by Brian Nelson
Nautica
L
100% Pure Cotton
Machine wash with like colors.
Tumble dry low. Do not iron.
HECHO EN HONDURAS
But that interface only told him the health of the shirt. To do any modifications, he had to interface through an iSheet. It had been a nagging source of frustration during his captivity, because he realized how poorly he had designed the shirt, how narrow-minded he had been. The shirt contained assemblers that could be programmed to do anything. ANYTHING. But the only thing he had programmed them to do was stop bullets. He should have made it much more versatile. With tools for surveillance and communication. And most importantly, he should have designed it with weapons, to send his nanosites into the bodies of his enemies to kill them. If he ever got out of here, he swore he would make a device that really made the wearer invincible.
But here in his cell, he had no way to reprogram the shirt—until now. He had only two hours and could make only the crudest modifications. But they would have to do.
Chapter Twenty-Six
The Wall
May 13, 2026
Tangshan Military Laboratory, China
“I believe I have the solution,” Eric told Dr. Chu the next morning, and he explained the final steps of forced evolution.
Chu grasped the concept immediately. “Yes!” he said in a voice jittery with excitement. He began to wring his hands. “Yes, that’s it!” He giggled almost uncontrollably. “Oh, yes, it is a wonderful solution. Simple and organic. We were too obsessed with making perfect copies on the first try. We need to let them evolve with some mutation. How quickly can you begin testing?”
“Four days to code it, ten days to test, then probably three or four more days to fix any loose ends.” Now that the truth was out, he wanted to do it as fast as possible.
Chu’s grin vanished, and a shadow fell across his face. “But if this is the solution, then that means …” He trailed off, his initial look of confusion turning to one of anger. “I must tell the general,” he said, and without another word, he was gone.
* * *
That afternoon, Hui Lili stopped by to see Eric.
“Pass it to me only when I tell you,” she whispered. After a time, she said, “now,” and he slipped the tiny iSheet into her pocket. She was cold toward him all day, not her usual enthusiastic self. He wondered whether it came from the realization that the terrible goal they had been striving for would now likely be fulfilled.
* * *
They came for him sometime in the night. The guards slapped him awake and yanked him out of bed. They yelled at him in Chinese and shoved him around.
He tried to get dressed quickly, but they kept pushing him and insulting him. Luckily, he had slept wearing the shirt. They hustled him into the hall barefoot, out onto the cold tiles.
This is it, he thought. They were going to kill him. He was afraid, his adrenaline racing, but he also felt a certain resignation, a feeling that he had done the best he could. He only hoped that it would not bring any harm to Jane.
At the elevator, they took him down instead of up. That was a first. The elevator chimed: seventy-three, seventy-four, seventy-five. They exited into a large room that reminded Eric of the indoor firing range at the NRL. But this range was much shorter, and it was not for practice.
His eyes were drawn inexorably to the far wall—drawn there by amazement and horror. This wall was a massive slab of gray concrete, gouged with pockmarks and spattered with black stains. It smelled of dead deer and urine. He could feel the death coming off it in waves, like heat off summer blacktop. Except that it wasn’t waves of heat; it was waves of cold. It touched his body and chilled him, sucking out his will to live. There was a sense that he was seeing something that should no longer exist. A wall that belonged in a black-and-white documentary or in a Holocaust museum, as a lesson for future generations. It radiated pain, sadness, and heartache, as if haunted by souls that had left their bodies behind in this terrible spot.
He remembered Meng’s words: I will find a way to get what I need out of that head of yours, even if it means dashing your brains against the Wall.
Now he realized what he meant.
Ten feet from the wall stood Ryan and Olex, along with five guards armed with Kalashnikovs. A firing squad.
A guard knocked him forward with his rifle butt, and he fell in next to them.
“Is it working?” Ryan asked out of the corner of his mouth.
Eric nodded.
“Well, that’s something.”
A guard slapped Ryan across the face, spinning his head to the side. Eric saw a line of blood begin to ooze out of the corner of his mouth. Ryan wiped the blood away with the back of his hand and looked at it. At any another time, he would have made a smart-assed remark, but now he kept quiet.
Eric was thinking fast, desperately trying to imagine a way out of here. But they were deep underground, inside a huge military base. And the shirt? Ryan was wrong. There was no way to put it to use. Even though Eric had increased the radius of protection to six feet, it still wasn’t enough. Only if they lined them up shoulder to shoulder would they have a chance against the firing squad. And then what? Rush five men armed with automatic weapons? They would surely get separated, and once separated, Ryan and Olex would be shot. And Eric could never overcome five men.
It was hopeless.
Then Meng was suddenly among them, clearly enraged, eyes narrowed to slits, jaw clenched, breathing loudly through his nostrils. He uttered a command in Chinese, and the guards began hitting them with the butts of their rifles, kicking them, until all three were on their hands and knees.
“I have made myself very clear to you, have I not?” Meng bellowed as he paced back and forth in front of them. “And have I not made the price of disobedience equally clear? Yet, still. STILL!” He spat out the words. “Still you think you can trick us, that you can sabotage us and get away with it?
“Do you feel it?” He pointed at the wall. “I know you can. Look at it! That is what awaits those who try to stop us. That is where they die.” His chest heaved as he took a deep breath. “They die for nothing, you know, every one of them. Because we will never go back. We will never be subjugated again. That is what I have given my life for. That is my sworn duty! To make sure that we never go back! And I will not let anyone stand in my way.” He waited, letting his words sink in.
It was then that Olex said something in Chinese to Meng. Eric couldn’t understand the words, but he could recognize Olex’s derisive tone. A sarcastic rolling of the eyes. He was mocking the general, and with a degree of condescension and disdain that only Olex could achieve.
General Meng’s face turned crimson. Whatever Olex had said left him so infuriated that he was speechless, unable to reply.
Olex saw it, too, so he added another insult, again in Chinese.
General Meng responded with a shout of fury, a terrible cry that raised the cords on his neck. He seized Olex by the hair and flung him toward the wall. In half a second, Meng had snatched a Kalashnikov from one of the guards and cocked it. Holding it at his shoulder, he aimed at Olex.
Olex raised himself on one knee then stood, his face unaffected, looking almost amused at Meng’s outburst.
Then Meng seemed to calm, and he snorted out a laugh as if he suddenly realized the jest. Olex straightened and smoothed down his shirt. Eric relaxed, feeling that the storm had passed.
Still grinning, Meng opened fire.
“No!” Eric cried. He tried to rush to him, but the guards stopped him and threw him to the ground.
The rifle was set on full auto, and Eric watched in horror as the bullets zipped into Olex, removing wads of tissue and blood. All through his torso, from his hip up to his shoulder and into his head. It was a horrible thing to see. Such a beautiful system, the human body, so cavalierly destroyed.<
br />
The thunder of gunfire ceased but still echoed in the concrete room. General Meng stood there, still peering through the sights, smoke trailing from the rifle’s muzzle, the only sound the tintinnabulation of the last copper casings rolling across the floor.
All was still except for a wet wheezing sound coming from the body—no longer Olex, but a mangled organic machine—as its lungs still fought for air. General Meng stepped over to it, like a man investigating a strange noise in his bushes. He gave the head a kick, and the skull opened further, spilling white brain matter. The wheezing continued.
“What’s wrong?” Meng asked the corpse. “Can’t think of anything clever to say?” He put the heel of his boot on Olex’s throat and crushed it. A moment later, the wheezing stopped.
Meng barked out another order in Chinese, and the guards converged on them.
Our turn, Eric thought. I’m so sorry I made such a mess of things. And I’m sorry, Jane, for being such a jerk.
But instead of being shoved toward the wall, Eric and Ryan were being pushed toward the elevators. There the guards separated them. Eric called out to Ryan. “Did he know?”
Ryan was shoved in one elevator, fell, and was kicked for it. Just as the doors were closing on him, Eric saw him shake his head.
* * *
It was two hours before Eric could stop shaking. He sat on the edge of his bed, head in his hands. Sobbing. He felt so cold. He pulled the blankets over his shoulders, but it was no use; he couldn’t warm up. His teeth chattered. You’re okay … you’re okay, he kept silently repeating to himself. But still, he shivered.
He had killed Olex; that much was clear. He was responsible for the death of a great man, a man smarter than he was and more deserving of life. A man who had not been weak, was not a coward, and had not given in to the enemy.
Just like Eric, Olex hadn’t known he would be kidnapped, but smart as he was, he must have grasped the situation immediately. They had brought him over to solve forced evolution. And he must have deduced that Eric had been stalling them, telling them that only Olex had the answer. So he had played along. He knew the answer. Of course he did. None of the other Americans were smart enough to figure it out. Yes, he would help them. He was Ukrainian, after all, and had spent his childhood under the Communists. He still empathized with their way of life: simplicity and equality. But he insisted on an apartment. That’s right, comrades, he wasn’t staying in a cell. Not Olexander Velichko. He appeared to be helping them but had really taken them in the wrong direction. And with Olex’s prodigious mind, he had kept the ruse going—day after day. Whatever they threw at him, he could roll with it, improvise an answer they would believe. Perhaps he could have kept it up indefinitely if Eric hadn’t opened his mouth. That explained Chu’s shock when Eric told him the real solution. The mousy doctor knew at once that Olex had been wasting their time.
But why hadn’t Meng killed them all? Why spare them? He must be keeping them alive in case his scientists had any problems with replication. And after they replicated? That would probably be the end. Yes, that was when he would kill Eric and Ryan.
Hours passed, and still he trembled. Under the covers, he tucked his cold hands between his thighs and curled up like a baby in the womb. His ears still rang from the gunfire, and for once he welcomed the infinite silence of his room.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Bud Brown
May 13, 2026
FBI Headquarters, J. Edgar Hoover Building, Washington, DC
Special Agent Bartholomew “Bud” Brown was sitting in his office on the other side of the world, rubbing his eyes. He would turn fifty-seven this year, the FBI’s mandatory retirement age, but he felt much older. He was beginning to forget things and making careless mistakes. He needed to get away from the office. A vacation—that was what he needed. But he hadn’t taken a vacation in nine years, and he knew, deep down, that he wasn’t going to take one now.
He closed his eyes for a moment and tried to collect his thoughts. He was becoming obsessed by a case. He could feel it coming on. Whenever a case didn’t make sense, he got like this. He couldn’t leave it alone. It was actually a good attribute from the bureau’s perspective. It meant he would put every ounce of energy into solving the riddle. But the same attribute had clearly ruined his personal life. His obsession with work had led to his divorce and his estrangement from his children.
His new obsession? A cold case that he had almost forgotten about. Until yesterday.
By chance, he had run into Dr. Lawrence, the FBI’s medical examiner, in the cafeteria. Albert Lawrence was an enormously fat man in his late fifties—from Brown’s generation—who threw his gut around like a weapon, always wore an unlit cigarette on his lower lip, and reeked of bourbon. The man was equal parts brilliant and deranged. He had an almost supernatural understanding of the delicacies of the human body, yet was determined to destroy his own through neglect and gluttony.
“Agent Brown, you owe me a bottle of scotch for that last stiff you sent me.”
“The security guard? Williams?”
“That’s the one. What an insufferable headache! Never liaise with naval intelligence. Did you know they wanted to send over their own pathologist?”
Brown sat down across from him. “What did you tell them?”
“I told them to go to hell, of course. I’m the best ME on the East Coast. I don’t need some pissant navy doc breathing down my neck. They can read my report just as well as anybody else.”
“You ruled it an AND, right?”
“That’s right, brain hemorrhage. I guess that’s what those navy boys wanted to hear, because they left me alone after that. Peculiar case, though.”
“Peculiar? I thought it was open and shut.”
“It was, but it was the strangest brain hemorrhage I’ve ever seen—so specific, and in an otherwise healthy brain.”
“Go on,” Brown said.
“Well, the man’s pons, it was liquefied.”
“His what?”
“The pons Varolii—it’s the bridge between the thalamus and the medulla oblongata. Part of the brain stem. Williams’s was turned to jelly.”
“That’s what made him turn off like that?”
“Exactly. But it was so targeted, so precise. None of the other tissue was damaged: the medulla, the cerebellum—everything else was fine. Even the bleeding was minimal, almost as if the bleeding started after the pons went through the blender.”
“Did you tell this to the navy?”
“No, I just sent the report: apparent natural death caused by brain hemorrhage.”
“And you still think that’s what it was, a brain hemorrhage?”
“Of course. What else could it be?”
Brown rubbed his jaw. That was the million-dollar question, wasn’t it?
He thought back to the interview with Dr. Hill. The young man had begun the interview well: good eye contact, direct and honest. But then he had given them a line about selling the chemicals on the black market. He looked down at the floor when he said it. Then he had yawned—showing his stress, oxygen craving. An awful liar. And the other thing: watching that videotape, he was fit to jump out of his seat. What did he see? Something related to his top secret project? A project so secret it was above bureau clearance.
Brown had tried to find out more about what was going on over at the Naval Research Lab, and what he found he didn’t like. Nanotechnology—the construction of superfast, intelligent, microscopic machines. Was that what this was? It would explain why Admiral Curtiss had been so interested in the death and why he’d just as quickly disappeared when they found no evidence of foul play.
“Doc, what happened to Williams’s body?”
“We handed it over to the funeral home when we were finished. That’s the standard procedure. He’s somewhere six feet under by now. Or in an urn on someone’s man
tle.”
Brown grimaced. There was no way to get more evidence from the body. But maybe … “Did you keep any samples of his … What did you call it—pons?”
“I did. Why?”
“Can you take another look at it? Maybe under a microscope.”
Dr. Lawrence pushed his massive bulk back from the table and folded his arms across his belly, a look of displeasure on his pasty white face. He clearly didn’t like the idea of extra work, especially for someone who didn’t have the least understanding of medicine. “And what exactly would I be looking for?”
“Anything unusual, especially anything that isn’t human tissue.”
“You mean some sort of pathogen? I did blood work and ruled that out.”
“Please, just look again.”
Lawrence gave a huff, and his fat jowls shook. “I’ll think about it.”
Much to Brown’s surprise, the doctor called him the next morning. This morning.
“All right, damn it, I admit it, you piqued my interest yesterday. But I didn’t find any foreign material in the sample.”
“Nothing?”
“No, but when I looked at the tissue under a microscope, I found something very interesting.”
“What?”
“There were no intact cells. Not a single one. Every cell in the pons had been ripped apart.”
“Any idea what might cause that?”
“To be honest, I’m at a loss. Bacteria don’t do that, and if it were a virus, some virus would still be in there, but there was nothing. Absolutely nothing. And besides, no virus could work that fast.”
“So do you still think it was a brain hemorrhage?”
There was a long pause. “I … I don’t know. I have no indication of a disease. No indication of external trauma. We know the death came suddenly, and there was some bleeding in the pons region of the brain stem. So a hemorrhage is still the best answer, although I admit, it doesn’t explain the ruptured cells. Do you want me to tell the navy?”