Operator B by Edward Lee Page B

looked duped. “Why would they think that?”
    “Well…because it’s true. We’ve been doing it for decades—saves us lots of money. Why send up our own missions when we can tap and analyze their  findings?”
    “Cloak and Dagger is alive and well,” Wentz supposed. “The United States—the world’s best friend.”
    Ashton ignored the sarcasm. “General, a year ago, the joint Japanese/Russian mission was initiated. A collection probe—QSR4—landed in the Tharsus Bulge on Mars and immediately began to relay findings back to earth—”
    “And to us, ” Wentz finished, “from the taps we secretly planted in their probe.”
    “Yes. And what the collector discovered was more than bacterial fiber fossils but… live  bacteria.
    “You’re not joking, are you?” Wentz asked.
    “No, General, we’re not,” Jones said. “The mission’s analysis sensors positively identified the organisms as live.  Our own analysis of the data, however, unbeknownst to the Japanese and the Russians, indicates quite a bit more. Our own spectrographic survey of the probe’s findings was processed through CDC and Langley, and the bacteria reveals characteristics consistent with a cytomegalic mutation.”
    Wentz frowned. “Do I look like a microbiologist?”
    Ashton crossed her legs in the chair. “What he means, sir, is that the CDC analysis of the molecular specs strongly suggests that the Tharsus bacteria is host to a virus more hazardous than anything ever found on earth.”
    Wentz stared at them through a dark interlude.
    “In about six months,” Jones went on, “the return stage of the QSR4 mission is going to pick up that collector and bring it back to earth.”
    “So tell them to scrub the pickup,” Wentz made the most obvious suggestion. “I think if you told them they were bringing a deadly virus back to earth, they wouldn’t have to think long before they aborted the entire mission.”
    “We can’t do that, General. That would acknowledge what they’ve suspected all along—that our own agents have been planting tap-sensors in their probes. It would ruin foreign relations.”
    Wentz almost laughed. “Well then fuck  foreign relations. This is a bit more important, isn’t it?”
    “It’s not that simple, sir,” Ashton said.
    Wentz considered this. “Fine, then do what you Big Brother guys do best. Destroy the return stage before it gets back—”
    “That’s even less serviceable,” Jones countered. “It would be plainly detectable as a hostile attack on the geostatic DPS net. They’d never believe it was an accident, and since the U.S. is the only country in the world with the sufficient anti-satellite technology to pull something like that off—”
    “They’d know it was us,” Wentz agreed.
    “And considering the upcoming trade agreements pending in Congress,” Ashton reminded, “we’d lose all economic ties with the Japanese forever, and the Russians would more than likely freeze all U.S. investment assets currently in place.”
    “So you see our dilemma,” Jones said. “If we sabotage their return mission on its way back, we risk an economic war that could put us in a true depression. And if we tell them of our knowledge of the nature of the bacteria—that we’ve secretly installed the equivalent of analytical eaves-dropping devices on their space missions, then the news will hit every wire service in the world, and we’ll lose every ally we have.”
    Wentz couldn’t believe the knit-picking here. “What are you guys? Republicans? You consider positive U.S. foreign relations more important than preventing a potential plague?”
    “It wouldn’t be a potential  plague, sir,” Ashton explained. “All the spectrographic and chromatographic analysis of the data we intercepted from the QSR4 sample-collector indicates a viral component with exponential contagion attributes. If that return stage succeeds in bringing the Tharsus bacteria back to earth—”
    Jones’ voice grated,