Net Force--Eye of the Drone
Page 13
Carmody nodded with the phone in his hand.
“Tell me about it,” he said.
“All right,” Morse said, and told him.
EPILOGUE
One month later
The Gulfstream G280 winged south over the calm, dark Ionian Sea toward Catania, a short hour’s flight for its five passengers. They were headed to the Sicilian coast on an informant’s tip; for all the high-tech ways of rooting for information, slapping paper currency into open palms still worked wonders.
Carmody and his men would see if this one panned out. In any event, the twin-engine jet taking them to their destination was a solid indicator that the agency had upped the allocation of its own funds and resources to their hunt.
Carmody was glad. He had spent years of his adult life pursuing American military and security interests in places far from America. He’d operated in tandem with lawmen and soldiers in scores of countries. Some were more helpful than others. But he preferred it when he didn’t have to rely on the locals for support.
He settled back in his seat, opened a browser window on his tablet, and clicked on a news story. It was splashing headlines across the internet, and he chose the London Daily World article only because Google’s news aggregator put its icon first in the row.
It read:
HERO INTERPOL COP BREAKS SATELLITE SPY RING, LATE COMPUTER SCIENTIST’S MISSING DAUGHTER FOUND HOSTAGE IN FORMER EAST GERMAN BUNKER
NORN Aerospace and Volke Bank executive Gunther Koenig indicted for espionage, murder, and kidnapping
Morgan Grosvenor
LYON, FRANCE—At ten o’clock this morning, Inspector Renault Chaput of Interpol stood behind a podium at the organization’s General Secretariat Headquarters to receive the Maltese Cross lapel pin that is Interpol’s highest commendation. It was an apt ceremonial conclusion to Chaput’s probe of NORN Aerospace and its chief executive, Gunther Koenig, 57, of Munich—an investigation that exposed a scandalous criminal enterprise of historic proportions.
Mr. Koenig was arrested last week in a highly publicized raid on an underground home converted from a former East German nuclear bunker at Tessin, in the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, a heavily wooded area 400 miles north of Munich.
According to court documents, the multiple charges against Koenig stem from his selling of banned high-resolution spy photographs, videos, and real-time imagery illegally taken by NORN geomapping satellites to a variety of rogue states, UN-designated terrorist groups, and narcotics and human traffickers. The use of private satellite surveillance is strictly prohibited by international law. It is believed the NORN orbital spysats equal or exceed the imaging capabilities of even the most sophisticated United States NSA surveillance and reconnaissance satellites.
“One must be dogged and dedicated in pursuit of wrongdoers of every stripe,” Chaput told the invited media in the presence of Interpol director Pascal Bollavieu.
Law-enforcement and German government sources confirm that Chaput broke the case by obtaining coded information prepared by the late satellite programmer Dr. Eric Bergmann before his mysterious death. Unexpectedly freed in the bunker raid was Dr. Bergmann’s only daughter, Munsey Bergmann, 24, of Bavaria, who dropped out of sight in February. Authorities are withholding the details of her apparent abduction and captivity to protect her privacy.
In a twist worthy of a spy movie, Bergmann used his own little-known source code for a 1980s-era computer game of his design titled Marcus Nebula’s Kingdom Quest. The game has a small but avid cult following that maintains online message boards and chat rooms.
Bergmann is said to have become aware of Koenig’s treasonous activities and documented them in what has become known in recent days as his Kingdom Code. A new investigation into the circumstances of his death is in its early stages, but authorities confirm that foul play is considered possible.
“Chaput’s discovery that Eric Bergmann hid information about Koenig, NORN, and his criminal operation in a coded floppy disk is remarkable police work,” said one highly placed source. “The inspector obtaining the digital key needed to unlock the Kingdom Code was its final extraordinary component.”
According to unofficial accounts, Chaput single-handedly obtained the keys from an armed and dangerous hacker after a daring foot chase through Bavaria’s Perlacher Forest. The hacker is believed to remain at large after narrowly escaping arrest—but not before Chaput seized the key codes in a life-and-death struggle with the cybercriminal.
“I have no desire to bask in my accomplishment,” said Chaput. “My goal is not glory, but justice.”
But speaking of the inspector’s heroism, Interpol director Pascal Bollavieu told reporters, “His diligent efforts and bravery set a new benchmark for future law-enforcement investigations...”
Carmody raised his eyes from the tablet as Dixon took the aisle seat beside him. He’d brought two cups of coffee from the galley at the rear of the cabin.
“Here.” Dixon handed him his cup. “Service.”
“Thanks.”
They sat drinking the coffee.
“This stinks,” Carmody said.
“Some dudes want everything.”
Carmody’s face was inexpressive. Dixon glanced down at the tablet on his lap.
“‘Hero Interpol Cop,’” he read off the screen. “Goes to show truth in journalism is kaput.”
Carmody looked at him.
“Stop,” he said.
Dixon drank some more coffee. The plane’s engines droned. After a long minute, he said, “Outlier—she’s the one who ought to be getting that Maltese Cross.”
“Yeah.”
“She set it all up,” Dixon said.
“Yeah.”
“Braithwaite’s men. Chaput. Us. Every one of us. So she could get hold of the disk and get the disk into our hands.”
“Yeah.”
“And she could’ve gotten herself killed.”
“Yeah.”
“So why are we still looking to lock her away in a supermax prison cell?”
Carmody put the coffee down on the tray in front of him, leaned back, and stared straight ahead at the door to the pilot’s cabin.
“She’s a fugitive from the law. A wanted criminal.”
“She’s also the real hero of that story you read.”
“That isn’t our job to decide.”
“So we cuff her and let somebody else sort things out afterward?”
Carmody kept looking up the aisle at the cabin door. “We aren’t supposed to care what happens to her afterward.”
“And you don’t.”
“I don’t.”
Silence. Dixon held his coffee without drinking any more of it. After a while, Carmody turned toward his window and saw his face reflected in the glass.
It was the face of an outright liar.
* * *
ISBN: 9781488069031
Net Force: Eye of the Drone
Copyright © 2020 by Netco Partners
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
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