Tokyo
Japan
Randi Russell slung the bag over her shoulder and dodged along the crowded sidewalk, watching her reflection in the store windows for anyone taking undue notice. Beyond a few admiring glances from the men she passed, her practiced eye spotted nothing. By design, she wasn’t the only Caucasian on the street. Covert-One didn’t keep a safe house in Tokyo, and Klein had been forced to set one up with less time and forethought than he usually brought to the task. They’d agreed that the best bet would be to hide in plain sight—to rent an apartment in a part of the city heavily frequented by foreign tourists and businessmen.
Randi cut right and jogged up a stairway leading to a set of glass doors. She pressed her hand against a palm reader—the Japanese loved technology—and heard the lock buzz. A moment later she was striding across a tastefully minimalist lobby toward a bank of elevators.
The one on the right was open and she ducked inside, keeping an eye on the glass front of the condo building as she punched in her floor number. Still nothing, but it didn’t mean much. In that kind of a crowd, a professional surveillance team would be virtually impossible to detect. And that didn’t even take into consideration probable hacks into the surveillance cameras that bristled from just about every wall in Tokyo. At this point, pretty much everything had become a roll of the dice. And those dice were most likely loaded.
The elevator rose smoothly to her floor without anyone else getting on. Randi put a hand on the Beretta under her jacket as she stepped into the hallway. Empty.
She moved quickly, feeling uncomfortable out in the open. A wave of her key card in front of a door near the back of the corridor caused it to pop open and she stepped through.
A man jumped up from the sofa that was nearly all the furniture that would fit in the tiny space, watching her with a startled expression.
“You’re not Jon.”
“They told me you were smart,” Randi said, entering the kitchen to empty her bag of the ramen and beer it contained. As expected, the refrigerator was no bigger than the one she’d had in college. Space in Tokyo was at an incredible premium, and while she would have liked to go with something a bit roomier, those kinds of condos tended to attract attention. Better to be just another one of the anonymous millions wedged into three hundred square feet.
“Who are you?”
“That’s not really important,” she said, tossing him a beer and taking one for herself. She came out of the kitchen and went straight for the couch. “Now, let’s have a chat about nanotechnology.”
Greg Maple looked down at her. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Instead of looking away after the lie, he kept staring—studying her face with an enigmatic expression that was more complicated than the fear she expected under the circumstances.
“What?” Randi said, popping open her beer and taking a swig.
“You…” Maple started. “You look like someone I used to know.”
Randi didn’t immediately react. Maple and Smith had been friends for a long time. Long enough for him to have met her sister.
“You mean Sophie.”
His eyes widened. They looked enough alike that Randi had become used to the reaction. It was still gut-wrenching to think about her dead sister—Jon’s dead fiancée—but at least she was practiced at it now.
“You’re Randi Russell?” Maple said.
“In the flesh.”
“CIA.”
She nodded.
“I knew it!” Maple said, pulling up a folding chair. Their knees almost touched in the tiny space. “He’s military intelligence. You’re working together.”
“That’s right,” she said. It was the obvious assumption and she decided to run with it.
“Where is he? Is he okay?”
That was a hard question to answer because she honestly didn’t know. According to Klein, when Smith had called to set up a meeting between the president and Takahashi, he’d sounded fine. There was no way to know if that was still the case, though.
“We’ve lost him.”
“Lost?”
“Misplaced,” she corrected. “Temporarily. And in the meantime, I’m filling in.”
“Is that why you had me kidnapped?” he said with a little understandable anger coming to the surface.
She decided not to acknowledge it. “It’s my understanding that you’ve taken the lead on this nanotech problem. I need to know what you’ve learned.”
“You could have picked up a phone instead of dragging me all the way to Japan.”
“Phones are too hard to secure, Greg. I prefer to have my conversations face-to-face. Now drink your beer before it gets warm.”
He popped open the can obediently and took a swig, but it didn’t seem to make him any less nervous.
“So? Have you figured out anything that can help me?”
He shook his head. “Probably not that can help you, but things that are…amazing.”
“Let’s hear those, then. Keeping in mind that I’m not Jon. I’m not a scientist.”
“Okay. I found a couple of structures that didn’t seem to have anything to do with the machine’s ability to copy itself.”
“Jon told me about them. You didn’t know what they were for. Have you figured it out?”
“I think so. The first is to control the number of times the individual unit can replicate. So you take one nanobot and you set the replication counter to ten. It makes ten new bots, but each of those can only make nine. And in turn, each of those can only make eight. When you get to zero, replication ends. In that example, you’d end up with millions of bots before it’s all over. If you were to set that initial parameter at a thousand instead of ten, you’re talking numbers that are hard to even imagine.”
Randi frowned and set her beer down. “You said a couple. What about the other structure?”
“That seems to relate to magnetism.”
“They attract each other?”
He shook his head. “I think they measure the earth’s magnetic field.”
“What for?”
“Probably to locate themselves—like birds.”
She let that process for a moment and didn’t like the conclusion she was coming to. “So, if they know where they are, it’s possible that they could be programmed to work only in a certain geographic area and to go dormant outside that area.”
“Very possible.”
They had known the technology worked—the machines were clearly able to self-replicate using steel, plastic, and concrete as fuel. What Jon hadn’t been sure of was whether it could be weaponized. Weapons had to be deadly, but just as important they had to be controllable. If you had a gun, you had to be able to aim it. And that’s exactly what Maple was talking about.
She wanted to ask more, but was unsure how much to reveal. In the end, though, Maple wasn’t an idiot. With the facts he already had, it seemed reasonable to assume that he’d already considered the scenario she was interested in.
“Then you’re telling me I could make it so these things only worked, say, in China. When they crossed over the border into another country, they’d just stop reproducing.”
“Assuming that the system is foolproof. The problem with replication is that it’s hard not to introduce errors. Mutations is probably a better word. Usually, those mutations are neither here nor there. Sometimes they kill the organism, or in this case break the machine. But every once in a while, they could make the machine better.”
“And by ‘better,’ you mean better at reproduction. There could be a mutation that turns off the control system.”
“Exactly. Theoretically, errors could be introduced that would allow the machines to replicate indefinitely or operate outside the programmed geographic borders. Even worse, though, you could get changes to the type of fuel the bots use. What if they became capable of eating rock? Or water? Or flesh? That’s potentially end-of-the-world stuff.”
“What if that happened? How would we stop them?”
“Radiation. And a lot of it. That’s the only thing I’m aware of that can kill these things.”
She let out a long breath and picked up her beer again. “That’s why it was developed in Fukushima, right, Doc? So they’d have a way to kill it if they lost control.”
“That would be my guess. Everything was probably going along fine and then the tsunami caused a containment breach. It forced them to irradiate Reactor Four.”
“Okay. Let’s assume they’re still working on this thing—either developing it or manufacturing it. They’d still need that safeguard, right? Access to radiation.”
“I assume so.”
“Okay. Then put yourself in their shoes. Where would you be?”
“A nuclear sub would be ideal. Easy to irradiate and even if you didn’t get them all, they’d end up at the bottom of the ocean. With no fuel chain, they’d corrode in the salt water before they could make it to civilization.”
“It’s a little hard to make pronouncements about the Japanese military right now, but building something as big as a nuclear sub without anyone knowing doesn’t seem plausible. Even for Takahashi.”
“Yeah, I thought of that too,” Maple said. “But I have a theory. Do you want to hear it?”
“Hell yes, I want to hear it.”
“A few years ago, the Japanese built a facility to store the nuclear waste from their reactors. It’s carved out of a mountain in the northeast. That’s it. If I was working on this thing, that’s where I’d be set up.”