‘What did the lab say about it?’ Lopez asked.
‘That’s where it gets creepy,’ Jarvis said. ‘The device is a highly complex transmitter and receiver and was essentially plugged into the general’s brain. The guys in the laboratory are convinced, and have actually signed their report together, that this device in effect is a form of remote control.’
Ethan looked up sharply at Jarvis. ‘You’re kidding?’
‘Two dozen Fort Benning recruits are dead,’ Jarvis replied. ‘I wouldn’t be kidding about something like this. I know how insane it sounds, but that’s what the guys are telling me and I’ve got no reason to doubt them.’
Lopez picked up one of the images as she spoke.
‘So, you’re saying that this general was not in control of himself when he opened fire on his own people.’
Jarvis nodded slowly.
‘He killed his own family too, people he was well known to dote upon. We’ve never seen anything like this. The technology is of the highest order and is something that our own agencies like DARPA have been working on but have yet to make any serious headway. Right now they’ve been limited to hacking the brains of bees and rats, not taking over the minds of senior military leaders.’
Lopez startled. ‘You’re saying that it’s possible to hack a brain?!’
‘The technology is in its infancy but yes, it’s possible. I’ll let the geeks downstairs explain all that to you, but right now our main focus is on figuring out where this thing came from and who the hell put it in the general’s head.’
Ethan put aside his amazement at what he had just heard and began thinking quickly.
‘We’ll need to retrace his every step to figure out when this thing was put inside his head.’
‘And the general must have endured a medical procedure that he was expecting,’ Lopez pointed out. ‘He can’t have failed to notice somebody shoving this up his nose.’
‘Army personnel are already in contact with the general’s personal and army physicians, but so far they’ve drawn a blank,’ Jarvis replied. ‘The general hadn’t seen any physician for at least three months, so I can’t see how it could have been implanted through normal procedures.’
‘He must have known,’ Ethan surmised. ‘Do you think that he might have consented to such a procedure, perhaps under duress or the belief that it was for another purpose?’
‘I doubt it,’ Jarvis replied. ‘I knew the general from back in the first Gulf War, and he was bright as a button and not a man easily fooled. I have no reason to doubt that he’d changed much in the intervening years.’
Lopez frowned, still looking down at the images.
‘What about the control method? If this stuff is even possible, that means that it must have been remotely activated. Can we track down what frequency it might have used?’
‘Outstanding,’ Jarvis replied to her. ‘The techs are already looking into it, and we have teams studying X–Rays of the device. You’d better check in down there and get up to speed before you deploy.’
‘What’s the rush?’ Ethan asked, and then he realized immediately. ‘Damn, if this thing got into a senior army officer then they could be anywhere.’
‘That’s right,’ Jarvis replied, ‘and right now the president can only keep a lid on this for a couple of days before the storm breaks under its own momentum and the media pounces on anything it can find. Can you imagine the panic it will cause if it’s revealed that these things even exist and that they could be in the heads of any one of our senior military figures, even the administration itself?’
Ethan turned for the door.
‘What’s waiting for us downstairs?’ Lopez asked.
‘You’re going to have to see and hear that for yourselves to believe it,’ Jarvis said.
***
V
‘Hellerman!’
Jarvis led the way into the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Advanced Research and Intelligence Engineering Section, known as ARIES, allowing Ethan his first glimpse in a long time at one of the most secretive departments in the US defense arsenal.
Created to support to the work of other agencies such as the NSA, CIA and DARPA, ARIES was specifically tasked with emulating the technology of other nations that had been uncovered by overt overseas operations, for the purpose of finding effective defenses against those technologies. In a world where cyber–warfare was becoming more widespread with each passing year, with foreign hackers accessing everything from the computers of major film studios to even the Pentagon and other defense installations, the risk of exposure and manipulation of sensitive material and equipment had never been higher.
Hellerman was a short, bearded and bespectacled operative who had long been Jarvis’s right hand man at the agency. He hurried over, his cheerful demeanor infectious.
‘Hi guys,’ he beamed, and then at Lopez. ‘Ma’am.’
Unusually Lopez, more than used to fending off the attentions of men, fawned over Hellerman and hugged him tightly.
‘What’s up, brainbox?’ she asked.
Hellerman, his cheeks flushed with color as Lopez pulled away and a slightly vacant glaze over his eyes, blinked and beamed again.
‘Quite a lot, actually. Has Doug brought you up to speed?’
‘We know about the implant and what it does,’ Ethan said as he shook the scientist’s hand. ‘But we don’t know the how.’
‘Then step this way,’ Hellerman said as he guided them through the laboratory.
Although not quite the marvel of technological fecundity seen in a Bond movie, it was hard not to draw comparisons to Q’s infamous contraptions. Ethan could see scientists experimenting on numerous highly classified objects, including body armor woven from spider web silk and what looked like a self–reassembling, shatter–proof window.
‘It’s a window made from a temperature sensitive fluid contained within a silicon film,’ Hellerman explained as they passed by the sealed lab. ‘When a bullet strikes the window, the heat released by the impact causes the fluid within the film, which is solid at room temperature, to melt and stretch. The heat from the impact is dissipated through the fluid, the fluid begins to solidify, and the bullet is captured in mid–flight and contained by the surrounding film. It all happens in milliseconds, of course. It’s a nifty way of protecting the interiors of vehicles and identifying the offending bullet’s origin and direction of travel all at once.’
Hellerman led them to a busy little office in one corner of the lab and gestured to something on his desk.
‘Check this out,’ he said as he reached for a small black box with a dial and a couple of switches mounted upon it.
Ethan saw Hellerman activate a switch and then he flinched as from Hellerman’s desk a large bee suddenly lifted off, its wings buzzing loudly in the small office.
‘Jesus,’ Lopez uttered as she stepped clear of the bee, ‘how did that get in here?’
‘Don’t worry,’ Hellerman said cheerfully. ‘It’s entirely under my control.’
Ethan watched in amazement as Hellerman guided the bee around the periphery of the office using the control box, speaking as he did so.
‘The guys at DARPA have been working on creating miniature synthetic drones for decades, mostly copying from nature itself and funding civilian programs to assist them. Some bright spark at the University of California, I’d like to think a guy a bit like me, had the idea of simply attaching their control system to a live bee instead of trying to build replica creatures.’
‘Genius,’ Lopez mumbled as she ducked to avoid the buzzing insect. ‘They’re going to sting our enemies to death? How does it work?’
‘The bee has a small rig glued to its belly that contains a microchip, which itself connects to the insect’s brain and flight muscles. Then, we control it via a laptop computer and this remote unit. Engineers at a place called the Center for Robot Assisted Search And Rescue, at Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station Center, are developing these little guys to help
complex search and rescue missions and disaster relief, flying them into danger zones or small cavities in collapsed buildings to look for survivors.’
‘What happens if the bee gets too tired?’ Lopez asked.
‘Ah,’ Hellerman said, ‘they stop flying, but we can monitor their wing beats and if performance starts to degrade then we simply fly them out of the danger zone and across to one of these advanced devices.’
Ethan watched as the bee hovered over Hellerman’s desk and landed gently alongside a large spoon filled with a clear fluid.
‘Sugar water,’ Hellerman announced, ‘the world’s cheapest fuel. The bee takes a drink and is soon ready to get back into action.’
Lopez watched the bee suspiciously as she spoke. ‘It’s not exactly a stealth bomber though is it, and the technology is not complex enough to control a fully grown man?’
‘No,’ Hellerman admitted, ‘but this is a simpler program that’s not a part of DARPA’s Black Budget research. That stuff really is top of the line.’
Ethan knew that the US Government’s Black Budget was a vast sum of money annually presented to the defense community for development programs so secret that even Congress was not informed of their purpose or content.
‘You think that somewhere in the Black Budget there might be an answer to what happened to General Thompson?’ Ethan asked.
‘For obvious reasons we don’t know much about what happens deep within DARPA’s most classified projects,’ Jarvis replied for Hellerman as he joined them in the office, ‘but I do know that DARPA runs a program called Robotic Challenge, and that recently a robot named ATLAS that was part of the program “went dark”. It was also being developed as part of programs inspired by the Fukushima nuclear disaster, creating an ability to send machines into areas that would be hazardous to human beings, but I’ve heard rumors that ATLAS is now being militarized into the world’s first fully combat–capable robot. A Terminator, effectively.’
‘General Thompson wasn’t a robot,’ Lopez pointed out. ‘Could somebody have figured out a way of doing to him what you’re doing to that bee?’
‘It’s a question of complexity,’ Hellerman said. ‘There’s a company in the US that’s selling something called RoboRoach, which is the first commercially available kit that allows people to remotely control a cockroach. There’s an uproar at the moment about the ethics of all this, but official programs have developed various insect drones. A species of beetle named Mecynorrhina torquata has been controlled using pulses directed to the insect’s optic lobes, with batteries harvesting energy from the insect’s own movements to power the pulses. Something closer to a human application involves Dogfish sharks that have had electrodes implanted into their brains which were then used to control their movements, with an aim to using them as underwater research vessels or for seeking out mines in hazardous waters. Even birds have been controlled, with researchers at Shandong University of Science and Technology in China implanting micro–electrodes into a pigeon’s brain and flying it at will. Again, much furor among animals rights’ groups over such research.’
‘But wouldn’t anybody controlled in such a way just shout out that they were being manipulated?’ Ethan asked. ‘A pigeon or shark can’t protest what’s being done to them, but General Thompson certainly would have done had he been able to do so.’
Hellerman gestured to an image pinned to the wall of his office that depicted a human brain via a CAT scan of some kind, the various regions of the brain highlighted.
‘According to the autopsy report, the artifact was removed from General Thompson’s brain and had originally penetrated the frontal lobes, one of four main lobes in human brains and those of all mammals. The precentral gyrus, which is located near the rearmost border of the frontal lobe, contains the primary motor cortex which controls the voluntary movements of our various body parts. However, it also contains the dopamine sensitive neurons of the cerebral cortex which are associated with reward, short term memory, planning, motivation and attention.’ Hellerman tapped the image of the frontal lobes with one finger. ‘If you can control this region of the brain sufficiently, stimulating the dopamine sensitive regions while at the same time controlling the victim’s motor cortex, then you won’t have to worry about them crying foul when they open fire on their own family because they’ll be smiling and dreaming while they’re doing it.’ Hellerman shrugged. ‘They may even be asleep.’
‘Asleep?’ Lopez asked.
‘It’s quite common for people to conduct quite complex tasks while effectively being alseep,’ Hellerman explained. ‘Have you ever driven along a stretch of road for a prolonged period of time and then suddenly wondered what happened over the last ten minutes?’
‘Occasionally,’ Ethan admitted.
‘Then you were in some respects asleep,’ Hellerman replied, ‘driving on autopilot. The processes involved were so natural and instinctive to you that your brain did not need to be fully involved and so it began to quieten down. I know that now and again I’ve been dreaming while behind the wheel and still watching the road in front of me at the same time. I’m not going to admit that to a police officer, but we all know that it’s happened once or twice. If the people that developed the device that was found in General Thompson’s brain had perfected a means of keeping their victims in a pliant state while controlling their actions, then they could have created the perfect assassin: an individual with access to anywhere, who could be controlled from afar and would raise no suspicions. Can you imagine what could be done with such individuals? Area 51 workers could be sent into Groom Lake to find the aliens, or Wall Street financiers used to get the lowdown on the latest stock market developments, or senior government figures used to get into the Pentagon to gather state secrets.’ Hellerman became somewhat sobered. ‘Or scientists to sabotage nuclear facilities and create Hell on earth.’
Ethan peered at the image of the human brain and then looked down at the bee on the desk, still sipping from the sugar water.
‘That’s our clue,’ he said finally.
Jarvis looked at Ethan. ‘What do you mean?’
‘They wouldn’t be able to infiltrate Area 51, or a nuclear facility,’ Ethan explained.
‘Why not?’ Lopez argued. ‘If they can control an individual long enough to get them into Fort Benning, they could do the same at the Pentagon or even the White House.’
‘It’s not about the control,’ Ethan said. ‘We need to look at all photo and video footage of the Fort Benning attack, because our real killers will be on it.’
‘General Thompson did the shooting,’ Jarvis pointed out. ‘His killers could be anywhere within signal range, many miles away.’
‘No,’ Ethan countered. ‘All of these mind control programs have one thing in common. They control the body, even the brain to a point, but they do not control the eyes.’
Lopez raised an eyebrow. ‘The hackers would need line of sight to control their victims.’
‘To see what they see,’ Ethan confirmed. ‘It’s possible they could attach micro–cameras to their victims.’ Ethan turned to Jarvis. ‘Have the lab people check out General Thompson’s uniform, see if there’s a concealed camera anywhere on it.’
Jarvis turned away as he reached for his cell phone and began dialing.
‘You think they’d have to be close to the victims to make this all work?’ Lopez asked.
‘Think about it,’ Ethan said. ‘You’ve got a senior official under your control and you walk them straight into the Pentagon. If you’re not inside the building with them then you’re effectively blind and cannot control your victim, you can’t see where they’re going.’
‘And they can’t be allowed any degree of autonomy,’ Hellerman agreed, ‘or they’d break free and cry for help.’
‘So they would need visual aids of some kind,’ Ethan went on, ‘either that, or they’d need further implants to see what the victim was seeing and further signals to relay that information to whoever was co
ntrolling the victim.’
Jarvis turned to Ethan.
‘They found nothing,’ he reported. ‘General Thompson was in the open when he killed the recruits at Fort Benning, but he killed his family as they slept in their beds.’
Ethan frowned. ‘Then how could his controllers see what he was doing?’
‘Whoever did this, they’re already in the country and they’ll have more victims lined up because the technology must already be in place,’ Jarvis said. ‘I don’t think that General Thompson’s rampage was the main act. I think it was a test run.’
‘Test run for what?’ Hellerman asked.
‘Something bigger,’ Lopez realized. ‘Much bigger.’
***
VI
J. Edgar Hoover Building,
Pennsylvania Avenue,
Washington DC
No big deal.
That’s what FBI Special Agent Hannah Ford kept telling herself as she stepped into the headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the brutalist architecture of the high rise building basking in the bright sunlight outside, just a few blocks down from the White House.
Despite her clearly displayed identity badge and having the appointment booked for her, Hannah was still subject to the routine scanners, bomb dog and pat down before her arrival was recorded in the daily log and she was allowed inside the building. All around, in almost every hallway, were displayed images of the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted, permanent reminders of the Bureau’s endless mission to seek out those who had taken flight from US justice and bring them back to face the courts.
Hannah Ford felt the weight of that mission upon her shoulders in the presence of so many indicators of just how many enemies of the state were out there to make her task seem impossible. Since the events of September 2001, the FBI had tripled the number of intelligence analysts and altered its internal structure to streamline its intelligence gathering capabilities, all to counter the increasing threat from within America’s shores, where Islamic militants and their sympathizers plotted and conspired to bring mayhem and grief wherever they travelled.
The Identity Mine (Warner & Lopez Book 3) Page 3