“Okay, it’s a safe bet Aariz Qaderi and the CMR are invited to the auction. Do we know where Qaderi is now?”
“As of two days ago, still in Grozny. I’m retasking a satellite right now for a pass over his house. We’ll know something in about four hours. In the meantime, we’ve got a problem we have to solve first.”
“Which is?”
“Our tracking method just got flushed down the toilet — or at least partially.”
Four months earlier, having decided the arsenal auction was genuine, Fisher and Grimsdottir began searching for a method, not only to tag and track the weapons once they left the auction site, but to find the auction site itself. Standard GPS-oriented tracking methods were a nonstarter. With hundreds of millions of dollars at stake, Ernsdorff and his employer would make sure the attendees and the weapons were clean when they arrived at the auction site. No matter how small and how well disguised, GPS trackers emit electromagnetic waves. It was the unavoidable nature of the beast. If Fisher was going to have any chance of making sure the weapons didn’t disappear into the black hole of the terrorist underworld, he needed an unorthodox tracking method.
As it turned out, such technology existed, but it did not belong to the United States or any of her allies but was instead the brainchild of private Italian researcher named Dr. Terzo Lucchesi, one of perhaps six scientists who had pushed the field of nanotechnology to its farthest reaches. What Lucchesi was doing in his Sardinia-based laboratory was the stuff of science fiction.
In an ironic twist, Grimsdottir and Fisher attempted to start their own doppelganger factory, writ small, by hacking into Lucchesi’s mainframe and stealing what they needed: an atomic scale tracking beacon that Fisher could deploy at a distance and Grimsdottir could monitor remotely. The most promising approach came from one of Lucchesi’s projects, code named Ajax, which involved molecular, photonic-crystal-based robots designed for microscopic electronic repair. Of course, as did most nanotechnologies, Ajax had a plethora of collateral applications, including the signal-hijacking of silicon microchips.
Once Grimsdottir had extracted the details of Ajax from Lucchesi’s mainframe, she turned the project over to her own private laboratory, deeply firewalled within Third Echelon, which set out to transform Lucchesi’s robots into microscopic, and therefore untraceable, beacons designed to infiltrate cell phones, laptop and desktop computers, modems, broadband routers — anything that used microchip technology to transmit digital data — and send a prearranged burst transmission using the host device’s own internal circuitry. Alone, each Ajax robot was ten nanometers, or one hundred thousand times smaller than the head of a pin; the number of bots required to hijack the average silicon microchip was 125—in all, smaller than a virus.
“So what’s the problem? Your lab geeks leave the door open?” Fisher asked.
Grimsdottir laughed. “Not quite that simple. We’re missing a line of code. We’ve got the bots working like a charm — we can program them to magnetically gravitate to anything with whatever EM signal we choose; they infiltrate, congregate, and diffuse where they’re supposed to, but they don’t transmit.”
You think Lucchesi left it out?”
“Yes. We don’t know why. Maybe he didn’t have it finished when we hacked in, or he held it back for security reasons.”
“How long is this line of code?”
“Four thousand or so characters.”
“Long line. You’ve tried to hack back into his mainframe?”
Grim nodded. “It’s not there.”
“At four thousand characters it’s not something he memorized,” Fisher observed. “Which means he’s got it stored somewhere else — somewhere not linked to his mainframe.”
“Agreed.”
“So I’m going to Sardinia.”
“Already got your flight booked.”
24
An afternoon Iberia flight took him from Madrid to Milan’s Malpensa Airport for a charter connection to Olbia on Sardinia’s northeastern coast, where he drove inland on the E840 until he reached the small town of Oschiri. Whether it was coincidence or sentimentality, Fisher didn’t know, but according to Grimsdottir’s biographical brief on Terzo Lucchesi the doctor had been born in Oschiri. He’d built his cutting-edge laboratory two miles from Oschiri, on the arid hills overlooking the Coghinas Reservoir, a location that had as much to do with water access as nostalgia, Fisher guessed. Nanotechnology fabrication produced copious amounts of heat; without fresh cooling water… Fisher hadn’t done enough research to know what happens to superheated nanotech, but he doubted it was pleasant.
Fisher drove into Oschiri, found a restaurant from whose terrace he could see the Lucchesi laboratory, and ordered lunch. While waiting, Fisher, again playing the lookie-look tourist, snapped photos of the countryside around the facility. As laboratories went, the building was architecturally impressive but petite: a white cube measuring two hundred feet to a side and sixty feet tall, with mirrored slit windows on each floor at five foot intervals.
During his approach to Oschiri, Fisher had seen signs of neither a police nor a military presence, which told him Lucchesi had pulled off a minor miracle beyond those he creates in the lab: He had managed to keep the Italian military and intelligence communities at bay. As it seemed unlikely neither entity was unaware of Lucchesi’s work, Fisher guessed this meant he was placating them with marvels peripheral to his nanotech work or that he had promised them something juicy in the future.
Or Fisher was simply wrong, and Lucchesi had a company of 9th Parachute Assault Regiment troopers inside the cube.
After lunch Fisher followed the SS392 northwest out of Oschiri and to the reservoir. The winding road took him within three-quarters of a mile of the laboratory before curving north along the shore, over a bridge, then east, following the contour of the reservoir before curving once again, this time north into the mountains. He stopped the car, turned around, and retraced his course to Oschiri.
He’d confirmed his suspicion: There were no boats to be rented on Coghinas Reservoir. If he wanted to exploit the laboratory’s natural weaknesses, he’d have to do it the hard way.
An hour later, back in Olbia, Fisher drove to the airport, found the FedEx pickup desk, and collected the box Grim had sent him. In a hurry, Fisher had decided against visiting another cache, which was in San Marino, on the opposite site of Italy’s boot. He drove to his hotel, unpacked the box, and powered up his OPSAT. As promised, Grim had left him an update:
1. Team returning to U.S. pending your results.
Fisher was under no illusion: With Kovac still breathing down her neck about whether he, Fisher, was verifiably dead, Grimsdottir might soon reach a place where she had to either actively continue the ruse or manufacture evidence that Fisher was still alive. Perpetrating the lie would give Kovac cause to fire her; coming up with new evidence would send Hansen and his team back in the field. Fisher would have to consider his options.
2. Started covert investigation: Ames’s finances, history, communications, etc.
Ames had lied about the source of the information that had sent the team to Vianden, and Ames had
