NanoStrike (2 page)

“Perhaps we can track his group,” Aussie said. “I’ll set markers to circle twenty or thirty people.” Aussie tapped away as he spoke. “The man in the blue suit’s behind him. The blond woman will stand out.”

Quinn got the idea. “Use the tall kid with the baseball cap?”

Aussie clicked the target. A red arrow appeared above the kid and, along with another five arrows, moved across the screen, floating above the crowd. The pinpointed group reached the top of the stairs leading out of the platform and started to break apart.

Quinn pointed at the screen, careful not to touch now he considered Aussie a colleague rather than a smart-ass. “What’s happening? What’s that?”

“Someone’s fallen. They’re going around,” Aussie said. The arrows flowed past the obstacle and reformed into a group.

“What’s ahead?” Quinn asked.

“The ticket barriers; once they pass through they’ll have to pick an exit.”

The gates had been swung aside so the panicked crowd could get out as fast as possible.

Quinn kept his eyes on the screen. “Frank, if you were the perp, which exit would you choose?”

“The first I could.”

Quinn smiled. “Me, too. Aussie, let’s work on that assumption.”

Aussie split the screen again.

On the left, the group passed through the barriers and scattered. On the right, Aussie displayed video from a camera mounted outside, high on a pole and trained on the Oxford Street south exit. Commuters streamed out of the stairwell. Many stopped a few feet after reaching the pavement, blinking in the sunlight, and causing a backup.

“God, people are stupid. Can’t they get out of the way?” Frank said.

Two red-arrowed passengers emerged. Behind them, someone wearing a gray sweatshirt, face obscured by a hood, pulled off his gloves and strode along Oxford Street and out of camera shot.

“There! The gray hoodie. Male!” Quinn said, stating the obvious. “Only one reason to wear a hood and gloves in July.”

Aussie backed the footage up, tapped at his keyboard, and a blue arrow hovered above the hoodie’s head. “We can’t see his face, but the software will map his body shape. The longer he’s in the shot, the more attributes to scan. Give me enough time and I’ll be able to spot him anywhere.”

“Clever,” Quinn said. “Where’s the next camera?”

“A hundred yards along Oxford Street.”

Quinn rubbed at his cheek, as though he was trying to erase a mark. “With eleven thousand cameras in London, they should have this area blanketed, not one every hundred bloody yards.”

Between cameras, they lost the killer for over a minute. When he reappeared, the hood still shadowed his face. He walked left to right across the screen.

“Big man, fit-lookin’ bugger, too,” Frank said.

“Two hundred yards to the next camera,” Aussie said, anticipating Quinn’s question.

The detective glared at the back of the technician’s head as if he were to blame for the camera locations. Time clicked away at the bottom of the screen.

“He should be here by now,” Quinn said.

They waited two minutes, three, still nothing. A few business types passed, but no hooded terrorist.

Frank straightened and rubbed the small of his back. “Lost him.”

“Let’s wait,” Quinn remained bent forward, staring at the screen, willing the man to show. The timer showed five minutes, fourteen seconds when a tall tourist in a T-shirt strode along the sidewalk.

He had a blue arrow over his head.

“Come on, you prick, smile for the camera,” Quinn said.

As if he had heard, the man looked up. Aussie tapped a key. The screen split, and a face appeared on the left. Dark hair and eyes, well groomed, tanned, and clean-shaven.

“Handsome bastard,” Frank said.

“Check his physique, the way he holds himself, the way he walks,” Quinn said as the killer strode out of the shot. “That’s no brainwashed Arab fanatic. He’s a pro.”

Their quarry didn’t show at the next camera. After ten minutes staring at the screen, Quinn straightened, and rolled and cricked his back.

“Good job, Aussie. Can you extract the piece we viewed and send it to my desk along with the cleanest mug shot you can manage?” Quinn handed him a business card.

“Send it here as well.” Frank produced his card.

“Be glad to.”

“Thanks,” Quinn said. “If you see anything else, call my cell.” Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Frank glaring at him and about to speak. Quinn’s phone rang and postponed the confrontation.

“It’s Mike Mitchell, Quinn. Can you come to the staging area and look at something?”

“What?”

“It’s . . . you need to see this for yourself.”

“Give me thirty minutes.” Quinn closed his phone and turned to Frank. “That was Mike Mitchell.”

“The City Coroner, has he got something for me?”

“Dunno, let’s go find out.”

Frank pulled into traffic. His face was hard and set. “Quinn, this is my jurisdiction.”

“We both want to catch the bastard, Frank.”

“I know you were first responder, Quinn, but terrorism is my patch. Back off, or I’ll make you.”

Frank Browning had been Quinn’s partner in the Met’s Murder Division before his recent move to Special Branch. He knew Frank’s limitations, and watching him pissing on a pole to mark his territory was all the proof Quinn needed—Frank wasn’t up for a job this big. Uncomfortable silence settled over the remainder of their journey.

Processing two hundred and four bodies was far beyond the resources of the City of London Coroner’s Office. The Met had commandeered a local school as a temporary mortuary.

Once they’d passed through the rigorous security procedures at the entrance to the school’s gymnasium, Quinn spotted Mike Mitchell observing a pathologist who was bent over a gurney, working on a corpse. Mike had been City of London coroner for twelve years. He and Quinn first met professionally, but their relationship had morphed into friendship, and they got together at least once a month for a beer. Mike joked that he felt obligated to buy for his best customer.

Quinn scanned the room. Sixty or more white-sheeted gurneys were double-parked along the walls. Quinn couldn’t tell whether they’d been autopsied or still waited. It brought home the human tragedy of what, until now, he’d been dealing with as hunt-the-hoodie. These people had families and jobs and lives. But now, all they were was dead. Anger surged through him. He forced it down. To catch this murderer he needed focus, not fury.

Quinn tapped the tall, thin doctor on the shoulder. “So what’s the big secret, Mike?”

Mike spoke without looking around. “Give me a minute, Quinn.” The female pathologist he was observing was bent over a corpse, and speaking in a low, fast voice into a handheld Dictaphone. Once finished, she stepped back, revealing a woman’s body. Quinn checked the corpse’s face: thirty maybe, no more. No rings, perhaps they’d already been sealed in her personal baggie.

“Damned shame,” Quinn said.

“Tell me about it. We’ve pulled in staff from five counties, and it’ll still take us three or four days to process them all. Anyway, thanks for coming, Quinn.” Mike nodded to Quinn’s partner. “Hi, Frank. I thought you two had a lover’s tiff and split up?”

“This is a Special Branch investigation,” Frank said and handed Mike his card.

Mike turned to Quinn, who rolled his eyes.

“Oh. Right. Um, come with me.” The Coroner led them past the gurneys to a small, windowless office. He closed the door behind them.

“What do you make of that?” Mike pointed to a three-foot-tall, black, headless, armless torso perched at the center of a battered, old metal desk.

“Don’t tell me you brought me here to admire a new work of art,” Quinn said.

“No, Dummy. What do you think it is?” He waited.

Frank laughed. “Did someone chop off ET’s head and legs and leave him here?”

Quinn glared at his ex-partner. This was no time for jokes. “I’m not sure, but the ribs aren’t sculpted correctly.”

“Close, but no cigar.” Mike stepped toward the bust and ran a gloved hand down the front of its neck as if the contact might give him inspiration, provide an explanation of how the object had come to be. “Not sculpted, molded,” he said. As though someone poured quick-setting concrete down their throats . . . or, you know, the foam-in-a-can stuff that you squirt into gaps and it expands to fill them? Something entered through the airway, filled the lungs, expanded, and hardened to this black compound. Look here.”

He ran his finger along the corrugated neck of the bust. “This is an exact impression of her trachea.”

“That’s why the ribs are indented. It’s molded from the inside,” Quinn said.

“Exactly, and that’s not all. With this muck in their lungs you’d expect them to die of asphyxiation, right?”

Quinn and Frank nodded.

“Wrong again. See that?” The coroner pointed to a grapefruit-sized indentation midway down the left front of the casting.

“This stuff expanded so fast that her heart was crushed to a stop. I have two hundred and four heart-attack victims in my lab.”

The coroner moved back from the bust to allow them an unobstructed view. He held out a box of latex gloves.

“Pick it up. Go ahead.”

Quinn started to move but checked himself and let Frank take the lead. Frank pulled on gloves, put his hands either side of the ribcage, and raised the torso a few inches off the desk.

“Solid, but lighter than I expected.” He rapped with his knuckles and rubbed the surface. “Feels like those charcoal briquettes you buy for the barbeque.”

When Frank finished, Quinn also lifted and felt the material. He checked his hands. They were black. “Soot?”

“Have you seen anything like this before?” Quinn asked the coroner.

“Come on, Quinn . . . no one’s seen anything like this before.”

Chapter 3

Two Years Earlier
. . .

Nazar Eudon was an oilman. Finding oil, processing oil, and selling oil had made him rich. But nowadays “oil man” wasn’t politically correct; so, on the advice of his marketing VP, he had made a token investment in green energy, or the closest to it he could stomach—ethanol production.

The one thing that annoyed Nazar more than being
only
276th on the
Forbes World’s Billionaires
list was wasting his time. Nazar’s head of research had invited him to a demonstration at Eudon Ethanol’s Ohio facility in Akron. He’d allocated four hours for the visit, and he begrudged every second.

Professor Philip Farjohn’s eyes were bright and his face flushed with excitement as he illustrated his points with expansive sweeps of his arms. “We have d . . . d . . . developed a remarkable technology since our l . . . l . . . last meeting, Mr. Eudon.”

While the professor talked, Nazar peered through a letter-box-sized window into a thirty-foot-diameter metal fermentation tank. A transparent container the size and shape of a telephone booth occupied the center of the tank, twenty feet below him. A stepladder stood ready beside it.

A clear liquid filled the bottom of the container, which overflowed with garbage: old tires, newspapers, flattened cardboard, plastic soda bottles, and a pizza box (complete with pizza remnants) were visible. Nazar wondered whether the professor had brought the trash from home. The man was eccentric enough to consider it.

After five minutes of the professor’s stammer-filled explanation, Nazar held up his hand to signal a stop. It took a few seconds for the tall, angular man to slow his words and calm his arms. Finally, like a clockwork toy running out of spring tension, he came to rest.

Nazar said, “Professor, I believe it will be more efficient if I tell you what I have understood from your briefing and then allow you to correct any omissions.”

“Yes, b . . . b . . . but . . .”

“Professor.”

“Sorry, it’s ju . . . just . . .”

Nazar’s hand edged forward until it touched the professor’s large, bony nose. The man jerked back and fell silent.

Nazar pointed to the window. “I’m looking into a fermentation vessel. Normally, it would be loaded with wood chips and flooded with water. Specialized fungi developed at your lab would break down the chips. The resultant mash, when heated, releases the sugars from the feedstock.”

“Yes, the p . . . p . . . process takes a huge amount of energy, but—”

Nazar cleared his throat and continued. “Yeasts feed on the sugars and convert them to alcohol, which is distilled to extract ethanol.”

“As you say, but now—”

“Your team has developed, or, if I understand correctly, they have used nanotechnology to
build
artificial microbes, atomic-scale machines which you call nanobots. You believe this development constitutes a breakthrough.”

“They are l . . . l . . . less than one nanometer, one billionth of a meter, Mr. Eudon, but amazing, quite amazing.” The professor smiled a smug, self-congratulatory grin.

Nazar continued. “You claim these nanobots are intelligent enough to analyze and then break down a wide variety of feedstock. They can disassemble the feedstock at an atomic level and reassemble the atoms into the molecular structure of ethanol, eliminating the lengthy fungal decomposition and expensive heating phases.”

The professor nodded along with Nazar’s description, and, when his boss finished speaking, he jumped in. “The nanobots bring an additional benefit. When alcohol concentrations rise, the yeast dies, leaving valuable sugars unconverted. With nanobots, we can continue the conversion and harvest the maximum p . . . potential from the f . . . feedstock. Yields are much higher.”

“How high?”

“Thirty percent by volume.”

Nazar nodded. Finally, he’d heard something interesting. He pointed to the trash in the center of the chamber.

“Professor, it looks as though you cleared out your garage.”

The man blushed sufficiently to confirm Nazar’s suspicion.

“Initially,” the professor said, “we d . . . developed the nanobots to work with wood chips. The breakthrough came when we built the analytical layer into them. Theoretically, they can p . . . process any biomass—anything that grows with s . . . s . . . sunlight.”