The Storm

CHAPTER 9

PAUL AND GAMAY TOOK A BUS FROM THE WATERFRONT TO the Maldives National University. It pulled to a halt at Billabong Station, and the two Americans stepped off the bus with a group of students as if they were attending night school.

“Ever want to go back to the university?” Gamay asked.

“Only if you go with me and let me carry your books,” he replied.

She smiled. “Might have to consider that.”

They made their way inside. The National University courses ran the gamut from traditional Sharia law to engineering, construction and health care. Its maritime engineering curriculum was widely known to be excellent, perhaps spurred on by the low-lying nation’s desire to prevent the rising seas from drowning it.

A colleague at the maritime school, who was familiar with NUMA, received Paul and Gamay. He introduced them to a female faculty member in a purple sari, Dr. Alyiha Ibrahim, a member of the sciences department.

“Thank you for seeing us,” Gamay said.

She took Gamay’s hand in both of hers. “In the ocean, like in the desert, travelers in need are not turned away,” she said. “And if there is a danger to Malé in what you have found, I would not only be selfish to ignore you, I would be a fool.”

“We don’t know if there’s any danger,” Gamay insisted, “just that something has gone wrong, and this may help us determine the cause.”

Dr. Ibrahim smiled, the mauve color of her wrapping highlighting the green tone in her eyes. “Then let’s not waste any time.”

She led them to a laboratory room. The scanning microscope was set up and ready to operate. A panel showed all systems green.

“May I?” Dr. Ibrahim asked.

Gamay handed her the vial and she drew out a sample. With great precision she placed it on a special tray and slid it into the scanning compartment.

A few minutes later the first photos came up on the screen.

The image was so strange, it caused each of them to pause. Gamay squinted, Paul stood with his mouth slightly open, and Dr. Ibrahim adjusted her glasses and leaned closer.

“What is that?” Paul asked, staring at the monitor.

“They look like dust mites,” Gamay said.

“I’m not sure what they are,” Dr. Ibrahim said. “Let me try increasing the magnification.”

The bulky electron microscope whirred and took another scan. As the second picture emerged on the screen, their surprise only deepened.

Dr. Ibrahim turned to Paul and Gamay. “I don’t know what to tell you,” she said. “I’ve never seen anything like this in my life.”

WITH PAUL and GAMAY at the university and Joe watching over Leilani, Kurt went through the personal effects of the missing crewmen. It felt wrong somehow, like picking over the bones of the dead, but it had to be done if just on the chance there was some clue hidden in them.

After an hour of working that thankless task, he was ready for it to be over. He found nothing to help him but at least one item that might be helpful to Leilani: a printed photo of the crew, her brother front and center, filled with joy, as if the world were his oyster.

He put the crew’s effects away and stepped out into the hall with the photo in hand. One door down he found the suite he’d booked for Joe and Leilani. It was divided into two adjoining rooms, but to reach the second room one had to make it past the first.

He knocked, heard nothing, and knocked again.

Finally the handle turned. Leilani’s face appeared, framed by the door, and it hit him just how strikingly beautiful she really was.

“Where’s your bodyguard?”

She opened the door wider. Joe was sound asleep on his bed, snoring softly, still in his clothes and even his shoes.

“Top-notch security,” she said. “Nothing gets past him.”

Kurt tried not to laugh. It had been a thirty-hour day for Joe. Even if his animal magnetism didn’t have an off switch, apparently the rest of Joe did.

Kurt slipped inside. Leilani closed the door gently and padded silently across the carpet in bare feet, black yoga pants, and a green T-shirt.

Kurt followed her to the adjoining room, which had the shades drawn and the lights dimmed.

“I was meditating,” she said. “I feel so out of touch with any kind of balance right now. One minute I’m angry, one minute I want to cry. You were right, I’m unstable.”

Funny thing, she seemed okay to him. “I don’t know, you seem to be hanging in there.”

“I have something to put my mind to now,” she said. “Finding out what happened. I have you to thank for that, however grudgingly you agreed. Any leads?”

“Not yet,” he said. “So far, all we’ve found are inconsistencies.”

“What kind of inconsistencies?”

“Kimo and the others were looking for temperature anomalies,” he said. “They found them, but not the way they expected. Ocean temperatures are rising all over the world, but they discovered reduced temperatures in a tropical zone. That’s the first odd data point.”

“What else?”

“Strangely enough, reduced ocean temperatures are normally a welcome thing. Cooler temps lead to higher oxygen content in the water and more abundant life. That’s why warm, shallow seas like the Caribbean are relatively barren while the dark, cold sections of the North Atlantic are where the fishing fleets congregate.”

She nodded. And Kurt realized he was going over basic data and conclusions that she would be easily able to make for herself, but they knew so little it seemed best to leave nothing out.

She seemed baffled. “But Kimo told me they were finding lower levels of dissolved oxygen, less krill, less plankton and less fish in the water even as the temperature dropped.”

“Exactly,” Kurt said. “It’s backward. Unless something was absorbing the heat and using up the oxygen as well.”

“What could do that?” she asked. “Toxic waste? Some type of anaerobic compound?”

Ever since he double-checked the numbers, Kurt had been racking his brain for a possible cause. Volcanic activity, red tides, algae blooms—all types of things could result in dead zones and deoxygenated waters, but none of them explained the temperature drop. Upwelling of deep cold water might, but that usually brought abundant nutrients and higher levels of oxygen to the surface, causing an explosion of sea life in the local vicinity.

It was a problem, perhaps even a problem Kimo and the others had been killed for discovering. But it didn’t tell them anything directly.

“I don’t know,” he said. “We’ve gone over everything they sent off, including Kimo’s e-mails to you, just to see if we missed anything. So far, we’ve come up blank.”

A flash of concern appeared on her face. “You looked over his e-mails to me?”

“We had to,” Kurt said. “On the chance he’d inadvertently sent you some vital piece of data.”

“Did you find anything?”

“No,” he said. “I didn’t really expect to. But we can’t leave any stone unturned.”

She sighed, and her shoulders slumped. “Maybe this is too big for us. Maybe we should leave it up to some international organization to investigate.”

“What happened to all that determination from a few hours ago?”

“I was angry. My adrenaline was pumping. Now I’m trying to be more rational. Maybe the UN or the Maldives National Defense Force can handle the investigation. Maybe we should just go home. Now that I’ve met you and your friends, I can’t bear the thought of anyone else being hurt.”

“That isn’t going to happen,” Kurt said. “We’re not leaving this to some agency that has no real interest at stake.”

She nodded her agreement as Kurt’s phone chirped.

He pulled it from a pocket and clicked answer.

It was Gamay.

“Making any progress?” he asked.

“Sort of,” she said.

“What do you have?”

“I’ve sent you a photo,” she said. “A snapshot from the microscope. Pull it up.”

Kurt switched into the message mode on his phone and pulled up Gamay’s photo. In black-and-white but crystal clear, a shape that looked both insectlike and strangely mechanical. The edges of the subject were sharp, the angles perfect.

Kurt squinted, studying the photo. It resembled a spider with six long arms extending forward and two legs at the rear that fanned out into flat paddles shaped like a whale’s tail. Each set of arms ended in different types of claws, while a ridge running down the center of the thing’s back was marked with various protrusions that looked less like spines or barbs and more like the printed wires of a microchip.

In fact, the whole thing looked positively machinelike.

“What is it?”

“It’s a micronic robot,” Gamay said.

“A what?”

“That thing you’re looking at is the size of a dust mite,” she said. “But it’s not organic, it’s a machine. A micromachine. And if the sample I took is any indication, these same machines are seared into the residue from the fire in great numbers.”

He looked at the photo, thinking about what Gamay had just said. He tilted the phone so Leilani could see. “Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie,” he mumbled.

“Try four and twenty million,” Gamay said.

Kurt thought about their earlier conversation and the theory that the crew had set fire to the boat to rid themselves of something more dangerous.

“So these things got on the boat, and the crew tried to burn them off,” he said, thinking aloud. “But how’d they get aboard in the first place?”

“No idea,” Gamay said.

“What are they for?” he asked. “What do they do?”

“No idea on that either,” she repeated.

“Well, if they’re machines, someone had to make them.”

“Exactly our thinking,” Gamay said. “And we believe we know who that might be.”

Kurt’s phone pinged again, and another photo came up. This time it was a page from a magazine article. A photo in the corner showed a businessman stepping out of a gaudy orange Rolls-Royce. His mahogany hair was pulled back into a long ponytail, and bushy beard covered most of his face. His suit looked like a navy blue Armani or some other double-breasted Italian cut.

“Who is he?” Kurt asked.

“Elwood Marchetti,” Gamay said. “Billionaire, electronics genius. Years ago he designed a process for printing circuits onto microchips that everyone uses today. He’s also a huge proponent of nanotechnology. He once claimed nanobots will do everything in the future, from cleaning cholesterol out of our arteries to mining gold from seawater.”

“And these things are nanobots?” Kurt asked.

“Actually they’re larger,” she said. “If you think of a nanobot as a Tonka truck, these things are earthmovers. A similar concept, still microscopic, but about a thousand times bigger.”

Leilani was studying the photo. “So this guy Marchetti is the problem,” she said firmly.

Kurt reserved judgment. “How do we connect these microbots to him?”

This time Paul answered. “According to an international patent on file, this is very close to one of his designs.”

Kurt’s own sense of righteous anger was building, he noticed Leilani wringing her hands.

“Is he using them for something?” Kurt asked. “Experimenting?”

“Not that we know of.”

“Then how’d they end up in the sea?” he asked. “And more important, how’d they end up on the catamaran?”

Paul’s guess came through. “Either they escaped from the lab like the killer bees forty years ago or Marchetti is using them for something without letting the rest of the world know.”

Kurt clenched his jaw, grinding his teeth. “We need to pay this guy a visit.”

“I’m afraid he lives on a private island,” Paul replied.

“That’s not going to stop me from knocking on his door. Where do I find it?”

“That’s a rather good question,” Gamay said.

There was an odd tone in Gamay’s voice, and Kurt wasn’t sure he followed. “Are you saying no one knows what island he lives on?”

“No,” she told him. “Just that no one knows exactly where it is right now.”

Kurt felt as if he and the Trouts were having two different conversations. “What are you guys talking about?”

“Marchetti is building an artificial island,” Paul explained. “He calls it Aqua-Terra. He launched the core last year and has been outfitting it ever since. But because it’s mobile, and because he chooses to stay in international waters, no one’s quite sure where he is at any given time.”

Suddenly, Kurt remembered hearing about it. “I thought that was just a publicity stunt.”

Leilani spoke up. “No,” she said, “it’s real. I read something about it. Six months ago it was anchored off Malé. Kimo said he wanted to see it if he got the chance.”

“Okay,” Kurt said. “You guys find out whatever you can about these microbots. I’m putting a call in to Dirk. As soon as we track down Marchetti, I’m going to pay him a visit. I’m sure a floating island isn’t too hard to find.”