Daniel Suarez - Kill Decision

The Korean scientist nodded. “The enemy’s probably monitoring orbit schedules.”

“Okay, so even though we were in the right time and place, we still have no idea where these things are originating.”

The African-American scientist nodded sadly. “It’ll be worse here in the States. The drones mix in with domestic air traffic-small private planes. There are thousands of unregistered private airstrips-runways on ranches and commercial and private lands that aren’t attended by flight controllers or anyone else. Radar echoes alone aren’t going to identify these things, and since they are remotely controlled we can’t listen for unique radio signatures.”

The Korean scientist nodded. “None of them have been picked up by DEA drones or coastal radar, so they might be being built and launched domestically. But with just two dozen attacks over three months, we don’t have much data to work with. There’s too much terrain to cover.”

The blond scientist added with a slight Germanic accent, “Without an intact specimen-”

The Korean scientist next to him shook his head vigorously. “The moment we try to grab it, it’ll explode in our faces-making it next to impossible to determine who built it, how it operates, and how to defend against it.”

Odin glanced down at the notes on his pad of paper and crossed an item off a list. “That’s being handled, Two. Next comes target prediction. Where are we?”

The Japanese researcher shook his head. “Nowhere, Odin. We’ve run the previous bombing victims through tens of thousands of link analysis filters, searching for any recognizable pattern or connection, but there’s nothing. A human rights activist, a financier, oil company executives…” He threw up his hands. “None of them knew each other or had interactions of any type. They didn’t work for the same companies or even in the same industry. They had no common financial interests, enemies, religious or political affiliations, social interests. Exchanged no communications. Not all of them were American, and on paper some of them would have been political adversaries-for example, the human rights activist in Chicago and the private prison lobbyist in Houston. Or the financial journalists killed in the New York cafe bombing or the retired East German Communist party boss living in Queens.”

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…”

It 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.