Net Force--Eye of the Drone

by Jerome Preisler

  So what next? She was not yet ready to leave Munich. She had come here for something that would not only provide information she was seeking about Gunther Koenig and his NORNs, but possibly help her find out what happened to Eric and his daughter.

  They were her friends, and she owed it to them to stay.

  Kali silently looked down at her tablet, closed the video review window, and opened another to check on the progress of her download. Her interface with the drone’s hacked camera told her its video files were transferring at a rate of a gigabyte a second—or slightly over fifteen minutes for each terabyte. Soon she would have all of them stored away in her cloud vault.

  Logically, then...what was her next step?

  She didn’t need long to decide it was to do what she’d started out to do. The fewer eyes in the sky watching her, the better. But so far only one was flying within reach.

  She would strike it blind.

  II

  It was 12:53 p.m.

  In the drone’s control van, Carmody and Dixon were monitoring its video stream from Ruppertstrasse, when Carmody noticed something odd that sat him up straight.

  “Take a look at her windows,” he said. “You see what just happened?”

  Dixon nodded. Their panes had suddenly turned a solid opaque white.

  “I don’t get it,” he said.

  Carmody pictured Outlier coming out of the mailbox office. “She put switchable film on them,” he said. “I bet you that’s what she went to pick up this morning.”

  “Terrific,” Dixon said. “I knew she was onto us.”

  Carmody didn’t answer. He was trying to remember something.

  “The flicker test,” he said after a moment. “The Israelis came up with it. They used the film to determine if an object was under drone camera surveillance.”

  Dixon frowned. “How nice.”

  Carmody sat there pondering. Maybe he didn’t know exactly how Outlier thought, not yet. But after months on her trail, he was getting there. And he doubted it would satisfy her just to confirm she was under surveillance. For her, it would be a first step.

  And her next? Logically, what would it be?

  It struck him in a flash.

  “Pull in the drone,” he said. “Now.”

  Dixon didn’t ask questions. This was a direct order, and it was impossible to miss the urgency in Carmody’s voice. He leaned over his keyboard, typing quickly, the console’s channel transmitter radioing his commands up to the hexacopter.

  A moment later the drone broke out of its hover and shot off toward Old Town, bound for the Moosach launch/recharging station to the east.

  * * *

  A towel draped over the back of his neck, Braithwaite swung off the elliptical machine in the corner of the living room, sweating heavily from a half hour of pedaling at a good incline. He took two deep gulps from a water bottle and started pacing over to his dumbbells for some quick curls, but abruptly paused as he noticed something through the balcony doors.

  It was the windows across Ruppertstrasse. He had noticed them out of the corner of his eye. At first it appeared the woman must have drawn her blinds. But then he decided the windows themselves looked opaque.

  He stood there a moment, making sure. No, there was no question. Her windowpanes were as white as sheets of copy paper.

  The dumbbells forgotten, he scratched behind his ear with a fingertip. Then he grabbed his phone off a stand beside the sofa, sat down, and made a phone call.

  If she was onto him, then continuing his surveillance was a pointless charade. He was going to need manpower.

  Fast.

  * * *

  Carmody was looking at his monitor when the hexacopter disappeared from its GPS flight map. He glanced over at Dixon.

  “The bird.” He nodded at the screen. “Where is it?”

  Dixon pulled off the VR glasses. He’d lost it, too.

  “I don’t know,” he said, baffled.

  * * *

  Kali tapped her device to input a string of code, her interface with the drone showing its position on an aerial map of Munich. A separate, smaller window showed its camera feed of the streets below.

  She had penetrated the drone’s inboard memory and found two sets of geographic coordinates from which it was receiving radio transmissions—probably flight commands. One set corresponded with Moosach Industrial Center on the map. The other, closer, location was on Ziemssenstrasse, the cross street outside Nussbaumpark.

  She suddenly recalled riding past the do-it-yourselfer fair in the green space and noticing the white van parked outside. On Ziemssenstrasse. This was its third day there, and she had thought it looked deliberately anonymous. Too much so for her comfort.

  She double-checked the radio coordinates on her map. They confirmed her suspicions at once, precisely matching the spot where the van was parked.

  It was unquestionably the drone’s control vehicle.

  But now she was in control of the little aircraft. And it was about to make a surprise visit.

  * * *

  In the front seat of the control van, Schultz heard a buzzing noise that immediately drew his attention. It seemed to come from somewhere above him and to the right.

  He turned his head toward his passenger-side window and was stunned to see the drone flying in low from the corner of Lindwurmstrasse. It was about five hundred feet in the air and really moving. Its rotors humming, it dropped even lower as it came toward the van, passed directly over its roof, and then swept off above the other parked vehicles lining Ziemssenstrasse.

  On the sidewalk bordering the park, people stopped cold in their tracks and gaped up at the dipping, diving aircraft. They were men and women, adults, teenagers, and children. They were fairgoers and random passersby. And the haywire drone scared all of them.

  They began running off in a panic, parents scooping small kids up into their arms as they bolted in every direction.

  Peering outside, Schultz swore under his breath. The hexacopter had reached the end of the row of vendors’ vehicles, halted in midair, and was now doubling back toward the van. No more than fifty feet off the ground, it swept in for a second pass, coming closer and closer at a wild clip. A buzzing, whirring, high-speed blur, it dived down low in front of the windshield and nearly went crashing right into it, missing by less than a foot as it swooped off to overfly the other vehicles.

  Just then, Schultz heard a slight rustle of movement on his passenger side. He didn’t have to look to know who it was. Carmody was quiet for a big man. He had sidled through the bulkhead door and dropped into the seat beside him.

  “Get us the hell out of here,” he said.

  Schultz nodded and started up the engine.

  * * *

  Five minutes after Carmody’s team radioed in about the out-of-control Raptor III, Krauss’s tracking display went black. She shifted to the drone’s camera feed and also saw nothing but a dark screen.

  She looked over at Metzler. He nodded at his display, indicating it was blacked out as well. Then both techs swiveled around toward Wheeler and Long on the stools behind them.

  They all sat there looking at each other for about sixty seconds. No one said a word. Or looked over at Chaput.

  He coughed exaggeratedly into his fist. They pretended not to notice. He coughed again, louder. They all just sat there looking at each other in silence.

  The Interpol man’s patience, such as it was, did not so much run out as leave him in a sudden rushing burst, like air from a popped balloon.

  “Someone tell me what’s going on!” he hollered. “That’s an order!”

  Krauss and Metzler looked at the two Americans. The Americans shook their heads. Krauss and Metzler looked at each other. Metzler shook his head. She glared at him a second and turned to the Frenchman.

  “Figure it out for yourself,”
she said.

  * * *

  The shiny blue lake called the Feldmochinger See was located in a public recreational area about three miles due north of Moosach. Though it was a month too soon for wading or swimming, the area was crowded with outdoor lovers on this beautiful Saturday afternoon.

  Sunbathers relaxed on outspread blankets near the lake’s grassy banks. Rowers rowed in inflatable rafts and kayaks. Bicyclists pedaled on the riding paths, dogs romped happily off their leashes on spacious lawns, and a boisterous group of men and women played volleyball along the lake’s eastern shore. There were even four or five hardy, early-season nudists airing themselves out on the gently rolling dunes of the Free Body Culture zone.

  This was where the Raptor III was spotted making its terminal descent.

  It came in low over the screening trees south of the FBC dunes, no higher than a hundred fifty feet in the air. Surprised and outraged, the nudists in the sand scrambled for their clothes and beach towels. One woman noticed the drone’s mounted camera and dived toward a patch of cattails, imagining herself live-streamed on the internet by a flying voyeur cam. A man grabbed a towel, lifted it to his waist, and then had an abrupt change of heart. With a shake of his upraised fist, he slung the towel to the ground and defiantly bent over to show the drone his ample buttocks.

  The hijacked aircraft’s operator took no interest. Across town to the southwest, Kali Alcazar was guiding the Raptor III inevitably toward the lake. She had blocked its camera feed from all eyes but her own.

  The drone passed over the nudist zone, the volleyballers, the groups of people sunning themselves on picnic blankets. It dropped another fifty feet toward the ground and startled several romping dogs. A few began to bark. A little terrier ran off yelping. The terrier’s owner chased after it with the leash in her hand, calling its name in a panic.

  The drone flew on. A teenager sitting cross-legged in the grass at the water’s edge pulled a half-smoked joint out of his mouth and gaped skyward as it passed about fifty feet above him and hurtled toward the water.

  Reaching the middle of the lake, the drone fell from about thirty feet in the air, plunging down and down to meet the water’s surface. Ducks scattered and squawked in complaint as it hit with a loud, definitive splash, two of its arms snapping off on impact. The rotors on its remaining arms chopped briefly into the water, whipping up tiny spouts of foam and spray. Then its motor flooded out, sputtered, and died.

  Within a minute, the drone began sinking like a rock.

  “Heilige scheisse!” the kid with the joint blurted, wide-eyed. People were flocking to the shore all around him.

  He licked his thumb and finger and pinched the head of the joint to douse it amid the gathering commotion.

  * * *

  Kali put her tablet into sleep mode, carried it across the living room, and left it to charge on a sofa table. She had wiped all the data from the Raptor III’s black box after downloading its video files—and before she sent the drone plunging into the Feldmochinger See. Whoever was behind the aerial surveillance would have downloaded the videos as they were streamed live, so it was unrealistic to think they didn’t have copies. But at least no one else could acquire them by recovering the drone or its flight recorder from the water.

  Her concern now was the man in the apartment across Ruppertstrasse. She couldn’t even guess how much he knew about her. But he represented a very different threat than the law-enforcement people she suspected of launching the drone.

  She planned to stay in the Airbnb until nightfall, and no longer. She knew of a narrow window in the surveillance coverage. One that would give her more of a chance.

  Kali lifted her backpack off the chair where she had put it after returning from Old Town. She didn’t have much clothing in the bedroom. A few items in the closet, and even fewer in the dresser. She needed only minutes to get ready.

  Then she would settle in and wait for sundown.

  * * *

  At a quarter past four in the afternoon, slightly over three hours after the Raptor crashed into the lake, Hanna Krauss and Stefan Metzler sat at their truck consoles seeking an ELROI, or Extremely Low Resource Optical Identifier.

  In basic terms, a satellite’s ELROI was equivalent to a license plate on a terrestrial motor vehicle—the major difference being that, instead of metal tags that displayed a series of easily readable letters and numbers, an ELROI was about the size of a postage stamp and mounted on the outside of an orbital spacecraft. Powered by a tiny solar cell, the beacon, an omnidirectional laser, flashed in a continuous programmed sequence, at a specific narrowband wavelength, to provide a unique coded ID for the host satellite.

  Though quite bright, an ELROI’s flashes could not be seen by the naked eye. That would require flashes of long duration, the energy demands of which were prohibitive and created radio frequency interference that could potentially disrupt vital communications with the satellite. Of very short duration—the laser diode emitted just a few photons per second—the beacon’s blips of brightness therefore could only be detected by sensitive equipment on the ground: a telescope with a narrowband filter and photon-counting detectors.

  Nearly every satellite launched into orbit since 2021 carried an ELROI. But for the unit to be practical, a satellite’s trackers had to know its orbital path in advance. This was because the targeted ELROI-equipped satellite and telescopic receiver needed to line up as the spacecraft made its pass over a ground station—an opportunity that might occur for only a few minutes each day. Thus an online registry was kept and shared by cooperating governments.

  With their high-level BfV security clearances, Krauss and Metzler had unhampered access to it. After logging in to the system, all they needed to do was input their time and location data for the sat images of Outlier that had been streaming down to her earthbound watcher that morning. The registry’s computers did the rest, correlating their information with the ELROI IDs of commercial and government satellites that would have been in orbital position to take those images, and then yielding a definitive match.

  What they learned was interesting, to put it mildly.

  * * *

  “We found two satellites that could have taken the pictures,” Krauss was saying over the secure connection. Besides herself, the conference call’s participants included Metzler, Chaput, Long, and Wheeler in the Moosach truck, and Carmody and his group at their CIA safe house in a suburb south of the city, where they had hastily gone after leaving Nussbaumpark. “Both are geomappers privately owned by NORN Aerospace—a company based here in Munich,” Krauss explained.

  “Why does that ring a bell?” said Carmody.

  “It could be because NORN is a de facto subsidiary of Volke Bank, owned by a consortium in which the bank has a controlling interest,” Krauss said. “NORN’s director and CEO is the bank’s president, Gunther Koenig.”

  “And why does he ring a louder bell?”

  “Koenig was among several millionaires and billionaires implicated in a sex trafficking investigation two years ago,” said Chaput. “There were brothels in Europe and the United States. It was an international scandal.”

  “Whoa,” Dixon said. “I remember that one... Wasn’t some fast-food executive connected?”

  “Among other immensely affluent men,” said Chaput. “Many of the women were underage. Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen years old. They were taken from developing countries in every continent, held captive, and farmed out to a list of wealthy clients.” He paused. “Koenig was investigated for solicitation of child prostitution. There were rumors of money laundering. But charges were never brought against him, and he suffered no professional consequences.”

  “Was he innocent?”

  “He is rich, powerful, and of aristocratic Bavarian stock,” Chaput said. “I doubt it mattered.”

  “One second,” Carmody said. “The ex-operator who’s spying on Outlier, Brait
hwaite, he was receiving the NORN feed. Meaning he could be linked to Koenig.”

  “Or paying NORN for its services,” Dixon said.

  “Not legally,” Carmody said. “Isn’t that what we talked about before?”

  “Yes,” Krauss said. “The video of Outlier on Mr. Braithwaite’s computer was extremely high resolution. Commercial satellites are prohibited from marketing photographic or video images of that quality. Real time or otherwise.”

  Silence.

  “Suppose Braithwaite’s working for Volke Bank. Or NORN. Or Gunther Koenig himself,” Carmody said after a moment. “That would tell us Outlier has the attention of some shady people.”

  “And maybe help explain why she’s in Munich,” Dixon said.

  Carmody was quiet.

  “Are we sure the satellites are NORNs?” he asked after a moment. “No chance of a mistake?”

  “None,” Metzler said. “The ELROI is one hundred percent reliable in terms of identification. The data about the orbital pattern comes from the Hortensie III tracking station. A classified signals intelligence facility.”

  “That’s down in Bad Aibling...about thirty-five miles south of the city center.” Carmody was thinking aloud. “It’s guarded by US Eighteenth Army troops.”

  “Yes,” said Metzler. He paused. “Hannah and I found something else in the Hortensie data that might be relevant.”

  Carmody waited.

  “The NORN-3 and NORN-4 are in staggered orbital patterns to provide uninterrupted surveillance of an area,” Krauss said. “But there are always coverage gaps with satellites. Their length depends on many different factors. They might be weeks, days...or, in some cases, hours.”

  Carmody jumped in. “Okay,” he said. “When is the gap for the NORNs?”

  “It begins tonight,” Krauss said.