In sixty seconds, Kim’s perfume molecules had dispersed throughout Maureen Wilson’s body — a microscopic and unwitting gift from the Canadian Prime Minister’s executive assistant to the executive assistant to the Vice-President of the United States.
At 8:55 a.m., the South Korean VP called the meeting to order. The heads of the world’s richest nations — presidents, premiers, prime ministers, one vice president, and one king — took their places.
Kim, along with over one-hundred assistants and administrative staff, filed into the next room where the Koreans had laid on an elaborate buffet.
A gas will diffuse until its concentration is equally distributed throughout the space available. Since her arrival, Kim had been throwing off an invisible stream of perfume. Had someone viewed the rooms and hallways at a molecular level, they would have observed that every cubic inch of air contained molecules of her scent. They had been breathed and shared by dignitaries and lackeys alike.
Molecules had no sense of status.
At precisely 9:00 a.m., the South Korean president took the stage. He stood behind the lectern and acknowledged the warm applause of his guests. At 9:01, he began a short, well-rehearsed speech of welcome.
Courtesy of Dawud Ferran, Allah’s Revenge’s newest captain, each of Kim’s perfume molecules carried with it a tiny passenger — a programmed nanobot.
At 9:02 a.m., the passengers awoke.
After sixty seconds of exponential replication, trillions of nanobots started analyzing their surroundings, seeking biomass: blood, liver, lung, throat, eye, nose, heart, brain — feedstock for the self-replicating monsters-in-miniature. With organic material as fuel, and body heat for energy, the nanobots disassembled the molecules and reassemble them into a black, charcoal-like substance.
At 9:03 a.m., the Korean president broke off in midsentence, covered his mouth with his hand, and cleared his throat.
“Excuse me,” he said and reached for the water perched on the lectern. As he grasped the glass, he grimaced at the hard, black grains he’d coughed into his palm. He gulped the liquid, and, with no time for further apology, began coughing in uncontrollable spasms. He spat out the water because he couldn’t swallow. He doubled over, gagging chunks of black charcoal from his lungs into his mouth, and puked them onto the stage.
Coughing broke out around the meeting table. A few concerned staffers poked their heads through the door, and seeing their superiors struggling for breath, tried to assist, but they too experienced an uncomfortable tickle in their throats, then a scratching, then a unique and inexplicable sensation: They wanted to vomit. They wanted to breathe. Neither was possible. They were filling up — drowning from the inside.
By 9:05 a.m., the room was in chaos, decorum at the world’s most exclusive meeting overridden by the primal need to survive. Staffers charged into presidents as they ran for the door. In the hallway, security guards writhed on the floor.
Two shots rang out.
The noise brought a rush of secondary guards barging through the polished oak doors at the far end of the hallway, which had until then sealed in most of the perfume-contaminated air.
A green-uniformed Korean guard-captain dropped to one knee and felt for a pulse in the soldier lying nearest the outer door. A pistol lay near his hand, and blood from the man’s thigh soaked into his trousers. The guard had shot himself trying to pull his pistol. He was dead.
At 9:09 a.m., following their programming, Dawud’s nanobots stopped disassembling biomass.
They stopped assembling charcoal.
They stopped.
The captain ran with his men, guns out, toward the conference room. A pyramid of corpses, piled on top of one another like some weird carnival act, blocked the doorway. The captain stared past the dead, into the room. Most of the bodies were near the doorway. Many had bloody track marks on their necks and faces, souvenirs of a desperate attempt to clear an air passage. Black cinder crammed their mouths, stretching their jaws unnaturally wide, like overstuffed pigs laid out for a medieval feast.
The captain’s eyes locked on the center of the room. In the middle of the huge oak table, huddled on top of the magnificent carving, stood two men, and they were alive. Clinging together like limpets, they wore light-gray, ankle-length robes, their heads covered with black-and-white checkered shumags. Nothing else in the room moved.
Making an unpleasant snap decision, the captain climbed over the pile of death blocking the doorway.
“Are you okay?” he shouted to the men on the table.
“We are okay,” said King Hudayfah, the Saudi Arabian ruler. “Thanks be to Allah, we are okay.”
The captain barked orders. “Check for more survivors. Try the next room.”
All ten of his security detail had followed him over the warm body-pile. Three of them checked the victims strewn around the floor of the conference room. The others ran into the next room. The captain had tears in his eyes as he sought a pulse on the corpse of his country’s president, sprawled on the stage next to the fallen lectern.
One of the guards appeared in the doorway leading to the staff room. “Captain, you need to see this.”
The captain spoke to the two survivors. “Please remain on the table until we’ve secured the area.” The King nodded.
Leaping over corpses, the captain ran into the next room. There were forty or fifty more victims, mostly on the floor. His eye was drawn to a couple lying on the buffet table, sprawled across the huge array of food that should have been their breakfast.
“Perhaps they thought getting off the floor would save them?” he said.
“No, sir, I mean this!”
The soldier pointed to a woman in a blue pencil skirt standing stiff and erect against the far wall. The torn remnants of a white blouse hung from her neck. Two lines of black charcoal, as wide as tire-treads, protruded eight inches from her body. Starting at her shoulders and finished at the tops of her thighs they formed a crude X. Both eyeballs dangled against her cheeks, forced out by two macabre black turds protruding from her eye sockets. The fungus-like mass formed a horn on each side of her head where it had squeezed out from her ears.
“Damn,” said the captain. Then he threw up.
Chapter 19
By 9:00 a.m. the day after Abdul’s disappearance, Quinn was on his way to Eilat in a Fiat 600, the only rental available at such short notice.
Quinn had felt like a circus novelty act climbing into the smallest car he’d ever seen. The steering wheel jammed against his thighs, so he had to keep switching feet on the pedals to stop his legs from going dead. His head touched the roof, and each bump in the road (and there were plenty) compressed his neck into his shoulders.
The car’s thermometer, a flat disk stuck to the dash, read thirty-eight degrees — one hundred Fahrenheit. The sweat-inducing humidity reminded him of childhood family vacations in Florida, but without A/C. With the windows open, dust and sand stirred up by vehicles as they passed him on the highway peppered his face and made his eyes water. The trip to Eilat lasted five hours. It seemed like ten.
He checked into the Dan Hotel, dropped his bag inside the room, stripped, and hit the shower; never had he felt this dirty.
Once clean, he snagged a scotch from the minibar and called Frank Browning, who chewed him out for leaving Jerusalem. Frank didn’t believe his story about following a lead. Special Branch was flying in an Arabic-speaking replacement who was arriving in Jerusalem that evening and expected to meet Quinn.
”Tell him to call me,” Quinn said. “I’ll brief him by phone. I can’t get back to Jerusalem until tomorrow.” Frank grunted in reply.
Not much he can do about it from London, anyway.