Jon Evans - Swarm

The British hacker shrugged, frustrated. “It was shipping. We know drones go out in containers with false manifests, dressed up as drilling machinery. But before they reach the port they go through several layers of middlemen, few of whom seem to keep their real data online, if they keep it at all. I was going to try to salmon-jump up that chain this week, but in one day? With records written in Arabic or Russian? Not likely. Only so much you can do from behind a laptop.”

“What about your drones?” I asked.

“Fresh out. Used everything we had on this side of the pond breaking you out of Anaconda. Not that I’m starting to regret it or anything.”

Sophie gave him a look. “Don’t do me any favours.”

“That include retroactively? Like that time I decided not to strangle you to death?”

“Wait,” Jesse said, suddenly alert. “They scan the shipping containers how?”

LoTek shrugged. “Bar codes, probably.”

“No. Bar codes are two years ago.” Jesse actually cracked a smile. “You’ve gone all software on us, buddy. Time to come back to the dark side.”

“Hardware is Mulligan’s remit. And dilettante dabblers like you.”

Jesse held his smile, but its cheer withered at that disrespect from an intellectual superior. I supposed it hadn’t happened much in his life. “Specialization is for insects,” he shot back. “Shipping containers use RFIDs now.” Radio frequency identification, pronounced arphids . “If we could get a drone, we could mount an RFID detector and fly it around -“

LoTek cut him off. “First, we don’t have any drones. Second, you couldn’t mount a detector with sufficient range. Third, containers are highly fungible and we don’t know which ones to look for.”

A dejected silence fell.

“Come on,” Sophie said, “it’s a huge fucking factory, there has to be some way to find it.”

But the silence continued unbroken. Nobody seemed to have any more ideas, and the clock was ticking. We had no leads to the factory, and if Jesse was right, the Russians might launch their attack tomorrow.

“Never mind the factory,” Lisa suggested. “What if we lured some drones to us?”

“Might not be a bad idea.” Jesse looked speculatively over at the squat metal box the size of a bedside table with winking LEDs and a flared cannon-like barrel mounted on top, connected to the body by thick metal cables. It looked a bit like a steampunk blunderbuss atop a cyberpunk fridge. “We do have that homemade EMP cannon. Should knock out drones at a hundred metres.”

“And scramble everything else electronic within fifty feet,” LoTek pointed out, “after which it takes two minutes to recharge, during which we’re at the mercy of any follow-up. If we broadcast our location I somehow doubt they’ll be kind enough to send exactly the right number of drones for us to skeet shoot and test. If we put out a honeypot they’ll blow it to smithereens and keep sending more until we’re all dead.”

Danielle said, “They might not even bother with drones. Not long ago a Chechen dissident was murdered in a hotel near the gold market here. By Russian assassins, everyone assumes. I really don’t think it’s a good idea to tell them we’re in town.”

Jesse conceded the point. “Then what?”

Nobody had an answer.

“This ultimately might not be a solvable problem,” LoTek said grimly. “We need more data, we don’t know how to get it, and we don’t have much time.”

I looked at Sophie’s face, hoping for some sign of a brilliant insight. But she didn’t look thoughtful. She looked it was beginning to dawn on her that her whole world, our whole world, might slowly be coming apart.

“Jesus,” Lisa said. “I can’t believe this.”

Nobody said anything.

“Maybe they won’t do it. They’ve just been testing the waters, right? They won’t really want to launch a major military attack. Kill thousands of people and start a war for no good reason.”

LoTek shrugged. “Who knows? It’s the one chance they’ll ever have to knock out and maybe replace the world’s hyperpower, so I wouldn’t bet my life against them taking it. The men who run Russia are as vicious as they come, and risk-takers by nature, you don’t get to the Kremlin without taking a few chances. And who is the US going to declare war on? One of the big problems with drones is that you can’t prove who sent them. I expect there are whole disinformation campaigns ready to point to the Chinese, or the Iranians, or both, as the real masterminds. And that’s if the Americans can get their act together at all. The USA might be the most powerful nation on earth, but it’s not a resilient society. Hit it hard enough and it really might just fall apart.”

I waited for someone to dispute that analysis. Nobody did. Sophie looked like I felt, like she was drowning, lost and helpless. I wondered how many would die if and when the Russians pulled the trigger, on that day – today? tomorrow? – when every cable and pipe and road and grocery store in the USA went dark and empty.

I remembered what Sophie had said after landed in Colombia, that she could guarantee that Michael Kostopoulos wouldn’t be the last victim of a drone. How right she had been.

Michael Kostopoulos.

Michael Kostopoulos.

“Hey,” I said slowly. Everyone looked at me. “Who killed Michael Kostopoulos?”

“Ortega,” Sophie said impatiently. “Let’s get back to -“

“No, he didn’t. I asked when I was there. Dmitri had never even heard of him, and he commanded Ortega’s drones. So who sent the drone that got Kostopoulos?”

The question rippled around the table.

Jesse said, “If it wasn’t Ortega, it must have been the Russians, right? No one else had those drones.”

“Exactly. But why would the Russians murder a DEA agent in Colombia?”

Nobody had an answer.

“Interesting,” Sophie admitted.

“Huh.” LoTek pursed his lips. “Be worth looking into his notes and files, if we could. But we can’t. Even I can’t hack into the DEA’s repository, not overnight.”

“Would it help if you had another DEA agent’s password?” Lisa asked.

He rolled his eyes at her apparent naivete. “Sure, with an in like that it would be easy. But how exactly do you expect us to find -“

Jesse laughed.

“Don’t be too terribly alarmed, Mr. Tek or whatever it is you call yourself,” Lisa said drily, “but I happen to be a DEA agent in good standing. They gave me a badge, a gun, and a login. I never realized that last might be the most dangerous.”

“You’re DEA?” LoTek regarded Lisa as if she had tentacles. “Fucking hell. This Grassfire lark may take some getting used to. I’m not accustomed to having suits on my side.”

“Call me a suit one more time and I won’t be on your side much longer.”

He smiled. “Give me half an hour. That’s all I’ll need.”

I stood on the balcony and looked down at glittering Dubai. The others were still in the living room, clustered around Jesse and LoTek as they hacked into the DEA, but I needed some space. Everything was happening too fast. The whole world was changing, and I had somehow found myself inside one of the axes on which it turned. If we screwed up, and so far it seemed like we had done nothing but, we would fail not just ourselves but all humanity.

I had asked for an extraordinary life. Now I wanted to give it back.

I heard footsteps approach, recognized their rhythm immediately, winced.

“How are you doing?” Sophie asked softly.

I didn’t look at her. “What do you care?”

“James. That’s not fair.”

“Not fair?” Infuriated, I turned to face her. “You frame me as an arms dealer to terrorists and drug cartels, you destroy my entire life behind my back, you lie to me from the day we met, and you say I’m being unfair to you?”