by Ben English
The other two women made sympathetic sounds. Ian looked at Alonzo and rolled his eyes.
Nicole caught the motion, and pushed her plate back. Patting her stomach unconsciously, she said, “Well, maybe we’ll have time for a walk together over to the market before you go.”
“Definitely! I need to pick up some souvenirs.”
Nodding at both references to exercise or shopping, Allison folded her napkin. “I think we three need to unite against our common enemy.”
Ian dropped his fork. “The white man?”
Alonzo diverted his attention from the end of the table to where Jack beckoned him. “Look at this.” Steve’s screen displayed screens of dollar figures. “We pulled this last night from the PicoMorph server.”
Steve was so excited he hadn’t touched his food. “We found the money.”
“Accounting records?”
“Well, we have Raines attached to Lopez and the rest of the West Valley cartel through the pharmaceutical company. They’ve been laundering for years; nobody caught it because the international safeguards and systems used to detect this kind of thing are designed to catch anomalies in financial records, blips in the books. This has been a constant, massive outpouring of cash for over a decade, rather than a blip.”
“Sort of like hiding in plain sight.”
“That’s a good way to explain it,” Jack agreed. “The important thing: this is directly admissible in the U.S. under the anti-drug laws and treaties with Cuba.”
They would submit this to the FBI in due time, through a private channel. Provided that channel ever managed to disentangle himself from the three women at the end of the table.
*
Nearly everyone was present—the Tanner brothers were debriefing the locals. Might as well begin. Alonzo found his official meeting voice.
“All right, everyone. I know we’re all still going through the intel from the PicoMorph adventure last night, but what have we established so far?”
Allison raised her hand. “Ian carries a nail file.”
The man in question threw Jack and Alonzo a pleading expression. Alonzo considered letting him swing in the conversational wind a bit, but Irene had a plane to catch. His eyes found hers.
“Irene, would you mind showing us what you prepared? Give us enough info about the evidence so we can follow you, but please save the science for a written report.”
“Sure.” She stood and moved next to the small wheeled table, which supported three glass slides surrounded by individual, thick-walled plexi cubes. Steve handed her a remote control, and she began adding photos and schematics to the video wall.
“The five men who assaulted you and Alonzo in the night market were common laborers, but had top-notch fake IDs. All worked in and around the new conference center as electricians.
“PicoMorph Pharmaceuticals ran an extensive lab on Cayo Verad for several years. Evidence indicates that they weren’t just studying the local plants and animals, but they were running tests on the human population as well. Made it look like a fishing village to the outside world. The people in the village were encouraged and enabled to have large families, and the medical research seems to have been focused on the children.”
Neither Alonzo or Jack had seen pictures from the Cayo Verad expedition, and Irene also showed them a scan of the document they’d found in the abandoned hospital.
“Ian brought back two fingerprints from the island and we had some luck here. Both belonged to George Marduk; he was in the military database as a civilian research specialist with top secret clearance, though this was years ago.”
“Do we know anything else about Marduk?” asked Ian.
“Only that he’s been with Raines since the beginning. Has held different executive positions in a few of Raines’ companies, some of them simultaneously. Not sure exactly when the government work started. His fingerprints are on a request for personnel transfer, apparently one of the resident researchers was requesting a new assignment. Somewhere away from the island.”
“Was there a name?” Alonzo said. “We can track them—”
“She was on a list we already had,” said Steve. “We tracked her to Colorado. She got out of pediatric medicine after leaving the island.” He frowned. “She died last week of a stroke, according to the medical examiner. She was twenty-nine.” He looked at Jack. “She was on the list of targets you got from Brad’s father in Paris. Top of the list.”
“Sally Harris,” whispered Jack.
Nicole leaned forward. “So we might infer Marduk had a position of authority on the island. He wasn’t just a lab coat.”
Irene nodded. “Here’s what he looks like today.”
She showed them a picture of the Board of Directors for Raines Capital. Seated next to Raines himself was a nondescript, vaguely Asian man. “He’s not attached to any division of the company, but spends most of his time overseeing PicoMorph. Not sure how he met Raines.”
“They knew each other in college,” Jack said. Ignoring the curious expressions around him, he pressed, “What sort of experiments were they conducting, Irene? What killed all those children?”
“That leads us back to your five friends from the Mercado Nocturno. Whether or not they came off the island together, they’ve been working for Raines a long time.” She took a deep breath. “This is where we start down the rabbit hole.
“I told Jack after the autopsy I couldn’t tell how old any of them were. Aside from loss of hair pigment, they each had bodies of men in their late twenties or early thirties. I found an enormous amount of microcapsules in their blood.”
“Lots of people take their medications using timed-release microcapsules,” said Ian. “Even vitamins.”
Irene nodded. “My kids all get their vaccinations thru microcapsule release.” She continued. “And although each of the men from the night market were otherwise healthy at their time of death, they had all gotten dengue fever when they were younger. The markers remain in the blood forever.”
Alonzo shivered. “I had dengue once. Thought it was a really bad flu.”
“This is different. You had hemorrhagic dengue, according to your file. That version only appeared in Cuba after 1981. In the medical world, the different kinds of dengue are very distinct. As different as fingerprints.” Irene picked her next words very carefully. “The five men who attacked you had contracted classical dengue fever. I had to dig, but the last outbreak of that strain which occurred in Cuba or anywhere else was in the 1930s.”
“Wait, what?” said Alonzo. The others didn’t like what they were hearing.
“Let her get through the rest,” said Jack. “Like you said, Irene, down the rabbit hole.”
Irene pressed her forehead. “We haven’t gotten to the rabbit hole yet.” Fatigue deepened her expression. “What I just told you isn’t even the odd part. I’m still merely reporting evidence.”
A single image showing a dozen people appeared onscreen. “Everyone you see was on the list of victims you got in Paris. They all died within a few days of each other, across the U.S. Gave their respective coroners fits trying to determine cause of death.”
Alonzo recognized an American senator; the rest were a mixed bag. Two college kids (a couple—they were together in the same picture), an older woman, a CEO-type.
“Each have something in common with the men from Cayo Verad: unusually low levels of cellular energy. See, even several hours after death, basic metabolism continues. Not so with all these victims. Their mitochondria were completely depleted. At the time of death, their ATP processes had almost totally stopped.”
“What about the little boy from the island?” asked Steve.
“Couldn’t tell. That little guy has been dead too long to have any functioning mitochondria.”
“So,” said Jack, then stopped. Thought a moment. “The cellular energy was used for something.”
“Info about manufacturing is printed on each batch of microcapsules. I was able to match up batch d
ates with the PicoMorph information database. We can confirm that the microcapsules in the blood of the workers went to Cayo Verad more than ten years ago.”
“How did you learn this?” asked Allison. “From our activities last night at PicoMorph?”
Alonzo smiled. She was adorable. Wouldn’t stoop to mention hack, pirate, or burglary.
Irene clarified. “Actually, most batch information is available to the public, on the PicoMorph website. Type in the code and there you go.”
“How terribly helpful,” said Allison.
“What we found on the PicoMorph servers last night leads us to this next part. Weird. Although that word doesn’t seem strong enough.” She was exhausted. “Steve, are you ready?”
“I think so.” He had a computer hooked up to two devices Alonzo had never seen. One of them had an antenna while the other looked like a spectrometer, a tool for measuring energy across the electromagnetic spectrum.
Jack shifted uneasily in his seat, but said nothing. Alonzo noticed this, and also caught the sad look Irene gave him in return. Both men were dying to ask her questions, but would respect the process.
She turned to the wheeled table with its three plexiglass enclosures. “We’ve got enough samples to show this more than once, but who knows how many people we’ll have to convince—sorry, I’m getting ahead of myself.” She activated a micro-camera mounted to the enclosure, and the video wall became a microscope viewfinder.
“The first slide has a sample of the blood from the worker who attacked you in the market.” She pointed out basic cell shapes. Everything was moving. Alonzo suffered through a nasty memory of high school biology before Nicole interrupted.
“But that’s impossible. These all look healthy. You’re showing us healthy blood, and they’ve been dead almost three days.”
“Right,” said Irene, with a wave. She zoomed in several hundred times until they could make out the individual structures within a cell. “Now watch. When the cells are hit with a certain signal . . . go ahead, Steve.”
Alonzo didn’t hear a thing. Onscreen however, several shapes within the cell suddenly changed color and grew rapidly. Within a few seconds, the color spread to the rest of the cell.
Irene zoomed out, and they saw the rest of the cells and much of the fluid had changed color as well. Movement stopped.
“That was fast,” said Ian. “Necrosis?”
“No. Programmed cell death,” she responded. “Several of the systems inside each cell shut off or went into hyperactivity, and the cell wall was breached. In medical terms, this is an induced, premature death.”
“Excuse me,” said Allison. “I’m afraid I’m out of my depth here. Are you saying that living tissue was destroyed by some kind of combination of frequency and medication?”
“No; the cells were programmed to die from within. I believe that each cell is saturated with multiple tiny, tiny devices—on the nanoscale—which were triggered or instructed by a simple frequency combination. A code, inside the frequency. Think of it as very specific, very complex notes on a piano. The . . . nanomatter devices . . . activate when they receive the notes. Then they deliver instructions to the different parts of the cell, like a virus.”
“Can’t the body fight it?”
“Too small. Too many.”
Jack leaned back. “And this tech is supposed to be ten years old. Irene, what happened to the children?”
“Okay.” She wet her lips. “Watch the second sample.” Nodding toward Steve she said, “Let me zoom all the way in, then send the first trigger.”
Her hands trembled slightly as she repositioned the microscope. “This is a tissue sample taken from the body we recovered on Cayo Verad. A three year-old boy. I released his remains to the government a few hours ago.” She said this with a note of defiance.
“The microcapsules in his system are almost four years old.”
“You mean they–” Nicole left the thought unfinished.
“The microcapsules were implanted in utero,” Irene completed.
They followed her eyes to the second plexiglass container, then to the screen. A gathering of cells jumped into view, then grew exponentially until a single cell filled the screen. The microscope allowed them to see the inner membranes and shapes within.
Irene gripped a small fire extinguisher.
“Right now, all sorts of chemicals are cascading across the cell. There’s no user’s manual for what we’re doing; we don’t really know what kinds of instructions the nanodevices will accept. Based on what we downloaded from PicoMorph, we managed to find one set of commands. Show them, Steve.”
Nothing changed for a moment. Irene tensed.
Then the slide shattered, burst against the walls of the enclosure with a ringing, almost musical note. No one failed to see the flash of light accompanying the miniature roar.
Jack was on his feet as the rest of the team recovered, peering at the remains of the glass slide. He looked warily back at Irene. “How?” he said.
“Is that even possible?” asked Ian.
Jack answered before Irene. “There’s not enough energy in a group of cells to do that. Not at the cellular level.”
Irene lifted the plexiglass shield. The air tasted faintly of ozone. “We’re still just gathering evidence, Jack,” she reminded him. “But you’re right. Can’t generate that much energy that fast at the cellular threshold. But at the molecular level? Or the sub-molecular?”
Steve unplugged the transmitter from his computer. “Technology gets smaller and faster,” he said, almost under his breath.
“Could the devices have advanced that far in ten years?” asked Alonzo.
“Look here,” said Ian, bringing up a photograph. “This is a picture Allison took of the doorway to the church on Cayo Verad.”
“Where you found the coffins.” Jack added.
“Right. But these burn marks around the door—we figured someone was standing there, bracing the door shut, trying to keep out . . . whatever – there are scorch marks in the shape of human feet there, in the concrete floor. If you blow the pictures up you can see the outlines of veins and bone patterns.”
Irene nodded. “That’s in my report as well. I found organic tissue in the doorframe.”
“So,” said Jack. “It’s safe to say that an adult was injected with these devices as well, not just children.”
“That’s what the evidence indicates,” said Ian, grim.
Alonzo’s mind reeled. He needed a drink like nothing else. This was insane.
Then again, he thought, remembering what Raines built in London. “Think big, then think little,” he muttered.
Jack looked sharply over to him, then at Irene. “But the devices are turned off until activated by the frequencies.”
“Not necessarily,” said Irene. “We really don’t know what they’re doing. The frequencies just deliver a set of instructions, or trigger a prearranged response.”
Jack considered this. “So once someone is exposed to the nanodevices, you wouldn’t need a sophisticated delivery system to activate them.”
Steve nodded. “Any TV, radio, cell phone, internet-connected car. Actually, what with so many machines around us connected to the internet all the time, pretty much anything can be part of the delivery system. Vending machines, taxi displays, Jumbotrons, household appliances—”
“We get it,” Alonzo said.
Jack indicated the third slide. “What about this last sample?”
“That’s the newest batch, from the syringe Alonzo brought back from the night market. It had both old capsules—from the worker’s blood—and new capsules in it. Brand new, in fact.”
Alonzo stood and looked closely at it. Thought about how close he’d been to the business end of a needle. “Well? This is what they were going to inject me with? What about it? What does it do?”
Irene was at a loss. “No idea. We haven’t been able to get the nanodevices in that sample to respond at all. I only brought them along
because I’ve been working on all three samples together.
“There’s nothing in the PicoMorph files about this batch of microcapsules. They’re dated last week.”
“So it might be evolved even further than whatever went into the kids. But it still has to be passed by syringe.”
“Not necessarily. Maybe a syringe was all they had handy to use on Alonzo. Might even have a different dispersal system.”
Alonzo had an idea. “You know who might know? Dr. Fenn , or what’s-his-name, in San Francisco. Dr. Switzer.”
Jack agreed. “Copies of all of this material, including the pertinent files, go to the CDC and our contacts at the U.S. intelligence agencies by the end of the day. I’ll write up the abstract.”
That was good, thought Alonzo. Jack was good at summarizing things so that security chiefs could feel smarter than they actually were.
As everyone prepared to move, Jack cleared his throat. “While we’re all still together, I want to thank Irene. She’ll take copies of the case file back to L.A.—but now she’s got to pull a Houdini before we find something else for her to do.”
Everyone applauded. In a move that surprised both of them, Allison hugged Irene. “Would love to meet your darling family someday. Your husband must perfectly despise us for keeping you here so long.”
Jack spoke up. “I’m sure he’d like you, Allison. It’s me he’s not thrilled with. If Irene’s husband and I were in a room with Hitler and Stalin, and he had a gun with two bullets, he’d shoot me twice.”
Jack offered to take Irene to the airport. “You’ll be in L.A. before dinner. Al, you coming?”
Alonzo still stood near the third slide, eyeing it with a mixture of curiosity and practical regard. He remembered how close the needle had come to his own skin. It didn’t feel like he was looking at his own death.
“Can I ride along?” asked Nicole. “I actually have a couple of questions.”
“I’ll drive,” said Irene, Jack, and Alonzo together.
Trajectory and Resonance
She’d driven the stretch of road out to the airport at least a dozen times now, but Nicole came along to see something new. Hoping, really, to see something old, but with luck it would be new for her.
