by Alan Russell
“The mental state of the witness is not in question here. I’m still waiting to hear from you if you were driving in Venice Beach the night before last.”
“Are you really telling me that’s why you’re here?”
“That’s one of the reasons.”
“What’s the other? Are you investigating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?”
I wondered if his analogy was coincidental and decided it wasn’t. “Please answer my question.”
“What difference does it make if I was driving the Tesla? Let’s say the witness is of sound mind and saw me off the angel. Is that a crime?”
I didn’t answer.
“I didn’t think so,” he said. “There’s no statute prohibiting the hunting of angels in Los Angeles, is there, Detective?”
“Negligent discharge of a firearm is against the California Penal Code.”
“I doubt whether you’d go angel hunting with a handgun, or even an assault weapon. You’d probably need a special weapon. And it’s quite possible that kind of specialized high-tech weaponry wouldn’t violate any ordinances. If that’s so, hunting angels wouldn’t be illegal, would it?”
I shrugged, and did my best to not look bothered by Corde’s smirk. “Were you driving your Tesla in Venice Beach the night before last?”
“Venice Beach?” he said, and acted as if he was trying to remember.
“I’m sure we can find some surveillance tapes in areas outlying Venice Beach. From those I would be able to determine whether you were driving your Tesla Roadster on the night in question.”
“That might be entirely possible,” said Corde, “but I’m curious as to whether you have surveillance tape of the Tesla being in the proximity of your witness in Venice Beach?”
He looked at me. All the animals he had killed looked at me. The interview wasn’t going as I had hoped.
“I do believe I was driving the Tesla two nights ago,” said Corde, “but I can’t recall if I ended up in Venice Beach. Sometimes I go out driving to clear my head.”
“Did you go out driving last night?”
He shook his head. “Why do you ask? Was another angel murdered?”
“Our witness died last night. We’re investigating that death as well.”
The door to the trophy room opened, and half a face showed itself. This half-face looked considerably more attractive than all of Rick Novak’s.
“Do you or your guest need anything?” a woman asked.
“Good timing, my dear,” said Corde. “The detective was giving me the third degree, and I am hoping he won’t be bringing out rubber hoses and bright lights. Do come in.”
The trophy girlfriend, or so I assumed, walked into the trophy room. She looked to be in her mid-to-late twenties, with ginger hair and a peaches-and-cream complexion. Dangling from her neck was a small golden ankh. She didn’t look comfortable in the killing room and kept her eyes averted from the dead animals. There was something familiar about her, I thought, and remembered the picture of the woman on the yacht. She certainly resembled the woman in the photo.
“Elle Barrett Browning,” Corde said, “I’d like you to meet Detective Gideon.”
She extended a hand, and as we shook, both of us said it was nice to meet the other.
“The detective was just about to get around to asking me if I had an alibi for my whereabouts last night. Would you mind telling him?”
“Drew and I were both here all night,” she said.
“You left out the prurient details,” Corde said. “I’m sure the detective would love to hear those.”
It looked as if Elle blushed, but the room’s shadows made it difficult to tell.
“Actually, I wouldn’t,” I said.
“I am glad one of you is a gentleman.” She faced Corde and said, “I thought I’d retire early. I have to be on the set at five.”
Belatedly, I made the connection of why she looked familiar. Elle Barrett Browning was a film actress. Her claim to fame was primarily romantic comedies, which might have been why I was slow on making the connection. I am not the demographic for those kinds of films and am beginning to think I am no longer the demographic for any movies. Damn talkies.
“But dinner will be arriving any minute now,” Corde said.
“I’m not hungry. And that will leave all the more for the Attack Pack. They’re coming over, aren’t they?”
“They are indeed.”
Corde turned to me. “OZ had its roots in video games, and we still have an interactive gaming division. When the old guard gets together, we can honestly say we’re working late while playing video games.”
“Sometimes they’re down in the Bunker all night,” Elle said.
Whenever I hear the word bunker or hunker, I think of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun, and I imagine the Allied bombs shaking them in their underground chambers. My grandfather fought in World War II, and I suspect my association comes from stories he told me about Hitler and Braun being hunkered in their bunker.
“Bunker?”
“That’s what we call our underground compound,” Corde said.
“Imagine the Pentagon war room,” said Elle, “with huge monitors and radar screens and tracking devices.”
“I find it’s a perfect screening room to watch your movies,” said Corde. “Even you agreed there was no better place to watch you in your remake of The Philadelphia Story.”
His words were offered with a smile, but it seemed to me they came with an edge.
“It would make a wonderful screening room,” she said, “if that was all it was used for.”
“ ‘The time to make your mind up about people is never,’ ” I said.
They were words I lived by, but my remembering Katherine Hepburn’s line from the movie got me two blank stares. For a moment I wondered if I had quoted from the wrong film, but then figured the line had been lost in the remake. Hollywood is known to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
“Where is this bunker?” I asked.
“It’s actually not very far from the house,” said Corde. “You just take a path down the hill. Unless you’re looking for it, you wouldn’t know it’s there. I had it built into the hillside.”
“And that’s where the—Attack Pack—meets?”
“It’s an ideal gaming spot,” he said.
“Does everyone in your group work at OZ?”
He nodded. “We just went from one kind of joystick to another.”
“The difference between men and boys is the size of their toys,” said Elle.
“I thought you were retiring,” said Corde. “I thought you needed your beauty sleep. You don’t want to look bad on film, do you, and disappoint all those fans of yours?”
“No, I don’t want that,” she said.
I got the impression Elle wasn’t answering his comment as much as she was responding to the undercurrents of another conversation.
“It was nice meeting you, Detective,” she said, and took her leave of the room with a lowered head, once more avoiding looking at the taxidermy.
As the door closed behind her, I resumed my questioning: “OZ builds cutting edge drones . . .”
“Not drones,” he said, interrupting. “They are UAVs, as in ‘unmanned aerial vehicles.’ ”
“How many different types of UAVs does OZ make?”
“What’s your security clearance?”
“My dry cleaner lets me run a tab.”
“You wouldn’t want me to violate the law, would you, Detective? I am bound by national security not to discuss the particulars of our SUAVE division—that is the Special Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Enterprises. Unless you’ve gone through an SSBI—Single Scope Background Investigation—or the director of National Intelligence has vetted you to receive sensitive compartmental information, or the secr
etary of defense has authorized you for a special access program, there isn’t much I can say to you.”
“Between Google searches and your annual shareholder’s report, there seems to be plenty of information out there on OZ.”
“That’s yesterday’s news, and in the war business old intelligence means defeat. OZ is tomorrow’s news.”
“What can you tell me about your UAVs that doesn’t violate confidentiality?”
“They are the new paradigm in weaponry,” he said. “Every generation has its game changer, from the atlatl to catapults, to fighter jets. It was radar that won the Battle of Britain. Atomic bombs ended the Second World War. You can’t fight the next war using the weapons of the last war.”
“Is Dumbledore the next war?” I asked.
It was common knowledge that OZ was developing a new series of microdrones, what they called the “Dumbledore.”
Corde smiled. “Who is to say Dumbledore won’t prevent the next war?”
“I thought atomic weapons were supposed to be the great deterrent. That doesn’t seem to have worked out.”
“Maybe the Chinese won’t be so quick to act if their numerical advantage can be countered by swarm drones.”
“The Maginot line was supposed to be the ultimate deterrent to the Nazis. It didn’t work out that way. Whenever I hear about new wizardry, I always think of the Mickey Mouse character in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.”
“A lot of people think I named Dumbledore after the wizard in Harry Potter,” said Corde.
“Didn’t you?”
“The science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke once claimed it was impossible to distinguish advanced technology from magic. The average person has no idea what UAVs can and will do. A magic wand is nothing compared to the power I can wield. At this time it takes up to two hundred people to support a single UAV strike. Some of those personnel are at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, while others might be in Langley, Virginia, and still others nearer to where the drone was deployed. With the Dumbledore all you’ll need is one pilot controlling multiple UAVs. In time, that single pilot might even be able to be in charge of a swarm of UAVs, what most call ‘nano drones.’ But to get back to your question, I actually did not name Dumbledore after a wizard. A dumbledore is merely another name for a busy bee.”
“That’s not exactly a name that strikes fear in the heart.”
“I didn’t want a name like ‘Predator’ or ‘Reaper.’ That isn’t what Dumbledore is about. The name is just what it means. The Dumbledore is small. But it’s much more than a humble bumble. Those allergic to bee stings know Dumbledore to be a killer. And when it comes down to it, all of us are allergic to bee stings. It’s only a matter of degree. There’s nothing that scatters people—or an army—faster than a swarm.
“How do you combat a swarm? How do you go up against hundreds of tiny killers that are able to come together and disperse in a moment’s notice? How do you safeguard against something so small but potentially so deadly? Isn’t there always a chink in the armor just waiting to be exploited? Killer bees will take on a whole new meaning.”
“What’s the range of a Dumbledore?”
“That’s classified.”
“What’s its surveillance capacity?”
“That’s also classified. It’s no secret, though, that it has EO/IR/SARS capabilities.”
“And what’s that mean?”
“It has electro-optical, infrared, and synthetic aperture radar sensors.”
“Does it play a mean pinball?”
Corde answered the question he wanted me to ask, and not the remark I had made. “There are UAV programs doing all sorts of things you could never imagine. They’re monitoring terrorists. They’re watching borders. They’re patrolling pipelines. And maybe you should worry about being outsourced, Detective, because they’re also doing police work. UAVs fly more than a million combat missions every year, and these days the Air Force produces more drone pilots than fighter and bomber pilots combined. Remotely piloted aircraft are becoming more the rule than the exception.”
“Why don’t I find that reassuring?”
“Maybe you sense an end of an era.”
“Do you ever pilot your drones?”
“There are few things I like doing better. I am afforded God’s eye view.”
“If that’s the case, the Almighty might need to have His vision checked.”
Corde ignored me. He was still experiencing his God’s eye view. “I always feel a letdown when I step away from the controls. The world around me feels one-dimensional.”
“Maybe if you were on the ground and had an all too mortal view of a drone strike you wouldn’t be as enamored with the process.”
“I’m sure you are right, but I don’t feel bad about that. I want terrorists to be on edge. On the ground people can often hear UAVs patrolling overhead. In Pakistan and Afghanistan they call them ‘mosquitoes.’ That’s the whine they hear. That’s how we keep potential insurgents in check. They know we’re there. They know they can run, but they can’t hide.”
“Have you personally performed military operations with your UAVs?”
“Officially, that’s classified.”
“What about unofficially?”
He smiled but didn’t comment directly. “There is nothing quite like being in the ghost world. Though you might be thirty thousand feet or higher, you can clearly see moving images below you. Then you bring down your UAV and do your looking from a sight line just a few hundred feet above the ground, which gives you an overhead shot like a bird. You move in and out, the crosshairs going with you, and with each movement you have the power to rain death. And it’s quiet where you are looking, and peaceful. There is no sound. You feel removed; you feel as if you are hovering above that ghost world. As death is dispatched, you watch the victims run, but there’s no place for them to hide. Those who run for cover are called ‘squirters.’ They are like cockroaches when a light’s turned on, scurrying and scrabbling. At the last moment their eyes bulge out, and their last word is invariably a curse, not a prayer, even from the devout. Usually they say some variant of ‘shit.’ Isn’t that curious?”
“I don’t think I share your fascination.”
“I would guess you’re in the minority. Do you know that you can go to YouTube and watch UAV strikes? The last I heard there have been over twenty million hits. There’s even a term for those who can’t seem to get enough of that kind of viewing: drone porn.”
“I never thought I’d be glad that Grumpy Cat went viral, but it’s nice to know more people are watching her than drone porn.”
I didn’t mention that Ellis Haines had more views than did drone strikes and Grumpy Cat combined; Corde probably would have liked that analogy better.
Gesturing to Corde’s room of kills, I asked, “Have you used your UAVs in your personal hunts?”
“No comment.”
“Why is that?”
“There are certain archaic laws limiting UAV access to a particular airspace. I am not about to admit I violated those laws.”
“So if you decided to go on an angel hunt using UAVs, it would be illegal?”
“Not necessarily. There is a difference between flying hobby UAVs and flying military UAVs.”
“Hypothetically, if someone were to hunt angels, how would they go about doing that?”
“Hypothetically,” said Corde, emphasizing the word with a smile, “that would require several new and unique technologies, or so I would imagine.”
“What kind of technologies?”
“Let’s start from the premise that angels can’t be seen with the naked eye. Given that, you would need new imaging platforms and detection systems.”
“Are you talking about enhanced radar?”
He waved his hand as if to say I was at least in the ballpark of understanding
, which was probably as much as a troglodyte like me could be expected to comprehend.
“Our witness said he saw the angel. If angels are invisible, as you say, how would that be possible?”
Corde offered another shrug. “It might be nothing more than making the invisible visible by applying a kind of particulate matter in the air.”
“What do you mean?”
“The easiest example I can offer is how smoke reveals laser beams you wouldn’t know were there without the vapor.”
“So you’ve got your advanced radar along with your ability to make the invisible visible. How do you shoot down an angel?”
“I can’t imagine it would be easy. You’d need two or three pilots controlling the latest technology in UAVs to channel the prey.”
“You’d hunt in a pack,” I said.
“Yes, and you’d need special digital weapons.”
“Why is that?”
“I am thinking conventional weapons wouldn’t bring down an angel.” His knowing smile seemed to take up most of his face. “My best guess is you would need to hunt them with a new kind of DEW.”
I remembered the acronym from Officer Nance. “You’re talking about a directed energy weapon?” I said.
Corde looked surprised. “Yes,” he said. “I imagine you would need the type of weapon that could aim energy without a projectile.”
“Does that mean some kind of laser?”
“That could be one type of DEW. But there are many others. What would be best is a mobile DEW with an energy source to tap into.”
“So what that translates to is hunting angels with ray guns.”
“You sound skeptical. More than a hundred years ago, Nikola Tesla envisioned a directed energy weapon. He even wrote papers on his particle-beam weapon, his death ray. The science has long been there. It has only lacked the proper application.
“It would be ironic, wouldn’t it, to be hunting in a Tesla with a weapon imagined by Tesla?”
“ ‘Ironic’ is one word for it.”
Corde looked pointedly at his space-age watch. It was a less than subtle hint that I should be going, but I acted oblivious to the hint and his expensive timepiece.