This is not too much to ask of an American diner.
The staff at Broadway in southeast Baltimore know and understand this. They get the whole diner experience. Sure, they have some froufrou stuff like the Pecan Belgian Waffle, which Rudy ordered, and the vegetarian omelet that made me lose respect for Sean, but they made my breakfast the right goddamn way. And if they have stuff like Philly Disco Fries and Crab Braided Soft Pretzels on their—God help me—Snack-a-Tizer menu, then I figure it’s there for the tourists. Before I moved to SoCal I was a regular, and the waitress remembered me and asked me if I wanted “the usual.” That was going to weigh heavily in her favor when it came to leaving a tip.
We settled in to a table away from everyone else. I’d put a service-dog vest on Ghost and he acted the part, sitting docilely and looking at the patrons with disinterest. The dog’s a great actor. Sean and I jockeyed for the seat with the best view of the front door. I let him win and sat next to him so I could use the mirror. While we waited for the food, I excused myself and stepped outside to call Sam Imura.
“Rudy and I just got to town,” I told him, “and things are already getting interesting.”
“Interesting how?”
I told him about the bugs. “Interesting toys, too. Nothing I’m familiar with. Maybe better than our stuff. Can you send someone by to grab them and run some tests? I’m at the Broadway.”
“Sure thing, Joe,” said Sam. I gave him the make, model, and license-plate numbers of Sean’s rental car. They wouldn’t need to come inside for the key. We’re the DMS, we don’t need no stinking keys.
“Send a team to do a full sweep of Sean’s house, too. And get clearance from the Big Man to have Sean’s office swept. I want this finessed so it doesn’t go through the commissioner’s office, because that means he’d call my dad, and I don’t want my dad to worry.”
“Would you like to tell me how to tie my shoelaces, too?” asked Sam.
“Sorry,” I said contritely. “Just a little frazzled. It’s been a day, y’know? Oh, hey, who’d you send to the farm?” My Uncle Jack’s farm was out in Robinwood, Maryland, which was an hour and a half’s drive northwest of Baltimore, up near the Pennsylvania border.
“The Pool Boys,” said Sam, and I grinned. Despite the last names, Tommy Pool and Alvin Pool weren’t in any way related, but they might as well have been. Tommy Pool was from Elkton and Alvin Poole was from right here in Baltimore. They both had Ocean City tans, lots of white teeth, surfer-blond hair, and tons of frat-boy charm. They didn’t look like government agents, and they certainly didn’t look like coldhearted killers, which is what they both were. Good guys, but not nice good guys. I understood why Sam had assigned them to this. Tommy was an Iraq War orphan who lost both his parents in that mess when he was nineteen. Alvin was a fifth-generation Special Operator. His two sisters and his older brother were Special Operators, or had been. Like Tommy, Alvin was the last living member of his family. If someone made a move on Sean’s wife and kids, they would be pushing all the wrong buttons on the Pool Boys.
“Good call,” I said. “My brother’s dog, Barkley, is out there, too. He’s a retired K-9, but he can still get cranky when someone gets too near the kids.”
“I heard. The Pool Boys are apparently making friends with him. Something about letting him lick up spilled beer?”
“Family tradition,” I said, thinking of Ghost. Although the two shepherds weren’t related, they had a shared talent for knocking over unattended beers and then cleaning up their own mess. Very courteous of them. Three words, though: dog beer farts.
“Alvin checked in an hour ago,” Sam told me.
“I know you’re low on manpower, Sam, but—”
“Just tell me what you need,” he said with a touch of annoyance.
“Whoever planted those bugs has people in the field,” I said. “Sean thinks they’re in black SUVs.”
“You want a couple of cars following you and your brother to see if they can pick up a tail?”
“That would help my butt unclench, yes.”
“No problem. You need anything else, Joe?”
“Not yet.”
“Call if you do,” Sam said, and disconnected.
INTERLUDE SIX
GRAYWATER COPPER MINE, LLC
YAVAPAI COUNTY, ARIZONA
THREE YEARS AGO
Miguel Tsotse tried to move, but he couldn’t.
He could breathe. He could bleed. That was it. His body felt as if a stone giant had wrapped its cold, hard fingers around him, squeezed too hard, and then fallen asleep without relaxing its grip. There was no light at all. The air was thin, and it stank of his own fear. And of something else. A coppery odor.
With a jolt, he realized what it was.
“Jimmy…?” he said. It came out as a whisper, tight, hoarse from pain and rock dust. Even so, his voice was too loud. The kind of loud that let him know he was in a very tight space. Not just with stones and dirt packed around him from the collapse but as if that space was sealed at both ends. Like a phone booth. Like a torpedo tube.
Like a coffin.
“Jimmy,” he repeated, trying to make his voice bigger, trying to be heard.
Failing. Hearing nothing in reply. Not a voice. Not a moan. Not the sound of picks and shovels as the crews worked to dig them out. It chilled him, and he had to clench to keep from pissing his pants. Why wasn’t there the sound of anyone digging? Where were the shouts of people looking? Where was the clang of metal on stone as they worked to lever the bigger rocks out of the way?
Where was the rescue team? Where was everyone?
“Jimmy … can you hear me?” Miguel listened as hard as he could. Praying, mouthing the words the nuns taught him long ago, when he was a little boy in Albuquerque.
There was no sound. Nothing except the sandpaper rasp of his own breaths and the rustle of his shirt as he tried to move. He had never been claustrophobic—miners didn’t last long if they couldn’t abide close spaces—and had often been described as “steady.” Not the kind to fly off the handle, never short-tempered, and not much of a worrier. But he had never been trapped like this before. In minor cave-ins and collapses, sure. But not caught like this. Not sealed into a stone coffin five hundred yards beneath the desert floor. Not alone in the dark, in all this silence.
“Jimmy,” he said again. “They’re going to come for us. You just hang on, okay? I know you can hear me. Just hang on. They’ll be here, I guarantee it.”
Miguel knew that he was talking to himself. Talking to calm his own nerves, talking to hear a human voice.
Then nothing. No sound from Jimmy. No rock sounds, either. Not after the rumbling stopped. The two of them had been alone in this chamber, doing an inspection of a natural side tunnel to assess how much it needed to be reinforced for digging. This was a standard cut-and-fill mine with sturdy ramps, a well-constructed elevator, a new crusher, and all the usual safeguards on everything from the hoist house to the ore loadout. Everything was safe, because safe mines were profitable mines. Miguel had no idea what triggered the collapse. Neither he nor Jimmy had touched a thing, but now they were trapped down here.
Miguel heard something and froze. A sound. Soft. Close.
He almost spoke, almost called out to Jimmy again, but didn’t. The sound was coming from the wrong direction to be Jimmy. Miguel turned his head, but it was too black to see anything. Looking in the direction of the sound helped him focus, helped him concentrate on making sense of it.
There it was again.
A whispery sound. Not a tool sound, though. He strained to hear. The sound changed, became sounds. He could hear the soft whisper in two places. Then four. Then a dozen places. Chittery sounds, like the whisper-tap-scuff of insect feet. That was strange, though, because there weren’t many insects down here. It was too cold and dry and there was nothing to eat.
The sounds grew as whatever it was came closer. Not a dozen little feet. Hundreds of them. Scuttling through the blackness, swa
rming through cracks in the broken rock. It horrified him. The thought that the collapse had disturbed the nest of some kind of insect. Some kind of scuttling thing. He couldn’t even move his arms to protect himself if they came at him.
Scuttle. Whisk-whisk.
A hiss of noise as the unseen things came closer and closer. In the utter stillness, Miguel could hear the sounds they made as they collided and climbed over one another, the way a mass of roaches will. He had seen that on an excavation once, back when he did general demolition for a construction company. Ten thousand roaches boiling out of the basement of a meatpacking plant that had been damaged by an earthquake. Grown men—workers hardened by years of backbreaking work—had fled screaming as the glistening carpet of roaches swarmed up at them. Miguel had screamed, too.
As he screamed now when the first wire-thin legs of the insects crawled over his face.
He screamed and screamed, the noise filling every lightless inch of his rock coffin. The insects swept over him, through his hair, inside his clothes. He thrashed and twisted, trying to fight them, trying not to die this way.
And then the lights came on.
A thousand tiny white lights.
On his clothes. On his face. All over his body. Pinpricks of light, suddenly there, filling his tomb, hurting his eyes, sending his mind spinning toward a wall at high speed. His thoughts crashed as he saw the things that had crawled through blackness to find him.
Roaches.
Except that they weren’t.
They were green and orange and red. Not roach colors. Bright colors. Candy colors. They stood on tiny legs and had antennae that flicked back and forth. He turned, seeing more and more of them appear, squeezing through cracks only as wide as two stacked pennies. They squeezed flat and then expanded again. Just like roaches, but their faces weren’t insect faces.
They were miniature flashlights. Each light was minuscule, but collectively they filled the tight hole with a blinding glare.
Miguel’s brain kept slipping gears as he tried to make sense of this. These weren’t insects. They weren’t. They were …
Miguel mouthed the word. It was impossible, strange, and freakish.
“Robots…?”
* * *
The technician hunched over the monitor screens turned in his seat and yelled, “We got him!”
Everyone in the shack crowded around him. Officials from the mine, the dig supervisor, senior technicians with the search-and-rescue company, and one unsmiling woman in a stiffly pressed army uniform, with its operational camouflage pattern of muted greens, light beige, and dark-brown hues. Her patrol cap was spotless and was pulled low to keep her face mostly in shadow. She wore the oak-leaf cluster of a major and a simple plastic nametag: “Schellinger.”
“Are they alive?” asked the supervisor.
“One of them is,” said the tech as he zoomed in on a bloody, dirty face.
“That’s Miguel Tsotse,” said the supervisor. “He looks okay. Scared, though.”
“Of course he’s scared,” snapped one of the officials. “Half the goddamn mountain fell on him.”
“I think he’s scared of the swarm,” said the tech.
“Yeah, well, I would be, too,” said the supervisor. “Where is he?”
The tech punched a key and a new window opened up on the upper left of the screen, showing a detailed 3-D map of the entire mine. There were clusters of heat signatures in various sections. The tech pointed to the yellow signatures on the upper levels. “Okay, those are the rescue crew and a couple of the bot wranglers. Now, down there, see the blue dots? That’s the swarm, and the yellow dot they’re clustered around is Miguel.”
“What about Jimmy Beale? Can you see him?”
“Sending half of the swarm to look for him now,” the tech assured him, and the group watched as half of the lights winked off and the tiny robots flattened once more and wriggled into the cracks. As they moved deeper into the mine, the 3-D picture expanded. “They each have a microcamera that’s too small to do much good individually, but the bots combine their signal so that we can get a video image, a thermal reading, and to collectively map wherever they go. They’re keyed to look for heat signatures, which is how they found Miguel, and they’re relaying data to other bots stationed along the path they used to find him. Each one is like a little relay tower. Without them sending signals like that, the rock would block us from seeing anything. That’s one of the reasons we send so many down there. All told, I have three thousand bots in play.”
“Robots,” said one of the executives in disbelief. “You know how long it would have taken a crew of our best men to find him with that much of the ceiling caved in? Days, if we found him at all.”
The tech grinned. “We modeled these babies after real cockroaches, and, believe me, roaches are impressive as hell. They can run full tilt through a quarter-inch gap by reorienting their legs and flattening their bodies to a tenth of an inch. And even at that compression they can withstand something like nine hundred times their body weight without injury. They’re super heroes. No wonder they’ll outlive us all. And these bots are the latest generation of CRAMs, which is shorthand for compressible robots with articulated mechanisms.”
“This is fucking amazing,” murmured the supervisor.
Major Carly Schellinger bent forward to study the screen. Her face was unreadable, and she hadn’t spoken a single word since entering the shack.
The group watched as the insect robots worked their way laboriously through cracks and fissures in the rock. A new heat signature appeared on the screen fifty meters from where Miguel was trapped.
“Oh, man,” said the tech. “Oh, no … The other human heat signature is low and falling. Sorry guys, but your other man’s dead. His body is already cooling.”
“Jimmy was a good guy. Smart,” said the supervisor dolefully. “A good worker.”
The officials exchanged worried looks. This was going to be expensive in a lot of ways. Two of them went outside to use their cell phones.
“We have to get Miguel out,” insisted the supervisor.
“I’ll forward the data to your laptop,” said the tech. “The bots have mapped the fault lines all the way down to where he’s trapped.”
The supervisor ran out, and the others followed until only the major was left with the tech. She walked over, pulled the shack door shut, and turned the lock. The tech frowned at this.
“They may need to get in here again,” he said.
“They can wait,” said the major.
“Um. Okay.”
Major Schellinger came over and pointed to the screen. “These bugs of yours. They carry lights, thermal scanners, mapping software, and transmitters,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Tell me,” she said, smiling for the first time, “what else can they carry?”
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
BROADWAY DINER
BALTIMORE, MARYLAND
SUNDAY, APRIL 29, 9:44 AM
I went back inside as the waitress put the food on the table. Everything was hot; everything had been prepared exactly right. I gave her my very best Joe Ledger smile, the one that makes the corners of my eyes crinkle. How she managed not to undress and fling herself on me remains a mystery.
“I’ll get word as soon as we get the all-clear,” I said as I slid into my seat. “Then we can jump on this thing.”
“Where do you want to start?” asked Sean.
“I’m thinking we should poke around this Vee Rejenko character,” I said, and gave him what Nikki had given me. “Vee figures in this too strongly. His companies have involvement in all the hotels where the kids died. And I had my guys check the press on the deaths … there isn’t nearly as much as there should be. Not by a tenth. My guess is that Vee has some leverage he can use on the local newspeople.”
“That wouldn’t account for the dearth of Internet coverage,” observed Rudy.
“No. But it’s suggestive of a bigger organization behind hi
m. I mean, he’s a mobster so he didn’t invent the nanotech. He probably can’t spell nanotech. Which means it came from someone higher up the food chain. Whoever that is has resources, and we know from personal experience that the right computer can game the system.”
“We don’t have anything on Vee,” said Sean. “Can’t get a warrant on a hunch. Any judge would laugh us out of his office.”
“Depends on how nicely we ask,” I said. “But maybe we don’t need a warrant to have a conversation. We could drop by for a playdate with him. Ask questions before he can lawyer up. Lean on him a tad.”
“Hmm, there’s this thing, Joe,” said Sean. “It’s called the Constitution. Pretty cool stuff—you might want to Google it. Or do you fondle your copy of the Patriot Act when you get up in the morning.”
Rudy chuckled. “That is exactly the kind of speech Joe usually gives to someone who says exactly the kind of thing he’d just said to you.”
“So? Call me old-fashioned, guys,” said Sean, “but I’m kind of committed to the whole ‘due process’ thing.”
I held my hands up. “Okay, fine, we can do it your way, Sean. Let’s go ask him nicely and waste some time as he finds clever ways to tell us to fuck off. And then you can spend the rest of your life looking over your shoulder. And, while you’re at it, you can put Ali, Lefty, and Em into witness protection.”