*
When Roman arrived onsite in response to the earlier text alert, more than one person in the meeting room was completely startled to see him. He was equally disconcerted. For the past several weeks, he had been working inside a military complex in the mountains between Aspen and Denver, Colorado, with an officially non-existent Western Hemisphere Defense Command strategy team. A digital security mask overrode the global position indicator on his com, and broadcast his location as Dallas, Texas, his status read 'On Business.' The gathered attendees he now viewed, representatives of eleven countries and organizations, were not the same people he had been seeing every day at WestCom to negotiate a revised security agreement for Central American countries. Instead, this group was military and industrial officials, contacted by various organizations to assemble and hear specific information.
In a room containing a long oblong table, short at one end, wider at the other, and built on a slight rise, every person could clearly view the rest of the seated attendees. At each chair, translation sensors were embedded into the armrests. An individual's com would detect the spoken language and, if necessary, feed a simultaneous translation into an earpiece. On one wall 90-inch video conferencing screens were positioned to project as if the displayed individuals, who were in other locations, were sitting in the room. Another wall broadcast news and satellite images. The last supported a refreshments table with the preferred beverages and snacks of every participant ordered and available based on a Network predicted calculation of the amount each person would consume, within the scheduled time they would be meeting. Roman was hungry, but he would not have time to reach the food table.
"What's going on?" were the first words Roman heard upon entering.
"I'm sorry General, I received the same message you did," he politely replied to U.S. Army General Patrick Wheeler. "I have no other intel." Wheeler inattentively looked at him, and Roman quickly moved to take his place among the representatives.
On a video screen, Slater James, an agent at British Intelligence in London began speaking, "We have been monitoring a situation at the Grand Rapids hydro dam in Canada."
"What kind of situation?" Roman asked.
"The incident was a glitch," answered the hydro company’s representative Corey Miller, a senior executive with military clearance for the meeting. "A fried or split line led to an outage. But we cannot get a complete report."
"You do not know the problem?" questioned Eduardo Juarez, the ranking Mexican military officer based at WestCom.
"It's a big facility, could be any issue. But the real problem is, we have no credible Network report," Miller glumly stated. The complete hydroelectric complex provided zero carbon emission, always on electricity, to the populated areas of central North America, north to the mining and military towns in the Arctic, and south down the Pan American highway from Winnipeg to Minneapolis to Kansas City to Dallas to Monterrey and to Mexico City on through Tegucigalpa to San Jose and ending a few miles south of Panama City. Each of those centers transmitted electricity in a hundred directions to the skyscrapers of the big cities, factories in commercial zones, acres of agricultural production sites, and small forgotten towns along the routes. The towering transmission lines rolled out from sites like Grand Rapids at high voltage across empty plains, and upon reaching populated areas, the lines went underground, or where necessary, disappeared to continue transmitting virtually, through the air. Most humans had never seen a power line. As a stable, reliable energy source managed through a treaty, almost all military installations within range also connected to the complex. Despite its limited use of human employees on the ground, Grand Rapids was a vital location affecting millions who obtained at least part of their living from its existence. The center of North America was the crucial infrastructure reinforcement for the mega-populations and ports on the coasts. The strategic inhabited centers in the Pacific Northwest, around the Great Lakes, New York City, in Northern and Southern California, Texas, South Florida and Mexico City contained nearly three-quarters of the continent's people. Those regions had self-contained networks, energy, and water supplies, but almost all back-ups were in the center, on the Hudson Bay grid.
Miller continued, "We have a lot of data being analyzed, cross-ref—" He halted as an alert signal sounded, and the room fell completely silent.
"Please look at the monitors everyone," Slater directed. "We have now been advised the incident was extended."
The video screens switched to scenes of the disaster at Grand Rapids, smoke drifted over a crumpled heap of steel where the transmission tower in Sector 2G had once stood. The entire room gasped. At the destroyed site, a dozen wheelbarrow-sized drones acted as water cannons, and dosed the embers from the explosion fire, while a camera drone, programmed to detect body parts, scanned for Santino. Human investigators had been dispatched to the scene, but all of the initial information to be analyzed was already captured in The Network. The meeting room participants rapidly activated personal screens from their coms and simultaneously read The Network's report.
"This is your glitch?" shouted Wheeler. "What is this?"
"No, no, this happened..." Miller frantically clarified, reading the report on his com, "...this happened after. The security camera pictures show a drone—"
"But this is unbelievable! There is no drone on this report, only the man."
"What brought down the tower?" Roman asked.
"The situation was all routine," responded Jayna Luongo, another security cleared corporate executive. "An error was detected and an employee was sent to look."
"But why a human? The report does not say what went wrong." Roman was also quickly looking at the details on the report.
"There was an error."
"But what does that mean? There's no diagnostic for the error."
"Did the employee make a mistake?" Miller asked.
"Doesn't say," Luongo replied. "There was an error, an employee was sent to look, and a drone—"
"What drone?" Roman asked.
"Whose drone?" Wheeler demanded. "Report does not say that either."
"The Network recorded the transmission tower had an error, but there is no confirmation as to what or why," Luongo continued. "We only have surveillance pictures of a drone...umm...attack. That's all we know. But those pictures cannot give us any more details."
"But what kind of drone was it?" Wheeler asked again. "Was there military activity in the area?" Military and law enforcement drones could be weaponized with the ability to deliver a range of disabling impacts from the effects of stun guns to missiles. But operating a legal, weaponized drone required adherence to laws, regulations and protocols, sanctioned and used almost exclusively by governments. If the rules had been followed, a few of the people in the room would have the details available on their coms, but they did not.
The questions flew across the table as Roman stood up, and walked up to a 50-inch screen displaying a live camera feed of the smoldering scene at Grand Rapids. 'What an extraordinary explosion,' he thought. 'Enough to bring down the tower, an entire transmission tower, but how?' He looked closely at the images. The tower had collapsed straight down, straining adjacent transmission lines, but not creating a domino effect. The wire casings were set to automatically snap, and avoid pulling another tower down if one fell. In fact, the attack, as the incident was now being referred to, seemed to have been neatly organized only to collapse the one tower with poor Louis Santino. 'But was Santino necessary?' Roman wondered. 'Why didn't the attacker isolate the tower? Why kill one human too? What was this? What kind of terrorist organization or anarchist was after them now?'
"Listen everyone, please listen!" Slater shouted to restore calm. "We have been watching this site since the outage was first reported. Consider this next information confidential and the reason we called you here. This information has not been widely disseminated but...the attack drone...this is the third incident worldwide
that we know. But this is the first one to knock out power. Whoever this is, he is getting bolder. And whatever technology they have, we cannot identify the capabilities. Every time an incident has occurred, we have had to find the drone visually, using satellite pictures, there was no detection on The Network."
"What do you mean no detection?" Wheeler asked. "Network cameras and sensors are always checking the entire space around—"
"No, excuse me but we do not have continuous checking, as you say," Slater corrected him. "If the intruder drone is emitting an electronic signal, The Network would detect the disturbance through the complex's sensors. For most security protocols, if the detected signal is within camera range, we'll immediately get a picture or video record. The system analyzes the picture and identifies the object in the captured image. The protocol only looks for detected signals. Only objects with a detectable signal can be detected unless the known object has a previously identified distinct sound like a buzzing bee, or a particular feel, like the touch of a human hand. If no object is detected, the picture will not be analyzed, a human would have to launch a manual request, if the human even knew to look for the problem in the first place. Whatever that box is, it has no detectable signal."
"But that's impossible!" Luongo cried. "How can a drone fly around without a signal? A human must be in control."
"Maybe this is an advancement in drone operation, Ms. Luongo," Slater countered, slightly annoyed. "Some of our enemies have technology we do not have."
"Or we do not officially have," Roman said.
The room fell silent. "And the destruction? We have not heard about that before, what a mess," Wheeler added. "Humans will have to clean up."
"Drones can do the heavy lifting," Miller assured the group.
"Not before we've examined every inch of the place."
"I am afraid we are only likely to find dead wolves," Slater ruefully commented. "We will not find evidence of any use to us."
Roman tried to concentrate. 'We won't find any evidence,' he thought. 'We have to catch him, whoever he is. We have to figure out the pattern, what he's doing and why.' He looked around the room. 'We'll never move forward with these people.' Holding his com under the table to avoid appearing distracted, Roman sent a text message to Slater.
"Listen up!" Wheeler shouted over the clamor. "Our analysts will look for clues in the data, but in the meantime, what do we think is going on here? Terrorists? Industrial sabotage? Who?" The room went silent.
"We have had three attacks, three completely different locations," Slater added. "There's been a solar farm in Botswana, a wind farm in the North Sea, and now hydro power in Canada. The only connection among the sites is renewable energy. But for the first two, the facilities did not really lose power...or a life."
"And this time, kaboom." The General dramatically flung his arms into the air.
"Yes this saboteur has escalated the attacks."
The people in the room looked at each other. They were political appointees, friends of leaders, and business people with money, in general, not the people with the experience and patience to strategically think through the incident, and make implementable decisions. Roman moved towards General Wheeler.
"We should ask for an emergency U.N. Security Council meeting," Wheeler commented. The clamor of simultaneous shouting began again.
"And tell them what?" Juarez demanded.
"To be careful, to change security protocols."
"But for what? What explanation can we give?"
As Roman approached, he spoke clearly and directly, "General, we do not need a U.N. meeting. We immediately need to bring in the right people to get to work on this. This is an ongoing international problem, not one incident. We need a team that can think this through, figure out what's going on and take action."
The General stared at him. "Of course people," he said pointing to the room as if to indicate he knew what people were, and he had them right in front of him. "What are you talking about?"
"With all due respect General, not people who talk," Roman continued. "People who think. People who would have a better understanding of the issues we could be dealing with."
"People who think?"
"I agree, General," Slater interjected. "A different type of group is required to manage these incidents."
"Whoever did this has access to some amazing technology," Roman stated. "We need people who have experience in these areas. We also need to be ahead of this perpetrator, to be on top of his potential next target. We need to identify the right people, get them collaborating, and let them figure this out."
"The right people?" Wheeler asked puzzled. "What people? Who?"
"I know who," Roman confidently replied.
*
You can find The Motion Clue and all Case Lane books
at your favorite e-bookstore website.
For more information visit Case's website https://www.claneworld.com
Thanks for reading,
Case Lane
*
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