"One of the best debut thrillers I've read in a long time." – Douglas PrestonIn this riveting debut thriller by one of the leading researchers in nanoscience, the race is on to stop the devastating proliferation of the ultimate bioweapon.When Nobel laureate Liam Connor is found dead at the bottom of one of Ithaca, New York's famous gorges, his research collaborator, Cornell professor of nanoscience Jake Sterling, refuses to believe it was suicide. Why would one of the world's most eminent biologists, a eighty-six-year old man in good health who survived some of the darkest days of the Second World War, have chosen to throw himself off a bridge? And who was the mysterious woman caught on camera at the scene? Soon it becomes clear that a cache of supersophisticated nanorobots – each the size of a spider – has disappeared from the dead man's laboratory.Stunned by grief, Jake, Liam's granddaughter, Maggie, and Maggie's nine-year-old son, Dylan, try to put the pieces together. They uncover ingeniously coded messages Liam left behind pointing toward a devastating secret he gleaned off the shores of war-ravaged Japan and carried for more than sixty years.What begins as a quest for answers soon leads to a horrifying series of revelations at the crossroads of biological warfare and nanoscience. At this dangerous intersection, a skilled and sadistic assassin, an infamous Japanese war criminal, and a ruthless U.S. government official are all players in a harrowing game of power, treachery, and intrigue – a game whose winner will hold the world's fate literally in the palm of his hand.
Copyright © 2011 by Paul McEuen
LIAM CONNOR WAS SICK TO SEE IT, STANDING ON THE DECK of the USS
“TURN BACK,” the commanding officer ordered through the megaphone.
“You can’t do this!” screamed one of the Americans. “I have a son. I’ve never seen my son!” He had his shirt off, waving it frantically back and forth, a fluttering white bird over the blue water. Two other men rowed.
“TURN AROUND.
Warning shots spat out of the Oerlikon twenty-millimeter deck cannons, the noise deafening, rapid-fire jackhammers, a strafe line between the lifeboat and the USS
The mist settled, the sea again quiet. The tall one jumped up and down, waving his damned white shirt, threatening to topple the small boat. “Stop firing!” he shouted. “We are
“He’s lying,” said the Army general Willoughby. Willoughby was a few feet away from Liam on the foredeck, watching through his own field glasses, his lips drawn back, teeth clenched. “See the way he moves? He’s jumping out of his skin.”
On the bridge, the commanding officer of the
Another spit of bullets from the guns, and the boat vanished again in a cloud of spray. This time the line was closer, near enough to soak the men. Connor saw fear clinging to their faces like the drops of water. If the gunner raised his sights by a few degrees, they’d be shredded.
The leader of the lifeboat sat down on the gunwale, the white shirt falling from his hands. The boat floated listlessly, slowly twisting while the four argued among themselves, their words carrying over the waves. The tall one pointed toward the
“The stupid bastards are coming,” Willoughby said.
The tall one stood, facing the
The commander of the
He gave a slight nod.
It was over in seconds. Two Oerlikons fired simultaneously, and the sea erupted. The lifeboat exploded red, fragmented into an array of splinters and planks of wood. In an instant, both the men and the lifeboat were gone, nothing left but the mist and a stain of flotsam and debris on the water.
Liam saw something moving, flopping on the surface. At first he thought it was a dying fish. But it wasn’t a fish. It was an arm, severed at the shoulder.
He vomited over the side of the ship.
LIAM CONNOR HAD SPENT FOUR YEARS IN THE BRITISH ARMY, but he had never seen men die like that. Liam was a small man, five-six, but strong-willed, wiry and tough. He was also Irish, with blond-red wavy hair and a complexion like putty stained with red ocher. He was tenacious, with a precocious, sharp mind and fast feet. He had started university at Cork at the age of fourteen and quickly established himself as a biology prodigy, on his way to a Ph.D. when the war intervened. He could also run a mile in just over four minutes fifteen seconds, making him the third fastest man in Ireland. He was a lieutenant, by the British Army’s reckoning more valuable as a scientist than a bullet catcher. Barely twenty-two years old, he’d spent the past four years at Porton Down, in the southwest English county of Wiltshire, the center of British chemical and germ weapons research. His specialty was saprobic fungi, the feeders on the dead.
He was a scientist. He’d never seen men die like that, killed by their own brothers-in-arms.
TWO DAYS AGO HE’D BEEN IN GERMANY, AT A CHEMICAL FACTORY outside Munich. He was in the final weeks of his military service, a member of an Allied team conducting a postmortem of the Nazi chemical and germ warfare program. He expected to leave Germany within days, return to England and on to Ireland and his wife, Edith. They’d been married for almost three years, but in that time had spent less than ten days together. He missed her like he missed Ireland.
Thirty-six hours before, his plans had drastically changed. Liam was shoved on a troop transport plane in Munich with no explanation. Four flights later, he found himself halfway around the world, over the Pacific, circling a flotilla of U.S. Navy vessels. They’d strapped him in a parachute and ordered him out, the first parachute jump of his life. He’d been fished out of the sea and brought aboard the USS
