jon. I wouldn't want you to end up stinking like a skunk.”

  * * *

  Smith took the route Marty described. Invisible laser beams swept the entire property. A footstep off the path, or intrusion from anywhere else, would activate God-knew-what.

  He climbed to the covered porch. “Call off the watchdogs, Marty. I've arrived. Open the door.”

  From somewhere inside, the voice coaxed, “You have to follow the rules, Jon.” Instantly the disembodied voice returned: “Stand in front of the door. Open the box to the right and place your left hand on the glass.”

  “Oh, please.” But Smith smiled.

  A pair of ominous metal covers over the door slid up to reveal dark tubes that could contain anything from paint guns to rocket launchers. Marty had always found childlike glee in ideas and games most people left behind at adolescence. But Smith gamely stood in front of the door, opened the metal box, and rested his hand on the glass plate. He knew the routine: A video camera snapped a digital photo of his face, and instantly Marty's supercomputer would convert the facial measurements into a series of numerical values. At the same time, the glass plate recorded Smith's palm print. Then the computer compared the collected data to the bar codes it kept on file for everyone Marty knew.