“Sure,” Jenner said. “I get that. Maybe Mia knew about him. But who doesn’t? Everybody’s heard of the devil, whether they’ve had any dealings with him or not. And what happened Thursday night? These things Mia says she found? Johnny Wong’s a gangster—but that’s all he is. He’s nothing special. He runs girls and card rooms. He’s got a protection racket. Sometimes he kills people.”
“A lot of people.”
“But this?” Jenner asked. He touched Carver’s forehead. “This is too big for Johnny Wong.”
“You’re not seeing it,” Carver said.
He waited for Jenner to protest, but his partner was silent.
“Hadley was looking for Johnny,” Carver said. “She wasn’t just singing in nightclubs. She was burrowing into the underworld. You look at the list of her gigs, and you can see it. She knew what she was doing, said all the right things. She climbed up the ladder and found him, and we know what happened after that.”
“A lot of his acquaintances turn up dead. You said it yourself.”
“It’s not what happened to her that proves it. It’s that she wanted to see him at all. If she was in Mia’s network, then she was looking for Johnny because he knows about these things. There’s a lot of difference between knowing about something and causing it. Maybe it’s hard to buy that Johnny built these things, but is it so much of a stretch to think he knows about them?”
“How’s he going to know a thing like that?”
“He owns all the bars and all the girls. He’s got an ear in every cab and every limo. He probably knows what you’re going to order at that club of yours before you’ve even seen the menu.”
“And if Mia’s network is a lie, if her contraptions are made up?”
“If she’s lying to us, it’s still all connected. It still leads to Johnny Wong. He’s our key.”
It was too dark to read Jenner’s face, but Carver knew he was running the possibilities again, trying all the scenarios.
“I still don’t know,” he said. “But I guess it’s like you said. What other choice do I have?”
“None,” Carver said. He pulled the door open and Jenner stepped out. “This is the one thing we’ve got. So we run with it. But watch your back.”
“You know it.”
They shook hands, and then Jenner was gone.
Mia was waiting for him in the bell tower.
She’d trimmed the lamp’s wick until its tiny flame gave off more smoke than light. The helicopter had made another pass, this time releasing its belly-pod of drones. Carver could hear the electric hum as they cut through the air outside the tower. Mia was leaning over the police scanner, her right ear to the chatter on the Central District police band. She’d set its volume as low as it would go.
“Adam-Five-David just called in. They’re ten-seven-M,” she said. “I don’t know what that is.”
“They’re eating dinner,” Carver answered. He pulled out the chair next to her and sat. “Or getting a cup of coffee, killing time. You catch where they are?”
“Seventeen oh one Stockton.”
He closed his eyes to picture the city, running the blocks in his mind.
“That’s Mama’s, on Washington Square.”
It was just a few blocks from the house on Filbert. He hadn’t spoken to Houston since she’d left the confessional at the Irish Bank. But he knew she was following the plan he’d given her. She’d taken her dinner break on schedule, and she’d picked a perfect spot. When she got to her radio car and called a 10-8 to let dispatch know she was back in service, she’d be exactly where they needed her.
“Does Jenner have time?”
Carver looked at his watch.
“She’ll be twenty minutes. And Jenner—he knows his way around.”
“Did you find out anything about the house?”
“Just what’s online, the public records,” Carver said. He’d looked it up immediately after hearing the address on Fremont’s recording. “The city tax map says it’s owned by something called the MMLX Corporation. But I’d need a subpoena to get a list of its officers.”
“So it’s what—a front company?”
“I guess.”
“Does that happen a lot?”
“I’m a homicide cop,” Carver said. “Most people I meet, they’re lucky to sleep indoors. They don’t have holding companies.”
“Anything else you found on the house?”
“It’s forty-seven hundred square feet. The tax-assessed value is fifty times my annual salary. Three years ago, someone pulled an electrical permit to wire half a dozen four-forty-volt mains into the basement.”
“All that’s online?”
Carver nodded. “What could you do with electrical mains like that?” he asked.
“Run an imaging center, for one thing,” Mia said. “An electron microscope. Take your pick of industrial lab equipment.”
On the table, the scanner was still playing the exchanges between the dispatcher and the hundred radio cars she was running. Carver leaned toward the speaker and listened for a moment. It was a calm night, relatively speaking. There’d been an armored truck hijacking on the Embarcadero. A murder-suicide in a North Beach garret apartment. But there hadn’t been any all-unit calls that would have taken Houston and Roper away from their dinner break and out of the area.
“Did you and George ever talk about how these things are getting built?” he asked Mia. “Where they come from?”
“It’s all just guesswork.”
“Tell me what you guessed.”
“We think they start out like spores,” she said. “Tiny things, smaller than bacteria. Small enough to pass through any safeguard, to slide past an FDA inspector. Are you following me??”
“You think they’re putting them in the water supply. In the food.”
“Just consider everything you let into your body. It could be in the water. Or it could be in ordinary table salt. Or a drug everyone takes, sooner or later—like aspirin. Maybe, thirty years ago, they sprayed it over the major cities like aerosol, and it’s just waiting in the dust.”
“You’re saying it could be airborne?”
“It could be anything. It could be in your annual flu vaccine. You sign up for an immunization, but that’s not all you’re getting.”
“But these spores—where would they come from?”
“If you wanted to make a nanomachine, something this small, you could use three-D printing.”
“They’ll print on that scale?”
“You could do it with an electron microscope—they do more than just make images. You can move atoms one at a time.”
“One atom at a time?” Carver asked. “Wouldn’t that be too slow? You have three of these in your head. I have four. And multiply that by how many billions of people?”
“What if you just had to make the first one?” Mia asked. “And then that one made a second. And those two made four, and then eight, and so on.”
“You’re talking about reproduction. Like they’re alive.”
She shook her head. “I’m talking about molecular self-assembly.”
“A machine that can make a copy of itself—like when a cell splits in two?”
“Yes.”
“That’s possible?”
She nodded.
“My guess is that somewhere there’s a lab with a breeder tank in it. The spores are in a solution. Carbon and hydrogen. Some rare earth elements, for the nanoelectronics. They gather raw materials and spit out copies of themselves, and when the vat’s full, a technician does something to them. Activates them for the next phase.”
“Which is what?”
“This is a machine with two modes,” Mia said. “In the first mode—the breeder mode—all they do is split in half and reassemble. It’s the machine version of cellular mitosis. They could do that forever, or until they ran out of raw materials. But the second mode is what they’re really for—getting inside a human host. Growing their legs to wire up the brain, to tap i
n to your thoughts and feelings. You’d want them sterile before that. If they started multiplying inside a host, it’d be a disaster. So there’s got to be a way to switch them off.”
“How would you flip a switch on something you can’t even see?”
“They might respond to an ultrasonic pulse. Or irradiation.”
“So you have a vat full of breeding nanomachines,” Carver said. “You blast them with x-rays, and they stop reproducing and get ready for phase two.”
“But there’s one other thing,” Mia said. She was warming her hands around the lantern’s glass globe, which threw the room into shadow. “This is what really worried us. What if someone accidentally released them into the wild and they hadn’t all been sterilized? What if a strain got out that could make copies of itself while it was inside your body?”
“I don’t know.”
“One becomes two, and two becomes four,” Mia said. “Do the math.”
“Just tell me.”
“Say one generation takes an hour. At the end of three hours, you only have eight. Not such a big problem when you’re talking about something so small,” Mia said. “But after twenty-four hours, you’d have sixteen million.”
She held her hands closer to the flame, blocking it entirely. Now the only light came from the red dial of the police scanner.
“With that many packed in your head, you might be bleeding out of your ears. But if you somehow stayed around another day, you’d have so many, you’d need a mathematician to explain it to you. They wouldn’t stop breeding until they ran out of raw materials. If something like that got out, there’d be a narrow window to eradicate it. Either you stop it in the first twenty-four hours or there’d be nothing left to save. Any organic matter they came in contact with would have turned to gray soup.”
Carver looked at her in the low red light. When she’d knocked on his door to ask him to sleep over, she’d had the same expression on her face. Terrified by things beyond his understanding.
“You think that’s what happened on Thursday night.”
“I don’t know,” Mia said. “I don’t know if it happened or not.”
“But that’s what you think.”
“It would explain why they gave you something that broke the things apart and inoculated you against their own invention.”
His face must have shown that he still wasn’t following her. She started again, speaking more carefully this time.
“Start with what we know,” she said. “You went to a house that had been converted into a lab. You were called there for a dead body. Houston and Roper were there, and they let you in. After you went inside, someone else came along and hit you with a jet inoculator gun. They erased your memories, too, but that wasn’t the real point. They needed to kill the things growing in you before they could spread. They were trying to stop an outbreak.”
Carver stood up and went over to the louvered window. Peering through the wooden slats, he could see the half-circle cuts in the sidewalk where the bell had hit. A woman ran past, holding her shoes in her hands. A moment later, two men came in pursuit. Their arms pinwheeled as they sprinted down the hill after their prey.
There was nothing he could do, and he didn’t want to watch. He sat down again, pulling the lamp away from Mia’s hands so that he could see her face.
“Everything you’re telling me, this would be huge. Worldwide.”
“It’s everywhere.”
“If these people can do what you’re saying, they must be the most profitable outfit on the planet. They’re not running it out of a basement on Filbert Street.”
“Of course they’re not.”
“Then what is that house?”
Mia answered with a question of her own.
“If you’d built a machine this illegal, would you apply for a patent?”
“Probably not.”
“And if you don’t have patent protection, then the only way to protect what you own is to keep it a secret. But secrets can be stolen. And if a company was sitting on something that valuable, a person on the inside would have a lot of temptation.”
“So you think the body on Filbert was an insider. A scientist who worked for the organization behind this.”
Mia looked up and nodded. “He snuck something out of the lab but didn’t know how to control it,” she said. “Then you and Jenner wandered in.”
Carver had nothing to say to that. If everything worked, they would know more about the Filbert Street house in a few minutes. If there were clues suggesting that Mia was lying, Houston and Roper would find them. He looked at his watch and saw that it was time. Jenner would need to make the call before Houston and Roper went back in service. It would take a minute for it to filter through the 911 center to Central Dispatch, then another minute for the police dispatch to pick it up and send it out. Houston and Roper had to be the closest available unit, with nothing else on their plate.
“It’s time,” Carver said.
“All right.”
He picked up his phone. He’d already typed the text, so all he had to do was hit send.
Roll.
Jenner wouldn’t bother to answer. By now he’d be getting out his second burner phone, the one he’d bought earlier today. He’d use it once and then toss it in the trash. Carver took Jenner’s computer and logged in to the church’s wireless network. He’d borrowed the password along with the keys.
When he had a working web browser, he went to the video conferencing site. He logged in to the chat room and then angled the computer so Mia could see the screen.
“Is it working?”
“She’ll turn on video when they get the call.”
“All right.”
He leaned back in the chair and looked at the blank chat screen. Houston’s voice came up on the scanner, clear and confident.
“Adam-Five-David, we are ten-eight.”
“Ten-four, Adam-Five-David,” the dispatcher answered. “What’s your twenty?”
“Washington Square.”
“Proceed to four fifty-seven Filbert for a possible ten-seventy,” the dispatcher said. “Complaining witness was on a cell phone. Walking his dog.”
“Ten-four.”
Jenner had timed it perfectly. He’d used his throwaway phone to call 911 and report a prowler outside 457 Filbert. He wouldn’t have been within sight of the house, but a block or two away. If the 911 dispatcher looked at her screen to see where his call originated, the GPS ping would make Jenner’s claims seem plausible.
From here on, it was Houston and Roper’s show. How they investigated it would depend on what they found on site. Houston understood what he wanted, and he knew she’d do it if she could.
“Here it comes,” Mia said. “She’s starting the feed.”
24
HOUSTON HAD TURNED on her body camera, which was wirelessly linked to her car’s computer. From there, she’d uploaded the feed to the video chatting site. Carver and Mia could watch everything as it happened.
She was coming up Filbert Street, driving no faster than the traffic. A block from the house, she turned to the curb and parked by a fire hydrant. They watched her take the mike and raise it to her lips, saw her key the transmit button with her thumb.
Then they heard her voice over the scanner.
“Adam-Five-David. We are one block downhill from four fifty-seven Filbert. We will proceed on foot. If there’s a ten-seventy, we don’t want to spook him off with the unit. We’d rather catch him.”
“Adam-Five-David—proceed ten-double-zero.”
“Ten-four,” Houston said. “Confirm will exercise all caution. Adam-Five-David is ten-seven-I.”
“That’s good,” Carver said to Mia. “She just bought herself fifteen minutes off the air.”
“Can anyone else see her camera feed?”
“Not the way she’s patched it.”
On the screen, he watched Houston put the mike back on its dashboard clip. She unbuckled her seatbelt and stepped out of the
car. When she turned her head, Carver saw across the roof of the radio car. Roper was already out. He was a tall, good-looking kid. He nodded at Houston, and she came around the hood to meet him. They went up the sidewalk together, Houston walking slightly behind Roper so that he stayed in the frame.
When they reached the house, Houston stood on the sidewalk in front of it. She brought her head back to let the camera sweep from the front steps to the top floor. Carver recognized the basic outline from the images he’d seen on the internet. He’d expected a house that was extravagantly well kept. A postcard scene from the city he’d grown up in. But when Houston panned up, he saw burn marks around the second- and third-floor windows. Peeling paint, and dead plants in the flower boxes. The largest windows on the second floor had been boarded from the inside. The heat-crazed glass looked like it might fall out of its frame with the next strong breeze.
“Does this thing have audio?” Mia asked.
“Let me try.”
He toggled the volume bar on the chat screen, then leaned toward the computer’s pinpoint microphone.
“Houston?”
“I read you,” she said. “You getting this?”
“We are.”
“You can smell it,” Houston whispered. “The fire, and that same metal smell. It’s like they dumped barrels of it on the street.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Ring the front bell,” she said. “If someone comes, we’ll try to talk our way in. Say we need to check for a prowler.”
“And if nobody’s home?”
“Then getting in will be a lot easier,” Houston said.
She was definitely his kind of cop.
“All right,” Carver said. “Proceed. But ten-double-zero.”
“You know it.”
She glanced down, and Carver saw she’d drawn her service weapon, had it in her right hand. Then she was going up the steps to join Roper. He spoke to her, but his voice was too soft to pick up on Houston’s throat microphone.
“Do it,” Houston said to him. “I’ve got you.”
Now she was holding the gun in both hands, pointing it at the door. Roper hit the bell.
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