Smith knew where this was going and shook his head. “It’s not us, Greg.”
“So you say. Look, I know you’re a hell of a scientist and you’re pretty well connected, but it’s not hard to believe that something like this could go on way above your pay grade.”
It was completely understandable and logical that Maple would head down this road, but Smith didn’t have the luxury of letting his friend get trapped in a blind alley.
“I’m going to say this just once, Greg, and then we’re going to leave it alone: there’s no such thing as above my pay grade.”
Maple looked at him skeptically but then quickly realized that Smith meant what he’d said.
“What if we cast a wider net? Maybe someone doing brilliant work in a related field?”
The engineer shrugged and shook his head.
“Okay. What about someone who worked in nanotech and died?”
Another shrug.
“Someone who worked in the field in the past but then moved on to something else?”
That seemed to get a glimmer.
“What?”
“Well,” Maple started, chewing thoughtfully on his ragged thumbnail. “There was a guy, but it was a long time ago. And by a long time ago, I mean when you and I were still using Clearasil and chasing cheerleaders. He wasn’t the theoretical father of nanotech—that was probably Richard Feynman—but he was the practical father. He was the first guy to make something actually work in the real world. But then he left his university position and started up a consulting company. As far as I know, he never worked in the field again.”
“Name?”
“Ito.”
Smith felt a jolt of adrenaline at the Asian-sounding name. “Chinese?”
“Hideki Ito,” Maple said. “Japanese.”
Smith began pacing around the lab again. “What’s Ito done since he started consulting?”
The engineer frowned. “I honestly don’t know. I mean, I assume he’s still alive because I haven’t heard otherwise but I’m not aware of any meaningful work coming out of him since the nanotech stuff early in his career.”
A Japanese scientist. A Japanese reactor. As the pieces fell into place, the picture seemed to get hazier. Smith continued to pace, stopping short less than a minute later.
“What?” Maple said. “Do you have something?”
Smith looked him directly in the eye. “First of all, I want to reiterate that this is so far beyond top secret we don’t even have a category for it. If this leaks, there would be consequences.”
“Are you threatening me, Jon?”
“Yes. Look, I’m sorry I got you involved in this, Greg. But the fact is you are involved and there’s nothing I can do about that now.”
“Are you kidding? I have honest-to-God molecular factories in my lab. I wouldn’t have missed this for the world. You’ve known me for a long time, Jon. This isn’t my first rodeo. You can trust me.”
“Okay. Then here’s the rest of it. The radiation levels in Fukushima’s Reactor Four were way too high to be explained by the damage done by the tsunami. That reactor was supposed to have been defueled.”
Maple frowned. “After that buildup, I have to admit that I was hoping for something more interesting.”
“Could radiation destroy these things?”
“At high enough levels, sure.”
“So these little machines are basically just artificial viruses, right? They co-opt their host for fuel to replicate themselves. And the more there are of them, the more damage they do.”
“Yeah, that’s probably a good way of thinking about it for someone with your background. They’re viruses that destroy the cellular structure of concrete, steel, and plastic.”
“Well, I’ve worked with some of the most dangerous pathogens on the planet over the years. The first thing I think about when I’m doing it is containment. In my case a whole lot of stainless steel, four-inch-thick glass, air locks, and suits with separate oxygen supplies. And if all that fails, there’s a toxic chemical shower that kills everything it touches.”
From his expression, it was clear that Maple was starting to see where he was headed. “Of course! Why didn’t I think of that? Reactor Four wasn’t sabotaged with the nanobots. They were being developed there! The tsunami hit, containment was breached, and they flooded the lab with radiation. That’s why there’s no activity in the samples you gave me. They’re dead!”
33
Prince George’s County, Maryland
USA
When Jon Smith entered Klein’s office, a young woman with tattoo-covered arms and a gold nose ring looked extraordinarily happy to see him. It was hard not to sympathize. Being stuck in a small room with Fred Klein and Randi Russell could be a little intense.
“How are you feeling?” she said with genuine concern.
“Better every day, Star. Thanks for asking.”
Star Minetti was a thirty-something who looked like she’d spent most of her life dealing drugs from the back of a Harley. In fact, she was a former librarian and research genius. If you threw her in a warehouse full of unsorted government documents, she’d come up with the exact crumpled Post-it note you wanted inside of three hours. The fact that the old man was willing to overlook all the piercings and body art pretty much said it all about her skill level.
Klein greeted him with a subtle nod as he took a seat, but Randi ignored him in favor of fiddling with the lid of her travel mug. It was to be expected. Their conversation about Kaito Yoshima had strayed pretty far into the personal and after those kinds of exchanges, she always seemed to pull back a bit.
“Did you find Dr. Ito?” Smith asked.
“Not exactly,” Star replied, standing against the wall in what seemed to be an effort to blend in with the artwork. “He does have an address, though. A nice house outside Ono. It’s right there in the local phone book.”
Smith started to ask a question but she anticipated it. “It’s a few miles from the Fukushima plant.”
“That’s what I was afraid of. Can I assume he’s not living there anymore?”
“It’s closed up.”
“And when did he move out?”
“It was one of the areas evacuated after the tsunami. He never came back.”
Smith let out a long breath.
“Go on, Star,” Klein prompted.
“Yes, sir. Dr. Ito started a private consulting company after leaving his research position at Kyoto University. He makes good money—around four hundred thousand US dollars according to his tax returns. All of it comes from three corporate clients.”
“What corporations?” Randi said, finally looking up from her mug.
“I could give you the names but they wouldn’t mean anything. As near as I can tell, they’re just shells. They seem to have been set up solely to pay him.”
“Does he have any employees?”
“None. It’s a one-man show.”
Smith pushed his chair back so he could see her better. “And what about that other thing I wanted you to look into?”
“General Takahashi? You were right. It’s a bit of a maze, but it appears that his family has significant ownership in the company that operated the Fukushima plant.”
Not what he wanted to hear. A few days ago he would have said that discovering the Chinese were behind the nanotech at Fukushima would have been a worst-case scenario. This, though, had the potential to be a hell of a lot worse.
“Great job as always, Star. Thanks.”
She made a beeline for the door, obviously anxious to escape before Smith changed his mind and asked her to stay.
“Shut the door behind you, please,” Klein called after her.
She did and they sat in silence for a few moments before Smith spoke. “The dangers involved with a weapon like this can’t be overstated. And neither can the chances that it could go completely out of control.”
“Are you sure it’s meant as a weapon?” Klein said. “I read your report and
looked into the technology. Is it possible that this was one of the Takahashi family’s commercial pursuits? Nanotech is a growing field and I wouldn’t be surprised if they were interested.”
“It’s possible,” Smith admitted. “But why so much secrecy? And why self-replication across three materials that are critical to modern civilization and warfare? If I were working on this, I’d fuel it with some incredibly rare material. Then, if I lost containment, I wouldn’t have to pump a bunch of radiation into it to keep it from wiping out the industrialized world.”
Klein leaned back in his chair, staring for a moment at an antique map hanging on the wall. “There seems to be reasonable agreement that the Japanese are looking to expand their military capability and move out from under our umbrella. If I were an island nation with limited resources and manpower, this might be just the kind of weapon that would attract me.”
Randi suddenly stood. “I know a couple of the analysts at the agency who keep tabs on the Japanese. Maybe they could give us some context.”
Klein gave her a brief nod. “Talk to them. Quietly.”
She spun on her heels but then paused. “You look good, Jon. It’s nice to see you not shuffling around like an old man.”
A moment later she was through the door and gone.
Smith pulled a piece of paper from his pocket and slid it across the desk. “I’ve got a little shopping list for you, Fred. You know. Just in case.”
Klein’s eyes widened when he read the note. “Jesus, Jon. I’m not sure America even has one of these anymore.”
“See what you can do.”
“I assume you don’t want it dropped in your garage.”
Smith shook his head. “Send it to the Okinawa air base and put it under wraps. Then hope to God we never get a chance to use it.”
34
CIA Headquarters
Langley, Virginia
USA
Randi Russell hustled down the hallway, already late because of a number of wrong turns. It never ceased to irritate her that she could flawlessly navigate the tangle of ancient streets and alleys crisscrossing the Middle East, but every time she came to headquarters, she got lost. Of course, she set foot in Virginia rarely and then only when there was no other option.
She spotted the conference room she’d been searching for and picked up her pace a bit. The men waiting for her were the agency’s top minds on Japan and, in light of the shit storm going on in the Pacific, probably had better things to do.
Randi juggled her notepad and coffee, gripping the door handle and grimacing as she entered the room. She hated office buildings and everything about them. The smell, the fluorescent light, the cheesy artwork. But most of all, she hated the bureaucracy that incubated in them like bacteria.
The two men sitting next to each other behind the table didn’t immediately react to her arrival other than to stare. Not an uncommon reaction in the scheme of things. She’d met them in passing years ago but, by design, she was a bit of a ghost. And she’d apparently built quite a reputation based on a bunch of outlandish stories quietly passed around Langley’s back offices. Most weren’t true, of course. The vast majority of the CIA’s employees would never have the clearance to hear the even more outlandish real ones.
The man on the right suddenly leaped to his feet and strode around the table. The two analysts had picked up the nicknames Laurel and Hardy at some point, and the monikers seemed even more fitting now than when she’d first run across them.
“Randi, Randi…” Carl Rainsburg said, taking her hand and kissing it. “What a pleasure it is to see you again…”
He was probably 6 feet 6 and no more than 170 pounds dripping wet. A sandy-haired Caucasian who had a master’s degree in Japanese literature from a school near Tokyo. His still-seated companion was of first-generation Japanese descent, a bit chubby, with an awful haircut and a habit of chewing his lower lip when he got nervous. At that moment, he was gnawing on it like he’d missed lunch.
“So smooth,” Randi said, retrieving her hand and finding a chair. Rainsburg rushed to pull it out for her before rejoining his companion on the other side of the table.
“Nice to see you, Ms. Russell,” Stephen Sato said, briefly interrupting his quest to ingest his lower lip.
“You, too. I appreciate both of you taking the time to meet with me. I’m guessing you’re pretty busy right now.”
“Not at all,” Rainsburg said. “It’s not every day we get to sit down with a beautiful legend like yourself.”
“Uh-huh.”
“You’ll have to excuse my colleague,” Sato said with a grin that came off a little slier than she’d have given him credit for. “We always have time for the people hanging it out there in the field—beautiful or not. What can we do for you, Ms. Russell?”
“I’m concerned about what’s going on in Asia.”
“You and everyone else on the planet,” Rainsburg said. “And take it from us, you should be. That’s a pretty serious staring contest they’ve got going on right now.”
“What I want to know is why. I understand what the Chinese are getting out of this, but what do the Japanese have to gain?”
Sato let out a loud breath. “How long do you have?”
“Give me the Reader’s Digest version.”
“It’s all about history,” Rainsburg started. “Thousands of years of it, culminating in some serious nastiness during World War Two. Let’s just say that the two countries despise each other. You know that—you’ve worked in China.”
She nodded. “But it seems like Masao Takahashi would be backing away from this thing like his ass was on fire. Why isn’t he? Am I wrong when I say that the Japanese military is no match for the Chinese?”
“Japanese self-defense forces,” Sato corrected. “Officially, the Japanese don’t have a military because of the constitution we wrote for them after the war. Having said that, they do have the fifth-biggest defense budget on the planet.”
“Still, she’s right that they’re no match for China,” Rainsburg interjected.
“Not even close. Don’t get me wrong now. Their people are well trained and they have some decent gear, but against the Chinese? No way. You’re talking about a quarter million troops with conventional weapons versus two and a quarter million troops with a nuclear arsenal behind them. Last time I checked, those ain’t good odds.”
“But,” Rainsburg said, “there’s a rub.”
“I know,” Randi said. “We have a treaty saying we’ll defend them.”
“Exactly. And that makes the whole situation a lot more complicated. The Japanese people are understandably tired of taking it on the chin for things that happened before most of them were born. They want respect and they want to stand on their own two feet.”
“But Takahashi courting a war and then letting us fight it for him isn’t Japan standing on its own two feet. It’s Japan stepping on ours.”
“You make an interesting point,” Sato said. “Takahashi’s a complicated guy. He’s nationalistic as hell, but he isn’t stupid. And frankly he doesn’t have any great love for the US. He blames us for his family having a hard time after the war. To be honest, Carl and I have been struggling to figure out what his endgame is here.”
“Could he be starting to lose it? He’s in his seventies, right? A little dementia, maybe?”
Sato shook his head. “No indication of that at all. Trust us when we tell you that Takahashi has an angle. Maybe he’s changed his mind about politicians and he’s looking to run for office. We haven’t been able to figure it out yet.”
Randi chose her next words carefully, not wanting to give away too much. “What if he thinks he can win?”
“What,” Rainsburg said. “By dragging us in? What would—”
He fell silent when Randi shook her head. “What if he thinks he can win without us?”
They looked at each other and burst out laughing again.
“Sorry,” Sato said, while Rainsburg continued to sn
icker. “Look, Takahashi’s a little nuts and there’s no question that his notion of Japanese superiority goes beyond disturbing. But that guy knows more about military strategy and history than most of our top generals combined. It doesn’t take a genius to look at the Asian chessboard and see that Japan doesn’t have any pieces.”
“So you’re saying that if he did believe that,” Randi offered as innocuously as possible, “there’s a chance that he would be right.”
“Believe what? That the Japanese defense forces could defeat China? Why would he?”
“I’m just throwing it out there,” Randi said. “What if, for the sake of argument, the Japanese defense forces have capabilities we’re not aware of?”
Rainsburg rolled his eyes. “Sounds like we should introduce her to Eric.”
“Who’s Eric?”
“Eric Fujiyama,” Rainsburg said. “He used to work here, but he let it get to him. You know how it is. We’re all conspiracy theorists, but Eric went a little too far.”
Sato pointed to his head. “Tinfoil-hat territory. He thinks Japan is in the process of taking over the universe.”
“Interesting,” Randi said. “Maybe you should.”
“Should what?”
“Introduce us.”
They looked at each other but this time without the laughter. Their sudden hesitance seemed to suggest there was more to this story, and Randi suspected she knew what it was.
“You still stay in touch with him, don’t you?”
Both men stared guiltily down at the table. Sato was the first to speak. “He’s a wacko, but he’s also really smart. The guy’s forgotten more about Japan than most people will ever know.”
“Maybe even us,” Rainsburg said.
“Okay,” Randi said. “Sounds like he might be my man. You got a number?”
They both grinned.
“What?”
“He doesn’t really like phones,” Sato said.
“Carrier pigeon?”
Rainsburg scribbled something down on a sticky note and held it out to her. “This is his PO box in Portland. Handwrite a letter and send it there.”