O’Neill scowled and shook his head. “My contacts won’t listen to warnings either. They’d take the crew alive and let loose the plague acrossHokalita. Anyone we approach will do the same.” He fell silent, before adding. “We need to move that ship ourselves.”
“Right.” Mackenzie squared off against O’Neill, a scowl smothering his face. “How the fuck do you suggest we do that? Get out and push?”
“It’s doubtful the Zodiacs would have the power to pull it out to sea,” Cosky said, ignoring Mackenzie’s sarcasm.
But then, everyone ignored Mackenzie when he acted like an ass. Which was most of the time.
“Wolf and I discussed this possibility and already came up with a solution.” Capland pushed his way to Wolf’s side with a laptop tucked under his arm. “I’m going to hack into the ship’s navigation system and pilot it out to sea.”
“You can do this?” O’Neill asked.
“I believe so. I can hack into its AIS signal and trace the signal back to the navigation system. From there, we seize control of the ship and guide it out to sea.”
“There have been multiple accounts of ships being hacked through their AIS,” O’Neill said. “But far as I know, those attacks just shut down the ship’s navigation sensors. They never seized the navigation controls.”
“I’ve been working on a remote hacking technique, with the potential to seize the navigational controls of any craft.” Capland backed into one of the seats along the rear wall and sat, balancing his laptop on his knees. After a few minutes of typing, he shook his head. “From this distance, I’m unable to pinpoint the correct AIS signal. We need to get closer.”
Wolf frowned. Getting closer in the Chinook meant a greater chance of exposure. “We’ll have to deploy the Zodiac.”
“At least we have an advantage now,” O’Neill offered with a wry smile. “As preoccupied as our targets are with whatever they’re watching, they won’t notice us coming.”
Wolf wished thejie'vanhad kept his mouth shut. That comment felt far too much like a taunt to the trickster gods.
Chapter twenty-three
Day 31
Washington, D.C.
Thirty-six hours after Doctor Comfrey’s hysterical call, the IT tech finally cleaned the virus from the server and got the elevators and wi-fi back up. The systems were still glitchy. In fact, they were so unpredictable the elevators were off limits, and the security panels still didn’t work. But the IT guy said the cameras were operational again. At least Clark could see inside the specimen lab.
With that in mind, he opened his new laptop, connected to the server, and accessed the hidden hard drive for the basementcameras. The specimen lab had three cameras installed. He clicked on the first.
He focused on deep breathing, and maintaining calm, as he waited for the camera feed to load. Just because Doctor Comfrey had stopped calling, didn’t mean something had happened to her. She’d given up, that was all, realized that screaming at him wasn’t going to get her out of that lab any sooner.
As for that last phone call, she must have been delusional, seeing things that weren’t there. Like specimens coming to life. No food, no shower, no change of clothes. For a prissy germophobe, that alone could have pushed her into paranoia.
He told himself that right up until the camera flickered to life and he saw the open mortuary drawers. Twelve of them. They’d brought the same number of specimens he’d brought back from Karaveht.
Okay...his fingers tried to crush his laptop’s mouse. Okay...so the drawers were open. That didn’t mean anything. Comfrey could have opened them herself during a delusional episode. Or her assistants could have. He toggled the camera switch, moving the camera to the right, and landed on a corpse....
There was no way it could be anything else. Not with the autopsy scar and the missing skull cap. The flesh of its jaw was missing, exposing fractured, grinning teeth. There was no way the thing could be alive, yet it stood upright.
Doctor Comfrey hadn’t been hallucinating after all.
A bare arm to the left of the first corpse caught his attention. He moved the camera and found another villager. Dead, like the first, only this one had a partially missing arm and totally missing face. He switched to the next camera and located half a dozen more villagers. All standing. All dead.
Fascinating...
The nanobots must have reactivated and repaired the damage to their hosts, then revived their bodies. Although, how could thebodies be standing with the amount of damage they’d sustained? None of them had a full brain, not after Comfrey had removed their skull caps and taken their amygdalae and frontal cortices. How could their bodies function without their brains?
Fascinating...
Where was the good doctor, anyway?
After thirty-six hours, the bots should have infected all the living in the lab. Comfrey and her assistants should have killed each other by now, per the NNB26 prototype’s programming.
He sat back in his chair and stared at the screen. Anticipation slowly heated, overtaking the earlier anxiety. It would be fascinating to monitor the progression from newly dead to repaired and reactivated.
