Kill Decision

  McKinney took the briefest of moments to be disgusted. “God, you’re sick!”

  Evans flicked the dead bolt. “We’ve got more pressing problems than my prurient tastes.”

  Odin examined the dead-end room. “Dammit, Morty. You trapped us!”

  Evans was scurrying about, clattering at keyboards. “Not true. I just need to clear some machines and grab some gear before we bug out.”

  “Bug out where?” Odin looked around at the racks lining the walls of the small room. An explosion like a shotgun blast tore through the door, ripping an inch-wide hole in the wood laminate. Odin raised his gun but didn’t fire. “They’re breaking in! Evans, you stupid—”

  “Would you give me a moment?” He was still clattering on keyboards.

  McKinney could see he appeared to be launching a wipe sequence, and several screens started scrolling progress on a shell script.

  Another last punch on an ENTER key and Evans grabbed a laptop bag hung over a chair-back. “Ready to roll!”

  “Roll where, asshole?”

  There were several popping explosions at the door, and now two foot-wide holes splintered the wood. Odin fired several shots at bot-birds that tried to flutter through.

  Evans grabbed McKinney’s shoulder and pulled her to a computer rack. He pulled back on it, and it swung away from the wall on a hinge, revealing a narrow corridor.

  McKinney smiled in relief and turned to shout at Odin. “Odin! This way!”

  Odin emptied his HK’s clip at the door, blasting apart several more of the artificial birds, but they blasted several more holes in the door as well. He turned and gave Evans an irritated look before diving into the breach on McKinney’s heels. “Why the hell didn’t you say something?”

  “Because I knew you’d force me to leave before I was ready.” Evans stopped in the corridor opening. There were already lone bot-birds fluttering around the server room. Evans pulled a round olive-drab canister from a bracket on the wall and pulled a metal pin from it.

  McKinney shouted, “What the hell are you doing? Let’s get out of here!”

  “Gotta clean up, or I’m going to have some legal issues later on. . . .” He tossed the now smoking canister into the server room, and a blinding white glow began to expand, followed by a wave of broiling heat. Slam. The secret door shut behind them, Evans raced ahead, leading the way. The blinding light showed through a previously unseen gap at the base of the secret door. A furnacelike roar came to their ears.

  They raced down the narrow secret corridor, single file, until they reached another hatchway. Evans turned to them and held up a finger for silence.

  He whispered, “We hang a left at the laundry room, and that’s the maid’s door. There’s a fire stairwell across the hall.”

  Odin nodded. “Pablo Escobar . . .”

  “I was keeping my options open, dammit.”

  McKinney and Odin nodded.

  Evans pushed through and proceeded left. They were close on his heels. McKinney cast a glance at the place and realized this guy really did have a hell of condo. There was no swarm here, and in a moment they reached the service entrance. He unbolted it and ducked his head out. A quick wave, and they headed across and down the building corridor to the fire exit. The moment Evans hit the push bar, the fire alarm sounded. They ran down the stairwell, the fire-rated door slamming behind them.

  Odin shouted, “There’ll be fire and police here soon.”

  Evans nodded. “Good thing. Some asshole started a fire back there.” He rounded the next stair flight with the others close on his heels. “You really fucked me this time, Odin! What the hell am I going to do now?”

  “Help us stop these things.”

  “Oh, goddammit. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

  “You’ve got no choice now. Whoever is behind this has access to intelligence and surveillance systems. You and I both know what those systems are capable of. They’ll find you no matter where you go.”

  “Goddammit!” Evans cast a sharp look back at Odin but kept running downstairs. “I don’t appreciate being rewarded for being loyal by having a hive of robot hornets sent to kill me.”

  “Give me a name, Mort.”

  “Oh, don’t worry. I’ll give you more than a name. I’ll give you a whole live person. . . .”

  CHAPTER 26

  The Puppet Master

  Reston, Virginia, was a prosperous town—although it wasn’t really a town. It was officially a “census-designated place” with “government-like municipal services” provided by a nonprofit association. The Dulles Toll Road ran straight through Reston’s center and was lined with brand- new ten- and twenty-story office towers bearing clever logos that screamed high tech and whispered defense. There were German sedans in the parking lots. Scores of upscale eateries along with the usual midscale chain fried-everything theme restaurants for the junior engineers. There were plenty of trees and parks. Planned development was the norm here.

  There were American flags too, of course, fluttering on vehicle fenders, corporate campuses, and public areas just as they had after 9/11. But there was a sense of purpose here as well; “stopping the evildoers” was what they did in the defense corridor. Half these companies hadn’t existed before 2001. Now the military couldn’t find its soldiers without them. National security was the town’s main industry. And business was booming.

  In college if anyone had told Henry Clarke he would be doing top-secret work, he would have laughed in their face. He was going to be the next social media wunderkind. In a way he was—except that he could never tell anyone. Now here he was, putting in another late night managing cyber battalions in far-flung time zones from a suburban tech defense park.

  It was past one in the morning, and as he clicked across the quiet building lobby from the parking elevators, the RFID tag in his badge identified him to the armed security people at the front desk before he arrived. He didn’t recognize this crew, but then, security people were always rotating. And the security system told the guards everything they needed to know about him.

  “Evening, Mr. Clarke.”

  Clarke nodded as he passed the buff Latino and his female colleague in navy blazers.

  “Should I turn on the lights for twenty-two?”

  “Don’t bother. I like the darkness.”

  Clarke nodded to them as the elevator arrived, and he tapped the button for the top floor. In a few moments he was moving through the lobby of his company’s full-floor office. The full floor wasn’t necessary, but then, they had lots of subtenants who didn’t want nameplates and addresses of their own. It was hard to say what any of them did, but none were here at the moment. The place was deserted.

  Although it was originally Marta’s idea, Clarke had started to enjoy coming in to the office in the wee hours. It was relaxing not having his phone constantly ringing. Instead he was issuing most of the messages without having to deal with real-time responses.

  He drew a key card out of his pocket and unlocked his office door with a muted bleep-bleep. Tossing his leather satchel onto the sofa, he moved across the large corner office in the dim emergency lighting. There along the far wall was his favorite piece of art—a slab of cut blue-green glass six feet wide, four feet tall, and one inch thick on a three-foot-tall granite pedestal. Projected into the heart of the glass by an ingenious arrangement of blue, white, and red lasers and spinning mirrors was a map of the world, onto which was projected the current “mood” of every continent as derived from word forms flowing through the public Internet—data from Web search queries, blogs, social media entries, Wikipedia edits, news articles, and on and on. Tag clouds of the ten most common words and phrases flowing through the veins of the Net filled the boundaries of each continent. Positive words such as hope and great were depicted in blue, neutral words in white, and negative words in red. Even as he watched, large red letters for attack seemed to encompass half of North America. He could spend hours watching the mood of the world shift and spread
like a lava lamp of news. When the Japanese earthquake and tsunami occurred, he had seen the red data race across the globe faster than the actual shock waves.

  The artful device had cost him two hundred and ninety thousand dollars, but he would have paid double. With it, the moment anything happened in the world, he knew. It was his personal crystal ball. Nothing could surprise him as long as he gazed into its depths.

  “A fascinating piece,” a voice spoke from behind him.

  Clarke spun in alarm toward a darkened corner where his reading chair stood.

  “I saw something like it in Germany. Except it wasn’t so beautiful.”

  “What the hell? Who are you? How did you get in here?” Clarke started edging toward his desk and his phone.

  “Looking for this?” The man tossed Clarke’s desk phone into the center of the room, where it clattered to a stop. A tail of severed cord trailed from it. “Don’t reach for your cell phone either. You wouldn’t live to dial.”

  “What are you doing in here? Do you have any idea how serious . . .” Clarke was still backing up as an intimidating man with cold blue-gray eyes emerged into a shaft of light. The intruder was dressed in a white plastic smock with rubber gloves and plastic booties. A six-inch killing knife held firmly in one gloved hand. “Oh, God.”

  “Surely you knew there would be consequences for what you’re doing?”

  Clarke looked around and considered shouting for help.

  “Go ahead. No one can hear. I imagine that’s the whole point of this place.”

  Clarke bumped into the edge of his desk. “I don’t know who you’re working for, but I can pay you more.”

  “I’m not here for money. What I want is information.”

  “I’ll tell you everything I know. No problem.”

  “Your firm is part of a private intelligence-gathering operation. One designed to detect and neutralize opposition to your clients’ enterprises. Correct?”

  Clarke struggled to find words. It was a familiar-sounding process but with an entirely different emphasis. “Wait, wait. We gather information from legal sources. We market ideas. We predict likely scenarios—what we do is simple business intelligence.”

  The man stared. “You’re a propagandist, Mr. Clarke, and personally, I don’t give a shit how you rationalize it in the wee hours of the night. What I want to know is who hired you to push autonomous drones.”

  Clarke was at a loss. “Is that what this is about?”

  “Who hired you?”

  “Surely you—”

  “We could breach your network, examine your banking transactions, trace payments to and from offshore shell companies—but frankly, fuck that. I don’t have the patience. It’s three times now that some asshole has tried to kill me with a drone strike, and I’m ready to start sending back severed heads. And unless you tell me something I don’t already know, I’m gonna start with yours.”

  “Oh, God.” Clarke started to hyperventilate. “You think I have something to do with the drone attacks? Hold it, hold it. I’ve got nothing—nothing—to do with those attacks. We were hired by M and R to help mold public opinion in support of the drone appropriation. That’s all I know. That’s it—”

  “Who at M and R?”

  “I could give you names, but they’re just lawyers. They’re all just lawyers. I’m telling you, they’re all half out of their minds with fear that they’re going to be the next one hit by a missile—they’re sending their kids to suburban schools like this is the London Blitz or something. We were paid to sell drones to the public, but frankly it makes sense—we’re under attack. Why wouldn’t we want to launch drones in our own defense as quickly as possible?”

  The man moved closer, rolling the knife in his palm with frightening skill. “Time’s up.”

  “Wait! Wait!” Clarke held up his hands defensively. “Rita Morehouse. Jack Allenby, Aaron Nichols, uh, Uma Verazzi.”

  “Those are your handlers at M and R?”

  Clarke nodded, suddenly sweating and trembling. “Yes. Please don’t kill me. I promise I won’t warn them. I swear it.”

  “Well, you’re not someone I’d want watching my back. I didn’t even have to cut you.” The man deftly grabbed Clarke’s silk tie and, with a single frictionless motion, cut it clean away, leaving an orphaned double-Windsor.

  Clarke recoiled, trembling and clenching his eyes shut as he held up his hands defensively. “Please! I promise you. I swear it.”

  After a few moments he opened his eyes warily, but the man appeared to be gone. Clarke lowered his arms to see his office door open and himself alone. He let out a deep sigh, just now realizing he’d forgotten to breathe. He leaned back against his desk and tried to collect his thoughts.

  The first thing he did was edge toward his office door. He then leapt forward and closed, then locked it. He peered through the glass at an angle to see if anyone was outside. The man seemed to be gone.

  Clarke reached into his jacket and produced his iPhone. A moment later he was listening. Even though it was one in the morning, it only took one ring to pick up. It never occurred to him to wonder why. “Marta! Some SAD-SOG asshole just threatened me at knifepoint in my own goddamned office.”

  “He said he was SOG?”

  Clarke took a deep, calming breath. “No, but he sure as hell knew who we are. He said he’d been attacked three times by drones, and he was coming for somebody’s head. He was definitely black ops and wanted the names of my contacts at M and R.”

  “Who did you give up?”

  “Some mergers-and-acquisitions people. The first names that came to mind. . . .”

  * * *

  In a panel van half a mile away, Mordecai Evans, Linda McKinney, and Foxy sat listening to the conversation as they watched the voice patterns on a laptop monitor. The voice of Mr. Clarke was filled with anxiety.

  “. . . I need protection, Marta. This guy walked in here like it was a public restroom. This wasn’t some amateur. I don’t know how he got past security.”

  “Calm down, Henry. If they wanted you dead, you’d be dead.”

  Evans was busy clattering at a laptop linked to an almost Soviet-looking stack of ruggedized radio receivers dotted with antennas. “I’ve got her IMEI and IMSI. Looks like a company phone—no name—but I place her near the Georgetown waterfront. Stationary, so she’s probably at home. I’ll use the control link to direction-find her when we’re close.”

  Clarke’s voice pleaded in the background. “. . . this is no joke, he literally cut the tie off my neck.”

  “It will be handled. Just go home. Get some rest.”

  McKinney watched Evans working.

  Evans answered a question she was only thinking. “Multichannel digital receiver.”

  “I didn’t know it was this easy to intercept cell phone conversations.”

  “Well, it is. It’s called meaconing.” He pointed. “Wireless phone systems consist of base stations spread around town. When you turn on your phone it searches for the base station with the strongest signal and establishes a control link—down which it sends information about the phone’s identity. The first thing I do is jam the target phone’s existing control link. That forces it to scan for a new base station—which I mimic by providing a stronger signal. Basically I become his cell tower, and that gives me a control link to his phone. I can then listen in and see the identities of any phone he communicates with. The control link is completely separate from the connection that people use to talk on the phone. That means I can remotely program a target phone to turn on even if it’s off. I can activate the microphone when he’s not on a call—use it as a bugging device. And lots of other things. Even if they’re using civilian encryption, it won’t help. Most encryption is done at the base station . . . and of course, I’m now his base station.”

  “Is this what you did for Odin overseas?”

  He nodded. “Yeah, it’s great for mapping the structures of fluid organizations like criminal gangs, knowing who’s
important to whom. Dropping bombs on people.”

  “I’m starting to realize that.”

  The rear door to the van opened, and Odin, Smokey, and Ripper entered—the latter two wearing security guard blazers.

  Evans scowled at Odin. “I thought you said your whole team was dead?”

  “I said what was necessary to get your cooperation.”

  “Asshole . . .”

  Odin nodded to the screens as he closed the doors behind him. “Who’d he call first?”

  Evan gritted his teeth for a moment. “Looks like a Beltway bandit. He wanted protection. She told him to strap on a pair.”

  Odin tossed the stub of a lavender silk tie into McKinney’s lap. “Get us moving.”

  * * *

  Marta’s city address was an ultramodern penthouse overlooking the Potomac, just west of the Watergate. It had set the firm back five million, but it was essential to have a base of operations suitable for entertaining, close to the Kennedy Center, the waterfront restaurants, and other cultural landmarks. There was an expansive terrace area overlooking the Francis Scott Key Bridge—a terrace with built-in catering facilities and space enough for a hundred cocktail party guests. At night the view was beautiful, but she seldom noticed it—especially tonight.

  Instead Marta sat alone at the head of a postmodern cherrywood table in her massive formal dining room, flanked by granite tile and glass walls and valuable modern art, idly perusing the latest foreign policy best seller—penned by a policy wonk she knew. Just another heavy business card. She took a sip from a full glass of very good Cabernet.

  Before her hall clock sounded two A.M. she was startled by a hoarse caw and looked up to see a large black raven ominously perched atop the chair-back at the far end of her dining table, twenty feet away. She calmly closed the book and waited.

  A few moments later a handsome, athletic man in a gas company uniform, helmet, and climbing harness stepped partway around the corner. He had cold steel-blue eyes and the self-assured gait of a special operator.