"Ernsdorff. Or whomever he's fronting for. Here's part two of the story: One of the serial numbers from Zahm's China job--"
"He didn't remember where exactly. . . ."
"The Jilin-Heilongjiang region, near the border with Russia, about a hundred miles northwest of Vladivostok. Anyway, one of the serial numbers from Zahm's job turned up during a raid of a CMR weapons cache outside Grozny. It was a land mine."
"Hardly worth ten million dollars," Fisher observed.
"No. I'm thinking the ten million is buy in. The land mine was a teaser--a freebie to get Aariz Qaderi interested.
"That's the bad news. I've waded through Zahm's 'insurance' records from the theft. What Ernsdorff had him hit was a doppelganger factory."
Fisher paused, sighed. "Oh, hell."
For decades China's foreign intelligence agency, Ministry of State Security--the MSS or Guoanbu--had been focused on industrial espionage. Through its Tenth Bureau, Scientific and Technological Information, the Guoanbu had been successfully targeting private military contracts in the West. The existence of doppelganger factories--laboratories applying the raw intelligence data gathered by the Guoanbu --had been suggested by the CIA in the late nineties, but solid evidence had never been found.
Doppelganger factories were dedicated to one purpose: creating perfect knockoffs of the West's latest and greatest weapons, often systems that weren't yet even in use by Western militaries.
"The official name was Laboratory 738," Grimsdottir said. "But based on Zahm's data, there's no doubt what it was."
"You said 'was.' "
"I went back and checked the satellite imagery. About a month after Zahm's job, all activity at that chicken farm stopped. In the space of forty-eight hours it became a ghost town."
"Can't say I blame them," Fisher replied. "What else are they going to do? Admit to the rest of the world they stole the biggest and baddest secrets, then used those secrets to create an uberarsenal that they then lost? What are we talking about, Grim? What kind of weaponry?"
"I'll download the encrypted list to your new OPSAT when you're ready, but suffice it to say that Zahm wasn't exaggerating: If this arsenal falls into the wrong hands, they'll become a first-world power overnight."
HEREwas one of the reasons--the other had been settled months earlier--Fisher had been on the run for the past year and a half. Long before Lambert died he'd become one of the few U.S. intelligence officials convinced that doppelganger factories were, in fact, real. Worse still, Lambert had come to believe the Guoanbu had been getting help from within the Pentagon, the private defense industry, and the U.S. intelligence community, including high level NSA officials--all of whom were, in essence, sowing the seeds of America's destruction. Armed with the most sophisticated--and often improved-upon--weapons and systems, China, its nuclear weapons, and its billion strong People's Liberation Army would become invincible.
While it hadn't taken much time for Lambert to convince Fisher and Grim that his theory was sound, it had taken much more to convince them that his plan was their only viable course. In killing his boss, Fisher had not only laid the groundwork for his entry into the mercenary underworld, but he'd also removed the specter of Lambert uncovering the corruption and treason that had infected virtually every aspect of the U.S. military-industrial complex. With Lambert dead and Fisher on the run and hunted, those involved would breathe a sigh of relief, go about their business, and hopefully make a mistake on which Fisher and Grimsdottir could seize.
"So let's put the pieces together," Fisher said. "Ernsdorff is playing money man to whomever hired him to hire Zahm."
"Mister X," Grimsdottir suggested.
"Okay. Mister X takes delivery of the 738 Arsenal. . . . Did Zahm indicate where this happened?"
"Korfovka, Russian Federation, about sixty miles from Laboratory 738 and five miles over the border. I'll send you the particulars later."
"Mister X takes delivery of the 738 Arsenal, then uses Ernsdorff to put the word out to the world's major terrorist groups about the auction. They invited anyone with the resources to provide the ten-million-dollar ante. To sweeten the deal, he sends out party favors--like the land mine they found at the CMR cache."
"I can buy that."
"What was it, by the way? The mine, I mean."
"Antitank. Essentially a miniature MIRV," Grim replied, referring to a multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle. "It uses range and bearing tremble sensors to target multiple tanks. When they're in range, the mine pops up and launches up to six kinetic-energy armor-piercing penetrators--tungsten carbide combined with depleted uranium--moving at about eight thousand feet per second."
"About five thousand miles an hour," Fisher added. "Even with a thirty percent miss rate, one of those things could take out a tank platoon."
"In the space of about ten seconds," Grim added.
"OKAY,it's a safe bet Aariz Qaderi and the CMR are invited to the auction. Do we know where Qaderi is now?"
"As of two days ago, still in Grozny. I'm retasking a satellite right now for a pass over his house. We'll know something in about four hours. In the meantime, we've got a problem we have to solve first."
"Which is?"
"Our tracking method just got flushed down the toilet--or at least partially."
Four months earlier, having decided the arsenal auction was genuine, Fisher and Grimsdottir began searching for a method, not only to tag and track the weapons once they left the auction site, but to find the auction site itself. Standard GPS-oriented tracking methods were a nonstarter. With hundreds of millions of dollars at stake, Ernsdorff and his employer would make sure the attendees and the weapons were clean when they arrived at the auction site. No matter how small and how well disguised, GPS trackers emit electromagnetic waves. It was the unavoidable nature of the beast. If Fisher was going to have any chance of making sure the weapons didn't disappear into the black hole of the terrorist underworld, he needed an unorthodox tracking method.
As it turned out, such technology existed, but it did not belong to the United States or any of her allies but was instead the brainchild of private Italian researcher named Dr. Terzo Lucchesi, one of perhaps six scientists who had pushed the field of nanotechnology to its farthest reaches. What Lucchesi was doing in his Sardinia-based laboratory was the stuff of science fiction.
In an ironic twist, Grimsdottir and Fisher attempted to start their own doppelganger factory, writ small, by hacking into Lucchesi's mainframe and stealing what they needed: an atomic scale tracking beacon that Fisher could deploy at a distance and Grimsdottir could monitor remotely. The most promising approach came from one of Lucchesi's projects, code named Ajax, which involved molecular, photonic-crystal-based robots designed for microscopic electronic repair. Of course, as did most nanotechnologies, Ajax had a plethora of collateral applications, including the signal-hijacking of silicon microchips.
Once Grimsdottir had extracted the details of Ajax from Lucchesi's mainframe, she turned the project over to her own private laboratory, deeply firewalled within Third Echelon, which set out to transform Lucchesi's robots into microscopic, and therefore untraceable, beacons designed to infiltrate cell phones, laptop and desktop computers, modems, broadband routers--anything that used microchip technology to transmit digital data--and send a prearranged burst transmission using the host device's own internal circuitry. Alone, each Ajax robot was ten nanometers, or one hundred thousand times smaller than the head of a pin; the number of bots required to hijack the average silicon microchip was 125--in all, smaller than a virus.