“What the hell are you doing?” he shouted but it was already too late.
Lulu leapt from the Pontiac. She did a full somersault in the air and landed somewhere out of sight on the hitch of the tanker truck. Decker felt his heart seize up in his chest. For a moment, she vanished from sight. Then, as the truck pulled forward beside him, he caught a glimpse of her in the passenger-side mirror. The image was so small, it was almost as if he were watching some YouTube video on a smartphone.
Lulu swung up out of sight once again, only to reappear on the passenger-side running board. Moments later, she was sitting right beside the man driving the truck, the gun aimed at his face.
There was a honk and Decker swung his head back to the road. He had almost run into the camper beside him. It peeled off down the boulevard, followed by a whole stream of cars, including the Volkswagen. But the propane truck kept by his side. They continued to circle the roundabout, flitting under the overpass and then reappearing once again into the sunlight, such as it was. Decker tried to spot the Predator in the sky but it was nowhere to be seen. Besides, the wind was rushing in with such chilling ferocity, watering his eyes, that it made it virtually impossible to see anything clearly.
He turned back to look at the tanker truck but it had vanished. No, there it was. He could see it in the mirror behind him. The driver was standing outside the open driver-side door. Lulu had somehow managed to slip into the driver’s seat. She was barely visible behind the dashboard, given her stature. The truck honked and the driver leapt from the cab into a large pile of gray snow at the foot of the pylons supporting the highway. He rolled out of sight.
The tanker truck honked once again as they swept around the circle. Lulu was waving at him, urging him forward. Decker stepped on the gas. And, just as he slipped under the overpass and into the shadows again, the truck spun to the side. It teetered and started to tip. Decker’s heart skipped as he watched the silver tanker whiplash and roll onto its side, pulling the cab over beside it.
As it fell, the driver door opened and Lulu jumped up out of the opening. For a second or two, she balanced precariously on the frame of the door — like a surfer, her arms out — as the cab and the silver tanker threw sparks up behind her. She leapt into the air, flipping midstream, and fired back at the tanker as she sailed into the same bank of snow where the driver had fallen.
There was a terrible blast as the propane exploded. The Pontiac was carried up by the shockwave and, with it, four other vehicles. Out of nowhere the Predator fell from the sky, drawn like a moth to the flames.
There was a second explosion as the drone hit the deck. The highway collapsed as the Pontiac finally touched down on the boulevard. The steering wheel was ripped from his hands and Decker lost control of the vehicle. It bounced once and sailed onto the side of the road, finally coming to rest in an ice-covered drainage ditch.
Decker reached down and unfastened his seatbelt. As he turned, he saw a huge mushroom cloud of black smoke rising up from the highway. Flames still engulfed what was left of the overpass when a shadow emerged from the cloud.
A figure. Tiny. More phantom than human.
It was Lulu. She walked from the smoking debris with a calmness that belied the chaos behind her.
Decker got out of the Pontiac. He ran toward her as fast as he could. As he approached her, she lifted her hand and gave him the tiniest wave. Then, without warning, she collapsed onto the street.
CHAPTER 41
Decker and Lulu stood on the corner of Ames and Amherst in Cambridge, near the Saxon tennis courts on the MIT campus. Across the street was the Media Lab, with the Weisner building and the List Visual Arts Center behind it. The Lab was a five-story contemporary structure with diaphanous metal screens hanging over the windows and a large saucer-like canopy hovering over the roof, like a steel comb-and-cover, an architectural toupée. “Is that it?” Decker asked. “The Education Arcade?”
Lulu nodded.
“Are you sure you don’t want to wait in the car? You still look like shit.”
“Thanks,” Lulu said. Then, she added, “I’m fine. Really. Besides, you’re gonna need me to enter some parts of the facility. They’re secure.”
“I thought you said they did game design.”
Lulu sighed. “They do,” she said, rubbing her eyes. They were still raw from the smoke and debris following the drone attack. “Primarily for educational purposes. But the building is actually the Media Lab, not just TEA. And some of the research is classified.”
“You won’t be able to use your ID,” Decker said. “You know that, right? I’m sure they’ll be tracking us.”
“I know,” Lulu answered. “Don’t worry. I won’t give us away.” With that, she began crossing the street.
The main entrance required no passkey or ID. They simply waltzed in. The lobby was airy and large, three stories tall, with net-like decorative hangings draping down from the ceiling. The walls were lined with offices visible from the lobby through floor-to-ceiling windows. They ignored the welcome desk and headed straight for the stairs at the back.
Decker followed Lulu down one flight and they soon found themselves in a bright cafeteria.
Decker was surprised. “I’m not really hungry,” he said, but Lulu ignored him.
“Grab a tray and help yourself to some food. I need to do something first.”
“What?”
“You’ll see,” she said cryptically.
Decker did as he was told. He joined a rag-tag group of students, most of whom were involved in a tense debate about pheromones. He wasn’t really paying much attention to them until he heard a word that made him stop dead in his tracks—drone.
“It works on pheromones,” one explained to the others. He was a rather fat twenty-something with long hair and bad teeth. “Which are actually modified hormones used to control functions ranging from cell-cycle regulation to the production and release of other proteins and chemicals. They’ve been isolated in the saliva, sweat and urine of various species.”
“Including humans, of course,” a pretty girl with a moon-like face added.
“Of course. Most mammals have a specific organ for the detection of pheromones, mediated by millions of olfactory sensory neurons located in the epithelium. But, while humans can detect around ten thousand different odors using around three hundred and fifty ORs—”
“What’s an OR?” another boy, Pakistani or Indian, inquired.
“Olfactory receptors,” said the boy with the long hair condescendingly.
“Oh, right.”
It was clear to Decker that the fat boy was trying to impress the pretty moon-faced girl.
“Anyway, ORs are transmembrane proteins embedded in the cell membrane of the sensory neurons of the olfactory epithelium. These transmembrane proteins are coded in the DNA, and several studies — including the one Buck did back in 2004—show that each neuron may express only one gene. Get it?”
“No,” said the Indian boy.
The boy with the long hair sighed. “My drone can identify millions of odors, not just ten thousand, and literally map to a unique DNA signature. Think about it,” he said. “Why blow up a whole village, manufacturing yet more terrorists in the process, when you can send in one small device and hunt down one man, your target, based on his unique pheromonic signature? It’s the perfect killing machine.”