Spiral

by Paul Mceuen

  “Why should I trust you?”

  “Because I’m telling the truth.”

  One of the pigeons in the box fluttered its wings. Kitano said, “I want a signed presidential pardon. For any and all crimes committed.”

  Dunne didn’t look away. “It’s already arranged. If you make it.”

  “When?”

  “We’re waiting for another communiqué from Orchid. We’re assuming first thing in the morning.”

  Kitano studied the trapped birds, running his fingers over the lock on the door. He stepped forward. His face was only inches from Dunne’s.

  “You sicken me, Mr. Dunne.”

  Dunne didn’t look away. He wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.

  Kitano surprised him. He spit in his face.

  “You son of a bitch!” Dunne said.

  Kitano attacked. He dove for Dunne, on him like a monkey, hands scratching at Dunne’s face. The ancient prisoner was remarkably strong. Dunne couldn’t shake him, and yelled for help.

  A giant guard came through the door and grabbed Kitano by the neck. The old man was thrown backward and fell in a heap against the far wall.

  A second guard stood over Dunne, eyes wide. “You hurt?” Dunne shook his head no, though he tasted blood. He was in shock. His neck was bleeding. The other guard, the giant, had Kitano in a headlock. The pigeons screeched, flapping their wings wildly inside the cage.

  Dunne got his wits about him and stood. Wiping blood off his face with his jacket sleeve, he said, “I hope Orchid slices you open, like you sliced all those prisoners at Harbin.”

  He left the old man to the screeching of his birds.

  42

  THE ROOM WAS PITCH-BLACK. MAGGIE AWOKE, DRENCHED IN sweat and hyperventilating. She had been trapped in a horrible, horrible nightmare. She was standing in an empty field, Dylan at a distance and walking away from her toward a cliff. She tried to run after him, to save him, but she couldn’t move. She tried to yell, to warn him, but it was as if her throat were made of stone. She was frantic and panicked, unable to warn her son, unable to stop him.

  Maggie tried to calm herself, to erase the terrifying image of her endangered son. The air was sticky and humid inside the claustrophobic gas mask. The tears on her cheeks were cold. From not far away, she heard the sound of geese, their cries echoing in the chamber.

  She knew what was happening. The toxins of the Uzumaki were chemical cousins of LSD—hallucinogenic but much rougher. The alkaloids exploded like a bomb in your mind, causing a wild hallucinatory mania. Outbreaks from infested rye in Massachusetts in the 1600s had led to the Salem witch trials, where infected women were put to death. Outbreaks in France in the summer of 1789 had incited the manic, crazed riots that catalyzed the French Revolution.

  Even though Maggie knew what to expect, the truth of it, the awful plunge into it, was much more frightening than she could have imagined. She was alone inside her head, alone in the dark.

  The hallucinations kept coming. A scratching noise, like fingernails on concrete. She knew what the sound was, even though she couldn’t see it. The room was full of corpses, crawling like spiders. They were all over the floor, dozens of them. The floor was far below. The corpses wanted her, but they could not reach her.

  Maggie pulled and pulled with her right arm, working to free her hand from the metal cuff, fighting to keep her thoughts under control well enough to focus on her task. She always had small hands, and after a car accident when she was sixteen, the bones in her right hand had broken in two places. Her thumb was never quite right. It would slot into her palm as if it were made to go there. She could form her hand into a small pointed cylinder and slide it in almost anywhere. She’d been fighting to pull it out of the cuff since she’d been imprisoned.

  Pull, Maggie. Pull.

  The skin grabbed against the metal, the pain like an ice burn but good because it helped her concentration.

  Nothing else is real. Keep pulling.

  THE SOUND OF METAL.

  Jake was at the boundary of sleep. He’d finally slipped under, but it had been light, too much worry in his head to let him go deep.

  The sound again. It took Jake a second to identify the metallic screech. When he did, he was instantly awake.

  It was the hatch, the metal, submarine-like door separating Jake in his quarantine room from the outside.

  It swung open. Dr. Roscoe was there, in the flesh. They’d broken Jake’s quarantine.

  “Is it Dylan?”

  “No. Nothing like that. You’re to come with me.”

  “Why? What time is it?”

  “Four a.m.”

  TWO MEN WERE WAITING, BOTH IN MILITARY FATIGUES.

  “We’ll have to talk while we walk,” said the one on the right, a tall African American, clearly the ranking officer. “I’m John Lexington, Air Force colonel, on loan to the Defense Intelligence Agency. This is Major Robert Altair, Army. We’re part of the operations team. What did they tell you about Orchid’s demands?”

  “Nothing.”

  “She has two. She wants Hitoshi Kitano, and she wants money. As much money as a man can carry. This morning, we are supposed to deliver Kitano to a specified location. Accompanying him, carrying the money, was to be a Marine.”

  “You said was.”

  “Orchid changed it up at the last minute,” Altair said. “She’s trying to throw us off guard. She chose a new money hauler. Someone with a vested interest in Maggie Connor. Someone whose decision making might be compromised.”

  “She wants you,” Lexington said. “We have to get you ready. We don’t have much time.”

  LAST DAY

  SATURDAY, OCTOBER 30

  TOKKŌ

  43

  “EACH BILL WEIGHS ABOUT A GRAM,” MAJOR ALTAIR SAID, holding a hundred-dollar bill in his hand. “A thousands bills, a kilogram. You’ll carry one hundred times that, a hundred thousand bills, about two hundred pounds.” Jake looked down at the stack of cash and did the math. Ten million dollars. It didn’t seem like enough money. Not for all this.

  “We have trackers implanted in one hundred of them,” Altair said. “Needles in a haystack. Every hour, one will go off, sending a pulse that will be picked up by the satellite system. Once an hour. One hundred hours. Over four days of coverage.”

  “Won’t she be able to detect them?” Jake asked.

  Altair handed Jake a bill. “There’s one in here. See if you can find it.”

  Jake ran his fingers over the hundred, folded and unfolded it. He held it up to the light. He saw nothing.

  “It’s a beauty. No silicon. No metal. The antenna is a weave of carbon nanotubes, a thread no bigger than a strand of spider silk. It runs along the edge of the bill, invisible to nearly any form of imaging technology. X-ray machine, RF scanner, you name it.”

  Jake understood. Electronics based on carbon had begun to invade the territory that was once the exclusive purview of silicon. “The logic circuits?”

  “Pentacene transistors. Low performance but good enough. An RF graphene transistor drives the antenna. The whole thing runs on an electrochemical power source consisting of a bag of ATP. Carbon. Carbon everywhere. All right,” Altair said. “Now we just need to take care of you.”

  TEN MINUTES LATER, JAKE WAS ON HIS BACK IN A SIMPLE operating theater. A doctor stood over him, holding a metal syringe with a four-inch needle. “Left or right?” the doctor asked.

  “Left.”

  “This may sting. Whatever you do, don’t move your head.”

  He inserted the needle in the space between his left eyeball and the socket. He slowly dispensed the plunger, implanting the tracker.

  Altair watched closely as the doctor worked. “The basic platform is the same as the trackers in the money, with a few little twists. The antenna runs along the optic nerve. The sensor and power supply look like blood vessels.

  “We used to put them in your arm, but sometimes you could see them in an MRI. This is better. The eye is a regio
n of complex imaging contrast. There’s a lot going on in there, lots of fibers and tissues behind your eyeball. No one is going to notice our little tracker.”

  Jake suppressed the desire to flinch. He felt the needle rattling around in the space beside his eye. He thought of Isaac Newton, who pushed sewing needles behind his eyes in order to understand the optics of vision. Newton was insane.

  The needle popped out, and Jake took a deep breath. He sat up slowly, blinking rapidly. Needle or no, he was just glad as hell to be out of the slammer. He thought he might have gone mad if he’d had to sit in that little room doing nothing while Maggie was missing and Dylan deteriorating a few feet away. He had a deep burn going, a desire for retribution. He wanted more than anything to save Dylan and Maggie, and he wanted to punish Orchid for what she’d done.

  “Run your finger over the spot,” Altair said. “You feel that? That little stiff thing? That’s your tripwire. You pull that, the pulse triggers. You’ll feel it, like someone kicked you in the head. Might lose your vision for a little while.”

  Major Altair went over it in detail, Colonel Lexington watching from the other side of the room. “You understand? It’s right up against the blood vessel, nice and warm. Only two ways that’s going to happen. Number one: you pull the tripwire out, or—”

  “Or number two: I’m dead.”

  “You got it. Your heart stops, your epidermal tissues cool fast. A sensor will go off if the temperature drops below ninety-two degrees. It triggers somewhere between one and five minutes after you expire, depending on the thickness of the fat in the surrounding tissues. It’ll go off even faster if you pull the tripwire. Maybe ten seconds. In either case, we triangulate from the satellites, and we’ll be there in minutes.”

  “How many minutes?”

  “You let us worry about that. Just as soon as everyone is together, do it. We’ll hit the area with an EMP pulse. Then we’ll be there. We got your back. Jake, you with me? Orchid’s there, you’re there. You pull. Then we come in.”

  “Got it.”

  “One more thing. You pull it, you be sure and make Orchid stay put for the next few minutes. Make sure she doesn’t wander off. No more than, say, two hundred meters. You understand me?”

  Jake caught the look in Altair’s eyes. Jake nodded. He understood. In case they wouldn’t be putting boots on the ground. In case they’d be sending bombs.

  “You understand? No mistakes, soldier. No excuses.”

  “No excuses, sir,” Jake said, an Army man’s reflex.

  44

  DUNNE WAS SWEATING LIKE CRAZY AS HE SAT WITH THE President and the NSC principals in the conference room at Camp David. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs stood, a rail-thin Marine named Stanley Narry: “Mr. President, it’s go/no go time. We either send Sterling and Kitano, or we hold back.”

  The FBI director, an African-American ex-senator from Illinois, also got to his feet. “Mr. President, his psychological profile checks out. Sterling is ex-military. Good mental discipline. Scores low on rebellion scales. The only caveat is that he knows Maggie Connor well, has some involvement with her family, though, of course, that’s why Orchid wants him.”

  They were silent. Dunne watched them trying to come to terms with a world suddenly on the brink of devastation. He couldn’t think straight, had barely slept the previous night. It had to be the stress. He’d never reacted to pressure this way before—he thrived on pressure. But then again, no one in this room had ever faced down a danger like this.

  He caught himself scratching at his arm. His skin itched, as though ants were crawling underneath.

  The President turned to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. “Stanley? Where are we?”

  “Every EMP weapon in the arsenal is in the air, full coverage except for some remote areas. And if you want something burned, odds are we can do it in under twenty minutes. We pulled all the MK-77 incendiaries that we could, including all the old Vietnam-era stuff that was mothballed at Fallbrook Detachment. And we’ve got the MOABs. Biggest non-nuke in our arsenal, blast radius of a couple of football fields. That’s what I’m recommending, Mr. President. If it comes to it. No mistakes with a MOAB. The Mother of All Bombs.”

  “What about boots on the ground?”

  “That’ll take longer. Depending on the location. Hour, half-hour at best.”

  The head of the NSA cleared his throat. “If I can interrupt. The first tracker is set to go off in ten seconds. Nine, eight, seven…”

  Dunne watched the screen displaying a map of the eastern United States. When the tracker in the money blipped, satellites would record the signal and the location, and have it on the screen in less than a second.

  “Five, four, three, two, one.” A moment of silence, then a blue blip appeared along the coast, north of the tendril of Cape Cod. The satellite perspective zoomed in, the coastline magnified, the grid of human cities defined, along with the tangled web of the Boston road system.

  Dunne recognized the Charles River, the haphazard buildings of the MIT campus on one side, Back Bay Boston on the other. He felt nauseated. Finally the zooming stopped, the screen at maximum resolution.

  The blue blip was on Beacon, two blocks from Mass Ave.

  “They’re waiting for the go.”

  The President said, “All right, folks. Look sharp. You gotta take a piss, it’s too late. This is about to get hot.”

  IT DIDN’T TAKE LONG FOR THINGS TO GO WRONG.

  Jake Sterling was behind the wheel, Kitano in the passenger seat. The car was a silver 2006 Toyota Camry, just as they’d been told. It wasn’t lost on Jake or his handlers that the Camry was the most popular car in America, and silver was the most popular color.

  It was a quiet Saturday morning in Boston, the sky clear, only a few clouds. A cold front was predicted to move in by the afternoon. Leaves swirled off a maple on the side of the road.

  They arrived at the parking lot on Boylston, following Orchid’s instructions emailed hours before. They had with them a cellphone that had been mailed to Fort Detrick the previous day. The Langley spooks had studied it as though it was the Rosetta stone, looking for anything that would reveal the nature of their quarry. They took it apart, checked every component, every diode and RF filter, but there was not a damned thing special about it. It was a cheap cellphone with a phone number. Nothing else.

  As expected, the phone now rang. Jake answered. The synthesized voice on the other end told him to leave the garage they were in and drive to another garage across town. The phone went dead. Jake did as commanded, sure that the call had been intercepted and a surveillance crew was on its way to the new location.

  Jake kept glancing at Kitano. The old man’s features were dead. He had a bandage on his face from his fight with Dunne. He was sweating like hell, a rank odor coming off him. Jake didn’t bother with small talk. Instead he simply drove.

  The Air Force guy, Lexington, had told Jake to keep a close eye on the old man. Kitano was here under duress—a sheep offered to the predator—and he might try to run for it. Lexington wanted to cuff Kitano to Jake, but Orchid’s instructions forbade any weapons, ropes, watches, anything at all.

  Ten minutes later, they reached the garage. Jake took the little parking ticket from the machine, entered, began ascending the slow spiral upward.

  They were on the third level when the phone rang again. Jake answered, and the voice said, “Take the next available slot.” Jake and Kitano did as ordered. “Go to the fourth floor. There is a Red Taurus with Michigan plates. Get in it. Pull down the visor.”

  In they went. Jake pulled down the visor.

  The card said:

  GET OUT.

  GO TO THE FIRST LEVEL.

  ENTER A GRAY VAN THROUGH THE REAR DOORS.

  The interior of the van was outfitted like a cross between a Geek Squad van and an ambulance. Two video cameras looked down from mounts in the corners. A laminated sheet of paper dangled in the center of the van’s storage bay. On it were a series of ins
tructions, to be followed sequentially.

  Step one was to strip to the bone. Jake and Kitano did as ordered. Jake soon was naked except for his hands. He slowly unwrapped the gauze covering the burns, the air stinging the wounds.

  Per step two, they put all their clothing and possessions in a pair of metal boxes, then stored them in a locker at the back of the van and locked it with a Yale padlock.

  On to step three. As instructed, Jake took the battery-powered clippers and trimmed his hair short, tight against his skull. He handed the clippers to Kitano, then turned around before the camera. Kitano trimmed his wisps of hair, his face showing the indignity of being old and naked, a body in decay. Jake felt a twinge of compassion for Kitano, his shrunken arms barely anything, just bits of skin and sinew. But then he thought of Harbin, Unit 731, the torturing, the experiments.

  Jake turned away, studied his short-haired reflection in the back window of the van. He felt as though he were nineteen again, a soldier-to-be, not yet schooled in the currency of death.

  Step four. Stand before a white panel on the side wall of the van. Some sort of full-body scan, Jake guessed. Altair had assured him that the carbon tracker they’d put in him was invisible to almost anything, but Jake couldn’t help but worry. Engineers always believed in the infallibility of their latest technology, like Icarus, right up until they fell from the sky.

  Steps five through seven, according to the laminated sheet: get dressed—jeans, sunglasses, and red shirts for both. Leave the van. Bring the money. Get in the VW Golf with tinted windows parked three spaces down. Instructions on the visor.