Richard Clarke - Sting of the Drone

LOGAN AIRPORT

BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS

He had been standing in the line for over an hour. The lines for Americans were short, but they were making the wogs wait, he thought. Already he could see the way they treated the brown people. The Air India 747 had disgorged a lot of them into Logan’s Terminal E, International Arrivals.

He watched as people at the head of the line moved up to the booths where the policemen sat. The policemen asked them questions. Some went through quickly, but most were asked many questions. The policemen typed into computers, searching for any indication that the person standing before them should be barred from entry into the country. He noticed that the policemen were wearing pistols on their belts. Once, he noticed that a man was taken away from a booth and escorted by two policemen to a door on the sidewall. He wondered if that would happen to him. He worried, but he did not want to sweat. That, they had told him, would be a sign for the police to look more carefully. He should not look nervous.

He told himself there was no reason to worry. He was now Birbal Malhotra, Indian citizen, born in Delhi. Three months ago he had obtained the new Indian identity card, one of over three hundred million that they had issued so far. Only a billion left to issue, he thought. It had his picture and a computer chip with his fingerprints and iris scan. It had cost a lot to get from the Indian civil servant who worked in the Identity office, but it was real. He was now in the Indian government database. He was Hindi.

And as a Hindi with one of the new ID cards, he had had little difficulty getting the visa from the American embassy in Delhi. His mother needed special long-term cancer treatment in America. He needed to go in advance to get them an apartment. More money had created a Mrs. Malhotra, a letter from a real doctor in Delhi, and a real Indian-American doctor in Boston. The American doctor had family in Mumbai, now they were a more wealthy family. It was a solid legend. It would withstand scrutiny. He hoped.

Was it really necessary for him to be here? It would have been safer to send others, but he wanted to be sure. He needed to meet the men who would carry the bombs, look them in the eye, take their measure. Would they panic? Would they fuck up? He could have met them in Europe, but he did not want a record of them traveling abroad. It was a risk coming here, but he saw no other way.

“Next.”

The policeman yelling at him woke him from his daydream. He moved up to booth 8 and presented his passport and the I-94 form he had filled out on the airplane. He was surprised to see the police officer was a black man.

“What is the purpose of your visit?”

“I am here to prepare for my mother coming to get cancer treatment.” He knew that would be the first question.

“Where?”

He felt the sweat running down his back. “Dana-Farber,” he replied. “It is part of Harvard.”

“I know what it is,” the black man replied. “Where will you be staying?”

“Hotel Essex, long-term stay, in Back Bay.”

“How long will you be in the country?”

“They said the treatment could take two months for her. The visa is good for a year, but I will not be here that long, sir. I will probably leave before Christmas.”

“You know you can’t work while you are here? No employment here. What do you do in India, what is your occupation?”

“I am a solicitor, what you call a lawyer.” Could the policeman detect the Australian accented English? He had tried to sound like he was from Delhi, but he knew it did not work.

“Put your right hand on this screen. We are going to take your fingerprints. Look up, we are taking your picture. Do not smile.”

The policeman returned his passport to him. “Do not lose this I-94 stub. You have to turn it in when you leave the country. Now collect your bags and give this blue form to the officer at the exit. Good luck with your mother’s treatments.”

Good luck? Maybe he had worried too much. He had no luggage to collect. He had shipped it on ahead to the Essex. There was only his carry-on wheelie. Would they look through that? They could. They would find nothing.

They did not look in his bag. He could have had anything in it, but how was he to know they would not inspect it? He handed in the blue form to the last of the policemen and walked through a door, following the sign to Ground Transportation.

He found the right bus stop and took it to the blue train, the T they called it. T for target, he thought. He wanted to see it right away, so what better way to get to the hotel? Take the blue line to the green line, they had told him. Get off at Copley, walk two blocks to the hotel. It was beginning for Ahmed Bahadur. He was starting to think it would work.

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 21

2700 LAS VEGAS BOULEVARD

LAS VEGAS, NEVADA

Her mobile must have rung when she was in the shower, she thought, as she stood, drying herself off and deciding what to wear. The little voice mail light was blinking. Instinctively, she picked up the device to hear the message even before dressing.

“Hey, Sandy. It’s Ray. I’m in town for Black Hat, the hacker convention over at Caesar’s. But I see there’s a drone exhibition and conference at Mandalay. Wanna go? Call me.”

A drone exhibition? She tapped “drone, Mandalay” into the search engine on the MacBook Air on her coffee table. “No shit,” she muttered aloud as the Web page for the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Exhibition and Conference popped on the screen. UAVEC. “Well, why not?” She picked the mobile back up and scanned for Ray’s number.

Ninety minutes later they were wandering together on the floor of the Mandalay Hotel and Casino Convention Center, which was packed with exhibits and displays about drones. “This is the fifth Israeli company I have seen so far,” Ray observed as they stood in front of a scale model of a bright, white drone that seemed no bigger than three meters in length and about two in wingspan. The word SHERIFF in blue letters was painted on each side of the short fuselage.

“Interested in our Police Patroller?” a chubby man said as he emerged from around the wall of television screens showing videos of the UAV in action. “Take a precinct where you now use ten police cars and you can reduce that to two. And with Police Patroller you will know before you dispatch a car that it’s worth doing. And for tactical response, we can beam live shots to the police cars, so they know what kind of situation they are driving into before they get there.” He walked over to the scale model and began pointing things out with a handheld laser. “It comes standard with a forty million candlepower spotlight and a loudspeaker.”

“Does it come with a shotgun capability?” Ray asked. Sandra Vittonelli looked at him with incredulity apparent on her face.

“That is an option, not in the standard config,” the salesman replied. “But you have to check to see whether that option is street legal in the U.S. I don’t think it is yet, but we hope it will be soon. Lotta interest in that.”

Sandra began to move on. “Are you the buyer, sir?” the salesman asked Ray. “City police? County?”

Ray pointed at the retreating Vittonelli, “Actually, she’s the sheriff of Jefferson County. I’m just a deputy….” He smiled at the salesman. “Got to catch up with her. You know that kind of boss….”

She stood in front of a four-meter-tall circular device that appeared to be a helicopter drone. The sign in front of it said THE PERFECT HOVERING SURVEILLANCE PLATFORM. It was from Canada. “Where the hell is this Jefferson County where I’m sheriff?” she asked Ray as he caught up to her.