Final Winter

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.

So it was up to him. And so off he went.

Now Darren looked over at the Princess. Even though she was well dressed and groomed and made-up she didn’t seem quite right.

‘Adrianna, something doesn’t make sense.’

‘Go on.’

Darren was surprised at how he didn’t feel uncomfortable at what he said next. ‘I have a slight confession to make. I’ve been performing some duties that are above and beyond what’s been required of me.’

Adrianna seemed to try to smile. ‘That sounds like you, Darren. What have you been up to?’

‘I’ve been placing some rogue programs on some of the server systems, trying to enhance the information stream we’ve been able to play with. You know us NSA guys: there’s no such thing as too much information.’

‘True.’

‘One program that I’ve used sends me copies of certain e-mails that have keywords flagged to a mail account I control. This program is called a BCC program. Stands for Blind Carbon Copy — funny, of course, since who in hell uses carbon-copy paper anymore?’

‘Darren—’

‘I’ll get to the point. One e-mail I got in the system overnight was a report filed with the CIA Office of Security. You know what they do, am I right?’

Adrianna seemed to freeze right there in her chair. ‘I do. What did the report state?’