Kill Decision (21 page)

Odin pondered it. “What were the journalists working on when they died?”

“Corruption at major investment houses. The activist was doing a documentary on sweatshops in Syria.” He shrugged. “If you’re going by a list of people they criticized—well, it’s a long list. It’s in the hundreds. We certainly can’t use it to predict an attack. We sliced and diced the data just about any way we can think of, and the only clear pattern is that these drones don’t attack in high winds, rain, or snow.”

A murmur swept though the group as several wrote that down.

“None of you guys noticed that?”

Odin looked up from his notepad. “Praying for rain isn’t a solution. What else have you got?”

“Other than that . . . I guess we’re still dead in the water.”

“Not entirely.” Odin tapped the intercom on a phone sitting on the table nearby.

A voice came over the speaker.
“You ready?”

“Yeah, get in here.”

“There in a sec.”

McKinney couldn’t help but notice that Odin was looking at her. She raised her eyebrows.

The others looked to her as well.

Odin paused a moment before speaking to her. “Your value, Professor, lies not only in what you know, but also in what you represent.”

She looked at him askew. “I’m not following you.”

The team room door opened, and Hoov, the Eurasian communications specialist from the plane in Africa, entered carrying a laptop case. He pulled up a chair and deposited the case on the table between Odin and McKinney.

Odin gestured to him. “You remember Hoov. He’s been examining an image we took of your laptop several days ago—before the attack.”

“You broke into my quarters.”

Hoov shook his head dismissively. “Not necessary, Professor. I was able to remotely access your system.”

“Oh, well . . . that’s okay, then.”

“Tell her what you found, Hoov.”

Hoov nodded and addressed McKinney. “Three different classes of malware—one a fairly common ZeuS/Zbot Trojan variant, but two of them were a bit more exotic. Not known in the wild, and sophisticated. They both utilized a previously unknown OS vulnerability—what’s known as a zero-day—which means we’re dealing with serious people.”

“Get to the point, Hoov.”

“Okay. Professor, your computer is infected with the same rare, stealthy malware that compromised the Stanford servers.”

McKinney wasn’t surprised. “Okay, so they stole my work the same way they stole the Stanford researchers’ work.”

“Correct.”

“How long do you think they’ve been inside my machine?”

“Hard to say. But . . .” Hoov looked to Odin.

Odin leaned in. “I’ve got a cyber team ready to trace the espionage pipeline this malware serves whenever I give the word. But I don’t want to do that just yet.”

“Why not?”

“It would risk detection, and I don’t want them to abandon this pipeline like they did the Stanford one. Right now they’re still searching for you. That’s valuable to us.”

McKinney narrowed her eyes at him.

“They’re not positive you’re dead. They’ll be looking to see if you pop up again. We can use that.”

“I don’t like where this is going.”

“If they suddenly discovered you’re not dead, for example, and are here in the United States working with the U.S. military . . .”

“Jesus!” McKinney pushed back from the table and stood up. “You didn’t bring me here for my expertise. You brought me here as bait!”

The other researchers turned to look at Odin with varying degrees of concern.

He held up his hands. “Wait a second. If we can get them to send a drone after you, that means we can predict where a drone attack will occur in advance. Which is what we’ve already spent months preparing for. It means we have a shot at catching one of these things.”

“No matter how many times you assure me you’re telling me the truth—”

“Whether you like it or not, until we find out who’s sending these drones, you’re not safe—and neither is anyone you care about. That means there’s no going home for you until you help us trace these things back to their maker.”

“I can only imagine what happens to me now if I refuse. Do you strap me to a telephone pole somewhere and chum the Internet with my data until drones come to kill me?”

Odin stared impassively. “I was sort of hoping we wouldn’t have to use straps. . . .”

CHAPTER 14

Insomnia

I
t was well
past midnight, and Linda McKinney hadn’t slept in three days. Instead she was sitting at the desk in her room in front of the government-issued laptop. Oddly, it had no brand markings on it. She flipped up the lid and was surprised to see it was already powered on. The main page of a wiki was on-screen.

In the dim screen light McKinney could see her logon and password info on a printed security card next to the laptop, along with a “security best-practices” guide. She minimized the wiki page and noticed an Ubuntu desktop arranged much like the one on her own laptop. Okay, at least they were using open-source software, and they’d spied on her enough to install Code::Blocks on this loaner machine
.
No doubt her weaver ant simulation project files would be on here as well. She was actually impressed that the government folks were this competent.

She double-clicked on the Firefox browser icon. Not surprisingly, it didn’t bring her to the Internet. No getting to the outside world. Instead it went to the same intranet project wiki page that was already open. The title “Task Force Ancile” headed the page with the company’s shield logo. Along the left side were links to various categories: intelligence, video, interdiction, and many more.

A top-secret operation with a logo. She thought that was funny.

McKinney clicked on the word
Ancile,
and a definition popped up describing the Ancile as the legendary shield of the Roman god of war, Mars. The text said Rome would be master of the world as long as the shield was preserved.

Master of the world, eh?

Ruling the world wasn’t on her personal list of priorities. She back-clicked and surveyed the categories of information available on the main project page. There were various headings:
Robotics,
AI algorithms, Forensic analysis,
and many more.

She clicked on a link entitled
Attack Scenes
. It brought her to a page with dozens of thumbnail images. Brief introductory text described them as videos uploaded to various offshore aggregation websites. They appeared to be video clips of actual attacks as they happened, presumably filmed by spotter drones—like the one that had hovered outside her cabin back in Tanzania.

McKinney clicked on the first video thumbnail. It expanded to a full-screen high-def digital video of several men playing golf on a lush green course somewhere. There was no sound. Even now the angle was changing subtly, as though being filmed from a moving object. The men stood around the manicured green watching one of their number getting ready to putt.

Suddenly an instantaneous blast ripped the scene apart. McKinney recoiled in horror as body parts rained down in every direction. Strangely, there was no crater in the grass, which was now smoking, yet slick with blood. It appeared that the bomb detonated above the ground, to devastating effect. She closed the window and just stared at the main page. There were at least a dozen more.

“Dear God.”

She didn’t want to see any more of that. How had the videos been discovered? And by whom? The comments section still seemed to be hashing out the answer. Logons with call-sign names she didn’t recognize, but also the occasional one she did—Expert Three, Hoov, Gumball.

She backtracked to the main wiki page and followed the link to a diagram of all the drone attacks. It showed a map of the United States overlaid by a couple of dozen red dots scattered mostly on the coasts—although some were deep in the Midwest. As she moved her mouse over the dots, basic details of each attack popped up: date, GPS coordinates, number of dead and injured, and a hyperlink for more information. She clicked on a link for a bombing in Urbana, Illinois. She remembered its having been reported as a terrorist bombing in a park months ago. Six dead. A dozen injured. A dedicated page popped up with the names and photos of victims, grisly high-res photos of the scene. She scrolled down to see vast amounts of information, and another bustling comments section.

Looking at all the death and suffering that had occurred, McKinney couldn’t help but feel she was being petty in having suspicions. But then, they’d made a special effort to get her to view this, hadn’t they? Her contribution to the effort was apparently going to be as cannon fodder.

She pushed away from the desk.

*   *   *

M
cKinney stared
at the ceiling in the alarm clock’s blue LED light. The cold glow cast fantastical shadows on the acoustic tile above her. She heard the whoosh of air flowing through the HVAC system and the occasional mysterious sounds of far-off activity—heavy trucks, echoed shouting, and clanging metal. She tried to imagine what was going on elsewhere in this secret place. A place that didn’t officially exist and where no one she knew could find her. Isolation protocol.

It was 1:47 in the morning according to the blue digits on the nightstand. The sheets and blankets were crisp and smelled new. The mattress firm. She felt truly clean for the first time in months. No dust or humidity down here, and the bathroom was new. The hot water came down in torrents. Properly focused, it could probably quell a riot. Everything in the room had the cool precision of Scandinavia.

She sat up in bed. This whole place just felt wrong. She couldn’t quite put her finger on what was eating at her. Why she couldn’t sleep. Why she hadn’t slept since the attack. She grabbed the TV remote and switched on the television. The Weather Channel blinked into existence on the far wall. Soothing music played over a list of international cities and temperatures. After a few moments she changed channels to the first of several cable news networks in rotation.

More beating of war drums. People being warned to report suspicious activity. More details of yesterday’s bombing in D.C. Updated fatalities from the Karbala bombing—4,300 dead. She changed channels several more times. Nation-under-siege hysteria was everywhere. Even the commercials were for pepper spray and burglar alarm systems. She stopped on one channel where a congresswoman from Ohio was speaking on the floor. 
“. . . in a rush to make sweeping changes we’ll regret. We’ve been down this road before, and we’re no safer for it. Sixty-five billion dollars over the next four years for a fleet of autonomous drones to defend the homeland. Again, money that could be put toward education, health care, or infrastructure. Drones are not going to stop these bombings. In fact, our drones might be the root cause of these bombings. . . .”

McKinney cast off the covers and sat on the edge of the bed. The news had moved on to another story, but she hadn’t. She turned it off.

Our drones might be the root cause of these bombings.

And sixty-five billion dollars for drones being pushed as an emergency defense. The ultimate automated cash machine—drones could be both the hero and the enemy, and who would ever know?
Sixty-five billion dollars.
And that was probably just the start.

McKinney got up and walked aimlessly around the room, feeling the cool stone on her feet. What reason did she have to believe what they’d told her?

She was a scientist, and science required evidence to sustain a hypothesis. The operative hypothesis being that this was a government-sanctioned top-secret military operation to defend against deadly drone attacks. But where was the proof to sustain that hypothesis? Over the past decade, half a dozen illegal black ops run by rogue elements in the military had been revealed—assassinations, torture. . . . Maybe these people weren’t even with the military—maybe they were private operators, looking to influence government policy. Maybe they were agents of a foreign government. What did she really know?

She thought back over the past forty-eight hours. They had flown here in private aircraft, to a private air terminal at Kansas City—bypassing customs and Homeland Security entirely. Smugglers could have done the same. Did she really know she’d been at an army base back in Wiesbaden—or that it was even Germany? It was dark. She saw a couple of men outside in uniform. She saw offices and army insignias, but truthfully, how did she know that wasn’t just some airport office somewhere? She hadn’t seen any military cargo planes or fighter jets.

The attacks were real enough—they’d been in the news for months—but if these were the people behind them, they could easily have provided all this footage to her. But why would they need to deceive her? Could they be trying to trick her into helping them? The iterations of conjecture were stacking up fast.

What did she really know?

She felt confident she was in Kansas—the highway signs, the cars and businesses on the way in. She was in the United States. There was supposed to be rule of law here.