“You didn’t really -“
“No. We knew before we got here we might want to make an incursion into the factory once we found it. Helps that most electronics are made in China and India and shipped to Europe via, you guessed it, Dubai. This is the new New York, you know. City that never sleeps. Nexus of the new world.”
“Very poetic,” Lisa said tartly. “Can we get things going now please?”
“They’re on their way already.”
Moments later we began to hear the sirens.
Chapter 80
We knew what was coming but I was still taken aback by the size of the emergency-vehicle motorcade that howled to the front door of Greenwood Technologies: more than a dozen each of fire trucks, ambulances, and police cruisers. The guards at the gatehouse were obviously way out of their depth, faced with the authorities’ storm of swirling lights. Just as obviously, they had been ordered to let no one in under any circumstances. In the voluble standoff that developed it was easy for Lisa and I to walk straight up dressed in our brand-new full-body hazardous-material suits and helmets.
“CNRB Emergency Response,” Lisa said tartly to a policeman at the perimeter.
“We don’t have any -“
“Check my ID.”
He called over a superior officer, who brought a small portable card reader with him, and plugged Lisa’s ID into it. I tried not to be nervous about the fact that the police were Arabic and we were very obviously foreigners. About four-fifths of Dubai’s population was expatriate, after all; and like all civil servants, he would do what his computers told him to do.
LoTek had done his work well. The officer looked puzzled but not suspicious. “CNRB Emergency Response,” he read from her card. “Never heard of you. What is CNRB?”
Lisa said, “Chemical, Nuclear, Radiological, Biological.”
They stared at her aghast. Well, not at her, exactly – our helmet visors were tinted, and our suits bulky enough that they probably only knew she was a woman from her voice – but at the soul-devouring terrors she represented.
“Didn’t they tell you what this was?” I tried to affect harried exasperation. “You better let us in as soon as possible, and stay out of the complex yourselves.”
We were ushered to the gatehouse, where guards had finally allowed the police to enter. People kept their distance from us, as if we might already be contagious, while a stressed-out man in a nice suit spoke into the gatehouse intercom.
There was much for him to be stressed out about. As far as he knew, a fundamentalist Islamic group opposed to Dubai’s liberal attitudes had smuggled a “dirty bomb” full of genetically engineered smallpox and polonium into the Greenwood Technologies factory, one that would render this entire free-trade zone uninhabitable due to radiation, and infest Dubai with aerosolized smallpox likely to kill at least ten per cent of the population before the outbreak could be contained. As we waited I watched the news and rumours spread from policeman to fireman to emergency medical technician, saw bodies stiffen and faces go taut. Fear was even more contagious than smallpox.
Lisa and I were mostly afraid that Dubai’s real CNRB team would turn up, but our cyberspace force was on top of things. We waited stiffly at that gate for ten minutes for the factory to be evacuated. I felt like an extra on a movie set. I had understood that LoTek had spent years infiltrating military and government systems around the world, but I hadn’t really understood the influence he could wield until I stood there, surrounded by forty emergency vehicles, while a massive factory complex was evacuated purely on his say-so. It was suddenly easy to understand how Grassfire had grown so widely and so powerful.
“Here they come,” Lisa muttered under her breath. I heard her through my earpiece; LoTek had wired the three of us into an ongoing conference call.
“See anyone familiar?” LoTek asked.
We had hoped that this evacuation alone might win the battle for us. If they tried to smuggle Sophie and Jesse out, we could use our temporary authority to rescue them and have their abductors arrested. But the people streaming out of the factory were all men, mostly Indian, with a sprinkling of Slavic faces; none were Jesse.
“No,” I said, when the trickle ran dry, as all the evacuees herded into police wagons for quarantine.
“Shit. We’re breaking LoTek’s Law here, big time. You pull a stunt like this, sooner or later people notice, and then they hunt you down, and eventually they find you. Only a matter of time. So kindly do me a favour. Hurry the fuck up.”
I looked at the huge squat slab that was a drone factory. Against its immensity the doors set in its side looked like mouse holes. Sophie, Jesse, and their captors were somewhere inside. Lisa and I had to somehow rescue them before anyone figured out what was really happening. I wished the real police could come in with us, but such was the price of our bioterror subterfuge. I wished we had some kind of weapons. The Russians inside were heavily armed. We had nothing except our false cloak of authority.
“All right,” I said, “let’s go.”
We marched forward towards the drone factory’s open doors.
Chapter 81
A barren hallway led us through a small nest of offices, changing rooms, meeting rooms, a cafeteria. The walls were adorned by punch clocks, a work schedule, a few safety posters, a whiteboard covered with scribbled Hindi. The silence and emptiness were eerie. I felt like I was in a real-life game of Resident Evil and homicidal zombies might attack at any second.
The hallway opened up into a vast and vaulted interior space cluttered with machinery, some the size of a house, all of it arrayed around an assembly line covered with drones in various stages of construction. There were about two dozen workstations. Robotic arms hovered above them, frozen in mid-motion. The air was hot and smelled of metal. Nothing moved, and no one was visible, but I heard the hum of engines and computers in standby mode, ready to erupt into action again. It reminded me of the final scene of The Terminator.
I doubted our quarry was here; the assembly chamber had plenty of nooks and crannies to hide, but no locked doors. From the stacks of boxes and shipping containers at one end of the U-shaped line, to the fully assembled drones opposite, it was all one vast open space.
“Keep moving,” LoTek confirmed.
We followed the finished product into the next room, another cathedral-like chamber with two drone launchers on one side and a catch-net on the other. Quality assurance, I guessed; they tested each drone before moving it on to the next room, another abandoned industrial-sized space, this one full of stacked hexagonal metal cases six feet on a side and three high. They made me think of honey cells in beehives.
I opened one of the cases. Its hinged lid was was easy to manipulate. Inside a finished drone nestled in spongelike foam. For shipping, I supposed. I wondered why hexagons rather than cubes. You could tile a surface with either.
“The elevator?” Lisa asked. A freight elevator occupied one corner.
LoTek said, “Where is it?”
She checked her phone. “Northwest.”
“No. The other way.”
An idea hit, and I tarried a moment, reached down to the drone I had just revealed and opened the three panels in its body. Fuel cell; avionics, including a gleaming golden Axon chip; and payload, packed full of that waxy white substance that looked like Play-Doh.
“Holy shit,” Lisa said.
“Yeah. Loaded for bear.” For safety the electrical connectors were physically disconnected, just like in Mexico, knotted and taped down so that they couldn’t physically reach the detonator. “Makes sense. This way they only have to smuggle the Semtex to one place.” I stood. “Come on.”