Drone Games (36 page)

Greef scampered up the dock steps, carrying what were presumably Faiz Al-Aran’s clothes along with a brown leather briefcase.

“Not one sign of him,” Greef announced. “If he jumped in that water, the poor bloke’s a shark biscuit by now. I’ve never in my life seen anyone try and swim with man-eaters as if they was dolphins. That’s like ringing a dinner bell.”

Cheng took the briefcase and attempted to flip the latches.

“Whoa now, mate,” Greef said, bending next to Cheng’s ear. “There’s one heckuva camera mob watching. We need to think about this. There’s something weighty in that case that I wager you want. Problem is, if this Al-Aran rigged up a nasty surprise, then I don’t fancy having your or my face blown off. Not to mention scrubbing all these sticky beaks off my dock.”

“Good points,” Cheng whispered. “I need to get off this island and back to the States quietly. I don’t have time for the media here or the hassles of evidence protocol. Is there a back road to the airport?”

“Hmmm, it’s possible, mate,” Greef answered quietly. “Lanzarote or Arricife?”

“Lanzarote.”

“Any brass headed into my pocket?”

“Fifteen hundred dollars, US.”

Greef pursed his lips. “The FBI keep its word?”

Cheng offered his hand. “And I was never here.”

“A tidy sum, but these Las Palmas bullymen could have a say. Some might even go berko wanting their own investigation.” Greef’s eyes narrowed. “I was a fair truckie in my younger days, but if we could just take my water tinnie, everything would be ace. That way nobody’d know where we was off to. All we need is a little misdirection. You run these blokes off my dock, mate, and we’ve got a deal.”

Cheng flagged a young policeman in front of the crowd.

“
Hablas
English?”

“
Si, señor
.”

“There’s enough high-explosive in this briefcase to blow up all of this crowd and half this island,” Cheng advised. “Where’s the nearest law enforcement headquarters with x-ray capability?”

“Las Palmas,” the policeman answered, nervously backing away. Cheng followed him. The man stumbled slightly. “Please,
señor
, be careful. We must ask everyone to—”

Cheng lifted the briefcase high in the air. “
Bomba
.”

The crowd scattered, and as they did, Cheng and Greef sprinted to the waterside docks. In a flash, Greef had the lines untied and the engines started. He flattened the throttle on the twenty-one foot Cobia 211 Bay Skiff, and the hull planed out for the open ocean. Top speed was fifty miles per hour. Lanzarote Airport was twenty-seven miles away.

“You can open that briefcase anytime,” Greef shouted over the wind and spray. “It’s safe enough for a $1,500 peek.”

“How do you know?” Cheng shouted back.

“I already looked.”

—

Washington, DC

Oval Office

“NOW WE’RE getting somewhere,” Secretary Bridge announced to the president. “We have a laptop computer, names, and a possible method. We’ve been concentrating on the interior of these aircraft when all along the threat’s been outside. It’s a flying bug.”

The president nearly laughed. “Have you lost your mind?”

“A remote-control drone capable of carrying who-knows-what kind of explosive and attaching it to the plane somehow—an engine or wing near a fuel tank or some other vulnerable position.” Bridge rifled through a folder. “Here. This is your aircraft killer.”

“Entomopter?” The president strained to make sense of the term. “What on Earth is an Entomopter, and what maniac designed it?”

“He’s no maniac,” Bridge assured. “He’s a well-respected professor at Georgia Tech. Believe it or not, this drone was built for your Mars mission. It was supposed to help survey planetary landscapes and carry rock samples.”

“Are you sure you have proof?”

“Riley has a name, address, and description of a potential conspirator. He’s an Egyptian-American named Faiz Al-Aran. We think he’s on the
Queen Mary 2
. At least, he was registered as a passenger. He may have temporarily disappeared somewhere in the Canary Islands. Riley’s working with the Spanish authorities. They’ll find him. The State Department also has a request in to the Saudi embassy for sight detainment of another individual named Ibrahim Al-Assaf who supposedly works for their oil ministry. He arranged to acquire these drones from Georgia Tech. That’s the good news.

“Unfortunately, there are some unconnected dots. A man fitting Al-Aran’s description was on that ship. But if that’s true, then it’s unlikely that he personally triggered any detonations. And that means he’s working with unknown accomplices inside the United States. Second, we still have no idea on the method used. We’re confident that the drone is involved, but we don’t know how. Riley wants a visual of it in flight.”

“What’s the bad news?” the president asked.

“We’ve had three crashes,” Bridge said. “Before he left the country, Al-Aran walked off Georgia Tech’s campus with six drones.”

“Did you say six?”

“Yes. Six.”

Courtyard Marriott

FBI Command Center

Milwaukee, Wi

Tuesday, June 2

RILEY SET Shaitan on the conference table.

“One good-guy professor, one flying bug, and one bad-guy professor who for some strange reason decided to backstroke with man-eating sharks. There’s no way this Al-Aran could have acted alone. I want his conspirators—names and descriptions. They had to have been somewhere with a clear view of the departure runways. We haven’t come up with a single airport lead in this investigation, and I’m sick of it. I want a suspect list, and I don’t care how it’s done or who is on it. How many interviews have we completed?”

“We have Al-Aran’s laptop,” Cheng said. “It’s in New York, where our best people are looking at it.”

“Yeah? And who is the FBI’s best?”

“Bruce Baltis. He works in the Bureau’s Cyber Security Division. I’m sure you’ve heard of him. As an intern, he wrote an integration program that connected state fingerprint identification systems to the FBI’s national system. We think he was involved in that Siemens thing.”

Riley’s head turned fast and he gave a painful look. Cheng couldn’t tell if that meant “shut up” or that Riley really didn’t know. Cheng thought about ending the topic, but he finally decided to share. After all, it was never proved.

“Supposedly, a supervisor found and read a folder in Baltis’s office. When he questioned it, the supervisor was immediately reassigned. Like, that day.”

“What kind of folder?” Riley asked.

“From Siemens.”

Riley had a vacant look. “So?”

“It was a System Controls portfolio,” Cheng announced. “The supervisor thought that Baltis was simply leaving the Bureau for a job there, but nothing ever happened. Things just went back to normal. The folder also contained a list of Israeli contacts. I thought that at your level at DHS, you’d have been briefed.”

“What are you talking about?” Riley asked incredulously.

“Siemens? Iran? There was speculation that Baltis was working with Israel during that time. Some thought that he was
that
guy. He’s that good.”

“Wow,” Riley said after a moment. Now he understood. He remembered the terrorism briefing, and it scared him. Governments were the prime suspects. “Are you telling me that the guy looking at Al-Aran’s laptop designed Stuxnet?”

“I never said that.” Cheng raised his hands. “I said there was speculation.”

Stuxnet was a devastating computer worm that had secretly infected thirty thousand Iranian PCs, including those running uranium enrichment processes at the Bashir and Natanz facilities. The worm caused centrifuges (machines that spun and separated Uranium-235 weapons-grade) to increase their normal operating speeds of 1,064 hertz to 1,410 hertz for fifteen minutes before returning to normal frequency. Twenty-seven days later, the worm slowed the centrifuges down to a few hundred hertz for a full fifty minutes. The stresses from the faster, then slower speeds effectively destroyed one thousand machines. The United States and Israel denied any responsibility.

“You’re sure Baltis is on our side?” Riley quipped.

“Ask him yourself,” Cheng responded. “You’ll get along great. He’s no-nonsense and very direct. Almost bordering on rude, but I guess it’s expected. His mind doesn’t think like yours or mine. The laptop has become the focal point of the investigation. He’s analyzing the hard drive as we speak. If there’s anything there, he’ll find it. And if I might make a suggestion . . . I don’t think we should give any of this to that Fox woman.”

Tom Ross entered the room and caught the end of the conversation. He glared at Cheng. “Are you talking about Neela?”

“I was just saying that I’m uncomfortable sharing too much information, especially from Al-Aran’s computer. I think some things should be kept confidential.” He turned to Riley. “As far as names, first you need a list of suspects, and right now that’s impossible. All we’ve got is raw data. There are no suspects.”

“Then I want numbers,” Riley demanded. “How many?”

Cheng exhaled and reached for a stack of papers.

“Mitchell International has a ten-mile perimeter bordering 118 military, civilian, and commercial structures. So far, our agents have interviewed everyone who lived, ate, worked, or touched those structures—truck drivers, delivery personnel, transients, renters, and old and new homeowners. We even tracked down customers who were filmed by restaurant security cameras, just like you requested. Any one of them could have had access to a rooftop or vantage point from which to maneuver and guide a drone onto a runway. Take your pick. There are over two thousand names.”

Riley turned to Ross. “Okay, Mr. NTSB, start thinking of how we can use Neela to our advantage. Perhaps even a little disinformation?” He approached a magnetic dry-erase whiteboard and lifted a thick black marker. He drew five columns.

“Mr. Cheng, do we know how many businesses around Mitchell’s perimeter are foreign-owned?” Cheng shrugged. Riley labeled that as column one. He labeled column two as
High Vantage Points
. “I want names of anyone who had access to an area that overlooked a runway. Does anyone fit that?”

“We never looked at it from the perspective of a flying drone.”

“Number three, a link to the military. I want a sorted list of people we interviewed who are currently or have been in the service. Number four is”—he turned and wrote
Unusual Circumstances
—“strange behavior, a practical joke, an accident, or an injury. Anything that could be attributed to a terrorist training mishap. Even a suspicious or untimely death.”

Cheng dug through his notes. “A Milwaukee detective reported some commando activity in the woods south of here.”

“Say again?” Riley perked up.

“A paintball tournament,” Cheng said straight-faced. Riley was not amused. “I’m sorry, Jack, but I’m punchy, and this is impossible. We need at least two or three input days so we can do some system searches. Poring through all this paper will just bog things down. Where do we even start?”

“We start with Mitchell International,” Riley said. “Our perpetrator was in the vicinity somewhere, and then he vanished. Something tells me that the observation area on the north side of the airport is hot. That Professor Robertson said his drone operated from a laptop. Maybe our suspect just sat there and controlled the whole thing from a vehicle right out in the open.”

“No way,” Ross observed. “He would’ve been spotted by security cameras.”

“Who covered the north side perimeter and associated buildings?”

Cheng straightened in his chair. “I told you that one of my agents ran into some disgruntled military personnel at an American Legion Post, so I went back there myself.”

“And?”

“Nothing. They’re disgruntled, all right, but other than a bad case of racism, it was clean. One of their employees did pass away recently on the premises. I guess you could consider that an ‘unusual circumstance.’ His name was Chief . . . er, Watts. Jerry Watts. A Vietnam veteran who managed the place. He was well liked. His friends said he drank too much even when he wasn’t celebrating his birthday. They found him behind the bar on the morning of the eighteenth. He’s suffered a massive heart attack.”

“His birthday?”

“Uh-huh. He turned sixty. Talk about bad luck. It was his own party. He and his buddies played cards until around 5:30 a.m. He died just before the Delta crash.”

“Hmph,” Riley said, drumming his fingers. “Anything else?”

“Not really. We interviewed all the regulars except for some kid who lives above the bar in an efficiency apartment—a Marquette dental student. Their admissions staff is running him down. He was out of town.”

“What’s his name?”

Cheng rifled his notes. “Waleu. Mike Waleu.”

Riley wrote the name under
High Vantage Points
.

“That’s one. Who else?”

“Jack, don’t do this,” Cheng pleaded. “We’re talking two thousand names attached to the Milwaukee investigation alone. The follow-ups could take weeks.”

“We don’t have weeks,” Riley said angrily. “I need a conspirator, and I need my fish. I think better with my fish.”

Riley retrieved his stuffed toy and noticed Cheng’s eyelids drooping slightly. He launched Shaitan across the room. It sailed past Cheng’s head and skipped off the whiteboard, erasing the I in Mike Waleu’s first name.