Part 32 (1/2)
”Exactly.” He glanced at her again, as though surprised that she'd thought of it.
”Trace the airline ticket,” she said. ”Maybe Ian charged it to a Chira-Sayf credit card. Maybe somebody else paid for it. Find out who.”
He nodded.
”Who sent your brother to Johannesburg?”
”That's one thing I'm going to have the company look into.” He listened. ”Voice mail.” His tone became curt. ”We have a crisis. Meet me at...” He looked around. ”Golden Gate Park, outside the j.a.panese Tea Garden. p.r.o.nto. I'll explain when you get here.”
He snapped the phone shut. ”We'll get this figured out.”
”You trust your right-hand guy?” Jo said.
”Implicitly.” He put the Mercedes in gear and pulled away from the curb.
”Tell me why somebody would want to steal Slick.”
”It's valuable. And I'd decided to destroy it rather than let it be put to use.”
”Would Ian steal it? Sell it? Hurt you?”
”Never. He knows its potential, and I simply cannot believe that he would ever want it used in the real world. He was a soldier.” He shook his head. ”No, he'd only agree to obtain it to save Seth and Misty. He also knows I'd never agree to give it to him. It means he's at the edge of despair.”
Shepard crept along the curving road through the park. His demeanor had become locked-down and tense. His gaze swept between the rearview mirror and the wing mirrors. With each yard they drove away from Fulton Street, the chrysanthemum glow of streetlights and apartment windows faded. The trees swallowed what little light could penetrate the fog. They moved in a bubble, able to see only the inside of the car, neither behind nor ahead.
”Slick was an experimental nanotech project,” he said. ”Its official designation was C-S/219.”
”Military?”
”Chira-Sayf doesn't manufacture weapons. It was DOD-funded, but it was supposed to neutralize IEDs.”
”It was a bomb-killer?”
”It was supposed to save lives.”
”Is Slick the substance that contaminated your brother?” she said.
The silence was thicker this time, dry, like dust. ”It shouldn't be possible. We destroyed it.”
”Why?”
”It was supposed to deactivate roadside bombs. It didn't.” His expression turned bleaker. ”You're a doctor-have you seen blast wounds? Afghanistan, Iraq, the London tube...”
”Yes. Ghastly.”
”Body armor will protect soldiers' vital organs, but their arms get blown off. A suicide bomber's rib gets embedded in a soldier's femur. Shrapnel, nails, ball bearings get sprayed into some little girl's face.”
Abruptly, Jo thought of Gabe's scars. I mended. A knot formed in her throat.
”Carbon nanotubes are tiny machines,” Shepard said. ”They're simple, stupid bots. They work at a molecular level via chemical interactions. Ours was supposed to bond with compounds found in commonly deployed IEDs and neutralize them.”
”But?”
”It had the opposite effect. It made explosives even more unstable.”
”Jesus,” Jo said.
Shepard's shoulders were tight. His gray eyes were piercing, like his brother's. ”When we tested it, bombs went off prematurely. When we tried to dispose of them, after removing the detonator, they ignited. It was a disastrous result.”
”So you shut the project down,” Jo said.
”Slick was unpredictable, unstable, and dangerous. I killed it.”
”Didn't the DOD want it anyway? They're the world's biggest buyer of ka-boom.”
”I authorized the project to save lives. I didn't want to pay for Chira-Sayf's corporate jet by manufacturing munitions.”
”And that's why you shut down the South African operation?”
”Yes, the Jo'burg lab was producing Slick. And Ian must have gone to Africa to get a sample. But he must have failed. Or...” He exhaled harshly. ”Or made a mistake and got contaminated. Now he wants to get it from me.”
”So Ian thinks you have Slick? You, personally-or that you have access to it?”
”Yes.”
”But you said it was all destroyed.”
”I thought it was. But if Ian's-affected, then he had to have come in contact with it.”
”Because that's what is destroying his memories?”
”Slick will screw you up if it gets into your bloodstream. It binds with iron. And it's lipophilic,” he said. ”It attaches to fats in the bloodstream-in effect gets coated with them-and then slips past the blood-brain barrier.”
”Slick is a Trojan horse, isn't it?” Jo said.
”Yes,” he said.
It slipped inside other molecules, lipids and iron-ferrying molecules, and fooled the brain into letting it past. Once there, it acc.u.mulated, a.s.sembled itself into strings, and destroyed the medial temporal lobes.
”That's how it ruins the ability to form new memories,” she said.
”And once it gets past the gates, it starts rewiring the brain.”
”Rewiring-Jesus, what can it do?” she said.