Chapter 31

Beretania Street, Honolulu 30 October, 4:30 p.m.

It’s strange.” Dorothy Girt, senior forensic scientist with the Honolulu Police Department, kept her eyes focused on the eyepieces of a Zeiss binocular microscope. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

She stood up, and Dan Watanabe sat down at the microscope. They were in an open area subdivided by lab benches. The benches were stocked with testing equipment, imaging equipment, microscopes, computers. He adjusted the eyepieces, and focused.

At first, he saw…a small object with a metallic look.

“How big is it?” he asked.

“One millimeter.”

It was somewhat larger than a poppy seed. But it was a machine. Or looked like one.

“What the hell…?” he said.

“My feeling, too.”

“Where’d it come from?”

“Fong’s office,” Dorothy Girt said. “The evidence team dusted the office for prints. They lifted this object on a print tape, from a window near the lock.”

Watanabe changed the focus, and moved his gaze up and down the object. It was damaged; it appeared to be crushed, and was covered with a dark, tarlike material. The object vaguely resembled a vacuum cleaner, except that it had something that looked like a fan on it. Fan blades inside a housing. A little bit like a jet engine. There was a long, flexible neck, a gooseneck, and at the end of the neck two sharp, flat metal pieces stuck out.

“It must have fallen out of somebody’s computer,” he said.

Dorothy Girt was standing next to him, leaning on the lab bench. She straightened up. “Does a computer have knives in it?” she said quietly.

He looked again. What he had thought were two flat pieces of metal coming off the gooseneck now looked more like blades. Crossed daggers, gleaming, at the end of a flexible arm. “Do you think…?” he began.

“I want to know what you think, Dan.”

Watanabe turned the zoom knob. He went down into the view, deeper and deeper, magnifying the daggers. They became precision instruments, forged and polished. Each blade reminded him of a tanto, a Japanese dagger used by samurai. There was some kind of dark, dirty material smeared on the blades. And then he saw the cells. Dried red blood cells. The cells were mixed with fibrin.

“There’s blood on it,” he said.

“I had noticed.”

“How long are those blades?”

“Less than half a millimeter,” Girt answered.

“Then it doesn’t work,” he said. “The victims bled to death from cuts up to two centimeters deep. The cuts opened their jugulars. These blades are far too small to cut somebody’s throat. It’s like trying to kill a whale with a pen knife. Can’t do it.”

They both were silent for a moment.

“Except at birthdays,” Watanabe added.

“Excuse me, Dan…?”

“You’re wrapping a birthday present. You cut the paper with…?”

“Scissors.”

“Those blades are scissors,” he said. “They could have snipped large wounds in the victims.”

He began scanning the device, searching for identifying marks-a serial number, a printed word, a corporate logo. He found nothing of the sort. Whoever had built the device had not put on identifying marks, or had carefully erased them. In other words, whoever had made the device didn’t want it to be traced.

He said, “Did the autopsies turn up any more of these devices? In the wounds, in the blood?”

“No,” Girt said. “But the examiners probably wouldn’t have noticed them.”

“What’s the status of the bodies?”

“Fong was cremated. Rodriguez got buried. John Doe is in the fridge.”

“He needs a second look.”

“Will do.”

Watanabe stood back from the microscope and put his hands in his pockets, and began to walk up and down the lab. He frowned. “Why was the device found on a window? If it came out of a body, how did it get to the window? How did it get into the body in the first place?” He returned to the microscope, and studied the little device’s fan-like housing. Whoa-it was a propeller. “My gosh. This thing could fly, Dorothy.”

“That’s speculative,” Dorothy Girt said dryly.

“It could swim in blood.”

“Possibly.”

“Can you recover DNA from the blood that’s stuck on the device?”

A prim smile. “I can get DNA from a flea’s sneeze, Dan.”

“I’d like to see if the blood on the device matches any of the victims’ blood.”

“That would be interesting,” Dorothy Girt said, her cynical eyes brightening a little.

“They make small robots,” he murmured.

“What, Dan?”

He stood up. “Nice work, Dorothy.”

Dorothy Girt gave Lieutenant Watanabe a faint smile, hardly a smile at all. What did the lieutenant think she did with her time in the forensic lab, other than nice work? With exquisite care, she picked up the tiny object with a pair of tweezers and lowered it into a plastic vial smaller than her pinky, and carried the vial into the evidence locker area. After all, she could be handling a murder weapon.

Watanabe went out thinking. Nanigen. Small robots. Now there seemed to be a link between the Willy Fong mess and Nanigen.

Time to have a chat with the CEO.

Vin Drake had dropped by the communications center. He had kicked the young woman operator out of the room and locked the door, and had taken over the pinger himself. Now he gazed into a screen that displayed a three-dimensional terrain map of the northwest cliffs of Manoa Valley, from the valley’s bottom to the structure of Tantalus Crater, two thousand feet above. Near the top of Tantalus Cliffs, at the base of the crater, he saw a circle with crosshairs over it.

This showed the approximate location of the stolen hexapod. The survivors, he could see, had made it nearly to the lower slopes of Tantalus Crater. At the rate they were climbing, they would reach Tantalus Base maybe by tomorrow morning, unless a predator got them. He couldn’t control the predators. What he could control was Tantalus Base.

Sitting in the communications room, Drake got out his encrypted corporate phone and called Don Makele. “The hexapod is getting close.”

Chapter 32

Tantalus Cliffs 31 October, 9:45 a.m.

The truck climbed up over a lip of rock and emerged into a pocket of mossy ground. A small pond gleamed, and a miniature waterfall dribbled into the pond. As the drops landed in the water, they made the water shimmer with prismatic flashes.

Rick, Karen, and Erika climbed down from the truck. They stood by the pool, gazing into it. It was crystal-clear, with a mirror-like surface.

“We’re so dirty,” Erika said.

“I could use a swim,” Karen said.

They saw their reflections in the water; they were tired-looking and sweaty, and their clothing had become ragged and grimy. Karen knelt and touched the water. Her finger dented the water but didn’t break it. She was touching the meniscus, the rubbery surface of the water. She pushed against the meniscus, putting her weight into it, and her hand broke through the surface. “It’s so tempting,” she said.

“Don’t do it. You’ll be killed,” Danny said from the truck.

“There’s nothing dangerous here, Danny,” Karen said.

Rick wasn’t so sure. He took the harpoon and probed it around in the pool, jabbing it into the bottom and stirring the water. If any nasty creature lived in the pool, he hoped the disturbance would lure it out. The water flickered with single-celled organisms drifting and corkscrewing, but none of these little creatures seemed dangerous.

The pool was small and shallow enough that they could see all of it. Nothing seemed threatening.

“I’m going for a swim,” Erika said.

“I’m not,” Danny said.

Rick and Karen glanced at each other.

Erika went off behind a clump of moss, and returned naked. “Is there a problem?” she said to the others, while Danny stared. “We’re all biologists here.” She stepped onto the surface of the pool. The water dimpled under her toes, but it supported her weight, didn’t break. She pressed down harder, and suddenly she broke through and went in up to her neck. She waded over to the waterfall and stood under it. The droplets tumbled down, bursting on her head and making her gasp. “It’s magnificent. Come in.”