"But that is not what happened here!" Angel exclaimed. "You need to tell the media that—"
"We're not inclined to correct them, Angel. It would cause a panic if the public knew the truth."
"It stains the migrant community! It gives people yet another excuse to fear the and hate refugees. The truth needs to be told!"
"In this case, the truth would do more harm. It would cause—"
"That's what you told me this summer! But if you had let me publish the article I wrote, none of this would have happened!"
"Or it might have happened much sooner and with greater severity."
"You do not know that!"
The final group of about a dozen filed into the theater and were led toward the front, where they were asked to sit. Snacks were passed out, then Emily knocked quietly on the projection room door and stuck her head in to ask what to do next.
"Tell them to sit tight," Norstrom told her.
Her eyes flicked to Cheong, who nodded. She quietly shut the door, cutting off the anxious chatter reaching their ears from inside the theater.
"The attacks continued into the next day," Norstrom continued, "spreading out across northern France and southern Great Britain. Civilians this time. Some of the attackers were shot and killed by police, but many eluded law enforcement. In order to put a stop to it once and for all, we made the decision to use the kill code. Our cyberforensics team found it on one of the phones recovered at Nordqvist's estate. It was registered to a man named Barrahas Catalan."
"Duke," Angel whispered. "Was he with the terrorists?"
"My men are looking into his connection," Norstrom said. Turning back to Cheong, he continued his explanation. "The signal was broadcast over the regional emergency cellular networks. It was enough to put the rampage to an end, but not before some eleven thousand people were dead."
"If you broadcast it, how did it spare the people you brought here?" Cheong asked, gesturing at the refugees milling about on the other side of the glass. "If they have these things inside their bodies, wouldn't they be dead, too?"
"The last three buses from the original evacuation were already sent to Gravenhage in the Netherlands. It's well outside the broadcast area. There is a secret bunker there underneath Noordeinde Palace, part of The Hague complex."
"Another bunker?" Angel asked. "So you already suspected two weeks ago that something like this might happen."
"All three groups were supposed to end up in smaller bunkers, including the ones that went to Nordqvist's estate. That group was actually supposed to go to a remote facility in Spain, but, as you know, the UN belayed that order."
"Someone at the UN, you mean," Angel said. "I think Nordqvist was supposed to steal the technology."
"Yes, we know. But he was a pawn. Nordqvist's methods were well known. He could reverse engineer any piece of technology, and would happily do so if the price was right. He didn't care who he stole from or who he sold it to. But I don't think he knew about the nanites or the refugee extraction until right before he was asked to take them in. He would have been briefed that same morning."
"By whom?"
"Someone saw an opportunity to acquire the technology for themselves. Probably another nation-state. If I hadn't been tied up in Istanbul — literally — I would have done everything I could to countermand the decision to involve him."
Angel could feel her cheeks growing hot again at the memory of her father's former competitor. In the face of death, he had proven himself to be more human than he deserved to be remembered by. For Angel, however, it had made it easy to grieve his selflessness. Even now, when reminded of the type of person he really had been, she couldn't forget how he had saved her life. At the moment, however, all she felt was anger.
"Why did you leave Gravenhage?" Cheong asked.
"We had intel that strongly indicated Noordeinde Palace had been compromised and was going to be hit. The bunker is an electronics dead zone — that's why I chose it — but it's not impregnable to conventional weapons. I was still in Calais doing the mop up, so I ordered my team in The Hague to evacuate immediately. Using the established protocols, nine vehicles were dispatched to separate destinations along different routes; six of those vehicles were decoys. The first bus was located and hit even before I could leave France. Luckily, the damage was contained to the passenger compartment only. There were no survivors."
"They killed each other off?"
"According to the driver, most of the refugees were attackers, but not all. A smaller subset of their countrymen were their victims. Oddly enough, the attackers didn't attack each other once their victims were dead."
"How was it stopped?"
"Again, by using the self-destruct. Each driver was provided a cell phone and instructions that it was to be used only in the event the attack program had been activated."
Norstrom reached into his pack and extracted two objects— a cell phone and a battery, and held them in his palm.
"Takes about seven seconds to boot up the device once the battery is installed. Another five seconds to activate the self-destruct program by pressing and holding the number six."
"Sir?" Emily interrupted. She had entered moments earlier and was waiting silently for a lull in the discussion, only to grow impatient. "Any idea how much longer you're going to be? They're getting restless out there. And I need to help Joseph on that thing you wanted him to look after."
Cheong nodded. "Yes, go ahead, Emily. Tell Tomo and Eduard we'll be out shortly." He turned to Norstrom, not bothering to formally dismiss the girl. She waited a moment longer before backing out of the room.
"And the second bus?" Angel asked.
"The driver broke protocol when he used his cell to call his wife. The passengers began attacking each other even as he was on the line with her. She told us she heard a strange series of sounds, like electronic tones, then her husband's shout. This was followed by a loud crash. Then silence. We still don't know how the killer knew when and where to strike. Or how he managed to get that particular phone number, but since then, we've banned all cell phones."
"Were the attacks like the other?"
He nodded. "I was monitoring the bus in a trailing vehicle. I saw it swerve, then go off a bridge. It crashed into a ravine eighty feet below. No survivors. I was onsite within three or four minutes. Our field team quickly ascertained that only the bodies with teeth marks on them did not appear to have nanites in their blood. They did not appear to have been injected."
He slowly inhaled, then let it out, as if the memory pained him. "Obviously, this person or persons had considerable knowledge of our movements, so I suspected a leak. I raced to the third bus and intercepted it. I knew that if they were to have any chance of surviving, I had to go completely off script. I drove them straight to Schiphol Airport and secured an emergency charter. A flight plan for Newfoundland, Canada, was filed after takeoff, from which we obviously deviated. Everything else was off the books. We landed on a back road about six miles away from here and came overland by foot."
"Great," Cheong said. "So, now I've got forty-eight ticking time bombs sitting in my theater, ready to explode at any moment, and the detonator is likely on its way."
Chapter Forty Eight
"Twenty-two positives so far," Angel said, straightening up from the microscope and ticking off the current sample in the + column. "Six negative."
Norstrom set the next dozen blood samples he had drawn from the people in the theater onto the bench, and Angel quickly scanned them with her eyes, visually checking for color and that the blood hadn't coagulated in the heparinized tubes. She believed she could spot the difference between the positives and negatives, and more often than not she was right before confirming her guess under the microscope. The positives seemed to have a darker, oilier sheen to them. But it wasn't always so obvious.
"Did I do good?" he asked.
She nodded. Norstrom's offer to collect the blood samples from the refugees had come as an unexpected but
pleasant surprise, as she was eager to do the microscopy work.
"I once had basic medical training," he explained. "A long time ago. A lifetime, in fact. But when I realized we would need a field-expedient means of collecting and analyzing the blood obtained from any agents we captured, I had some experts come in and train the team. It came in handy at the second site, where the bus crashed."
He never ceased to amaze her with the breadth of his knowledge and skills, once more forcing her to wonder about the man's background. China may have stripped away some of his veneer, but it left so much still hidden away.
A year ago, a man like him might have intimidated her. But a lot had changed since then. Now she appreciated how much more complicated the world had become, and she was glad that there were people out there aware of the changes and working behind the scenes to make sure none of it went off the rails.
She thought that Jacques would appreciate that, even though he might not view it in quite the same way. He had always told her it was people like their father who had turned the world into what it was, a place much too complex for humanity to survive for long in. He hated the idea and never wanted to be a part of it.
Thinking about her brother, she remembered that strange comment Cheong had made about him in the hallway earlier, and she shifted her attention from Norstrom to the man now planted on a stool at the other end of the bench. What had he meant by it? Why would he think Jacques wasn't alive?
Now that it was on her mind, she wondered if she should ask him about it. He hadn't said a word since that first sample showed positive, and even then, when he placed his eye to the microscope's objective, his only utterance had been a resentful grunt. Angel, not one to gloat, couldn't help but feel vindicated. From Norstrom to Padraig, then Farid and Cheong, she'd felt as if she'd had to prove herself over and over again.
If you were a man, it wouldn't be the same.
She wasn't sure it was true, not entirely. But in Cheong's case, it felt personal.
Strangely, verifying the existence of the nanites seemed to have stunned him. Now he looked as if his mind had completely shut down, as if coming face to face with a very real, very tangible existential threat had overloaded it. Like he just couldn't believe something like this might actually be real.
She wanted to ask him about Jacques, but she wasn't sure she'd get a coherent response out of him.
"Do you want the rest?" Norstrom asked.
It took Angel a moment to realize what he was asking.
"Should only be about a dozen," he offered, "but I'm happy to stop. Pretty sure Cheong's convinced by now."
She looked at the tubes before her. Each blood sample took several minutes for her to process. She didn't simply want visual confirmation of the presence of nanites, but also an estimate of their number circulating in their blood. To do this, she required the use of a Neubabuer counting chamber, a specialized microscope slide with a tiny grid etched precisely into the glass. The slide was a standard part of any cytology lab, but she was surprised nonetheless to find several of the expensive items stored in the drawer with the microscope supplies.
With close to two dozen positive samples, she could already tell there was little variation in the concentration of nanites in them— averaging about fifteen million per milliliter or roughly three times the average white blood count. The number was small compared with the red blood cell concentration, which, in healthy adults, was typically around five billion per milliliter. Yet it still seemed like an incredible amount to have to administer into the body.
She checked her lists, adding Farid's name to the negative column. Only now, after so many other negatives, did the lack of nanites in his blood make any sense to her. He was a control subject, a patient who had not received the experimental treatment.
Norstrom frowned, peering over her shoulder. "If he wasn't injected with the nanites, then why was Kurtz so adamant about not releasing him in Istanbul? Why the mask? He acted like he knew Farid had them in his blood."
"I believe he did not know," she replied. "Kurtz made a very big deal out of the studies being double blind, as if using such rigorous methods somehow made what they were doing acceptable. Technically, he would not know who was injected and who was not. That information would only be available after the study was complete and the data were being analyzed."
"He had to know. Farid said they took blood after they captured him in Istanbul."
"Maybe he did, I do not know. But let us say Kurtz cheated and did peek at Farid's blood, it would not have made any difference to him. Negative controls are just as essential in a study. They provide an indispensable baseline for comparison. That is why he could not release Farid."
"And the mask and bindings?"
"To make us believe he had them inside his body."
"Then how do you explain how quickly Farid recovered after entering the hospital in Ankara? He said he'd been sick for weeks before that."
She sorted through the tubes from the rack on the bench before extracting one and holding it up. "Sharif Hosnani," she read from the handwritten label. "This blood is from the sick man I saw at the camp in Paris, the day I met the man who claimed to be Farid's brother."
"Mahdi, the test monitor, you mean?"
She nodded. "I was certain this man was going to die. Yet, less than twenty-four hours later, he was almost completely recovered. This sample is positive for the nanites, and he is now as healthy as someone half his age. With Farid, I remember he said it took a couple days for him to recover, not overnight. I should have picked up on that discrepancy before. At best, he most likely received strong antibiotics at the hospital. They can act quickly, too, just not as quickly."
"So, the nanites really are as good, if not better than, real medicine."
Angel frowned. As much as she disliked admitting it, it seemed to be true. She stood up and stretched her neck to work the stiffness out of it. "I wish to finish checking these and the remaining samples," she said. "Yes, I would like it if you could finish the blood collection."
"And then I expect you'll be wanting apartments for them all?" Cheong said, breaking out of his trance. "Meals, perhaps?"
Neither Norstrom nor Angel answered.
"I cannot allow them to stay here."
"They will remain here until we figure out how to remove the nanites," Norstrom said firmly. He gestured at the laboratory equipment around them. "There must be a way to extract them using this stuff. Angel can—"
"No!" Cheong shouted. "I said you can't stay here! We'll make other arrangements. I will speak with my people at 6X. I have no doubt they will be interested in what you have discovered. They'll even provide you with equipment, expertise, money. But you can't stay here! The apartments are all privately owned. We can't—"
"We will!" Norstrom shouted. "We have to! We can't wait!"
"Stop it!" Angel cried. She was going to chastise Norstrom, but the look on his face stopped her. "What is it?"
"There's something I didn't tell you. When we broadcast that self-destruct program to stop the attacks, the final casualty count was much higher than we had anticipated."
She frowned, not understanding where he was going with this. "You said it was eleven thousand."
"Yes, but what I didn't say was how many of those died directly from the self-destruct signal."
"It should have been . . . around a hundred," Angel calculated. "Seventy-five percent of the refugees who were sent to Calais."
"We estimated that it could be as high as seven thousand."
"How is that possible?"
"The experiment is a lot larger than we realized, Angel. It wasn't just the encampment under the Charles de Gaulle Bridge. It was encampments all over northern France. It might mean encampments all over Europe, possibly even in Asia and the Americas."
"How is that even possible?" Cheong asked.
"The Russia study was tens of thousands," she reminded him.
"And this would be a virtually limitless pool," Norstr
om added. "Over the past year, as many as fifty million refugees have fled their homes in the Middle East and Africa. It's possible that as many as a million have been injected. This is why we have to find a solution to this, Angel, and why we will stay here for as long as it takes."
The Chinese man opened his mouth, but nothing came out. At last, the scale of the problem was beginning to hit home.
"I wish there were another option," Norstrom said. "But even if there were, at this point, moving these people now would be too risky. As you said earlier, Cheong, those people out there are walking time bombs. Keep them safe inside the bunker, and the bombs won't detonate. Until we figure out how to defuse them, we can't let them out. And no one can be allowed in."
"But I do not know how to do that," Angel said. "I do not know how to get the nanites out of their bodies."
"We'll figure it out. Until then, nobody tells anyone we're here. Is that understood, Cheong? We can't risk word getting out, not even to people you trust."
Cheong slumped back onto his stool. He looked absolutely miserable, but he didn't argue. Finally, he nodded and stood up. "I'll have Emily convert the gymnasium into a temporary living quarters. We'll move in mattresses."
Angel nodded almost imperceptibly to Norstrom when he glanced over at her. For all of Cheong's protestations, the man had actually yielded much more easily than they had thought he would.
"Fine," Norstrom said. "Then I guess I'll finish collecting the samples."
Chapter Forty Nine
Angel finished counting the final blood sample from the next-to-last set Norstrom had brought in and looked up from the microscope. The lab seemed unduly quiet. In a normal setting, all of the equipment would have made enough noise to be noticeable. But none of it was turned on, so the usual hums and buzzes were absent. In fact, the place was disturbingly quiet. Even the overhead lights were completely silent.
She checked the clock on the wall and frowned. An hour had passed since the two men had left her alone. Unless he was having trouble collecting the final set of samples, Norstrom should have been back already.
Iceland: An International Thriller (The Flense Book 2) Page 31
