A-Sides

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  Seventy miles away, JB monitored the transmissions from the stricken vehicle. As planned, once the air bag went off, a signal was transmitted to the truck’s monitoring company before being abruptly choked off as the vehicle sank beneath the water. Rescue units would be automatically dispatched to the last recorded GPS location before the airbag deployed. On JB’s end, part of the macro of the executable file he had used to trigger the acceleration and brake failure had been to clear the memory as soon as the airbag went off. There would be no trace of the malfunctions left in the computer’s black box. Still, it never hurt to be sure.

  He made a quick call to Andrews AFB and had the UAV operator re-task the nearby drone for a quick look at the accident site.

  “Mike, this is JB at NSA. Could you do a quick recon of sector thirty, grid twenty-eight, the Rollsback Bridge? I think I’ve got a vehicle in the river.”

  “Sure thing, JB.”

  The buzzing UAV, flying almost invisibly overhead at four thousand feet, was rerouted. Mike brought the circling vulture down to two hundred feet to surveil the area where the truck had met its sorry end. Aside from the splintered guard rail, a few roiling air pockets and a spreading brick-red stain of dyed petroleum, there was nothing else to see on JB’s computer screen.

  “Looks like it, JB,” Mike said. “You gonna call it in?”

  “Yeah, Mike. Thanks. I got it.”

  A few keystrokes later, the UAV had returned to its scheduled patrol.

  Pushing back from his terminal, JB shut down the system and removed the flash drive. The endeavors of the last two hours dematerialized in digital smoke as the RAM modules discharged. He stood up and stretched, cracking stiff joints and loosening cramped muscles. He took another sip of water before flipping open his cell phone and calling Sandra. He sighed as he waited for the connection to complete. Maybe, he thought, No-One’s Safe Anywhere wasn’t an unfair reading of the NSA, after all.

  Sandra answered the phone. It was time to put the grand finale to this show.