When Stevens had been taken below and locked up, the captain brought out the carton of wrist sniffers. “McClellan, you and Brown distribute these things to the men, see the other shifts get them too. Run off copies of these two pages that tell how it works. When the day shift gets it figured out, send two cars over to the Morningside Project. No, make it four cars and a wagon. Don’t bring in any kids under ten. I got a feeling we’ll make a clean sweep.”
The ET’s had misled the captain, though only a little. The radiation emitted by illicit drugs was high-frequency sound, a supersonic howl coming from assemblies of nanobots that had been sown some time ago throughout the coca plantations and poppy fields of the world. Nanobots, Chiddy and Vess had agreed, made more sense than any other form of tracer, because they were self-perpetuating. Designed to utilize only molecular assemblies found in drugs for replication materials, they settled in and procreated like bacteria, making millions of themselves virtually overnight. Whenever an area became overcrowded, millions migrated away to other plants or trees, carrying the useful assemblies with them. Within a period of days, there was no source of either cocaine or opiates anywhere in the world that was not fully tagged.
The nanobots had been designed to be impervious to refining processes. They didn’t show up on scanners. They didn’t show up on anything manmade except electron microscopes, and even then, only if someone knew what to look for. Their supersonic howls were detectable by the wrist sniffers, of course, but wrist sniffers could not be taken apart for examination. Any attempt to do so resulted in a foul stench and a puddle of unpleasant and rapidly evaporating goop.
The drug-bots were designed to penetrate wrappings, they were programmed to move out of the drugs into the clothing of the carrier, into the hair and body of the carrier, into the vehicles the carrier used, into the money the carrier received. If there were no drugs in the environment, they could not replicate, and their life spans were designed to be short, thus eliminating the possibility of innocent persons being identified as carriers. They were designed to take particular actions in response to specific signals. With a wary eye on the economics of the situation, neither Vess nor Chiddy had ordered them to do anything else, yet.
Incident in Virginia—MONDAY
Late Monday evening, an armored truck made its way down a lonely country road in Virginia, headed toward an abandoned farm that was owned, ostensibly, by a widow in Baltimore. The woods behind the house were cut by the arcs of three concentric fences, an outside, slightly saggy one of rusty barbed wire, a second one of tight electrified mesh, and a third, the one nearest the house, of high-tension cables and electrified chain link with concertina wire at the top. This latter barrier, invisible from the road, began at a ramshackle shed connected to one side of the farmhouse, circled into the forest, and came out at a dilapidated annex at the other side. The splintery boards and flaking paint off the farmhouse hid a reinforced concrete bunker at the entry to a large storage area buried in the hillside. What one saw from the approach was an assemblage of rotting rail fences outlining weedy fields that ran up the slope to the house, its sagging roof part and parcel of the whole, sorry picture.
Dink was driving, with McVane beside him. Briess, a small man with a ratty mustache, was standing in the tall, armor-plated body of the truck. Arthur was on urgent business elsewhere, but his place had been taken by a sound technician and half a ton of equipment designed to detect every physical manifestation that might occur when they arrived at the ramshackle house.
“We stay in the truck, right?” Dink asked, as he came to the last turn in the driveway.
“We stay in the truck,” agreed McVane. “If these creatures are what we think they are, they’ve had appetizers in Oregon and an entree in Florida, and I’m not offering to be dessert.”
“What’s your guess?” asked Dink, braking the van to a halt and shutting off engine and lights. “About what they want?”