Biowar (14 page)

Karr parked the bike and leaped up on a Dumpster at the back of a low-slung concrete-block building, climbing up on the roof and then mounting the ladder of a water tower to look at the warehouse where the goons had stopped. He reached into his pocket and took out a small pair of folding opera glasses, along with a wire to hook the feed into his handheld and ship it back to the Art Room. The optical portion of the glasses was capable of 20X magnification; the unit could also use an infrared, or IR, sensor roughly twice as powerful as Generation 3 military units. Karr selected infrared to try to look through the thin wall of the warehouse; he saw two figures near a window at the front but wasn’t positioned well enough to see farther into the facility. Neither of the figures had guns.

“We’re running down the owners of the warehouse,” Chafetz told him. “But I doubt that’s significant. Can you get close enough to get visuals on the people as they come out?”

Karr craned his neck toward the building. He could hop from one roof to the other.

“Doable,” he told her. Then he hopped from the ladder, took a short windup, and jumped to the next roof. A taller building sat next to it; he could just barely reach high enough to pull up and get over. This one had a good view of the warehouse and the alley in the back.

He moved his glasses around, scanning the warehouse. Most of the interior was empty, but a small part of the front comer of the building had interior walls and thick insulation, probably so it could be air-conditioned efficiently. This made seeing through it problematic, though the Art Room was able to find and enhance five shadows, IDing four as people and the fifth as a cat.

A Toyota was parked in the back. Karr reached to the back of his belt and took out one of his flies, a small eavesdropping device that could fit on a fingernail. From his left pocket he removed a device that looked like an old-fashioned Pez dispenser. Instead of candy, however, the device dispensed a sticky plastic that Karr rolled into a ball. He placed the fly at the top, then tossed the wad gently on the roof of the car. It splatted, looking like an odd bird dropping. He keyed his handheld to wake up the bug, got a beep indicating it was working, then went back to scanning the warehouse.

“Duck,” said Chafetz suddenly.

The kids who had followed them and stolen his wallet came out the front, scootering away. Two other men got into the Toyota and backed quickly out of the alley.

“You want the Toyota,” said Chafetz.

“Great. Keep tabs on it for me while I go get my wallet,” said Karr.

“Uh ...”

“Uh what?”

“They threw it in a barrel and lit it on fire. I’d guess it’s pretty crispy by now.”

19

Malachi Reese grooved on the Blink 182 cut, bouncing at the edge of his seat as he guided the tiny spaceship toward its destination. Called a “vessel,” the craft looked like a foot-long section of copper pipe, the sort you’d find in a home water system. It had steering fins that were “ignited”—in layman’s terms “extended”—by a small canister of hydrogen, allowing Malachi to steer it with the aid of the keyboards in front of him. In some ways, the vessel was nothing more than a ridiculously expensive space-launched dump truck; in about thirty seconds Malachi would hit a red button on his console and shower his target with motion and sound sensors about the size and shape of a flattened penny. Once deposited, the sensors would transmit their data back to the Art Room for the next four hours.

“How are we doing?” asked Telach.

“We’re just about on target.”

“I have a man in there and he’s been knocked out,” said the Art Room supervisor, her voice strained. “I need to know what the hell is going on.”

“Hey, like, I’m doing six times the speed of sound, you know what I’m saying?”

That was an exaggeration—the vessel was actually moving at about Mach 4.

Malachi was a ReVeeOp-a remote vehicle operator or, more bureaucratically, “flight control specialist class three,” the highest designation below supervisor status—controlling the spacecraft from a bunker a short distance from the Art Room. He made a slight course correction, then got ready to pickle his sensors.

“I’m sorry,” apologized Telach.

“Not a prob, Mom.”

He checked his course again, jacked the volume on the Mp3, and watched his screen for the cue.

“Baby,” he said as the timer nailed down to one. His fingers danced quickly on the board.

“Got a good spread,” he told the Art Room through the headset sitting over the buds for his stereo player. The vessel had dumped its load of sensors on and around the castle where Dean was being held.

“What’s that in the background?” asked Telach. She reminded him of his third-grade teacher.

“Christmas carols,” said Malachi.

“You’re a bit ahead of the season, don’t you think?”

“Never too early to celebrate.”

He tickled the buttons, monitoring the vessel’s flight on the pseudo-3-D terrain map at his right. He wanted to crash the now useless pipe into a wooded hill about two miles from the target, which was a large castle on a hill in northern Austria. The course had been preset, and as soon as the computer beeped to confirm they were on beam, he went back to the keyboard at the extreme left of his work area, punching the two preset keys at the right. The screen above the board changed, putting up green dots and squares to show whether the sensors were good.

He had a full board. Kick butt.

Had to be the music. Blink ruled. From now on, Christmas songs every flight.

In July. They’d love that.

“Malachi?” asked Telach.

“You’re up and good,” he said, punching the bar at the very bottom of the board, giving control of the feed over to the Art Room.

20

As the Toyota drove out of the city, oblivious to the bug on its roof, Karr decided the time had come to gear up. He headed for an equipment cache stored in the basement of a store that sold Buddhist shrines and related paraphernalia. After he purchased two small envelopes of incense from the rail-thin girl who worked at the register, an old man with a long white mustache appeared in the doorway.

“I’m Sam’s friend,” Karr said, adding a line in Mandarin Chinese, not Thai, that told the man he had come to worship his ancestors.

The old man bowed, then smiled, showing that he was missing several teeth at the front, and led the way into a back room, pulling a rug off the floor to reveal a trap door. The wooden steps bent severely with his steps, the rickety stairway creaking and swaying as he made his way down. The man stopped and lit a match, then picked up a torch from a bucket nearby. Flames shot upward when he ignited it, scorching the rafters; Karr followed as the old man brushed aside spiderwebs, walking past a collection of wooden boxes toward an area lined with shelves.

“How many bodies you got buried down here?” Karr joked.

Chafetz had claimed he didn’t understand English, but a moment later the proprietor stopped and held the torch over a skeleton in the comer.

Karr laughed, then stooped down and gently pushed the skeleton to the side, pulling out a large footlocker next to it. The locker held a variety of light weapons and equipment available for Deep Black ops and had to be opened in a certain way or the plastiques it was largely made of would explode. With his right hand still on the red diamond at the top, he reached with his left hand and undid the latches. Then he removed his hand and yanked it open—the locks had to be cleared within five seconds of being undone.

He took one of the rucksacks at the side, debating whether to take the light armor as well. He finally decided against it; though the carbon-boron vest was relatively light and flat, it would still be bulky under his shirt and provided incomplete protection. He helped himself to a number of different grenades, then took one of the large flat cases at the bottom of the locker. The flat case held a special NSA-issue rifle called the A-2. A gas-operated assault weapon similar in most respects to the German Heckler & Koch G11, the weapon had virtually no recoil and was extremely accurate. At the same time, its thirty-inch length made it more compact than an M4, the standard assault gun preferred by American airborne troops because of its small size and weight. The A-2 actually looked more like a box with a pistol grip than a rifle, but its magazines held 102 rounds.

The old man held the torch out but looked away the whole time, as if he were afraid of intruding on a woman’s modesty. Karr repacked the locker, closing it with a thud. Upstairs, he left a few bills with the girl before leaving.

“What do you have?” Karr asked Chafetz.

“The car is owned by an employee of a silk exporter in Chiang Mai. We’re trying to flesh that out.”

“I don’t think this is about clothes.”

“We’re working on it. There’s no connection to the hotel or to your friend there. Or to Kegan for that matter. The Toyota’s a few miles north of Don Muang, the airport. Head in that direction and we’ll see what comes up.”

“You sound more like Rockman every day.”

“Be nice.”

By the time he reached the highway, the Toyota had stopped at a building owned by an American company that had gone bankrupt several months before. The silk exporter—the name in English meant Silken Rose—had done business with the American firm, but the Art Room had otherwise been unable to obtain any useful information about whom they might be dealing with, let alone what the connection was with Kegan.

Karr followed Chafetz’s directions, turning off the highway, rumbling past a housing development, and then through an industrial park onto a less-developed road. He drove for about a mile until the macadam turned into hard-packed sand; the ruts made him slow down but he was still doing forty when he passed the building. He trucked on a bit, pulling off about a half-mile away after the road bent to the north enough to keep from casual sight.

“They’re in the building,” Chafetz told him. “We can’t hear a thing.”

“I think I’ll use the Kite,” Karr told her.

“It’s daylight, Tommy.”

“Sandy, anybody ever tell you that you have a habit of stating the obvious?”

The Kite was an unmanned aerial vehicle or UAV The NSA had a variety of the robot planes for use in different situations. This one contained video and bugging equipment and was small enough to be carried and launched by one person. It could stay aloft for roughly an hour and was quiet enough to use in the countryside. But it did have a drawback—intended for night-time use, the Kite was painted black. It would be fairly visible in the bright sky. Karr knew from experience that the aircraft often could escape detection; most people saw only what they were looking for. Still, it was a risk, and one he should avoid unless the situation clearly warranted it.

The warehouse property was marked off on his left by a barbed-wire fence; Karr walked toward it, trying to get a look inside. There was another row of fencing beyond it, with a line of seemingly abandoned trailers parked nearby. He couldn’t see the Toyota. He took out his binoculars and scanned the area, making sure he was alone. The trail he’d taken ended a hundred yards farther east in a large swamp, and there were no signs of anyone nearby. He stuffed the binoculars back in the ruck and took out his IR viewer, scanning the area close to him again just to be sure.

“All right, so we’re not hearing anything from that fly on the car?” Karr asked Chafetz.

“If I were hearing something I’d tell you that, wouldn’t I?”

“Maybe you’d want it to be a surprise. How come the warehouse is made out of concrete block?”

“Is that a trick question?”

“I didn’t see any other warehouses around here made out of block.”

“You’re a building inspector now?”

“By birth.”

Tommy’s father had been a master carpenter in Scandinavia before emigrating to the United States, and among his many lessons was the fact that a building’s construction always told a story. The story here, or at least part of the story, was that the material was difficult for the infrared sensor in the glasses to see through. In fact, he wasn’t getting any heat signature through the walls at all—which probably meant a great deal of insulation on the inside as well.

“Could be a freezer,” said Chafetz.

“Send me the blowup of the satellite image,” said Karr, taking out his handheld.

The image showed no external heating or air conditioning unit. These could be buried or disguised, of course, but a similar infrared scan from an earlier series gave no indication of that either.

“You think it’s shielded?” asked Chafetz. “If so, it could be a bio lab.”

“Well, let’s find out,” said Karr. “I’m going to launch the Kite.”

“Risky.”

“Better than knocking on the front door.”

Telach came on the line as he pulled the knapsack over and took out the Kite.

“Tommy, you’re moving kind of fast for us,” said the supervisor.

“Thanks.”

The robot airplane looked very much like a miniature box kite, with a sausage and propeller in the middle. It carried video sensors and could be rigged to drop sensors. Though nearly silent, it was intended for night use and painted black, which was why Chafetz had been objecting.

Karr slid a drop package onto the nose area opposite the battery-powered motor. The entire aircraft was about the size of a shoe box.

“Tommy, if there are a lot of people in there, you’re going to be outnumbered,” said the Art Room supervisor. “Wait a bit and we’ll have the CIA airborne resources on-line.”

“How long’s that going to be?”

“Thirty minutes tops. It’s flying up from the south.”

“The Toyota’s not going to hang around. Don’t sweat it, Marie.”

Karr keyed up the robot aircraft’s control program on his handheld computer. Unlike the UAVs used in both Gulf Wars and Afghanistan to supply visual images of the enemy, the small robot drones used by the Desk Three ops could be flown by a single person, either in the field or back at NSA headquarters.

“All right, you have a point,” said Telach. “Just remember we have no backup if you get on the hook. You’re on your own.”