by Kyle Mills
The one on the right was open and she ducked inside, keeping an eye on the glass front of the condo building as she punched in her floor number. Still nothing, but it didn’t mean much. In that kind of a crowd, a professional surveillance team would be virtually impossible to detect. And that didn’t even take into consideration probable hacks into the surveillance cameras that bristled from just about every wall in Tokyo. At this point, pretty much everything had become a roll of the dice. And those dice were most likely loaded.
The elevator rose smoothly to her floor without anyone else getting on. Randi put a hand on the Beretta under her jacket as she stepped into the hallway. Empty.
She moved quickly, feeling uncomfortable out in the open. A wave of her key card in front of a door near the back of the corridor caused it to pop open and she stepped through.
A man jumped up from the sofa that was nearly all the furniture that would fit in the tiny space, watching her with a startled expression.
“You’re not Jon.”
“They told me you were smart,” Randi said, entering the kitchen to empty her bag of the ramen and beer it contained. As expected, the refrigerator was no bigger than the one she’d had in college. Space in Tokyo was at an incredible premium, and while she would have liked to go with something a bit roomier, those kinds of condos tended to attract attention. Better to be just another one of the anonymous millions wedged into three hundred square feet.
“Who are you?”
“That’s not really important,” she said, tossing him a beer and taking one for herself. She came out of the kitchen and went straight for the couch. “Now, let’s have a chat about nanotechnology.”
Greg Maple looked down at her. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Instead of looking away after the lie, he kept staring—studying her face with an enigmatic expression that was more complicated than the fear she expected under the circumstances.
“What?” Randi said, popping open her beer and taking a swig.
“You…” Maple started. “You look like someone I used to know.”
Randi didn’t immediately react. Maple and Smith had been friends for a long time. Long enough for him to have met her sister.
“You mean Sophie.”
His eyes widened. They looked enough alike that Randi had become used to the reaction. It was still gut-wrenching to think about her dead sister—Jon’s dead fiancée—but at least she was practiced at it now.
“You’re Randi Russell?” Maple said.
“In the flesh.”
“CIA.”
She nodded.
“I knew it!” Maple said, pulling up a folding chair. Their knees almost touched in the tiny space. “He’s military intelligence. You’re working together.”
“That’s right,” she said. It was the obvious assumption and she decided to run with it.
“Where is he? Is he okay?”
That was a hard question to answer because she honestly didn’t know. According to Klein, when Smith had called to set up a meeting between the president and Takahashi, he’d sounded fine. There was no way to know if that was still the case, though.
“We’ve lost him.”
“Lost?”
“Misplaced,” she corrected. “Temporarily. And in the meantime, I’m filling in.”
“Is that why you had me kidnapped?” he said with a little understandable anger coming to the surface.
She decided not to acknowledge it. “It’s my understanding that you’ve taken the lead on this nanotech problem. I need to know what you’ve learned.”
“You could have picked up a phone instead of dragging me all the way to Japan.”
“Phones are too hard to secure, Greg. I prefer to have my conversations face-to-face. Now drink your beer before it gets warm.”
He popped open the can obediently and took a swig, but it didn’t seem to make him any less nervous.
“So? Have you figured out anything that can help me?”
He shook his head. “Probably not that can help you, but things that are…amazing.”
“Let’s hear those, then. Keeping in mind that I’m not Jon. I’m not a scientist.”
“Okay. I found a couple of structures that didn’t seem to have anything to do with the machine’s ability to copy itself.”
“Jon told me about them. You didn’t know what they were for. Have you figured it out?”
“I think so. The first is to control the number of times the individual unit can replicate. So you take one nanobot and you set the replication counter to ten. It makes ten new bots, but each of those can only make nine. And in turn, each of those can only make eight. When you get to zero, replication ends. In that example, you’d end up with millions of bots before it’s all over. If you were to set that initial parameter at a thousand instead of ten, you’re talking numbers that are hard to even imagine.”
Randi frowned and set her beer down. “You said a couple. What about the other structure?”
“That seems to relate to magnetism.”
“They attract each other?”
He shook his head. “I think they measure the earth’s magnetic field.”
“What for?”
“Probably to locate themselves—like birds.”
She let that process for a moment and didn’t like the conclusion she was coming to. “So, if they know where they are, it’s possible that they could be programmed to work only in a certain geographic area and to go dormant outside that area.”
“Very possible.”
They had known the technology worked—the machines were clearly able to self-replicate using steel, plastic, and concrete as fuel. What Jon hadn’t been sure of was whether it could be weaponized. Weapons had to be deadly, but just as important they had to be controllable. If you had a gun, you had to be able to aim it. And that’s exactly what Maple was talking about.
She wanted to ask more, but was unsure how much to reveal. In the end, though, Maple wasn’t an idiot. With the facts he already had, it seemed reasonable to assume that he’d already considered the scenario she was interested in.
“Then you’re telling me I could make it so these things only worked, say, in China. When they crossed over the border into another country, they’d just stop reproducing.”
“Assuming that the system is foolproof. The problem with replication is that it’s hard not to introduce errors. Mutations is probably a better word. Usually, those mutations are neither here nor there. Sometimes they kill the organism, or in this case break the machine. But every once in a while, they could make the machine better.”
“And by ‘better,’ you mean better at reproduction. There could be a mutation that turns off the control system.”
“Exactly. Theoretically, errors could be introduced that would allow the machines to replicate indefinitely or operate outside the programmed geographic borders. Even worse, though, you could get changes to the type of fuel the bots use. What if they became capable of eating rock? Or water? Or flesh? That’s potentially end-of-the-world stuff.”
“What if that happened? How would we stop them?”
“Radiation. And a lot of it. That’s the only thing I’m aware of that can kill these things.”
She let out a long breath and picked up her beer again. “That’s why it was developed in Fukushima, right, Doc? So they’d have a way to kill it if they lost control.”
“That would be my guess. Everything was probably going along fine and then the tsunami caused a containment breach. It forced them to irradiate Reactor Four.”
“Okay. Let’s assume they’re still working on this thing—either developing it or manufacturing it. They’d still need that safeguard, right? Access to radiation.”
“I assume so.”
“Okay. Then put yourself in their shoes. Where would you be?”
“A nuclear sub would be ideal. Easy to irradiate and even if you didn’t get them all, they’d end up at the bottom of the ocean. With no f
uel chain, they’d corrode in the salt water before they could make it to civilization.”
“It’s a little hard to make pronouncements about the Japanese military right now, but building something as big as a nuclear sub without anyone knowing doesn’t seem plausible. Even for Takahashi.”
“Yeah, I thought of that too,” Maple said. “But I have a theory. Do you want to hear it?”
“Hell yes, I want to hear it.”
“A few years ago, the Japanese built a facility to store the nuclear waste from their reactors. It’s carved out of a mountain in the northeast. That’s it. If I was working on this thing, that’s where I’d be set up.”
46
Outside Melbourne
Australia
President Sam Adams Castilla stood at the massive window and looked out over the rows of vines stretching to the horizon. The sun had just set, casting long shadows across the landscape and obscuring all but one man patrolling the grounds with a German shepherd.
The house was on loan from an Australian manufacturing magnate whom he’d known since he was the governor of New Mexico. Its relative isolation made it easier for the Secret Service to secure as well as a more appealing venue for the negotiations he was hosting. Setting was more important than most people realized. Warm, comfortable, and serene. Those were things that put people in the mood to compromise.
A quick glance at his watch confirmed that it was time. As the president of the United States it was his prerogative to keep people waiting, but he sensed it would be a mistake in this case.
He walked across the expansive bedroom suite and into the long second-floor hallway. Two Secret Service men fell in behind, talking quietly into microphones hidden near their wrists to tell their team that he was on the move.
Normally he would have greeted them by name, but not today. Today he was lost in his own thoughts.
The direct talks between Prime Minister Sanetomi and President Yandong of China had been going surprisingly well. Or maybe it wasn’t so surprising. Both men had a nasty nationalistic streak, but both also seemed to understand that they had taken this particular drama a little too far. That it wouldn’t be long before the situation metastasized beyond anything that either country could handle.
It was only the first day of the summit and the six-hour meeting that had ended earlier that afternoon already was generating compromises from both sides. Of course, the question of the Senkaku Islands was still open, but Castilla was convinced that it could be resolved in principle over the next few days.
What he wasn’t sure of, though, was whether it mattered.
He continued around the corner, blind to the expensive artwork and historical pieces that normally would have caught his eye. Instead, he focused on a closed door at the end of the seemingly endless corridor. Were the prime minister of Japan and the president of China even relevant anymore? Or had the power to control this situation shifted into the hands of a single man? The man he was about to meet.
Castilla paused, taking a deep breath as his two guards took up positions along the wall. One of the surprisingly few meaningful benefits to being the president of the United States was that he was generally better informed than the people he met with. In this instance that edge had been lost. Badly.
Castilla pushed through the door and closed it behind him. A Japanese man in a dark-blue business suit immediately rose from one of two wingback chair set up in front of a fireplace. The electric lights had been dimmed and the flames gave off a warm glow, though it didn’t feel as tranquil as Castilla had hoped.
General Masao Takahashi gave a respectful bow, and Castilla strode across the room to offer his hand. The soldier’s grip was predictably firm and they locked eyes, neither man attempting to assert dominance, but neither willing to cede it.
“Please,” Castilla said, indicating the chair Takahashi had risen from.
The soldier sat after another short bow and the president took the chair next to him. “It’s my understanding that you have valuable information relating to the negotiations between your country and China,” Castilla said.
“I’m very grateful and honored that you agreed to see me,” Takahashi said. “I understand the demands on your time.”
The famous Japanese politeness. Castilla wanted to take the man by the throat and scream, What the hell are you doing, you crazy son of a bitch! Trying to start World War Three?
Instead he smiled and reached for a pot on a table next to him. “Tea?”
“Thank you.”
Takahashi appraised the man in front of him as he poured two cups and held one out. Once again fate had smiled on him. Most politicians were dim and one-dimensional. Not so, Castilla. He was an extremely intelligent man who didn’t need to rely on others for knowledge of history, geopolitics, and economics. Even war. While he would resist, the man would at least be capable of understanding.
The Americans were an interesting people. While there was little doubt that they were inferior to the Japanese, their genetic impurity was in many ways their advantage. Originally America had attracted only those who had the ability to make the difficult ocean crossing and, perhaps more important, those who wanted to. Individuals who had the courage, mental capacity, and discipline to throw off the yoke of Europe’s repressive aristocracies and carve out a better life on their own.
The president didn’t seem inclined to speak further, so Takahashi decided to take the initiative. “I assume that Colonel Smith and his people have fully briefed you on Fukushima?”
“That you were using Reactor Four to develop a weapon based on molecular manufacturing?”
Takahashi nodded.
“They have. It’s my understanding that it can destabilize concrete, plastic, and steel—the building blocks of modern civilization. But it’s also my understanding that it will be almost impossible to control. And that if it should run wild…” Castilla’s voice trailed off.
“It’s been extensively tested with one hundred percent success,” Takahashi said. “We can control it.”
“By using the earth’s magnetic field to localize it and limiting its ability to reproduce,” Castilla said.
“You are indeed well informed.”
“The problem is that my people aren’t convinced. They believe there’s a big difference between a lab setting and the real world. The consequences of using this type of weapon go well beyond anything developed by humanity thus far. The only analogy I can come up with would be a full-scale nuclear war between the US and the Soviet Union.”
Takahashi took a sip of his tea. As formidable as this politician was, he was, at his core, a hypocrite. When it was the American people who were threatened, the United States threw its values of freedom, human rights, and privacy into the trash bin. It indiscriminately wiped out civilians via robotic drones. It imprisoned countless people without charge and then tortured them for information. It dropped atomic bombs. But when another country was in the crosshairs, the Americans were always the first to call for moderation and restraint.
“Our development efforts over the last decade have been quite varied, Mr. President. The nanotech is only one component.”
“And what are the other components?”
Takahashi didn’t respond, instead taking a sip of his tea.
“Surely, one of the benefits of having an incredible arsenal is letting your enemies know that it exists and that you’re willing to use it.”
“But we aren’t enemies, Mr. President. I’m here out of friendship.”
Castilla didn’t bother to hide his skepticism. “Japan is an island. Can I assume your first order of business was to control the sea?”
“Our first priority was in fact cyber warfare. Naval superiority was our second.”
“But your new battleship was sunk.”
“The battleship was a showpiece. Our defenses are based on self-cavitating torpedoes.”
“Like the Soviet Shkval?”
“In the same way as a computer is like a h
andheld calculator. Our units are significantly faster, have vastly greater range, and are artificially intelligent.”
“But that wouldn’t protect you from China’s missile batteries or air force.”
“We’ve developed an extremely effective air defense system based on electromagnetic pulses.”
Castilla’s brow furrowed. “Nuclear.”
“Yes. Our system creates a long-lasting radioactive cloud that destroys the electronics of anything moving into our airspace.”
“I would have thought that your history would make you understand the seriousness of that kind of weapon.”
“On an emotional level, yes. But on a logical level, it had the opposite effect. The casualties in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were much lower than most people realize. There are people who were within a few meters of ground zero who are still alive today. Obviously this isn’t an ideal solution, but my people tell me that America’s approach to missile intercept is ultimately a dead end.”
“If the Chinese were to see nuclear weapons detonated…” Castilla paused for a moment. “This could escalate into a full-scale nuclear war.”
“As you mentioned earlier, we would tell them about our missile defense network so that they don’t misinterpret it as an offensive strike. But if they choose to escalate, it’s unlikely any of their weapons would reach us.”
The president had gone noticeably pale, even in the warm light coming from the flames. A sensible response in Takahashi’s estimation. Again, Castilla proved that he was no fool.
“Biological?” the president said in a careful, even voice.
“We have significant stockpiles of a modified version of the SARS virus. Of course, this is a weapon that would be used only in the event of a significant ground force invasion. It’s extraordinarily contagious and fast acting, though not particularly deadly. The illness lasts two weeks on average. Quite incapacitating, I’m told.”
“Can I assume that your population is fully protected?”
“Of course. It was done quietly through our national vaccination program.” Takahashi waved a hand dismissively. “We also have armor that is thirty times lighter and nineteen times thinner than steel. Rocket fuel nine times more potent per kilogram than what you have access to. Computers that are an order of magnitude more powerful than those available to your NSA. The list goes on, but I assume you understand my point.”