“This section is for synthetic LSD, I believe. They were manufacturing their own. There are large quantities of ergotamine and lysergic acid.”
Nicholas read some of the labels. “Hydrazine, hydrochloric acid, sodium nitrate—yes, they were manufacturing LSD. All of the components necessary for the epibatidine are here, too.”
“It’s going to take hours to catalog all of this.” She put a hand against his cheek. His face was still smudged with smoke, and his hair had dust and bits of debris in it from the roof. She leaned up and wiped her finger across his nose. “Ah, that’s better. I’ve really smeared it now. Your dad’s truly okay?”
“Yes. Adam found out Ardelean stayed overnight at the Savoy, but he’s gone to ground. You’ll like this—Barstow was apparently using a hacker who worked for Ardelean before they had a falling-out. Barstow used him to try and dismantle Radulav. We’re going to go talk to him—name’s Caleb Temora—as soon as you’re finished.”
“Oh, I’m done. Nothing more I can do here. Just curious why LSD, of all things.” She cocked her head, “The two drugs we know they were making do have something common—they were both tested for mood stabilization and pain relief in the sixties. And microdosing is popular again, small doses stabilize your mood.”
Nicholas said, “Evidently Ardelean was using more and more.”
“From what I’ve read, too much and he’d go off the rails, lose objectivity, lose sight of what was real and what wasn’t. And paranoia, to list only a few things that could happen.”
“Isn’t that all we need? A genius who’s gone crazy.” He waved the hard drives at her. “If you’re done here, let me show you something else interesting—a pilot’s nest for the drone system. Then we’ll go talk to this Caleb Temora.”
Ardelean’s homemade air traffic control center was a room at the end of the long hallway. Nicholas pressed some keys, and huge screens whirred to life—aerial maps, weather forecasts, the flight paths of all of London, lit up in reds and greens. There was a cockpit, as well, facing the screens, with a huge gearshift. He said, “This is how they were flying the drones. Remote access—they can fly one from the other side of the world with this setup. It’s military-grade, like our folks have. At least we know where the drones were being piloted from, and how.”
Mike could only marvel. “To think this was in the hands of a civilian, practically in the middle of London. At least we can feel safe that the drones are grounded.”
Nicholas said, “We can’t know that Ardelean doesn’t have another flight command.” He studied the keyboard, said, “I think their pilot was Radu, and he’s lying dead in the other room. See, all the software is coded to him. Unless Roman pilots them himself, which is obviously possible—” He shrugged. “At least we’ve shut down one level of his operation. Now, let’s get these hard drives to Adam. I’d like a shower and some food. Then we need to go talk to this mystery hacker my father is guarding.”
She followed him, “I want the MI5 physician to check your wound again.”
He shook his head. “Not necessary, don’t you remember? A medic went over me, pronounced me good to go.”
“He did no such thing. He stared at you and shook his head.”
“You know what I really want? A big, juicy American hamburger, maybe with cheddar on top, lots of onions—”
“Oh, be quiet. I know you, you won’t eat or sleep as long as we have a drug-addled genius with a drone army on the loose.”
“Sadly, you’re right.”
CHAPTER SEVENTY-THREE
The Federal Aviation Administration projects that by 2020 there will be 7 million small drones occupying U.S. airspace.
—GCN
MI5 Headquarters, Home Office
Thames House
12 Millbank
Westminster, London
Adam bounced up from his seat like a cork when they came into the room. “You guys look like you’ve been in a war. You okay?”
Mike patted his arm. “We’re okay. We promise.”
“Good, because that wasn’t cool. Do you want to see the video of what happened?”
Nicholas nodded. “We missed something rather major on the satellite pass. I’d like to see where the missile battery was hidden.”
Adam had the video queued up. He didn’t tell them he’d already watched it fifty times, heart in his throat every time.
He hit play. “Here’s your chopper, comes in quiet, perfect, hovers. Mike goes down, and, as she does, look here. The surface-to-air missile came out of the chimney. It was disguised to look like a piece of brick. The whole section slides free, and it launches, a direct hit on the windshield of the chopper. We think it was on a motion sensor.”
“Bloody hell.”
“Exactly. Nicholas, there you go. Your jump coincides with the missile launch, and, as you can see, the helicopter goes ass over teakettle, barely misses Mike’s head with the rotors, and flings you into the air as it flips, catapults Gareth to the edge of the roof, where he falls and you catch him, and goes down the building. Serious acrobatics ensue, and then Mike saves you and Gareth.
“I’m so sorry about the pilots. They didn’t know what hit them, literally didn’t change their speech patterns. It was so quick.” His voice cracked, and Nicholas put a hand on Adam’s shoulder.
“It felt like a thousand years up there. Thank you for this. Now.” He dropped a waxed canvas bag in Adam’s lap. “Here are all the hard drives from Ardelean’s house and laboratory.”
“Yeah, what was the laboratory about?”
“Manufacturing drugs. Epibatidine and LSD, for starters. But I’m sure there’s more—there was an entire genetics laboratory there, high-end stuff. You let us know what you find, okay?”
“Copy that. You’re heading to meet your dad? Here’s the address. That’s where they’re holding the hacker Temora. And, guys? You’ve just aged me nearly a year, and I don’t want to be twenty-one yet, too adult for me. So be careful, okay? Ardelean has to be royally pissed. I’ll bet he plans to give a new meaning to being on the warpath.”
Once Adam was alone again, he set up a pipe directly to Gray in New York, and the two of them began communicating through a separate, secure video feed. “How are the bosses?”
“They’ve been better. It was a long night. But they’re both alive and in one piece, so that’s an upside. Nicholas brought me all the hard drives.”
“Good,” Gray said. “How about we divide and conquer. You take half the terminals. I’ll take the other half. See what we can find.”
“Sounds good.” Adam spent twenty minutes setting up all of the hard drives on their dedicated terminals before he started pulling data out of them as fast as he could. Gray, remotely accessing his half of the terminals, whistled quietly to himself.
“What are you seeing?”
“There’s a lot here, Adam. Most of it is encoded—it’s going to take ages to sift through it all. Definitely experiments, years of data. The chemistry is astounding. If they’d been doing this in a government or university lab, they’d be Nobel contenders. I count three separate genome-related medications that they’ve developed. Two didn’t work in human trials, but the third showed promise. I assume that’s what Radu had Mike inject into him.”
“So when you say human trials—”
“Radu was the guinea pig. My God, he could have killed himself ten times over if any of this went wrong.”
“This server is all artificial intelligence generating information on the Voynich manuscript. We’re talking years of data and papers and footnotes. But the language itself—this is artificial intelligence at a whole new level. They were even starting to experiment with drones flown by AI instead of pilots. Now that’s a dangerous thought. These guys are geniuses.”
“Yes, they are. Imagine if they’d shared with the class. Here’s yet another new programming language, but I’ve never seen anything like it. I can’t make heads or tails.”