A $50 Cost Against a $1.2 Million Defense
Beneath Seventh Avenue in Brooklyn was an abandoned D line subway tunnel.
The two men felt their way along the tunnel wall in the dark for about forty minutes.
Above them lay one of New York's bustling commercial districts; underfoot were half a century's worth of foul water and rat droppings.
Riptide led the way.
He had spent two weeks studying the layout of this stretch of underground pipes.
Every junction and hiding place was etched into his memory.
Sing Sing followed behind, carrying a plastic bag in his left hand. Its contents clinked and rattled.
Riptide glanced back at him, then stopped himself from speaking.
He simply couldn't understand it.
Why would someone heading into an underground laboratory carry a bag full of random junk?
"The ventilation shaft is fifty meters ahead."
Riptide kept his voice low.
"We can get into the lab's exhaust ducts from there, but..."
Before he could finish, Sing Sing had already crouched down and opened the plastic bag.
He took the contents out and laid them on a ledge.
A bottle of Red Star Erguotou, 56 percent alcohol.
Two jin of pork hind leg, streaked with blood and wrapped in plastic.
A thin-bladed boning knife and a rat cage.
The cage was made of wire and held five or six rats, which were trampling over one another.
Riptide stared at the cage for three seconds, then looked at Sing Sing again to make sure he wasn't joking.
"Where did you get the rats?"
"I set the cage in an alley behind Chinatown. New York's rats are pretty fat. They eat better than I do."
Sing Sing tore off the plastic wrap and sliced the pork hind leg into thin pieces in a few quick strokes.
"What defenses are in the duct below the ventilation shaft? Give me the details."
"An infrared temperature-sensing array, with a set of sensors every three meters."
Riptide got back on task.
"The detection range covers the entire cross section of the duct. As soon as anything at human body temperature enters, the alarm goes off."
"Past the temperature sensors, there's a laser grid. You can't see it with the naked eye."
"Touch any one of the beams, and four drones will fly out at once within ten seconds."
"What do the drones carry?"
"Miniature electric-shock rounds."
Sing Sing finished slicing the meat and spread the pieces out on his knees, one by one.
Then he opened the rat cage and lifted one out by the scruff of its neck.
The rat squeaked and kicked all four paws wildly.
Sing Sing wrapped a slice of pork around it.
Riptide watched him and froze for three seconds.
"What are you doing?"
"Dressing the rats."
Sing Sing didn't look up, his hands moving swiftly.
"The surface temperature of pork hind leg is twenty-seven or twenty-eight degrees, not far off a person's skin temperature."
"Rats have high body temperatures to begin with. Wrap them in a layer of meat, and the infrared sensors won't be able to tell whether they're people or ghosts."
"Each one of them is a moving heat signature."
"The drones lock onto heat sources and track them automatically. Four drones chasing a few rats should keep them busy for a while."
Sing Sing wrapped four rats.
The fifth was too small for the meat to stay wrapped around it, so he let it go.
"Four is enough. But what about the laser grid? You said we can't see it."
Sing Sing picked up the Erguotou, unscrewed the cap, poured a little into his palm, and brought it under his nose for a sniff.
The real thing. Fierce.
"Fifty-six percent Red Star. That's enough alcohol."
Riptide stared at the liquor.
"When we reach the laser grid, wait behind me."
Sing Sing screwed the cap back on and tucked the bottle inside his shirt.
"I'll take a big mouthful and spray it out. When the alcohol mist hits the lasers, it'll refract the light and reveal the beams."
"Once we can see them, we can get through."
"How much area can you cover with one mouthful?"
"For the three years I sold pork, I didn't have a freezer in the summer. I relied entirely on spraying strong liquor over the meat to sterilize it and keep it fresh."
"With one mouthful of fifty-six-percent Erguotou, I can spray a fan two and a half meters wide."
"The duct is 1.8 meters in diameter. More than enough."
Riptide made a rough calculation of the cost.
A bottle of Erguotou was fifteen dollars, two jin of pork hind leg eight dollars, and the rats were free.
The total cost was less than thirty dollars.
The picture was added later, so Riptide is already a cadre.
Across from them, the infrared sensors, laser grid, and drone interception system had cost Stryker $1.2 million to purchase from an arms dealer.
The two men climbed the ventilation shaft and crawled into the exhaust duct.
Sing Sing crawled about twenty meters ahead, then turned and made a hand signal.
Ahead of them, a row of sensors was embedded in the duct wall at three-meter intervals, their red indicator lights blinking.
Sing Sing took the rats out from inside his shirt and set them in the duct one by one.
The pork made it hard for the rats to move, but their survival instincts drove them to push desperately forward.
The four rats jostled and tumbled over one another, stumbling into the detection zone.
Three seconds later, the sound of machinery came from deep inside the duct.
The whir of propellers approached, then rapidly receded again as the drones chased the rats.
"Go."
The two men climbed through a maintenance opening on the side and into the main duct.
Sing Sing moved quickly along the duct wall, counting the weld seams overhead.
Past the third seam, the duct narrowed.
Sing Sing unscrewed the Erguotou, tipped his head back, and took a full mouthful.
His cheeks bulged as the fifty-six-percent liquor burned fiercely in his mouth.
He pursed his lips and sprayed it out in one burst.
The atomized liquor spread through the duct, forming a layer of white mist, and three invisible laser beams became clear red lines.
One stretched across at knee height, another was level with his chest, and the top one ran close to the ceiling of the duct.
The gaps between them were uneven, and the narrowest was only wide enough to pass through sideways.
Sing Sing didn't hesitate. He ducked low and slid through along the bottom of the duct.
He knew this position all too well.
When the market stalls were closing, he had spent three years practicing crawling in and out under half-raised roller shutters.
He had even spent quite a bit of money on it.
Sometimes his legs still felt unsteady when he came out.
A maintenance cover lay at the end of the duct.
Sing Sing pried out four screws, and as he removed the cover, cold air surged up through the gap.
The laboratory was below.
The two men climbed down through the ceiling maintenance opening and landed without a sound.
The corridor was long, with a reinforced glass door fitted with an electronic lock every five or six meters on both sides.
Most of the cells were empty, their lights off.
After Riptide had walked a dozen steps or so, his whole body stiffened as he stared at the third cell ahead on the left.
The light was on in the cell.
Behind the glass door, a person lay on a narrow iron bed.
The young man was in his early twenties, with a shaved head and a surgical gown.
His wrists and ankles were secured to the bed frame with metal cuffs.
"Anton!"
Riptide charged toward the glass door.
Sing Sing grabbed Riptide by the back of his collar and pulled him back.
"There's a spherical camera at three o'clock. The commotion from you rushing over will trigger the linked access-control system."
"Did you forget the rules we agreed on?"
Riptide stopped struggling and said nothing.
Sing Sing let go.
"Follow me. Don't take a single extra step."
Sing Sing followed the base of the wall around to the blind spot, then edged sideways along the glass wall to the front of the cell.
The glass door's electronic lock required both fingerprint and password authentication.
A small screen on the panel showed that it was locked.
Behind the glass, the young man named Anton lay on the iron bed.
Above the metal cuff on his wrist, something was moving across the skin of his forearm.
Gray-silver lines slowly wriggled beneath his skin, one after another.
A data panel stood at the head of the iron bed, its green numbers constantly changing.
A string of characters appeared on the top line.
X-09-Weapon.
The experimental parameters were listed below.
Gene fusion rate: 17.3%.
Rejection response index: dangerous.
That designation...
Sing Sing had caught a glimpse of it in the Pentagon database Da Vinci had dug up.
It was Stryker's Weapon X Program.
It attempted to forcibly implant the X-Gene into ordinary people to create artificial Mutants.
The test subjects' median survival time was only eleven days.
And the panel showed that Anton had already been here for fifty-eight days.