“Understood.”
What neither of us said aloud was that the DMS had bungled so many cases during the Kill Switch debacle that all of us had lost some faith in our judgment. We were all suffering different levels of PTSD. The fear there is that damage of that sort can create hesitation, and in our line of work hesitation is nearly always fatal. Or it can make you jump at shadows.
And you wonder why I drink?
My next call was to Nikki, a senior analyst in our computer department. I gave her info on Sean and the names of the dead kids and told her to find me a connection. She ran it through MindReader and called me back in less than twenty minutes.
“I’m getting hits,” said Nikki, “but no pattern. What do you want first?”
“Nanites.”
“Nothing there. They’re not mentioned in the official report Dr. Jakobs filed, and there are no other reports related to Baltimore, local prostitution, unexplained deaths of children, or rabies outbreaks. It might be incidental.”
“How so?”
“There are a lot of groups using nanite swarms these days, Joe. Ever since the Zika virus mutated, they’ve been spraying tons of them. They carry chemical and biological agents that sterilize the female mosquitoes so they can’t breed.”
“We’re using nanites for this?” I asked, appalled.
“Sure. All over the world. There’s a chance the girl was in an area where they were spraying and inhaled some of the nanites. Joe, I’m pretty sure Bug forwarded a report to you.”
“When?”
“Like… two years ago?”
“Shit.” There were a lot of reports forwarded to me every day. I skimmed most of them because we’re talking hundreds of pages, either in print or online. If I was in the field, then all of that data piled up. There was no earthly way for me to keep ahead of it all. “Which is why I love you, Nikki,” I said. “You always help me with my homework. Tell me, would those Zika nanites be in her brain?”
“Well… no, probably not. We can ask Dr. Acharya when he gets back from the DARPA camp.”
“Look,” I said, “is there any chance those nanites were carrying rabies?”
“There’s absolutely nothing like that in the files. Nanites don’t bite. They’re really, really, really tiny.”
“Okay. What about rabies by itself? Any new outbreaks?”
“Well, sure, though not that much. There was a report on that, too.”
“Which I clearly have not read,” I told her.
She sighed audibly. “According to the CDC, incidents of rabies here in America are in decline. There were only two or three cases reported annually and only forty cases diagnosed in the United States between 2003 and early last year, twelve of which were cases where the person contracted the disease while outside the U.S. There’s been a definite increase in the last eighteen months, but it’s still such a low number that it hasn’t gotten much national press.”
“What’s causing the change?” I asked.
“I’ll get in touch with Dr. Cmar. He’ll know.”
John Cmar was the director of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Sinai Hospital of Baltimore, but he was also a senior consultant for the Bughunters, a covert rapid-response CDC group funded by the DMS. He’s one of Mr. Church’s “friends in the industry.”
“Keep me posted on that,” I said.
“Okay, but I’m checking other instances of rabies and I’m seeing increased incidents in India, and in West Africa, Mexico, and Brazil. Pretty much the poorest parts of the Third World, but there are always disease outbreaks there. I’m not seeing anything that ties into what happened in Baltimore, though. I mean, rabies shows up a lot in animals, mostly skunks in the middle part of the country and parts of California, foxes down in Texas, and raccoons on the East Coast. Some bats, and like that. Dogs with rabies are really rare because of vaccinations. We can’t know how the girl contracted it until we get the samples and have our own lab run tests, and even then we might not know for sure. It’s so weird for city kids. I mean, exposure to nanites from mosquito spraying is a hundred times more likely, and even that’s odd.”
“Okay. What about the hotel where Holly died? Any red flags in its health-code violations?”
“No, nothing in particular. I found some deep background stuff on the hotel management but no actionable evidence,” Nikki said. “Nothing you can use in court. But there’s this — all the kids Sean told you about died in hotels or motels, and although none of them are owned by the same people, there is a connection. They all use the same linen and vending services, which are owned by a Baltimore businessman named Vsevolod Rejenko, known as Vee.”
“Russian mob?” I asked.
“Vee’s Czech. Got his U.S. citizenship six years ago. Been looked at a couple of times for possible racketeering, but nothing came of it. I have a bunch of searches active on MindReader, though.”
Old and cranky as it was, MindReader was still a pretty spiffy computer system. It has two primary functions. The first is that it has a superintrusion software package that allows it to invade other computers and, in doing so, rewrite the target’s own software in order to erase all traces of the invasion. It’s a ghost that can walk through walls. The second thing it does is serve as a master pattern-recognition-analysis computer. Because MindReader can essentially steal information from the databases of all other law-enforcement agencies, it can then collate that data and look for patterns no one else sees. If Mr. Church trusted the motives and ethics of the heads of other law-enforcement agencies, he’d probably share MindReader. But there are a lot of complete jackasses out there, even among the good guys. Bug runs MindReader, with Nikki and Yoda as his right and left hands. They are supernerd geniuses who had all been frustrated idealists trying to fight the stupidity of the “system” by acting as anarchist hackers of one kind or another. Then Church stepped into their lives and gave them the chance to do real good for the world, and to do it by using the world’s most sophisticated and powerful computer.
“This Vee character,” I said. “See if he still has active ties in the Czech Republic?”
“Because of Prague, you mean? I thought of that. Vee recruits some of his staff from there, but that’s all that came up.”
“Go deeper. See if he has any ties to the technologies industry in general, and any connection at all to nanotechnology in particular.”
“On it,” she said, and ended the call.
My next call was to Lydia Rose, to book me on the first available flight to Baltimore.
INTERLUDE THREE
The clerk was reading the paper while an old anime of Sailor Moon played on every screen in the shop. When the bell above the door rang, he looked up to see a middle-aged businessman come in. The man looked sweaty and nervous, the way a lot of customers did. That was useful. It spoke to a type. This man was not here to buy a flat-screen TV or a videogame console. He was too old, for one thing, and his clothes were too good. He didn’t have the slacker look, or even the look of the young worker drone who decompressed after his shift by escaping into alien worlds.