by Lis Wiehl
Everyone he spoke with offered information freely except in one area—when he asked what was going on with Provivilan, he met with reticence and secrecy … and a sense that he would be wise not to ask too many questions about it. People who should have known something said, “I’m not the right person to ask” or changed the subject. When he tried to use the company computer to research the program, he was asked on the home screen for an access code, which he did not have. His friend and coworker Illena Nemkova, who’d worked on the project, hadn’t returned his e-mails or phone calls for some time now.
It was time to find out why.
Once Quinn passed a background check and was cleared to work at Linz, a company vulnerable to corporate espionage, he’d been given a thumb drive to wear around his neck and use for identification and authorization—all Linz employees had them. When he plugged the drive into his own personal laptop (which he was told in clear and non-ambiguous terms that he was not allowed to bring onto campus) and scanned it for hidden codes with malware software, a computer engineer friend had recommended, he discovered that the drive was protected by a firewall that took him a good ten or fifteen seconds to breach. His suspicions were confirmed. The drive contained a GPS tracker and a keystroke transmission program that would tell whoever wanted to spy on him exactly where he was and what he was doing.
Which was, he thought, smiling, a rather naive way to try and keep track of your employees.
Working on his laptop, Quinn cloned the thumb drive onto a second device, disabled the GPS and keystroke trackers on the second thumb drive, then left the original thumb drive plugged into the USB port on his office computer. Now whoever was monitoring him would assume that he was at his desk working, while in fact he would be navigating the Linz campus, using the cloned drive as his pass key.
He knew Illena worked in Building C, but he hadn’t been able to contact her since he’d started working three days ago; he started there. He waited until lunch to enter, blending in with the crowds. Building C was identical to every other building in the complex; he found the personnel directory on the wall behind the front desk, but rather than stop to read it and raise suspicions, he took out his phone and—discreetly—took a picture. He enlarged the photograph and read the directory in private, in a stall in the men’s room.
There was no listing for Illena Nemkova.
He rode the elevators and eavesdropped, and reaffirmed his impression that the majority of the people at Linz were more interested in making money than helping the sick, talking about bottom lines and stock options and vacation homes with a see-no-evil speak-no-evil blindness to whatever else might be going on.
On his last trip, on his way back to the main lobby, he noticed something that he’d missed before: there was no button for the basement level—only a USB port where that button should be.
That made no sense. All the other buildings had basements. C was exactly the same as all the other buildings. Therefore, C had a basement. So why couldn’t he go there?
He returned to his office, logged into his company computer using his debugged thumb drive, and searched the company’s laboratory supplies database, directing the computer to list not what he could order but an inventory of what was already stored on the premises. The list was a long one. He redefined his search to sort for supplies in Building C and frowned as the items scrolled by. Portable oxygen bottles, HEPA filters, an alkaline tissue digester, ultraviolet arrays, large bleach tanks, and most significantly, PP or positive pressure suits worn to shield the wearer from biological hazards by insuring that in the event of a tear in the suit, the air would continue to blow out and not in.
It could only mean one thing. He was stunned by the audacity of it, and by the danger, and then he was angry. These particular supplies were unique to a very specific kind of BioSafety lab, Level 4, that dealt with extremely dangerous kinds of materials—things like smallpox or the Marburg and Ebola hemorrhagic viruses, the deadliest bugs on the planet. The kind of lab that one would have to keep hidden away, safe from prying eyes. The kind of lab one might hide in a basement.
He searched for the five closest BSL4 laboratories, even though he knew the answer. His search engine listed, ranked nearest to farthest, the National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratory in Boston; the NIH labs in Bethesda; the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick; Consolidated Laboratory Services in Richmond, Virginia; and the Kent State University Laboratories in Ohio. The only privately owned BSL4 laboratory he was aware of was the Texas Biomedical Research Institute in San Alberto. Unless the laws had changed, running a secret BSL4 lab was illegal.
He logged back into the system using the thumb drive with the GPS and keystroke trackers and sent a couple of harmless e-mails to make it look like he’d been working.
As he finished sending the last e-mail, he felt it start. A pounding behind his temples. Another headache coming on. He closed his eyes. He felt himself suddenly weightless and swimming in a dizzying whirlpool. He dropped his head to his desk and squeezed the back of his skull with both hands, pressing his fingers hard into the bones below and behind his ears.
When he lifted his head up again and opened his eyes, the right half of his field of vision was dark. He raised his right hand and waved it from right to left in front of his face and only saw it when it was even with his right shoulder.
His skull throbbed, and he thought he might pass out from the pain …
Then the pain abated.
He waited, breathing slowly and fully through his nose until the pain was mostly gone, and opened his eyes to discover his full field of vision was restored. He extended his right arm and wiggled his fingers, just to be certain, and saw fingers wiggling in his peripheral vision. In another minute, the nausea was gone. When he stood, he listed to the right and braced himself with his right hand on the desk. He sat back down and waited. The second time he stood, his balance was better.
He tapped his phone and found the number on his contacts list for Dr. Christopher Belden and decided to Skype him.
A moment later a man appeared on his screen. He was balding, about forty, with wire-rimmed glasses, wearing a blue oxford shirt and a black tie.
“Hey, Chris,” Quinn said. “Catch you at a bad time?”
“Hello, Quinn,” the doctor said. “How are you doing?”
“You tell me—I’m just calling to see if I’m aphasic. You can understand what I’m saying, right?”
“I do, loud and clear,” the doctor said. “You don’t look so good, though. Tell me what’s going on.”
Quinn described the episode he’d just had. It had been Belden, an old friend, who’d suggested an MRI after Quinn told him about the headaches; the MRI revealed Quinn had a midgrade infiltrating multiform glioblastoma of the pons reticular formation—a tumor in his brain, growing in a place where an operation wasn’t possible. It had been the size of a pea when they’d found it. Now, according to the episode Quinn had described, Dr. Belden believed it was larger. He suggested that Quinn come into the office and schedule another MRI to see just how much the tumor had grown. Quinn declined, just as he’d declined chemotherapy after determining it had a 15–20 percent chance of shrinking the tumor temporarily and a 100 percent chance of making the end of his life miserable.
“What’s another MRI going to tell us?” he asked the oncologist. “How much time I have left? It’s not going to change how I’m living. I’d rather not know.”
“Okay,” Belden agreed. “You’re right.”
“I just want to know what to expect. This one was a bit rough.”
“More of the same, I’m afraid,” Belden said. “More frequent. Longer duration. Longer recovery. And then it’s going to happen and it’s not going to go away. Maybe seizures.”
“Thanks for being honest, Chris,” Quinn said. “I’ll keep you posted.”
Or not, he added silently, closing the Skype window and opening up the supply database again.
He needed to find out what was in Building C. Someone had to know, and on a campus full of scientists, there had to be someone else at least as curious as he was. The trick was going to be finding that person without giving himself away.
And without getting himself killed … before his time.
7.
December 21
9:24 a.m. EST
The UPS driver greeted Tommy by name, more as a frequent customer than as a famous person. Tommy had been one of the highest paid players in the NFL when he retired after accidentally killing an opposing player in a legal but vicious hit. After retiring, he’d opened All-Fit Sports, Health, and Fitness Center of Northern Westchester, stocked it with all the newest fitness equipment, advertised using his own image, and watched the money pour in. He gave a tenth of his profits to his church and a tenth to charity, and he was putting a few Special Olympic kids through college, but the rest of the money he made he had fun with. Some of the profits he’d turned into vehicles, which occupied the house’s huge six-bay garage, which he now instructed the UPS driver to back up to. Tommy had at one time owned an orange Jeep Sahara, a botanical green Jaguar XKR convertible, and a silver 2001 Ford Focus station wagon for surveillance. (“Plus, it’s a chick magnet,” he’d told Dani, “except it’s the wrong end of the magnet.”)
He had a small Volkswagen camper van for overnight trips, a Harley-Davidson Sportster, a more powerful Harley-Davidson Night Rod, a BMW F800GS for off-road riding, a Trek road bike for Ironman competitions, a Trek mountain bike for trails, a Yamaha Grizzly for deep-woods camping, and a go-cart, just because he’d always wanted one. He’d owned a vintage Mustang, to replace a car he had in high school that was now at the bottom of Lake Atticus after he’d stupidly accepted a challenge to race it on ice that wasn’t quite as thick as he thought. The replacement Mustang caught fire and blew up after Amos Kasden tampered with the engine. The Night Rod was at the bottom of Lake Atticus as well. And the Ford Focus, what was left of it, was now in Ray DeGidio’s salvage yard.
Fortunately, he was not a person who became attached to material objects.
Dani watched out the window as Tommy met the truck. She threw on a coat and trotted across the courtyard to the garage where she found him at his workbench at the rear of the bay. The service bay was furnished with every tool a man could want, possibly every tool two or three men could want. As a rule Dani did not like gender stereotypes, but she couldn’t help loving a guy who could fix things, maybe because her father had been a tinkerer too.
On the floor was a large UPS box with the letters IADS on it. “What’s I-A-D-S?” she asked.
Tommy turned and smiled at her. “Israeli Aero Defense Systems,” he said. “I ordered this last night for express delivery.”
“From Israel?”
“No,” he said, trying to find a page in the manual. “From a website called Gizmopalooza. It’s like Amazon for guys who like gadgets. I get everything there for half off.”
“Because?”
“Because I own it,” he said. “Fifty-one percent of it. It’s doing really well.” He referred to the manual again. “It says you’re supposed to be able to put it together in ten minutes, but the instructions could have been written better.”
He returned to the bench, where Dani saw what looked like a white oar or blade of some sort, bent at the tip. As she stepped closer, Tommy said, “Aha,” snapped a piece on the blade, and turned to show her, holding above his head what looked like an oversized paper airplane—a V-shaped wing about two meters across with a tapered tubular fuselage one meter long and a small propeller at the end of the fuselage where the tail should have been.
“What is it?”
“It’s a UAV,” Tommy said, admiring the device. “Unmanned Aerial Vehicle. The Orison 6.”
She shook her head. “Which means absolutely nothing to me.”
“It’s a drone. For over-the-horizon surveillance. Weighs, like, nothing. It’s got full-color video for daylight and combination infrared/night vision for starlight imaging. It’ll fly for almost two hours on one battery, with a fifteen-mile range. Top speed is about eighty-five miles per hour and stall speed is about thirty, but you get longer battery life at slower speeds.”
He plugged something into the wall—a power adapter for the drone, Dani guessed. It glowed bright green.
“Oh man. You gotta love these guys. It came fully charged. See? That means we can send it up right away.”
“Great,” Dani said. “I think I’m going to—”
Tommy knelt down next to the drone, ignoring her. “This thing has a fifteen thousand-foot ceiling, though the FAA puts a four hundred-foot ceiling and line-of-sight limit on civilian use. I thought about getting a quad-rotor, but I couldn’t find any that have the same range or dwell time. When you’re done, you either call it back or program it to return to the launch GPS position. It flies back, cuts the engine, pops the parachute, and lands right where it started. You put a fresh battery in and you’re back in the air in less than a minute.”
“What’s that?” Dani asked, catching sight of something right next to the box that looked like a crossbow, only longer.
“That’s how you launch it,” he told her. “It’s like a ballista.”
She frowned. “A ballista?”
“Kind of an old Roman siege engine thing. You control it with this.” He held up what appeared to be a tablet computer with video game controls mounted on either side as handles, with thumb-operated joysticks and multiple buttons. “This is the GCS. Ground Control Station. It gives you all your avionics plus the video or infrared/NV feed, and it has a built-in DVR that lets you record for up to twelve hours. Plus, it’s got Bluetooth, so you can sync to any computer with Wi-Fi or to GPhones. This will give us over-the-horizon imagery, and it will also let me reprogram the infrared to scan for both hot and cold signals. We’ll spot the demons before they see us; plus, I ordered an extra ultraviolet payload to go with the infrared. That should help us keep track of those things we saw in the woods last night. I wonder if I should have ordered two? It’s kind of inconvenient to have to land the thing to switch cameras. What I need is one that can fly with all three cameras—”
“Tommy,” Dani said, “this is good, but don’t go overboard just because you can. You don’t have to have every single new electronic gizmo that comes out.”
“You’re right, I don’t,” he said. “But think how great it would be if I did.”
“Tommy—”
“Come on. Let’s see if it works.”
Dani hesitated a second, then shrugged. Why not?
She followed him out to the courtyard. He set the aircraft down and handed Dani the GCS while he set up the launcher, the front end supported by a bipod with telescoping legs to raise it four feet off the ground. He pulled the rubber tubing back until it latched behind the tickler, set the UAV on the tiller, and took the GCS from Dani, placing the strap behind his neck to hold the controller in front of him in a way that reminded Dani of a nightclub’s “cigarette girl” in the old black-and-white movies.
“What are you doing?” she asked as he tapped the touch screen.
“Inputting the home GPS coordinates and setting it on auto-return,” he said. “Listen to that—do you hear that?”
“Hear what? I don’t hear anything.”
“Exactly. The propeller is turning and we can’t even hear it. Anybody who looks up and sees this thing is going to think it’s just another turkey vulture. Stand back.”
Dani gave him room. The trigger to release and launch the aircraft was a pedal at the end of the tiller. When Tommy stepped on it, the Orison 6 rushed suddenly skyward. Dani watched as the UAV grew smaller and smaller, rising into the air. She found it strangely compelling, the way she’d felt watching her nieces trying to take their first steps. She loved seeing Tommy happy, and the new toy was doing the job.
“The left joystick controls the camera and the right joystick flies the plane,” he said, looking not into the
sky but at the screen in front of him. “This is easier than a PlayStation3.”
“I wouldn’t know,” Dani said. “I’ve never played a video game in my life.”
“Aha,” Tommy said. “I knew I’d find your flaw if I looked long enough. The optics are high-def at 1080 DPI. Is this cool or what?”
As he focused on the screen in front of him, Dani looked up into the sky, where she saw the UAV circle slowly. Then it began a dive, heading straight toward them.
“Tommy,” she cautioned.
“Hang on …”
“Tommy!”
“Wave to the camera.”
“Tommy, pull up! You’re going to—”
Twenty feet above them, the UAV broke from its dive as Dani ducked involuntarily, and then it rose again, swooping over the top of the house, where it clipped the weathervane and crashed just beyond the greenhouse, one wing separating from the fuselage.
“That could have gone better,” Tommy said.
He handed Dani the controller and ran to retrieve the tiny aircraft. By the time he returned to her, he had the UAV back together again.
“This thing is almost indestructible, but it’s going to take some getting used to. Let me see your GPhone for a second.”
Dani handed it to him. A minute later he handed it back to her.
“I synced it up with your phone. Bluetooth,” he said. “Now you can see what the bird sees, right on your screen.”
“The bird?” Dani said. “You’ve flown it for thirty seconds and you already have a nickname for it?”
“I’m going to need to practice a little,” he told her.