by Mark Parragh
“Well, we’re not driving,” she replied. “We’re drunk.”
“We’re reasonably drunk,” he said. “It’s a reasonable amount. No problem. The motel’s just up the street.”
They stopped at the truck so Crane could retrieve the bag Josh had sent down. Then they headed up the hill toward Motel Maria.
“I mean the plan,” said Crane. “What are we going to do?”
“Ah. In the morning, we go hunting. We’re going to find a cartel transceiver and bring back extremely detailed information about it.”
“And then?”
“Then Josh and his people rig up a trick circuit board. We go back out and install it in the unit, and it starts to intermittently fail. What are they going to do when that happens? They’re going to take it back to the engineers to fix it. They’ll take it right where we want to go.”
“With a bug on it?”
She shook her head. “Josh says too risky. With a message coded into the ROM. Something only the techs will be able to read. It’ll tell them how to transmit their location to us.”
“They’ve been kidnapped. Are we sure they know where they’re being held?”
“Josh says they’d have to,” she said. “No way they could design all those point-to-point links without really good maps. They just code that into the board and it sends the location back to us. We go get them.”
Crane thought about it. That could work, he decided. His plan had been to harass the cartel until they decided what Jason Tate did for them wasn’t worth the price of protecting him. This would raise Tate’s price considerably. And even disregarding Tate, if they could find the other kidnapped engineers and rescue them, that was worth doing by itself.
As they approached the motel, Jessie suddenly said, “And I’m going to need my own room. Because we’re not sleeping together.”
Crane was still running the scenario back and forth in his head, looking for angles, and was taken by surprise.
“What? No! I know!” he stammered. “I didn’t mean to—”
“I just want to be clear about that up front. Because you’ve got kind of a reputation. Josh told me about you.”
Crane didn’t know what to say. Jessie was certainly attractive, but … “I … yeah, of course, separate rooms. I never thought …”
They stopped at the office and got Jessie the room beside Crane’s.
“You don’t have a bag?” Crane asked.
“Grew up traveling light,” she answered. “Good night, Crane.”
Then they went into their separate rooms and closed their doors.
“For Christ’s sake, Josh,” Crane muttered as soon as he was inside. Why the hell would Josh tell her something like that? He pulled off his shirt and tossed it on the flimsy chair in the corner of the room. “How would you even know about … ?”
He stopped short and let out a sigh. Then he stepped outside and knocked on Jessie’s door.
“Josh didn’t really tell you that, did he?” he said when she opened the door.
“No,” she admitted. “Of course he didn’t.”
“You were trolling me.” Crane rolled his eyes. “All right, point for you, then.”
He was turning back toward his own door when she said, “Crane?” He stopped, and she nodded at his shirtless torso and raised an eyebrow. “Looking good,” she said. “You been working out?”
Crane grinned. “Shut up.”
As he closed his door behind him, he heard her knock on the wall between their rooms, and then her muffled voice. “Get to sleep. Early day tomorrow.”
“Good night, Diamond.”
“Good night, Crane.”
He stripped and got into bed. It occurred to him that she’d done a very deft job of quickly establishing where they stood while warning him that she could outmaneuver him if she wanted to. She had laid the ground rules for their partnership quickly and with a hint of misdirection.
He liked her, he decided, and he was comfortable with things as she seemed to want them. There was some kind of natural chemistry between them, but it wasn’t really a sexual thing. Something else.
Too bad, really, he told himself as he drifted off to sleep.
Chapter 21
The next morning, Crane and Jessie met in the motel courtyard as the sun was still rising. She was wearing the same clothes since she hadn’t brought any bags from her plane. She thrust her H&K into the holster in her cargo pants, closed the door to her room, and said, “Morning.”
“Morning,” said Crane.
Then they walked down to the waterfront to retrieve Jessie’s truck. Jessie had Crane open the glove compartment, where he found a bag full of granola bars. They each had one for breakfast while Jessie drove through town.
The truck kicked up a plume of dust as Jessie drove a bit faster than she should have down the access road to the airstrip. Her Short sat waiting at the corner of the tarmac. Jessie parked in its shadow and keyed a remote. The plane’s rear cargo ramp pivoted smoothly down.
“Give me a hand, will you?” she said as she strode around the back of the plane and jumped up onto the descending ramp.
Crane followed. At the rear of the boxy cargo hold was a small curved shape with rudders, tricycle landing gear, a shaft with braced rotor blades …
“An autogyro?”
“Aerotrek ELA G8,” she said proudly.
“We’re flying in that?”
“Yeah, that’s what it’s for,” said Jessie as she swung the autogyro around until its nose faced the ramp. “What did you think we were doing?”
Crane had assumed they’d be flying the Short to search for radio sources, and then marking what they found and going back over land to investigate. Apparently not. Crane hoped the thing was airworthy. The fuselage reminded him of a kayak, one with a propeller and stabilizers in the back and rotor blades above. But she meant to fly it, and he had no intention of letting her get the upper hand again.
“All right,” he said. “I’m game.”
Behind the autogyro’s nose cone were two tiny open cockpit seats, each with its own windscreen. Crane went around to one side as Jessie went to the other. They grabbed the fairing beneath the forward windscreen, threw their weight into it, and rolled the machine down the ramp and onto the tarmac.
“Josh sent down some radio detection gear,” Jessie explained. “It mounts on the left side of the rear cockpit where you’ll be, so you’ll have to get in on the other side.” Crane helped her get the frame installed and tested the gear while Jessie removed the braces holding the carbon fiber blades in place and double-checked the engine.
It took about half an hour to get the autogyro ready to fly and confirm that the radio gear was properly installed. Then they found a chart of the surrounding area and spread it out on the hood of the truck. The map showed the desert as an unbroken stretch of brown for hundreds of miles in every direction but west. Crane looked for something that suggested any particular spot in that sea of brown was a better place to put a radio transceiver than any other spot.
“How big is this thing we’re looking for?” he asked at last.
“Hard to say,” Jessie answered. “I’ve seen pictures of some that the army found, and they vary. Depends on what parts the person making it has access to. And how good they are, I guess. Average? Maybe so by so.” She used her hands to indicate something perhaps the size of a high-end stereo receiver.
“But then there’s the antenna itself,” she added, “which has to be dug in and guyed. Plus the solar panels and mounts. The tools to get it all built. It’s a pretty good load.”
Crane saw where she was going. “So you wouldn’t want to haul it any farther through this kind of terrain than you had to, would you?”
“Not if you could help it,” she said. She traced the long highway that ran from Bahia Tortugas back to Vizcaino. “I’m thinking we fly east, more or less following this. I’m betting we’ll find something within a couple miles of the highway. Just far back enough that
it’s not obvious from the road.”
Crane thought that sounded reasonable. “Let’s do it.”
Jessie had a pair of helmets with built-in intercoms. They put them on, Jessie did one more walk-around of the autogyro, and then they climbed aboard and plugged their helmets into cockpit jacks.
“You hear me?” Jessie said in Crane’s headphones.
“Got you.” He powered up the radio gear beside his seat and heard a series of beeps and tones, and then signal indicators as he swept through the major bands. “And I’m getting radio noise. We’re good to go.”
He dialed back the detectors as Jessie powered up the engine. They were looking for a small source close at hand. He didn’t want to be picking up the main radio tower in town.
The engine sprang to life with a snarl, and the autogyro started forward. The blades overhead picked up the headwind and began to whirl. Crane thought Jessie was taxiing out to the runway to take off, but the autogyro seemed hardly to have covered a hundred feet before Jessie pulled back hard on the stick and they were airborne. The autogyro climbed sharply, the nose pointing up and the acceleration pushing Crane back into his seat.
She took them up to about five hundred feet and then banked sharply, rolling the aircraft nearly onto its side and pointing the nose northeast, toward Vizcaino. The aerobatics seemed uncalled for, Crane thought.
“You’re just doing this to mess with me, aren’t you?” Crane said.
“Tweaked the engine a little bit,” Jessie replied, and he could hear the laugh in her voice.
Once she was at altitude, Jessie pulled back the throttle, and the engine settled down into a more comfortable drone. They flew over a pale tan desert landscape with the dark line of the highway just visible off to their right. The wind was hot and dry as it whipped around the windscreen. The outboard radio gear in particular seemed to be deflecting wind into his face.
Crane turned his attention to the radio panel, scanning through frequencies, listening for signals that shouldn’t be there. Below, he saw long, angular ridges and arroyos, rocky slopes studded with cactus, and occasional patches of sparse green where the drainage brought together enough water to support plants.
Once he got used to the cramped space in the autogyro, and Jessie’s penchant for dangerous piloting, it was a pleasant way to fly, he decided. The thing was steady, and it could maneuver like a startled cat—something Jessie seemed to delight in demonstrating at random moments for no obvious reason.
They’d flown for nearly half an hour, and Jessie said they were about forty miles from Bahia Tortugas, when Crane picked up the first traces. The board began to light up, and a warning tone went off in his headphones. He hit a key that started recording data for Josh’s people to analyze later.
The tone grew stronger, and the readouts on the panel suggested they were getting closer. Whatever it was, it was faint. He asked Jessie to veer off and fly a straight north-south course for a few miles while he turned the antennas and focused them to the east.
The tone was faint for the first minute, and then suddenly it was anything but. The needles buried themselves in the meters, and the tone was an angry snarl in his headphones. Then, no more than thirty seconds later, it dropped off again. Crane was convinced now that he’d found what they were looking for. A high-gain antenna was transmitting a narrow radio beam—the open desert was the perfect environment for it as long as you didn’t find a ridge in the way—and they’d just flown right through the beam. That gave him a heading. He passed the info to Jessie, and she wheeled the autogyro around and flew in the direction Crane had identified.
Another ten minutes of flying with the signal growing stronger, and they found it. Jessie spotted the antenna near the end of a narrow track that left the main road and twisted through a line of low hills before it simply stopped. As she came in lower, Crane spotted the remains of an abandoned shack, long since fallen in on itself and reclaimed by the desert. Someone had tried to live out here once. Crane had no idea why.
Jessie came in low and slow and circled the site while Crane took photos with a Canon point and shoot. Then she brought the autogyro down on the packed earth at the end of the road. They dropped down to the ground and simply stopped.
“You just love to show off in this thing, don’t you?” Crane said as they climbed out.
“I thought you liked a little thrill!” she said as they took off their helmets. “They got a Denny’s back in town? We get done here, I can drop you off in time for the early-bird special.”
Crane was unloading a tool bag and a pair of cameras from the autogyro. He stopped and turned back to look at her in annoyance.
“Grandpa,” she added with a grin.
“No, I get it.”
He tossed her the tool bag, and she caught it with a heavy clatter of the tools inside. She slung it over her shoulder, and then they both set off for the antenna.
Crane was struck by the quiet here. There was the faint rustle of the hot breeze through the patchy grass, but nothing else. He listened but couldn’t even hear a bird cry. A snake startled as they approached, and took off across the sandy ground, and Crane could actually hear it moving.
“Peaceful at least,” said Jessie.
Crane nodded toward the ruins of the house off to their left. The roof had fallen in, and sand had collected against one side and drifted around the corners. Wind-blasted boards stuck up like the ribs of a wrecked ship.
“That’s because nobody can live out here,” he said. “It’s like being on the moon.”
The transceiver was in a scarred metal box bolted to the base of the antenna mast. A transformer took power from a small bank of solar panels positioned low against the ground a few yards away.
Jessie was already logging their map coordinates. She’d brought a lengthy checklist of information they needed to collect to give Josh’s team everything they needed to understand how the system worked and then convincingly sabotage it. He and Jessie were to record radio signal graphs, map the surrounding area, and take extensive pictures of the unit’s components, including any part numbers or other identification. It was going to take a while.
One of the cameras was a small action camera to record video of the entire operation. Crane clipped it to his shirt.
“Ready to record,” he said. “Can you try not to troll me on camera? I have to work with these people.”
“I’ll do my best,” she said. “But it is a lot of fun. And you make it so easy.”
Crane rolled his eyes and hit record.
The box was sealed against water and windblown sand by a black rubber gasket, and locked with what Crane assumed was a three-point lock. He took his picks from his pocket. “You want to do the honors?”
Jessie took the picks and quickly opened the lock. She opened the door to reveal a stack of circuit boards, power supplies, cooling fans, and a nest of cabling.
They got to work.
Chapter 22
Palo Alto, California
The architects who designed what was now the Myria Group building had, at some point, painted themselves into an architectural corner. Caught between their clients’ demands for special features and the requirements of the California Building Standards Code, they had finally thrown their hands in the air and left a large, irregularly shaped chunk of dead space in the center of the building’s sixth floor. It had no windows and only one door at the end of a narrow hallway that went nowhere else. It was spectacularly unsuited for any normal purpose—until Georges Benly Akema had stumbled across it one day and claimed it as his workshop.
Georges was a computing and electronics prodigy from Cameroon whom Josh had discovered working as a busboy in an Indian restaurant down the street. When he learned that Georges had used discarded PCs and hand-coded software to make his own smaller version of the supercomputing architecture he’d used to predict stock fluctuations, he’d snapped him up immediately. He took it as just one more example of the kinds of talent that tended to wash up in
Silicon Valley in one way or another.
Georges had a desk in the war room like the rest of the team, but he spent most of his time in his private playground, tinkering with gadgetry and working on odd ideas. All too often, he became so engaged in his work that he didn’t notice his phone ringing, and so Josh would have to go downstairs and find him, as he was doing now. It was worth it, Josh thought, given the number of Georges’ creations that ended up going out into the field with John Crane.
Josh traded greetings with someone from the marketing department as they passed in a gallery with tall windows looking out over the lake. Then he turned down the long, empty hallway that led back into the center of the building. The hallway ran for more than a hundred feet, passing nothing at all. Josh hummed the theme from Get Smart as he walked. Finally, it ended at a heavy, olive-colored metal door with no markings. There was nothing here but a badge reader beside the doorframe. Josh swiped his badge and let himself in.
Georges’ lair was an overstuffed labyrinth of old computers, machine parts, server racks, a 3D printer, and other things even Josh didn’t recognize. Between the odd shape of the room and the placement of shelves and storage bins, Josh had to navigate by ear. Tinny music came from somewhere, a man rapping in French over brassy reggae.
Josh followed the sound and finally found Georges standing in front of a rolling whiteboard taped up with the photos of the cartel transceiver that Crane and Jessie had sent back. The music came from a huge vintage boom box that looked like it had been through a war. He could see Georges rapping along under his breath.
“Who’s this?” he said, and Georges started in surprise.
“Ah, good afternoon, sir,” he said in his lilting accent. Then he smiled. “Didier Awadi, from Senegal. Good stuff, yeah?”
There was a moment of distortion as one of the boom box’s speakers briefly fritzed. “You know, we can get you a decent sound system in here,” said Josh.
Georges smiled. “I tried that. Very nice Bluetooth speakers. They sounded too good. It wasn’t right. I had to send them back and dig this thing up on eBay.” He leaned over and turned down the volume. “So how’s the plate reader working?”