by Lior Samson
“You know, you are amazing, my Rolfy, and I love you.”
“Of course I’m amazing, and, well, I guess I love you too.” He took his time setting the tray down, never taking his eyes from hers.
— 40 —
Gwenbrook Riding Academy was bordered on the northeast by a single-lane dirt road heading south from the paved county road. Once the fence with its ‘No Trespassing’ signs started appearing on the right, Rolf slowed his electric pickup and scanned the left shoulder, looking for something he had spotted on Google Earth. There it was, tire ruts, grown over with grass. “Old access to the power line corridor, it takes a bend in a few hundred feet. We won’t be visible from the road.”
“You still haven’t told me what exactly you … we are doing. I mean, I’m not complaining about the weekend, which was wonderful, but we hardly talked. And then you took off this morning.”
“Patience, Grasshopper, I’ll show you.” The pickup rocked and bucked as he eased it along the disused roadway. He rolled into a grassy clearing to one side and killed the engine. “Hop out and give me a hand with the tarp.”
As they stood on opposite sides of the pickup and carefully rolled back the tarp covering the bed, Dana laughed. “It’s a drone, right?” The aircraft, with its gray-green woodland camo finish, sat with its wings reaching diagonally from corner to corner in the long pickup bed. “You’re going to do a flyover with a buzz-bomb to make sure you have everyone’s attention.”
Rolf undid catches on the straps holding the drone in place. “This is no simple drone and it does not buzz. This is a Semi-Autonomous Aerial Surveillance Robot. It’s more glider than plane, driven by a near-silent electric ducted fan and powered by ultra-light fuel-cell batteries. It has multi-spectrum cameras that allow sophisticate image analysis and—”
“And it’s ginormous. Of course, nobody would ever notice such a big green electric pterodactyl circling overhead, near-silent or not.”
“You might be surprised. Grab that wing and we’ll lift it out. Careful. Easy now. There. Now hold it as high as you can and look up.” The underside was camouflaged to look like cloud-smeared sky and the wings were translucent. “See, harder to spot than you think. Plus, it’ll be gliding along quickly but quietly right at the three-hundred foot legal limit. It’ll fly a preprogrammed search pattern while its high-res surveillance camera sends us pics in real-time over a 5G link. My little box there will stitch them together into a seamless view that we can scan or zoom in and out on even as it’s still coming in. Pretty slick, huh? We should be back on the road out of here in less than an hour.”
Rolf booted up his ruggedized laptop before powering up the drone’s onboard electronics to check the wireless connection. “Now, we lug this thing, ever so carefully, up to the ridge where the powerline was supposed to run. It will give us a straight shot to launch it.”
Once at the ridge and the wide swathe cut through for high-tension lines that were never completed, Rolf held the drone aloft and started to sprint along the overgrown corridor. As the ducted fan kicked in and started to whir, he heaved the drone at an angle upward. It rose for a bit, dipped, then began a long slow tight spiral climb to clear the trees before turning away from the powerline right-of-way toward the horse ranch. The whir of the drone faded as it continued to climb and turned back parallel to the road to start its preplanned mapping pattern.
“Let’s get back to the truck and watch the pics as they’re coming in.”
— —
Rolf considered the powerline corridor to be too rough and overgrown to land the drone, so, as the last of the images popped onto the laptop screen and were tiled into place, he backed up out onto the dirt road and parked on the shoulder. “Keep a look out for the drone,” he said, as he plugged a console with joystick controllers on it into his laptop.
“There it is, eleven o’clock high,” she said.
“Got it. Once I land it on the road, be ready to help me get it back into the truck.” He lined up the drone with a straight stretch of the road and brought it down gradually, bringing up the nose at the last moment to drag the tail and put it into a belly flop and sloppy skid along the hump in the center of the road. “Not bad, now let’s stow it and get out of here.”
They were just lifting it by the wings when the sound of hoof beats drew their attention to the woods across the road. A horse and rider could be seen through the trees, gaining speed while heading toward the fence at the other side of the road. The rider expertly urged her horse into a jump that cleared the fence and the ditch running beside the road. She reined in and tugged the horse into a smart quarter-horse turn to head straight up the road toward them.
Rolf shouted. “To the ditch.” He ran in an arc to bring the wings around to parallel the road. He, Dana, and the plane, dove for the edge as the rider spurred her horse into a gallop and flew past them to be quickly lost in a swirl of dust from the road.
“Into the truck. Forget the drone. It’s only hardware and it’s insured. Let’s get out of here.”
Rolf was completing a three-point turn to head the pickup back down the road when the horse and rider reappeared out of the dust cloud. He slammed down on the accelerator, forcing the rider to wheel her mount to avoid crashing into them. As he raced away, he could see her in the rearview mirror following at a full gallop until she was lost in the dust cloud trailing them.
“Who was that masked rider,” Rolf joked.
“I think it was Lady Seabrook, but I really didn’t get a good look. What in hell did she think she was doing?”
“Running us down.”
“Can she get anything from the drone?”
“Shit, yeah.” He slammed on the brakes and pulled over to the side of the road. “Hand me my laptop.”
“What are you going to do, fly it to us?”
“No, it can’t take off on its own; it has to be launched. But I’m erasing its memory card.” He typed in an access code and a command. “There, she may have plenty of good guesses, but she won’t have the data to know precisely what we were doing or who we are.”
“Scant comfort, I’d say.”
“I’ll take what comfort I can get. Now, let’s head home and start going through the photos.”
“What are we looking for?”
“Bodies.”
— —
It was early morning before the combination of Rolf’s pattern-recognition software, a deep-learning package, and a great many quick eyes-on visual checks paid off. “We have two really good candidates where the ground seems to have been disturbed in about the right shape not too long ago and with reasonable accessibility. This one”—he tapped a spot on the wall screen— “is in a small clearing where one of their trails runs through the woods, and this one not far from the main stables is in what seems to be a vegetable garden. It’s a little too small, but it fits the criteria.”
“Fine, now what do we do? We can’t just go in there with a couple of shovels and ask Seabrook to let us dig up her garden and chop into one of her bridle paths.”
“No, but now we finally bring in the men and women in blue. Don’t forget, I’ve worked with the LAPD. I know the right people to call.”
“Don’t they need, like, a search warrant?”
“I’m one step ahead. Lieutenant Figley thinks he knows just the right sympathetic judge who would be ready to sign a warrant on the basis of what we have. It does require tossing in your phone company logs with the cell tower data, which might make you vulnerable, but if a search were to actually turn up a body, Figley thinks your trespassing will be overlooked.”
“What about your aerial trespassing?”
“Not in the same league as digital breaking and entering, but odds are we both get off with a talking to and a wrist slap.”
“Odds are, huh.”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, what the hell. Let’s do it. I’d rather spend a few years in a minimum security prison for geeks than eternity in an unmarked grave.”
— —
Armed with a warrant, an interagency team led by Rolf’s colleagues from Los Angeles County, carried out their raid the following Monday. After slow excavation, the site in the woods turned up the carcass of a mountain lion that may or may not have been illegally killed. The spot in the vegetable patch turned up nothing, being the site of a tomato planting that was dug up after it stopped producing.
Gwen Seabrook accepted the police team’s apologies with calculated fury. “I hope you are satisfied and duly chagrined. I don’t know where nor from whom you got your information, but I will tell you, this is an outrage. Be forewarned that I shall pursue every legal avenue of redress open to me regarding your unwarranted intrusion onto private property. Good day, gentlemen. I trust you have replaced your divots after slicing into my property.”
The next day, a FedEx package arrived at Rolf’s apartment; it contained the blank memory card from the drone.
— —
“What are you doing?” he asked Dana.
“Moving out, what does it look like?”
“I didn’t know you were moved in.”
“Typical male. Clueless.”
“I may be clueless, but I am not your typical male. Your typical male is not ready to marry Dana Carmody.”
“What?” She spun around to face him. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“Us, the time we’ve been spending together, what I maybe should have realized long ago—long, long ago. And maybe far away. It took me a while to get here, but all this … this threat stuff has made me aware that we’re not getting any younger, neither of us. I think we should—”
“Not now, Rolf. I already have too much to handle. They know who you are and where you live. I have to get out of here and back to my hidey hole.”
“I’ll protect you.”
“And how will you do that? With the same saber-sharp skill that you skewered Gwen Seabrook, that you zeroed in on where the body was buried, that … Oh shit, just get out of the way and let me leave.”
“Okay, but you’re running away because you can’t handle commitment. You’re always going on about men who can’t commit. Why is that? What is the beam in your eye that leads you to spot the splinters in the men around you, the men who care about you? Not just men. From what I heard, Barbra is ready to tie the knot with you.”
“Where the fuck did you hear …? Oh, never mind. Look, goddammit, I’m just trying to stay alive. I got no time for this shit. I …” Her voice wavered and she started to cry. “Fuck it, I’m out of here.” She shoved the last few things into her backpack and pushed past him.
Rolf stood in the bedroom, arms crossed, as the apartment door slammed.
— 41 —
After the sideshow with the Drucker Proxy avatar, the defense at the wrongful death trial quickly closed its case. The plaintiffs’ summation was delivered by Hal in his workmanlike manner, leaving the jury with only one clear path forward: to rule in their favor and with a massive award. Bannon Turndale countered with a long entreaty that appealed to unspecified conspiracy theories about how the complex systems of Existendia might have been hacked, since the proxy software that otherwise operated the robotic arm was not active at the time of the attack. Along the way, he never missed a chance to refer to Defense Exhibit J as if it were, in fact, Coleman Todd Drucker incarnate, the implication being that, if Drucker lived on, in whatever form or guise, the jury could hardly find Existendia or its officers liable in a wrongful death suit.
While Turndale danced in front of the jury, Dana was back in Barbra’s pied-a-terre, plotting her next assault and making phone calls. “Pop, I need your help.”
“I’m not surprised, baby girl. What can I do for you now?”
“Can I get you to call in some markers and arrange for some business meetings with somebody from your far-flung business empire?”
“Possibly, what do you have in mind?”
“Are any of your investments involved in real estate development?”
“Maybe. Can I call you back on a different line?”
“Sure, Pop. I’ll be right here.”
— —
Gwen Seabrook’s voice over the phone was as thick as raw honey. “I know the timing isn’t the best, but it’s a real sweet deal if it closes. These people are interested in the southwest corner for a major high-end housing development, a planned luxury community sporting tie-ins with the ranch. Kinda like those golf-course communities but not aimed at retirees, more the younger, active set with too much money and not enough places to spend it. They want me to fly up to San Fran so they can give me a tour of what they did up in Marin County.”
“Have you checked them out?”
“You know me, I did my due diligence. They’re the real deal, with plenty of backing. If we can close a deal at the right time, it’ll be extra icing on the cake.”
“Okay. How long will you be gone. The jury’s not going to be out forever.”
“Two days, an overnight. I’ll put Midge in charge at the ranch. I can always fly back early if something comes up.”
“All right. We both should dump these phones and start over.”
“Of course.”
— —
For the moment, the main building at Gwenbrook was deserted except for Dana and Rolf. She had been reluctant to bring him back into the fray yet again, but she knew she needed his skill set. Between the two of them, they had disabled the alarm system and suckered the two security guards into chasing a ghost at the far end of the property. “I’d say we have twenty minutes at best,” she said. “I don’t trust how long your robot is going to be able to keep those guys distracted. Once they lose interest or figure out they’re being led on a wild goose chase, they’ll be in our laps in less than ten.”
“No worries, because I’ll get warning if they start heading this way. But, let’s dig fast and hope we hit pay dirt.”
Rolf was pecking away at the computer as Dana riffled through file drawers when they were interrupted by the sound of a closing door. Before they could find cover, the office door swung open. It was Jerry Pendrake brandishing a handgun.
Dana backed away from the credenza. “Well, if it isn’t Aloe-Wishes.”
“Perhaps you were expecting Ipotane.”
“We were expecting she would be long gone and you would be preoccupied.” Rolf took a step toward Pendrake.
“Don’t. I think you know I can do it.”
“Really? Was Geraldo Potts your first? Did you do it yourself or hire it out?”
“I’ve killed before, for my country. I didn’t hold the gun or swing the hammer in those cases, but I set it up for officials in China to disappear and I provided coordinates for drone strikes.”
“And poor Coleman Drucker?”
“Easy. It’s one of the oldest hacking tactics: man-in-the-middle. I put a pipeline between the connectome model running in the cloud and the peripherals system down here. When I saw by remote access from my office what Drucker was doing, I saw opportunity. I almost didn’t have time to draw the path for the robot arm. It had to be completed while the proxy was still running or the cover would be blown. Luckily, the proxy reacted with horror at the sight of his own murder and pulled back. Then it was just a matter of inducing amnesia with a restore point. Took a while to complete the overwrite, but fortunately, no one thought to query the proxy until much later.”
“Why’d you do it?”
“For the money, what else. And I enjoyed the power, especially as I could wield it while that jerkoff Netsky reveled in his own delusions.”
“And now you’ve been caught. I’m no prosecutor, but I would say the case against you is pretty solid.”
“The case may be tight but the noose is not. I have not been caught. In a few minutes, Gwen will show up, having finished the prep for Operation Houdini.”
“I thought she was up in San Francisco.”
“Was. She came back early after she concluded your stooges didn’
t know what they were talking about. Nice try, but you need to make sure everyone in your cast is working from the same script. Fortunately for us, the curtain is about to close on this act. Presto change-o, new scene.” He gestured with the handgun to get Rolf over next to Dana. “We were trained by the best and have taught ourselves some new tricks along the way. The set-aside for the settlement in the lawsuit that most punters are wagering will be in the ten figures, is already gone, sucked down a digital black hole, and we will follow shortly. Netsky wants to live forever, to live on in one of his cockamamie connectome models. Me? I just want to live now, to live large.”
“So it’s simple greed.”
“Simple justice. I did everything for my country, including destroying its enemies, and my country canceled my contract without even severance pay. I got a pat on the back and a boot to the behind the moment they had enough of me. Now Gwen and I have what we earned and deserve.”
“You’ll get caught. Where can you hide? Everything is connected, surveillance is everywhere.”
“So are we. And a few close friends. We’re everywhere and nowhere. We surveil the surveillers. Hey, Gwen and I are the best, brilliant hackers, but we can’t be everywhere and do everything. We have a team, also the best.”
“The Snake River League.”
“Distinguished alums. Distinguished by a common commitment to getting even and getting ours. Now”—he unwound a long strip from a roll of duct tape—“it’s time to buy us some time.” He taped Dana’s hands behind her back, then taped her feet to the side chair before doing the same to Rolf. He put a short strip across Rolf’s mouth then turned back to Dana. “Any last words before I do you? No? You so rarely seem at a loss for words.”
“I’ll save my words for the grand jury.”
“Be my guest.” He taped her mouth and pressed the edges. “Bitch.”