UAV - Chapter 7

1

Helen checked the security monitor one last time before heading to the cells. The feed was grainy, black-and-white, piped through a camera system that had been installed when the building was still a functioning police station. On screen, Jack Wallis was finally moving. He'd been unconscious for fourteen hours—longer than she'd anticipated. The sedative, combined with the alcohol, had hit him harder than Beck.

Beck had woken up six hours ago. Francis had put him to work immediately, sitting him in front of a terminal and explaining what was expected. Beck had told Francis to go to hell, which was exactly the response Helen had predicted. Francis had responded by breaking a chair. Also predicted.

She left the monitoring room and walked down the corridor toward the holding cells. The old police station smelled of mildew and stale concrete, a permanent mustiness that seeped into everything. JanCorp had maintained the building for years while letting the official records lapse—perfect for black operations, invisible to municipal authorities. But they hadn't bothered with air fresheners.

On her way, she passed the room where they were keeping Imran. The Markwell engineer sat hunched over a folding table, mapping out network architecture on a laptop while William's shadow filled the doorway behind him. Imran's wire-rimmed glasses had slipped down his nose and his ink-stained fingers moved across the keyboard with mechanical precision, but his eyes were empty. The fight had gone out of him three days ago, when Victor had shown him photographs of his daughters walking to school in Islamabad—taken that morning.

Helen paused in the corridor. A brilliant man reduced to a tool. She'd told herself Imran was a willing consultant when they'd first brought him from Lahore. Victor's story. She didn't believe it anymore.

She kept walking.

The cell block door groaned when she pushed it open. The fluorescent light above Jack's cell flickered with an irregular buzz, casting shadows that jumped across the cinder block walls. The paint had faded to a sickly green, chipped and dusty. The place looked exactly like what it was—a tomb that hadn't been used in decades.

Jack was sitting on the steel bed, head in his hands. He'd been sitting like that for ten minutes according to the monitor, not moving, just breathing. Working through the fog of the drugs and the reality of his situation. When he heard the door, he shot to his feet, and rage ignited behind his bloodshot eyes.

She kept her expression neutral. Smiled, even. The cheerful mask was easier than the alternative.

"Hi, Jack," she said. "Glad to see you finally awake."

He didn't reply immediately. The war played out across his face—anger fighting fear, both of them fighting confusion. His fists were clenched at his sides, knuckles white against the bars. He wanted to grab her. The tension screamed from his shoulders, from the way his jaw worked.

But he was smart enough to know it wouldn't help. After a moment, the rage banked down to something colder.

"What do you want?" he asked. His voice came out rough, scraped raw.

"I heard you were a fantastic chef," she replied with a grin, "and we were hoping to steal your recipe for chocolate truffles."

Nothing. Not even a twitch.

"No, not even a chuckle? Tough crowd. I thought the reason was obvious."

"I'm a drone pilot." His voice was flat, stripped of everything.

"Bingo." She pointed at him like a gun. "Bang. You're a lot smarter when you aren't drunk. Or drugged. Sorry about that, by the way. Had to make sure you came quietly."

He straightened, reaching for whatever leverage he thought he had. "I'm an Air Force pilot, and they will be looking for me. The military doesn't take kindly to kidnapping their personnel. You don't..."

He trailed off when she started laughing. She couldn't help it—the naivety was almost endearing.

"Oh, Jack." She wiped her eyes. "You really think anyone's looking for you? You're a drone pilot. You sit in a trailer in Nevada flying robots over the Middle East. They probably won't even notice you're missing for a few weeks. Maybe a month."

The words landed. Hope drained from his face like water through a sieve.

"And worse," she continued, "you left of your own accord. Snuck off base using hacked credentials. So even if they were looking for you, it's to charge you with a crime and then discharge you."

Jack had no answer for that. His shoulders dropped. He was running through the same logic she'd already mapped: AWOL, hacked credentials, court-martial offense. Even if he got free, he had nothing to go back to.

She straightened up and gave him a mock bow. "My name really is Helen, by the way. I wasn't lying to you about that."

"What do you want?" he repeated.

"What does anyone want? World peace? A million dollars? Good health?"

"I'm not interested in idle chit-chat," Jack said, anger seeping back into his voice, his hands balling into fists again. "So tell me what the hell you want or get out."

The smile faded. She pulled out a tablet from her back pocket, tapped through to the security logs she'd compiled. Network traffic analysis, access records, the trail Beck had left through the military systems. She held it up so Jack could see.

"You helped hack the satellite relay that runs your drone software," she said. "And we need you to do it again."

He opened his mouth—to deny it, she could tell, to claim mistaken identity—and then stopped. Understanding bloomed across his face, followed almost immediately by something that looked like hysteria.

He started laughing. Deep, gasping laughter that echoed off the cinder block walls.

Helen's face went hot. "What's so funny?"

"You think I hacked something?" Jack gasped. "You kidnapped me because you think I'm some kind of hacker? I can barely turn my computer on. I can't help you."

"Bullshit," she snapped, tapping the tablet. "Your login was used to bypass the security systems. You and Beck hacked into the security network, disabled monitoring, spoofed location data. That's not amateur hour."

"Beck used my login," Jack said, the laughter dying. "He's the computer guy. I just fly the drones. But I sure as hell didn't hack anything. I wouldn't even know where to start."

Helen stared at him. She'd interrogated enough people to recognize a lie, and Jack Wallis was not lying. The earnestness in his voice, the bewildered frustration—this wasn't a performance. He genuinely couldn't hack anything.

"You're serious," she said.

"Completely."

"You really can't hack anything."

"I can barely use Excel."

Helen's jaw clenched. She turned away, a string of profanity escaping under her breath. Hours of surveillance. The blonde wig. The perfume. The carefully orchestrated honeytrap at the MGM Grand. All of it wasted.

"We didn't need both," she said toward the cell block door.

Victor's voice came from the hallway, deep and cold. "I thought we would."

2

She stormed into the office where Victor was reviewing tactical maps, her jaw clenched so tight it ached. He barely looked up when she entered.

"We didn't need both," she said, slamming the tablet down on the desk.

"I thought we would," Victor replied with a shrug. His voice was maddeningly calm, like they were discussing lunch options instead of a failed kidnapping.

"You had me dress up like a doll to trick this guy, and he isn't even useful to us. He can't hack anything. He's just the pilot."

Victor set down his map. "You did look pretty nice in that dress, though."

Helen's face flushed. "Screw off."

Victor ignored the outburst, tapping his chin. His eyes went distant, calculating. Always three steps ahead, always running scenarios. That was what made him effective. And terrifying.

"So what do we do with Jack now?" she asked, forcing professionalism back into her voice. "Let him go? Drop him somewhere?"

"Not yet. Not until after we're done with Beck."

"Why? He's deadweight. Extra mouth to feed, extra risk. If he escapes or someone finds him, it compromises the entire operation."

Victor leaned back. "Then don't feed him. Not like he's going anywhere."

Helen waited, uncertain whether that was a joke. With Victor, you could never tell.

"Victor."

"Relax. We'll feed him. Minimal rations, enough to keep him alive." He picked up his map, made a notation. "Jack might still be useful."

"How? He admitted he can't do anything we need."

"Tell me something," Victor said, not looking up. "Why do you think Beck used his login?"

"What?"

"Beck's the hacker. Good enough to penetrate military-grade security. So why use Jack's credentials instead of his own?"

The same question had nagged Helen when she'd first analyzed the network logs. "If Beck was a good enough hacker, he might think people are watching him specifically. Security services monitor high-value targets, flag unusual activity. But they wouldn't be watching Jack. A standard drone pilot, no red flags. Using Jack's login would be simple operational security."

"So you don't think he was trying to throw Jack under the bus?"

"I doubt it. More likely trying to protect them both."

"Good," Victor said, standing. His chair scraped against the floor. "Then Jack has use. Same principle as Imran—everyone cooperates once you find the right pressure point."

The casual way he said it made Helen's skin crawl. He talked about people the way an engineer talked about components.

"What do you mean?"

Victor walked to the window. Sunlight streamed through dirty glass, casting shadows across his face. "Beck cares about Jack. You said so yourself. There's loyalty, friendship. That's a lever we can use."

"You want to threaten Jack to make Beck cooperate."

"Not just threaten. Having Jack gives us insurance. Beck tries to sabotage the operation, Jack pays the price. Beck thinks about running, he knows we have his friend."

"Victor, that's..." She trailed off. What was she going to say? She'd already crossed a dozen moral lines working for JanCorp.

"It's effective," Victor finished. "And that's all that matters. We have a timeline. Beck needs to crack the military network, give us full access to their drone fleet. If having Jack in a cell speeds that process up, then Jack stays in the cell."

"What if Beck calls your bluff?"

Victor turned to face her. His expression was cold, empty. "Then we don't bluff. We make an example. One bullet, quick and clean. Then we ask Beck again, very politely, to cooperate."

Helen's stomach turned. "You'd actually kill Jack? An innocent man?"

"Innocent is relative. He aided and abetted Beck's hack, even if he didn't understand what he was doing."

"That's a rationalization and you know it."

"Maybe. But it helps me sleep at night." He smiled without warmth. "Not that I have trouble sleeping anyway."

He walked toward the door. "Keep Jack isolated. No communication with Beck. I want them separated until we need to use one against the other. And Helen?"

She looked up. "Yeah?"

"Stop second-guessing the operation. You signed up for this. JanCorp pays you very well to do jobs like this. If you can't handle the moral ambiguity, maybe you're in the wrong line of work."

He left before she could respond.

3

Helen stood alone in the office, staring at the tactical maps spread across the desk. Lines and circles, attack vectors and timelines. Everything reduced to data points and objectives.

Jack in his cell. Confused, scared, thinking about his family. Beck being forced to hack military systems under duress, knowing his friend's life hung in the balance. Imran down the hall, a brilliant man reduced to a hollow-eyed puppet because Victor had photographs of his children.

The drones they would hijack. The damage they would cause.

Her sister Kate, who'd died trying to stop operations just like this one.

Helen closed her eyes. When had she become this person? When had doing the wrong thing for the right reasons turned into just doing wrong things?

The answer eluded her. And that scared her more than Victor ever could.

Kate wouldn't have run. The realization cut through her like a knife. The last time they'd been together—really together, not trading encrypted messages across time zones—was Kate's kitchen floor at two in the morning, eating cold pad thai from the carton because all the plates were packed for storage. Kate deploying in six hours and Helen pretending she wasn't terrified. At the door, Kate had grabbed her hand. *Don't let them use you, Hel. You're smarter than all of them combined. Promise me.* Helen had promised. She'd broken that promise every single day since.

Kate had tried to stop Victor, tried to expose what JanCorp was really doing. And Victor had killed her for it. A car bomb. Quick and brutal.

Helen had spent two years telling herself she was playing the long game. Gathering evidence. Waiting for the right moment. But the truth was simpler and uglier: she was a coward. She stayed because leaving meant risking her life, and she wasn't brave enough to make that choice.

She looked down at her hands. The same hands that had kidnapped Jack. That had worked on the code that would let Victor hijack military drones. That had sat across from Imran while he walked her through the Markwell architecture, his voice flat and hollow, a man complying under the weight of threats she pretended not to understand.

What would Kate think of her now?

The answer was obvious. And it made her sick.

She looked at the tactical maps again. Victor's handwriting—tight, precise, each notation coded in a shorthand only his team understood. Target coordinates. Drone patrol schedules. Communication frequencies. Everything she needed to expose the entire operation, laid out on paper like a blueprint for mass murder.

Helen pulled out her phone and took six photographs. Each one framed carefully, capturing every marking, every notation. She saved them to an encrypted folder on her personal cloud storage—not the JanCorp account, the one she'd set up years ago under a false name, the one Kate had taught her to use.

It wasn't much. If Victor caught her, these photos would be her death warrant. But if she could get them to someone—the FBI, a journalist, anyone outside JanCorp's reach—they would be enough to unravel the entire operation.

She deleted the camera roll, cleared the recently deleted folder, and set the phone face-down on the desk. Her pulse hammered in her ears.

Then she walked down the corridor to the server room where she'd been building the drone infiltration software. The terminal glowed in the dim light, her code filling the screen. Clean, efficient, lethal—exactly what Victor had asked for.

She sat down and opened the authentication module. The handshake protocol she'd designed would give Victor seamless access to the military drone network. She scrolled to the error-handling layer—the code that managed what happened when multiple drone sessions competed for the same authentication channel.

She modified the collision-recovery routine. A subtle change: instead of staggering retry attempts with randomized delays, she hardcoded a fixed retry interval. During testing with one or two drones, the system would perform flawlessly—collisions would be rare, and the fixed interval would resolve them on the first attempt. But if someone tried to hijack multiple drones simultaneously, the identical retry timing would cause their authentication requests to collide again and again in an endless loop. The system would choke on its own traffic.

It was the kind of bug that looked like an honest mistake. A junior developer's oversight, not sabotage. Even Beck, as sharp as he was, would need hours of load testing with multiple simulated drones to spot it. And Victor would never give him that kind of time.

Helen saved the file, committed it to the local repository, and leaned back in her chair. Her hands were steady for the first time in days.

No more hesitation.