The company provided them with an SUV and the group drove in sullen silence, out toward Charles Hite’s home.
Marc watched Sydney’s environs fall away as they left them behind and entered the prosperous suburbia of Vaucluse on the South Head peninsula, out across the bay from the city. Dense green hedges and stands of close-planted trees screened expensive modernist homes from the road, their entrances hidden behind artfully sculpted walls and security gates. In the more affluent ends of the district, Marc saw the same kinds of ‘stealth mansions’ that he had glimpsed in places like Monaco and Beverly Hills, where the rich kept their homes under cover of clever landscaping to deter criminals, the media and everyone else from seeing too much.
He looked away from the window and noticed Crowne, sat up front in the passenger seat, watching him in the rear-view mirror. At Marc’s side, Lucy seemed not to be aware of it, affecting a sleepy aspect that he knew was pure theatre.
‘We’ll be there soon,’ began the security chief. ‘And to be clear. You’re both here as observers, okay? Look but don’t touch.’
‘Observers,’ Lucy echoed. ‘What does that make you? I’m pretty sure all of us are on dubious legal ground right now, if you wanna get technical about it.’
Crowne ignored her and glanced over his shoulder at Marc. ‘You know, I reached out to some old friends of mine in the agency. Asked around about Solomon and Rubicon. I heard some interesting stories.’
‘He’s an interesting man,’ Marc replied.
‘That why you quit MI6 to go work for him?’ Crowne smiled, like he had scored a point, and then quickly corrected himself. ‘Oh, but you didn’t quit, right? I’m told you were kicked out. Why was that?’
All my friends were killed. The reply came to him and it was so strong, so immediate that for a moment Marc thought he had actually said it out loud. ‘That’s a thread you don’t want to pull on, mate.’ He met Crowne’s gaze and held it. ‘Let’s stay professional, yeah?’
Crowne blinked first and gave the driver, the Samoan security guard who Marc had crossed paths with the night before, an arch look. He clearly didn’t want to let it lie. ‘How about you?’ he asked, switching targets to Lucy. ‘There are a few stories floating around about the woman who works as a consultant for the Rubicon PMC. Someone even say she might be ex-Delta Force. What do you think about that?’
Lucy shrugged. ‘Delta don’t have any female operatives. Strictly boys only, or haven’t you heard?’ She graced Crowne with a brief look. ‘Anyone who says otherwise watches too many movies.’
Marc suppressed a smile. The black ops urban legend about the US Army’s covert troop of female soldiers was more truth than lie, but it didn’t hurt to muddy the waters a little.
‘You want to know what I think?’ Crowne went on, as the vehicle turned off the main road and down an even-more exclusive avenue.
‘Not at all,’ Marc told him, and finally the man got the message.
Up ahead, a collection of artfully angled concrete cubes, steel verandas and blue panoramic windows formed the elements of Hite’s home that were visible from the street. Barriers of brushed metal sat across the end of the drive, serving as the modern portcullis to the dead man’s castle.
Marc climbed out as the SUV rolled to a stop, dragging a battle-worn Swissgear backpack over one shoulder and squinting in the sunshine. The house stood atop a curve of rust-coloured cliffs, directly overlooking a sheer drop into breakers of white foam, where the waters of the bay crashed against the rocks. Even from outside the house, the view back toward the city was an impressive one, with Sydney Harbour Bridge clearly framed against the sky and the white arcs of the Opera House resembling a distant bird about to take flight.
‘Good enough optics, and Hite could be looking right into his own office from here,’ said Lucy, walking up to Marc’s side. She pointed out the distant nub of the Horizon Integral office tower among the other buildings of the city skyline. ‘Looks like maybe six klicks and change, as the crow flies.’
Marc crossed to the gate, eyeing the security system. A magnetic card reader was mounted at the pedestrian doorway. He unzipped his pack. ‘I have icebreaker software on my tablet and an RFID spoofer. I can probably get this open—’
‘Or I could get Hite’s staff to let us in,’ Crowne told him, pushing past. He buzzed the intercom and waited. ‘They work for the company. They’re not going to give us any shit about being here.’
The gate retracted and the Samoan drove the SUV in through the widening gap. Marc gathered up his pack as Lucy followed the vehicle on to the property. She paused to give Marc a pat on the shoulder. ‘Don’t worry. You’re gonna get your chance to impress everyone.’
Crowne’s prediction turned out to be dead on. By the wary expressions on their faces, the maid and the two guards who met them at the entrance clearly knew the security executive, and his presence was enough to make them give the group a wide berth from then on.
Stepping inside, Marc craned his neck to take in the entrance hall of Hite’s house, a cylindrical space that extended down a set of shallow steps into a wide reception, and up three floors to a clear dome roof. Hanging directly below the dome, suspended on cables, hovered an abstract winged sculpture; a half-naked angel with line and form that veered more toward eroticism than virtue. To Marc’s eye, it resembled an illustration off the cover of some low-grade heavy metal album.
‘True what they say,’ Lucy sniffed, giving the piece a cursory glance. ‘Money can’t buy good taste.’
Her pronouncement proved accurate as they moved through the rest of Hite’s home. There was a lot of gold and marble, except where there was leather and steel, and if the place had a room that didn’t have a gargantuan television screen, Marc didn’t see it.
‘I expected a rich nerd to have more books,’ said Lucy. She glanced around. ‘Any books, in fact.’
Marc shook his head. ‘Hite is what you call a bro-grammer. All the usual macho alpha-male crap with a high-tech gloss.’
‘Charming.’
A shiny, polished object on the mantelpiece caught Marc’s eye and he wandered over to look. A stylised cloud made of glass, it appeared to be a trophy of some kind. Etching on the surface read DroneSpeed Tokyo Invitational 2016: Hottest Lap Winner – DART. Next to the award was a framed picture showing Hite standing at the number one spot on a racing podium, caught in the middle of spraying a fan of champagne from an open bottle. He had a wild grin on his face, and the polo shirt he wore in the image had the same word embroidered over his breast. ‘Dart,’ Marc read it aloud. ‘Must be his racer handle.’
‘He have a study or a home office?’ said Lucy.
‘Before, you mentioned a workshop?’ Marc added. ‘Hite doesn’t strike me as the type to go for the obvious choice.’
‘There’s the garage out back,’ Crowne explained. ‘Where he kept his playthings.’
It turned out to be a well-appointed work space the size of a small barn, stocked with hardware and tools worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Marc saw computer-controlled lathes, platforms for plating custom circuit boards, and more. In one corner, a high-specification 3D printer worked slowly through a lengthy production cycle, and he peeked in through a window in the machine’s hatch, watching as it assembled a complex honeycombed shape out of resin.
Drones and unmanned aerial vehicles of all shapes and szes hung from racks on the walls. The smallest of them were tiny flyers that could fit in the palm of a hand, or toy-like replicas of real-world helicopters. The larger ones were futuristic blended-wing designs with metre-wide spans, and spidery airborne camera rigs clustered under sets of six rotor units.
One entire workbench had been given over to racing drones, similar to the display model that Lucy had examined in Hite’s office. Marc crossed over to it, his gaze taking in banks of lithium-ion batteries docked to slow trickle chargers, bins of spare propeller blades, motors, cables and other components. Hite’s workshop had the same geometric precision as his of
fice layout, everything there for a reason, and nothing on display that didn’t have a function.
A gutted quadrotor drone lay in the middle of the bench, half-finished in a halo of unsoldered wire. It reminded Marc of a science lesson dissection experiment, and the shape of the small UAV triggered a moment of muscle memory in him. His hand clenched, the still-healing scars on his palm and his fingers tingling.
He picked up a triple-bladed plastic rotor and ran his thumb lightly along the razor-sharp edge of the blade. ‘This is the same gear they used in Malta. I wasn’t certain before, but I am now.’ Marc examined the quadrotor. It was a twin to the skeletal machine he had swatted out of the air on the roof of the hotel. He turned it over and studied the cyclops-eye camera mounted on the front of the device.
‘How does it work?’ Lucy held a bulky remote control unit in her hand, moving the metal joysticks with her thumbs. ‘My brother had an RC car with one of these when we were kids.’ A prop-less drone on the rack in front of her buzzed angrily as its motors spun in response to each push of the stick.
‘You wear these.’ Marc showed her a set of blank-faced virtual reality goggles and held them up to his eyes. ‘Got monitors inside, they give you a direct live feed from the drone’s camera. It’s called FPV . . . First Person View.’
Behind them, Crowne folded his arms across his chest. ‘Hite was off doing this shit at tournaments around the world every other month,’ he said sourly. ‘Don’t see the appeal, myself.’
Lucy shrugged, looking up at the other machines. ‘They’re not exactly Predators or Reapers.’ She glanced at Marc and they shared a silent communication, both of them remembering a moment on the rooftop of an abandoned orphanage in Turkey, when the bigger brother of these sport drones had rained Hellfire missiles down on them. ‘But any tech can be weaponised, if you’re motivated.’ Lucy took in the workshop with a sweep of the hand. ‘A swarm of them, loaded with explosive charges or toxins? That’s a goddamn nightmare.’
Crowne snorted. ‘Now you’re telling me Hite built drones for terrorists?’
Marc moved to a desktop computer in the corner of the workspace. ‘Maybe.’ He jerked his thumb at the 3D printer. ‘Anybody with one of those and a soldering gun could assemble a working quadrotor with components you can buy off the web. I reckon Hite traded his drone designs to Ghost5, probably as a side-deal along with selling them the zero-day exploits.’ He pulled out his hardened tablet and connected it to the desktop’s USB socket. ‘Let’s have a look-see what else Chuck was working on . . .’
Marc’s intrusion programs went to work bombarding the firewalls Hite had set up on his system, and the barriers were as formidable as he had expected. The dead man knew his stuff, placing layers of redundant protective code around the password protection and input protocols. Marc waved away Crowne’s impatient demands to see immediate results and let himself be drawn into the business of navigating the firewall code, looking into the heart of it for a weakness.
He hardly noticed when Lucy and Crowne left to search the rest of the house for anything else that could incriminate Hite. In the back of his mind, he guessed that Wehmeyer was probably halfway toward constructing a plausible narrative that would hang responsibility for any wrong-doing around Hite’s neck, and keep Horizon Integral clean of any blowback. But the fate of the software company was only collateral damage when weighed against the potential horrors that Ghost5 could wreak with a fully functional Arquebus digital weapon. With hundreds of industrial systems out there in the world running vulnerable code, there would be no way to protect them all from potential attack without causing panic and ruining Wehmeyer’s company.
Time passed, and the software barriers were slowly eroded until Marc’s army of digital scouts began their forced assault on the workshop’s mainframe. Once he was in, he set a search macro running for anything that could connect Hite to the rogue hackers, sifting petabytes of information and data mining files.
But the dive into the database turned up nothing of use. It appeared that the workshop mainframe was exactly what it appeared to be, a system used only for operating the printer and the computer-controlled tools, a place where Hite had stored volumes of performance data harvested from thousands of test flights for his prototype racers. On the surface, it seemed like the ideal place for Hite to have concealed any data he didn’t want to show up on his office system or personal laptop – after all, the best place to hide a tree was in a forest. But there were no detectable phantom partitions on the mainframe’s drives, nothing that resembled one kind of data masquerading as another.
Marc found countless logs that stored battery charging rates and discharge times, motor efficiency ratings, GPS records and statistical information for every aspect of racer drone operation. There were endless FPV videos where Hite had saved the footage shot by the cameras in his UAVs. For a while, Marc searched those files, wondering if the drone on Malta had sent its images here, but he came up empty.
He pored over folders of digital recordings from race meets, kinetic action sequences where Hite flew his custom-made machine against other drone pilots, through obstacle courses set up in abandoned warehouses and disused factories. Other files contained endless repeats of test flights in the national park across the bay, or down along nearby Shark Beach, Camp Cove and around the lighthouse at Hornby. Marc picked some videos at random and fast-forwarded through them, seeing Hite film himself as the drone circled his goggle-wearing form. It would take months to sift through all of this, to be sure that nothing was buried there.
Marc stood up and stretched for the first time in hours, abruptly realising how thirsty he was and that it was now late afternoon. He walked around the workshop to kill the lethargy, draining the aluminium water bottle from his pack to the last drop, and his gaze snagged on a calendar hanging from the door. Hite had marked off flight days for his drones, and something in the numbers needled at Marc’s thoughts.
Going back to the database, Marc found the current month’s log of the drone calibration flights and ran down the list. There was only one day when Hite hadn’t sent up his racer for its practice run, logging the reason as ‘bad weather’. Marc flipped back to the month before, and the one before that. Each time, a single test day had the same no-fly tag, but cross-checking it against the battery use log showed a charge-and-drain cycle no different from any of Hite’s other practice sorties.
Marc knew for sure he had a lead when he looked up the local weather report for the missing days and found clear skies for all of them. A slow smile crossed his face as he pulled the GPS logs. If nothing had gone up, there would have been a blank entry, but Marc’s scout software showed him the ghostly fragments of a deleted file instead. Hite had been flying a drone, but he hadn’t wanted anyone to know about it, and erased the data after the fact.
‘Gotcha, you little sod . . .’ Marc said to the air, and he began to sift through the digital ashes of the trashed GPS data, slowly reassembling what Charles Hite had tried to hide.
TWELVE
‘This is you working?’ said Crowne, curling his lip.
‘Can you be quiet?’ Marc told him, tilting his head behind the big video headset. ‘You keep distracting me and I’ll crash it.’ His hands were clasped around the RC controller Lucy had fiddled with earlier, his thumbs making tiny course corrections to the left and right with the stubby joysticks.
Lucy looked away. A monitor screen on a nearby bench showed a repeater view from the nose camera of the quadrotor drone that the Brit was piloting, and she watched trees part and give way to a sheer drop over the edge of the cliffs. ‘Where are you taking it?’
‘Following the virtual trail,’ Marc replied. ‘I reconstructed the GPS path of the missing test flight. I want to see why Hite was so determined to delete it.’
Crowne made a disgusted noise. ‘This is a waste of time.’
‘I have to do it now,’ insisted Marc. ‘We’re losing the light out here. Can’t fly in the dark.’
&nb
sp; ‘I’m starting to think that this shit about Hite and these ghost-hackers is a smokescreen.’ Crowne turned his gaze on Lucy. ‘You could be covering up for Rubicon and your boss. You’re the ones who broke in, after all. I only have your word that Hite was dirty.’
‘That’s fair,’ Lucy allowed, and Crowne raised an eyebrow. It wasn’t the answer he had been expecting. ‘I mean, he wasn’t the only one with top-level access to the HIOS Sigma codebase, am I right? Wehmeyer had it too. You have it.’ She let that sink in. ‘We have proof that the exploit data found its way to Ghost5. Maybe I’ll get our guys to look into your financials like we did with Hite, see if the same indicators are there?’ She didn’t tell him that Assim had already done that, of course. Hite’s banking transactions were the only ones that flashed up enough red flags to be suspicious, but Lucy guessed that Crowne might have some cash of his own that he didn’t want any outsiders knowing about.
‘That sounds like a threat,’ he said.
‘Call it an observation,’ Lucy countered.
On the video screen, the drone’s point of view dropped until it was halfway down the sheer cliff wall, staring out at the bay. ‘This is where the route ends,’ said Marc. ‘I don’t see anything.’
‘Was the tide out when he made the flights?’ Lucy wondered. ‘Did he land it?’
Marc sighed. ‘I don’t know. There’s a magnetic gripper rig on the belly of the drone, but I can’t see anything here that could be picked up . . .’
‘Turn it around,’ said Crowne, forgetting his impatience for a moment.
Marc pivoted the drone around 180 degrees and the cliff face came into view. There was a small cleft visible as a black shadow, a hole punched into the rock. ‘Hello . . .’ With care, he guided the little machine into the gloom and the video camera adjusted to the blackness.
A slimline steel attaché case was wedged at the back of the fissure, tucked out of the way in a place where no one was ever going to stumble upon it. Lucy could see the handle had been modified with a magnetic clamp. ‘Please tell me we haven’t found Chuck’s porn stash.’
Ghost: Page 23
