The China Dogs (20 page)

“Not at this rate, not in this city—”

He cuts off the rant before it gathers momentum. “Okay. Some kind of awareness campaign wouldn't be a bad idea. I'll get the pencil heads in Press and Communications on it.”

“I was thinking more of extra neighborhood patrols. Increase our presence in tourist spots. Beef up the armed response teams, keep them on standby, cancel holidays—”

“Stop. Stop. Stop.” He leans forward on the desk and smiles pityingly. “Have you got a stash of lottery cash in your desk drawer that you're looking to share?” He smiles sarcastically. “C'mon, have you? Coz if you have, then can you give your famished old friend here a few hundred thou' to pay for all that overtime, extra details, new recruits?”

Ghost ignores the sarcasm. “Civil protection shouldn't be a matter of money. It's—”

“Bullshit.” Cummings picks up his wrapped
frita.
“Don't act dumber than my burger. My budget is more busted than a drunk at a Vegas table, and I'm not about to fuck it up any more because some people got bit.”

“
Killed
,
not bit. People were
killed
. Men, women, and children. And more are going to
get
killed if you don't do something about it.”

“You ruin my fuckin' appetite. That's what you do.” The captain throws the remains of his food, basketball style, into a waste bin a yard away and glares at Ghost. “On your way out, take a look at the wall map and the crime stats all over it like a hooker's rash.”

Ghost gets to his feet.

Cummings berates him all the way to the door. “Drugs and gangs kill more innocent people every week than your damned dogs do in an entire year. If we ain't got more money for fighting that, then we sure as hell don't have it to go collaring Lassie and Rin Tin fucking Tin.” He waves his hand dismissively. “Damned rabbit food. Feed that to the dogs, the fuckers will be too weak to bite anything.”

70

Eisenhower Executive Office, Washington DC

L
ess than an hour after Pat Cornwell briefed Press Secretary Jay Ashton, he ushers two more White House staffers into his office.

Dr. Marlon F. Gonzalez, Director of the White House's Office of Science, and Chairman of the President's Council of Science Advisors, is an intense medical academic in his mid-fifties. He is small with a large shock of Einsteinlike hair and a brain quicker than the CERN accelerator.

Forty-three-year-old Katy Chimes, a professor turned politician, the duly elected head of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, is the opposite. Even before she slips on Louboutin stilettos she stands an Amazonian five-eleven, and the pixie-cropped brunette is still fit enough to play a mean game of volleyball.

Cornwell briefed them on the phone last night and has called them in to give him and Brandon Jackson, the President's appointed security advisor, the benefit of their expert views on how real the Chinese threat could be.

Gonzalez folds his hands as though in prayer, then talks in a gentle, almost reverential tone. “Weaponizing animals—­particularly canines—is something we've looked into doing ourselves, but have never seen through. The initiative floundered because of lack of support, lack of budget, and lack of expertise. But from what I've been able to find out from those who were involved in our brief attempts, the short answer is yes, it's entirely possible to genetically or biomechanically provoke dogs into attacking humans. The main problem would be controlling them.”

Cornwell is already frowning. “You need to go slow for me. Explain the first part—genetic or biomechanical.”

“By genetic I mean to imply that their DNA would have been altered, possibly in a laboratory to promote extra aggression. It could be triggered by maturity of the animal—hitting puberty. But this is hugely difficult for a third party to control with any degree of precision. By biomechanical I mean that the dog is given some drug—through injection or food ingestion—that affects it. To use a crude analogy, it could be like giving bodybuilders excessive testosterone and causing so-called ‘roid rage.' ” He thinks over the latter scenario. “This again is very difficult to control—the party would have to individually inject dogs, or personally ensure they were fed the correct amount of drugged food or liquid at the correct times.”

Don Jackson feels he has information that will help. “The vet reports show excessive levels of adrenalinelike substances in the blood but not the stomach. That would suggest injection rather than digestion, wouldn't it?”

“It would,” Gonzalez agrees.

Katy Chimes has some deeper doubts. “I get the science, but really, could the Chinese do it? I mean, if
we
couldn't see a project like that through, then why could they? The Chinese might be masterful copiers and technicians, but they're not noted as being creative, or being great innovators.”

Gonzalez looks horrified. “With all due respect, you forget China's Famous Four inventions—the compass, gunpowder, printing, and papermaking. Without these our world today would be remarkably different.”

The VP doesn't want an academic debate to derail his briefing. “Let me understand the basics—are we agreed that the creation of weaponized dogs is actually possible?”

Gonzalez smiles. “In genetics, anything is now possible. Here in the U.S. we're spending more than five billion dollars a year on genetic testing—it'll be nearer twenty-five by the end of the decade. Molecular biotechnologists can grow limbs and organs like we once grew tomatoes. Hell, even the Austrians have been growing cerebral organoids—minibrains, if you like. It's the same in China; they're
pouring
resources into this area. But to weaponize dogs they would need geneticists with an intimate knowledge of the canine genome, people who would be capable of very sophisticated cell engineering, gene synthesis, and the like. The project we started focused on manipulating the dog's somatotropin levels—this is the growth hormone produced naturally in animals. We found there were ways of raising it and sustaining that rise so you got much bigger and far more aggressive animals.”

Jackson jumps in again. “These dogs weren't extraordinarily large. Strong and relentlessly aggressive, yes, but not overlarge.”

Cornwell drills a finger into an itchy ear. “I want to go back to Katy's point. It's at the crux of our dilemma. Could the Chinese really do any of this?”

Jackson throws a curveball. “Even if they couldn't, they could have bought the expertise in, sir. The Koreans and Russians are very scientifically advanced and have no scruples about helping China. I'd rule out Japan, though. Their relations with Xian Sheng are worse than ours.”

Cornwell accepts the point and moves on. “Dr. Gonzalez, you mentioned control. I got the feeling you had more to say when I interrupted you.”

“Yes, Mr. Vice President. If we imagine these dogs to be weapons, then like all such devices they must have a trigger. The question is whether that trigger is biological, technological, or psychological. If biological, then geneticists will have had to further alter the genome, so that at a certain stage of maturation the dog becomes distressed, cannot function, and becomes enraged. If technological, then we are talking about some microimplant, some nanodevice that can be activated to cause similar distress and resulting aggression. If psychological, then perhaps as pups the animals have been abused or exposed to something that makes certain people seem more predatory to them than they actually are, so they feel instinctively inclined to attack upon sight.”

Jackson sees room for optimism. “If there's a trigger on the weapon, then I guess there is also a safety lock. What might that be, Professor?”

Gonzalez shrugs. “I admire your simile, but there might well
not
be one, Director Jackson. Again, it's something we struggled with in our research. In the end we had to accept that some weapons, like hand grenades, only have a trigger, and when it is pulled, there is no Off switch, no going back.”

71

The Everglades

T
om Watkin used to camp at Long Pine with his dad when he was a kid, and he feels warmly nostalgic returning with his eight-year-old son Perry.

They've left his wife and Perry's older sister Lucy-Anne back at home for a couple of days and brought their bikes, canoes, and fishing rods to what has become a sacred spot for the thirty-five-year-old schoolteacher.

The high Florida sun penetrates the canopy of tall slash pines as they trek through sweet smelling grass and gather dead wood for a campfire.

Tom finds himself pointing out the same things his pa did a quarter of a century ago and posing pretty much the same loaded questions. “D'you know how big the Everglades are, Perry?”

The freckle-faced youngster looks up and takes a wild shot at it. “As big as Disney World?”

Dad shakes his head. “Bigger.”

Now Perry is in trouble. Disney World is so huge that when he went, they spent three full days walking around and he still hadn't seen everything. “Big as
two
Disney Worlds?”

Tom laughs and pulls the kid tight to him. “Let me tell you. The Glades cover more than a million and a half acres—and that's only half the size it was a hundred years ago. It's made up of ten thousand islands. Almost a quarter of a million acres of sugarcane is grown out here and almost eight million people depend upon the Glades for drinking water. So, it's really important that we respect this place, that we don't damage things and we support all the efforts to keep it for generations to come.”

Tom is about to go back more than ten thousand years and tell Perry all about the ancient people of the Glades, about the Tequestas and Calusas, the Indians and the Spanish, about hurricanes and shipwrecks, when he spots a small black and white Alsatian puppy watching him, head cocked to one side with a puzzled look in its eyes. “Hi little fella; where'd you come from?”

The puppy bounds toward Tom as he drops into a crouch to lure him over and allow Perry to pet him. “You're a lovely little guy, aren't you?”

The boy puts his hand on the little dog's soft head. The puppy licks his arm and makes him laugh. “Hey, that tickles.”

Father and son are both on their knees spoiling the dog—when eighty pounds of unseen Alsatian slams into them.

Tom feels like he's been hit by a fallen tree. Pain explodes in his neck, like someone's driven four six-inch nails through his skin.

Perry picks himself up and is thinking of crying. Partly out of shock and confusion. Partly because he went facedown into the rough dirt and feels like his face has been rubbed with glass paper.

Then he sees his father. Lying on his back. A big dog on his chest. Biting lumps out of his face.

Perry screams.

Blood bubbles through holes in his dad's throat.

The young pup scampers from Perry's side and disappears into the vast darkness of the Glades, leaving the young boy frozen by fear.

72

New York

D
anny loses track of time as he watches his capture program snare snippets of the highly confidential digital data stream.

Man, this is a big fish.

As big and exotic as shutting down the PlayStation Network or opening up the private bank accounts of the main directors of J.P. Morgan, and he had his talented hands in both those ventures.

He'd spotted the traffic a long time back. A blip of astonishingly encrypted code, unlike any he'd ever seen before. To 99.999 percent of Internet users and even 99 percent of all hackers and crackers it would have gone unnoticed.

But to Danny the shark, it was like blood in the water, or a fluorescent flare spelling out his name in a big black cyber sky. Once spotted, he logged its shape and form and determined to chase it to the ends of the earth.

Then it vanished.

Painstakingly, he worked on what few fragments of encryption he'd captured. He replicated them, much as a forensic scientist uses advanced PCR kits to create fuller DNA profiles from ancient specks of century old human genes.

Gradually, he developed a program that was a hacker's equivalent of an automated speed camera with facial recognition, staked it out there on cyber superhighway, complete with capture net, and waited. Eventually the code recognition software picked up the unique profile of the encryption, locked on, and loaded in the big fish.

Now an invaluable copy is wriggling inside his portable hard drive and begging the critical question of him.

Can he crack it?

Can he break all the locks and codes and booby-traps that whoever wrote the software built in there to protect its secrets? He's damned sure he can.

Zoe's ring tone blasts out from his phone.

This time he answers it. “Hey, sis, you need to start with sorry, then grovel your way uphill from there—and believe me, it's a long
way, a very long way to forgiveness.”

“I'm sorry. Danny, I
really am
sorry.” She sounds like she's in a cab or someone's car because the signal distorts almost as though she's talking underwater. “I left messages on your answering service straight away saying I was sorry. What I said—all that stuff about Jenny being a gold digger—it was just a sisterly reaction. It was stupid. I don't know this girl from Eve and—”

“Sounds like you don't know me either.”

“Don't be like that. I do know you and I
care
about you.”

“Then care that I'm happy. That I've found someone, Zo'. Someone I'm ready to take a chance on. Christ knows, we deserve a chance, don't we?”

Zoe knows that her silence gives away the fact that she's not sure how to answer him. She certainly can't see her taking a risk on Ghost.

Can she?