Net Force--Eye of the Drone Read online

  Once in Munich, Carmody decided to pull in the BfV via Interpol, recognizing he needed their technical resources. His operations manager, Morse, had taken care of it, using her leverage with the German law-enforcement agency to give him operational control. It was your basic quid pro quo; the CIA would get custody of the prisoner in exchange for sharing what they learned from her with the other agencies.

  Their deal brought dividends even before Carmody got use of the drone. Two years ago, a new German counterterrorism law had established a national short-term rental and hotel guest registry, and the BfV’s unrestricted access to the database narrowed his search area right off. Even so, Outlier didn’t make it easy, covering her tracks with a string of aliases, duplicate and triplicate flight and hotel bookings, disposable virtual eSIMs in her phone...

  She was better than good. Better than anyone Carmody had ever pursued. Smart, unpredictable, with plenty of resources. She seemed able to travel anywhere in the world at will and kept things in storage units all over the place. Carmody figured the Ducati was among those things.

  She had good taste in more than bread, he thought. The Diavel Carbon was a damned fine machine. Light for a twin-V, designed for speed and precision as well as thunder. No other bike could compete.

  Carmody wasn’t going to kid himself—Outlier intrigued him.

  Six months on her trail, tens of thousands of miles covered across several continents. Sometimes she seemed like a ghost. Sometimes like a reflection in the mirror—or infinite reflections in a room filled with mirrors. She always seemed to stay several moves ahead of him. Get too close and she would pick up and vanish. But give her too much room to maneuver and she was gone anyway.

  The thing was, she didn’t fit the usual profiles. She didn’t seem motivated by money, power, or ego. There wasn’t a single known instance of her running a blackmail scheme or boasting about her successes. She was no ordinary black hat.

  This time, for the first time, Carmody thought he had a real shot at bagging her. It was the closest he’d gotten yet, and he was tempted to swoop in. But first he wanted to find out why she was in Munich. Something told him it was well worth knowing, whether or not it increased the risk of losing her again.

  He sat on the stool and typed. He was a clumsy typist, pecking away with two fingers. But he wasn’t writing a Greek epic, and he managed to open the video file. He rewound to the point where Outlier left the bakery, then brought the video a bit further back. Her preferences in bread were interesting, but he was more concerned with the items she’d collected at the mail pickup office. Maybe he’d missed something about them. Or overlooked something else that might be important.

  He looked intently at the monitor, paying careful attention to the time stamps. At 7:35:04 a.m., she pulled the motorcycle out of her apartment building’s underground garage and rode to Old Town on Lindwurmstrasse, passing his van and the green space on the way. Then she left the bike at the Tor and went about her errands. Nothing important on the surface. But the packages had no labels, meaning she must have peeled them off in the mail delivery place. How often did people do that?

  Deciding there was nothing more to learn from the Old Town images, he fast-forwarded to where she got back to her Airbnb on Ruppertstrasse—8:10 a.m.—and found more nothing. She parked the motorbike in the underground garage and the drone turned its spycam on her windows. It peered through her upraised window shades and caught her fixing breakfast, zooming in close enough to capture the label of the strawberry preserves. Breitsamer, small batch, good stuff. Carmody wasn’t surprised by her taste. But he appreciated it, having spent half his childhood in the kitchen of a restaurant.

  Unfortunately, there was nothing more remarkable to see. At 9:15:17 a.m. the drone broke its stationary hover and flew off for a recharge, its camera running on for another ten seconds and capturing some extraneous video of the building across the street.

  Carmody was about to end his playback when he spotted a bald man through the glass balcony doors. The time stamp was 9:15:20 a.m., ten seconds before the video recording would terminate on his orders. If it wasn’t for his slow-handedness at the console, he might have exited the file before getting a look at him.

  The balcony was on the apartment building’s fifth floor, and the man was sitting on a sofa in the room behind it, a smartphone to his ear.

  At first Carmody didn’t notice anything of interest. But the laptop computer on the coffee table in front of the guy was angled so the playback revealed a portion of its screen. And what Carmody saw there was very interesting.

  He backed the video up to 9:15:16 a.m. Paused it. It gave him a good view through the balcony doors. He framed the laptop and then zoomed in again.

  His eyes narrowed. He wasn’t in error. The image on the laptop’s screen showed Outlier in Old Town earlier that morning. Her backpack on, the market bag in her hand, she was walking through the Sendlinger Tor plaza toward her motorcycle. It was a high-resolution bird’s-eye view.

  But he would not have confused it with the drone’s surveillance video. The angle was more directly overhead. Taken from a much greater height.

  Carmody sat staring at the screen. Say either Interpol or BfV had its own man tailing Outlier, he thought. Someone with access to the drone’s surveillance feed. He could accept that explanation even if he didn’t like it. But the video didn’t come from the eye of the drone. Which left him wondering...

  Where was it coming from? And who was the man watching it?

  * * *

  Taking a break from his post as the hexacopter recharged over Moosach, Dixon went into Nussbaumpark, bought a fruit punch at an outdoor concession, and wandered the fairgrounds in the sunshine.

  There were workshops for building and repairing cuddly or fighting robots and drones. There was a fashion show for wearable tech. There were labs for ecological innovations, and hands-on demos of 3-D printable and self-programmable Internet of Things gadgets. The largest tent was dedicated to technology startups—hardware and software developers looking to invite crowdfunding opportunities with creative prototypes and video presentations.

  The attractions were swarmed with happy tinkerers. Dixon caught snippets of conversation in the aisles and felt the intimate energy of their connections even without understanding the languages they spoke. There were young people and old people and people who fell somewhere in between, all sharing a common culture and interest. The fairgoers and exhibitors could have easily swapped roles. They were cheerful and talkative, and there was a tangible feeling of community in the air.

  Dixon walked past some sumo-bots chasing each other in circles, stopped, and checked his watch. He’d killed maybe fifteen minutes. The Raptor would be fully juiced before he knew it. He needed to start back toward the van.

  He ambled toward the park entrance. Up ahead, he saw a long table under a flapping canopy. The banner sign was written in English and German, and its lettering mimicked the look of characters produced by the dot matrix printers of the 1980s or ‘90s.

  It read:

  INTERACTIVE EPHEMERALS

  INTERAKTIVE EPHEMERALEN

  We carry/Wir Tragen:

  Bandit’s Road

  Spear of Destiny

  Longship Warriors

  Marcus Nebula’s Kingdom Quest

  Original floppies/Source code downloads where available

  Originaldisketten/Quellcode, sofern verfügbar

  Dixon stopped on the path, his glance abruptly falling on a square gray object on the table that looked like a metal suitcase. Memories rushed through his head: Big Creek, Idaho, his father’s storage shed, and the big old computer he kept inside with the rest of the clutter.

  The machine on the table could have been scavenged right out of that pile. A Kaypro, with a built-in, nine-inch green phosphor screen, two vertical diskette drive slots, and a pull-down metal keyboard that doubled as a
lid. Forty years old, if a day.

  The young woman behind the table saw him eyeing it and smiled.

  Dixon smiled back. She was pretty and in her twenties, her ice-white hair shaved to a stubble on the right side of her head and worn shoulder-length and pink-tipped on the left side. The floppy pink T-shirt hanging over her tights had the company’s name printed across the front in the same dot matrix font as the banner.

  “Suchen Sie etwas im Speziellen?” she asked.

  Dixon knew enough German to tell her he didn’t speak it. “Deutch kahn ich nicht.”

  “English, then?”

  “On good days.”

  “Well, you’re in luck, because I’m fluent every day. Can I help you with anything?”

  Dixon poked his chin at the Kaypro. He guessed he had a few more minutes to kill.

  “I was just admiring that museum piece,” he said. “My late father owned one. Must’ve gotten it before I was born.”

  “Do you still have it?”

  Dixon shook his head. “Afraid it went with the farm.”

  “Ah,” she said. “Too bad. It’s quite collectible.”

  “Figures,” he said. “Would I be a rich man if I’d hung on to it?”

  “No,” she said. “But richer.”

  His woe-is-me look made her smile again. It was a pretty, unguarded smile.

  “Just curious,” he said, pointing up at the banner. “Those names... Marcus Nebula... Longship Warriors...are they computer games or something?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Interactive adventure games. Early eighties vintage.”

  “Same as the Kaypro.”

  She nodded. “They would have been played on it. Or on comparable machines.”

  Dixon was surprised. “I had no idea they could handle graphics back then.”

  “They didn’t. Everything was text based,” she replied. “Say Marcus reaches a wormhole at the galaxy’s edge. Does he warp through in search of his solar scepter, or turn back toward the space mining colony? A player decides and inputs an answer. Every choice changes the story’s direction.”

  Dixon grinned. “Sounds like you’ve done some intergalactic warping yourself,” he said. “I was really into video games as a kid. Funny I never knew about any of these.”

  “Not really,” she said. “None of them were commercial releases. They were played by a small online group of fifteen or twenty people. A club, really. And only the game’s creators knew the source code—the programming language used to write them. In some cases the game files were corrupted. Some retro addicts are working backward from fragmentary copies to piece them together.”

  “So there won’t be Marcus Nebula sequels?”

  “Not in the original format. The programming language was very complex. It would take a genius to figure it out.”

  “And the creators?”

  “One died long ago. The other was Eric Bergmann,” she said. “Do you know of him?”

  “No,” Dixon said. “Should I?”

  “Many at this fair do,” she said. “Bergmann was a legend of sorts. One of Munich’s...is the correct expression ‘favorite sons’?”

  Dixon nodded.

  “He lived in the States for decades as NASA’s top programming engineer,” she went on. “When NORN Aerospace started up, he returned to help put it on the map.”

  She paused. He looked at her.

  “Bad pun,” she said. “NORN is our country’s largest satellite geomapping company.” A shrug. “Anyway, the games were Bergmann’s hobby, and he kept the source code secret.”

  “Why the past tense?”

  “He died a year ago,” she said. “Went on holiday in the mountains and had some sort of accident. His body was found in the Wiesent river.”

  “Wow,” he said. “That’s too bad.”

  “More so, because of what’s happened to his daughter. Munsie. He raised her alone, and she was devastated by his death. They say she left Munich without a word to anyone.”

  Dixon shook his head. He’d noticed a man with white hair in a ponytail walking up to the stand. The guy caught his glance and gave him a friendly smile.

  “So,” the young woman said. “On a happier note...we’re fortunate to have largely pieced the games together.”

  “‘We’ being...?”

  “Interactive Ephemerals. We’re not-for-profit archivists. Everything we earn goes toward restoring technological artifacts. Our hope is to assemble complete copies of the games and perhaps someday use their source code to build upon them.” A smile. “Then you’ll finally have your sequel.”

  “Marcus Nebula Returns.”

  “It works for me.” She paused. “I haven’t asked...are you interested in seeing the games we have for sale?”

  Dixon realized that he was. And that he was even more interested in seeing her smile again. But he needed to get back to the van.

  “I can’t right now,” he said regretfully.

  “Oh.”

  “I’m in Munich on business.”

  “Oh.”

  “But maybe later,” he said. “If I have a chance.”

  She looked at him across the table and nodded.

  “We’ll be here through tomorrow night,” she said. “I take my break at four o’clock, though.”

  “Great,” he said, and felt suddenly clunkish. “I mean... I’ll try to drop by before that.”

  She nodded.

  “Else,” she said, putting out her hand.

  “Scott,” he said, shaking it.

  They stood facing each other in the warm sun and pleasant grass-scented breeze. For a moment, neither released the other’s hand. Then Dixon pulled his back a little awkwardly, turned, and walked up toward the park entrance.

  He waited till he was outside to take a quick look around at her, only to find the crowd getting in the way.

  * * *

  The man with the snow-white ponytail stood near the Interactive Ephemerals table, peering in Dixon’s direction. First for a minute, then another thirty seconds, then longer. The crowd of fairgoers was dense on the path between them, and he was unable to see past their milling bodies to the park entrance. After two full minutes, he turned toward Else.

  “Was that guy a gamer?” he asked in German.

  She shrugged. “No,” she said. “Well, sort of, I guess.”

  “He’s American,” he said.

  “Yes. How could you tell?”

  He tapped the area above his collarbone. “His medallion. It was military. An American naval symbol. Didn’t you notice?”

  “I saw it,” she said. “Is something the matter, Franz?”

  “I noticed he didn’t make a purchase.”

  “He’s on a business trip. I think he just roamed into the fair.”

  “But he was asking about the games, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “And didn’t buy anything.”

  She looked at him. “What’s wrong with you? Do we need a sale that badly?”

  He stood very still. “It’s early,” he said after a minute. “You know I’m a night owl.”

  “Weird is what you are. I think you should get us some coffee. Before you scare people off. We’re going to be here another nine hours.”

  He looked back toward the park entrance, then turned to her and smiled. “My treat, I suppose.”

  “You’re the guru of junk technology,” she said. “I’m only an unpaid, junk-loving geek volunteer.”

  He sighed. “Flattery will get you everywhere, Else.”

  “In that case, make mine a large cinnamon vanilla latte with two shots of espresso,” she said. “And thank you for offering!”

  * * *

  Kali was logging off her encrypted email server when the recharged drone came flying over the building across the
street.

  Her brief wait was at an end. With the tablet on her lap, she toggled on the window film as the little aircraft returned to its stationary hover above Ruppertstrasse. There would be a three-second idle period between each light-dark-light flicker sequence, and she would let it run through the sequence several times.

  A second’s flickering across the windows would likely go unseen by anyone watching the drone’s video stream. If noticed at all, it might be mistaken for shadows cast by clouds or trees. But the robotic eye would detect and process the flicker pattern regardless of whether the drone’s human operators could see it.

  Kali sat watching the bitrate graph on her screen. State-of-the-art military and law-enforcement drones did not beam images directly to their operators on the ground like civilian drones. The encrypted digital images were transferred to orbital satellites—uplinked—and then funneled earthward—downlinked—to the drone’s handlers in a line-of-sight data stream. The downlink precisely mirrored the uplink, carrying all its original coded information.

  The transfer of moving, or flickering, images required more data, and a higher bitrate, than the transfer of still images. Each time Kali toggled the flicker sequence, the graph line correspondingly spiked to show an increased bitrate. Each time she stopped the film from flickering, the line flattened out to show decreased bitrate activity.

  Purchased online for just thirty-five US dollars, her portable satellite antenna was browsing the air for downlinks across a wide range of channels, searching for a transmission with the precise jagged bitrate pattern generated by her film.

  It took just minutes to lock onto one, confirming beyond a doubt that the eye of the drone was trained on her windows. More importantly, it gave her air-cracking software a rich stream of information to sort and analyze.

  Kali’s first priority was to identify the specific video camera carried aboard the hexacopter. Since its unique digital signature would be coded into all its transmissions, the air-cracker could automatically match that signature against an extensive library of makes and models.