Biowar

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.”

“Understood,” he said, tapping the bottom of his handheld computer. A compass and a slidebar popped into view. He nudged the slidebar upward, pushing his power off neutral to two-thirds. Then he picked up the aircraft and hooked its nose into a thick band of rubber attached to a slingshot and launched the $50,000 spy plane like a child’s toy.

Though he could navigate with the bird’s-eye view screen on his computer, Karr found it easier to watch the plane and adjust the controls as he went. He tapped his stylus against the side of the screen, where a small compass showed the plane’s heading. The computer translated the taps into a complex warp of the box wings, adjusting them to stay on course as the proper bearing was met.

Karr flew the Kite a half-mile to the east, away from the perimeter of the factory, started a turn, then popped up the sensor map, which thoughtfully interpreted the magnetic field anomalies that the device detected. As he’d suspected, the perimeter was protected by a series of video cameras and motion detectors — and a minefield around the sides and back. But he couldn’t see inside.

Karr pushed the aircraft onto a course to take a direct overflight, deciding at this point he might as well go for it. As he’d feared, the top of the factory was as shielded from the infrared as the side; his sensors were simply not powerful enough to see through. He guessed that metal shielding had been used to help guard against bugs as well, though the field indicators didn’t come up with anything.

Interesting, but hardly informative.

Karr spun the Kite around a second time. This wasn’t getting him anywhere; it was time to fall back on a favored NSA tactic: provoke a response and see what happened.

Before he could decide exactly how to do that, the large garage door at the side of the building opened and two men with rifles emerged. Karr swooped back, pushing the Kite toward the open door and nailing the throttle.

“Tommy, what the hell are you doing?” asked Chafetz as the Kite plowed through the opening. He lost its feed; three seconds later, he heard a muffled explosion as the Kite executed the kill command, blowing itself up. By then, he was on his bike, hoping to escape the two pickup trucks that had barreled out of the building just as the Kite exploded.