Daniel Suarez - Kill Decision

“Holy mother of…”

Warner walked along the tables past oscilloscopes, soldering irons, and assorted tools littered across half a dozen workstations. Wrecked fuselage sections were in various states of disassembly, their components arrayed like the results of an electrical autopsy. Legal pads with scrawled notes in Arabic-not Urdu or Pashto, but Arabic-along with hasty diagrams were visible on the workbenches. He flipped aside a plastic tarpaulin and saw the rear section of an MQ-1 Predator, the downward-angled fins and propeller twisted from crash impact. He ran his hands along the ground power panel in the side of the fuselage, wiping away dirt and dust. Given the political waves this discovery would make, Warner had to be certain this was the real thing-absolutely certain.

He examined the panel. There was the release consent switch, still set to armed. The battery-off button, manual engine start switch, ground power. He pulled the tarp farther back to reveal the front section of the same or perhaps another MQ-1, the fuselage smashed, with dirt and pieces of branches confusing things even more. He tried to get his bearings, tapping each subassembly as he found it: the synthetic aperture radar antenna, a damaged Ku-band satellite dish. The APX-100 IFF transponder was missing and so was the video recording unit, but he found the primary control module, partially disassembled. Glancing up at the rest of the shop he saw at least four more MQ-1s.

Colonel Kayani smiled broadly. “Did I not promise it would be worth the trip, my friend? Of course, the Pakistani government has no reason to hide this from you. We have no use for American drones because we have our own Mukhbar and Burraq drones-of more advanced design.”

Warner stared at the walls in open wonder. And there, in front of him, hung what looked to be a large wiring schematic indicating the individual subsystems of an MQ-9 Reaper drone. The diagram was roughly quarter scale, and printed on professional blueprint paper. Warner could see the computer workstations and color plotters close at hand. They had the plans for an MQ-9. A Reaper.

This was a full-scale reverse engineering operation. He was nearly speechless.

“Well, what do you think?”

Warner, still wide-eyed, spoke without looking at Kayani. “I think I just got promoted.”

Henry Clarke undid the buttons on his Balmain jacket as he cast an arm over the back of a leather sofa in Marta’s K Street corner office. The tall windows had an expansive view over the broad intersections of Vermont and K Street, just off McPherson Square. It was a beautiful, sunny winter day, and he wondered where he should eat later-and with whom.

Marta, as usual, stood behind her desk, no chair in sight, pacing as she listened to someone on the phone, interjecting with the occasional “No. Yes. Yes.” She glanced up at the far wall in measured intervals.

Clarke’s gaze wandered to a dozen flat-panel television screens occupying the wall across from Marta’s desk, in between bookshelves and framed vanity photos of her standing alongside senators, presidents, and celebrity CEOs. Every one of those television screens was tuned to a cable news channel with the sound turned down and closed captioning turned on. It was a collage with variations on the same story-the drone “discovery” in Karachi, and a rehash of the drone attack in Iraq.

Clarke wondered about that.

Marta edged closer to her phone’s base station. “Get back to me when the hearing ends. Yes.” Marta hung up the phone and stood staring at him.

Clarke spread his hands toward the footage from Pakistan. “Well, what a coincidence.”

“There are no coincidences.”

“I don’t think the Arab street’s going to buy it.”

“It’s not meant for the goddamned Arab street. It’s intended for Main Street.”

Clarke shrugged. “Personally, I would have leaked bootleg video onto the Web first-give it illicit appeal. Coming from mainstream media makes it look suspect to a younger demo.”

“Suspect? You forget that the only voting your generation does is of the up-and-down variety. It might seem like an ancient Kabuki dance to you, but traditional media is where actual registered voters get their information. In response to the discovery, we’ve got talking heads pushing for greater homeland security and funds for autonomous UAVs. And meanwhile I see this…” She curled a finger at him and walked over to the windows.

Clarke sighed and followed her. They stood side by side looking down onto the green expanse of McPherson Square below. There, a few hundred protestors had gathered with signs and banners, the largest of which Clarke could just make out: America-The Biggest Terrorist.

“Comic Sans. Never a good choice.”

“It’s not their choice of font that concerns me. It’s that this attitude might spread.”

“Frankly, I’m surprised anyone still bothers to protest in the street. It requires so many people.”

Marta glared at him.

He held up a finger and walked over to his Dior Homme leather satchel and withdrew his iPad. With a few clicks he flipped it to show her a map of the D.C. metro area with clusters of thousands of red dots on it. “Look, cell phone geolocation data shows very few clustering anomalies for this hour and climate. And that’s holding up pretty much across all major metro areas. It’s gone down six percentage points since news of the Karachi workshop hit the Web, and it’s trending downward. If people are protesting, they aren’t doing it in the streets.” He circled his finger over a few clusters of dots. “Some potential protest knots in Portland and Austin, but defiance-related tag cloud groupings in social media put us within the three-sigma rule-meaning roughly sixty-eight percent of the values lie within one standard deviation of the mean.” Clarke gazed down at the protestors in McPherson Square. “Meaning everything’s normal. I wouldn’t worry about them-they’re not the reality. Just a statistical outlier.”

She stared down at the protestors, unconvinced. “You’re the social media director. It’s your job to contain this shit, and here I am looking at a counter-messaging campaign in my own backyard.”

“If it makes you feel better, do it the old-fashioned way-have your guy hire a dozen drug addicts down at the train station to join the protest. A few dirty, scary people ranting and raving on television. It’ll reverse the message to a boomer demographic. Or just ignore it. What happens on the streets doesn’t matter anymore.”

Marta stood glowering. “Don’t these people have jobs?”

“Probably not. Some of your clients might have had something to do with that.”

She looked up at him and grunted, then returned to her expansive desk. “Don’t get too smug, Henry. You and your sock puppet army are just another tool. The basic principles of public relations never change.”

He slipped his iPad back in its case. “Perhaps, but you never had metrics like this before me. I can tell you moment by moment how your message is playing with not just a national but an international audience.”

“Part of the audience, Henry. Only part.”

“The part that matters, Marta.”

“I can’t remember if I was as self-important as you when I was your age, but I do know I never learned anything by talking.”

“Well, that’s one of the benefits of social media. We can automate the talking.” He zipped his satchel shut and tossed it back onto the sofa. “How are your votes lining up on the Hill?”

“The bill is moving fast through the Appropriation subcommittees, but it’s been tied up in the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Some congresswoman from Ohio, or wherever the fuck, with qualms about automating war-as if the Chinese or the Iranians had any qualms about it.”