Paul McEuen - Spiral

Pull, Maggie. Pull .

The skin grabbed against the metal, the pain like an ice burn but good because it helped her concentration.

Nothing else is real. Keep pulling .

THE SOUND OF METAL.

Jake was at the boundary of sleep. He’d finally slipped under, but it had been light, too much worry in his head to let him go deep.

The sound again. It took Jake a second to identify the metallic screech. When he did, he was instantly awake.

It was the hatch, the metal, submarine-like door separating Jake in his quarantine room from the outside.

It swung open. Dr. Roscoe was there, in the flesh. They’d broken Jake’s quarantine.

“Is it Dylan?”

“No. Nothing like that. You’re to come with me.”

“Why? What time is it?”

“Four a.m.”

TWO MEN WERE WAITING, BOTH IN MILITARY FATIGUES.

“We’ll have to talk while we walk,” said the one on the right, a tall African American, clearly the ranking officer. “I’m John Lexington, Air Force colonel, on loan to the Defense Intelligence Agency. This is Major Robert Altair, Army. We’re part of the operations team. What did they tell you about Orchid’s demands?”

“Nothing.”

“She has two. She wants Hitoshi Kitano, and she wants money. As much money as a man can carry. This morning, we are supposed to deliver Kitano to a specified location. Accompanying him, carrying the money, was to be a Marine.”

“You said was .”

“Orchid changed it up at the last minute,” Altair said. “She’s trying to throw us off guard. She chose a new money hauler. Someone with a vested interest in Maggie Connor. Someone whose decision making might be compromised.”

“She wants you,” Lexington said. “We have to get you ready. We don’t have much time.”

“EACH BILL WEIGHS ABOUT A GRAM,” MAJOR ALTAIR SAID, holding a hundred-dollar bill in his hand. “A thousands bills, a kilogram. You’ll carry one hundred times that, a hundred thousand bills, about two hundred pounds.” Jake looked down at the stack of cash and did the math. Ten million dollars. It didn’t seem like enough money. Not for all this.

“We have trackers implanted in one hundred of them,” Altair said. “Needles in a haystack. Every hour, one will go off, sending a pulse that will be picked up by the satellite system. Once an hour. One hundred hours. Over four days of coverage.”

“Won’t she be able to detect them?” Jake asked.

Altair handed Jake a bill. “There’s one in here. See if you can find it.”

Jake ran his fingers over the hundred, folded and unfolded it. He held it up to the light. He saw nothing.

“It’s a beauty. No silicon. No metal. The antenna is a weave of carbon nanotubes, a thread no bigger than a strand of spider silk. It runs along the edge of the bill, invisible to nearly any form of imaging technology. X-ray machine, RF scanner, you name it.”

Jake understood. Electronics based on carbon had begun to invade the territory that was once the exclusive purview of silicon. “The logic circuits?”

“Pentacene transistors. Low performance but good enough. An RF graphene transistor drives the antenna. The whole thing runs on an electrochemical power source consisting of a bag of ATP. Carbon. Carbon everywhere. All right,” Altair said. “Now we just need to take care of you.”

TEN MINUTES LATER, JAKE WAS ON HIS BACK IN A SIMPLE operating theater. A doctor stood over him, holding a metal syringe with a four-inch needle. “Left or right?” the doctor asked.

“Left.”

“This may sting. Whatever you do, don’t move your head.”

He inserted the needle in the space between his left eyeball and the socket. He slowly dispensed the plunger, implanting the tracker.

Altair watched closely as the doctor worked. “The basic platform is the same as the trackers in the money, with a few little twists. The antenna runs along the optic nerve. The sensor and power supply look like blood vessels.

“We used to put them in your arm, but sometimes you could see them in an MRI. This is better. The eye is a region of complex imaging contrast. There’s a lot going on in there, lots of fibers and tissues behind your eyeball. No one is going to notice our little tracker.”

Jake suppressed the desire to flinch. He felt the needle rattling around in the space beside his eye. He thought of Isaac Newton, who pushed sewing needles behind his eyes in order to understand the optics of vision. Newton was insane.

The needle popped out, and Jake took a deep breath. He sat up slowly, blinking rapidly. Needle or no, he was just glad as hell to be out of the slammer. He thought he might have gone mad if he’d had to sit in that little room doing nothing while Maggie was missing and Dylan deteriorating a few feet away. He had a deep burn going, a desire for retribution. He wanted more than anything to save Dylan and Maggie, and he wanted to punish Orchid for what she’d done.

“Run your finger over the spot,” Altair said. “You feel that? That little stiff thing? That’s your tripwire. You pull that, the pulse triggers. You’ll feel it, like someone kicked you in the head. Might lose your vision for a little while.”

Major Altair went over it in detail, Colonel Lexington watching from the other side of the room. “You understand? It’s right up against the blood vessel, nice and warm. Only two ways that’s going to happen. Number one: you pull the tripwire out, or—”

“Or number two: I’m dead.”

“You got it. Your heart stops, your epidermal tissues cool fast. A sensor will go off if the temperature drops below ninety-two degrees. It triggers somewhere between one and five minutes after you expire, depending on the thickness of the fat in the surrounding tissues. It’ll go off even faster if you pull the tripwire. Maybe ten seconds. In either case, we triangulate from the satellites, and we’ll be there in minutes.”

“How many minutes?”

“You let us worry about that. Just as soon as everyone is together, do it. We’ll hit the area with an EMP pulse. Then we’ll be there. We got your back. Jake, you with me? Orchid’s there, you’re there. You pull. Then we come in.”

“Got it.”

“One more thing. You pull it, you be sure and make Orchid stay put for the next few minutes. Make sure she doesn’t wander off. No more than, say, two hundred meters. You understand me?”

Jake caught the look in Altair’s eyes. Jake nodded. He understood. In case they wouldn’t be putting boots on the ground. In case they’d be sending bombs.

“You understand? No mistakes, soldier. No excuses.”

“No excuses, sir,” Jake said, an Army man’s reflex.

DUNNE WAS SWEATING LIKE CRAZY AS HE SAT WITH THE President and the NSC principals in the conference room at Camp David. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs stood, a rail-thin Marine named Stanley Narry: “Mr. President, it’s go/no go time. We either send Sterling and Kitano, or we hold back.”