Strangers and Shadows (37 page)

“Not more than sixty seconds ago.”

“It’s him again?” Lankford asked.  “This could be the missing piece we need to decrypt that comm.”

“We’re tracing the origin now, but it’s the same exact encryption,” the operator said as he panted.

“Pull up the trace,” Dorian instructed.

The man hesitated and looked to Lankford for instruction.

“This man has the highest level of clearance, if he tells you to do something, you do it immediately.”

“My apologies, sir.  I had no idea.”

Dorian sighed.  “If you don’t mind, the clock is running.  Please, pull up the trace.”

The operator jumped to the nearest console and pulled up the incoming transmission and the trace that was in progress.

“Put it on the main screen, if you would, son,” Lankford said.

The entire wall on the far side of the control room came to life as it displayed the ongoing trace of the transmission.  A timer was counting up.  Presently it read one minute and forty-eight seconds.

“We should have the origin shortly,” the operator said.  

At two minutes and three seconds, a bright red dot appeared on the map.  “Okay, looks like the call was made from the…
Third Verse?
  Geo-tag has it somewhere in Europe… here we go—outside
t
he
Louvre
in Paris.”

The Third—it didn’t make any sense.  Had Desmond, if in fact that was who was making these calls, found a way out of the Sixth?  It was possible, but highly unlikely.  It wouldn’t be like Desmond to abandon his world when it needed help the most.
  “It’s possible that Desmond is not our man, or at least not the focus of these transmissions,” Dorian said.

“Should I scramble a team for the Third?  They can be on site in less than five minutes.”

“No, don’t bother.  They’ll be long gone before our agents arrive on scene,”  Dorian replied.  “What we really need is to find out who is receiving these calls.”

“If we can get a little more time on this call, we should have enough data to trace it back to the receiver, no matter how good his encryption is,” Lankford said.

The timer froze at three minutes seventeen seconds.  The call had ended.

“Did we get enough?” Dorian wanted to know.

“I don’t know.  I’ll have to run the trace to find out, but between this transmission and the first, we should have enough.  It will take a day or two.”

Dorian nodded and began to leave.  At least they had a lead now.  “Let me know as soon as you know anything.  I’ll have a strike team on standby. 

“I’ll put my best people on it.”

“Fine, but I want you to personally over see everything.  This one’s too important to fuck up.”

Agent Saboteur

Wizard was about to throw the encrypted comm unit into the demoleculizer when it began chirping.  He sighed in annoyance.  Desmond should know better than to use the burner comm twice.  At any rate, the call was probably important if he was willing to risk it.  He answered. 
“Hello, old friend, you really shouldn’t be using this comm code.”

“Uncle Wizard!  Thank the Verse you answered.  Dad said you would probably ditch this comm, but it was still the safest way I could think of to reach you in the Seventh.”

“Celia,” Wizard coughed. 
“This is a bit of a surprise…
 
You spoke with your father then?”

“Yes.”  They caught each other up quickly on the occurrences since last night.

Jack and Celia had gated to the Fifth and with a little difficulty got their hands on the equipment to relay a comm to Wizard from the Third, where they were now.  They most likely could have done it safely from the Fifth, but Celia didn’t want to risk someone discovering their signal.  If the Fifth found out about the other verses, it wouldn’t be from her.

Wizard, on the other hand, had been busy gathering his notes and research together.  So busy, that it had fortunately slipped his mind until a few minutes ago to destroy the burner comm, otherwise they would not be having this conversation.  Not that there had been a rush to destroy it, they wouldn’t have been able to trace the comm back to him from the call to Desmond, but now that he’d used it again, all bets were off.  He’d have to assemble the project elsewhere.  Which was just as well, he thought.  Trying to smuggle Jack and Celia into the Seventh would be far too much risk, with very little reward, and besides, it would take him a little while to get everything ready to go.

“How long is a little while?” Celia asked.

“Oh, shouldn’t be more than a day or so.”

They arranged the meeting and said their goodbyes, but not before Wizard warned them to destroy the comm unit.  The last thing they needed was an assault team chasing them around the Third.

At last, Wizard opened the lid on the demoleculizer and tossed the comm unit inside.  He closed the lid and activated the machine.  Moments later there was no trace left of the comm unit, its molecules having all been disassembled and recycled into the city’s infrastructure for use in some other product.

With the change in plans, Wizard now had to decide what equipment to bring with him and what he would leave behind.  He also needed to make sure he could obtain the missing pieces in the Third.

He had just located his large black duffel bag when the house comm chimed.  The display said it was Dr. Mesham’s office. 
Curious,
Wizard thought.  “Accept,” he said.  “Hello?”

“Professor Ander?  It’s Lin Park, something’s happened that I think you need to know about, but it’s not comm appropriate.  Can you meet me at my apartment tonight, say eight o’clock?”

Wizard thought it over quickly.  “Send me the address.”

He arrived at Lin’s apartment five minutes before eight, spending the extra five minutes standing on the street corner, pretending to read through the latest news mags.  Nothing appeared to be suspicious outside the apartment building, and after a few minutes, Wizard made his way up to the fourteenth floor.

Lin opened the door almost immediately after he’d knocked.  “Professor Ander, come in.”  She quickly ushered him into the dimly lit apartment and then stuck her head out into the hallway, checking for anyone following him.  When she was satisfied, she closed the door and led Wizard to the living room.  “Please, have a seat.  I’m sorry for all the cloak and dagger stuff, but I wanted to be as safe as possible.”

“No need to apologize, dear.  What was it that you thought I should know about?”

Her face grew serious.  “Well, remember when you gave that lecture at the tech convention on the evolution of nanites?  You said that we must consider the possibilities that the nanites
could, and would,
begin to change on their own.”

Wizard instantly recalled giving that speech years and years ago.  The memory
had
stuck because he was nearly laughed off the stage.  Soon after that, he had been slowly but surely ostracized from the academic community.  Lin had been the only scientist to talk to him after that speech, saying how much she was intrigued by the idea, and asking all sorts of questions he did not have any answers to.  That was when he had recruited her to keep an eye out for any changes that she might notice in the nanites as she went on with her career.  She was his first recruit into the little spy network that he’d constructed over the years.  Since that day, she had fed him little bits of information here and there, which, along with the rest of the network, allowed him to stay abreast of the latest advances in the private, as well as the military sector.  “I remember that lecture, Lin.  As I recall, it gathered rave reviews.”

She smiled, despite the seriousness of the meeting.  “Quite so.  The first piece of news is that Julia White is still alive.  Well, in a manner of speaking anyway.”  She described what she’d learned about the Prime Minister’s transfer to the young woman’s body.  “They have a problem though—the nanites in the body have been shutting down, one by one.  The sample we took from her has started shutting down the new nanites that we introduced to it.  I think that the nanites have some kind of virus.  Or at the very least, something that behaves like a virus.”

“I thought that sort of thing was impossible these days,” Wizard said, more than a little surprised at Lin’s conclusion.  It had been hundreds of years since computer viruses had existed.  They had been wiped out before he was born.  The code that programmers used today didn’t allow for the possibility of a virus.  Which was not to say that code couldn’t be tampered with.  There were still plenty of ways to hack into a programmer’s code, but they were extremely difficult.  It would require at least one insider, often more, and sometimes the entire code would just be replaced or re-written.  “Back doors” were mostly a thing of legend nowadays.

“That’s just it,” Lin said.  “It
is
impossible.  I think that the nanites are experiencing a physical virus.  One that they just don’t have the cure for or the brute strength to overcome.”

“How is that possible?”

“We’re not entirely sure yet.  It only seems to pass on with direct physical contact.  As of now, there haven’t been any instances of wireless infection, which is what leads us to believe the virus is at least physical, if not biological, in nature.  Personally, I think it has something to do with the girl’s body being from the Fourth.”

“That would seem to be a factor for sure,” Wizard allowed.  Although, if what Lin said about the body rejecting two consciousnesses was true, then it was possible that that was also, or maybe entirely, responsible for the damage to the nanites.  “We can’t rule out the effects of the two minds in one body either.”

“No, I guess not,” Lin said, a little disappointed.  The Fourth idea was hers, after all.  “Dr. Mesham wants to go to the Fourth and get some biological samples for testing, though.”

Wizard nodded.  He would want to do the same in the doctor’s position.  “Whatever the cause of it, we know its effect.  I don’t suppose you have a sample of it with you?”

“No, I’m sorry, all of the samples are back at the lab locked up in the quarantine safe.  There’s no way they would ever let me out of there with a sample.”

Wizard was hoping to get lucky, but no matter.  Nothing worth doing was ever easy.  He reached into his satchel and pulled out the stunner he kept there.  “Sorry about this, Lin.”  He fired.

She collapsed to the floor, her limbs as limp as a rubber band.  Wizard maneuvered her onto the couch and removed a second object from his bag, a transdermic injector.  It was filled with a powerful sedative.  Even with her nanites helping her recover, she would still be out for eight to ten hours, which would give him enough time to do what he needed to.  He injected her below her ear on her neck and set about looking for her access key.  He regretted what he had to do to Lin, but he couldn’t have her taking the blame for the access key.  In a twisted way, he was protecting her.

Back out on the street, Wizard shoved his hands deeper in his jacket pocket to help shut out the chilly wind that had picked up.  His mind was racing, trying to update the plan as he walked along.  He hadn’t planned on knocking his informant out, but he couldn’t let an opportunity like this go passing by.  If there was a nanite virus, and they were able to weaponize it, then there might not be a need for what he and Desmond had originally had in mind.

Several blocks later he hailed a hover cab. 

 “Where to?” the driver asked. 

It was a good question.  Where did he want to go?  He didn’t have a large window of time to break into the lab and steal a sample of the infected nanites before Lin’s sedative wore off, but all of the research for Desmond’s plan was back at his house, he couldn’t leave this Verse without it.  He would only be able to gate out once.  After that, they would have his transponder, letting them track him almost instantly if he used it to gate back in.  No, things were much more likely to be difficult at the lab, better to save his ace in the hole for that job.  If things got dicey he would just gate out.  Unfortunately, that meant he would have to have everything he needed to leave with on him when he went to the lab.  He gave the driver his home address and sat back, preparing to whittle his travel kit down to the bare bones.

Two hours later, he was standing outside the labs where Lin worked.  He was dressed as a lab assistant with an old white lab coat that he’d managed to find in the back of his hallway closet.  He had a large pack over his left shoulder, stuffed to the point where zipping it up had taken a considerable amount of effort.  Around his waist he had a smaller pack which held Lin’s access key, a small vial of her blood that he had taken from her after he’d sedated her, his stunner, and the pneumatic syringe, loaded with several doses of sedative.

He was worried about the bulky pack being too conspicuous, but there were several lab assistants walking in and out with back packs on.  The building was home to several different labs.  Lin’s happened to be on sub-level D.

After-hours the security was minimal.  It would be mostly automated with the actual amount of guards on hand somewhere between two and six.

The first guard Wizard saw was behind the desk at the front door.  He looked to be fairly alert as he stirred his steaming beverage.  Every few seconds he would glance at a different security monitor, but he didn’t seem overly concerned with the front door, which had had someone entering or leaving at least every seven seconds for as long as Wizard had been watching.