Twelve Days

by Steven Barnes

  CHAPTER 28

  According to various news sources, all the survivors of the original Dead List remained under high security. They had been exhaustively scanned. Nothing unusual or dangerous had been detected in any of their bodies or behaviors. Regardless, one by one, they were dying in the same grotesque fashion, as well as a few individuals whose names had not been on the original list. As well as, most assumed by this time, yet unnumbered or unidentified others.

  International lawyers and diplomats worked overtime, all backdoor channels sizzling. It was a period of unprecedented international cooperation on the one hand, and explosive tensions and suspicion on the other. Everyone saw the current situation as someone else’s gambit.

  But whose? And what was the endgame?

  At her desk at CNS, Olympia Dorsey scanned the news synopsis flowing across her screen, searching for information relevant to her own concerns. What had happened at Madame Gupta’s? Was Maria telling the truth? She didn’t actually know the woman well …

  On the other hand, she didn’t know Gupta at all, not really.

  One bit of local news popped out at her. A death. Flagged as important because of the direct connection to the Dead List.

  But before she could follow that thought, her phone rang. “CNS,” she said.

  She recognized the growl on the other end instantly. It was “George,” the same man who had called eighteen months before, providing information about crack dealing in Smyrna. She wasn’t certain, but she suspected he was a Fed strangled by bureaucratic red tape. “You want to check your e-mail,” he said. “It’s from an account called Mailvault. The password is your son’s middle name.”

  She didn’t wonder how he knew Hannibal’s middle name. “George” had access to information far more secretive.

  “Why are you doing this?” she asked.

  The man on the other end of the line sighed. “Just … seems like the right thing to do.”

  “All right,” she said. “Hold on.”

  She opened her e-mail. Clicked on one from a Mailvault address. Typed in the password “Kai” and then clicked on a link.

  Eight split-screen images appeared. Several were just names, but two of them were live human beings.

  “What am I looking at, George?” she asked.

  “There were eight targets on today’s list. There were suspected criminals, but also heads of state, and a general. Two of them agreed to be under constant medical imaging surveillance. They are all exhaustively protected by their respective governments, but also we’re videoing the whole process. At least, we … were.” Some fluttering in his voice froze her stomach.

  “What happened?”

  “You’ll see in a moment,” he said. “What you have there is the record of the last ninety seconds of one life, and the last … hundred and eighty seconds of another.”

  Another nested box popped up in each picture. Thermal-coded scans of human brains.

  “Who is this?” she asked.

  “Do you really want to know?”

  At first, the question irritated her. And then she tasted her sour stomach in her throat. “No. Maybe not.”

  Graveyard laugh. “Here we go. Notice that the temperature in the pineal gland just began to rise…”

  Crimson invaded the picture. “Whoa…”

  “And then…” he said, “the entire nervous system goes ‘Merry Christmas.’”

  The screen brightened. The man’s muscles bunched tight, tighter, contracted so violently, that several actually tore away from the insertion points.

  The room spun, and then steadied. She realized she’d been gritting her teeth until her jaw felt sore. “Is this in real time?”

  “No. Slowed by a factor of ten. But at the last second there was a steep, steep spike, and…”

  The screen went white.

  She blinked and drew back. “What happened?”

  The sensors protested. “Now watch the time code. Just about the time the first one was peaking, the second began to heat up … and there it goes.”

  The scan was chaotic now. Something terrible had happened in both brains. The temperature began to drop again. Before it cooled both men were dead, twisted by violent spasms into pipe-cleaner origami.

  “What does this mean?” she whispered.

  “We don’t know. These two died under supervision, and we have confirmed reports of three others, with no word at all from three more. We’re assuming death. From what we can see, timing is uneven, but many were clustered around nine a.m. Eastern Standard Time.”

  Olympia felt a chill. “It’s almost as if it isn’t a mechanical effect.”

  The voice on the other end of the phone wasn’t machinelike at all. The answering tremor was too damned human. “An explosive, some kind of nanotechnology … all of the strangeness people have been talking about. All those things could be timed, and precisely. There is an odd … casualness about this. As if there was a human factor more directly involved, an … organic quality to the whole thing.”

  “George,” she said. “Is that your real name?”

  He paused, then said, “No. It’s Cody.”

  A violation of their unwritten agreement. A tacit acknowledgment that some things simply didn’t matter as much as once they had. “Do you have any idea at all what is going on? I mean … if this is real, what does it mean? How is it being done?”

  For a moment the only sound over the phone line was breathing. Then Cody spoke. “We have a thousand leads, and not a single solid clue. All I have right now are questions. I’m sending you another file. And this one … well, put on your headphones. I don’t want someone listening over your shoulder.”

  Another encoded e-mail popped up on the server. She clicked, and produced a document entitled EYES AND EARS ONLY.

  The document was mostly an embedded video, but these words were written at the top: DECEMBER 18, WASHINGTON. MEETING IN WHITE HOUSE BRIEFING ROOM.

  The image was blurred, as if it had been captured on an iPhone. The room was filled, awaiting a press conference. A panel of very tight-lipped men and women faced them. President Brenda Correll stood at a podium to the side, severe in a dark suit and judicial expression, perhaps officiating. Olympia had voted for Correll, but the razor-sharp debater and former governor seemed shaken, and not at all the cool, unflappable campaigner who had motivated Olympia to donate more money than she ever had to any other politician.

  A man Olympia did not recognize was speaking. “Fact: world leaders, key people in military, arts, and society are dying and we don’t know why.”

  “Fact,” the woman next to him continued. “People are dying, but dogs, cats, trees … other people nearby are not affected. This is something that is targeted at specific human beings.”

  The first man spoke again. “However, this unknown mechanism does not meet the criteria of an infectious disease. There is no virus or bacteria, no known vector to move something from one person to another. There are diseases that move through the air like pneumonia; there are diseases that spread by contact with bodily fluids like Ebola. This does not meet either criteria.”

  A third panelist spoke. “Something is selectively killing people, but it is not a disease. It seems to operate independent of distance. It is not that there is some place where it began, and spread outward from that locus, according to the rules of epidemiology. This is not a plague. People have died in steel-reinforced cages locked in sealed vaults. One man died in a nuclear submarine, a mile below the surface of the ocean.”

  A shocked murmur from the room. “We don’t know anything that can do that across arbitrarily long distances, penetrate lead or steel and kill human beings selectively. Those are the facts as we have them. There is no mechanism, even theoretically, that can do what has been done.”

  More murmuring, half-formed questions, anxious hands raised and then lowered.

  And then a voice. “Well, you know…”

  The camera turned around, focused on the back where a man a
bout six feet tall with a shock of gray beard and a roundish belly stood and repeated: “If you look at it from the point of view of information, quantum mechanics, and DNA, there is at least a framework. There is one mechanism that might be able to do it. One device.”

  President Correll’s voice: “Professor—” (something or someone had obscured the sound of the name), “precisely what machine or technology do you have in mind?”

  “Precisely,” the bearded man said. “The mind. The human brain. Question: what makes us human beings and not chimpanzees? Our DNA is ninety-six percent the same as chimps’, but the four percent difference contributes to what we do with our brains. It makes us what we are, makes every individual human being what they are. So the DNA isolates us as a species and each of us as individuals.

  “The mind and the physical brain have some interaction we still argue about—we know that somehow a thought triggers a physical action, say the lifting of an arm. But exactly how? We don’t know. And … if we can affect things within our bodies, can we do the same outside them? These are questions for a philosopher … perhaps.”

  “But it opens a door,” Correll said. “Is that what you’re implying?”

  “Yes. The next piece is what is called ‘Quantum entanglement’—the fact that on a very, very small scale, things that have touched, or been a part of each other, continue to interact after separation. Well, you know, this is something that Albert Einstein, Nathan Rosen, and Boris Podolsky wrote about, what has been called ‘spooky action at a distance.’”

  “This is just absurd,” the female panelist said.

  “The entire situation is absurd,” the bearded man replied. “And yet, it is happening. You can’t describe this in terms of medicine, technology, or disease or poisons. No way to kill at a distance, no way to achieve the kind of precision we have seen. Not with any known technology.

  “So … I suggest we deliberately throw out what we think we know. Start at the other end of the spectrum. And ask what is required to do what has been done, even if we cannot or will not believe in any theory as to the means of accomplishment.”

  “And you’re saying,” Correll said thoughtfully, “that the smallest number of moving parts would involve human DNA, some … undocumented capacity of the human mind, and something we have yet to understand about this ‘entanglement.’”

  “Precisely,” the professor said.

  The room exploded into buzzing conversation, and above that roar Olympia could hear the president say: “Get on that. Find out everything that man knows. And by the way, this has been declared ultra–top secret and does not leave this room.”

  The video winked off. She swallowed.

  “Well … do you believe any of that? I mean, isn’t that Area 51 stuff?”

  “As you can see, it’s kitchen sink time.”

  When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

  Who had said that? Stephen Hawking? Sherlock Holmes?

  “Well, thank you, Cody. A lot to think about. If you get anything else you can share, please do.”

  “I will.”

  She sighed. The end of the world might have been on her screen, and she was supposed to work on a story about traffic lights. “I have to get back to work. Today’s a rush. Not even time to start the Crock-Pot. Pizza tonight.”

  “You can still get pizza.” He laughed. “Way things are going, that’s something you might miss in a couple of days. Enjoy it.”

  No pizza? Somehow, that notion was so incredible that it penetrated the bubble of calm that held back her panic. Didn’t pop it, not quite … but she noticed her hands were sweating. “Now you’re scaring me,” Olympia said.

  CHAPTER 29

  Olympia grabbed her stuff from her desk and headed into the editorial room. As they gathered, she noticed that her coworkers looked more ragged and haggard than they had just a few hours previously, as if some elixir vitae had been drained out of them.

  “Thank you for coming,” Sloan said. His Bozo hair was tangled, as if he had combed it with his fingers. “Two things. First, I regret to tell you that a member of the CNS family, blogger Maria Cortez, died yesterday in a gas explosion…”

  Olympia heard nothing more for at least thirty seconds. Maria … dead? What the living hell? She realized that she had started to read that story when Cody called. Olympia held her breath: this was simply too enormous a coincidence: it had to have something to do with the Salvation Sanctuary. But what?

  She felt numb, sick, overwhelmed. Something about the disappearances? Was this a child abuse situation? Missing cult members?

  And … dear God, Hannibal. She had almost put Hannibal directly in their hands. God only knew what they wanted.

  She wanted to leave the room, to have a chance to think through all of this. She had an almost overpowering urge to talk to Terry about it. He had been at that first meeting. He would have an opinion. But she had ordered him from her house and bed. She couldn’t.

  But he loved Hannibal. He would want her to …

  The ongoing chatter pulled her back to the room.

  “… will keep you posted as to the time and location of memorial services.

  “Now on to other business. We received a note that the president will be making her … last public statement before…”

  He couldn’t quite bring himself to say it. Before she gets twisted into a knot? Before the end of the world?

  “Does anyone have any idea at all…”

  The television screen flickered. The seal of the office of the president of the United States appeared. And then it disappeared, and the POTUS herself appeared. She looked wan, hollow-eyed, as if she hadn’t slept in a month.

  “My fellow Americans,” Correll began. “The message I have to give you is unique not only in my own life experience, but so far as anyone knows, in the entire history of the human race.”

  “Shit,” Joyce Chow whispered.

  You have no idea, Olympia thought, remembering the White House briefing and the professor’s metaphysical theory.

  “As you know,” the president continued, “ten days ago, a message was published on an Indonesian Web site. The origin of the message is a matter of intense speculation by intelligence agencies around the world, but so far, at this time, no one has been able to identify the source.”

  “I don’t like where this is going. Come on, we must know something,” Joyce said.

  Did she, Olympia, know something? Could the pieces she held be anything but insane supposition? Was it suicide to speak, or murder not to?

  “… some unknown form of assassination technique has been employed. The following illustration is the current best guess. I offer this theory for a variety of reasons. Your government has been trying to understand this most difficult situation. We are committed to protecting our citizens from the fear and chaos that would inevitably accompany a sense of unfettered risk. And there is another concern. A hope that somewhere, someone listening to these words might know something that would help us understand, and counteract, what has happened here.”

  “Here we go,” Sloan said.

  The screen blossomed with animations illustrating the president’s words.

  “There is an entire science of nanotechnology,” she said, “the production of machines on a microscopic level. The size of bacteria, or viruses. The current best guess is that such assassination nanobots have been developed, and introduced into the bodies of the people on the list. Possibly including myself. How? There are several competing theories. Through food, perhaps, or even through the air, if someone has devised a method of guiding machines the size of gnats at a distance.”

  That sounded almost as far-fetched as the professor’s take, which might have been debunked—at least as far as she was willing to say publicly. Did the White House even believe its own theories? But then … she remembered legitimate scientists speaking of nanotechnology, and its potential did sound almost magical. So it could be
true, but …

  “Say, what?” two of the reporters muttered, almost simultaneously.

  “Jinx,” one said. And that was followed by a nervous twitter. Olympia wanted to slap the living hell out of someone.

  “Extensive examinations have revealed no such nanocytes, but that is not in itself determinative. We have stealth technology for missiles, planes, even submarines. It is possible that someone has found a way to cloak the existence of such creations. The possibility of guiding them at a distance is suggested by the precision targeting involved. Every one of the killings might have been the result of nervous system disruption of a nature we have been unable to duplicate or explain … or prevent.”

  President Correll stopped. Her hand twitched toward her forehead, and then settled back down. Sloan froze the image.

  “Did you see that?” he asked.

  “That,” Olympia said, “is pretty frightened body language. She thinks she’s dead on Christmas Day.”

  “She’s the one who’s been scanned. They can’t find anything. She’s terrified.”

  “Pretty calm and cool on the outside,” Christy muttered. “Holy shit.”

  Yeah. Holy shit, indeed.

  The video came back to life. “The current theory is that by techniques currently unknown, such nanocytes have been introduced into the bodies of the selected targets. That they then navigate through the bloodstream to the cerebellum, sending a signal to every muscle in the body, triggering lethal contraction. Effecting hemorrhage, and the breaking of bones. Massive doses of relaxant have been given, to no effect, and in one case, resulting in cardiac arrest. The cure was as deadly as the disease.” The president paused, a thin sheen of sweat gleaming on her forehead.

  “Yeah, freaked out,” Christy muttered.

  “Wouldn’t you be?” Olympia asked.

  “I’m already pissing my shorts.”

  The president continued. “So … certain aspects of the triggering suggests such a signal. Of course, there is another body of opinion that suspects the assassination is timed with some unknown mechanism, perhaps nuclear decay, or microwaves, or a soluble wall around a biotoxin.”