Jon Evans - Swarm

I had watched with trepidation while the brusquely efficient Colombian doctor removed the bandages on my feet, but three days of healing and medicine had left them only a little raw. Swathed with second skin, and enclosed in supportive orthopedic shoes which made me look like I had gorilla feet, they only felt a little bruised.

“Blisters heal fast,” she assured me. “You’ll be running again in a week.”

“Like hell. I am going to spend the next month imitating the offspring of a sloth and a snail.”

She smiled. “Want to go shopping first?”

“Seriously?”

She shrugged. “Flight doesn’t leave until tomorrow, we’ve got all day to kill, Doctor says you’re fine to go out. I thought you might like real food and civilization.”

“Yes, please.”

A battered taxi took us from the hospital’s shabby and crowded entrance through busy streets, some clean and lined with villas, some of them rotting slums, to the monumental El Prado mall. Inside all was gleaming order and shiny neon brands. Stylish shoppers drifted in packs. I couldn’t believe I was in the same country as the jungle we had barely survived. It felt like some kind of fantasy-novel parallel retail dimension.

“There’s supposed to be a good restaurant not far from here,” she said after I finished buying new clothes with money from the ATM card that had miraculously survived our jungle ordeal. “A place where Gabriel Garcia Marquez used to hang out when he lived here.”

“Screw that. I’ve had enough cultural authenticity to last me a lifetime, thank you very much.” I pointed to the food court. “I want McDonald’s and ice cream, and I want it now.”

I was just finishing my mint-chip cone when Lisa’s phone warbled.

Whatever she heard turned her expression serious in a hurry. She listened for a minute, then said, tersely, “Yes, sir. We’re on our way.”

She hung up and stood up, all business again, alert and ready for action.

“On our way where?” I asked.

“Washington.”

“What? Why?”

Lisa said, “About ninety minutes ago the head of the DEA was assassinated in his home not a mile from the White House. By a drone.”

We didn’t even go through immigration. Two men in dark suits met us at the gate and hustled us through Authorized Personnel Only doors, down featureless hallways, and into a dark sedan that whisked us across the Potomac to a chrome-and-glass complex that looked like the headquarters of a moderately successful software company. There we were ushered into an office barren except for a briefcase on the floor, a laptop on the steel desk, and the two people waiting for us. One was a short wide man with an air of authority and a shock of black curly hair. The other was Sophie.

When she saw me she rushed over, grabbed me and gave me a long, deep kiss, heedless of our officious audience. I held her so tightly I had to ease off after a second for fear of cracking a rib.

“Hey, you,” she whispered, brushing tears from her eyes as I smiled through my own. “Good to see you.”

I murmured, “You too.”

Sophie turned to Lisa and said, heartfelt, “Thank you.”

Lisa’s smile seemed uncomfortable. “Any time.”

“Terry Clark.” The short man stood to shake my hand. His grip was powerful, and his smile seemed to have too many teeth in it, like a shark’s. “So you’re the civilian who aced our improvised jungle survival course. And you’re Agent Reyes. Well done. I’ve already put you in for a commendation. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

“You too, sir. Thank you very much.” Lisa seemed starstruck, as if in the presence of royalty; she all but curtsied and saluted after shaking his hand.

Clark turned back to Sophie and I. “Welcome to the alphabet soup. We’ve got quite a task force assembled here. DEA, FBI, CIA, NSA, there’s even an ATF guy, don’t ask me why, plus Homeland Security, State Department, Pentagon, Secret Service, and probably a dogcatcher who fixes kitchen sinks. I have the dubious honour of being the ringmaster of this clusterfuck circus, and I have called you two here to ask you a favour on behalf of your country.”

I wanted to ask, Canada needs my help? What’s wrong, are the Habs and Leafs tanking again? , but decided silence was wiser than sarcasm.

“What we have on our hands here,” he continued, “is a major national security crisis. Drug cartels murdering the head of the DEA in his home. We have reason to believe that the weapons they are using were supplied to them by your laboratory’s clients. The so-called Convoy Emerging Wealth Fund.”

He paused to let that sink in.

“Based on what evidence?” I asked, and returned Sophie’s let-me-do-the-talking look with a warning glare of my own. I was glad to see her, but after what I had just been through I wasn’t about to stay quiet for anybody, or let a claim that Jesse was involved in a criminal conspiracy go unchallenged.

Clark said, “Aside from the remarkable similarities between the drones you built for Convoy and those used by the cartels, there’s their location.”

I blinked. “Their location?”

Sophie said, “I’ve been helping the DEA look for drones. Went through their satellite photo archives with our Axons.” Her neural networks weren’t just good for keeping UAVs aloft and tracking radio signals or sunken treasure; they were powerful general-purpose pattern-recognition machines. Spotting instances of a particular image in a vast haystack of data was exactly the kind of problem at which they excelled. “We’ve found silhouettes of whole squadrons of drones flying across the Caribbean towards the USA. Thirty a day, every day, going back for more than a year.”

I whistled with surprise.

Then I said, “Wait a second.” That didn’t make any sense. “Across the Caribbean? From Colombia? No way. Those drones can’t fly that far unless they’ve invented a whole new generation of fuel cell while they’re at it.” I was confident about that much; this was my area of expertise.

“Exactly. I’m guessing they can go maybe four hundred miles when loaded. Which just happens to be the distance from Colombia to Haiti, and from Haiti to Florida.”

I opened my mouth and closed it again. Jesse and Anya had been operating out of Haiti for the last six months.

“We have a few shots of drones flying north from Colombia, too,” Sophie said. “Figure they go from there to Haiti, recharge during the day, then on to Florida the next night, navigating via GPS, low and under the radar. If carbon-fibre frames that small show up on radar at all. They’re not much bigger than frigate birds. Land them in the Everglades, unload them, send them back to Colombia for more. Two-day trip each way, thirty drones reaching the USA every day. That means a hundred and twenty drones, carrying a cumulative payload of forty tons of drugs over the last year.” I whistled again. “We haven’t found any shots of the return trip yet. It probably won’t help, I’m sure all the launch and landing sites change frequently.” She shook her head with something like admiration. “Drones solve the smuggling problem, simple as that. Unstoppable and untraceable. Even if the occasional one gets intercepted, it can’t testify.”

“The bottom line,” Clark said grimly, “is that these jokers have a hundred and twenty drones they can bring into America and pack with Semtex instead of cocaine any time they like. Are you beginning to get the picture here?”

“Yes,” I said, half-chastened, “but that’s still only circumstantial evidence against Convoy. Nothing tangible.”

“No. You’re quite right. We don’t have any real evidence, and even if we did, they’re a British corporation, directed by a Canadian and a Russian, operating out of Haiti, with a Liberian-registered ship anchored in international waters. Going after them would be a legal nightmare.”