NanoStrike (22 page)

He and Lana’s father followed the wheelchair. When they were in the elevator, Quinn spoke to the nurse. “I wonder, could you ask her father if I could get a ride to Jerusalem?”

She looked puzzled. Probably trying to understand how a British policeman found himself in Eilat without transport. She spoke to Lana’s father, who turned and grabbed Quinn’s hand in both of his.

“Yes, yes, okay, yes,” he said, clearly at the limit of his English language proficiency.

Quinn and Lana waited in the lobby with the nurse while her father collected the car. Finally, a banged-up, white, two-door Datsun pulled up at the front door. The father leaned across, opened the passenger door, and flipped the seat forward. As Quinn squeezed in back, a sharp spring jutting from a tear in the seat fabric dug into his thigh and ripped his trousers. This heap of junk made a good getaway vehicle, but he dreaded the prospect of a four-hour drive with his knees folded into his belly.

The nurse helped Lana into the passenger seat and stood in front of the hospital, waving, as they pulled away.

Once they were out of Eilat, Quinn stopped checking the road, satisfied the blue suits didn’t know where he was. Lana’s hand trembled as she brushed a few stray hairs from her face. Quinn could hardly believe she was sixteen; twelve seemed closer to the mark.

“Lana?” She turned in her seat. Hollow cheeks and dark rings under her huge brown eyes betrayed the stress she’d been under. She glanced at his face before her gaze shyly wandered to the side window.

“Do you know a man called Ghazi?” he asked.

She held his gaze for a moment and shook her head. The answer surprised him, but he sensed the girl was telling the truth.

He came at the problem from a different direction. “Lana, where is Adiba?”

“In Jerusalem. At home.” She turned to her father and asked him a question. He answered with a few gruff grunts.

“Father says she is at home.”

Quinn looked in the driving mirror, and Lana’s father gave a shake of his head. Quinn acknowledged with a small nod.

Okay, he doesn’t want to upset her any more. Adiba disappeared after Lana, so, if the girl hadn’t seen her sister that ruled out his idea that Ghazi had used Lana as bait.

Quinn tried another tack. “When did you meet Nazar Eudon?” he asked.

“I don’t know Nazar Eudon.”

She didn’t look at him, but he was sure she told the truth. Lana didn’t know who Nazar was, but she had recognized his face.

“The man you saw on the TV, in the hospital. You became upset when you saw him, remember?”

Her eyes stretched wide and tears welled so quickly that Quinn immediately regretted asking, but he needed to understand if Nazar was involved with Adiba’s abduction. Sisters abducted within a week of each other—even in the Middle East, surely that wasn’t normal.

Lana spoke rapid-fire to her father. He barked back at her, the car swerved as his concentration wavered from the road. Quinn waited through their heated conversation, trying to gather what he could from tone of voice.

Finally, Lana turned again. “My father says you may not ask these things. It is not civilized for a man to speak of such matters with a girl.”

Lana’s father caught Quinn’s eye in the driving mirror.

“No!” he barked.

“Please tell your father I’m sorry for offending you and him.”

She spoke to her father, who continued to glare at Quinn, his face fixed and angry.

Quinn stewed for ten minutes, frustrated, but stymied. He couldn’t mention Nazar again, and he couldn’t figure out how Lana connected with Abdul and Ghazi. Maybe when they arrived in Jerusalem he’d have another chance. He got out his phone and powered it on, then pulled a piece of hotel notepaper from his wallet and punched in the number.

“Mr. Eudon’s office.”

“I’d like to speak to Mr. Eudon, please.”

“Hello, Mr. Quinnborne, this is Keisha. What may I do for you?”

“Ah, you recognized my voice . . . do you have any news on Abdul or Adiba?”

“No, nothing,” Keisha said.

When Quinn spoke his daughter’s name, Lana’s father started to talk loudly, in Arabic. Quinn put a finger in his ear to block the noise.

“I’ve moved from the Dan hotel. Please take a note of this number? It’s my cell.” He began to recite the number, but she cut him off.

“I have the number, detective. Thank you. Is there anything else?”

“No, just . . . call if you have any news about Abdul, and again I apologize for upsetting Mr. Eudon.” Quinn hated groveling, but friends were scarce. He turned the phone off to save battery and shifted in the seat. His left leg had already gone to sleep.

Chapter 25

When she finished speaking to Quinn, Keisha knocked on Nazar’s cabin door. They were en route from New York to Phoenix. Nazar intended to meet the professor and learn first-hand about the problem with the virginbots.

“Come.” He lounged on his bed, scrolling through the news on a tablet computer. The world was in chaos. Even the launch of his ethanol plant, the solution to the world’s energy crisis, had been pushed off the front page by the G20 attack.

“I received a call from Inspector Quinnborne.”

Nazar wrinkled his nose.

“He’s still looking for Abdul and Adiba.”

“Where is he?”

“He didn’t say, but he’s checked out of the Dan, so he may be leaving Eilat.”

“Sit,” he said and patted the bed.

She sat close and pressed a bare leg against Nazar’s.

“Perhaps this brute can help in our dealings with the terrorists.” Nazar absently stroked her naked thigh with the back of his hand. Keisha recognized the distant look in his eyes: he was planning, running scenarios, weighing options. Nazar was a brilliant man. She waited, watching her leader, her muse.

After two hours driving, cramped and hot, Lana delighted Quinn when she asked for a bathroom break. They pulled into a gas station, and Quinn extracted himself from the car like a cork from a bottle. Stiff-legged with dark saddlebags of sweat soaked through his shirt’s underarms, he limped to the restroom and cleaned grime from his face. With no A/C they’d been driving with windows open. He toweled off and switched on his phone. Keisha had left a message: “Mr. Quinnborne, I need to speak with you urgently.”

He called back, and she picked up. “Mr. Quinnborne, thank you for returning my call. Please call me on a landline; your number may be compromised.”

Quinn jerked the phone from his ear and held it at arm's length like a biting snake. He powered off and considered the trashcan. Never get rid of an asset unless you have to—advice learned from his father, good advice. He slipped the device into his pocket and headed for the blue payphone attached to the side of the gas station. At least they still had payphones in Israel. After three failed tries, he figured out what codes to enter and finally got connected.

Keisha answered. “Abdul contacted us,” she said. “The terrorists intend to use him as a courier. They have stolen something of value to Mr. Eudon and wish to sell it back to him. Mr. Eudon wants you to act as our intermediary in the transaction. You would be compensated for your services. Perhaps you can help us and at the same time find Abdul.”

“Where and when will the exchange happen?”

“We do not have specifics yet, but you need to be in Tel Aviv by tomorrow, July 23rd.”

“I’ll be there.”

“Excellent. Please call me on a landline when you arrive.”

Back on the road, Quinn spoke, through Lana, to her father and explained that he needed to get to Tel Aviv. She translated her father’s reply.

“Father has to return the car to his brother-in-law, Hassan, in Jaffa, which is near Tel Aviv. You will be welcome to stay the night in Hassan’s home, if you wish.”

Quinn smiled. He couldn’t imagine turning up with a foreigner on his brother-in-law’s doorstep and expecting him to provide a bed for the stranger. “Thank your father for me.” This killed two birds because he couldn’t check into a hotel; they would want his passport, and the Israeli police would love to be the first to find the missing English detective.

Hold on Abdul, I’m coming.

Chapter 26

Late afternoon, Mountain Standard Time, Nazar Eudon’s helicopter landed outside the prototype building in Arizona. Two days before, this had been the scene of great excitement as Nazar’s team had demonstrated their extraordinary energy breakthrough.

This time, Mason Phillips, head of security, drove the golf cart. Mason escorted Nazar along a hallway and into a large open laboratory. The professor stood with three white-coated technicians in the center of the room. They stared at a plastic cube, murmuring in low nervous voices. The cube reminded Nazar of a popcorn machine.

“Mr. Eudon, welcome.” The professor used the technique of speaking inside an exhalation of breath. It made the conversation strangely discontinuous, but Nazar preferred it to the damn stammering. The professor offered his hand, and Nazar glared at it as though it were a piece of dog shit. The three colleagues averted their eyes, and the academic turned bright red. He took a deep breath and spoke. “I decided to show you the problem rather than trying to explain.”

“An excellent idea,” Nazar said, his voice dripping with sarcasm.

The professor nodded to a short, plump woman who stood at the computer keyboard. After a few keystrokes, the computer monitor sprang to life.

Nazar studied the display:

Target –          C2H5OH (Ethanol)

Inhibitor –      C2H5OH*30% (Ethanol)

Feedstock –    Bio

Catalyst –       Photon

                        ss:mm:hh:dd:mm

Activate -        00:00:00:00:00

Terminate –    59:59:23:31:07

The woman pointed to the screen. “This is the nanobot programming interface. Under normal operating procedures, we place a sample of virginbots into the induction chamber.” She indicated a small glass vial at the center of the glove box. “Then we raise the temperature.” When she depressed a key on the computer, four red strip lights came on, one inside each corner of the cube. “Once the temperature reaches twenty-one Celsius, we modify these parameters and imprint the constraints on the virginbots in the induction vessel. The imprinted cells are removed and grown to make larger quantities, clones of themselves with the same imprinted parameters, which go to the production facility.”

“I understand. So what’s the problem?” Nazar, relieved, wondered whether the professor’s crisis was nothing of the sort. After all, scientists and businessmen had different ideas of what constituted a problem.

“David imprinted all of our virginbots the day he left. The problem lies here.” The woman pointed to the last line on the screen. “This parameter dictates that the virginbots will stop converting feedstock on July 31
^st
.”

Nazar smiled.
These
idiots
! “Why don’t you put in a later date?” he said.

“We can’t.”

The statement hit him like a punch to the gut.

“I don’t understand. If this is normal procedure, why not?”

The woman pressed the ‘Tab’ key. The cursor jumped to each field in turn, but then skipped past the last one.

“The Terminate field is not accessible,” the woman said.

“How did this happen?”

Mason, the security chief, spoke. “The surveillance video from January tenth shows David removing one vial of virginbots from the containment vessel before placing the remaining stock into this device and modifying their programming.”

One of the lab technicians spoke up. “The computer saves a log of every keystroke entered by an operator, a failsafe device so we can track an erroneous parameter. The log shows the date you see in the Terminate field being input by David.”

Mason pointed at the date. “The video shows that David Baker made more key depressions than we have recorded on the log file.”

“He entered additional data we have no record of?” Nazar said.

The professor spoke for the first time since he greeted Nazar. “Exactly.”

Nazar studied the man. He had always been thin, but he had lost weight. His face was gaunt and pale, eyes bloodshot with purple rings beneath. Nazar thought he detected makeup.

“How is this possible?” Nazar still did not understand why these eggheads couldn’t change the programming.

“David sabotaged the virginbots,” Mason said. “He must have built a backdoor into the control program, enabling him to change and lock the final date sequence without the computer logging his keystrokes.”

“Can’t you patch the program? Change it back again?”

“That is only possible if we have the program’s source code,” Mason replied. “And we don’t.”

“You knew this at the opening ceremony. Why the fuck didn’t you tell me?”

“We’ve been t . . . trying to f . . . f . . . fix the problem since we discovered it in January.”

“And you didn’t think it was important to share that information?”

His question was met with silence.