CIA Headquarters, Langley Virginia
Today, Six Days after the Kidnappings
Chris felt Sherrie’s hand grip his, and he immediately began to worry about whether or not his hand was sweaty. Which probably made things worse. But she grasped it in such a way that it didn’t matter, interlacing their fingers and keeping their palms apart. Either her file on him was incredibly detailed, or she was just very considerate.
Or she had dated a guy with sweaty palms before, and assumed he’d have them.
He wasn’t sure how long he’d last playing this charade. It was times like these that he wished he were Kane. Kane was always cool, calm and collected. He wouldn’t be worrying about his palms sweating. He’d probably have his arm around her, holding her close, whispering sweet-nothings in her ear.
Whatever the hell those were.
As they entered the main lobby, Sherrie released his hand, and they became all business. Apparently their affair was to be known to those who paid attention, but not blatantly obvious so as to force someone to report their relationship as against regulation. There were lots of flings in the office, and it was quietly tolerated. His unaired theory on it was that they’d rather have you fulfilling your sexual needs with a fellow CIA staffer, than with some stranger who might actually be an enemy agent.
They passed through security and rode the elevator up in silence. She gave him a wink as she stepped into her cubicle. He returned it with flushed cheeks, and sat down at his computer.
This was where he was comfortable.
This was where he could do some good, and not have to worry about trying to figure out some female brain.
Logged in, he connected to the Echelon interface and began loading in every keyword he could think of into the dictionary that might cover the events in Ogden, and the kidnapping of the scientists and their families, now that he had been fully read in. It didn’t take long for his initial batch to be loaded, and he leaned back, tapping his chin, occasionally leaning forward and adding another word or phrase.
His secure inbox soon began to fill with hit results from previously logged conversations, and he smiled in anticipation.
Let’s catch us some traitors.
Jason Peterson “Residence”, Somewhere in North Korea
Three Days after the Kidnappings
Jason climbed into bed, the bed linens smelling different than he was used to. He realized their captors were going to a lot of effort to try and make them feel at home. The pasta was Barilla, the sauce Ragu, the parmesan Kraft. But the laundry detergent wasn’t their regular brand, and it was those little things that would never let this be home.
Maggie was already in bed, her bedside lamp out. He reached over, turned his off with a twist, then leaned over and kissed her gently on the cheek. He was exhausted, and knew as soon as his head hit the pillow he would be out like a light.
“Don’t you think it’s time you told me?”
He opened his eyes and stared at the dark mass beside him.
“Told you what?”
“Everything. What you’ve been working on. What happened three months ago that changed you.”
“It’s top secret, hon, you know I can’t—”
“Bullshit, Jason. We’re in North fuckin’ Korea. Apparently it’s only a secret to your family!”
Her voice was a hiss, but it still cut, causing his chest to tighten and butterflies to form in his stomach. But the worst part was that she was right. What the hell was the point of keeping the secret from his own wife, when she was here, right along with him, kidnapped, and probably going to die when it was all over.
He sighed. “You’re right.” But he was concerned. The house was almost definitely bugged. Would they care if he told his wife? Probably not. They probably assumed he already had. But what if the weapons potential hadn’t occurred to them? He leaned over and flipped the radio on, a piped in all-music channel with no DJ’s and no news, as they had discovered last night, bleated out of its tiny speaker. He turned the volume up as loud as he thought he could get away with, without disturbing the kids.
He then pulled the sheets and blanket over their heads, and huddled close to his wife, putting his mouth near her ear.
“Have you ever heard of nanotechnology?”
“Sure, tiny robots, right?”
“Essentially, yes. There have been several challenges. Essentially miniaturization of the components to the microscopic level, then coming up with a manufacturing process that would make them economical when produced in scale. We beat the first challenge years ago, and now are pretty good at building them, and programming them to do basic things in the labs. It’s really quite exciting what we’ve been able to do.”
“What are they used for?”
He could tell from her tone that she was excited to finally learn what he had been working on for essentially their entire marriage. Husbands and wives shouldn’t have secrets, but this was the job, and he had signed a non-disclosure agreement that had specifically mentioned his family, including his wife.
No bedtime stories.
No pillow talk.
Nobody said anything about being held hostage by a foreign power.
“Well, that’s the exciting part. With enough of these, programmed properly, we can do almost anything. Imagine, you’ve got cholesterol. No problem. You get an injection of nanobots—”
“Is that what they’re called? Nanobots?”
Jason shrugged, then realized she couldn’t see him.
“That’s what they’re called this month. We haven’t hit on anything yet that grabs us all. Nanobots, nanites, Microbots, T-one-thousandths—”
“Huh?”
“Sorry, Terminator reference. Anyway, whatever they’re called, imagine getting an injection. They swim through your veins, and whenever they encounter plaque buildup, they go to work, removing it. After a few days their job is done, your arteries are as clean as the day you were born, and your body then just eliminates them as waste.
“And that’s just the beginning. We can program them to recognize cancer cells, tumors, blood clots—anything. Organ damage. Fat cells! Imagine, the ultimate diet pill! Your heart is failing, they go in and fix it. Gallstones, they go in and eliminate them. All with just an injection of these things, programmed for a specific task.”
“But if they’re so tiny, wouldn’t you need a lot of them?”
“And that’s the second problem, which we thought we had solved about three months ago. We created a program where the nanobot would make a copy of itself, then transfer its programming to its duplicate. It was supposed to happen just once, but somehow the line of code limiting it to just one replication was removed, and it replicated a second and a third copy of itself, and in the meantime, the new ones, created their own copies. It was exponential. Within minutes they had broken out of their test environment, and run out of the test material we had used for them to replicate, so they began consuming the lab. We had to use the EMP to stop them, otherwise—”
His voice cracked as he recalled the horror. A hand gently snaked its way around him as Maggie comforted him.
“It’s okay, it’s over.”
“It was almost over for everyone. We were stupid. We were cocky. Nanotech researchers have been trying to come up with some sort of rules to govern its development so we can prevent the grey-goo scenario.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s an end of the world type thing. Basically you create a nanobot that can replicate itself using the materials surrounding it. It then keeps doing that, while its offspring do the same, and theirs as well. Eventually, the entire planet is consumed, and all that is left are nanobots. No humans, no buildings, no land, nothing. It’s just tiny robots.”
“And that’s what almost happened in your lab?”
Jason nodded. “Yes, it was horrible. Within just minutes they had swarmed out of the test chamber and were eating through the equipment, the tables, the floor. When I finally hit the EMP, th
ey stopped just inches from my feet.”
“What’s an EMP? I’ve heard that somewhere before.”
“It’s an Electro Magnetic Pulse generator. It’s a machine that builds up a massive electrical charge, then releases it all at once. It fries anything electronic, including nanobots and all of the computers within about a half mile radius. It fried the entire company. We nearly bankrupted them.”
“But saved the world.”
“Yeah, from our own stupidity.”
“If it’s so dangerous, why keep going?”
“Because of the potential. Imagine the health applications. We’re almost talking immortality here. An end to diabetes, strokes, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, organ failure, obesity. It’s the holy grail of medicine. And that’s not all. Imagine being able to dump these into our rivers and oceans. They could clean up the crap we’ve dumped in there over the centuries, leaving anything natural alone. Or they could be programmed to build things. Imagine a microscopic building crew that you just dumped into a pit and they began to build whatever they were programmed to build. It would revolutionize mankind, take us into the twenty-second century with perfect health, and cheap manufacturing of anything we needed.”
He could hear his voice rising in his excitement, and he took a deep breath, lowering his voice.
“We just needed to figure out a way to manufacture them in bulk. It was proving too expensive, so self-replication seemed the only way to go. We built in the safeguard, but it was somehow disabled.”
“How did that happen? Did you ever figure it out?”
“We went through our records, and it looks like Phil checked in a set of code that had the one line that prevented more than one copy from being made commented out.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s just programmer talk for disabling a line of code without deleting it, so you can easily reenable it later. It’s very easy to do, and it can be done by accidentally clicking on a button and not noticing you did it. It was an accident, and he felt terrible about it.”
“Obviously not terrible enough if he’s willing to let this get into the hands of the North Koreans. But how could they use it to create a weapon that wouldn’t end up destroying themselves?”
“Well, we figured that out too.”
“You did—”
He could hear her anger and disappointment.
“Not for weaponization, but to allow us to replicate in a controlled way. Essentially we would set an upper limit for the first generation, and when the code was copied to their offspring, a counter would be decreased when passed on, so the new generation couldn’t replicate more than that counter. When they created their copies, the counter passed on would be decreased again. Essentially you would only get as many generations as you set the counter to. So if you set it to one, then you would have your original nanobot, and it would create one copy, passing on the code with the counter decremented by one, so in other words, zero. The new copy wouldn’t make a copy of itself. If you set it to two, then the original would make two copies, the first copy getting a value of one, the second a value of zero. The first copy would make one copy of itself, passing on zero, and the second copy wouldn’t make anything, since it was already at zero. So a value of two would create four copies.
“Increasing the number increased everything exponentially. So if you set the number to a thousand for instance, you could create a batch that would be enough to treat a human for something. But if you set that value in the tens or hundreds of millions, it would create enough to consume a city, then stop.”
“Oh my God!”
“And we know the North Koreans have rockets that can reach a huge number of major cities, including our own. With these nanobots, they’d be able to destroy any city they wanted, and we’d be powerless to stop them. It could result in all out war, and if they thought they were going to lose…”
“They could remove the line of code.”
Maggie’s voice was almost a whisper, the idea too horrifying to give volume to.
“Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
Maggie hugged him harder, then put her lips to his ear, and whispered.
“You can’t do this. I don’t care if it means we all die, you can’t do this.”
He hugged her hard, and they both began to sob as he realized she was right. What right did he have to potentially destroy the world, just to save his family.
But how can I stop this?
BlackTide Headquarters, Arlington, Virginia
Today, Six Days after the Kidnappings
“Sir, we might have a problem.”
Colonel Atticus Tucker, Retired, looked up from behind his desk, his least favorite place to be. He had retired from the Army Rangers almost ten years ago, and been recruited by BlackTide almost immediately. With no wife, no kids, he needed a new family, and this faceless company became it. And since joining, he’d seen more action than he had after twenty years in the service.
And he loved it.
Though the bones were getting old, the heart was still strong, the mind was still quick, and he could still put in a good day’s training or lead a mission, but now his job was more black ops than front line detail. The pay was incredible. Actually, unbelievable, now that he had taken on his latest assignment. It was an assignment he had grappled with, and had been grappling with for almost a year.
How can we keep BlackTide growing, with our nation’s wars dwindling?
This was beyond the regular growth that a company could expect by signing contracts with more and more law enforcement agencies for training, of providing security to more civilian companies. His boss, and the founder of the company, Brad Finch, wanted something big.
And he had given it to him.
“What?”
“One of our sources has been monitoring Echelon and found a large number of new dictionary entries covering the Ogden operation.”
“Source?”
“Looks like some low-level analyst at Langley.” His aide flipped open a file he was carrying. “A Chris Leroux. He’s a nobody, but he did some searches on the scientists when they were initially extracted, then today put in a large number of new searches.”
Tucker frowned, leaning back in his chair. Humans were always the weakest link when it came to keeping a secret. Computers could be secured, networks firewalled, or taken off the grid. But humans could be forced to talk. There were very few he trusted to not, and he had met none since he left the Rangers.
“Results?”
“We don’t know if he’s found it yet since he’s going through thousands of hits, but we knew what to look for.” Tucker rolled his hand, urging his underling on. “Erickson mentioned the transport on an open line.”
“What!”
He knew they shouldn’t have involved a politician. It was insane. They couldn’t be trusted, but Finch had insisted, and as head of the company, Tucker had no choice but to agree. He had argued strenuously against it, but it was no use, and now here they were with this security breach, exactly as he had predicted. He even remembered the exact words he had said:
“If this falls apart, it’ll be because of Erickson.”
But Finch wanted him in the loop. They needed a high-level insider to pull the strings at the other end to get the desired result. This man had directed hundreds of millions in contracts to them, and when Tucker was fully in the loop, he was informed of the kickbacks.
The company was crooked.
As bent as you could get in this business.
And unfortunately for Tucker, he too had become addicted to the money. The weekends in Vegas with Finch as high rollers, “Whales” as the strip liked to call them. Booze, drugs, hookers. He couldn’t live without it now.
And he didn’t want to.
His country wasn’t the country he had signed up to protect anymore. He didn’t like the way it was heading. There were dangers out there that needed to be confronted now, and the pussy leaders in power didn�
�t have the balls to fight. Iraq was essentially done. Afghanistan was winding down.
And what was the result?
The Taliban were growing.
Al Qaeda was spreading.
The Arab Spring was a joke that had only replaced stable governments with Islamist ones. The entire Middle East was destabilizing.
China was growing militarily far too fast, North Korea was still allowed to throw its hissy fits every few months.
And North Korea was the key. It was an easy sell. Nuclear weapons weren’t working as a trigger, but when he had stumbled upon this new research, he realized it was what they needed. Give the North Koreans this, and no matter who was in power, they would have to do something. And it didn’t even need to be us. It could be the Russians, the Chinese. It didn’t matter.
All that mattered was war.
War meant spending. Spending meant profits for the private sector, meaning companies like his.
War was what Finch wanted, and war was what he was going to get.
And no damned CIA analyst was going to prevent it.
“Eliminate him.”
“Who? Erickson?”
Tucker debated that for a few seconds, then shook his head.
“No, Leroux. I want him dead before the end of the day. Make it look like an accident, random mugging, I don’t care. Just not a professional hit.”
“Done.”
CIA Headquarters, Langley, Virginia
“Got it!” hissed Chris to Sherrie. She turned with a smile and wide eyes of excitement as she jumped from her desk and came over to join him. There had been an incredible number of hits—tens of thousands. But that was to be expected. The trick was to then apply your own filtering algorithms to cull the data and find what you were looking for.
Fortunately it was something he was exceptionally good at.
Rogue Operator Page 16