Metal stairs led us up to an open door. The hallway beyond ran through another warren of offices before ending at a reinforced double steel doors with rubber seals around their edges. Signs warned that they led to the CLEAN ROOM. Of course: this was a chip fabrication plant, too, where the Axon FPGAs were produced. Integrated circuits could only be manufactured in a strictly controlled environment vacuumed clean of all contaminants.
An intercom hung on the wall. Through windows in the doors we saw the airlock-like space where supplicants who sought to enter the clean room’s hygienic nirvana were scrubbed clean of all dust. White chemical suits like those we wore hung on racks like discarded ghosts.
Through the windows in the doors beyond, I caught a glimpse of a woman’s face, and a bolt of adrenalin shot through me. She vanished an instant later, but even through my visor and two sets of windows, I could not fail to recognize the perfect, heart-shaped face of Anya Azaryeva.
“Jackpot,” I grunted.
Lisa tried the doors. They were locked.
I looked at the intercom. “Think you can talk them out?”
Our plan, inasmuch as we had one, was for Lisa to don her full airs of law-enforcement authority and talk them into fully evacuating the building before she had them arrested. Our only advantage was that as far as they knew we represented the full might and majesty of the United Arab Emirates.
“I can try,” she said, and pushed the intercom button.
A long moment passed. Then the intercom squawked to life, and Dmitri’s filtered voice demanded, “Who is this? What are you doing here?”
“Dubai CNRB Emergency Response,” Lisa said crisply. “We’ve received word of major biological and radiological threat in this building. We need you to evacuate immediately.”
The speaker clicked off, presumably for Dmitri and Anya to converse in private. Then he came back: “There is no threat here. You’ve been given false data. Your systems have been hacked.”
I flinched. That was bad on two levels. They might be able to communicate that suspicion to Dubai authorities, who might start investigating this crisis in more detail; and they might begin to suspect, if they hadn’t already, that Lisa and I were part of the hack.
“Sir, we need you to evacuate this building immediately, for your own safety. That is not a suggestion, that is an order.”
“No, that is a terrible idea.” I twitched at the sound of Anya’s voice. “This clean room is completely sealed from the outside word. If there is a toxic threat, which I do not believe, it can only be in the rest of the building. We would only endanger ourselves by leaving. We’re much safer here than if we evacuate.”
“Ma’am, how many of you are in there?”
“That’s not relevant.”
“Ma’am, I am ordering you to open these doors and let us in.”
Anya’s voice rose. “Even if you are who you say, you don’t know what you’re talking about. We are not leaving here.”
I winced. They suspected we were frauds, they weren’t going to evacuate, they weren’t going to let us in, and it actually wasn’t a bad rationale for staying inside.
“What is this threat?” Anya demanded. “Where did you get your information?”
After a moment Lisa said, “Ma’am, I need to confer with my superiors.”
She switched off the intercom and looked at me, stymied.
“Shit!” LoTek said.
“What?”
“They must have hacked Emirates Telecom too, they masked their phone records, I only just found them. A mobile phone in that factory made a call to Russia not five minutes – shit. They’re making another one now.”
“Stop them!” I demanded.
“I’m trying, the database is screwy, someone’s added some kind of trigger… “
I heard the sound of keys clacking.
“Got it,” he said. “They’re cut off now. But they had a minute. We have to figure they had time to tell their bosses what’s up.”
“They know it’s us,” Lisa said. “Or at least they suspect. We don’t have much time. We have to find a way in.”
We stared at the solid steel doors for a moment.
“You know what we could really use right now?” I asked rhetorically. “Some high explosives and a detonator.”
Chapter 82
Semtex didn’t just look like Play-Doh, it had almost exactly the same consistency. I stuck a wad the size of my fist into the crevice where the double doors met, hoped it wasn’t too much, inserted the detonator, and carefully attached the two wires we had scrounged. I hesitated for a breath before connecting the second. If Lisa had accidentally crossed them at the other end… but she hadn’t.
I followed the wires down the hall and into the office, closed the door behind me, ducked under the desk, and ensured that nothing that might turn into shrapnel was in our line of sight. There wasn’t much space down there and we had to press closely together. Lisa’s lean body was taut and bony against mine. I remembered holding her beside that river in Colombia. She held a bare wire end in each hand. I noticed she had found napkins somewhere and wadded them into earplugs. I stuck my fingers in my ears, opened my mouth wide, and nodded.
The explosion seemed to happen even before the wires made contact.
The whole world felt ripped asunder, as if not just air and matter but the very fabric of the space-time continuum had been torn. Glass and plastic shattered and melted. The desk toppled over – away from us, fortunately. But we were sufficiently shielded, and far enough out of direct harm’s way, that we emerged relatively unscathed from the rubbled office.
The hallway outside had been transformed into a charred and ravaged wind tunnel. Clean rooms were kept at positive air pressure, to keep out contaminants, and the explosion had shattered both sets of doors. Walking up that hallway felt like walking through a hurricane while carrying an anvil.
As we approached the pressure began to equalize and the wind to abate. True to its name, the clean room was devoid of dirt or imperfections. Racks of workstations surrounded the glittering high-tech altar where discs of doped silicon two metres across were transformed into billions of carefully linked transistors by the magic of photolithography, a transubstantiation that had given the world integrated circuits, computers, the Internet – and Sophie’s Axon neural nets.
When we reached the ragged lip of metal that had once been a door I looked around cautiously, half-expecting to be shot at, ready to leap back. I had hoped the explosion might knock out everyone inside, and feared that it might kill them all. Neither had happened. Instead the clean room was empty. On its opposite side, another airlock led to an elevator.
“They’re on the roof.” LoTek’s voice crackled and wobbled; we were at the very limit of the GSM signal. “I’ve got video from their security cameras. Six of them. Sophie, Jesse, Jesse’s psycho ex-girlfriend, and three guys I don’t know.”
“Dmitri,” I guessed, “and two Russian Special Forces types.”
“They’re waiting near the helipad. Draw your own conclusion. It won’t be long before their help is on the way, and-slash-or the Dubai cops figure out they’ve been had. I’m rerouting a whole lot of calls but I can’t keep them from talking forever.”
“Fuck,” I said.
“Also,” LoTek added helpfully, “they’ve got guns, and you don’t.”
“Thanks so much,” Lisa said. “Got any bright ideas?”
“You could go up there and hope they surrender on sight.”
“Uh-huh. Any others?”
“If I did I would have told you already. There is a theory that no problem exists which cannot be solved by a sufficient quantity of high explosive, but hostage rescue makes that kind of tricky.”
“Dubai’s police,” I said. “All the money in this place, they must have helicopters too.”
“Sure. But I’ve been doing my best to keep them on the ground. Once Sophie’s in their custody it’ll be tough to get her back. International fugitive and all that.”