Red Snow by Michael Slade Page A

How did you find out as much as you did?” asked Robert.
    “He boasted about it before he died. We know the transaction took place, but we don’t know why the bombs were never used.”
    Joe paused to let Gill and Robert take in all he’d just told them.
    “Now here’s the nightmare scenario,” he continued. “Nowhere on earth is more than twenty-some hours away by plane. Nothing gathers an international crowd like the Olympics. If a bioterrorist were to release Grof’s supervirus at Whistler in February—or at Sochi in 2014—he’d essentially create thousands of human time bombs, people carrying a potential airborne pandemic to all four corners of the globe.”
    Nightmare indeed, thought Robert.
    He made a mental note to discuss Grof’s Frankenvirus with Zinc and Nick at the next day’s security powwow.
    In a post-9/11 world, Robert knew, it was madness to hold the Winter Olympics at a site where the venues stretched over a hundred miles. It was going to cost a fortune in taxpayer money to police the games, what with skating down near the American border, curling and hockey in Vancouver, snowboarding up on the North Shore mountains, and the alpine events off hell and gone along one of the world’s most precarious roads. To make the games palatable to the Canadian public, security had originally been budgeted at a laughable $175 million. But those costs had soon skyrocketed to around a billion dollars. And then the bottom had crumbled away from the national treasury, which left taxpayers barely able to afford to protect the actual games. There was simply no money in the kitty for preliminary tryouts like those being held at Whistler over the next few days.
    As fate would have it, this was also the week that VISU, the RCMP-led Vancouver 2010 Integrated Security Unit, was fine-tuning its multi-threat detection system in downtown Vancouver. Called Safesite, this system boasts an array of sensors that can monitor entire city blocks and sniff out forty chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) threats. If a terrorist organization like al-Qaeda wanted to attack the Olympics with sarin, mustard gas, anthrax, or ricin, or with a “dirty bomb” of radioactive waste, the target would be Vancouver, not Whistler. That’s why all but a few of the Olympic defenders were now on a test run in Lotusland.
    In tough economic times, hard choices had to be made. Until security ramped up for the actual games, still two months away, Whistler had let down its guard.

Hell Dorado
     
    Whistler
    Mephisto’s inspiration had come from Dactylella , a carnivorous fungus. The fungus looped its many threads into nooses. If a roundworm stuck its head into one of the holes, the ring tightened, strangling it like a hangman’s rope. Then a penetration tube emerged from the thread to pierce the body of the worm and suck out nutriments. Sated, the fungus released its prey.
    Good idea, Mephisto had thought.
    And voilà .
    The metal strangling device he’d created resembled a dog collar attached to a four-foot chain ending with a hook. The inside of the collar was ringed with a circular razor blade.
    “How does it work?” Scarlett asked.
    They had just returned to the mountainside chalet overlooking the El Dorado Resort, where they’d baited the trap designed to hook DeClercq.
    The psycho demonstrated. The loop constricted when he yanked the leash.
    “Wicked!” she replied.
    “And this ,” her boss added, “I created for you. I got the idea from Jivaro headhunters.” Mephisto handed her the weapon.
    The Ice Pick Killer’s eyes widened with admiration as she grasped how it worked.
    “Wicked!” she repeated.
    Her new favorite word, it seemed.
    The most diabolic weapon, however, had come not from his brain but from Vladimir Grof. The two had linked up on the Internet, that godsend of sexual perverts and worldwide terrorists. What began with a discussion of biological plagues—with the Russian in Siberia and Mephisto in the