by David Archer
*
“Well,” Joel said, “there are a few. For one thing, I sometimes get a little mixed up about what’s real and what’s something new that just got put into my head. Like, I learned not to download first person novels, because it can get confusing when I remember something that keeps saying, ‘I did this,’ or “I did that.’ I found that out when I downloaded a science fiction novel from the fifties and spent a couple days thinking I was once kidnapped by space aliens and ended up talking to the Galactic Overlords.”
“I can see that would be a problem,” Sam said. “But what about...”
Joel suddenly held up a hand as he closed his eyes. “There’s just been a major explosion at Fa Ling Bioengineering,” he said. “Half the building is gone, according to the first reports from emergency responders, and search and rescue efforts are underway. Petaluma police say they have located about a dozen survivors who got out of a second floor window, but there are still people trapped inside. Much of the building is in flames and fire crews are doing all they can to get the fire under control.”
He opened his eyes and looked at Sam, whose face had turned white. “Dear God,” Sam said, “Denny and Summer were out there. Is there any mention about what happened?”
Joel looked sick. “A survivor who was just leaving the building said an employee walked in with a large backpack just before the explosion, so there’s speculation that it might have been a suicide bomber. Police are trying to figure out what happened, but they say it’s a nightmare out there right now.”
Sam took out his phone and dialed Summer, while Joel, Pat, and Becky just stared at him. It rang several times before going to voicemail, and then he tried Denny’s number and got the same result.
“I’m going out there,” he said as he dropped the phone into his pocket. He started toward the front of the building with all of them following, and was almost to where Steve and Walter were holding their interviews when his phone rang. He snatched it out and glanced at the caller ID, but it was a number he didn’t recognize.
“Prichard,” he said.
“Sam, it’s Denny Cortlandt,” Denny said. “Listen, mate, somebody just tried to blow up the whole lot out here. Summer and I were near the back of the building and got out, but we’re both banged about. They’re taking us to hospital here in Petaluma.”
“All right, it’s good to hear from you,” Sam said. “Are either of you hurt badly?”
“Summer has a big splinter in her leg, and they say I’ve got some in my back. Nothing life-threatening on us, but there are bodies laying all about. I overheard a copper say they found a suicide note in a car. Listen, both our phones were lost, and this one belongs to one of the police officers who was assigned to help us this morning. She happened to be with me when it happened, but her partner was killed in the blast. I’ll give it back to her, and call you again from the hospital.”
“All right,” Sam said. “You keep me posted.” He ended the call and put the phone back in his pocket, then tapped on the door of the interview room. He didn’t wait for a response before he opened it and walked in, and Steve and Walter looked up at him questioningly.
“Things are escalating,” he said. “Fa Ling was just hit by a bomb, possibly a suicide bomber. Denny and Summer were injured, but Denny says it’s not life-threatening.”
“This place will be next,” Walter said. “Chang is done with hiding. He has his chip, and he doesn’t want anyone else to get one.”
Sam’s eyes went wide. “We’ve got to evacuate the building,” he said. “If Walter is right, there may be a bomb here already.” He turned to Joel. “How can we…”
“Already on it,” Joel said, and only a second later, people started streaming out of the labs and offices. “I just sent email and text alerts to every employee to get out of the buildings immediately, because there may be a bomb. I’ve also notified the police that we may have a bomb situation.”
“Good job,” Sam said. “Now, let’s get ourselves out.”
The employee Steve and Walter had been talking to had heard it all, and hurried past them as he fled the building. The six of them followed quickly, and met Rob and his people with Doctor Hu and Doctor Prentiss as they got to the lobby. Darren and Jade were right behind them.
“Prichard,” Prentiss said, “is this for real? Is there a bomb?”
“We don’t know for certain, but it’s highly likely. Fa Ling just got blown up, and we’ve identified Fei as one of your engineers, Li Chang. He helped develop the chips, and he’s already got the gen-4.”
“But that’s all speculation, isn’t it? I mean, we don’t know this for certain, do we?”
“We have enough circumstantial evidence to make it ninety-nine percent certain. Chang is out to use the chip to secure his power over anyone he wants, and he doesn’t want to have any competition. Your chip is the most advanced there is, as far as we know, so he needs to shut you down to make sure no one else can become his equal.”
They hurried out of the building just as police were beginning to arrive, and Sam explained the reasons for their suspicions about a bomb to the police captain in charge. When the bomb squad arrived a few minutes later, officers with bomb-sniffing dogs entered the building.
Sam and his team gathered about a hundred yards from the building, and he was watching all of the people who came out.
“What are you thinking?” Steve asked. “I can see the gears turning, Sam.”
“This place has been on high alert security since the chip was stolen,” Sam said. “There’s no way a bomb could have gotten in there unless it was carried by an employee who would be considered above suspicion. I’m looking to see if anyone is acting nervous.”
“There may not be one yet,” Walter said. “If the one that hit Fa Ling was a suicide bomber, then Chang is changing his plans around. He’s trying to clean up after himself, so he sent a bomb into that facility to make sure they couldn’t produce more chips, and he’ll want to do the same to this one. If he already had a bomb here, it would have gone off by now. Look for somebody trying to bring one in.”
Joel nodded. “I think he’s right. We should be looking at whoever is trying to come in, not the people who were already here.”
Sam nodded, then jogged over to where the police captain stood. “I think what we’re looking for is a suicide bomber,” he said. “While it’s possible there may already be a bomb inside the building, it’s more likely that it’s going to be carried in by an employee or somebody else who has access to the building.”
“Well, we’re not letting anyone in,” the captain said. “We got a half dozen delivery trucks that were headed here stopped out by the main road, and all other traffic is being routed six blocks over. We thought of this already, so we’re running dogs on every vehicle. Just a precaution, but one that made sense.”
Sam grinned. “A lot of sense,” he said. “Okay, I’ll leave you alone.” He turned and went back to the others.
“I got an update,” Joel said. “They found a suicide letter in one of the cars. The bomber was Angela Davidson, one of their top engineers. She wrote in the letter that Yue Fei sent her the bomb and ordered her to carry it in and set it off because he had her daughters. He threatened to kill them if she didn’t do what she was told.”
Sam shook his head. “That’s his usual MO,” he said. “Threaten the family to make people do whatever you want. We have to nail this bastard, Joel. We’ve got to stop him, somehow.”
“Headaches,” Joel said, and Sam looked at him quizzically. “Headaches. You asked me about side effects of having the chip, right? Well, the most common one is headaches. The more I use the chip, the more likely I am to get a headache that day, and if a headache starts, it can turn into the migraine from hell. I’ve learned to just shut down as soon as one of them begins.”
“You think they affect everyone that way?” Sam asked.
“We think so. Everybody who has gotten a chip, even all the way back to the gen-1, has g
otten the headaches from overuse. Mindy Weathers, the girl who got the other chip like mine? She gets the same kind of headaches I do, and we both learned to shut down when they start. Otherwise, it just keeps getting worse and worse. I’ve actually blacked out from the pain.”
Sam’s eyebrows lowered. “Then there’s good reason to believe that Chang is having the same kind of headaches?”
Joel nodded. “Almost certainly,” he said. “According to Doctor Williamson, the headaches are the result of information overload. The more we use the chips, the more information gets shoved into our long-term memories. That causes a lot of brain activity, which results in increased blood flow to the brain. Greater blood flow to the brain means that blood vessels are expanding to accommodate the flow, and that’s the most common cause of a headache. The longer it goes on, the more intense the pain becomes.”
Sam grimaced. “Well, it isn’t much,” he said. “But at least it’s a weakness we know he’s got. Now all we have to do is find a way to exploit it. If I get the chance, I’m probably going to have to work you pretty hard.”
“I’ll do whatever you need me to do,” Joel said. “This guy needs to be stopped, somehow.”
A sudden commotion across the parking lot caught their attention, and they all turned to see what was happening. A car, a fairly late model sedan, was driving at high speed across the lot, and as they watched, it hit the curb and jumped onto the grass that surrounded the building. Several police officers opened fire on the car, and it suddenly slowed and veered off to the right. It stopped when it struck a tree, and was instantly surrounded by police officers.
The door was yanked open and someone was dragged out of the car and thrown onto the ground with several officers piling on. After driving through the hail of bullets, Sam was surprised to see that the driver appeared to be alive, but then another officer reached inside the car and came out with a backpack. It was handed off to someone from the bomb squad, who glanced inside and then hurried to the blast containment trailer they had brought along. The backpack was shoved inside, and Sam hobbled as fast as he could to where the driver had been captured.
It was a woman, and Sam thought about what Joel had said about the suicide bomber at Fa Ling. This was undoubtedly a woman who was following orders to protect her family, and her failure might well get them killed.
“Oh, no,” she sobbed, “oh, no, please, he’ll kill my babies. Oh, God, he’s going to kill my babies, he’s going to kill my babies! Please, I had to do this, I had to…”
She suddenly choked and coughed, and a big spatter of blood came out of her mouth as her eyes glazed over, and she went limp. Sam saw an officer touch her throat for a moment, and then he looked up and shook his head.
34
“I’m Sam Prichard,” Sam said, showing his ID and the DHS endorsement on the back. “What kind of bomb did we have?”
“Simple, but deadly,” said the bomb squad officer. “About twenty pounds of C4 with a hand grenade to create the shockwave for detonation. From what I’m hearing, this is about the same thing that was used in Petaluma. It would have done an incredible amount of damage to the building, depending on where it was detonated, of course.”
“Geez,” Sam said. “And she would have had to set it off manually?”
“Yes. There was a cord attached to the pin on the grenade. All she had to do was give it a tug and it would have exploded within seconds.”
Sam turned back to the rest of the team. “Well,” he said, “we finally beat him at something.”
“Yeah,” Steve said, “but all that’s gonna do is piss him off. We’ve got to find a way to stop this bastard, Sam.”
“And soon,” Sam said. He looked across the area to where Rob Feinstein and his remaining men were standing around Daphne. “He’s going to be wanting her sometime soon. We need to have plans in place when that happens.”
“What kind of plan have you got in mind?” Darren asked. “He’s going to want her to go somewhere he can pick her up without being followed. You’re not thinking of letting her actually go, are you?”
“No way,” Sam said. “The only thing I want is to know where he expects the surgery to take place. If we can get that information, we can take him down. As soon as the message comes in, we roll.”
“Not unless he thinks he’s got a doctor to do the operation,” Jade said. “He’s not likely to be waiting at the operating room. He’d want to be sure the doctor was there first, and that she wasn’t followed.”
“Yeah, you’re probably right. I’m hoping Indie will come up with some kind of leads.”
“Have you heard anything from her lately?” Darren asked. “Would it be worth giving her a call?”
“Not just yet,” Sam said. “Trust me, she’ll call if she comes across anything that might help us out.”
“So, what do we do in the meantime?” Steve asked. “There’s really not much point in continuing the interviews, since we know who we are dealing with.”
“You’re right about that,” Sam said. He turned to Joel. “Tell me something,” he said. “Is there any possible way to find out where Chang is out of that chip?”
Joel made a face that Sam took as a shrug. “Not really,” he said. “In order to use the chip at all, he has to have one of these special phones like I carry, but they’re actually only high-quality Android phones with some special software. If he got copies of the software and put it on any good phone, it would work, but it would also mean he could turn off the GPS on the phone. The chip itself only uses Bluetooth technology to communicate with the phone, and the signal is too weak to detect from more than a half-dozen feet away.”
“Damn. I was hoping there would be some way to track him down with it. What about tracking what he does with it? Is there any way to know what he’s actually using it for?”
The kid shrugged his shoulders this time. “If I had his number, maybe, but I don’t. His phone is probably not one that we ever had on the books here. It’d be too easy for him to just steal copies of the apps and load them onto a decent smartphone of his own.”
“And we don’t have any way to get...” Sam suddenly froze. “Wait a minute, we do have a number that can reach him. I mean, I’m sure it’s not his actual number, but Dr. Hu has a number she can text him on. Any chance that would help?”
Joel looked at him for a moment, then shrugged again. “Let me have it, and I’ll see if maybe he’s using a forwarder. If he’s just bouncing text messages around to hide his actual phone number, I might be able to track it all the way back to the real one.”
Sam led them all to where Daphne was standing surrounded by her guards and asked her for the number, which she read off. Joel closed his eyes for a few seconds, then looked at Sam and shook his head.
“No luck,” he said. “I’m not finding a forwarder, so it’s probably just a throwaway phone he used just for her.”
“But he hadn’t thrown it away as of this morning,” Sam said. “Can you get a location on it?”
Joel closed his eyes again, but when he opened them this time, it was with a smile. “I might have something. I couldn’t get a GPS location on it, but I got its ESN, so I was able to search all the cell towers in the area for contacts with it. That let me get three towers that are picking it up, and I was able to triangulate its approximate location from there. Unfortunately, all I can say for sure is that the phone is somewhere on Alameda Island.”
He turned and looked at Daphne again. “Can you send him another message? Ask if he has an update or anything?”
“Certainly,” she said. She took out her phone and her thumbs flew over the buttons.
It was almost a minute later when her phone chimed, indicating a response.
Arrangements are almost in place. How difficult will it be for you to get rid of your guards? Please understand that I have no intention of allowing you to come to any harm. I will need you again in the future, so you are not in any danger from me.
Daphne showed them the
message. “Shall I reply?”
Sam looked at the smile on her face and nodded. Her thumbs began flying over the buttons again, and she showed Sam the message she sent.
It will not be difficult. I am glad to hear that I’m in no danger, however. I suspected that you might need me again, which is why I am willing to proceed.
Sam grinned at her. “You’re a gutsy lady,” he said.
“Am I? Perhaps I am inspired by those around me. I have learned a great deal about the technology involved in this chip today, and I cannot imagine allowing anyone to gain such power.”
Her phone chimed, and she glanced at the message for a second before showing it to Sam.
Excellent. I will place you high in my ruling council. Be ready for my signal.
Sam looked at Joel. “Is there any way to be certain these messages are coming from the phone you triangulated?”
“I’m already digging around in her phone records,” Joel said. “I think it’s the same phone, but I can’t be certain he isn’t forwarding it through others.”
Sam stared at him for a moment, then turned to Darren and Steve. “Get everybody together,” he said. “We may be getting close to a lead on where to find Mr. Chang.”
“Mr. Prichard,” Daphne said. “If you find him there, what will you do?”
Sam smiled at her. “If at all possible, we’ll arrest him,” he said, “but we have to stop him at any cost. This man has control over so many people that he’s almost untouchable, and the only chance we’re ever likely to get to lay our hands on him is when he’s preparing for this surgery. It’ll be the only time when he’ll be vulnerable, when he won’t be able to make new decisions that might endanger anyone else.”
“Precisely what I am thinking,” Daphne said. “If he is anesthetized, he cannot be a danger. Perhaps we should let him take me.”
Sam shook his head. “Doctor, there’s no way we could allow that. First, he’s going to anticipate a trap, so he’ll make certain there’s no way for us to track where you are. Second, while he might not be able to give any orders at that moment, he’ll have left orders with people he trusts, orders that will undoubtedly mean your death if anything happens to him. And third, if you were to actually perform the operation, he may become so powerful that we won’t ever be able to stop him.”
