Robert Liparulo - The 13 th tribe

She stopped behind him and watched him work. She considered grabbing hold of his close-cropped Afro, then thought her nails on the back of his neck would give him a better scare. She raised her hand.

“What do you want, Nevaeh?” he said, clicking away.

She slapped the back of his head. “You’re no fun.”

“I’m busy. Go away.”

She turned and rested her backside against the edge of the desk. “Have you cracked the code on the microchips yet?”

“You just got back with them.”

“And we should be heading for the zone of operations by now, but we can’t move until you have the chips ready for the control panels.”

“Can’t stand still, can you? I had a dog like that once.” He glanced at her. “Had to put him down, made me too nervous.”

She picked up the soda can thing, drawing its wires tight against her side as she examined it. Under the glass dome rested an octagonal computer chip about the diameter and thickness of a dime. At each of its corners, a thin gold peg disappeared into a hole in the top of the can. It looked to Nevaeh like a spider caught in a trap.

“Hey, hey,” Sebastian said, standing and taking the can from her. He replaced it on the desk. “Do you want me to decode this thing or not? Get out of here, Nev. I mean it.”

She crossed her arms. “Give me an ETA.”

He sighed and dropped back into the chair. He waved a hand at the monitors, as though tossing sand at them. “These chips are designed not to be decoded. Each UAV requires two chips onboard and two matching chips at the control console. All four have to communicate with each other as well as the rest of the fleet for the drone to work. Thanks to your success at MicroTech, we now have duplicates of the control console chips. But they’re encoded and unusable until unlocked by the commanding officer-or me. Trouble is, each one has its own AES-256 encryption block.” He smiled at the confusion on her face. “That’s the most secure encryption in the world-NSA standard.”

“Can’t you just give me an ETA?”

“How long until the field test?” he said. It was their one window of opportunity, the only time the particular combat drones they planned on hijacking would be fully armed outside a theater of combat. The U.S. military had ordered beefed-up versions of their premier hunter-killer drones, each with enough firepower to bring down a skyscraper. They also wanted fleets of these flying killing machines to work in unison, with the ultimate goal of creating the most powerful conventional warfare unit of destruction ever. The field test was slated to be a demonstration of an operational ten-unit fleet. It was the Tribe’s intention to make it a demonstration of much more.

“Two weeks.”

Sebastian made a dismissive sound with his mouth.

“But Ben’s inside man says they always change the date for security purposes. Could be anytime.”

Ben-forever cultivating connections within multiple countries’ seats of power-had been particularly secretive about this one. The source must have had umbra-level clearance: he’d told Ben about the drones’ field test, the microchips that controlled them, and how to get the manufacturer’s secret spare set.

“I’ll have them cracked by tomorrow, okay?”

“I knew we could count on you. How’re Toby and Phin coming along? I heard them practicing their piloting skills on the Xbox.”

“They need a couple more days.”

She shook her head. “The field command center has been set up for weeks. All we need to do is plug in the manpower and the chips. You got the chips, and they’re still not ready?”

“It’s not as easy as it looks, Nev,” Sebastian said. “Lot of things to learn, and it has to be second nature to them, no time to think once they’re moving. They’ve been practicing all day. They need a break.”

“We should go as soon as you’ve cracked the chips. Let’s at least get on-site.”

“Talk to Ben.”

“I don’t need to talk to Ben.”

Sebastian shrugged. “Whatever.”

They stared at each other for a few beats. They both understood the balance of power. Ben was calculating and meticulous; Nevaeh swift and impetuous. Every mission required a mix of both personalities. How much of one or the other depended on a number of factors, such as the levels of risk, covertness, and political sensitivity. Either Ben or Nevaeh would take charge once they’d determined the mix. The Baltimore trip exemplified the concept. Ben had acquired the intel and planned the theft. Once there, however, Nevaeh had pushed them into action and taken care of the guard. Ben was the Tribe’s head; she was its muscle.

No one doubted that this new project’s size and importance-its potential impact-pushed it firmly into Ben’s purview.

She nodded and strode toward the door. “We’d better not miss it,” she said. She turned left into the corridor and stuck her head into the next room. Phin was sitting on his bed, balancing a bottle of whiskey on his knee and moving his head to music she couldn’t hear. When he saw her and plucked out an earbud, she said, “Want to kill someone?”

“Who do you have in mind?”

She pulled a sheet of paper from her back pocket and held it up. “A bad guy, who else?”

By the time Jagger had reached the first pit, Tyler was running around the next, uppermost dig to reach its shallow end. The boy hopped in and disappeared. Jagger waved to the dozen workers in the first hole. Several nodded in return, their hands occupied by a shovel and a trowel, a wood-framed screen and a camera. He passed Bertha, crossed the ground between the holes, and stopped at the edge of Annabelle’s deep end. Twenty feet below, Oliver, Addison, and Tyler crouched around a small lump protruding from the floor. Oliver brushed at the object while Addison made notes on a clipboard. Tyler was leaning close, as though inspecting a new kind of insect.

“Playing in the dirt again?” Jagger said.

Oliver cranked his neck to look at him and laughed. “In grad school I had a T-shirt with those very words. How’re things, Jag?”

“All quiet on the Middle Eastern front.”

Oliver flashed a big smile. “For now,” he said. He turned back to his brushing.

“Expecting trouble?” Jagger said.

“I hope so,” Oliver said without looking. “When we find what we’re looking for, the looters will descend like vultures. And the anarchists. Then you’ll really earn your keep.” He glanced up. “Not that you don’t now.”

“Something like this?” Tyler said, leaning closer to the protruding clump. “Is it special?”

“Probably not,” Oliver said. “Just a piece of pottery. Not even from the right era.”

“Then why are you being so careful?”

Oliver leaned back onto his heels and sighed. “Because you never know.”

Addison nudged Tyler with her elbow. “Some villagers in Jordan once found what they thought was a headstone,” she said. “They broke it up to sell pieces to tourists. Turns out it was an ancient memorial celebrating a Moabite ruler’s victories over Omri, king of Israel.”

“The stone mentions the House of David and Yahweh, the Jewish name for God,” Oliver added. “It pretty much shut up some groups who said there never was a King David.”

“People said that?” Tyler said.

“Anything to disprove the Bible.”

“But why?”

Addison shrugged. “They think religion is stupid, I guess. They want to live by their own rules, not God’s.”

Jagger squatted at the edge of the hole and set down the lunchbox. “We talked about that, Tyler,” he said. “That’s why Dr. Hoffmann’s digging here.”

Tyler chimed in. “’Cause some people say there was no Moses, right, Ollie?”