Net Force--Eye of the Drone

by Jerome Preisler

  “Why do you think she came here?” Long said. “Riding a motorcycle through these woods at night...”

  “She wanted to lose us,” Carmody said. “And Braithwaite.”

  Long said nothing. Around them, the police were searching for the rider. Many had fanned out into the surrounding woods, going on the theory that she had been flung off the bike before it dived into the creek.

  “They’re looking for a body,” Long said, watching them move in and out of the light.

  Carmody grunted. “She couldn’t have been going more than twenty miles an hour, maybe less, on the trail,” he said. “We saw what she can do on a bike. She was pushing a hundred thirty smooth as butter.”

  “You’re saying they won’t find her.”

  “I know they won’t.”

  “So what’s next?”

  “We process the Ruppertstrasse apartment and see what it gives us. We alert the airports. We see if we can pick up any tips from their security personnel.”

  “And Braithwaite and his boys? What about them?”

  “They aren’t any of our business.”

  Long looked at Carmody through the mask. He’d been a member of his team for a good while.

  “Sure thing,” he said.

  V

  It was eleven o’clock on Saturday night, the Austrian Railways’ Nightjet speeding from Munich to Innsbruck. Though the trip would take just over three hours, Kali had booked a sleeper for privacy. From the Tyrolean capital, she would board a charter flight to Catania in Sicily, then find a driver for the short ride to Pozzallo on the island’s southern coast. There she would board the ferry that made the run across the strait to Valletta.

  In the small hamlet outside the city, she would room with dearest Arianne, a trusted friend since childhood—and she could count such friends on the fingers of one hand. Arianne’s boy, Guzeppe, had grown a full year since Kali last saw him. She looked forward to walking out to the beach with him and sitting on the jetties with the waves splashing their feet.

  Now she sat at a little table by the cabin window, the Interpol inspector’s smartphone on top of it and connected to her tablet with a two-foot USB cord. Rather than try to crack his passcode, she had used the American FBI’s technique of exploiting vulnerabilities in the operating system. By doing so, Kali did not have to break the encryption to unlock the phone. Her software allowed her backdoor entry into the phone to gain access to his message files, emails, and other data as if she was its owner.

  With the tablet on her lap, she scrolled through the emails in Chaput’s inbox, opening and scanning those of interest. The one that caught her attention was dated and time-stamped earlier that morning. It was from an ordinary Gmail account. The sender’s username was a series of consonants and numbers. It whiffed of CIA.

  The message was a short, simple sentence, written without salutation in response to one Chaput had sent previously:

  I will address these issues with the parties mentioned, thank you.

  The conversation thread showed only a single original email from the inspector:

  Dear Ms. Morse,

  While Interpol has given your team every resource at our disposal, their attitude of casual disobedience is making my job more difficult than need be. As liaison between your organization and the BfV, I am fully responsible for oversight of joint operations. Although I understand that your men have primary control of the investigation, some of them do not seem to respect my overarching authority.

  Your Mr. Wheeler has gone so far as to deliberately mispronounce my name in an insulting manner. Spoken in line with simple French phonetics, it is by no means a difficult name. Chaput. Not Ka-put, his immature mauling of it. Such disruptive behavior cannot be tolerated in the course of an already challenging investigation...

  Kali stopped reading. Over an hour had passed since she left Chaput out cold in the woods. He would have awakened only minutes after she applied the sleeper hold. She did not want to give him a chance to find help, realize his phone was missing, and close his email account.

  What she needed to do would take under a minute. First, she emailed Chaput a web link using her own anonymous account. When she saw her message arrive in his inbox queue ten seconds later, she forwarded it to Ms. Morse, the sender of the terse response to his complaint about the Americans. And that was it.

  Franz would see that her operatives were given the game code. Kali had just handed them the key. She prayed they would use them without delay.

  The train moved on, swaying gently through a curve in the tracks. Kali looked out into the night and saw no sign of civilization on the mountain shoulders. In the Alps, the month of May had not yet melted the winter snow, and the reflected moonlight was a polished silver sheen on the slopes.

  Disconnecting the inspector’s phone from the USB, she carefully wiped it down with a hand wipe, opened her window, and tossed it out onto the track. She started to close the window, decided the fresh mountain air would help her relax, and left it partly raised. Then she got up, went to her bunk, took off her boots, and rested her head on the pillow.

  Closing her eyes, Kali Alcazar, the Outlier, put aside her waking thoughts and slept, briefly, with her guarded dreams.

  * * *

  Four o’clock, Sunday afternoon. Dark gray clouds had gathered over Nussbaumpark, their bellies swollen with rain. Bavaria’s outdoor spring festivities were at the mercy of moody alpine weather, and it appeared the do-it-yourselfer fair would end earlier than planned.

  Else was slowly packing up behind the Interactive Ephemerals table when she saw the American, Scott Dixon, approaching on the flagstoned walkway.

  Ah, gut, she thought. And not only because of what Franz had asked of her.

  “Hallo!” she called out, waving. “You came!”

  “With glazed chocolate croissants and coffee.” He set the tray down next to a carton she’d been filling with goods. “My friend says they’re unbeatable... I got them at a bakery over by the arch.”

  “Morgenstern’s?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Mmm-mmm,” she said. “This is so considerate.”

  He shrugged. “I thought, you know, if you were going on your break, we could find someplace to sit and talk. Not that I want to sound like a creeper.”

  Else smiled.

  “Don’t be silly.” She looked up at the clouds and spread her hands. “I would love to. But I’m busy preparing for the downpour. To go by the forecast, it appears they’ll even have to cancel tonight’s fireworks.”

  He nodded. “Ah, too bad.”

  Else nodded.

  “About the fireworks, I mean,” he said.

  She nodded again, thinking he was very handsome. “Will you be in Munich much longer?”

  “Good question,” he said. “Things are kind of up in the air.”

  “Like the rain.”

  “Yeah.”

  They stood there smiling quietly at each other.

  Handsome and sweet, Else thought, wishing she didn’t have to make up stories. Besides the fact that she was terrible at it, she didn’t like lying. Even if it was a white lie. But Franz had been adamant and would not have asked without an important reason.

  “Listen,” she said, “before I forget...you left something behind yesterday.”

  “I did?”

  “Yes, it’s right here.” She turned to the media shelf behind her and slid out a floppy disk. “One of the old games you bought.”

  Dixon looked confused. “Else, it isn’t mine,” he said. “I didn’t buy anything.”

  “But you did.” She held the disk out for him to take. “My boss saw it fall from your bag to the ground. Or knows someone who saw it fall. Or something like that. And he asked that I return it to you.”

  He shook his head. “You’re positive he was talking about me?”r />
  “Yes,” she said. Her eyes went directly to his eyes. “He said, ‘See that this gets to the American with the Navy SEALs medallion.’” She nodded toward his neck chain. “Who else could he have meant?”

  A minute passed. Their eyes remained locked. Finally, Dixon reached across the table.

  “Guess I just forgot,” he said, taking the disk from her hand. “Tell your boss the American appreciates this.”

  She nodded as he put it into his jacket pocket. “Scott?” she said, and hesitated.

  “Yes?”

  “I—I hope we see each other again. Having nothing to do with the disk. Or my boss. Or even the awesome pastries. Just, you know...”

  “I know.”

  “You do?”

  “Yes. That is...” He looked at her another long minute. “I think we’re falling for each other, Else.”

  She felt her heart thudding in her chest.

  “Very definitely, Scott,” she said.

  * * *

  At ten o’clock on Sunday night, Carmody sat at a laptop computer in the Ramersdorf-Perlach safe house, Dixon, Long, and Hanna Krauss with their chairs pushed around his at the dining room table, Wheeler stretched out on the nearby couch catching some shut-eye before the CIA team’s morning departure.

  On the laptop’s screen were line after line of instructions, HTML tags, symbols, and peculiar phrases—The Artemis Scepter was nanospace-shrunk!—that Krauss had confirmed at a glance was esoteric source code.

  “Before Wheeler gives Ms. Krauss a lift home, let’s review what we all know about this,” Carmody said.

  She looked discreetly at Wheeler. He looked back at her, his cheeks warm.

  “This being the thirty-year-old code for Marcus Nebula’s Kingdom Quest,” Dixon said. “Written by Eric Bergmann, an early computer game hobbyist and ace programmer for NORN Aerospace who died accidentally last year—”

  “I’d change that to ‘died under questionable circumstances,’” Long said. “He leaves town on a weekend fly-fishing getaway and turns up a floater. According to his files, there were no traces of drugs or alcohol, nothing to indicate a seizure or heart attack...”

  “No physical signs of a struggle or violence, either,” Carmody said.

  “But we all know there doesn’t necessarily have to be in order for someone to have murdered him,” Long said.

  Carmody grunted. “Ten months later, his daughter, Munsey, vanishes,” he said. “It’s hardly even a back-page story.”

  “Munsey Bergmann is twenty-four and a travel lover. A young woman who was largely educated in the United States when her father worked at NASA. She has friends there and elsewhere around the world,” Krauss said. “Munich held painful memories for her. She was said to be troubled over her father’s death and had spoken of going away for a while. There was no reason for anyone to be overly suspicious.”

  “I could make the opposite case,” Carmody said. “But let’s stick with what we know. Eric dies a year ago. Munsey disappears next a couple of months ago. Then a week or so back, Outlier shows up in Munich. We follow her three thousand miles from Ponta Delgada on a tip, not knowing why she’s here. Within a few days, we find out she’s being hound-dogged by operators—”

  “Former operators,” Wheeler said, winking open an eye from the couch.

  “Former operators with bad reputations and multiple links to NORN and Gunther Koenig, a chief officer at that outfit and Volke Bank...”

  “Links that include real-time NORN sat feeds of Outlier,” Carmody said.

  “Highly illegal surveillance feeds,” Krauss clarified.

  “Right,” Carmody said. “Feeds that were being viewed by Aurelion Braithwaite, the lead operator, in an apartment directly across the street from Outlier...one owned by Volke Bank.” He paused. “All flows back to Koenig. He’s the person directly responsible for luring Eric Bergmann to NORN from a major position at NASA.”

  “The person whose satellites Aurelion Braithwaite was using to spy on Outlier before he tried to abduct or kill her last night.”

  “And let’s not forget he’s also someone who slipped off the hook when he was hit with human trafficking allegations, like billionaire boy clubbers always do,” Wheeler said, both eyes open now.

  Silence in the room.

  “The other link that’s kind of floating around is Else, from the Nussbaumpark do-it-yourselfer fair,” Long said, looking at Dixon.

  Dixon looked back at him. “She’s got nothing to do with Koenig or Braithwaite and his RatHawks.”

  Long held up a hand, catching a certain note of defensiveness in his voice. “I didn’t say that,” he said. “But her boss, Franz... Schien, is it?”

  “Scholl,” Krauss said.

  “Franz Scholl, a web activist, electronic advocate, netizen, whatever you want to call him...is a close friend of the late Eric Bergmann.”

  “And a fellow computer gamer,” Krauss said.

  “In fact,” Long said, nodding, “the two of them go—or went—back decades, to when Bergmann wrote Marcus Nebula and the other games Scholl was selling at the fair.”

  “A copy of which Else handed you earlier,” Carmody said. “With an obvious fish story about you dropping it or something...”

  “And a nod and wink that made it clear Scholl asked her to give it to you,” Long said.

  “The big question is why did she put it in our hands?”

  “And whether it has something to do with Koenig,” Wheeler said. “Eric Bergmann being tied to both him and Scholl.”

  The room was silent.

  “I wonder how Outlier fits into the picture,” Carmody said after a minute.

  “You mean if she fits,” Dixon said.

  Carmody shook his head.

  “No,” he said. “How. I don’t believe in coincidence. She—”

  Just then, he felt his satphone vibrate in his pants pocket. Reaching for it, he saw that it was Morse.

  “Hold your thoughts,” he said, and answered.

  * * *

  “Duchess,” Carmody said, doing his usual calculation of the relative times between Munich and Langley. “No Sundays off for you?”

  “Not this one,” she said. “I’ve been on the line with Interpol.”

  “About?”

  “An email,” she said.

  “Wait,” he said. “Is it Chaput again?”

  “Yes and no.”

  Carmody was quiet a minute. “Okay,” he said. “You made me curious.”

  “The email was time-stamped five-oh-eight last night, my time,” she said. “So, eleven-oh-eight last night CET. Or Munich local.”

  Carmody was thinking that was roughly when he and Long would have been driving back to the safe house from the motorcycle crash site.

  “I’m listening,” he said.

  “What I received was a forward from Chaput,” she said. “It was sent to him from a burner account.”

  He waited.

  “The subject line was blank.”

  “Okay.”

  “There was no text. Not a word.”

  “Okay.”

  “Only a link to an anonymous file sharing site.” Morse paused. “A single file available for download.”

  Carmody straightened in his chair. He saw that everyone in the room was looking at him.

  “Did you open it?”

  “I had the techs do it,” she said.

  “To make sure you weren’t being phished.”

  “Right.”

  “And?”

  Morse was silent for about ten seconds.

  “Before I tell you about the file,” she said finally, “I’m going to share something else in strict confidence. You decide whether to inform your team. But that’s as far as it can go. These are orders. Understood?”

  “
Yes.”

  “Chaput couldn’t have forwarded the email to me or anyone,” Morse said. “Not at that precise time.”

  Carmody sat a moment. “Still listening,” he said.

  “There’s going to be a lot of public hubbub to the contrary, but here’s the reality.” She paused. “About two hours earlier, the inspector was ambushed and left unconscious while on a surveillance. The party responsible—the unknown party—lifted his phone, his weapon, and some night-vision equipment, but did him no serious harm. He was left where he went down with flex-cuffs from his own pouch on his wrists. When he came to his senses, he managed to find help. Or rather he ran into a group of police and rescue workers.”

  “So they knew he was missing.”

  “No. They were looking for someone else. He lucked onto them in the woods.”

  Carmody had a dawning suspicion that he knew where she was headed. “The woods,” he repeated. “Where was he?”

  “Listen,” she said. “We’re taking care of the inspector. He’s an officious jackass. His surveillance was unauthorized. But we don’t want a sacrificial lamb. Interpol and the BfV are turning blind eyes to irregularities involving your conduct. You trashed one of their drones. You got into your own brawl outside the garage. And then outside the cemetery... I have no idea what that was about. So we’re going even-Steven. What I’m going to tell you fits right into my orders. Discussion of it is forbidden. After tonight, it’s never to be mentioned again, even between us.”

  Carmody grunted. “Let’s hear it.”

  “Chaput was at the Perlacher cemetery,” she said. “Not a mile from the forest where Outlier’s motorcycle went up in flames. He followed someone there on a hunch that it might lead him to her.”

  “Was that someone Franz Scholl?”

  “Leave it be.”

  Carmody took a breath. Held it a moment. Then exhaled.

  “Okay,” he said. “That share file. The techs went over it?”

  “It’s been sent to Professor Alex Michaels in New York for a thorough analysis. He’s the top digital forensics expert in the country. But, yes, our people did in-house preliminaries. And we think we know what it is.”