Cottonwood Heights
It took Helen another five or so minutes to hijack control of the drones. The car jostled down the road and Beck hung his head in consternation, miserable in the seat beside her. Victor watched from the front seat, eyes on her at all moments.
“I’ve got them,” Helen said. “Putting them into formation to fly to Cottonwood Heights.”
“How long?”
“A little over an hour,” she said. “Right now no one knows what happened, and they might just think it’s a glitch.”
“We’ll be there about the same time,” William said.
Victor looked at Helen in the rearview mirror.
“Drive faster,” he ordered.
It was awkward in the car. William had turned the radio on when they first started driving, but Victor had switched it off without a word. Now they exchanged glances and occasionally someone coughed.
All of the drone safety measures would be locked out by the Markwell system. Once the first attempts by the Air Force failed to reinstitute control over their drones, they would shut off the entire network and lock everyone out in a full restart. It wouldn’t do any good, however, and Helen would still be able to control the drones.
They wouldn’t even understand how bad it really was until it was too late.
She wanted to ask if it was really necessary to hijack all five drones. Even with a military installation, one drone should have enough firepower to do as much damage as they needed to be done.
“Is the upload stream ready?” Victor asked.
“We can stream video from the drones to our employer as soon as we are ready,” Helen replied. “They’ll be able to watch the attack in real time.”
“Good,” Victor replied. “Open it to the public as well.”
“What?” Helen asked, shocked. “What do you mean?”
“Open the stream to everyone,” Victor said. “Create an open URL. Let’s broadcast it to as many people as want to watch.”
Helen hesitated. It wouldn’t be hard to do: she would open a feed through Tor networks and connect it to the drones. By the time anyone had found out where the feed was coming from they would be long gone.
It was just…it felt wrong. It was one thing to watch violence on the television when it was make believe. It was another thing entirely to give everyone access to real violence.
“I’ll see what I can do,” she said. “It’ll take a few minutes.”
“It had better be up before we arrive in Cottonwood,” Victor said. “I want the world to witness this.”
Helen bit back her response. She didn’t like the idea of killing anyone, but making a show of it…
Still, the question was: was she more afraid of doing something horrible, or Victor?
She would need to get out of this as soon as she could.
2
Lyle jumped out of the car as soon as it rolled to a stop in front of the abandoned office building. It had been closed to renovation several years ago when the contractor ran out of funding and left in disrepair ever since. The city would eventually tear it down, but for now, it was a forgotten landmark just outside of town.
He opened the trunk and started grabbing wires.
“Help me carry this all up to the roof,” Lyle said, picking up a power regulator. “It’s heavy.”
Kate picked up one of the long wires, groaning under the weight. “No kidding.”
Jack picked up another roll of copper wire and followed. “What do we need all of this for?”
“I’m going to form it into coils,” Lyle said, “and then hook it into the grid. I’ll use the regulator to up the amps, and when we turn it on it should release a pretty good blast.”
“It’ll take out the drones?”
Lyle nodded. “It should, in theory.”
“In theory?”
“If these drones are insulated then it won’t do a lot of good. But that isn’t common practice because it’s expensive as hell and makes them weigh almost twice as much, so this should work just fine.”
They trekked up the stairs to the roof. The staircase doubled back on each flight in the stairwell and was rough in some places where construction hadn’t been completed. All three were panting by the time they made it up. Lyle started setting up, and Kate and Jack headed back down to get the remainder of the supplies.
“Do you think this is going to work?” Jack asked Kate on the way down.
“Nope,” Kate said. “But it isn’t the plan anyway.”
“What’s the plan?”
“Find the people responsible for this and get them to shut it down before anyone gets killed.”
“You think they will be here?”
“I think at least one of them will be on site,” Kate said. “They’ll want to have boots on the ground, especially now that we got you out.”
“You think they know I’m gone?”
“I’m sure they knew almost as soon as it happened. They’ll be looking for us.”
Jack slung a large metal device over his shoulder and grunted. “Then why are we doing this?”
Kate picked up the last roll of wires and a bag of tools and followed Jack back toward the stairs. “Because it’s always worth having a backup plan, even if it’s an insane one.”
3
William parked the VW about half a mile outside Cottonwood Heights. He found a dirt road with a good vantage of the city and their target. Dust hung in the air behind them from their tires, floating away gently in the breeze.
“This is a good spot,” Victor said.
“Want us to set a perimeter?”
He shook his head. He moved William and Francis away from the car while Helen pulled out her gear. “I want you both to head into town and find out who’s after us.”
“Want them alive?” William asked.
“I want them dead,” Victor said. “I want them to suffer, but I want them dead.”
Francis eyed him. “You going to be all right here alone?”
“I’ll be fine,” Victor said.
“All right,” Francis said. They grabbed their pistols and started walking toward town, leaving Victor with Helen and Beck.
Helen set her computer on the hood of the car, swapping controls to keep all of the drones heading in the same direction. Beck was out of the backseat, but his hands were still tied. He leaned against the car and watched, morose and beaten.
Victor watched her, eyes cold and dead. “Keep them in formation,” he said.
“It’s harder than it looks,” Helen said, adjusting the screens and swapping between the various controls. “I have to make constant tiny changes to each of them to make sure they don’t crash into each other.”
“Is the camera streaming?”
“Yes.”
“Use the farthest one back. I want it to show the others firing their missiles.”
“Okay,” she said. Victor felt himself smiling slightly, watching her suffer. She hated this, but she didn’t have the strength to object. He would enjoy killing her but not nearly as much as her firebrand sister. “How far out are they?”
“Ten minutes,” Helen said. “Ten minutes until you can fire the missiles.”
4
By the time Jack and Kate made it back to the roof, Lyle had put together a pretty significant contraption. It looked like an art sculpture made out of copper wires, each strand wrapped around the others as it reached for the sky.
“Looks like a child made that,” Kate said. Lyle gave her a dirty look.
“I’d like to see you do better in such a short time span.”
“I don’t even know what you’re doing,” she said.
“I agree. What the hell is that?” Jack asked.
“It’s an EMP,” Lyle said.
“Why is it so big?”
“Because we need to run a huge current through it,” Lyle replied. He mentioned it like it should be obvious.
Jack turned to Kate, shaking his head. “I’m going to head down and try to warn the people in the target area. If we can get people out of harm’s way, then even if they do fire missiles it won’t do much harm.”
“Okay,” Kate said. “But if the drones get too close then get the hell out of there.”
“All right,” Jack said. He headed back to the stairs and disappeared.
Kate turned back to Lyle. “You almost done?”
“Almost,” Lyle said. He saw the bag of tools Kate had brought and grabbed one out. He hurried to his sculpture and started snipping the copper wire in various places.
“What are you doing?”
“Creating air gaps,” Lyle explained. “We want the current to jump so that a most of it ends up in the air. That’s what creates the pulse…hypothetically.”
“Hypothetically?”
“This was all Tesla stuff, and I’ve never built something like this before. I’m not great with electrical currents so I can only hope it works. The regulator should get us a huge jolt, and the pulse will go pretty far. If we time it right, it should fry the electronics on the drones.”
Kate sighed. “So it might work?”
“It might,” Lyle said. “Or…it might just explode.”
5
“Head into town and find out who made those footprints,” Francis said to William as they stood near the tall building outside of town. They had found a car parked outside of it, and Francis would bet anything that whoever was working against them had been driving it.
He didn’t know why they were here, at this building, unless maybe they had the wrong target. He didn’t particularly care, either.
They had found a pair of footsteps as well in the sandy gravel outside the building, heading toward town.
“Who am I looking for?”
“Just keep your eyes peeled,” Francis said. “If you see anything odd, call me.”
“All right,” William said.
He started lumbering toward the city, following the footsteps in almost comical incompetence. Francis watched him go with distaste and let out a deep sigh.
William was useless on a job like this. He didn’t want the person in the building to know he was here, so sending William away was the only real option he had. He doubted William would see anything in the city, but at least, it kept him busy.
He slid his pistol free, clicked the safety off, and crept into the building. There was a stairwell just inside and he headed up. He moved slowly, stepping quietly and listening. By the fourth landing, he could hear voices as someone walked into the stairwell above him, a few flights higher up.
“…it still dangerous, even if it works?” a woman asked.
“I don’t think so,” a man replied. “Tesla never said anything about it. I mean, it might cause cancer, but what doesn’t?”
“True.”
“Besides, that’s why I got the remote. It has half a mile range, so we don’t have to be anywhere close when we click it.”
Francis moved farther into the building, hiding around a corner on the fourth-floor landing. He held his pistol and waited.
6
Kate walked down the stairs beside Lyle. He held the remote in his hand, little more than a switch. She held hope that they wouldn’t have to use it and figured if Lyle actually had to throw that switch his great device would just flash with sparks and sputter out.
But, at least, he was trying. She was impressed with how composed he was through all of this. He’d been through a lot in the last day, and somehow he was holding himself together.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“For what?” he asked.
“If I’d left you in the hotel with the FBI, you probably could have convinced them you were innocent with the evidence you found. I basically ruined any chance you had of clearing your name.”
He let out a sigh and stopped walking.
“Maybe,” he said. “But it still would have been a longshot. But, the thing is, I don’t hold you responsible for anything. None of it was your fault, and if anything you’ve given me a chance to do something good.”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“I’m a coward.”
“No you aren’t,” she replied. “I’ve met cowards, and you aren’t one of them.”
“But I am,” he said. “I spent my life writing code that helps people kill other people from a distance. They are planning to kill thousands of people with barely any effort, and that is partly my fault.”
“But you’re here.”
“Exactly,” he replied. “I’m here because of you. I was too scared to tell anyone about the Markwell back door because I was coward, and now my best friend is dead. You’ve saved my life and given me the chance to redeem myself, if only a little bit. Thank you.”
She hesitated. “You’re welcome.”
“I just wanted to say that—”
“It’s my sister,” Kate said suddenly. Lyle trailed off. “I got her into this life, got her a job at JanCorp. She’s just following in my footsteps, and now she’s in danger.”
They started walking down the stairs again, heading from the fifth landing.
“Can’t you just get her out?”
“She’s working with the people who tried to kill me,” Kate said.
A figure suddenly stepped out of the shadows inside the fourth-floor landing, grabbing Lyle’s wrist and taking the remote. He dropped it on the floor and stepped on it, smashing the components.
Then he looked up at Kate and laughed. “We obviously didn’t try hard enough.”
7
Kate reached for her gun, but the man put his own to Lyle’s head.
“Don’t even think about it.”
“Francis,” Kate breathed, holding her hands to the side. “Let him go, he has nothing to do with this.”
“You know, I thought it was cute when your sister asked to work with us. Sort of poetic, working with her to hunt down the people who killed you, and she would never know that those were the same people helping her.”
“But she didn’t trust you,” Kate replied.
“Not once,” Francis said. “Too much like her sister.”
“I trusted you for years,” Kate said. “Then you stabbed me in the back.”
“That’s the thing about it,” Francis explained. “It always comes down to the money.”
Kate felt like she’d been punched in the stomach. “There was a price on my head?”
“A pretty big one,” Francis said. “A bonus we made off of our last job with you.”
“Who was it?” Kate asked.
Francis shrugged. “I never found out. They only worked with Victor.”
“Then you already collected,” Kate said.
“Yeah,” he said. “Speaking of which.”
A second later, he placed his pistol against Lyle’s stomach and pulled the trigger. Then he shoved Lyle forward into Kate. He screamed in pain and flailed, making it difficult for her to draw her own gun. She got it loose and raised up, tracking Francis, but he was already halfway down the stairs, heading for the exit.
Kate quick stepped after him, raising her pistol and firing. Francis ducked around the next landing and the bullets thudded around him.
“Stay here,” she said to Lyle. “I’ll be right back.”
Then she headed down the stairs, chasing Francis.
