7. Chapter 7
Chapter seven
Day 2 Washington, D.C.
Clark took a sip of coffee, picked up his Montblanc diamond-studded ballpoint pen, and paused to admire it. Not only was the pen subtly elegant and fabulously expensive, but it was a pleasure to use. The ink flowed with fluid ease and dried quickly. No smudges. No fuss. Just expensive excellence. The best the world had to offer.
Life was good.
But then he’d promised himself such a life back on those street corners of LA where he’d hooked for food and shelter. And again during his education at MIT, which he’d attended thanks to a very exclusive escort service that had booked him out to their wealthy female and male patrons as both arm and bed candy. The clients he’d met through the service had given him an appreciation for the finer things in life and a distaste for sex. A fair trade.
He glanced at the time stamp on the video feeds scrolling across his laptop screen and jotted down a note.
Subjects infected 6:30 pm 2/08. He listed the D.C. time rather than Tajikistan. Tracking was easier that way.
The new cameras combined video and audio, which helped track the progression of his new weapon. When the bots hit the inflection point, the subjects devolved into violence, which got loud. Shouting, screaming, and slamming things around was common. He’d know through the audio feed the instant his little soldiers had seized their hosts’ brains.
It was two hours since the SEALs had been infected by his NNB26 bot prototype. In earlier test subjects, the mental deterioration showed about now. But these six were SEALs—with all the stamina and mental fortitude the title implied. Perhaps they could withstand his weapon’s grip a little longer.
No matter—two hours, or three hours—the six men were living on borrowed time.
His laptop display was split into six mini screens. Each small window was tagged with a name. Thomas Acker, Nathan James, Peter Hutcheson, Aiden Winchester, Sean Backman, and Chris Jennings. It was nice to have actual names attached to his subjects, rather than those adolescent nicknames.
Squirrel? Grub? Lurch?
Ridiculous.
As he settled back in his Pininfarina Xten Chair and waited for his new weapon to seize the SEALs’ amygdalae and hypothalami, he gazed out his penthouse window toward the Pentagon. The Potomac River looked like a ribbon of black velvet from the fifteenth floor, while the Pentagon was glowing. No doubt Admiral Hurley was huddled somewhere in that radiant building, with the rest of the brass watching and waiting. Possibly praying—to whatever entity he prayed too—that his men would escape the insanity of Karaveht.
But there would be no reprieve. His nanoweapon would make sure of that.
The test had gone remarkably well. Sure, his planning had been meticulous. He’d identified every conceivable obstacle and removed them, but some things were beyond his control. Such as the delivery system in Karaveht. The distribution and subsequent infection of the locals had been time sensitive. It was essential the weapon deploy, infect, and kill the residents prior to the SEALs’ arrival. If the SEAL team arrived too early, the locals, in their infected state, would kill them before the bots could take hold, and he needed to prove his bots worked on special forces types.
Injecting the citizens would have given him more control over the timing. But injection would lead to scrutiny, and possible detection. Nor could they send infected individuals into the village. For exposure to occur through an infected individual, there had to be direct physical contact. A touch. A kiss. A hug. Sex. And it was difficult to control when such events took place.
Eventually, he’d chosen the well to disperse the bots. On his orders, Kuznetsov had dropped five vials of his little soldiers into the water. They’d tested this delivery system in the lab, so they knew the approximate time between the vial dump and the first infections. They’d adjusted the parameters for the size of the well and the distribution through the water pipes. The first people to drink the water would have infected their families and friends. From there, the infection rate would just keep escalating.
His new technology really was the perfect weapon.
From the condition of the bodies on Winchester’s camera, the villagers had died late last night, long before the SEALs arrived. Perfect timing.
The six SEALs had been infected the moment they turned the dead locals over. The bots would have entered through their hands and fingers. Possibly even through the soles of their boots. Gloves and boots didn’t prevent bot penetration. His little soldiers could pierce anything but the densest of metals. A weapon that could be circumvented by protective clothing wasn’t much of a weapon, was it?
Once a person was infected, the bots immediately began scraping biological materials from within the host’s body—calcium from the bones, iron from the blood, proteins from the various cells, as well as a multitude of other elements. Then they began replicating, creating hundreds and then thousands more bots. Most of the bots would migrate to the brain to attack the amygdala and hypothalamus, as well as disrupting the neural connectivity of the brain. The remaining nanobots shed into the skin and surrounding areas, waiting to infect additional hosts.
He settled back, and took a sip of coffee.
“Where the hell are you going?”
The question came from the laptop, but it was the edge to the voice that caught Clark’s attention. He focused on the window that was greenlit, showing—he glanced at the name—Sean Buckman was speaking.
Winchester responded in an unnaturally calm tone. “Just getting my thermal blanket.”
“Liar.” Buckman laughed. An ugly, taunting bark of a sound. “You don’t get cold.” His rifle lifted. “Don’t fucking move.”
Five of the six cameras were locked on Sean Buckman. He leaned closer to the screen. There was a distinct twitch in the corner of Buckman’s eye—his bloodshot eye.
“Fuck you,” Buckman snarled, his rifle rising higher. “Nobody is restraining me. Nobody is stealing my ability to defend myself. I’ll see you all dead first.”
The twitching had doubled. Yep, NNB26 had infected them. Clark smiled in expectation, almost vibrating with anticipation.
The confirmation came seconds later.
“Base, we’re infected. Early signs are twitching faces and fingers and bloodshot eyes,” the squad’s leader said.
Wow. Winchester had certainly identified those symptoms quickly. He glanced at Buckman’s camera feed, which was focused on the squad leader. Interesting… Still no yelling or screaming—at least from the SEALs. There was plenty of yelling coming over the comm, but all from the base.
Clark dialed the base audio down so he could hear what was happening between his subjects.
“Lurch!” the squad’s leader shouted. His video feed jittered, before centering on a huge Viking of a man, charging toward Buckman. “Stand down!”
Lurch? Oh, yeah, Nathan James. Damn, these nicknames were annoying.
The meltdown came fast after that.
Chuff. Chuff. Chuff.
The rifle fire didn’t sound like he’d expected. No sharp staccato reports. More like a couple of subtle coughs.
Nathan James’s head disappeared, and he dropped to the ground. More chuffing and two more men went down.
“You killed them! Why did you kill them?” Peter Hutcheson screamed. The man’s face was red, sweating. The skin next to his red eyes twitched. His stare was a thousand miles blind.
Hutcheson lifted his rifle, aimed it at Winchester. The squad leader dropped to the ground; his camera feed chaotic. Another burst of chuffs hit the audio feed. Hutcheson fell. Clark checked the remaining camera feeds. How many men were left?
Just Winchester and Chris Benton.
The two men’s cameras were focused on each other. Clark’s eyebrows rose. Benton didn’t have his rifle up. He leaned in to get a better look at Benton through Winchester’s camera feed. The face on the feed was twitching, and the eyes were bloodshot, but the gaze staring back at him was self-aware. The guy hadn’t gone crazy yet.
“It started with a tingle,” Benton said. “An almost electrical tingle in my mind.”
Interesting. Clark made a note on his tablet. Nobody had mentioned that symptom before.
“Find out who did this to us.”
The command startled a laugh from Clark. Good luck with that.
Through Winchester’s camera, Clark watched Benton shove the barrel of his handgun into his mouth and pull the trigger. He dropped to the ground.
A guttural sound, like a horrified rasp, broke from Winchester before his camera jerked away. The camera feed bounced and swayed, before lifting and filming the dark sky. A raw, primitive howl filled the silence.
All six cameras were still filming, three of them pointed at the dirt and snow and three of them at the dark sky. Was Winchester alive, or had he killed himself, too?
Clark frowned, settling back in his chair. The squad leader’s camera wasn’t moving. He was likely dead as well. While he hadn’t heard a gunshot, Winchester could have used a knife. He’d have to rewind the camera feeds to see how the man had died.
But for now, it was time to shut the test down.
Leaning forward, he hunched over the laptop, exited the camera feeds and laid down a string of passwords. A new window popped up. He entered another string of letters and numbers. Same with a third screen and then a fourth. He’d encrypted this program to hell and back. It would be difficult for someone to hack into that first login screen. Nobody could hack all four.
Seconds later, a fifth screen appeared. Kill switch activation. Yes. No.
He clicked yes.
Please verify. Another login screen popped up. The cursor sat there at the first box, blinking patiently. It was a good thing he had an eidetic memory. A lesser mind would have to keep all the passwords in a notebook—which was never secure. After he typed in the last password, the screen turned red and then blue.
NNB26 prototype has been deactivated.
He went through another series of passwords and screens until he was looking through the atomic force microscope mounted on the top of the NNB26 testing tank. The AFM sent the images through Wi-Fi to the main computer terminal, where the images were recorded and stored and could be accessed remotely.
He assessed the NNB26 robotic structures, which were viewed under a magnification of 1,000,000x. The microscopic bots were matte black and round. Normally, they scurried around like a colony of energetic ants, but currently, none of them were moving. As expected, they’d shut down on implementing the kill trigger—exactly as he’d programmed them to do.
Excellent.
He rubbed his hands together, his smile wider than ever. It was critical to prove that his weapon could be turned off. The video would prove what his new weapon was capable of, but nobody would bid on the technology if it couldn’t be controlled.
He’d have to program each batch of bots he sold with their own kill switch code, but now he had proof the prototype could be deactivated as easily as activated.
Let the bidding begin.