36.

London, United Kingdom

The Doctor is like a coiled spring. He has regained his intellectual genius and operates his systems as a virtuoso. Jeremy insisted that he hydrate and eat—and take a shower as well. He would have liked to see him sleep a bit to recover from the deprivations of the last few days. But the Doc refused, claiming that a good shower and a change of clothes would be enough. However, he has not reset his emergency protocol, and the two men are still operating from the bunker in self-sufficient mode.

Jeremy briefly summarized the events of the past week since his arrival in Toronto: his meeting with Kinkaid, his investigation into Phoenix, Vaughan's betrayal, the teams sent to Spain and Moscow. But this story alone is not enough to paint a clear picture of the situation. The two men desperately need to combine their ideas.

The Doctor has pulled a glass table into a corner of his den. He touches a control panel on one side, and the plateau lights up.

"Is that a..."

"...A touch table?" Doc interrupts. "Yes, developer version, I've added a few functions of my own, of course."

"Perfect," says Jeremy, "we should be able to reconstruct the events more easily."

The Doctor has already opened several applications. In a list, he places the results of his personal research.

"Phoenix was working on his famous 'universal spy' project for the CIA. The best of nanotechnology."

"Correct," Jeremy approves, "Kinkaid's team confirmed the presence of nanobots in Mosquito's brain."

"But now we know that Phoenix doesn't use passive observers. According to what I found," adds Doc, "he never solved the interfacing problems with the nervous system."

"No, but he discovered a way to make them deadly torture devices."

Doc is hastily taking notes. While Jeremy continues recounting the findings made in the previous days.

"We know he moved from a direct injection transmission vector to ingesting his nanites through food products. Probably thanks to the famous compound stolen in New York. He has also evolved his command mode. At first, he had to be very close, likely in the same room, with a sort of remote control. But since Brian and Mosquito ... it's clear he operates from a greater distance."

Doc stops and thinks for a moment.

"That's not possible," he says.

"There are eyewitness accounts, Doc, Mosquito was alone on a café terrace... Sarah..." He has to catch his breath before continuing. " ... there was no one in the house except me and Kinkaid's men."

"I understand," Doc acknowledges. "But it's not possible... The very nature of nanites prevents long-distance transmission. The size of the receiver and the energy required for such communications would currently be impossible to miniaturize in such a way. I'm sorry, but the transmitter must be relatively close for any communication to actually occur."

The two men ponder for a moment.

"Or maybe," Jeremy starts...

"A relay!" both friends exclaim at the same time.

"He uses a relay. He must have henchmen who implant a device on his victims," argues Jeremy. "Vaughan ... a bank employee in Brian's case... A passerby in the streets of El Formigal..."

"Any pickpocket could easily slip a small relay into the victims' pockets," agrees Doc. "The hardware itself could be barely bigger than a matchbox."

Jeremy shows a doubtful look. "We haven't found anything like that on the victims..."

"Maybe Phoenix has his men pick up his relay after the deed is done?"

"Possibly... In that case, we need to confirm what was found on Sarah..."

His throat tightens again. He pauses briefly, then continues: "Kinkaid was there, no one outside the rescue team approached Sarah. If she had a device on her, we can be certain that the major's crew would have discovered it, Phoenix wouldn't have had the chance to recover it."

"And if one of the agents was in league with Phoenix?" suspects Doc.

"We can't rule out any hypothesis, of course, but it's still worth asking."

"Not sure you left on good terms with him from what you told me. Do you think he'll continue to share his information with you?"

Jeremy displays a sly smile. "Oh, that shouldn't be a problem, no need to ask his permission ... we have access to his laptop."

"Are you telling me you hacked the computer of the head of a cell so secret that even I had never heard of it?"

Jeremy nods and opens an Internet browser on the table interface.

Doc lets out an admiring whistle. "Well, then ... respect. And how did you handle that? I imagine the machines of this organization must be rather well protected."

"The simplest way, actually. I managed to get physical access to his computer and install what I wanted."

In the browser, Jeremy enters one of his servers' address. He clicks on a few links in his interface.

"He lent you his computer, just like that?"

"No, of course not, I pulled the unreadable USB stick trick on him."

"No?"

"What do you do when something doesn't work and there's an IT guy in the room, who you gonna call?"

In the browser window, a machine address is entered.

"Look, his last IP address, if his laptop is online, we can see if there has been any news."

The Doctor opens a simple text command prompt. He begins to type several connections and search instructions. After a few minutes, he has the preliminary report concerning Sarah, including the list of her possessions upon her arrival at the morgue. It turns out to be quite meager.

He intentionally stands between Jeremy and the document, so the latter cannot read the autopsy file.

Apart from her clothes, her watch, and her wedding ring, a simple hair elastic band was found in one of her pockets.

"Not really enough to conceal a transmission relay," he concludes. "Maybe in her watch?"

"No... She wore that watch all the time I was there. If Phoenix had hidden a relay in it, he would have had to do it well in advance... He's Machiavellian, but I don't think he prepared things to that extent. However... Vaughan could have simply hidden a relay in the house."

"That's possible, but Jay ... the nanobots must be really close to the relay to receive the commands. If it's not on the person themselves, any movement would break the connection."

"Brian was found in the middle of the street, Sarah went up to the attic..."

"It doesn't fit," finishes Doc. "A relay in the bank office or on the ground floor of the residence would quickly become out of range for the nanobots to receive a signal."

"But Sarah had nothing else on her, how..."

Jeremy suddenly falls silent. He has turned pale. Doc fears that the successive evocations of Sarah have finally claimed their toll on his nerves, he asks: "Are you okay?"

"No! No! It can't be that, it can't be!" Jeremy abruptly stands up. He starts pacing around.

"Jay?" worries Doc.

The Frenchman snatches his chair and violently throws it against the steel door, letting out a furious yell.

Disturbed, Doc steps away from the table and stands up as well.

"Jay? What's wrong?"

Jeremy relentlessly kicks the overturned chair. "Damn it!"

Doc approaches his friend and grabs him by the shoulder. Jay turns around, hand raised, ready to strike.

"It's me, Doc, stop!"

The hand remains suspended in the air. "Doc?"

"Stop Jay, you're scaring me... What's wrong?"

The arm slowly falls. Jay collapses. Doc barely catches him in time. "You don't understand..." whispers the Frenchman.

He straightens, shaking his head. "It can't be..."

"What Jay? Tell me."

Jeremy doesn't answer. He rushes to his jacket, left on the back of a chair, and pulls out Sarah's mobile. "Her phone, Doc ... she was on the phone with Phoenix," he murmurs in a voice of despair.

He squeezes the device in his hand and collapses onto the chair. "I just had to make her move away from it..."

"You think Phoenix had relays placed in his victims' phones?"

Jay continues: "It was me who picked up Brian's personal belongings at the morgue. He had his mobile with him... And the café owner where Mosquito died... She saw him using his phone just before her supposed attack... I didn't make the connection... It's my fault..."

Doc steps forward. "You couldn't have known."

Jay remains silent. Doc watches him without adding anything. He retrieves the abused chair and puts it back in front of the touch table.

Slowly, the Frenchman gathers himself. Doc argues out loud: "Relays in mobiles? That seems tough, it would require physical access to the devices, and some time to modify them."

Resigned, Jay returns to his friend, who is still soliloquizing: "All this without the owners noticing... Difficult ... but possible."

Suddenly the Doctor jumps, slapping his forehead.

"Oh! Jay, I know, I know ... they can do that, you know?"

He is almost in a trance, wriggling and waving his hands in the air. This effervescence pulls Jeremy out of his stupor.

"Who 'they'?" finally participates in the Frenchman.

"Echelon! You told me Phoenix worked for Echelon?"

"About five years yes, but I don't see the connection."

"Oh! Jay, I wrote an article about it two or three months ago..." The Doctor's eyes widen. "That's why he's after me, Jay! He read my article, he knows I can stop him!"

Jeremy can see that his friend has probably understood many things. He would like, too, to be let in on the discovery, so he tempers his friend's enthusiasm a bit.

"Doc? ... Explanations, please..."

"Yeah, yeah..."

He runs his hands through his hair and scratches his chin, wondering how to present everything.

"OK ... do you know Echelon? The big global listening network that filters all calls from landlines, mobiles, radios, etc. Supposedly to 'fight terrorism,' but personally, I rather think that..."

"Doc? Focus..."

"Yes, OK, uh... Echelon... You know, they have a stranglehold on the Internet and..."

"Doc!"

"Anyway... About two or three months ago, I wrote an article to raise public awareness that the Echelon network could very easily switch from a passive listening mode to an active transmission mode. Really, it's just a few changes in the core programming. Then... Echelon could send data to units, like, in our case, cell phones. They could convey messages, code, run applications, retrieve local address books, pretty much ... whatever they want..."

"Doc, mobile service providers block such incoming transmissions, you know that. Only legitimate ones such as voice calls or text messages are allowed on their networks."

"That's what I was telling in my article. I was warning against the huge consortia being created by buying up companies. It drastically reduces the number of entities one will have to 'convince' in order to change the current measures in place."

"Doc, Phoenix doesn't have the financial power to embark on such acquisitions and alter such processes on a large scale."

"Of course not, but ...—and I can't believe I'm the one saying this—... without talking about a global conspiracy, what if Phoenix had found a way to compromise service providers without their knowledge?"

This time, The Englishman's hypothesis catches Jeremy's attention. He wants to understand more.

"You think that's possible?"

"Not only is it possible, but it's not even complicated. A simple well-placed transponder, which would merge the codes sent by Echelon with classic calls, and Phoenix could command his nanites with a subcarrier masked in a plain SMS. You see, the transmission of voice requires a lot more bandwidth, difficult to conceal code without altering the quality of the conversation. But instant messages? Oh boy, there's plenty of room to pass something else through..."

The two men pause for a moment to measure the scope of their conclusions. Jay confirms with an obvious fact: "And no need to put a pirate transmission relay in the devices... They are already WiFi, Bluetooth and NFC transmitters... If Phoenix can directly send his nanites code this way..."

"For as long as Phoenix has control over a provider's network, every mobile phone on that network becomes a potential candidate for remotely piloting nanites. Jay... The worst part, with the current telephony conglomerates, is that by compromising very few infrastructures it would be enough to cover a vast majority of mobile phone owners. In my article, I used the example of the United States. Through indirect partnerships, AT&T and Verizon networks cover eighty percent of North American subscribers. In Europe, the data centers of Orange in France, T-Mobile in Germany, Telia in Sweden, and Vodafone here in England would be plenty to access a large majority of customers for all Western Europe."

"We're talking about millions ... hundreds of millions of people," Jeremy adds thoughtfully.

"With only five or six compromised sites..."

Jeremy places Sarah's phone on the touch table, which immediately detects it and starts transferring the device's memory content.

"Doc, could you confirm our theory by going through the communication files?"

"Not with the default application, but wait, I have just the thing..."

Doc types a few new commands, opens the files stored in the depths of the mobile SIM and begins to inspect them.

"I'm not the first to enter the protected area of the SIM card," he notes.

"That was me," explains Jeremy. "I traced the call from Phoenix to send him a message."

"I see..."

"Doc, could you locate his number?"

"You want an address? Might as well ask me if I can recite the contents of the second drawer from the bottom in my office by heart..."

Jeremy shows a look of incomprehension at the metaphor used.

"Hello," Doc points to himself with a finger. "OCD? Of course, I can..."

He transfers the phone's data to his central system and stands up to join his console, closely followed by Jeremy.

He analyzes the files and simultaneously launches several applications. One of them soon displays the location of the last cell towers used to send Jay's message. Meanwhile, he scrutinizes the content of the transmission's data from the previous call.

"Jay? Look!" He points to some lines of code on his screen.

"Definitely a subcarrier integrated into a series of text messages... With some time, I should be able to decipher the content and analyze the code used by Phoenix to command his nanobots."

A new window displays a geographical map with a small highlighted area.

"Philadelphia," comments the Doc.

Jeremy inspects the map, thinks for a moment, and says: "Send these coordinates to Kinkaid. Us, we have other things to check..."

Doc turns to his friend with a questioning look. What else could they possibly have to check? They've just cracked the means of Phoenix's transmission and located his headquarters...