The Memory Collector (33 page)

I
n the heated cocoon of Alec Shepard’s Mercedes, Jo tried to keep cool. “You had Slick destroyed because it proved dangerous, didn’t you? It’s so dangerous, you didn’t just shelve the project—you closed your lab in Johannesburg.”

His eyes widened. “Who have you been talking to?”

“Nobody. I did basic open-source research. Stop looking at me like I’m an industrial spy.” She turned sideways in the seat. “Is Slick what poisoned your brother?”

He looked away, as though he was preparing to hedge his answer.

“I saw his MRI, Alec. And the MRI of another passenger who came in contact with him. It’s poisoning other people who were on his flight from London.”

His expression, in the weird dashboard light, turned stark.

“Sayf, S-A-Y-F. Transliterated from the Arabic word for
sword
. So either your company’s cutting shawarma with a big knife, or it’s pulling a play on words, because you’re updating an ancient form of technology. Damascus steel. Carbon nanotubes.”

His gaze broke from hers. “I’m not accusing you of industrial espionage. Somebody’s trying to steal our product. But they don’t want the formula or lab notes. They want the real thing. Christ. What a clusterfuck.”

“Talk. Your brother is in desperate straits, and he’s not the only one.”

Shepard’s face looked bleak. He took out his phone. “We need backup.”

“Who are you calling?”

“My right-hand man.” He didn’t smile, but she saw an acerbic light in his eyes. He pressed the phone to his ear. “I want to triple-check our lab security. And get Ian’s travel and expense records.”

“Money trail.”

“Exactly.” He glanced at her again, as though surprised that she’d thought of it.

“Trace the airline ticket,” she said. “Maybe Ian charged it to a Chira-Sayf credit card. Maybe somebody else paid for it. Find out who.”

He nodded.

“Who sent your brother to Johannesburg?”

“That’s one thing I’m going to have the company look into.” He listened. “Voice mail.” His tone became curt. “We have a crisis. Meet me at . . .” He looked around. “Golden Gate Park, outside the Japanese Tea Garden. Pronto. I’ll explain when you get here.”

He snapped the phone shut. “We’ll get this figured out.”

“You trust your right-hand guy?” Jo said.

“Implicitly.” He put the Mercedes in gear and pulled away from the curb.

“Tell me why somebody would want to steal Slick.”

“It’s valuable. And I’d decided to destroy it rather than let it be put to use.”

“Would Ian steal it? Sell it? Hurt you?”

“Never. He knows its potential, and I simply cannot believe that he would ever want it used in the real world. He was a soldier.” He shook his head. “No, he’d only agree to obtain it to save Seth and Misty. He also knows I’d never agree to give it to him. It means he’s at the edge of despair.”

Shepard crept along the curving road through the park. His demeanor had become locked-down and tense. His gaze swept between the rearview mirror and the wing mirrors. With each yard they drove away from Fulton Street, the chrysanthemum glow of streetlights and apartment windows faded. The trees swallowed what little light could penetrate the fog. They moved in a bubble, able to see only the inside of the car, neither behind nor ahead.

“Slick was an experimental nanotech project,” he said. “Its official designation was C-S/219.”

“Military?”

“Chira-Sayf doesn’t manufacture weapons. It was DOD-funded, but it was supposed to neutralize IEDs.”

“It was a bomb-killer?”

“It was supposed to save lives.”

“Is Slick the substance that contaminated your brother?” she said.

The silence was thicker this time, dry, like dust. “It shouldn’t be possible. We destroyed it.”

“Why?”

“It was supposed to deactivate roadside bombs. It didn’t.” His expression turned bleaker. “You’re a doctor—have you seen blast wounds? Afghanistan, Iraq, the London tube . . .”

“Yes. Ghastly.”

“Body armor will protect soldiers’ vital organs, but their arms get blown off. A suicide bomber’s rib gets embedded in a soldier’s femur. Shrapnel, nails, ball bearings get sprayed into some little girl’s face.”

Abruptly, Jo thought of Gabe’s scars.
I mended.
A knot formed in her throat.

“Carbon nanotubes are tiny machines,” Shepard said. “They’re simple, stupid bots. They work at a molecular level via chemical interactions. Ours was supposed to bond with compounds found in commonly deployed IEDs and neutralize them.”

“But?”

“It had the opposite effect. It made explosives even more unstable.”

“Jesus,” Jo said.

Shepard’s shoulders were tight. His gray eyes were piercing, like his brother’s. “When we tested it, bombs went off prematurely. When we tried to dispose of them, after removing the detonator, they ignited. It was a disastrous result.”

“So you shut the project down,” Jo said.

“Slick was unpredictable, unstable, and dangerous. I killed it.”

“Didn’t the DOD want it anyway? They’re the world’s biggest buyer of ka-boom.”

“I authorized the project to save lives. I didn’t want to pay for Chira-Sayf’s corporate jet by manufacturing munitions.”

“And that’s why you shut down the South African operation?”

“Yes, the Jo’burg lab was producing Slick. And Ian must have gone to Africa to get a sample. But he must have failed. Or . . .” He exhaled harshly. “Or made a mistake and got contaminated. Now he wants to get it from me.”

“So Ian thinks you have Slick? You, personally—or that you have access to it?”

“Yes.”

“But you said it was all destroyed.”

“I thought it was. But if Ian’s—affected, then he had to have come in contact with it.”

“Because that’s what is destroying his memories?”

“Slick will screw you up if it gets into your bloodstream. It binds with iron. And it’s lipophilic,” he said. “It attaches to fats in the bloodstream—in effect gets coated with them—and then slips past the blood-brain barrier.”

“Slick is a Trojan horse, isn’t it?” Jo said.

“Yes,” he said.

It slipped inside other molecules, lipids and iron-ferrying molecules, and fooled the brain into letting it past. Once there, it accumulated, assembled itself into strings, and destroyed the medial temporal lobes.

“That’s how it ruins the ability to form new memories,” she said.

“And once it gets past the gates, it starts rewiring the brain.”

“Rewiring—Jesus, what can it do?” she said.

“Carbon nanotubes have low electrical resistance for their size. They could generate low-resistance pathways for neuron formation.”

“You mean they could create new connections in the brain?”

“Yes. Fast ones.” He ran a hand over his beard. “Does he know he’s contaminated?”

“Yes.”

“Will he forget that?”

“I don’t know. Why?”

“Because if he does, and he handles Slick, a second dose would overwhelm his neural system and kill him.”

Jo leaned back against the headrest. Her ribs and leg were thumping. The car inched along through the fog.

“Ian must have obtained a sample of Slick from the Jo’burg lab. I see no other way he could have become contaminated by it. But if he’s trying to get more from me, he must think I’m the one person at Chira-Sayf who can still provide it to him,” Shepard said.

“Are you?”

He didn’t answer that. “If he’s after me, where’s the sample he obtained?”

“Alec, Ian can’t remember. If he got hold of a sample in Africa, he could have stashed it someplace, and he’d never be able to recall where.”

“So he wants to get more from me?”

“Right. And the people who are putting him under duress think you can get it.” She thought for a moment. “But if he had it in his possession . . .”

He put the car in gear. “Where is it now? And how long do we have to find it before it comes in contact with a substance that could cause an explosion?”

It was dark in the bedroom, and stuffy. Boards were nailed over the windows and the door was locked. Seth could hear a television playing someplace in the house. He didn’t know exactly what time it was, but from the T.V. theme tune, he knew it was early evening.

He wanted to hear the news come on, maybe find out if there was a bulletin asking people to look for him. His photo, description, police telling everybody to be on the lookout. He wished he knew where he was. When the men snatched him from Golden Gate Park, they’d duct-taped his mouth shut, put a pillowcase over his head, taped his hands and feet together for the drive. And all the way, he’d heard Whiskey crying.

The men had wanted Seth not to know where they were going. And they’d done a pretty good job, except he knew they’d driven fast, on a freeway. And they hadn’t crossed any of the big bridges. Now, regularly, he heard a train whistle. So they were south of San Francisco.

He tried to see the door lock in the dark. His feet were tied and his hands bound behind him with plastic handcuffs. The human hot dog, the man called Murdock, had jammed him against the wall and bent his wrists around behind his back to bind them. He’d done it after Vance came in to collect his dinner plate and saw the scratch marks around the lock and found the broken spring from the bed, which Seth had been trying to use to pick the lock.

His hands were going numb. He was going crazy.

The men were gone, he was pretty sure. Nobody was moving around out in the house. He didn’t know when they’d be back, just that he felt so, so alone.

He inched himself to the door. “Whiskey?”

He got no reply.

He couldn’t believe they were just going to leave him there. But he had a bad feeling that things had changed and were about to crack in half.

Shepard’s Mercedes crept along the road, deeper into the foggy park.

Jo’s voice was hot. “You knew Slick had neurological effects?”

“Not on people. We tested it on animals. They . . . they didn’t do well.”

She couldn’t keep the edge from her voice. “But that didn’t stop your research.”

“Of course not.” He gave her a look, quick as a jab. “You want to know why we need to destroy Slick once and for all? It destabilizes hydrocarbon-based substances, turning
them
into bombs. It’s odorless, colorless, impossible to spot with metal detectors, X-rays, explosive-sensing machines at airports, bomb-sniffing dogs.”

“Oh, my God.”

It was a bad guy’s dream weapon. All the scum of the earth would want it. Plus U.S. and foreign militaries. Intelligence services eager to destroy enemies without leaving a footprint. Organized crime. The Mafia. Mexican narcotraffickers. Islamic Jihad. Al Qaeda.

Shepard glanced edgewise at her. “Does your silence indicate understanding?”

“Unfortunately.”

“Whatever you’re thinking, it’s worse than that.”

“How can it be worse than some cocaine lord with his own army deciding to slip an undetectable explosive aboard a Mexicana flight? Or a terrorist painting a children’s hospital with Slick and standing back to watch it immolate everybody inside?”

“The lingering effects,” Shepard said. “As it spreads, it contaminates people it comes in contact with. It’s a twenty-first-century dirty bomb. Heat of the explosion can allow conditions for Slick to replicate. That’s how it can spread.”

Jo’s stomach slithered. “Where is it? What did your brother do with it?”

“That’s what we have to figure out. Before he does himself. And before whoever got to him gets their hands on it.”

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