“According to one of the scientists working on the thing, somebody sneaked in and stole something from their computer.”
“Who would bother? The technology is moldy, goes back to Tesla, more than a hundred years ago.”
Michaels shrugged. “Got me. I did a little web walking in VR, and it does look as if somebody got into their computer.”
“Kid hacker, maybe,” Jay said.
“Could be. You want to check it out, be my guest.”
“Soji is gonna be busy for the next couple days. I’ll take a look at it, get a jump on work.”
“Background and what I saw is in the work file under ‘HAARP.’ ”
“Copy, Boss. See you Monday morning.”
“My best to Soji,” he said.
Jay went to his office and looked around, but there wasn’t much new to see. Some hardcopy reports was all. He had checked his e-mail and phone messages using a virgil he’d checked out and taken with him, so he was pretty much up to date.
Just for grins, he lit his computer and read over the information on HAARP the boss had given him, including the hiddencam vid of the interview with the scientist, Morrison.
Very interesting stuff. Mind control? That would be worth stealing, but that also didn’t seem likely. People had been playing with low-frequency stuff for a long time without much in the way of results. Still. it was intriguing.
Jay logged off his computer. He’d been here for a couple of hours. Time to head home. Soji didn’t have to be on-line all the time…
But as he started for the door to leave, his com chirped, and the sexy, throaty female vox he’d programmed into his computer said, “Jay! Priority One com, Jay! Heads up! Answer the phone, you hunk of burning love!”
When he had been a member of the Chinese Army twenty years before, Jing Lu Han had apparently at some point collected a Russian Makarov pistol, and kept it hidden away for two decades afterward. No one had ever seen him with it — at least no one alive who could testify to that. There seemed no other way he could have come by such a thing, there not having been any Russians in or about Longhua in anybody’s memory, and Jing having lived there all his life, save for his time in the army.
However he came by it, it was with this pistol that Jing proceeded to shoot seventeen members of his home village in the wee hours of Friday morning. He walked calmly through the town, plinking at anybody who came out to see what the noise was about, and he did not discriminate as to sex, age, or familial relationships. By dawn, he had shot men, women, children, friends, and relatives. He had two dozen rounds of ammunition remaining for the pistol after he shot number seventeen — his butt-ugly and ignorant cousin Low Tang — but it was moot as to how many more he might have wounded or killed, given that he was overwhelmed at that point by half a dozen villagers and hacked to pieces by their sickles and scythes. The bloody tatters remaining of Jing were pounded into the hard ground under their sandals — before the six took their weapons to each other.
The only apparent survivor of this melee had a short-lived triumph, as he was murdered shortly thereafter by a middle-aged schoolteacher wielding a pair of hedge-trimming shears, with which she deftly snipped his left carotid artery. He bled out in less than a minute, judging from the blood trail.
The teacher then used the shears on herself, plunging them into her belly more than ten times before shock and loss of blood overcame her.
A block away, four women were killed by a fifth when she drove a forty-eight-year-old Ford tractor into, and then back and forth over, the four until the tractor ran out of gasoline an hour later. She fell asleep sitting there.
In the town’s only decent food market, nineteen people who had fled there to avoid the carnage were trapped inside when a teenaged girl set the place on fire. They were all cooked. The girl in turn was killed by an elderly woman who sneaked up behind her and smashed her skull with a shovel, and she in turn was slain by a very large naked man who grabbed and fell on her, suffocating her under his bulk as he lay there giggling.
In a period of six hours, ninety-seven residents were killed, twenty-one others were wounded seriously enough so that they would later die from their injuries, and a hundred more were injured badly enough that they needed hospitalization. Nobody knew about this immediately, because the landline communication wires out of town had been cut and then burned by a man who used part of the wire to hang himself.
The town of Longhua had seen better days.
Michaels looked up from his laptop and the hardcopy reports, photographs, and vids, at Jay. “How did we get this? It’s so detailed.”
Jay said, “Some of the pictures and vids are retro-spysat and computer augs, some came from the Chinese investigating team, some from a bashed up and bloody camera found on the scene. The reports we got from my friend in the CIA, who got it like the CIA usually gets such things — they bought it from one of their Chinese computer spies set up to find such things. It’s all fresh stuff, really fresh.”
Michaels looked back at the hardcopy picture of the women who had been murdered by tractor. They were mostly mush, and hardly recognizable as humans.
“What do we know? And why do we at Net Force need to know it?”
Jay said, “Longhua, China, a mountain town, a hundred and fifty kilometers or so north and east of Beijing, approaching old Mongolia. Nothing much happens in Longhua — or at least it didn’t use to.
“According to my CIA mole, there’s another village, called, ah”—he looked at the laptop on the table in front of him—“Daru, which is a couple thousand kilometers south of Longhua, on the coast across from Formosa. Same thing happened there a few days ago. The Chinese, of course, are sweating buckets trying to keep the lid on, but our sources say it was another verse of this song. Group insanity coupled with murderous violence. Survivors in both towns tell the same tale. All of a sudden, everybody went bugfuck and started attacking everybody else, no reason. This includes those who lived to be interviewed. They were minding their own business and blap! they were enveloped in a killing rage that overwhelmed them. None of them can explain it. It just suddenly seemed like a good idea to fold, spindle, or mutilate their family and neighbors to death.”
“What do the Chinese investigators think?”
“They don’t have a clue. They’ve checked for drugs, poison, psychedelics in the water, diseases, the weather, earthquake activity, even bad feng shui, and they haven’t found anything. Whatever caused it came and went, and it didn’t leave any traces.”
“And what does the CIA think?”
“The CIA doesn’t think, Boss, it just collects data and passes it along. I have a standing order with my pal for anything weird, it comes in as a Priority One Call, which is why we got it.”
“I’m sure your friend would be happy to hear you have such a high opinion of him. What do you think?”
“Well, what this looks like to me is some kind of deliberate test.”
Michaels stared into space. “And you think it is the Chinese doing it to their own people?”
“Can’t say for sure, but why not? Take out a few, who’s gonna miss ’em? They got more than a billion more where those came from.”
“Jay—”
“Sorry, bad taste, I apologize.”
“But the Chinese investigators seem surprised from these reports. Wouldn’t they know?”
“Left hand not telling the right what it’s doing? Happens all the time, all over. State doesn’t tell the CIA. The spooks don’t tell the Army. We’re part of the FBI, and the feebs don’t tell us a whole lot of things. Why would things be any better in China? That’s assuming the investigators aren’t part of the cover-up.”