Micro

Chapter 35

Kalikimaki Industrial Park 31 October, 10:30 a.m.

Lieutenant Dan Watanabe parked his brown Ford in the single, lone parking space marked VISITORS. The painted metal building stood next to the skeleton of a half-finished warehouse on one side and an empty lot on the other side dotted with thickets of underbrush. By the warehouse, he noticed an area covered with gravel. He walked over to it and picked up a few pieces. Crushed limestone. Interesting. It looked like the same stuff trapped in the PI Rodriguez’s tires. He dropped a few pieces in his shirt pocket, for Dorothy Girt to have a look at.

The parking lot around Nanigen’s building was full of cars.

“How’s business?” he said to the receptionist.

“They don’t tell me much.”

A coffeemaker on a table diffused the sour smell of coffee that had been heating for hours.

“Would you like me to make some coffee?” the receptionist asked.

“I think you already did.”

The company’s security chief walked in. Don Makele was a heavyset man packed with muscle. Makele said, “Any news on the missing students?”

“Could we talk in your office?”

As they entered the main part of the building, they passed doors that were shut. Windows looked into rooms, but the windows were covered with black blinds on the inside. Why were the blinds all drawn? Why were they black? As he walked along, Dan Watanabe felt the presence of a hum, a vibration coming up through the floor. That hum meant there was a lot of AC electrical current running in the building. For what?

Makele ushered Watanabe into his office. Windowless. Watanabe noticed a photograph of a woman, must be the guy’s wife. Two children, just keiki s. He noticed a plaque on the wall. U.S. Marine Corps.

Watanabe sat on a chair. “Nice kids.”

“I love ’em to death,” Makele said.

“You served in the Marines?”

“Intel.”

“That’s cool.” Chitchat never hurts, and you can pick up things. “We found your vice president, Alyson Bender—” he began.

“We know. She was very depressed.”

“What got her depressed?”

“She’d lost her boyfriend, Eric Jansen. Who drowned.”

“So Ms. Bender and Mr. Jansen were romantically connected, I take it,” Watanabe said. He could feel the uneasiness of the man under the surface. Cop instinct. He went on: “It’s actually pretty hard for seven people to vanish in these islands. I’ve called around to see if the students showed up anywhere. Like Molokai. Everybody on Molokai knows everybody else on Molokai. If seven kids from Massachusetts showed up there, the Molokai folks would be talking about it.”

“Don’t I know. I was born on Moloka‘i,” Makele said.

Watanabe noticed that he pronounced the name of the island in the old way. Moloka‘i. With the glottal stop. It made him wonder if Makele spoke any Hawaiian. People born on Molokai sometimes did speak Hawaiian; they learned it from their grandparents or from “uncles”—traditional teachers. “Molokai is a beautiful place,” Watanabe remarked.

“It’s the old Hawai‘i. What’s left of it.”

Watanabe changed the subject. “Do you know a gentleman named Marcos Rodriguez?”

Makele looked blank. “No.”

“How about Willy Fong. A lawyer up north of the freeway.” Watanabe did not mention they were dead.

Makele picked it up anyway. “Sure—” He squinted, looked puzzled. “The guys who got stabbed, right?”

“Yes, in Fong’s office. Fong, Rodriguez, and another man, still unidentified.”

Makele seemed confused. He spread his hands out and said, “What am I missing, lieutenant?”

“I don’t know.” Watanabe watched Makele to see his reaction to that.

Makele seemed surprised and irritated, but he stayed calm. Watanabe was pleased to see that the security chief fidgeted in his chair. He’s nervous, Watanabe thought.

“What I know about those murders,” Don Makele went on, “is what I saw on the news.”

“What makes you think they were murders?”

“It’s what they said on the news.” Makele paused.

“Actually they said it was suicide,” Watanabe said. “Did you think it was murder?”

Makele didn’t take it casually. “Lieutenant, is there some reason why you want to talk to me about this—?”

“Fong or Rodriguez weren’t doing any work for Nanigen, were they?”

“Are you kidding? Nanigen would never hire losers like that,” Makele answered.

Don Makele knew very well what had happened to Fong and Rodriguez. Nineteen security bots had disappeared on the night of the break-in. They had swarmed onto an intruder, cut into his body, and circulated in the man’s bloodstream, slicing open arteries from the inside. But the bots weren’t supposed to do this. They weren’t programmed to kill anybody. They were supposed to photograph the intruder and cut the skin lightly, making the intruder bleed and thus leave a blood trace behind—and they were supposed to trigger a silent alarm. That was all. Nothing dangerous, certainly not lethal. But somebody had programmed the bots to kill. Vin Drake did it, Makele thought. The bots had sliced he intruder to ribbons, then had cut their way out of the man’s body, and jumped from that man to the next man like fleas. Bloodthirsty, lethal fleas. A burglar and his friends had gotten themselves killed. Accidents happen more often to assholes. But what did this detective know? Makele wasn’t sure, and it made him nervous.

He decided to get tough. He leaned forward and put his voice into Official Mode and said, “Is this company or any of its employees the subject of a criminal investigation?”

Watanabe let a signficant silence elapse. “No,” he finally answered. Not at this time.

“I’m glad to hear that, lieutenant. Because this company is highly ethical. The founder, Vincent Drake, is known for putting his own money into cures for orphan diseases, diseases that nobody else bothers to cure because they aren’t profitable. Mr. Drake is a good man who puts his heart where his money is.”

Lieutenant Dan Watanabe listened to this with a neutral face. “You mean, he puts his money where his heart is.”

“That’s what I said,” Makele answered, gazing back at Watanabe.

Watanabe placed his card on the security man’s desk, and wrote a phone number on it with his pen. “That’s my cell. Call it any time if anything comes up. I think Mr. Drake is expecting me.”

Vin Drake sat behind his desk, leaning back in an executive chair. An Oriental rug covered the floor, an antique. The air held a pleasant aroma of cigar. Given the pleasance of the aroma, Watanabe concluded that the cigar had cost more than ten dollars. The office had no windows. Soft panel lighting. He noticed, through a side door, a private bathroom with marble fixtures. Interesting to see that inside a warehouse. The guy took care of himself.

“We’re very distressed by the recent events,” Drake said. “We’ve been hoping you could help us.”

“We’re doing our best,” Watanabe said. “I just wanted to get more background on the disappearances.”

“Sure.”

Watanabe had been enjoying the portrait of Drake on the wall behind him. It wasn’t bad. Maybe a little pretentious, but lively. “Can you tell me what your company does?”

“Basically we make small robots and use them to explore nature, as a way of discovering new drugs to save human lives.”

“How small?”

Drake shrugged and put his thumb and forefinger half an inch apart.

Watanabe squinted. “You mean half an inch? Like the size of a peanut?”

“Maybe a little smaller,” Drake answered.

“How much smaller?”

“Somewhat.”

“One millimeter, say?”

Drake gave a crisp smile. “That’s barely feasible.”

“But have you done it?”

“Done what?”

“Made robots one millimeter in size.”

“We’re getting into proprietary areas.” Drake leaned back.

“Have you had any industrial accidents with your robots?”

“Accidents?” Drake frowned, and then broke into a chuckle. “Yes—frequently.”

“Anybody get hurt?”

“It’s the other way around.” Drake laughed. “People step on the robots by accident. The robots always lose.” He sighed and looked at his watch. “I have a meeting.”

“Sure. Just one thing.” Watanabe would describe what he’d seen in the microscope, but he would not show Drake a photograph of the device, because a photo was evidence, and you don’t flash evidence. So he kept things vague. “We’ve become aware of a device, pretty small, that appears to have what might be a propeller and cutting blades. It might be able to fly, or swim in somebody’s bloodstream. Is this a Nanigen product?”

Drake took a moment to reply; Watanabe thought the moment lasted a beat too long. “No,” Drake answered. “We don’t make robots like that.”

“Does anybody make them?”

Drake gave Watanabe a careful look. Where was this cop going? “I think you’re describing a theoretical device.”

“What kind?”

“Well, it would be a surgical micro-robot.”

“A what?”

“A surgical micro-bot. Also called a surgibot. It’s a very small robot used for medical procedures. In theory, a surgibot could be made small enough to circulate in a patient’s bloodstream. Equipped with scalpels, a swarm of surgibots could perform microsurgery. They could be injected into a patient, and the surgibots would swim through the bloodstream to the target tissue. Surgibots could cut arterial plaques from the inside of an artery, for example. Or a swarm of surgibots could hunt down metastasized cancer cells. The surgibots would kill the cancer cells one at a time, thus defeating the cancer. But as of now, surgibots are a dream, not a reality.”

“So you’re not actually building these…what you call…surgibots?”

“Not like that, no.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t understand,” Watanabe said.

Drake sighed. “We’re getting into an area that’s very sensitive.”

“Why?”

“Nanigen is doing research…for you.”

“For me?” Watanabe said, looking mystified.

“You pay taxes?”

“Sure.”

“Nanigen is working for you.”

“Oh, so you’re doing government—?”

“We can’t go there, lieutenant.”

They were doing secret government work, classified, something with small robots. Drake was warning him off, hinting he’d have trouble with the government if he pursued this. Fine. Abruptly, Watanabe changed gears. “Why did your vice president jump off his boat?”

“What? What do you mean?”

“Eric Jansen was an experienced boater. He knew to stay with his boat even in surf. He jumped into the surf for a reason. Why did he jump?”

Drake stood up, his face flushed. “I have no idea what you’re getting at. We’ve asked you to find our missing students. You haven’t found anybody. We’ve lost two key executives. You haven’t given us a damn bit of help there, either.”

Watanabe stood up. “Sir, we did find Ms. Bender. We’re still looking for Eric Jansen.” He took out his wallet and nudged out his business card.

Drake took the card and sighed as he looked at it, and an unpleasant expression flitted across his face. “To be frank, we are disappointed with the Honolulu police.” He let the card flutter down to his desk. “One wonders what you actually do.”

“Well, sir, the Honolulu Police Department is older than the New York Police Department—I didn’t know if you knew that. We’ll just keep working our cases like we always do, sir.”

“We’ve got five more of them.” Dorothy Girt laid the photographs out for Watanabe on her lab bench. They showed the same devices, each with a propeller inside a housing and a gooseneck with blades. “I found them in the Asian John Doe. A smelly job.”

“How did you find them, Dorothy? They’re really small.”

Dorothy Girt flashed him a cool smile of triumph, and opened a drawer, and held up a heavy object. It was an industrial horseshoe magnet. “I swiped it over the wounds. Darned thing is heavy.”

She put the magnet aside, then showed him a blowup photo of one of the robots. The bot had been split cleanly, in a perfect cutaway view. Incredibly small chips and circuitry were visible, and something that looked like a battery, a driveshaft, gears…

“This thing is cut perfectly in half! How did you do that, Dorothy?”

“It was simple. I mounted it in an epoxy block, just like a tissue sample. Then I sliced it with a microtome. Same thing you do with tissue samples.” Dorothy’s microtome, with an ultrasharp blade, had split the micro-bot right down the middle. “Note this feature, Dan.”

He bent over the photo and followed her finger to a boxlike object in the guts of the robot. A small lowercase n was printed on the box.

“So,” he said. “The CEO lied to me.” He wanted to slap Dorothy on the back, but stopped himself at the last moment. Dorothy Girt didn’t seem like a person who would welcome the gesture. Instead he offered her a slight nod of the head in the Japanese mode of respect—a family habit. “Excellent work, Dorothy.”

“Hmp,” she snorted. Her work was never anything but excellent.