Drone

by M. L. Buchman

  “Yes sir.” For half a second he couldn’t tell if the stiff-necked colonel was being agreeable, or privately agreed that her boss was an asshole. He checked again, but he still couldn’t tell.

  Drake waved her forward.

  She made a show of reluctance to take the last two steps. Then she opened her briefcase and handed him a slip of paper over the desk. It had an address on a secure server.

  “There’s no password here.” He flipped it over, nothing there either.

  “It’s…” and then she blushed. Brilliantly red.

  “He insisted on something obscene.”

  “Not quite, sir.” Her voice seemed a little strangled.

  “So…”

  “Pardon my language, sir. Apparently your opinion of General Patrick is fully reciprocated. It’s—” She cleared her throat again, but it didn’t seem to work.

  “Let me guess: Up yours, asshole.”

  “Initial caps on each word with no spaces or punctuation. Yes sir,” she replied in the tightest of tones. “My apologies, it’s not how I wished to address the CJCS, sir.”

  Drake had to laugh at that. “Tell your boss I said hi and to go fuck himself.”

  “Yes sir,” the blush didn’t abate, but there might have been a smile hiding under it. “I must remind you that it’s a single-day password and will expire at midnight.”

  He checked his watch. He still had ten hours.

  She saluted smartly, he returned it, and she headed back out the door.

  He watched until she was out of sight. Not because she had a cute ass in her full-dress uniform, though now that he was watching, he noticed she did. He must be getting old, because all that did was remind him that she was about ten years older than his eldest and he hoped to god that no man was looking at his daughter and thinking that same thought. Elsie was a doctor and happily-married mother of his first granddaughter—who was old enough to start thinking about college in between thinking about boys who were undoubtedly busy thinking that at sixteen she had a cute ass…

  Time just moved too damn fast sometimes.

  The departing Colonel Gray was mostly reminding him of one of the items he’d discussed with the President before accepting the appointment to be CJCS.

  Information inside the intelligence-military establishment needed to be openly shared. The enemy was not in the building next door, but he was having a hell of a battle proving that to many of the agencies. More Colonel Grays and fewer General Patricks were needed, but he still had no idea how to implement that.

  He logged on to the indicated secure server, selected the appropriate file folder, and keyed in UpYoursAsshole. “Bastard,” he muttered as he inspected the folder’s contents.

  Drake watched each of the imaging files there.

  Visible light was useless because the desert sunrise hadn’t reached central Nevada yet at the time of the crash.

  Infrared satellite imaging showed a four-engine C-130 Hercules flying. Readouts had been added in the lower right corner: Altitude (est. m.), Ground Speed (est. knots), and Distance to Runway 32 (km). Runway 32 was the compass direction of one end of the Groom Lake runway, without the extra zero. So the Hercules had been flying from the west before turning for a straight-in approach from the south to land on the runway oriented at 320 degrees.

  Each image showed the Hercules flying straight and true one moment, then gone the next as if simply wiped from the screen.

  For ten minutes he viewed the five ten-second files that the NRO had provided him.

  All he got for his troubles was being ten minutes older.

  He’d wanted to make his own assessment, but having learned nothing, he opened the one text document in the folder: NRO Event Analysis. Two pages of useless chatter finally convinced him that the NRO imagery analysts, the very best and brightest in their field, had learned as little as he had.

  Where was that damned woman from the NTSB? She was supposed to be here by now. By the time he’d tracked her down, she’d already been aloft on her way to DC—which was convenient. He wanted to speak to her before he had to go explain just what the Hercules had been carrying when it crashed.

  18

  Miranda wondered at her own naiveté.

  Oh, you have a sign with my name on it? Of course I’ll follow you without asking any questions.

  Neither the driver nor the man who’d been holding the sign and was now seated in the front passenger seat had been of any help.

  “No ma’am. All we know is to pick you up and escort you to a meeting.”

  “No ma’am. We don’t know what meeting or with whom.”

  “No ma’am. We’re not at liberty to say where.”

  At a stoplight, she surreptitiously tried opening her door. They must have disabled the back door handles as if she was no more than a child.

  A child? Or a kidnap victim?

  Why would anyone want to kidnap an NTSB agent? That just might be a first.

  She’d landed at Dulles, and they were heading east toward DC, so that was a good sign, but nothing else was. Even grasping her right hand with her left didn’t stop her from trying the door handle several more times over the next five minutes.

  The vehicle seemed to compress in on her. The air was thick and over-air-conditioned yet it did nothing to evaporate the sweaty feeling.

  Then the picture snapped into focus. She never should have had that drink on the flight; it had clouded her thinking. Except it had been four hours ago.

  You also haven’t slept in over forty-eight hours.

  While true, that wasn’t typically relevant. The interrupted early flight out of LA yesterday. Then awake all last night working with the modeling software. What it had done was give the alcohol a disproportionate stronghold on her thought processes.

  Yes, that was it. Not fear, just lack of care.

  Cooperation seemed to be her only option at the moment.

  Perhaps if Holly was here, she would do some action-heroine thing, taking out two men who significantly outweighed her and then taking control of the car. As this wasn’t the movies and Miranda would never be Holly Harper…

  Cooperation implied simply accepting the current circumstances as normal. Well, if they were normal—or rather if she was going to pretend they were—what would she do next?

  She slipped out her phone. This time it connected instantly to the local cell networks.

  “I’m just going to check in with my team.”

  No reactions to her announcement from the front seat.

  She dialed Holly’s number, which went straight to voicemail as she’d expected because Holly would be in the NTTR dead zone.

  “Hi Holly. I made it to DC. I just wanted to check in on your progress. As I told you, I’m going to be in and out of meetings all day.” She’d said no such thing and felt a bit like a movie secret agent herself. Holly would know something was up. “I’ll keep my phone by me so that you can call. I really need that new data you were working on before the meetings.” She even thought to add a ‘Thanks’ and was pleased with her own dissembling.

  Still no reaction from the front seat.

  She dialed Terence.

  “Hey, girl. Where you hanging out?”

  “I just landed in DC. How are you doing?” She decided it would be best if she didn’t say why she was here. Her kidnappers—or perhaps escorts?—were bound to report anything she said. Were they tracing this phone call? She didn’t see any signs of it, but would she know?

  “Whoa, something big must be up if you’re asking me civilized questions.” He always teased her about such things, which was why she made a point of including them in conversations with him. And she then broke the code, by continuing before he responded. He always answered how he was when she asked.

  “I was hoping to catch up with you this afternoon or evening.” Hopefully he’d understand her urgency.

  “I had plans but, uh, I’ll cancel them. Just ring me when you hit town. I’ll be in the office.” Good. He
did understand. “Or did you want to make your pilgrimage to old 800?” He was the only one who knew about her regular visits to the reconstructed wreck at the NTSB Academy.

  “Oh, I doubt if I’ll have time this trip. And don’t wait for me. I may be delayed.”

  “Yeah, right.” He knew that she was far more punctual than any airline. Then he seemed to register her comment. “Right. Well, I’ll be waiting for your call,” then hung up. It was the closest thing she dared to dialing 911.

  If the two men in the front of the car thought anything of her two calls, they weren’t showing it.

  Or of her sudden unexpected cooperation in accepting the current circumstances as normal. A complete give away.

  She’d make a lousy secret agent.

  19

  “That little bitch!” Clarissa shouted into her phone.

  Miranda Chase was supposed to be sitting in Clarissa’s office, not telling the guard that if anyone wanted to meet her, she’d be sitting at the Kryptos sculpture down in the CIA’s central courtyard.

  “I sorry, ma’am,” the agent who’d fetched her from the airport said. “Unless you want us to physically carry her upstairs, she refused to go beyond the lobby other than to visit Kryptos. So, James led her there and I’m calling you.”

  She slammed down the phone.

  CIA division directors did not hop to the commands of pissant NTSB investigators.

  She stared down at the woman’s file on her screen. Frumpy even in her official photo: no makeup, hair in disarray, wearing some kind of a sloppy vest. Yet the citations spoke of her brilliance in the field of crash investigation.

  But why had she been called to this investigation? It was supposed to have been quietly swept under the carpet. God damn Harrington. He was in the middle of the fucking Nevada desert and he couldn’t even do that right. There was no chance of this woman uncovering the truth, but still Clarissa had to be sure.

  Out of options, she took the elevator down to the ground floor and strode out into the courtyard. A few shade trees, a green lawn with a small pool set among rocks, and the incredibly frustrating Kryptos sculpture.

  A small woman who couldn’t be more than five-four stood facing it. Her file hadn’t communicated her diminutive stature. In her rumpled clothes and heavy boots, it would be easy to dismiss her as a cleaning woman. She looked even smaller with the two guards looming nearby. Incompetent slugs—she waved them away, back to other duties—they couldn’t even get a woman half their size to Clarissa’s office.

  This? This flat-chested excuse for a woman was the best the NTSB had to offer? She shouldn’t have worried about a thing. Except her file said that she had a better crash investigation resolution rate than anyone else in NTSB history.

  “I’ve been reviewing your file.” Clarissa hadn’t intended to start that way, but something about this Miranda Chase she wasn’t sure how to handle—and Clarissa always knew how to handle people, male or female.

  Chase made no response. Either she was too slow to understand the dire implications of a CIA division director reading her file—or she did understand and she was terrified. If she was the latter, she was the best actress Clarissa had ever met; her face didn’t show a thing.

  “Does that surprise you?”

  “I find it…curious. Why were you reading it?”

  Most people, decent, normal people, wanted to know what was in their files. It placed the subject at an immediate disadvantage to ask so that she would know where the power lay in this meeting. Clarissa could detect no response.

  “I like to know the background of anyone I meet with,” Clarissa pushed a little harder.

  Chase continued to face Kryptos for a long moment as if seeking a thought, but kept her silence.

  The damn thing bothered Clarissa a little more every time she stood by it. James Sanborn had become the name in cryptography. Not some codebreaker, but instead a sculptor who had designed the enigmatic thing. The ten-foot-high side-bending S wave of green-hued copper was…irritating.

  Sanborn had encoded cryptographic messages into four sections.

  It had taken the CIA five years before they’d cracked the first panel (only to find out that an NSA team had done the first three panels in two years). And nobody had cracked the final panel despite Sanborn’s two released clues.

  Unless the NSA had and weren’t talking about it—bastards.

  “My father and I used to work on these codes,” Chase reached out to brush a hand over the surface. “He’d be sad to know that it was solved before his death, but that information wasn’t released until three years after his death.”

  “You were trying to solve one of the greatest modern cryptographic puzzles at the age of twelve?”

  “No,” Chase turned to look at her—almost. Her gaze seemed to glance off the shoulder of Clarissa’s Brooks Brothers palest-blue jacquard pantsuit. “We worked codes together from the time I was five. For my seventh birthday, he gave me a quarter-scale model of Kryptos that still stands in our garden. That’s when I began working on it in earnest. I often wonder if he wanted me to become a codebreaker, but I never thought to ask him while I still had the chance. Instead I now choose to solve the hidden codes in the puzzle of aircraft accidents. I haven’t worked on the uncracked fourth panel of Kryptos in years. Thank you. It’s nice to see the original.”

  “You’re welcome,” Clarissa managed to keep her tone pleasant. “Now, shall we go up to my office? There are some questions I’d like to ask you.”

  Chase stepped to one of the slab-stone benches arranged around the sculpture and sat as if it was just as fine as a leather conference chair.

  Clarissa inspected the courtyard. Other than the two guards, whom she waved back out of earshot, the courtyard was quiet at the moment; most people hurrying between the New and the Old Headquarters Buildings would be doing so along the connecting wings or underground. Sighing, Clarissa sat on the stone opposite.

  “Your lobby,” Chase nodded back toward the entrance, “is almost exactly twice the length of the loading bay of a C-5 Galaxy transport jet—the largest one in the military.”

  “I know what a C-5 Galaxy is.” But Chase barely let her say the words before continuing.

  “The largest in the US military that is. The Ukrainian Antonov AN-124 and AN-225 are longer. You see, the polished concrete flooring of your lobby is made up of alternating light and dark in four- and two-foot sections respectively. Twenty-eight pairs of flooring from threshold to threshold. Assuming you convert the eight entry stairs to be the twenty-ninth pair and add in the entry and exit door thresholds, makes it one hundred and seventy-six feet. Precisely the same length as the usable portion of two C-5 Galaxy cargo bays. The C-5 has eighteen feet of usable width capacity and your lobby’s center section is only sixteen feet from face-of-column to face-of-column. Though your lobby is six feet higher, so that does distort the comparison, but it’s intriguing to compare the similar volume of the spaces applied to different purposes.”

  Clarissa could only stare at the small woman. What part of her supposed genius considered that to be relevant to anything?

  “You’ve read my background, what’s yours?” Chase jumped back at least two topics as if there’d been no pause, though she still appeared to be talking to Clarissa’s left shoulder.

  “I’m Clarissa Reese, Director of Special Projects here at the CIA.”

  “That’s your foreground, not your background.”

  Chase’s gaze focused on Clarissa’s other shoulder.

  “Why have you sent for an NTSB inspector?” Chase said it like a rote phrase.

  20

  Clarissa Reese’s failure to answer immediately would have told Mike something—all it told Miranda was that she was going to have to wait some more. She allowed her attention to shift back to Kryptos while she waited.

  Between subtle shading and the absence of light lies the nuance of illusion.

  Actually the solution to the first panel ended with iqlusion,
but the reason for that final misspelling had yet to be revealed. Sanborn had said it was either for artistic balance or to make it harder to solve. Personally, she thought that it would factor in as a deeper clue to the fifth puzzle of Kryptos—the one that could only be attempted after the solution of the fourth panel had been found. She knew that subtlety and nuance were not her strengths, but she had made it her life’s goal to shed light and battle iqlusion whenever possible.

  Normally a crash investigation was very straightforward—often complex, but straightforward. The thousands of pieces of TWA 800 had taken four years to salvage from a hundred and sixty-three feet of water, reassemble, and analyze before a definitive finding could be announced. But it had been a process of collection, reassembly, discarding of various possibilities (including a missile strike), and then a result. The exact ignition point of the massive explosion had been identified and all 747s were now updated or redesigned to prevent its recurrence.

  The crash of the C-130 in the NTTR would eventually reveal its own truth from the land between subtle shading and the absence of light. Just as the third panel had translated to reveal a paraphrasing of Howard Carter’s description of his penetration into Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922: but presently details of the room within emerged from the mist. So, too would the C-130 eventually reveal its secrets to—

  “I’d like to discuss your current investigation.”

  Miranda blinked in surprise. Kryptos was so engaging that she’d briefly forgotten where she was. “My current investigation?”

  “Yes.”

  “Which current investigation would that be?” She decided on caution. She hadn’t appreciated being kidnapped as it delayed her speaking with Terence. Also, being kidnapped wasn’t exactly a positive turn of events.

  “Don’t toy with me, Ms. Chase. You wouldn’t like it.”

  “I have three investigations with the reports in final draft and undergoing editing, two presently in peer review. Another which is on hold pending metallurgy and two others on hold for other reasons outside my control.”