Net Force--Eye of the Drone

by Jerome Preisler

  He filled her in.

  “This could get dicey,” she said when he finished talking. “I could give you backup.”

  “I don’t need backup.”

  “I could insist anyway.”

  “But you won’t,” he said. “Look, I need a favor.”

  “What is it?”

  “I want the BfV and Interpol to stay out of things.”

  “Outlier just trashed a half-million-dollar German drone.”

  “I know.”

  “You should also know I’ve received an email complaint from our Interpol liaison.”

  “Chaput?”

  “Yes,” Morse said. “Not Ka-put, incidentally. As one of your men is fond of calling him.”

  “He wrote about that?”

  “It doesn’t make my life easier. What you want is already a tough ask.”

  “But you’ll do it?”

  A pause.

  “I’ll make sure you have no interference,” she said.

  Carmody thanked her.

  “Don’t bother,” she said. “I want the job done without you further annoying our allies. I want the target captured and turned over to our local field office. And one more thing...”

  “Yeah?”

  “I don’t want any surprises,” she said.

  There was a brief pause. He never made promises he wasn’t sure he could keep.

  “Out,” he said finally, and clicked off.

  It was 7:30 p.m.

  * * *

  Seven minutes later, Carmody got into an indigo Audi S1 in the parking area outside the Ramersdorf-Perlach safehouse. He’d left Schultz and Dixon behind. There was no point having all his men crowd Ruppertstrasse, and he wanted them available for unforeseen contingencies.

  The Audi was a nice hunk of car. Its turbocharged engine started up smoothly, with no kick. Pulling out of the spot, he drove around toward the exit on the west side of the parking lot.

  Then he turned left onto the northbound B2R, put some weight on the gas pedal, and sped on toward the city center.

  * * *

  Inspector Renault Chaput of Interpol Cybercrime leaned forward over the steering wheel, his red-bodied, black-roofed Mini Cooper Classic streaking like mercury over the southbound B2R. He was in a hurry to reach Ruppertstrasse.

  The file he had amassed on Outlier was the result of three years of dedicated, unstinting police work. He knew much that he had shared with the Germans and Americans—his so-called partners—and a great deal more that he was presently keeping to himself. Such as her apparent ties to Lucien Navarro and Eric Bergmann, radical hacktivists he was convinced were seeking to undermine the sovereignty of the world’s physical nations, and establish an independent, borderless cybernation that would compromise the integrity of all governments on earth.

  But he had probed even deeper into questions of Outlier’s identity and background. It was, for him, a personal affair. What once was mere suspicion about her lineage now seemed a near-absolute certainty.

  If he was correct about her Basque heritage, she carried lawlessness and rebellion in her DNA.

  His face set, Chaput sliced rapidly between lanes to pass the slower-moving vehicles blocking him from his destination. He felt insulted and disrespected. The order had come down from his superiors a short while earlier. Back off. The BfV, too, were instructed that their participation in the Outlier investigation was to be entirely suspended. Irrespective of the loss of the drone, they were no longer to even engage in a support role. The Americans were free to conduct their operation at will.

  Thus far, Chaput had followed his orders to the letter in coordinating the CIA and BfV’s joint operation. But he was no political tool, no functionary wrapped in tangles of red tape. He was a third-generation Interpol investigator. A solver of crimes by disposition and long expertise.

  Back off?

  No. No. He refused to curtsy to the Americans. He would not let himself be marginalized.

  He was a proud Frenchman and European. He’d given a decade of allegiance to Interpol. But above all, he was a Chaput. He bore his family’s suffering as his standard and owed a debt of generational vengeance to the Alcazars of Guernica.

  Chaput gripped the Mini’s wheel, surging past the federal speed limit to a hundred fifty klicks an hour. His narrow face was pinched into an expression of angry resolve. So be it, if Europe’s law-enforcement agencies were too timid to hold Outlier accountable for her crimes. As his father’s son, he would do it without reservation and accept whatever consequences came his way.

  * * *

  Kali finished a strong, sweet cappuccino she’d brewed, rinsed and dried her cup, and returned it to the kitchen cabinet. Then she sat down at the table and got out her phone. She wore her leather riding jacket and boots, and had placed her backpack and motorcycle helmet on the chair beside her. She would soon be ready to leave the Airbnb for the final time.

  But first, a call.

  “Ah, there you are,” a male voice answered. “Thank heavens. I’ve waited all morning to hear from you.”

  “Sorry,” she said. “It’s been a busy day.”

  “No doubt.” The man’s tone became sober. “Tell me what’s next.”

  “We meet at the designated spot.”

  “When?”

  “Fifteen minutes, does that work?”

  “I’ll make it work.” A pause. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes,” she said. “But I have to warn you...it’s going to be dangerous.”

  “I knew it would be.”

  “I mean more dangerous than we expected.”

  “Should I get my rosaries out of the drawer?”

  “This is no joke,” she said.

  “I didn’t mean to be funny.”

  She looked at the wall clock. “I have to go,” she said. “Are we set?”

  “All set.” Another beat of silence at the other end of the line. “Godspeed, little angel. Your elders would be proud of you.”

  Suppressing her emotions, Kali took a deep breath.

  “Later,” she said, and disconnected.

  Ready at last, she shrugged on the backpack, went to the door, and stood there a moment before opening it. With the phone still in her hand, she launched the cloud app she had developed before coming to Germany, bringing up a screen that showed the IP and physical addresses of every smart city camera pod on Munich’s grid. Then she scrolled to the pod at the corner of Ruppertstrasse and Lindwurmstrasse on a hunch, highlighted it, and clicked to access its multiple infrared feeds.

  The camera lenses looked up and down both streets. The cars parked along Ruppertstrasse were unoccupied.

  She switched to the Lindwurmstrasse feeds. There were several parked vehicles on the eastbound and westbound sides. Nearest the corner, facing east toward Nussbaumpark and Old Town, she saw a BMW M135i.

  The camera’s night vision showed two men in the front seats. Kali recognized the one behind the steering wheel as the bald man from the apartment opposite hers.

  After a moment, she checked the westbound Lindwurmstrasse’s video stream. Counted four cars back from the intersection. An Opel Crossland X, one man inside.

  She recognized him. He was American. From the team she had eluded in Ponta Delgada.

  She wasn’t surprised.

  Kali tapped her phone and the video streams vanished. She was now looking at the smart city pod control page. She had preconfigured them so the IP address of every pod in Munich was profiled in duplicate. Her first profile for each was listed by its street location followed by the word Primary. That was the camera view available to civil authorities and anyone else tapping into the pod feed. The duplicate profile was also labeled with a street name, but with the letter A after it, followed by a different number for every one of the city’s fifty-seven pods. That was her own
programmed view, the camera feed only she would be able to see.

  She scrolled down the list to Lindwurmstrasse-Primary and clicked to its settings menu.

  Beside the tab that read “Buffer Length,” she raised the default value from thirty to thirty-five hundred frames. The next tab down read “Video Delay.” She increased this from its near-real-time default setting of 1.59 seconds to forty-five seconds. Finally, she opened her secondary profile for the Lindwurmstrasse pod—designated A-16—and confirmed that its settings were unchanged from their civil-public defaults.

  She would continue to view the Lindwurmstrasse feeds in near real time, with less than a two-second delay. For anyone else, they would be on almost a full minute’s lag. Hopefully, it would be undetectable...and buy her enough time.

  Slipping the phone back into her jacket sleeve now, she turned her head to give the flat one last look. It appeared almost as it did when she arrived days before, a clean and adequate place to stay for a short-term visitor. The only change was the smart film. She had left it opaque on the windowpanes.

  Kali did not look back again as she snapped off the lights, opened the door, and started down the hallway.

  It was seven forty-five, and full night outside.

  * * *

  His foot pressing hard on the Audi’s gas pedal, Carmody swung right off the B2R-North onto Schaftlarnstrasse and then bulleted straight up the two-way street past the South Munich power station and the dark spread of the wholesale food and flower markets, closed and locked down now on Saturday night, leaving the road mercifully clear of traffic. He was three or four minutes from Ruppertstrasse, and thinking that might be too long.

  Moments ago, Wheeler and Krauss had reported in about the Volkswagen Golf entering the garage. It wasn’t good news. Carmody knew this because indications were that the Golf was a Volke Bank corporate rental, and because the man called Braithwaite, freelance security for a Volke Bank executive named Gunther Koenig, was cooping around the block from the garage. He knew it because Koenig and Volke Bank controlled a satellite geomapping outfit named NORN Aerospace based right here in Munich, and because Braithwaite had been spying on Outlier using the very sort of advanced satellite NORN launched and operated.

  It was a complicated jigsaw puzzle, one with a lot of pieces. And although Carmody still didn’t know how they all came together, he was certain they did in some big way...and that Outlier was somehow in the middle of the picture they formed.

  No, not good news, he thought. Not any of it. Especially for her. Braithwaite and his passenger in the BMW were war criminals who had skated on charges that could have locked them away for life. Stone-cold hitters. Carmody had tangled with their kind before. They played for keeps, and they were always on the wrong side of right.

  Carmody pushed the Audi another notch past the speed limit, blowing through a stoplight, keeping his fingers crossed it didn’t bring on the polizei. They were a headache he did not need, but he had to risk it. If he’d gotten a hunch Outlier was quitting the Airbnb tonight, then the men staking out Ruppertstrasse and her building’s garage were working on the same damned hunch.

  Whatever they intended to do based upon it, Carmody figured it would be as wrong as things could get.

  * * *

  Kali was hurrying past the elevator to the emergency stairs, planning to take them down to the garage, when a memory swept into her mind.

  “Got you.”

  “Ha, yes!”

  She blinked. A single blink, lasting half a moment.

  Drajan.

  It was a Sunday some years ago and they were heading over to the museum. The Prado, and Picasso’s Guernica, not long after she’d told him of the masterpiece’s special meaning to her. Of her grandmother taking her when she was a girl, and telling her of the history behind it.

  Going was his suggestion. She went to meet him at his apartment off campus, arranging to wait down by the elevator in the lobby.

  Kali was far from surprised when its door opened with no one inside. But she played along, pretending to be fooled as he sneaked up behind her from the stairs.

  “Got you!” he said. Pressing his lips into the hollow of her neck, simultaneously poking her waist with a finger.

  “Ha, yes,” she lied. His pranks amused her, and his gleaming eyes and kisses made her heart beat faster.

  His pokes had merely annoyed her.

  Drajan.

  The memories spread inside her like the fingers of an open hand, curled together, and then were gone. But before leaving, they had presented her with a thought...one that instantly shaped an idea.

  Entering the stairwell now, Kali raced up a story instead of heading down and emerged onto the sixth-floor hallway. There she went back to the elevator, reached for the call button, and poked it with a gloved finger.

  Got you.

  * * *

  There are two major types of control systems used for residential elevators. In a sequentially oriented system, the elevator is programmed to always continue the direction in which it is traveling. If it is going down, it will keep descending in order from floor to floor until it reaches the lowest stop. Five, four, three, two, one. The same is true going up. It will stop in ascending sequence. One, two, three, four, five.

  The other type of control system is task oriented. The elevator stops in whatever order the buttons are pushed. One person pushes five, the second into the elevator pushes one, the next person four. It will stop on five, one, four, in that order. The second person in is going for an up-and-down ride.

  The day she arrived at the Airbnb, Kali had tested the elevator and found it was on a task-oriented system, like the vast majority of residential elevators in Germany. Timing its rounds, she noted that the car took exactly sixty seconds to travel between floors and wait for passengers.

  Now the elevator rose from the main lobby level and opened in front of her on the sixth floor. She entered it and pressed the button for the fifth floor. Next she pressed L for the main lobby, G-2 for the lower-level garage, and finally G-1, the upper level where she parked her Ducati.

  The elevator descended one floor from six, stopped at five, and continued going down to the main level. To someone watching its indicators, it would appear the elevator had been boarded on the sixth floor, then her floor, in that order.

  Reaching the lobby, she got out of the elevator, hurried into the fire stairs, and bounded down a flight of steps to G-1. As she reached the bottom of the stairs, the elevator landed a level below her on G-2.

  She had bought herself a minute.

  It would have to do.

  * * *

  On the upper garage level, McKenzie watched the elevator’s up arrow flash green and became instantly alert behind the steering wheel. Climbing from where it sat in the main floor lobby, the elevator stopped on the sixth floor to let on a passenger or passengers. Then it went down to the fifth and stopped again.

  She’s on five, he thought. That could be her.

  He watched from inside the Golf. The elevator started down again. Four, three, two, one...

  Its red down arrow stayed illuminated as it made a stop at the main lobby, presumably to let someone on or off, then resumed its descent.

  McKenzie watched the elevator pass G-1 and go on to the G-2 sublevel below him.

  He did not lower his guard. She very well could still be inside it. This was a task-oriented elevator. He’d tested it out himself. If somebody who boarded it on the sixth floor was going down to G-2, it would stop there before going wherever the fifth-floor passenger wanted.

  He waited, leaning forward over the wheel. After about forty seconds, the up arrow flashed above the elevator door again. Then the G-1 indicator lit up. Someone was getting off on his level.

  Could be. Could very well be.

  Straightening like a fisherman who had felt a tug on his line, he started his
engine.

  * * *

  Kali pushed through the stairwell door and turned right. The garage was large and rectangular, with wide turn lanes along each wall that the building management stipulated remain clear of vehicles, making it easy for drivers to enter and leave. Though clean and fairly well lit, a twine of heating and ventilation ducts under the ceiling flung patches of shadow onto the floor and walls that would be obvious hiding places for someone waiting for her.

  The Ducati was only three feet away against the wall and nose toward the entrance ramp. Kali saw a man standing another nine or ten feet past the bike and turned toward the elevator.

  At the far length of the garage, near the entrance, a car started up. A blue Volkswagen Golf, its front end facing the elevator door. Both its driver and the man in front of her would be focused on its rising car.

  She hurried forward, a clock ticking in her head. Four seconds had passed since she left the stairwell. The man standing past the bike was over six feet tall and broad between his shoulders, with straight, greased-back hair. He wore a tan blazer that looked sized to order. He was still turned toward the elevator, still watching it.

  Six seconds.

  As Kali reached the bike, she saw another man appear from the shadows on her left side, approaching her with giant steps, threading between the two rows of cars separating them. He had a gold piercing in his eyebrow, wore a nylon windbreaker, and was built about the same as the man wearing the blazer. Each of the men outweighed her by at least a hundred fifty pounds, but she could not stop to think about that. She needed to move...

  She saw the Volkswagen edge out of its space and stop, still pointed toward the elevator. Probably the driver was not yet aware of her. But she could see the nearer of the two men turning toward the motorcycle, his right hand going under his blazer. He must have heard her behind him and was reaching for a weapon.