Out of Time r5-2

by Cliff Ryder

“We never send in a man who is less than one hundred percent.You know that, Alex.You also know that we don’t send agents on personal missions.”

  “This isn’t a question of you sending me, Denny. I’m going. If you want to get someone ready to clean up the mess when the cripple fails, that’s on you,” Alex replied. “That’s my wife in there, and this is my mission.”

  There was a long pause, and Alex thought it was over. They’d send someone in to stop him, and they’d send someone after Brin.

  “Alex,” Denny finally typed, “If you do this, I can’t vouch for you with Kate or anyone at Room 59. You’ll be on your own, and out on a very, very thin limb. Things look bad as it is.”

  “It’s what I have to do, Denny,” Alex wrote.

  “I understand why you might feel that way,”

  Denny wrote. “Don’t make any mistakes. If you fail or falter, we will come in—hard, fast and final.

  We aren’t done talking about this, and you aren’t off the hook for any of this. Kate is going to blow a gasket that I didn’t send a team to stop you. We’re going to have to debrief Brin, too. She knows way too much, and that’s on you, too. Your security passwords weren’t secure enough. You also might want to check out that anonymous e-mail drop you set up—you know, the one that’s absolutely a breach of security? She probably left you a thousand e-mails. If you live, you’ll still have a lot to answer for, and I’m not sure you want to pay this piper. You know the penalty for disobeying orders.”

  Alex knew Denny was right, but he also knew the only thing he could do was to try to get in and make it right.

  “I’ll finish the mission,” he typed quickly.

  “And thanks.”

  Denny didn’t respond, and with a weak grin, Alex typed, “Chameleon—going offline and out.”

  The chat window closed, and he made his way out through the outer room and closed that, as well. Alex stared at the screen for a long moment, considering whether or not to log in to the e-mail account. He hadn’t known Brin was home, wondering what he was doing and what was wrong. He also hadn’t known the doctor had called in the prescription, though thinking back he realized that he had known, and had just forgotten. He cursed himself for the lack of concentration. He’d always thought that if something went seriously wrong, his mind would get him through it—but he’d never counted on something coming along that could affect body and mind. He hadn’t counted on running across an enemy he couldn’t defeat.

  In the end, he turned off the computer without checking the e-mail. There would be time to straighten things out with Brin, and when that time arrived he’d do it face-to-face. She deserved that and he didn’t think he could stand seeing her pain or anger in the impersonal words of an e-mail.

  He stood and walked quickly through the kitchen and out into the garage. He had a small workshop there, a place he sometimes went to be alone. Brin had a similar retreat in a small room off their bedroom. Hers was lined with material related to her career and a collection of books she’d been gathering her entire life and had been unable to part with. Alex seldom ventured into that room, and never when Brin was away. She’d given him the same privacy in the workshop. It was a good thing—he hadn’t wanted to go off-site to stash the tools of his trade.

  He stepped around to the side of the workbench and pressed hard on a small, lightly etched square on the wall panel. At the pressure from his hand it slid inward and clicked. Alex tugged gently, and a panel swung out and moved to the side, revealing a series of shelves, cubbyholes and drawers.

  There was no time to infiltrate MRIS in his normal fashion. It was after-hours, and there wasn’t anyone he could pretend to be to make it easier to get inside. Things could shift once he’d breached security, but for now he thought armament was more important than disguise. He strapped on a replacement for the Glock 9 mm pistol he’d lost in Beijing, and he also took some electronic devices that he could use for knocking out their security systems.

  Once he had everything he needed in place, he carefully sealed the panel on the wall. His right leg ached, but his left seemed fine. His shoulder was stiff, but he thought if he didn’t push it too hard ahead of time, it would work for him when he needed it.

  He started to turn to his car, which hadn’t been out of the garage in weeks, and then stopped. He glanced back at the house, took a deep breath and jogged back to the front hall. He grabbed his bag, took it to the kitchen and opened it, rummaging inside until he found the two brown medicine bottles. He carefully sliced one of the painkillers in half, about a quarter of the prescribed dose. Then he grabbed the bottle of Klonopin and read the instructions again to be sure he had it straight. He took two of the pills and dry swallowed them, grimacing at the taste.

  He started to stash the bottles in a pocket, then caught himself and put them back on the counter. He put them in plain sight. If and when he and Brin got back home, there was no reason to continue with any secrecy. If he didn’t get back, it wouldn’t matter.

  On his way out, he saw that the answering-machine light was blinking. He frowned. It wasn’t likely that the message was for him, but he couldn’t risk not checking it. If Brin was in trouble, she’d try to contact him, and the answering machine was one way to do it. He crossed the hall and hit the play button.

  “Brin?”

  The voice was familiar, husky and feminine. It was Karen, a friend of Brin’s he’d met on several occasions. Karen was an ex-cop and a little rough around the edges, but a good friend. She’d watched Savannah for them more than once.

  “Brin, if you’re there, pick up. This is Karen.

  I’ve got Savannah. There was almost some trouble at the school—you didn’t tell me we were playing with the big boys. I got there first, thankfully, and I had Savannah in my car when things got strange.

  A bunch of guys in black suits—not Feds, I’d know Feds, but not cops, either—they converged on the school. I saw them covering the exits, but we got out. I hope those other kids are okay, but I promised you I’d watch this one, and I will. When you can, let me know what the hell is going on. You know how to reach me.”

  The phone went dead. Alex stared at it, rewound and listened again. They’d tried to get to Savannah.

  That meant, at the very least, that Brin knew what they were up to. If they were trying to coerce her into working, Savannah was their best bet. If they had him, they could have used him, as well. Alex was glad Liang had ruined their chances of that.

  He was also glad to know that Karen had Savannah. She truly liked their little girl, and if anyone they knew—short of Room 59 agents—

  could keep her safe, Karen was the one. She’d retired with honors from the force, and despite having to fight her way through a machismo-drenched hierarchy of officers, detectives and poli-ticians, she’d made quite a reputation for herself while she was active.

  The men in the suits worried him. If MRIS had that kind of force active, then he would have to use more caution than he’d anticipated. He’d thought maybe Rand was aware, and that people from Beijing would come in and take over the operation.

  Now he wondered if the bastard wasn’t in it a lot deeper than that.

  Alex returned to the garage and slipped in behind the wheel of his Porsche. It wasn’t the most inconspicuous car, but he knew it would cover the miles between home and Brin’s office complex quickly. That was all that mattered. He opened the garage door, backed out and hit the road with the tires squealing. He didn’t bother to close up the garage. He knew Brin would be angry when she saw it, but he thought that her being angry with him over something mundane would feel good.

  He kept the sports car just barely above the speed limit, fighting the urge to hit the gas. He couldn’t afford to draw too much attention to himself, and the last thing he needed was a police escort to the MRIS complex. He had to get as close with the car as he could and then go in on foot. Brin told him a lot about her work, but most of it was over his head. When she’d talked about the security systems,
however, he’d perked up. He was familiar with the company that had installed them, and he knew that the lab was protected by perimeter cameras and motion detectors, as well as a state-of-the-art cipher lock system.

  He was familiar with the systems because he’d been through them before. If he drove into the parking lot and walked up the front steps, they’d know he was there immediately, but he had picked Brin up several times at the loading dock, and once at a service entrance. He knew the side streets, and he had memorized the interior of the building on the two visits where he’d actually been escorted up to Brin’s office and laboratories. He hadn’t intended to create an internal map, but his training was too much a part of him to prevent it. He knew how to get to his wife’s office, and he knew where Rand’s office was located, as well. He only hoped Brin was working in her normal spaces, or if she wasn’t, that he could find someone and force them to tell him where she was.

  He saw the complex long before he arrived, rising several stories above the other buildings near it. There were a number of side streets, mostly fronting warehouses and industrial office spaces.

  Alex drove within half a mile of the complex and pulled the Porsche up in front of a small office building. There were two marked spaces with signs, and one of them read Vector Executive Parking. He took the spot marked CEO and smiled.

  If only Brin got out, he’d be able to tell her where to find it. If neither of them made it out, it would be found quickly and reported, and once there were reports in the system, Denny and Kate would see them and know something was wrong.

  Alex left the car unlocked with the keys in the ignition and turned toward the MRIS complex. He took off at a quick trot, and was happy to find his legs cooperating and the jarring rhythm of the pace only mildly painful to his shoulder. There were a few lights on, and he knew they were on Brin’s level. He sped his steps, gritting his teeth against the increased pain.

  Brin stared at the microscope in front of her and frowned. She adjusted the lens, brushed her hair to one side and looked again. Her frown deepened, and she turned to glance down at the computer screen to her right. She’d been going over and over the research for days, and now she was so tired she had to check and double-check herself anytime something seemed to deviate. She didn’t know if what she was planning to do would work, but she knew that it had never been more important that she understand a subject so thoroughly and completely.

  What she had under the scope was one of the samples from China. She had begun cultures of her own, but the preserved samples that had been operating for the longest had provided the most interesting and relevant data. If she were conducting le-gitimate research, the long-term data would be just as important, but when the entire goal was to just see if the damned process worked, the most mature cells were the ones with the most to offer.

  These weren’t acting properly at all. The original culture they’d come from had consisted of cells infected with polio and then treated with the nanoagents. The healthy cells—the control group—had been used to carefully program the agents. She’d seen a dozen studies involving different diseases. Some were viral, some were blood infections, others involved cell degeneration. In every case the programmed agents had infiltrated the maligned cells and began immediate reconstructing. They were able to replicate themselves rapidly, and they locked on to the healthy patterns of whatever host or control cell they were applied to. They were miraculous, potent and the most po-tentially dangerous weapon she could ever imagine.

  They could be programmed just as easily to mutate cells as they could to reconstruct them, and when they entered battle with healthy cells, their infiltration was even quicker and more deadly.

  They could defeat a human immune system in a frighteningly short period of time—or they could strengthen it against a particular disease to the point of immunity.

  Now she had encountered something new. It had been nearly a week since the sample she’d created on the slide in front of her had been exposed to the nanoagents. None of the research that had accompanied the samples stretched more than a week or two in length. It generally took a matter of hours for the agents to reprogram damaged cells and reconstruct their healthy state.

  The Chinese researchers had chosen to run through a large range of damaged cells, record the results up until the point a healthy state was restored and then move on.

  Now something new was happening. The cells on the slide had changed. They were no longer healthy cells, though they also showed no sign of the polio they’d been infected with. She put her eye to the lens again and concentrated. The cellular structure had shifted. At first glance it seemed as if there was a new infection of some sort—as if a contaminant had been introduced. Then she saw the truth. The nanoagents had not been content to reconstruct the healthy cells. When their work was done, rather than shutting down or remaining dormant, as the research seemed to indicate, they’d changed their programming.

  The changes were subtle but significant. The outer cell walls had strengthened, lowering the in-stances of combination. Growth was steady, but the overall cohesion of the sample had suffered. Individual cells with minuscule differences in their makeup had set themselves apart, like small for-tresses, and whenever two came too close, the nanoagents in each, programmed with a slightly different model of perfection, collided and began tiny wars for dominance.

  Brin stared at the sample on the slide for a few moments, jotted some notes and then pulled it out.

  She quickly went through a number of other samples, all from the long-term cultures provided by the Chinese. It didn’t happen in every case.

  Some of the samples were fine, despite being even slightly older than the polio slide, but others were worse. The cellular structure in a few had been de-molished and an entirely new cellular life-form had begun to emerge.

  Brin carefully replaced all of the samples and sat down at her computer. She entered the data for what she’d just seen. She had a cell-modeling program that had been preloaded with all the traits of healthy cells of each type involved in the research. When she entered the traits she recorded each day from her samples she got a timeline of reconstruction. The program created a model of the cell as it was at each checkpoint, mapped the changes that had already been made and mapped those that needed to be completed before the cells reached their original healthy state.

  In most cases, it took less than thirty-six hours for the cells to regenerate. Most of the case studies had been shut down at twelve days, making that the control. In biomedical research, that was an incredibly short window and wholly inadequate for results leading to the opportunity to test a new treatment on human subjects. That was why she’d begun her own research on the original samples provided. She’d foolishly believed curing disease was what it was all about. What had really mattered to Rand, and to MRIS, was cutting down the amount of time the nanoagents needed to complete their work.

  What she’d just seen changed everything, or at least it should have. Though the nanoagents still appeared to be effective in most of the samples, the few that had mutated and gone on to cause irre-parable damage sent huge red flags of warning shooting through her brain. She hadn’t recognized the cells the mutated polio culture had created.

  They would probably just war with one another until they were destroyed, but if one cell proved stronger and emerged victorious, what would they have created? Would it stop there? If they set loose what they thought was a controlled biological weapon, could it mutate into something that ran out of control and destroyed life as they knew it?

  In any case, she had to let Rand know. It might not matter to him, or to any of them. It had taken a big inner shift, but her view of the world had changed quite a bit over the past few days. She understood that there were men who cared very little for the lives of others, who put personal gain far ahead of human compassion and who saw her work only as a means to an end.

  Once she’d finished the reports she sent the output from the cell-modeling software to the col
or printer in the corner. She had a few minutes to collect her thoughts, and she put them to good use.

  One of the containers that had shipped out of China, the largest, was comprised of solely programmed and yet-to-be-programmed nanoagents.

  She opened this container and sat it on the bench.

  Next she pulled out a very small vial. She placed this vial into a larger tube, about the size of a lipstick container, then took the end result and filled in around it with a special gel used to insulate samples.

  Brin wasn’t certain when she was and was not on camera, so she worked quickly, but she tried not to make any sudden or jerky movements. She transferred a small sampling of the nanoagents to the vial, sealed it carefully, sealed the main package and placed it all back on ice. When she turned to put the case away, she slipped the metal tube into the pocket of her lab coat. She didn’t know if she’d been seen, but it was a chance she was willing to take. The scientist in her wouldn’t allow for the complete destruction of valuable research, and that was what was happening. She hadn’t sealed the canister fully, and as she stepped away from the bench, she brushed the temperature controls on the outside of the box. It was only a fleeting touch, but she’d been planning it for hours.

  That glancing touch allowed her to spin the dial on the temperature control. It would take a while, maybe longer than she had, but unless something very quickly stabilized the temperature regulation system on the canister, the samples inside would be contaminated. None of the nanoagent cells were programmed to withstand extremes in heat, and she’d adjusted the thermostat to raise the temperature to over one hundred degrees. Most, if not all, of the cultures would die within an hour or two of exposure to that.

  She crossed to the printer and gathered up the pile of printouts she’d created. It was time to take what she’d discovered to Rand. He wouldn’t believe her, of course, not at first. He’d say she was just being difficult, and he might order something to be done to Alex. It didn’t matter. In the end, Rand had a degree in biochemistry himself, though his skills had grown decidedly rusty since he planted himself in the director’s seat. He would see that the research she’d brought him was accurate, and he would know the truth. It probably wouldn’t stop him from going through with his plans, but that was why Brin was taking no chances. By the time he got someone in to double-check what she’d been doing, the samples would be destroyed.