Net Force--Eye of the Drone

by Jerome Preisler

  The stars were not hers, or anyone’s, to shatter. Nor would she have wanted them to be.

  But satellites...

  Definitely.

  * * *

  “Else, forgive me,” Franz said. “I hate leaving you like this.”

  She smiled. It was 8:00 p.m., and they were standing near the Interactive Ephemerals van on Ziemssenstrasse, outside Nussbaumpark. The fair was closing down for the night, and their fellow vendors were moving about all around them, wheeling handcarts loaded with display items from the park to their vehicles. With the expo’s second full day still ahead, their sale pieces and display items would be locked inside the trucks and vans until Sunday morning, remaining under the watchful eyes of event security.

  “Don’t worry,” Else said. “The weather’s amazing, and I’ll enjoy the walk home.”

  “You’re certain?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Take care of your wife. I hope she’s okay.”

  “I’m sure she will be.” Franz hated using Lotte as an excuse. But in this case, he did not think she would mind. “It’s just something that needs my prompt attention.”

  Else nodded. She had accompanied him to their storage facility in the van that morning, expecting Franz to give her a lift home. But his wife’s condition was difficult. And it really was okay that she walk. Perhaps she would even run into the handsome American along the way.

  “Go,” she said. “See you tomorrow. We’ll have another busy day and then watch the closing fireworks together.”

  It was Franz’s turn to nod, and then he rushed off. Getting into the van, he drove to the corner of Lindwurmstrasse and turned right, heading toward the cemetery at the city’s edge.

  Watching from his Mini Cooper, Inspector Renault Chaput pulled from the curb on Lindwurmstrasse and followed several car lengths behind.

  * * *

  On the garage entrance ramp, the Golf’s driver emerged from inside and swept around its rear toward Carmody’s door.

  Carmody unclasped his seat belt. He peripherally saw Wheeler and Krauss stepping off the curb behind the guy and shot Wheeler a glance that he read at once. It sent both of them back to the opposite sidewalk. Better they preserve their cover.

  The Golf’s driver came up close to the Audi. Pale and stick thin, he gesticulated for Carmody to move on.

  “Wegziehen!”

  Carmody unlocked his door. He could see where the guy’s sport jacket was bunched over a gun.

  “Bist du taub?” the pale man shouted. He rapped the knuckles of his left hand on the window. “Wegziehen! I want to get out of this fucking garage!”

  Carmody saw his right hand drop toward the bunched side of his jacket and opened the Audi’s door with a hard shove, springing out of the car as the guy drew his weapon, a suppressed Steyr micro. He was fast enough to backstep and avoid getting hit by the door, but he was still off balance and Carmody didn’t give him time to regain it. Taller than him by a head, with a longer reach, Carmody stepped in on him, grabbing the guy’s right arm at the wrist with his left hand. He twisted it upward so the gun went flying, while simultaneously shuffling in on him and driving the heel of his right palm up under the guy’s ribs.

  The pale man sagged a little as the gun flew from his hand and his diaphragm collapsed, the air in his lungs shooting up his windpipe to woof out of his mouth. Carmody moved in on him again, keeping his weight on his left foot as he smashed his knee up into the man’s groin, and his right knuckles into the guy’s left kidney.

  The guy went limp-legged and sank down to his knees. Carmody kicked him twice on the side of his head and, as the guy fell sideways to the blacktop, stomped on his right wrist hard enough to feel it break underfoot, then stomped on it again with a grinding rotation of his foot. There was no time to stick around Ruppertstrasse. Carmody intended to be off before its residents came spilling out of the buildings up and down the block, and had wanted to make sure the guy didn’t get up and follow him...

  Or Outlier.

  Carmody looked around for the guy’s gun and saw it a few feet away, the black polymer frame on the road’s black asphalt surface. Scooping it up off the ground, he tossed it through the Audi’s open door and turned back toward the pale man. He was thrashing and snorting and whining in the middle of the street. A white spear of bone was jaggedly sticking up through a blood-swamped tear in his wrist. Carmody looked around at the curb opposite the garage entrance and saw Wheeler and Krauss awaiting his instructions. He saw people starting to trickle from doorways, and nervous pedestrians approaching from the corner of Lindwurmstrasse. He got back in the Audi and slammed the door.

  “Whiskey, I need this kept quiet,” he said into the RoIP. His eyes went to the whimpering guy on the ground. “As much as possible.”

  “Okay,” Wheeler acknowledged. “I’ll put our BfV friends on it.”

  As he shifted into Drive, Carmody instructed his Audi’s AI to open the mobile GoMunich app. Schaftlarnstrasse was a one-way street running west toward Old Town and Ludwigsvorstadt-Isarvorstadt, so he knew Outlier’s initial direction. But he still might have time to pick her up, even if she’d already turned off the street and changed course.

  “License plate scan. Match to Ducati Diavel. Five-mile box, all directions,” he commanded, shooting up the block.

  Outlier would have legally registered the bike to avoid problems. Carmody was certain she would use an alias, but what mattered was that the motorcycle was in the city’s vehicular database. It could then be matched to a tag number.

  In Germany, plates were formatted with a country code: a one-letter geographic identification prefix—M for Munich, B for Berlin—followed by a strip of digits. Carmody did not know the local coding pattern for motorcycle tags. But GoMunich would. The app stitched together a panoramic photo mural extending five square miles around Tumblingerstrasse, scanning all motorcycles within the search box, and comparing their plate numbers to those in the city’s database.

  It got an almost instantaneous hit.

  “Vehicle identified—Ducati M-85342,” the AI reported. “Owner—Katrina Rooche, age twenty-seven. Bearing—southwest, Schaftlarnstrasse. Speed—ninety-six point five-six kph—”

  Carmody glanced at his dash display to view the real-time camera feed. There she was. Bingo. Black racing jacket, black helmet, crimson scarf, straddling her Devil...and with a solid lead on him. She’d gone west off Ruppertstrasse, then sliced south along the same two-way street he took into the city from the B2R highway.

  “Set best course, Schaftlarnstrasse,” he said, and went ripping around the corner as his foot jammed down on the accelerator.

  IV

  In the BMW hatchback, Braithwaite swung right onto Schaftlarnstrasse, motoring past the closed wholesale flower and food markets. On the dash display, his GoMunich app showed the woman ahead of him, riding hard toward the B2R southbound entrance ramp.

  “McKenzie’s gone silent,” Lau said in the passenger seat.

  “Yes,” Braithwaite said.

  “What do you suppose happened to him?”

  “I don’t know.”

  That was technically but not altogether true. Braithwaite had a nose for enemy threats, and the Audi shooting up Ruppertstrasse had given it a sure twitch. Whoever was behind its wheel was definitely driving with a purpose. Which was the reason Braithwaite had ordered McKenzie to stall the driver outside the garage.

  Apparently, he’d succeeded, since there was no sign of the Audi so far. But there was nothing from McKenzie, either. From an operational standpoint, you needed to assess losses quickly, and Braithwaite assumed McKenzie was out of the picture. Along with Drake and Kragen.

  Leaving Lau and himself to see things to the finish line.

  He glanced at the dash display again. The woman was almost at the highway ramp. Hell on fucking wheels. Where was she going?

  Brai
thwaite stepped on the gas. He would find out soon enough.

  * * *

  Following sixty yards behind Braithwaite, Long saw him turn onto the B2R at an accelerated clip. But he reluctantly waited to give the Opel more gas. The low, blocky shadows of the wholesale market complex were on his right. On his left, a silver half-moon skimmed the trees lining the street in front of the power station and the narrow Isar river channel behind the station. The smart city system regulated the brightness of the streetlights based on traffic density, and with the markets shut down for the night, this stretch of Schaftlarnstrasse was pretty dark.

  Long wished he could have stuck closer to his man. He was keeping tabs on him with GoMunich, so he most likely wouldn’t lose him. But the distance between them—especially if Braithwaite got on the open highway—would give the RatHawk room to maneuver if he sniffed a tail. And Long wanted him to have as little wiggle room as possible.

  Still, he thought it better to stay back. He could personally attest that a covert op never lost his survival instincts; Braithwaite would have eyes in the back of his head. Long needed to use restraint. Stay close...but not too close.

  It was only after Braithwaite took the southbound ramp onto the highway that Long put some added pressure on the fuel pedal. Peering ahead up the street, he suddenly wondered what was up with Carmody. The boss hadn’t checked in since he pulled off Ruppertstrasse.

  He decided to wait a minute and call him over the RoIP.

  Exactly fifteen seconds later, that became unnecessary.

  * * *

  Carmody sped south through the freight parking and delivery area behind the wholesale markets, passing between the tractor trailers parked outside the loading bays to his left and lined up in motionless rows across the expansive lot to his right.

  He could have driven past the front of the markets, knowing it would have put him on Schaftarnstrasse behind Long, with a straight shot to the B2R highway. But the freight area offered an advantage. It was private property, and Munich’s smart city pods were installed only on public streets. Even if Braithwaite was using the smart city app, he wouldn’t see the Audi coming. Not in his rearview mirror, not on his dash display, not at all. Carmody would be invisible to him.

  But the opposite wasn’t applicable. With camera/sensor pods on every lamppost and traffic light on Schaftlarnstrasse, Carmody could track Braithwaite using his GoMunich network connection. And that gave him a slight but crucial edge. A minute, two, whatever it bought, he would take it.

  He shot through the lot, his high beams pushing aside the darkness. Something fluttered into and out of their glare. A startled bird, maybe a bat. In the shadows around him, the motionless trucks looked like a herd of huge, sleeping dinosaurs. There were speed bumps and concrete strips dividing the parking and turn lanes, and Carmody did his best to veer around them. But he did not slow down. The Golf’s driver was a professional operator, and he’d pulled an assault gun. Someone like that didn’t draw a weapon without being ready to use it. The men who were after Outlier weren’t fooling around.

  Now Carmody was nearing the end of the lot, its exit up ahead on his left. The split screen on his dash display showed Outlier turning onto the B2R highway, and Braithwaite right behind her on Schaftlarnstrasse. She might be a criminal, or something else entirely. Carmody wasn’t sure he knew. But whatever she was or wasn’t, she was in serious jeopardy.

  He reached the exit and turned sharply into it. The Audi was all German-engineered pickup, handling, and traction, its V6 TFSI engine throbbing like a gigantic heart under the hood. Carmody jolted over a speed strip and cut right onto Schaftlarnstrasse.

  He found himself several hundred yards ahead of Long and only three or four behind Braithwaite. His accelerator floored, he sheered around the curve of the highway ramp and jumped onto the road, hot on the BMW’s tail. The game was over. If Braithwaite hadn’t known he was being chased, he knew it now.

  Carmody didn’t give a damn. He wasn’t letting him get to Outlier. Not before he did.

  * * *

  “Alpha, what’s your call?” Long asked, hauling onto the B2R behind Carmody.

  He wore a slug-shaped bone conduction earphone/mic on his right side. A moment ago, Carmody’s Audi had appeared from behind the market to slice between him and the BMW with the precision of a surgical knife.

  “Hold steady behind the sonofabitch,” Carmody said. “I want to get ahead of him...box him in and keep him off Outlier. Copy?”

  “Copy.” Long surged forward. “Anything else?”

  “Yeah,” Carmody said. “Try not to crash.”

  * * *

  Kali was nearing the overpass across the Isar when her saddle camera picked up the BMW and tossed its image onto her heads-up. It was close behind.

  She made the turn. The bald man made it with her. In the glow of the rising moon, the river channel below was a radiant lime green. Kali crossed it, swung right over the eastern bank, and opened her throttle, thrusting south at ninety miles per hour.

  Then she noticed something. Behind the BMW, on the right, another vehicle was coming up in the passing lane.

  It gained on the bald man, gained, and then pulled nearly alongside him, its front end about even with his rear door. Kali recognized it as the same indigo Audi that had almost slammed into her outside the garage.

  Good, she thought.

  She gave the Devil more fuel. Checking her HUD readouts, she saw her speed climb to a hundred miles per hour, a hundred five, a hundred ten. The BMW kept pace. The Audi moved up on the BMW.

  Kali edged toward a hundred twenty miles per hour and felt the force of acceleration like a wide, solid band across her middle. The wind lashing and battering her face shield, she looped off the highway and then shot onto Landstrasse with Metallica loud in her ears. The two vehicles were now neck and neck, jostling for position behind her.

  She sped up. Landstrasse here was a tired linear progression of budget hotels, strip clubs, package stores, pizza joints, and gas stations. Kali raced past them to where the road sank below street level, ran between graffiti-splashed concrete walls, then resurfaced to a stark change of scenery, the dreary urban strip molting off into green countryside.

  A vineyard to her right now, old-growth pine trees shouldering thickly together to her left. In front of her, the black ribbon of road was lit by LED lamp poles with smart city pods at their peaks. Her velocity climbed to one hundred thirty, then one thirty-five. Suddenly, there was space between herself and the two cars. She sped up. One forty...

  When Kali’s lead over the two vehicles increased to about a dozen yards, it was finally time.

  “Cas,” she said. “GoMunich. Code—blackout...”

  * * *

  German hunters of feral swine say the city of Munich, seen on a map, resembles the less-than-neatly severed head of a sus scrofa scrofa, the truculent Central European wild boar. At its western border, a gape-mouthed snout opens on the towns of Puchheim and Germering. The municipality of Oberschleissheim, where Bavarian aristocrats once summered on chill blue lakeshores, seems to balance atop the broad, flat head. Its ragged neck points toward Aschheim on its easternmost outskirts, and the deep, massive gullet hangs down over Starnberg to the south and southwest.

  The GoMunich smart city system encompassed the boar’s head in its one-hundred-twenty-square-mile entirety. Collecting information that was monitored and analyzed by tiered AI platforms and human technicians at a cloud data center on Wamslerstrasse, it was used to make real-time and near-real-time decisions about large public events, emergencies, traffic and transportation routings, and underlying infrastructure.

  At 9:16:37 p.m. on the night of May 6, 2023, GoMunich’s fifteen hundred sensor/camera pods went dark for exactly fifteen minutes. This unprecedented outage would not be detected until 9:30:37 p.m., however, as an unknown system intruder managed to set them into a timed delay without tri
ggering any alarms.

  What GoMunich’s human and computerized watchers saw during the delay had already happened. What was happening in that period was beyond their ability to see...or control.

  Kali Alcazar, the Outlier, had given herself one last window of opportunity. She needed to bring her plan to a wrap before that window shut.

  * * *

  The cemetery at Perlacher Forst was on the fringes of a sprawling pine wood that pushed up like a green wave against Munich’s southern boundary. As European graveyards went, it was not old, dating back to the 1930s. Opened to handle overcrowding at the cemeteries in the city proper, it was laid out like a wheel over two hundred fifty outspread acres of land, with hedge-lined avenues forming radial spokes from the chapel at its center. This configuration changed with expansion as the graves grew more numerous, but visitors familiar with the original plots still oriented themselves by the wheel spokes.

  Driving with his headlights dimmed, Franz pulled the Interactive Ephemerals van to a halt on the side of a dark dirt road away from the main avenues, and a short walk from the intersection of lots 73 and 120. Trees walled the banks of the road to either side of him, their limbs reaching overhead. The towering firs in Perlacher Forst stood in close equidistance, as trees will in virgin forests. There was scant underbrush because of the heavy carpet of moss that covered their massive roots.

  Franz exited the van, turning on his phone’s flashlight to peek quickly inside the vintage military pouch looped to his belt. When he ascertained that he hadn’t forgotten anything—although Franz looked youthful for his sixty-seven years, his memory could trip him up at the worst moments—he closed the pouch and turned toward the old family grave site.