NanoStrike (16 page)

Kim grinned like a schoolgirl receiving an unexpected Valentine present. She tore off the wrapping and stared, shocked, at a bottle of Clive Christian No. 1 perfume.

“Firman, I can’t accept this. It’s too much.”

“I insist.” He closed his hands around hers with the bottle between them. “Whenever I smell this perfume, I think of you. Do you like it?”

“Yes, of course, but—”

His voice became husky, low. “Wear some for me.”

She held the perfume in one hand, ran the other hand behind the lapel of his jacket, and pulled him toward her. The kiss released the sexual tension of the last four hours; no, the last twelve months—sparks flickered against the inside of her eyelids, and she thought her legs would buckle.

“Give me a moment.” Kim headed to the bathroom, where she stripped off and crammed her bra and panties into her purse. After a pee, she used the bidet, then sprayed herself with the nine-hundred-dollar perfume and slipped, naked, into her dress.

When she returned to the room, Firman turned and smiled. ”Now you smell as beautiful as you look, Ms. Kimberly Stevens.”

They made love until three in the morning. Never had she experienced a body so hard and toned. Firman was a considerate lover, and insatiable. She didn’t ever want to leave his bed, but the Prime Minister was scheduled to depart the hotel at eight, and he needed her.

“Firman, I must go.”

He wrapped his arms around her and held her close. It took an extraordinary act of will to pull away. As she dressed, he watched with a coy smile on his face, and in that moment, under his gaze, she felt like the most desirable woman in the world.

“Kim, there’s one more thing I need.”

“Firman . . . there’s no time. I have to leave.”

He smiled. “Will you wear the perfume to the conference today? Although I won’t be able to speak to you, I will smell your presence as I stalk the corridors looking for bad guys.”

She shook her head. Kim would never dream of wearing such expensive perfume to work.

“Please, Kim, do this for me, just today.”

His voice and his eyes were pleading. He was serious about this. She smiled. “Okay. If you insist.”

“Promise?”

“Cross my heart.” She bent and kissed him one last time where he lay in bed. “Now I must go or I’ll be late.” Playfully, he held onto her arms.

“Firman. Stop it.”

“Promise me again.”

“I promise.”

He let her go, and she floated along the hotel hallway, beaming from ear to ear. The early-morning traffic was light. She felt racy calling her hotel’s front desk at 3:40 a.m. and booking a six-thirty wake-up call. Snuggled under her sheets, Kim drifted to sleep surrounded by the smell of him and her perfume.

When she woke, she showered, toweled dry, and walked naked across the room to her purse. She took out Firman’s gift and with two quick strokes sprayed an ‘X’ of perfume starting at each shoulder, crossing her breasts and finishing at her hips. The aroma was exquisite. She posed in front of the mirror.

“I crossed my heart for you, Firman.” A pleasant shiver passed through her as she remembered last night’s sexual marathon—wow! Kim slipped into a blue pencil skirt and white blouse. The perfume would always remind her of him. “What a man,” she said as she left the room to begin a busy day of organizing at the G20 summit.

At the conference, she strode in front of the Canadian Prime Minister, cleared him through security, and gathered the necessary handouts. Inside the meeting room, she arranged the PM’s papers at a magnificent oval table whose stunning centerpiece featured a hand-carved conference logo: twenty rays of light—simulating the Eastern sun rising—emanating from a
chung-sa-cho-rong,
a traditional Korean lantern. Twenty plush, padded chairs circled the table, awaiting the representatives of the elite group of nations.

Staffers buzzed around their dignitaries making sure everything was set for the meeting. Kim watched as a robed assistant to the Saudi Arabian king demonstrated the use of a respiratory inhaler to his royal highness. The aide sucked in the spray with an exaggerated motion, then held the device to his king’s lips and depressed, encouraging and praising the monarch as a mother would her child. Boy, there were some spoiled puppies in this room.

At the head of the conference table, a small stage was set with a lonely white lectern at its center, flanked on either side by ten flags, one for each of the member countries.

At a quarter till nine, satisfied the PM had everything he needed, Kim headed for the bathroom. In the hallway, she nodded politely to Maureen Wilson, the American Vice President’s executive assistant; the President wasn’t scheduled to arrive until tomorrow.

As Kim passed, the aroma of Christian No. 1 perfume drifted into Maureen’s nostrils. A few thousand perfume molecules settled on Maureen’s tiny nose hairs as they filtered out dust and bacteria. But most swept in with her breath and flowed down her throat. The molecules, each less than three millionths of an inch, settled into the spongy pink alveoli in Maureen’s lungs. From there, they absorbed into the surging bloodstream pumping past her honeycombed lung walls, fetching and carrying oxygen to her brain and muscles.

In sixty seconds, Kim’s perfume molecules had dispersed throughout Maureen Wilson’s body—a microscopic and unwitting gift from the Canadian Prime Minister’s executive assistant to the executive assistant to the Vice-President of the United States.

At 8:55 a.m., the South Korean VP called the meeting to order. The heads of the world’s richest nations—presidents, premiers, prime ministers, one vice president, and one king—took their places.

Kim, along with over one-hundred assistants and administrative staff, filed into the next room where the Koreans had laid on an elaborate buffet.

A gas will diffuse until its concentration is equally distributed throughout the space available. Since her arrival, Kim had been throwing off an invisible stream of perfume. Had someone viewed the rooms and hallways at a molecular level, they would have observed that every cubic inch of air contained molecules of her scent. They had been breathed and shared by dignitaries and lackeys alike.

Molecules had no sense of status.

At precisely 9:00 a.m., the South Korean president took the stage. He stood behind the lectern and acknowledged the warm applause of his guests. At 9:01, he began a short, well-rehearsed speech of welcome.

Courtesy of Dawud Ferran, Allah’s Revenge’s newest captain, each of Kim’s perfume molecules carried with it a tiny passenger—a programmed nanobot.

At 9:02 a.m., the passengers awoke.

After sixty seconds of exponential replication, trillions of nanobots started analyzing their surroundings, seeking biomass: blood, liver, lung, throat, eye, nose, heart, brain—feedstock for the self-replicating monsters-in-miniature. With organic material as fuel, and body heat for energy, the nanobots disassembled the molecules and reassemble them into a black, charcoal-like substance.

At 9:03 a.m., the Korean president broke off in midsentence, covered his mouth with his hand, and cleared his throat.

“Excuse me,” he said and reached for the water perched on the lectern. As he grasped the glass, he grimaced at the hard, black grains he’d coughed into his palm. He gulped the liquid, and, with no time for further apology, began coughing in uncontrollable spasms. He spat out the water because he couldn’t swallow. He doubled over, gagging chunks of black charcoal from his lungs into his mouth, and puked them onto the stage.

Coughing broke out around the meeting table. A few concerned staffers poked their heads through the door, and seeing their superiors struggling for breath, tried to assist, but they too experienced an uncomfortable tickle in their throats, then a scratching, then a unique and inexplicable sensation: They wanted to vomit. They wanted to breathe. Neither was possible. They were filling up—drowning from the inside.

By 9:05 a.m., the room was in chaos, decorum at the world’s most exclusive meeting overridden by the primal need to survive. Staffers charged into presidents as they ran for the door. In the hallway, security guards writhed on the floor.

Two shots rang out.

The noise brought a rush of secondary guards barging through the polished oak doors at the far end of the hallway, which had until then sealed in most of the perfume-contaminated air.

A green-uniformed Korean guard-captain dropped to one knee and felt for a pulse in the soldier lying nearest the outer door. A pistol lay near his hand, and blood from the man’s thigh soaked into his trousers. The guard had shot himself trying to pull his pistol. He was dead.

At 9:09 a.m., following their programming, Dawud’s nanobots stopped disassembling biomass.

They stopped assembling charcoal.

They stopped.

The captain ran with his men, guns out, toward the conference room. A pyramid of corpses, piled on top of one another like some weird carnival act, blocked the doorway. The captain stared past the dead, into the room. Most of the bodies were near the doorway. Many had bloody track marks on their necks and faces, souvenirs of a desperate attempt to clear an air passage. Black cinder crammed their mouths, stretching their jaws unnaturally wide, like overstuffed pigs laid out for a medieval feast.

The captain’s eyes locked on the center of the room. In the middle of the huge oak table, huddled on top of the magnificent carving, stood two men, and they were alive. Clinging together like limpets, they wore light-gray, ankle-length robes, their heads covered with black-and-white checkered
shumags
. Nothing else in the room moved.

Making an unpleasant snap decision, the captain climbed over the pile of death blocking the doorway.

“Are you okay?” he shouted to the men on the table.

“We are okay,” said King Hudayfah, the Saudi Arabian ruler. “Thanks be to Allah, we are okay.”

The captain barked orders. “Check for more survivors. Try the next room.”

All ten of his security detail had followed him over the warm body-pile. Three of them checked the victims strewn around the floor of the conference room. The others ran into the next room. The captain had tears in his eyes as he sought a pulse on the corpse of his country’s president, sprawled on the stage next to the fallen lectern.

One of the guards appeared in the doorway leading to the staff room. “Captain, you need to see this.”

The captain spoke to the two survivors. “Please remain on the table until we’ve secured the area.” The King nodded.

Leaping over corpses, the captain ran into the next room. There were forty or fifty more victims, mostly on the floor. His eye was drawn to a couple lying on the buffet table, sprawled across the huge array of food that should have been their breakfast.

“Perhaps they thought getting off the floor would save them?” he said.

“No, sir, I mean this!”

The soldier pointed to a woman in a blue pencil skirt standing stiff and erect against the far wall. The torn remnants of a white blouse hung from her neck. Two lines of black charcoal, as wide as tire-treads, protruded eight inches from her body. Starting at her shoulders and finished at the tops of her thighs they formed a crude X. Both eyeballs dangled against her cheeks, forced out by two macabre black turds protruding from her eye sockets. The fungus-like mass formed a horn on each side of her head where it had squeezed out from her ears.

“Damn,” said the captain. Then he threw up.

Chapter 19

By 9:00 a.m. the day after Abdul’s disappearance, Quinn was on his way to Eilat in a Fiat 600, the only rental available at such short notice.

Quinn had felt like a circus novelty act climbing into the smallest car he’d ever seen. The steering wheel jammed against his thighs, so he had to keep switching feet on the pedals to stop his legs from going dead. His head touched the roof, and each bump in the road (and there were plenty) compressed his neck into his shoulders.

The car’s thermometer, a flat disk stuck to the dash, read thirty-eight degrees—one hundred Fahrenheit. The sweat-inducing humidity reminded him of childhood family vacations in Florida, but without A/C. With the windows open, dust and sand stirred up by vehicles as they passed him on the highway peppered his face and made his eyes water. The trip to Eilat lasted five hours. It seemed like ten.

He checked into the Dan Hotel, dropped his bag inside the room, stripped, and hit the shower; never had he felt this dirty.

Once clean, he snagged a scotch from the minibar and called Frank Browning, who chewed him out for leaving Jerusalem. Frank didn’t believe his story about following a lead. Special Branch was flying in an Arabic-speaking replacement who was arriving in Jerusalem that evening and expected to meet Quinn.

”Tell him to call me,” Quinn said. “I’ll brief him by phone. I can’t get back to Jerusalem until tomorrow.” Frank grunted in reply.

Not much he can do about it from London, anyway.

When Quinn finished with Frank, he called the number Scott had given him for Eudon Oil. After being passed around a few times, he reached the voicemail for Nazar Eudon’s assistant and left a message. “Mr. Eudon, I’m Detective Chief Inspector Steven Quinnborne of London’s Metropolitan Police Service. I need to speak with you about an urgent matter involving Abdul Ahmed, who I believe is known to you.” Quinn left his room number; Frank wouldn’t issue him an international cell phone—another power trip.