UAV - Chapter 6

1

Lyle found a hole-in-the-wall diner a few blocks from his hotel and walked there in the cooling afternoon air. The desert heat was finally breaking, replaced by a dry chill that crept in with the shadows as the sun dropped behind the Superstition Mountains, their jagged peaks turning black against a sky the color of a bruise. Saguaro cacti lined the roadside like sentinels, their arms silhouetted against the fading light. He hadn't eaten in hours, and his stomach was rumbling.

A hostess seated him at a corner table. The diner smelled of bacon grease and coffee that had been sitting on the burner too long, and a jukebox in the back played something country at a volume just low enough to ignore. Red vinyl booths lined the windows, their surfaces cracked and patched with tape, and a row of Kokopelli figurines gathered dust on a shelf above the register. His waiter, a teenager named Fred, took his drink order.

"Can I get you started off with something to drink while we wait for the rest of your party to arrive?"

"It's just me," Lyle said.

"For now?"

"Nope," he replied, "and I'll take a Coke."

The kid disappeared into the kitchen. Lyle pulled out his phone and scrolled, not really searching for anything in particular. He texted Peter a quick message about an article he'd read earlier and then put the phone away, glancing over the menu.

A woman sat down in the chair across from him. She was holding a menu up, hiding most of her face. "You should try the bison burger," she said, not looking at him. "It's out of this world."

Lyle looked around. "Excuse me."

She lowered the menu and smiled at him. "Yes?"

He opened his mouth, trying to think of something to say. "This…uh…is my table."

"I know," she agreed, looking back at the menu.

The waiter reappeared with a Coke. "Ah, okay, you're all here now?" he asked.

"Yes," she said.

"No," Lyle said.

"What would you like to drink?"

"I'll have the same thing he's having," she said.

"She's not with…" Lyle started to say, but the waiter was already walking away, completely ignoring him.

"You didn't get diet, did you?" she asked.

"What?"

"I hate diet. It gives me headaches. That fake sugar is disgusting."

"Who are you? Do I know you?"

"Nope," she admitted, lifting the menu. "How about we split a bison burger? It's pretty big, and I don't think I can finish the entire thing."

"Who are…why…um…what are you doing at my table?"

She stared at him. "Eating."

"I mean, why this table?"

"Because there are empty chairs."

"But, I mean, wouldn't you prefer…" he trailed off.

"If you have something to say, just say it," she said.

He took a deep breath. "This is my table, and I don't know you. I would prefer if you went somewhere else."

"There, that wasn't so hard, was it?"

She looked back at the menu. Lyle waited for a second, then said, "So, are you going to move?"

"No, but I appreciate that you said it."

The waiter reappeared. "Did you guys decide what you want?"

"We're going to split the bison burger," she ordered, handing him the menu. The waiter took Lyle's as well. "To go. And there's an extra twenty in it if you can get it in the next three minutes."

The waiter looked surprised for a second and then shrugged. "Sure."

He disappeared back into the kitchen.

"Why are you doing this?" Lyle asked.

"Because I'm hungry," she replied, "and I don't know when we're going to be able to eat next."

"What are you talking about?"

"Can I see your phone?"

"No, you can't see my phone," he said.

She gave him a look that made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. A shiver ran up his spine.

"Why do you need my phone?" he asked.

"Because they will use it to trace you," she said.

"Who?"

"The FBI when they realize you're a traitor. JanCorp when they realize you're still alive. Take your pick."

"What?"

"Just give me your damn phone."

Lyle thought to object, but it was hard to figure out what was going on. "This is a joke, isn't it?" he asked. Nevertheless, he handed his phone over.

She flipped it over, took off the back plate, and removed the battery. Then she put both pieces into her pocket.

"Might need it later," she said.

"Did Peter put you up to this?"

She took a sip of Coke, not looking at him. "Peter's dead."

Lyle hesitated. "What?"

"They killed him about an hour ago in his home. Made it look like you did it."

"No, no, that's impossible. I just talked to him."

"I need to know why," she said. "Why do they want you dead?"

The waiter reappeared with a bag. He handed it to the woman. "Here you go."

"Thanks." She handed him two twenties. "If anyone asks, we were never here."

"All right," the waiter said. He looked confused but just disappeared into the kitchen.

The woman stood up. "We're out of time, but as soon as this is over, you need to tell me everything. Got it?"

"What are you talking about?"

She looked at the front of the restaurant. "Start walking back to your hotel. Act like nothing is wrong. Don't look around when they start following you."

Lyle shook his head, unable to think straight or figure out what was happening. "What is going on?"

She leaned in close. "Hey," she said, grabbing his chin. "There are too many civilians in here. Children. They wanted to grab you in here, but I convinced them to get you outside first. If you don't start walking in the next ten seconds, then a lot of people are going to die. You don't want that, do you?"

Lyle stared at her, his pulse hammering in his temples. Without saying anything, he stood from his chair and started walking for the exit.

"Take this," she said, handing him the bag of food. "And don't drop it. Like I said, it might be a while before we get to eat again."

2

Lyle walked down the street, fighting the urge to look around. His legs were rubber and he was lightheaded, like he might pass out at any moment.

Just a prank, he told himself. Some stupid prank that Peter is playing on me.

He wished he could believe it.

The first block went smoothly as he walked down the sidewalk. The desert evening had settled in—the sky fading from orange to deep purple above the jagged line of the mountains, the air cooling fast the way it did in the Southwest, from scorching to almost cold in less than an hour. Street lamps flickered on in sequence ahead of him, casting pools of amber light on the cracked sidewalk where palo verde roots had buckled the concrete. The smell of grilling mesquite drifted from a backyard somewhere, mixing with the dry mineral scent of cooling asphalt. He wasn't hungry anymore; his stomach was twisted in knots.

The street was almost empty, with only a few people walking in either direction. He crossed to the second block. A black unmarked van pulled up to the curb in front of him. It was about fifty feet away, idling.

He let out a gasp of air, trying not to fall over. His body was tense and wobbly, but he kept putting one foot in front of the other.

Footsteps closed in behind him as he got closer to the van. "Oh God," he muttered. "Oh God, oh God, oh God…"

The footsteps sped up just as the door to the van swung open. Something slid over his head and the world went dark. A bag. Hands shoved him forward and he tripped. Someone caught him and hauled him up into the van.

He blubbered and thrashed, but strong arms pinned him down. The van door slid closed and they started moving. The van jostled beneath him as they traveled.

He kept muttering to himself, biting back the urge to cry and trying not to panic. "We've got the package," someone said.

"An easy grab," another voice said. This one he recognized as the woman from the diner. The one who had sat and spoken with him.

"What's this?"

"Looks like his leftovers," another voice said.

The first man laughed. "He won't be needing those."

They drove for a while, jostling and laughing and pinning Lyle to the ground. It was hard to breathe, and his head swam. His entire body was shaking.

"Why are you doing this?" Lyle asked. His voice was muffled.

"Shut up," one said, hitting him on the side of the head.

"This far enough?"

"Yeah, pull up here out of sight. We'll drop him in the trees."

The van pulled to a stop but kept idling.

"Grab the shovels," the first person said.

There was the sound of rustling and then the van door slid open. They hauled Lyle out and he panted into his bag. The night air hit him—cool and dry, smelling of creosote and sun-baked earth, the silence of the desert pressing in from all sides. Overhead, more stars than he'd ever seen in California blazed across the sky, indifferent to what was about to happen on the ground below.

"Please, you don't want to do this!"

They ignored him. The person dragging him threw him forward to the ground.

"Start digging the hole. We'll put him in first."

"Please…" Lyle muttered, trying to crawl away. Someone stepped on his leg.

"Going somewhere?"

A few laughed. Then came the soft pssh sound of expelled air.

"Hey, what—!"

Another pssh, then another. Someone started shouting, and scrambling erupted around him. A body thudded to the ground a few feet from him and he jerked away from it.

There was a scuffle with a lot of thuds as people punched and hit each other, then another pssh and then silence. Lyle could hear his own breathing, sucking the cloth bag into his mouth then blowing it out, always short of breath. It was quiet outside his bag, and his body trembled.

The bag was yanked off his head. He drew in air, gasping. Four bodies lay on the ground around him, scattered and in various positions. All of them were unconscious.

The woman from the diner stood overtop him, holding what looked like a long-barreled pistol. She had a bloody lip and looked slightly disoriented.

"Get up," she said, offering him a hand.

He tentatively accepted it, and she jerked him to his feet. He dusted himself off and gulped.

"What…what happened…?"

"I shot them," she said.

He stared blankly at her. "Are they…?"

"Tranquilizers," she added, shaking her head. "They'll wake up in a few hours with raging headaches, but otherwise, they'll be fine. Except him—" she kicked the boot of the nearest guy—"I had to break his arm."

"You…you helped them take me."

"Of course I did," she said. "That's what they hired me for. And I needed the van and a place to stash them while we figure out what to do next, so I let them bring us out here."

"They were going to kill me."

"Yep." She walked over to the van and circled it, crouching to check underneath with a penlight she'd taken from one of the unconscious men. Lyle followed on unsteady legs, and something caught his eye—a small black box zip-tied beneath the rear bumper, its red LED pulsing slowly.

"Wait." He dropped to his knees and yanked it free, turning it over with trembling hands. His engineer's instincts cut through the fear. "Cellular GPS tracker. LTE band—see the antenna layout? It's transmitting our position every thirty seconds." He popped the casing open with his thumbnail, studied the circuit board inside. "Semtech firmware chip. Military-grade components, not consumer. Someone's watching this van in real time."

Kate crouched beside him. "Can you kill it?"

He pulled the SIM card, snapped it between his fingers, and disconnected the lithium cell. "Dead. But they already have the van's last position."

"Then we move fast." She reached inside the van and pulled out the bag of food from the diner. "You dropped this, but I grabbed it."

"Oh."

She opened the bag and pulled out the sandwich. She ripped it in half and offered him a piece. "Eat."

"I'm not hungry."

"Yes, you are. Eat and you'll feel better."

Thinking about the food made Lyle nauseous. "I don't think I can right now."

"Either eat this damn sandwich or I'll shoot you."

Lyle took the offered half. He bit into it, but he couldn't taste anything. He chewed mechanically and swallowed.

"Why were they going to kill me?"

"You tell me."

"I have no idea," Lyle said. "I'm nobody."

"Not to them," she said, taking a bite of the sandwich and grabbing some fries. "You were worth a five-person hit squad."

Lyle rubbed his chin and then staggered over to a tree and leaned against it. "I…have to sit down."

"It's okay. Deep breaths. The adrenaline will wear off and the weakness will pass. What do you know that is worth getting you killed?"

"Nothing," he said.

"It already got Peter killed."

A tightness gripped Lyle's chest. "God…"

"We don't have all day."

Lyle looked up at her. He dropped the sandwich on the ground and his eyes burned. "It was all a mistake," he said.

"What was?"

"When we found it."

"Found what? Start at the beginning."

Lyle took a deep breath. "We were doing performance testing and I wanted to shave a few seconds off of one of our worst performing services. I started looking at the raw packet traffic—not the application layer, the actual network interfaces. Everyone else on the team would have profiled the code, but I think about systems from the hardware up. It's how my brain works. So I wrote a protocol dissector and started decoding the handoff traffic byte by byte."

"Obfuscated?"

"The code was intentionally confusing. Like they wanted to make it transparent."

"Transparent?" she asked. "Like see-through?"

"What? No. The coding meaning of it. Like, completely predictable but hidden from the user."

"Oh," she said. "So you were messing with stuff you shouldn't have been?"

"No one told us not to mess with it," Lyle said, "they just figured if they made it confusing enough we wouldn't bother. Anyway, it wasn't an issue until we found the backdoor."

"The what?"

"Whoever originally built the software added some clever weaknesses. External access that is almost impossible to use unless you know exactly what you're looking for. But, with it, you can gain complete control of the system."

"Why would they do that?"

"To let someone in who isn't allowed to be there," Lyle said.

"Like who?"

Lyle shrugged. "China. Russia. Anyone who knows about the weakness can exploit it."

The woman was silent for a second. "How many devices would this affect?"

"Thousands of drones all around the world. Many are military but some aren't."

"So with this exploit, someone could take control of a drone and fly it wherever they wanted to?"

"You're missing the point," Lyle said. "These aren't toys. The navigation suite controls the entire avionics package—flight surfaces, targeting sensors, weapons release. With this software, someone could take control of a drone and bomb a city."

3

The woman was silent for a long minute. "Damn."

"Yeah," he said.

"And now they know that you know?"

"There must have been some protection on it. When I checked out the files in VC it probably pinged whoever created the exploit."

"VC?"

"Version control," Lyle answered.

"Can you start talking like a normal person?"

He lifted his hands helplessly.

"Sorry about your friend," Kate said.

The grief hit Lyle fresh. The idea that he would never see Peter again was impossible to comprehend and unfathomably sad at the same time. "Peter was a good guy. And I got him killed."

"Don't think like that," she said. "Everyone makes their own choices."

"I told him to download the software."

"You didn't know it was an international security risk."

He sighed. "What now? Do I report this to the government?"

"Won't do any good," Kate said. "Get up, we need to go."

"What do you mean it won't do any good?" he asked, standing up.

"The people who killed Peter framed you for it, and they planted evidence both in the company and at Peter's house that you are a spy stealing the software. As far as the FBI knows, you've been planning to sell it for a while to Iran. Peter was on to you, so you killed him to keep him quiet."

"What? That's ridiculous."

"Not to the FBI," she said. "There's going to be a manhunt for you in the next few hours, so we need to get you out of the state."

"And go where?"

"East," she said. "I need to get you out of sight and get us to a position where we can figure out who really took the software and what they are planning to do with it. Then we can stop them."

"Why?" he asked. "Why are you helping me?"

She opened the door to the van, finishing the last bite of her sandwich. "I have my reasons," Kate said.

"How do you know so much about what's going on?"

She glanced over at him. "The people that are doing this—I used to work for them. A company called JanCorp. Six months ago, their leader decided I was a liability and tried to kill me with a car bomb." She touched the thin scar along her jaw, a pale line that disappeared into her hair. "He thinks I'm dead. I've spent the last five months tracking his operations, intercepting contracts, mapping his network. When I found out JanCorp was sending a team to Utah to kill a Markwell developer, I made sure I was on it."

"You infiltrated the team sent to kill me?"

"JanCorp uses local contractors for domestic jobs—freelancers who've never met the core team. I became one of them." Her voice was matter-of-fact, like she was describing a commute. "The hard part was convincing them to grab you outside the restaurant instead of inside. Now get in the van."

***

FBI Special Agent Marcus Reeves ducked under the crime scene tape and stepped into Peter Karnegie's kitchen in Cupertino. The forensic team had been working for three hours, and the room smelled of fingerprint powder and the faint copper tang of blood that had seeped into the grout between the floor tiles.

The victim lay face down near the kitchen island. Two gunshot wounds to the back. No defensive wounds. He'd been shot while walking away from someone he hadn't feared.

"What do we have?" Reeves asked the lead detective.

"Peter Karnegie, thirty-four. Software engineer at Markwell Systems. Neighbor heard what she thought were fireworks around seven, found the back door open when she came to check." The detective flipped his notebook. "We've got a name on the suspect already. Lyle Goldman, also Markwell. His prints are everywhere, and there's a laptop in the guest bedroom with classified drone navigation software copied to external drives."

Reeves crouched beside the body, studying the entry wounds. Close range. Nine millimeter. Professional spacing—two shots, center mass from behind. He stood and surveyed the kitchen. The laptop in the guest room, positioned where responding officers would find it immediately. The external drives left in plain view. In fifteen years with the Bureau, Reeves had learned that real crimes were messy. This scene had the sterile precision of a stage set.

He'd seen this kind of staging before—three years ago, the Chen case. A Raytheon engineer framed for selling classified specs to Beijing. Reeves had followed the planted evidence all the way to a dead end before his instincts pulled him back to the anomalies. Turned out the real thief was the engineer's manager, who'd needed a scapegoat. That case had earned Reeves his promotion—and taught him that the cleaner the crime scene, the dirtier the truth.

But evidence was evidence. He had a suspect, prints, and a body.

"Goldman's last known location?"

"Arizona. Credit card hit at a hotel in the Phoenix area, about six hours ago. Nothing since."

Reeves pulled out his phone. "This is Reeves, FBI Counterintelligence. I need a BOLO on Lyle Goldman—white male, thirty-one, suspected homicide and corporate espionage involving classified defense systems. Last known in Arizona. Consider armed and dangerous."

He hung up and looked back at the kitchen one more time. The perfectly placed evidence. The conveniently clear prints. The victim shot in the back.

Something about this case didn't add up. And Marcus Reeves had built a career on the things that didn't add up.