Seven Grams of Lead (6 page)

At the muddy base of the stairs, he swung the flashlight to show the remnants of a pair of railroad tracks. Weeds as big as bushes hung from the three-story ceiling. Segments of the concrete retaining wall were scattered all over, like building blocks left behind by giant children. There were no signs of people—just rats, scampering away from the flashlight beam.

“My ex-brother-in-law still lets me have the family discount on weed,” O’Clair said, setting the flashlight on a cement ledge twenty feet in, illuminating the close vicinity and throwing giant shadows of the two of them onto the far wall.

“Is it okay …?” Thornton opened and closed a hand in imitation of the movement of a mouth.

O’Clair shook his head emphatically. “Oh yeah, totally. You’re gonna love this shit.”

He eased off his hiker’s pack, produced an iPod connected to a small speaker, then balanced them atop the ledge. When he flipped a switch icon, reggae reverberated through the tunnel.

From his wallet, he drew a card-size magnifying glass with a built-in flashlight. “Okay, let’s party.”

Thornton bowed his head and submitted to an
examination of the lump behind his left ear. Again gesturing for Thornton to keep quiet, O’Clair tugged an appliance from his pack that resembled a compact personal fax machine. He used a rubber-coated coil to couple it with an instrument similar in configuration to a handheld hair dryer.

“Remind me to grab a quick shower later,” he said, fitting the mouth of the blow-dryer over Thornton’s lump. “If the princess smells the smoke when I pick up Nathan, she’ll speed-dial the civil court.”

Thornton was impressed by his friend’s performance.

O’Clair pushed a button on the face of his fax machine. An LED panel glowed green and the image of a small capsule formed at its center. Data streamed along the base of the panel. “So is this good shit or what?” he asked, exhaling from an imaginary joint.

“Incredible.” Thornton’s incredulity required no acting.

O’Clair sang along with a recording of Bob Marley—“Buffalo Soldier”—while continuing to scan Thornton’s body. The monitor yielded uniform green-gray surfaces that Thornton took for muscle and bone.

Setting the scanner down, O’Clair rifled once more through his pack and handed over a pair of headphones. Thornton slid the big foam cups over his ears, covering the area over the implanted device.

“Now we can talk,” O’Clair said.

“Wasn’t that the idea of coming to a subterranean cavern in the first place?”

“Actually, this is a New York Central Railroad tunnel, or it was until 1937. Theoretically it blocks transmission, but the capsule in your head has an onboard microphone that’s still recording. On our way out of here, the instant it gets reception, it’ll transmit all the audio it captured here, in a single burst. As far as I can tell, it captures every vibration of your left eardrum, meaning that whoever receives the transmission hears every word you hear or say.”

“But not now?”

“Right. Thanks to the special headphones you’re wearing, it’s currently only capturing the words of Bob Marley.”

Thornton tapped his head to indicate the implanted device. “I’m guessing this isn’t something you can pick up at a Radio Shack.”

“As you know, the NSA is the world champ of eavesdropping gizmos, or at least that’s what I would have bet my life on until five minutes ago, but this capsule is a decade more advanced than any I’ve ever seen.” O’Clair pointed from compartment to compartment on the image generated by the screen. “A capacitor powers a microcomputer, which runs the mic and the transmitter—standard stuff. The unique thing is what it’s missing: There’s no power source.”

“No nine-volt battery?”

“Possibly the capacitor is charged by the movement of your head, the way a watch works. Or maybe it uses the temperature differential between your body and outside air, transforming the heat flow into
electricity. I didn’t even know it was possible to miniaturize an energy harvester.”

His suspicion of an eavesdropping device confirmed, Thornton had a flood of questions. “Any idea how long it’s been in there?”

“I’d say at least six weeks because there’s no trace of inflammation.”

“From what?”

“A simple injection, probably, maybe while you were asleep. Probably they hit you with ketamine first to make sure you stayed asleep. Off the record, we use ketamine. Hardly anyone has any reaction to it.”

An odd thought struck Thornton. “Could they have used midazolam?”

“Sure. Midazolam’s just a stronger version of Valium,” O’Clair said. “The nice thing about ketamine is it gives the targets incredibly vivid nightmares, which makes for decent cover if you’re in their bedroom practicing dark arts.”

“Could Leonid Sokolov’s murder have actually been a case of midazolam causing a reaction?”

“Oh.” O’Clair’s eyes bulged. “With seven grams of lead to cover it up?”

“What if it had started out as an eavesdropping op?”

“If Sokolov had been drinking an unusual amount, yeah, there’s a chance that the midazolam could have triggered a respiratory depression. You think that’s somehow connected to you?”

“No, what are the odds?” Thornton said, despite a prickly sense that there was a connection. “Here’s a better question: Why hasn’t the thing in my head been picked up by metal detectors?”

“Actually, it appears to be constructed from processed collagen, like absorbable sutures, or maybe a comparable synthetic that the body can break down.”

Thornton gripped the rocky wall to steady his nerves. “Tell me you can get it out.”

“I can get it out. I brought a scalpel and some topical anesthetic. Wouldn’t take a minute. Whoever installed it will know, though.”

“Why can’t we short it, making it seem like the device failed? Hardly a stretch, given I received a major blow to the head, right?”

“Yes. Evidently it was the swelling that jogged the thing out of its bed atop your temporal bone. If not for that and your pre-op haircut, you would have never detected it. The issue is, after we take it out, we can’t reinsert it.”

“Why the hell would we want to reinsert it?”

“To find out who put it there. Once the device is out, we can’t reactivate it without them knowing it. Then we’ll have no chance of tracking them.”

His eyes having adjusted to the dark, Thornton saw that the underground train station was enormous, yet he was starting to feel claustrophobic. “And if we don’t take it out?”

“We would need to find another person implanted
with the same kind of device, or, at the very least, we would need a second functioning device.”

“Why?”

“The thing needs to transmit via cell phone stations. It sends your conversation as a data package.”

“Can’t you just track the data to the recipient?”

“Yes and no.”

“What’s the
yes
part?”

O’Clair sighed. “You need to understand the
no
part first. If you looked at it on a computer screen, the audio you’re transmitting would be represented by a distinctive N-log wave, a signal sequence that looks like a seismograph readout. The problem is that you wouldn’t have any way of knowing which signal is yours among the hundreds of thousands of other signals in the vicinity, generated by everyday cell phone conversations or radio-controlled toys or bar code scanners.”

Thornton pointed to his head. “So the signal coming from me would look like a fish in an ocean full of indistinguishable fish?”

“Exactly. But if we had a second device in the same room as you, transmitting the same audio, then we would be generating two identical signals that a computer could pick out from the rest of the fish. From that point, a high school student could track the data.”

“But we don’t know if a second device even exists. We can’t just somehow scan people for it, can we?”

“Yes, actually, with a radio-frequency detector
available at Radio Shack for about fifty bucks. The only problem is we’d get a false positive whenever a person had a cell phone on them.”

“In other words, every time?” Thornton said.

Nodding, O’Clair aimed the flashlight down the tunnel. The steel drums emanating from the speaker could have concealed the approach of a marching band. There was no movement, no unusual shadows. “What we can do is run an old-fashioned counterintelligence op,” he said.

He’s spent too much time among spooks, Thornton thought. “Like what?”

“If you went to, say, a Metallica concert in Madison Square Garden, the recording device would still pick up everything you say.”

“Filtration?”

“The energy harvester in this thing is a greater leap in technology than a car that runs on a couple double-A batteries. So I’m guessing that whoever developed it solved the issue of conflicting audio—like a foghorn on the Staten Island Ferry. But you could temporarily jam the recording device.”

“With a radio jammer?”

“Right.”

“How does that work?”

“It floods the eavesdropping device with a strong radio signal across a large part of the frequency spectrum so that the weaker signal from your conversation is essentially lost.”

“If you’re shooting a radio jammer at my head, wouldn’t whoever’s monitoring know what you’re up to?”

“Not if you went someplace where transmissions are jammed all the time.”

“Like at a radio station with a strong transmitter?”

“Yeah. Any significant source of electromagnetic interference could work. You would just need to be close to it.”

“But if I went to a place like that, my personal Big Brother would know I’m onto him, and he’d send his associate with the Ruger.”

“Not necessarily. If we play it right, Big Brother wouldn’t know you’re onto him, although he might suspect it—which would work for us. After we get out of here, simply tell me you have a meeting with someone from the agency. We’ll pick a place next to a radio station.”

“Which agency?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“I guess the more ambiguous, the better,” said Thornton.

“Now you’re getting it.” O’Clair smiled. “You tell me the person contacted you—just don’t say how. To add verisimilitude, I’ll send you an anonymous gobbledygook Hushmail beforehand that the eavesdroppers could interpret as an encrypted message.”

Thornton was uneasy. “When I texted you this morning, I was hoping you would take me to your
office—bring me in out of the cold, as it were—and let the professionals take over.”

“Now you need to stay away,” said O’Clair. “There’s a chance NSA is behind this. Since the Patriot Act, the only rule has been
Don’t get caught.
But even if we were as sure about trusting the NSA as we are about the sun coming up tomorrow, you know how it would play out—and this is true if you go to any of the agencies: You’d spend a day or two being polygraphed, then the brief would be cabled to heaven knows how many divisions, whose representatives would need to have an internal meeting and, after that, interagency meetings, and, finally, you’d get sent to someone in Tech who will know less than we do already.”

“At least we’d have the chain of custody, my skull to their gloved hands and a petri dish, along with government scientists testifying that the defendant, Russell Thornton, had a crazy-sophisticated eavesdropping device in his head on the night of Catherine Peretti’s murder. Maybe we can still extract audio that proves that my decision to go to Au Bon Pain was spontaneous.”

“Maybe. But you’ll lose the chance to find out who’s responsible for her death. And possibly for Sokolov’s death too, the repercussions of which I hate to even guess at—that guy was an electronic weapons pioneer in Russia; I doubt the Pentagon brought him here so he could teach physics.”

Thornton decided that his friend was right. “The
thing is, I already know the killers are
killers
, and if that’s not enough, they have unheard-of tech.”

“But they’re human.”

“So?”

“So they’ll make mistakes. They already have.”

“Like what?”

“They bugged the wrong guy.”

“It’s simple,” Sokolova
told the two DARPA scientists assigned to her. “So simple, in fact, that I’m afraid if I teach it to you, the Department of Defense will no longer have need for me.”

“I very much doubt that,” laughed one of the two new members of her team, a middle-aged electrophysicist named Daley.

“Dr. Sokolova is just being modest,” said Hank Hughes, her DARPA handler. “Please proceed, Bella.”

“Yes, please,” added Canning, at the South Atlantic office 800 miles away, eating take-out pad thai while listening to the recording. He had a feeling that the 550-plus hours of Bella audio he’d endured was about to become worth every minute.

“You’ll need to excuse my drawing skills,” she said.

“Done,” said Hughes.

Canning heard squeaks of a marker against a dryerase board.

“This is a simple twelve-volt lead-acid battery,” she began. “We place it at one end of our explosively pumped flux compression generator, which, basically, is a steel tube the size of a wastepaper basket that houses a copper cylinder packed with plastic explosive—we use a mix of Compositions C and PBX-9501. The solenoid coiled around the copper cylinder is made of Nomex-sleeved tinsel-copper wire, the same type used in aerospace conduits.”

Although the audio was a recording and already backed up, Canning raced to write down everything Sokolova said. It felt like directions to a buried treasure.

“The current from the battery generates a magnetic field,” she continued. “The solenoid then acts like a magnet. When we detonate the plastic explosive, the blast thrusts the inner cylinder against the outer tube, squashing the magnetic field between them, generating our ten thousand lightning bolts worth of electromagnetic energy.”

“Where’s the virtual cathode thing?” Hughes asked.

“That virtual cathode oscillator—or vircator—enters the equation after the energy produced by the flux compression generator goes through an inductor,” Sokolova said over more squeaking of the
marker. “The vircator is like a lens that magnifies the pulse, exponentially.”

“Pardon me, Dr. Sokolova,” asked twentysome-thing nuclear scientist Brooke Claiborne. “What is the relative size of the vircator here?”