by Alex Ryan
Qing stopped and pressed his thumbs into his temples.
Enough thoughts of Dazhong and her treachery. If given the opportunity, he would avenge her infidelity and punish her properly. If not, then she would simply perish with the rest of the corrupt in Beijing.
Darkness forced him to retrieve the LED flashlight from his bag. He clicked on the beam and a rat squealed, scurrying across the floor in front of him so close he almost stepped on it. He jumped back a step, his heart pounding in his chest. A drop of water fell from the ceiling and splattered on the bridge of his nose, startling him again.
He collected himself and forced his mind to the task at hand. As he made his way down the tunnel, he saw a dim light several hundred meters in the distance. Yes, good, the turn was close. He walked ten meters forward and felt a subtle shift in the air currents. He arced the flashlight beam right and found the next passage. He turned into the new tunnel and resisted the urge to jog. He was close. He checked his mobile phone for the time and smiled. Perfect. He would arrive on time. These were not the type of people who liked to be kept waiting.
A few minutes later, he reached the stairwell and climbed back up toward the surface. He had selected the meeting location—an unoccupied warehouse—because it afforded several strategic advantages. First, it was unoccupied. He knew this because he had purchased the warehouse fourteen months ago via a shell company. Second, it had an entrance to the Underground City, which meant he could enter and exit without being seen or followed. His original plan had been to sell the building to INI for a hefty profit, evade capital gain taxes, and set up nanobot incubators. He would maintain an office at the facility and have handy access to the Underground City. Never had he imagined that the building might someday save his life.
He came to the recess in the wall and shined his light inside, revealing a metal gate and the stairs beyond. He opened the gate and then clicked off the light and stowed it in his bag. He quietly opened the door at the top of the stairs, slipped into a small utility closet he’d had made to camouflage the entrance, and closed the secret panel door back into place. Then he waited a moment behind the ordinary closet door that opened out into a hallway at the rear of the warehouse. He pressed his ear against the door. Hearing nothing, he slowly opened the door, grimacing when it creaked slightly. He stepped out into the hall and shut the door behind him.
He glanced left and right and found the hallway empty as expected. He walked softly down the hall to the access door to the warehouse and pulled it open. Beside the door, a man holding a submachine gun startled and whirled to face Qing. The sentry raised his weapon and then glanced quickly over his shoulder at his boss, who was standing in the middle of a tight group of men in the center of the room. The leader nodded, and the guard stood down.
“Where the hell did you come from?” the guard grunted softly.
Qing said nothing and flashed the muscle a condescending smile. He walked across the tile floor and extended his hand in greeting to the leader, a man known in the underworld as Mok the Broker.
Mok looked at Qing’s hand and frowned. “You left me in a rather awkward situation, Doctor,” he said, pursing his lips and refusing to shake hands. Then he turned his back and walked a few paces, leaving Qing alone in a cone of light cast by an industrial yellow halogen light above their heads. “You made promises, and so I made promises. You provided me with milestones and timelines, and so I provided milestones and timelines. Do you see where I’m going with this?”
“I’m sorry but—”
“My clients do not care about sorry,” Mok said, cutting him off. “These are very serious, very violent people. Surely you’ve seen what they do to their captives? They chop their heads off with machetes.” Mok finally turned back to look at Qing, the trained killers on his flanks staring impassively—attack dogs on a leash.
Qing was not intimidated by this charade. In fact, he expected this. Mok had always been his contingency plan, but the broker of the underworld didn’t know that. Pride needed to be swallowed; face needed saving.
“Of course, you’re right. I’ve put you in terrible situation for which I apologize most sincerely,” he said, bowing his head slightly and crossing his arms behind him. “I assure you that this delay was not of my own making.”
Mok the Broker lifted an eyebrow. “Go on.”
“I fear my operation might be under investigation, and I did not want to risk your safety or anonymity. Extra precautions were necessary, and such things always take longer than anticipated.”
The man’s mouth dropped open. Then his face flushed with anger.
“You are under surveillance and you still came here to meet me? Are you insane?”
Qing put on his most disarming smile. “Quite the opposite. It is with an abundance of caution that I came here today. Everything is in order, and I am ready to proceed.”
Mok shook his head. “I am not certain we can still proceed,” he said. “There is more risk than you had led me to believe.”
“The greater the risk, the greater the reward,” Qing assured. “You have explained to your client what the agent can do?”
The broker laughed.
“My reward is money, which I must be both alive and free to enjoy. I do not share your passion for this weapon of mass destruction, nor do I share our client’s zeal for punishing nonbelievers. I am a businessman, and the cost-benefit ratio of our relationship has just shifted.”
Qing nodded. “Of course, which is why I suggest raising your fee from twenty percent to thirty percent—a very substantial sum of money. I will also add a five-million-euro bonus after you complete one additional task I require.”
“I am listening,” Mok said.
“It is imperative that I leave immediately.”
“You want us to arrange passage out of Beijing?” the man asked.
“Out of China,” Qing clarified. “I require a private, secluded residence where I can wait safely and comfortably until my new lab and residence are established in Manama.”
“How soon?”
“We must leave Beijing this afternoon.”
Mok snorted. “You ask a lot.”
“And I give as much,” Qing said. “I offer not just money but information to protect you and your organization—and your loved ones, if you have them—from things that are coming.”
Now he appeared to have the man’s full attention. Mok glanced down, thinking perhaps, but more likely stalling for affect.
“I can get you out, if we move forward,” Mok said.
“If?”
“Yes, if,” the arms broker said with a smirk. He nodded to one of the brutes beside him, who moved off toward a black SUV Qing could see parked inside the warehouse near the loading door. “The client needs a demonstration first.”
“Of course,” Qing said, not surprised. The event in Kizilsu was compelling but had not been witnessed firsthand. He slipped the messenger bag from his shoulder and from it pulled out a black case, about the size of a large textbook. As he did, the armed guard returned with a barefoot man, his torn clothing matted with blood and his bare feet swollen and purple. He could not see the man’s face, because the man’s head was covered with a black hood. The guard dragged the man with one hand and a folding metal chair with the other. The pair stopped three feet in front of Qing, and Mok’s goons went to work. One bodyguard forced the hooded man to sit on the chair, while the others used plastic ties to bind his arms and legs to the structure.
“This is the subject?” Qing asked, opening the black case. Inside was a small metal canister he had been using and three syringes full of a pink liquid, each a bit darker than the last and lined up perfectly in the foam cutouts inside the box.
Mok shook his head in apparent amusement and snorted again. “Subject? Yes, Doctor, this is your subject.”
Qing smiled, hiding his irritation at Mok’s insolence. “Of course,” he said and tapped the darkest of the three syringes—the highest concentration—to check that
no air was present. Silly, wasn’t it? A few ccs of intravenous gas would be the least of this man’s concerns in a moment.
“What did this man do?” Qing asked as he located a bulging antecubital vein in the crease of the hooded man’s elbow.
“Perhaps he did not bow low enough to Mecca; perhaps he drew a cartoon picture of Mohamed,” said Mok the Broker. “I don’t know, and I don’t care.”
Qing took position at the man’s side and then, careful to not stick himself, plunged the needle into the man’s vein. The man jerked his arm, but Mok’s bodyguard clamped down on the poor soul like a vise. Qing pulled back on the plunger and saw the swirling cloud of blood in the syringe that let him know he was in the vein, and then injected the pink liquid. He then dropped the syringe into a small clear case built into the side of his black box.
As Qing packed his case, he noticed that Mok and his goons were staring expectantly at the hooded man. One of Mok’s men was recording video of the event with his mobile phone camera.
“It’s not working,” Mok said with irritation after a minute had transpired.
“Patience,” Qing said. “If the buyers wanted to watch a bullet spill this man’s brains, then they would have bought a gun. The death that you are witnessing is happening on the cellular level. This is a precise and sophisticated biological weapon that can kill anyone—covertly, quietly, and without a trace.”
“He is not contagious?” Mok asked, taking a step back.
“No,” Qing assured, neglecting to mention that it was best not to be exposed to the target tissues until enough time had lapsed for the nanobots to scavenge completely.
“How long?” the man asked.
“The weapon was given intravenously, so tissue decimation will progress quickly.”
He had selected central nervous tissue as his target—like he had with Polakov. He had also injected a highly concentrated dose, so effects would manifest quickly. No time for games today; he had a tight schedule to meet. He took a bottle of sparkling water from his messenger bag and drank from it.
“Please send me a text message when you have the client’s decision,” Qing said, screwing the cap back on the bottle. “Remember, we need to be out of Beijing by three o’clock this afternoon.”
Mok waved a hand at him but kept his eyes riveted on the subject.
Qing strolled away, sparkling water in his hand.
The broker would be calling him very quickly. Until then, he had other important business to attend to in the Underground City.
Chapter 31
Chinese Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
0320 hours local
“I’m sorry, Nick, but you have to wait in the car,” Dazhong said, chewing her lower lip.
“Impending bioterrorism attack in Beijing, Snow Leopards on high alert, unsanctioned American Navy SEAL seeking entry into CDC after hours,” he said with sarcastic lilt. “Don’t worry, I get it.”
“Please stay in the car,” she said.
He narrowed his eyes at her. “Hey, I’m not the one who has trouble following orders, remember?”
“Keep your phone turned on so I can call you if I need you.”
“Of course, but I’m not the one who has trouble answering and returning phone calls either.”
She shot him a playful scowl, opened the driver’s-side door, and stepped out. “And whatever you do, don’t leave.”
“Cross my heart,” he said, and traced an X over his chest.
“I should only be an hour . . . maybe two.”
“Just go, Dash,” he said, scooting up and over the center console to take her place behind the wheel.
“Okay, I’m going. Bye, Nick.”
Ten minutes later, she was badged in, cleared through security, and pulling open the door to the nanoscope laboratory. She exhaled with relief to find the room exactly as she had left it hours ago. She powered on the nanoscope and began her search for nanobots. If her theory was correct, she would not find any in the prepared samples—only nonbiological, interstitial debris. She searched all the slides in the caddy but couldn’t find a single nanobot. Given the amount of tissue material she needed to search and the search magnification, she was certain to have missed one, or two, or maybe even half a dozen active nanobots in each sample. But finding the needle in the haystack was not the point. Twelve hours ago, there had been millions of nanobots in Jamie Lin’s tissues. The question she needed to answer was this: “Where did all the nanobots go?”
To her knowledge, she was the only person who had actually seen an intact nanobot—excluding Qing, that is. Major Li and his team of researchers had encountered the “smoking gun” problem during postmortem analysis of tissues harvested from the Kizilsu victims: pervasive tissue damage, no identifiable pathogens, but abundant, interspersed nonbiological debris. Unlike Li’s team, she had harvested her tissue samples only moments after Jamie Lin’s death, and she had put the samples on ice, thereby slowing cellular motility. The combination of these factors—time and temperature—probably explained why she had seen the nanobots in action, but Li’s team had not.
Her initial hypothesis for the mechanism behind the nanobot disappearance had been that the nanobots self-destructed after a predetermined time period—like a bomb detonating after the timer counts down to zero. The problem with this theory was that the empirical evidence did not support it or, at least, did not support it completely. The nonbiological debris that both she and Major Li had observed was uniform and unspecific. Every chunk looked like every other chunk. There were no identifiable pieces that screamed, “Nanobot Death Machine.” The task was analogous to being shown a pile of demolition rubble and then being asked to identify the architecture of the building that had been demolished. The fact that Major Li had possessed the insight to make the leap from indiscernible trash to a Bio-MEMS weapon was impressive. Had their roles been reversed, she doubted she would have made the same cognitive leap. Li, however, had not offered any theories as to what happened to the nanobots postmortem. If she could solve that mystery, then she could move on to the next step—figuring out how to stop them.
Her revised theory was simple: The nanobots did not self-destruct.
They were shredded—shredded by other nanobots.
The idea had germinated when Nick told her about Humpty Dumpty—not the egg, but the origin story. In the seventeenth century, the best way to blow up a cannon was simply to use another cannon. In the case of Qing’s nanobots, the same was true. The human immune system was incapable of destroying them; that was the genius of the weapon. The hardware advantage of a synthetic macrophage over a biological one was insurmountable. But as is so often the case, a great advantage does not often come without a great disadvantage. Yin and yang. In his quest to build the perfect bioweapon, Qing recognized that stealth was a prerequisite. Killing people is easy. Killing without leaving fingerprints is hard. Leaving millions of self-replicating nanobots in the tissues of a victim was one hell of a fingerprint. To safeguard his technology—from discovery, duplication, and defensive countermeasures—Qing turned to biology for the answer.
Apoptotic phagocytosis.
Apoptosis, or preprogrammed cellular death, is a highly regulated, essential biological process in the lifecycle of multicellular organisms. In contrast to cellular division, which provides the body a mechanism to generate new, healthy cells, apoptosis is a mechanism to rid the body of aged, defective ones. In healthy adult humans, cellular division and apoptosis are in equilibrium—averaging fifty to seventy million events per day. After a cell dies, phagocytic cells, such as macrophages, engulf and digest the remains. Dazhong was very familiar with apoptosis because of the essential role that preprogrammed cell death plays in a healthy, functioning immune system—providing an elegant, efficient means to rid the body of infected and cancerous cells. Now it appeared Qing had taken a page from nature’s playbook and programmed his nanobots to phagocytize each other once all the target tissue was destroyed.
The man is brilliant, she mused. Diabolical, but brilliant.
She backed her stool away from the monitor, arched her back, and groaned. She was exhausted. She couldn’t remember the last time she slept. She closed her eyes for just an instant. Her head bobbed with microsleep, and she snapped back awake.
Got to keep going. Got to keep pushing.
She stood and smacked her cheeks with her palms. Then she jumped up and down to get her blood pumping. It helped a little.
Time to make more slides.
Her theory was sound, but she needed proof—visual confirmation of nanobot phagocytosis. The samples loaded in the nanoscope were too old. She needed fresh tissue, but that wasn’t an option. Her only hope was that the refrigeration had slowed the motility of the nanobots in the remaining samples of Jamie Lin’s liver to the point that nanobot apoptosis was incomplete.
It took her thirty minutes to prepare two additional samples for the nanoscope, ten minutes to load them, and twenty minutes to find her holy grail, and when she did, her heart skipped a beat. There, in the center of a pile of black debris, a nanobot was busy tearing another nanobot to pieces, its legs beating furiously as it pulled its brother machine into a macerating maw in the center of the orb. She bellowed a victory howl so primal and loud it made her blush despite the fact that she was alone. Then a stab of panic washed over her. Had she remembered to press the record button for the nanoscope video feed? She glanced at the controls and breathed a sigh of relief—recording in high definition.
The fatigue she had been battling earlier was gone, replaced by endorphin-driven euphoria. She grabbed her mobile phone and dialed Nick. He picked up on the second ring.
“Hello,” Nick answered. He sounded tired.
“It’s me,” she said, “Dash.” As she spoke, it registered that this was the first time she had referred to herself by that name, which made her feel strange and good all at the same time.
