Project Hannibal Kathryn Hoff (best free e book reader TXT) 📖

kids would get overexcited and yell and climb all over him, and he’d love every moment of it. Karen would be furious at him for leaving her alone so long. He smiled, thinking of all the ways he’d make it up to her. Like a lion, he thought. Lots of roaring and fight to protect the pride. And like any good lion, he wanted a fierce lioness like Karen at his side. Something an alley cat like Cortez would never be able to appreciate.

Going home. For Luis that meant his cramped Fairbanks apartment—minus his television, laptop, and liquor if Brandon had been feeling vindictive. And no job. If Anjou didn’t get his funding back soon, Luis might even have to go back to Phoenix to live with his mother. The thought made him shudder.

But maybe he could find something better. After all, why wait for Ginger to start the publicity campaign? The only reason to keep the mammoths’ trek a secret had been to delay the army from finding them. Now that the army had tracked them down, publicity was the mammoths’ best hope. And Sera was perfect: young, pretty, personable, with a dramatic story to tell. What better advocate could the mammoths have?

He picked up his satphone to make calls to three Fairbanks television newsrooms.

Luis was last to board the helicopter, shoving inside his saddlebags full of gear. Choosing a seat next to Sera, he strapped himself in.

“You know, what you did back there was pretty brave.” He tried for a friendly smile, well aware that a scruffy-bearded stranger might be intimidating to a young woman.

Sera turned to him, her face earnest. “I couldn’t stand by and let them shoot them. That would be horrible—especially the new baby. Why would they do that?”

“The major seems to think the mammoths are dangerous.”

Sera straightened, chin up. “So are tigers, but we still need to protect them. Will the mammoths be all right now?”

“Only if people don’t hunt them down. It wouldn’t be the first time humans have driven mammoths to extinction.”

The hawk-eyed doctor, in the rear-facing seat behind Sera, turned enough to glance his way, not objecting to his speaking to the girl but letting him know she was keeping her niece in sight.

Don’t worry, lady. I’m not out to take advantage of her—at least not in the way you’re worried about.

Luis nodded to the glittering purple cellphone peeking out of Sera’s pocket. “Did you get some good pictures?”

“Don’t worry, I won’t post them.”

“That’s all right. So many people have seen them now, there’s no point in trying to keep the mammoths secret anymore.” He brightened as if he’d just had a brilliant thought. “You know, I think you should post your pictures. Maybe if more people knew about the mammoths, they’d understand why we need them. Did you know that protecting the permafrost is the single most important thing we can do to prevent climate change from destroying our planet? And bringing back mammoths is the natural way to preserve . . .”

CHAPTER 42

It’s always wise to have a backup plan

At the Anchorage FBI office, the Bureau’s interviewer paged through an ominously thick file. “Oh, your girlfriend’s North Korean, all right, but we always knew that.”

Henri Anjou felt naked, facing official questions in a black turtleneck without his white lab coat to lend him authority. His lawyer, a young woman who wore way too much makeup and jewelry, had coached him on cooperating. Answer honestly, don’t volunteer information, and don’t say anything stupid. She sat beside him in a barren interview room, tapping fingers on the bare table. As if he were a common felon about to be thrown into jail.

The FBI man—middle-aged and hard-eyed—ran a pudgy finger down a dense paragraph. “According to our brothers in the CIA, Ji-Young Kim came to Seoul on the refugee trail via China, Laos, and Thailand, at the age of twenty-three.”

Anjou looked up. “Ginger told me she’d been smuggled into South Korea as a small child.”

The FBI agent snorted. “Hardly. She already had a degree in microbiology and had done a hitch in the North’s intelligence service. They eased her way into South Korea as a sleeper agent with a mission to pick up all the high-tech intel she could. She proved so good at it that the North Koreans needed Russian help to figure out what they were getting. From then on, she’s been more or less on permanent loan to the Russians. They sent her to the US on a student visa. At that point, immigration knew she was North Korean but didn’t have any particular reason to doubt her story about being a poor refugee looking for freedom. Once she was in the US, she stretched out grad school as long as she could, taking research assistantships with a variety of professors in high-tech fields. We’re still tracing them all, but it seems likely she picked up a good bit of information along the way about proprietary technology and processes.”

“I helped her get her doctorate,” Anjou said gloomily. The lawyer flashed him a warning glance. Right, don’t volunteer.

“Once she latched on to you,” the interviewer said, “she had an entree into all those conferences. Nikodim Zhurov was one of her contacts—he’s been on the CIA’s radar for a while, and it was her continuing communication with him that made them alert us. Zhurov made it a priority to get mature mammoths into Russia. I gather the genes aren’t the problem, it’s growing an actual baby that’s hard?”

Anjou bridled. “The genes are critical. But,” he deflated a bit, “yes, the gestation and integration into a herd structure are crucial for survival.” No wonder Zhurov had made so much progress on the genetics—Ginger must have fed him scraps of Anjou’s research.

The FBI man took off his reading glasses and