Rainbow Six

John's arms around her. The divorce had been well publicized. It had had to be: She would never have gotten the White House job if she'd been married to one of the country'srichest men. And so, she'd forsworn him, and he'd publicly forsworn the movement, the beliefs they'd both held ten years before when they'd formulated the idea for the Project, but he'd never stopped believing, any more than she had. And so she'd gotten all the way inside the government, and gotten a security clearance that gave her access to literally everything, even operational intelligence, which she then forwarded to John when he needed it. Most especially, she'd gotten access to biological-warfare information, so that they knew what USAMRIID and others had done to protect America, and so knew how to engineer Shiva in such a way as to defeat any proposed vaccine except those which Horizon Corporation had formulated.

But it had had its own price. John had been seen in public with all manner of young women, and had doubtless dallied with many of them, for he'd always been a passionate man. It was something they hadn't discussed before their public divorce, and for that reason it had come to her as an unpleasant surprise to see him at those occasional social functions they both had to attend, always with a pretty young thing on his arm-always a different one, since he'd never formed a realrelationship with anyone but her. Carol Brightling told herself that this was good, since it meant that she was the only woman really a part of John's life, and thus those annoying young women were merely a way for him to dissipate his male hormones… But it hadn't been easy to see, and harder still to think about, alone in her home, with only Jiggs for company, and often as not weeping in her loneliness.

But set against that small personal consideration was the Project. The White House job had merely fortified her beliefs. She'd seen it all here, Carol Brightling reminded herself, from the specifications for new nuclear weapons to bio-war reports. The Iranian attempt at a national plague, which had predated her government job, had both frightened and encouraged her. Frightened, because it had been a real threat to the country, and one that could have begun a massive effort to counter a future attack. Encouraged, because she'd learned in short order that a really effective defense was difficult at best, because vaccines had to be tailored for specific bugs. And, when one got down to it, the Iranian plague had merely heightened the public's appreciation of the threat, and that would make distribution ofthe "A" vaccine the easier to sell to the public… and to the government bureaucrats here and around the world who would leap at the offered cure. She would even return to her OEOB office at the proper time to urge approval for this essential public health measure. and on this issue she would be trusted.

Dr. Carol Brightling walked out of her office, turned left down the wide corridor, then left again and down the steps to her parked car. Twenty minutes later, she locked the car and walked up the steps of her apartment building, there to be greeted by the faithful Jiggs, who jumped into her arms and rubbed his furry head against her breast, as he always did. Her ten years of misery were over, and though the sacrifice had been hard to endure, the reward for it would be a planet turning back to green, and a Nature restored to Her deserved Glory.

It was somehow good to be back in New York. Though he didn't dare to return to his apartment, this was at least a city, and here he could disappear as easily as a rat in a junkyard. He told the taxi driver to take him to Essex House, an upscale hotel on CentralPark South, and there he checked in under the name of Joseph Demetrius. Agreeably, there was a minibar in his room, and he mixed a drink with two miniatures of an American brand of vodka, whose inferior taste he was too anxious to be concerned about. Then, having come to his decision, he called the airline to confirm flight information, checked his watch, then called the front desk and instructed the clerk there to give him a wake-up call at the hellish hour of 3:30 A.m. The Russian collapsed into the bed without undressing. He'd have to do some quick shopping in the morning, and also visit his bank to pull his Demetrius passport out of the safe-deposit box. Then he'd get five hundred dollars out of an ATM cash machine, courtesy of his Demetrius MasterCard, and he'd be safe… well, if not truly safe, then safer than he was now, enough to be somewhat confident in himself and his future, such as it was, if the Project could be stopped. And if not, he told himself behind closed and somewhat drunken eyes, then at least he'd know what to avoid in order to keep himself alive. Probably.