Resonance: Book 2 of The Nanobot Trilogy

By Robert Jystad

After getting her foot in the door with the LAPD as a medical examiner in the Forensics Services Division, Van Eng finds herself promoted to detective and assigned to the Cold Case Homicide Special Section. Her unique investigative skills and raw courage, combined with her heightened senses due to a hearing impairment, make her an unstoppable force on the squad. Her vision and her sense of smell are acute, and she instinctively catalogues everything in sight with a memory that is borderline photographic. These special gifts all add to Van's investigative skills, but what impresses her colleagues most is her fearlessness.

This second book in The Nanobot Trilogy opens with murder on the Paramount Studios backlot. Someone has been killed during production of a new Bruckheimer film, "The Power of Small," touting the medical benefits of nanobots. While Detective Van Eng and her team investigate the murder, a trip to Pamplona to see the running of the bulls brings Van back into contact with her nemesis, Dr. Belinda Armendariz. Belinda had been the chief scientist and CEO of Ragnar Willowbrook Labs, a Silicon Valley-based biomedical engineering lab that was known to cut corners for its billionaire clients. After retrieving a stolen petri dish containing very special but very toxic nanobots, Belinda believed it was her destiny to resurrect the Basque Golden Age. Little did she know that she would once again run into a young, pesky detective from the City of Los Angeles.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jan 24, 2023
• ISBN: 9781667880501

Book preview

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Resonance is a work of fiction. The story line is a product of the author’s imagination, and any reference to people, events and locations is used fictitiously. Any resemblance to current events or locations or to living persons is entirely coincidental.

A 2022 Bookbaby.com Publication

Copyright © 2022 Robert Jystad

U.S. Copyright Office Registration Number TXu 2-330-455

Effective Date of Registration: July 29, 2022

All rights reserved.

ISBN 978-1-66788-049-5

Ebook ISBN 978-1-66788-050-1

Illustrations by Kim Peasley

To Konnie and Kaia

Your happiness is my happiness

"It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. 

People are either charming or tedious."

Oscar Wilde

Lady Windemere’s Fan, A Play About a Good Woman (1892)

About the Author

Robert Jystad is a California attorney living and working in Southern California. He focused his legal career on wireless communications and served as the president of the California Wireless Association for three years. Prior to law school, Robert was an editor in New York City working first as a production editor for Plenum Publishing and then as a managing editor and administrative director at Columbia University Law School. He has graduate degrees from Princeton Theological Seminary, Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs, and UCLA School of Law. Robert has had success with his academic writing, winning top awards at both Princeton and Columbia. He lives with his beautiful wife, Konnie, and his two bougee terriers, Fendi and Prada, aptly named by their mom. The family recently said good night to their Norwegian Forest Cat, Puff. As a kitten, Puff survived a terrible mistreatment that gave him a lifelong fear of plastic bags. As a young cat, he survived coyotes, snakes, and the many wild beasts roaming the hills of Rancho Palos Verdes, California. As an elderly cat, he survived a week on the run in Long Beach, and as a nineteen-year-old declining male, he even survived the Litter-Robot. You’ll forgive me, buddy, if I suggest that you had a good run and are now in a far better place.

Table of Contents

About the Author

Acknowledgements

Preface

Chapter 1. The Sun Always Rises

Chapter 2. Uno, Due, Trey

Chapter 3. Dawn of the New Revolution

Chapter 4. Not Quite Requited

Chapter 5. The Price of Progress

Chapter 6. The Resurrection of Ragnar Willowbrook

Chapter 7. Film Noir

Chapter 8. The Algernon Effect

Chapter 9. The Show Must Go On

Chapter 10. Ragnar Willowbrook Redux

Chapter 11. Plus Ça Change, Plus La Même Chose

Chapter 12. The Salt of Ernest Hemingway

Chapter 13.An Idea Whose Time Has Come (Part I)

Chapter 14.The Power of Small (Part I)

Chapter 15.The Running

Chapter 16.An Idea Whose Time Has Come (Part II)

Chapter 17. General Tom Warner

Chapter 18.Breakthroughs

Chapter 19. Weaponized

Chapter 20. The Power of Small (Part II)

Chapter 21.Critical Mass

Chapter 22. Silicon Valley Iconography

Chapter 23. Resonance

Chapter 24. The Director

Chapter 25. Toxicity

Chapter 26. The Cost of Making Movies

Chapter 27. Van’s Dreams

Chapter 27. The Briefcase

Postscript

Acknowledgements

Thanks, first and foremost, to my wife Konnie Jystad, without whom the character Van Eng would never have emerged. Konnie continues to amaze me with her sharp memory and enhanced senses. Kim Peasley, once again, made great contributions to the book both as its illustrator and as a copy editor. I also appreciated so much my sister Sharon Diekman’s willingness to review an advance copy of the book and her encouragement to keep it going. I want to welcome a new member of the team, Jason Henry, my colleague at Crown Castle, who enjoyed The Cytokine Plurality enough to ask me if he could review a draft of this second book in the series. Thanks also to Angie McIntyre and John Toccalino at Crown Castle, both of whom also encouraged me in the effort. Special thanks to my many new friends at Red Hill Country Club, the Jenkins, the Williams, the Lisinskis, Mr. Monniger, the Smits, the Nichols, the Aragons, the Wu’s, and many others, who read Book 1 with enthusiasm and who encouraged me to complete Book 2 as fast as possible. Special thanks to Red Hill member Mark Monniger for giving me access to the Paramount Studios backlot for research. Our Westie terrier Prada continues to keep me company as I write, while her partner Fendi is out chasing crows and continuing his this-side-of-the-fence standoff with Max, our neighbor’s German Shepherd. I often find myself identifying with Fendi’s delusions.

Preface

Detective Van Eng is assigned to the Cold Case Homicide Special Section of the Robbery-Homicide Division of the Los Angeles Police Department. Insiders call it CHESS. Van also happens to be hearing impaired. Despite her condition, she realized her dream of being promoted to detective because of the unique investigative skills and raw courage that she displayed while working as a medical examiner in the Forensics Services Division. Several junior and senior members of the bureau resented the promotion because of the difficult road that they all took becoming detectives. She never attended the police academy. She never served as a beat cop facing dangerous conditions daily in the rough neighborhoods of Los Angeles. She never had that chance. Van was denied entry into the police academy because of her impairment. However, with a background in biochemistry and criminal justice, the police academy’s admissions board directed her to forensics. While she worked there, Van impressed her boss and certain members of the division with her unique investigative skills, the result of her special gifts.

Like others with sensory impairments, Van’s remaining senses are heightened. Her vision is acute, and she instinctively catalogues everything in her sight to accommodate her lack of hearing. Her memory is borderline photographic to support her heightened need to assess her surroundings. She also has an enhanced sense of smell and can pick out and identify subtle scents that others do not detect. Finally, Van reads lips in multiple languages. These special gifts all add to Van’s investigative skills, but what impresses her colleagues most is her fearlessness. She has solved several challenging cases despite the jealousy and outright bias of her colleagues. But she had help. Her mentors included Dr. Frank Weatherby, head of the division, Detective Alvin Broad, senior detective in charge of CHESS, and Detective Charles Darling, a senior detective in Robbery-Homicide, who accompanied Van in her first case and who was responsible for having her promoted to detective.

Among those who would dismiss Van was Detective Paul Young, Detective Darling’s colleague in Robbery-Homicide. Detective Young considered himself sympathetic to Van’s situation as a human being, but he did not support her promotion to detective and felt she would risk the lives of fellow officers. But Van wasn’t concerned about Detective Young’s opinion. She threw herself into undercover work and brought down two of the more notorious gangs in Los Angeles. She took on Detective Young directly by reopening a case he had closed and then solving the mysterious death of UCLA medical student Marley Dakota, a case that ultimately introduced Van to Dr. Belinda Armendariz. Dr. Armendariz, prior to her downfall, was the chief scientist and CEO of Ragnar Willowbrook Labs, a Silicon Valley-based biomedical engineering lab that was known to cut corners for its billionaire clients. Book 1 ends with Belinda relaxing in a hotel room in Seattle, having retrieved a petri dish containing very special but very toxic nanobots. The petri dish was stolen from her lab. The cost of retrieving that stolen petri dish was substantial and included the destruction of a well-regarded biomedical lab and the deaths of its well-known scientists, none of which affected Belinda. She watched and listened remotely as Van’s team and the FBI raided her lab, watched and listened as her team defended her in a shootout and then were apprehended by Van and the FBI and imprisoned on her behalf. In her mind, her team had a job to do, and they did it. End of that story. Now this one . . .

Maps

Map 1. The Basque Region

Map 2. The Running of the Bulls

Map 3. Paramount Studios, Backlot

Chapter 1.

The Sun Always Rises

It’s hard to dispute that life on Earth is a miracle. Whether or not you believe in God or in a deus ex machina or even in nothing at all, you must acknowledge that the specific ordering of the universe and this solar system to produce life on this planet was not an inevitability. When the big bang generated the dust particles that eventually made up the sun, the stars, and the planets, the universe did not just snap into place. There was a lot of smashing and grabbing and exploding and battles for position and, in this solar system, Jupiter led the insurrection. The largest of the balls of gas, Jupiter embarked on a massive power grab, consuming all the debris in its path as it made its way closer to the sun. Mars was next in line and should have crashed onto the surface of Jupiter and been consumed by its immense powers. Then, suddenly and without any explanation, Jupiter stopped moving, dead in its path. The giant ball somehow decided it had had enough and settled comfortably into an elliptical orbit around the sun and, as it did, so did Mars and Earth and all the other planets. Had Jupiter engulfed Mars, nothing would have prevented that monster from engulfing Earth or latching onto Earth as another one of its moons and the conditions for life on Earth would never have developed. But inexplicably, the galactic Game of Thrones ended, and life on Earth became a possibility.

There was nothing miraculous about the briefcase, not on the outside. Truth be told, there was nothing special about the briefcase even on the inside, except for the idea it concealed. The crowds around the Capitol Mall were surly. A grand injustice was about to deprive them of another four years of one of the more unique presidents that the country had seen. Whether or not he was very good at the job didn’t matter. He was their president, and his time was about to end. The briefcase didn’t care about the crowd. It wound its way through the protesters like a leaf floating down a stream, pushing past boulders and branches, hopping through rapids and over small waterfalls and continuing on its way, as if it had a divine purpose. The briefcase’s carrier was wearing a trench coat, of course, not because he was a government agent trying to be nondescript, but rather because it was cold. He saw protesters in t-shirts and strange thin costumes and wondered how long it would be before they became hypothermic. He recalled a winter protest from his youth up in Ithaca, New York, years before he joined the same government that he then protested against, in which two young women thought shorts and skimpy t-shirts might get them some attention. It got them a quick ride to the hospital and a narrow escape from hypothermic death. He chuckled at the memory. He approached an empty bench, surprising given the number of people around. It was very cold and the bench was metal, so maybe the fact of its emptiness wasn’t that surprising. He sat down and set the case next to him under the bench and watched and waited. A nice older woman was feeding birds nearby. She asked if she might sit for a minute, to rest her back. He couldn’t refuse, so he scooted over and gave her room.

Do you think the Potomac has frozen over? she asked.

I wouldn’t try to cross it today, he responded, smiled, and then stood and left the case under the bench.

A delivery truck waited nearby. It wasn’t an easy walk for her, but the case wasn’t that heavy. As she approached the truck’s cab, the driver’s door opened, and an outstretched arm reached down and took the case and closed the door. She felt like coffee and entered a nearby coffee shop to warm up and enjoy a steamy latte.

Do you mind if I sit for a minute? she asked an older gentleman in a booth next to the window.

Be my guest, he responded. She sat, and they waited in silence for her latte.

Did you make the drop?

It’s done.

Good. Now I need you to go to Los Angeles. He handed her a small folded paper bag. Tickets and instructions.

She smiled and sipped her latte as she placed the paper bag in her purse. Without anything further, he stood and left the coffee shop.

Can I warm that up for you? asked a spry young University of Georgetown waitress.

Please, dear, she replied and pushed her cup forward. These old bones need a little extra heat, or they just stop working.

******

Dr. Belinda Armendariz awoke in her hilltop villa just outside Errenteria, Spain. Errenteria was a medium-sized town on the coast of Spain, but more importantly to Belinda, Errenteria was a town in her home country, the Basque Country as the people called it, officially the Basque Autonomous Community under the Spanish Constitution of 1978. Belinda believed in her people, fashioned herself their queen, as she dreamed about resurrecting the original Basque kingdom, the Kingdom of Pamplona. She had traced her lineage to the House of Jimenez, the monarchic dynasty that ruled over Pamplona for three centuries beginning in 900 A.D. It was, in her mind, the golden age of the Basque people, and Belinda believed it was her destiny to resurrect the dynasty and bring back the Basque golden age. Her rise to CEO of Ragnar Willowbrook Labs in the Silicon Valley and her growing wealth confirmed her grand destiny, and without telling anyone at the labs, she had redesigned the grounds around Ragnar Willowbrook so that the gardens and sculptures formed the heart-like shape of her Basque Country. From her fifth story office atop the labs, she could swivel her desk chair around and look out her window at the labs’ massive gardens and dream of being home.

Now she was home, waiting out the repercussions of her activities in the States, including a battle royale with the FBI and a fatal explosion at the Duc A. Tran Laboratory on Bainbridge Island, an island in Puget Sound nearest downtown Seattle. It was her ops team that had planted the charges causing the latter and—even though it had not been her intention to destroy the Tran Lab—her team got a bit too enthusiastic, and the explosion resulted in ten deaths. Belinda knew she might be hunted if she were tied to the explosion, but she had an ace up her sleeve. General Tom Warner, a five-star general at the Pentagon, knew about the accident and about the petri dish she had back in her possession, and she was certain he would protect her.

She looked at the petri dish and thought about where it had been. General Warner had called her colleague at the labs, Dr. Leonard Freund, and arranged for the delivery of the dish to Ragnar Willowbrook. The general would not divulge its source or contents, although he did warn her about it, and when they received it, the dish had been labeled Risk Group IV, meaning it was not only toxic, but possibly lethal. He wanted Belinda’s company to discern its contents and get back to him with a sense of its possible uses, military or otherwise. Belinda knew that the Pentagon was not always interested in military uses of technology. Several prominent examples of modern advances in technology started with the military, and the Pentagon’s interest in those advances extended well beyond a simple kill factor. ARPAnet, for example, was a computer-based communications network developed by an arm of the Department of Defense, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The military wanted a decentralized communications network that would withstand a nuclear attack. In the 1990s, DARPA shared the ARPAnet technology with several universities, which converted it into a nationwide computer communications network and renamed it the Internet. Belinda studied the dish, but she was not focused on whether or not she had possession of a potential weapon. What mattered more to her was that she was staring at a watershed advance in technology that she could control.

The question was, what to do with it now? Back at the lab, they had been in the process of formulating the protocol for its handling, but Dr. Freund let curiosity get the best of him and had made the mistake of giving the dish to a highly skilled technician named Sam Waterford for preliminary review. That might have been the first step in the process anyway, but Belinda, who struggled with Dr. Freund’s lack of control in several areas, had developed a successful protocol for handling new discoveries and it upset her when her protocol was treated lightly. Water under the bridge now, though. Freund’s mistake had led to the Labs’ likely demise and forced Belinda into hiding. Still, she had it back in her possession and had an opportunity for a fresh start. She would not go back to the States. That would be too risky. She had more than enough money in several offshore accounts and could start up a new lab, here in her home country, Basque Country or, perhaps better, just outside of the City of Pamplona.

Pamplona, of course, has been known around the world for other reasons, principally for its hosting of an annual test of true bravado, the fiesta del encierro also known as the Running of the Bulls, which took place during the mid-summer Feast of San Fermin. The event that started sometime in the 1800s was actually preceded by a centuries-old practice of herding bulls brought to the City of Pamplona on boats and wagons through the streets of downtown Pamplona into the bullring where they would eventually fight and die. The herd was led by one cowherd who raced ahead of what Hemingway called the furious energy of the bulls for the nine hundred meters from start to finish. The foolish test of bravery, the bravado, was started by young men who joined the cowherd and raced ahead of the bulls and risked being trampled, gored, or tossed in the air all to prove their merit as men and win the hearts of the women who pined for their fleet-footed heroes.

Belinda loved the encierro. For her it was a beautiful metaphor, not of grooms chasing brides as many of her compatriots saw it, but of death chasing life, the ultimate race against time. The fear she saw in the eyes of the runners just before the gore or the fall excited her more than anything else. As she watched, she took in deep rapid breaths, almost as if she were running herself, and when the heat became too much for her to bear, she would grab runners off the streets as they moved to the edge to avoid being run over. She pulled them upstairs and into her bed where she ripped off her clothes and made mad furious love usually with some foreign tourist whose delight at his fortune got him slapped and beaten and scratched and used up and tossed back to the street only to avoid the next wave of bulls. She did it repeatedly and found it invigorating, and it restored her and energized her to take the next giant steps toward her ultimate goal. Her latest move had been to target the Silicon Valley in California, which she knew had become the center of the universe, an actual Golden City of El Dorado contrary to the fantasy version sought by Sir Walter Raleigh. She found her way to the Silicon Valley and Ragnar Willowbrook Labs where she eventually connected with a partner in General Tom Warner from the Pentagon, and Belinda began to build her own empire.

******

The Gold Wing raced down Highway 1. Occasionally Brian let the bike get too close to the edge of the highway where he could look straight down into the cresting ocean waves that smashed against the cliffs and sent spray almost back on to the highway a hundred feet above. He raced through the winding curves moving in a manner smooth and controlled, not a furious energy but calm and focused. He thought always of Van, the girl detective who captured his imagination. She was right to say that he hardly knew her. But her pull was magnetic, irresistible. Crazy as it seemed, Brian knew that he had no choice but to head south, down to Los Angeles, down to everything he despised about urban life and the vapid Hollywood scene if only to discover whether his heart knew what his head was resisting, that this one might be special.

The highway straightened out and turned east just as he flew past Elephant Seal Vista Point, and the steep rocky cliffs were replaced by large brown fields. He passed signs pointing to San Simeon and glanced up the hills to his left where, in the distance, William Randolph Hearst’s castle-styled mansion peered out over groves of birch trees into the small bay below. The castle had been a Hollywood playground in the 1930s and ’40s for dignitaries and stars of silent films and the first talkies. Hearst’s closest companion, starlet Marion Davies, developed a reputation for hosting lavish parties at the castle, and her many prominent guests ranged from Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford to Calvin Coolidge, Winston Churchill, and George Bernard Shaw. Brian smiled as he imagined a convoy of old convertible roadsters packed with fancy men and women riding up the long windy road to the castle holding champagne glasses and sitting precariously on the top of the back seat or the window’s edge laughing and nearly being catapulted out of the car. For some, those few days would be the highlight of their entire lives.

The road veered back to the coast, and Brian stopped for lunch in Cambria at the Moonstone Beach Bar and Grill. He found a booth with an ocean view and relaxed behind a plate of fish tacos and a Diet Coke. He thought about the lab back up in Bainbridge and winced at the heartless destruction and death that had just occurred there.But he paused in reflection at the thought that it was the mere coincidence of a sudden downpour that had prevented a widespread catastrope from the release of the toxic smart dust on which he had been working and that, after an inadvertent prior release, had almost killed him and his colleague. Brian didn’t believe in divine intervention, but if anything were to convince him otherwise, that would have been it. Now, just days after the explosion, the university already was talking to him about replacing Dr. Stan Meisner and rebuilding the lab. Meisner had been Dr. Brian Johannsen’s mentor, and even if Brian didn’t particularly like Dr. Meisner, he was deeply saddened and angered at Meisner’s death in the explosion. He wasn’t ready to consider the university’s premature offer. He wondered if Fred Schmidt, the Silicon Valley billionaire who had introduced the lab to the toxic nanobots, was behind the urgency to get the lab back in operation. But for now, Brian didn’t care about Fred Schmidt or the University. He needed to get to Van, drawn as if by some irresistible force. He knew it would be foolish to imagine a life with Van, but it was hard not to let his imagination run just a bit. He bristled at the thought that he might be obsessing and maybe even bordering on creepiness, and he fought the urge to let the fantasy run on. Van had her own plans for her life, and whether he might be a part of it was not something he could control. As he finished his tacos, he thought there’s nothing wrong with taking it slow. He gulped down the Diet Coke, paid, and jumped back on his bike, racing down Highway 1 and then onto what one 1970s’ rock band called Ventura Highway, unconsciously increasing his speed as he got closer to Los Angeles.

Chapter 2.

Uno, Due, Trey

Trey Nguyen stared at the pages in front of him. He hated the title, The Power of Small, but his opinion had been overridden by the movie’s lead writer Peggy Rice and, more importantly, by the movie’s producer Jerry Bruckheimer. Jerry knows Hollywood , Trey thought. Who am I to second guess? Trey turned to the script. The storyline was certainly dramatic and the technology was novel and interesting in its own right, but Trey wasn’t satisfied. It needed a tension among the lead characters that was real and compelling.

The movie focused on a young female patient in the intensive care unit of a hospital in Hawaii. She was a brilliant college track star who was preparing for the next Olympics and decided to spend Christmas holidays prior to her last college season with her family in Oahu. Trey knew Hawaii well, and his ability to enhance