Lisa and I were mostly afraid that Dubai’s real CNRB team would turn up, but our cyberspace force was on top of things. We waited stiffly at that gate for ten minutes for the factory to be evacuated. I felt like an extra on a movie set. I had understood that LoTek had spent years infiltrating military and government systems around the world, but I hadn’t really understood the influence he could wield until I stood there, surrounded by forty emergency vehicles, while a massive factory complex was evacuated purely on his say-so. It was suddenly easy to understand how Grassfire had grown so widely and so powerful.
“Here they come,” Lisa muttered under her breath. I heard her through my earpiece; LoTek had wired the three of us into an ongoing conference call.
“See anyone familiar?” LoTek asked.
We had hoped that this evacuation alone might win the battle for us. If they tried to smuggle Sophie and Jesse out, we could use our temporary authority to rescue them and have their abductors arrested. But the people streaming out of the factory were all men, mostly Indian, with a sprinkling of Slavic faces; none were Jesse.
“No,” I said, when the trickle ran dry, as all the evacuees herded into police wagons for quarantine.
“Shit. We’re breaking LoTek’s Law here, big time. You pull a stunt like this, sooner or later people notice, and then they hunt you down, and eventually they find you. Only a matter of time. So kindly do me a favour. Hurry the fuck up.”
I looked at the huge squat slab that was a drone factory. Against its immensity the doors set in its side looked like mouse holes. Sophie, Jesse, and their captors were somewhere inside. Lisa and I had to somehow rescue them before anyone figured out what was really happening. I wished the real police could come in with us, but such was the price of our bioterror subterfuge. I wished we had some kind of weapons. The Russians inside were heavily armed. We had nothing except our false cloak of authority.
“All right,” I said, “let’s go.”
We marched forward towards the drone factory’s open doors.
Chapter 81
A barren hallway led us through a small nest of offices, changing rooms, meeting rooms, a cafeteria. The walls were adorned by punch clocks, a work schedule, a few safety posters, a whiteboard covered with scribbled Hindi. The silence and emptiness were eerie. I felt like I was in a real-life game of
The hallway opened up into a vast and vaulted interior space cluttered with machinery, some the size of a house, all of it arrayed around an assembly line covered with drones in various stages of construction. There were about two dozen workstations. Robotic arms hovered above them, frozen in mid-motion. The air was hot and smelled of metal. Nothing moved, and no one was visible, but I heard the hum of engines and computers in standby mode, ready to erupt into action again. It reminded me of the final scene of
I doubted our quarry was here; the assembly chamber had plenty of nooks and crannies to hide, but no locked doors. From the stacks of boxes and shipping containers at one end of the U-shaped line, to the fully assembled drones opposite, it was all one vast open space.
“Keep moving,” LoTek confirmed.
We followed the finished product into the next room, another cathedral-like chamber with two drone launchers on one side and a catch-net on the other. Quality assurance, I guessed; they tested each drone before moving it on to the next room, another abandoned industrial-sized space, this one full of stacked hexagonal metal cases six feet on a side and three high. They made me think of honey cells in beehives.
I opened one of the cases. Its hinged lid was was easy to manipulate. Inside a finished drone nestled in spongelike foam. For shipping, I supposed. I wondered why hexagons rather than cubes. You could tile a surface with either.
“The elevator?” Lisa asked. A freight elevator occupied one corner.
LoTek said, “Where is it?”
She checked her phone. “Northwest.”
“No. The other way.”
An idea hit, and I tarried a moment, reached down to the drone I had just revealed and opened the three panels in its body. Fuel cell; avionics, including a gleaming golden Axon chip; and payload, packed full of that waxy white substance that looked like Play-Doh.
“Holy shit,” Lisa said.
“Yeah. Loaded for bear.” For safety the electrical connectors were physically disconnected, just like in Mexico, knotted and taped down so that they couldn’t physically reach the detonator. “Makes sense. This way they only have to smuggle the Semtex to one place.” I stood. “Come on.”
Metal stairs led us up to an open door. The hallway beyond ran through another warren of offices before ending at a reinforced double steel doors with rubber seals around their edges. Signs warned that they led to the CLEAN ROOM. Of course: this was a chip fabrication plant, too, where the Axon FPGAs were produced. Integrated circuits could only be manufactured in a strictly controlled environment vacuumed clean of all contaminants.
An intercom hung on the wall. Through windows in the doors we saw the airlock-like space where supplicants who sought to enter the clean room’s hygienic nirvana were scrubbed clean of all dust. White chemical suits like those we wore hung on racks like discarded ghosts.
Through the windows in the doors beyond, I caught a glimpse of a woman’s face, and a bolt of adrenalin shot through me. She vanished an instant later, but even through my visor and two sets of windows, I could not fail to recognize the perfect, heart-shaped face of Anya Azaryeva.
“Jackpot,” I grunted.
Lisa tried the doors. They were locked.
I looked at the intercom. “Think you can talk them out?”
Our plan, inasmuch as we had one, was for Lisa to don her full airs of law-enforcement authority and talk them into fully evacuating the building before she had them arrested. Our only advantage was that as far as they knew we represented the full might and majesty of the United Arab Emirates.
“I can try,” she said, and pushed the intercom button.
A long moment passed. Then the intercom squawked to life, and Dmitri’s filtered voice demanded, “Who is this? What are you doing here?”
“Dubai CNRB Emergency Response,” Lisa said crisply. “We’ve received word of major biological and radiological threat in this building. We need you to evacuate immediately.”
The speaker clicked off, presumably for Dmitri and Anya to converse in private. Then he came back: “There is no threat here. You’ve been given false data. Your systems have been hacked.”
I flinched. That was bad on two levels. They might be able to communicate that suspicion to Dubai authorities, who might start investigating this crisis in more detail; and they might begin to suspect, if they hadn’t already, that Lisa and I were part of the hack.
“Sir, we need you to evacuate this building immediately, for your own safety. That is not a suggestion, that is an order.”
“No, that is a terrible idea.” I twitched at the sound of Anya’s voice. “This clean room is completely sealed from the outside word. If there is a toxic threat, which I do not believe, it can only be in the rest of the building. We would only endanger ourselves by leaving. We’re much safer here than if we evacuate.”
“Ma’am, how many of you are in there?”
“That’s not relevant.”
“Ma’am, I am ordering you to open these doors and let us in.”
Anya’s voice rose. “Even if you are who you say, you don’t know what you’re talking about. We are not leaving here.”
I winced. They suspected we were frauds, they weren’t going to evacuate, they weren’t going to let us in, and it actually wasn’t a bad rationale for staying inside.
“What is this threat?” Anya demanded. “Where did you get your information?”
