JK: let me guess. you have an answer.
SW: yeah. a really bad one. remember how we tracked the drones coming from colombia via haiti on satellite pix?
I remembered the conversation in Clark’s office, what felt like a million years ago. Squadrons of thirty drones a day had been caught on camera flying across the Caribbean to the USA. That was how we had concluded Ortega had at a hundred and twenty drones at his disposal; it was four days roundtrip between Colombia and Florida.
JK: sure.
SW: well, we have not ever found pictures of any flying back to colombia. looked hard. no dice. initially we figured they just took a different route, maybe overland via mexico. but that makes no sense. you increase discovery risk by an order of magnitude, for nothing.
SW: am starting to think: maybe the real reason ortega is attacking the g8 is because someone else put him up to it.
SW: am starting to think: maybe we never found drones going back to colombia because none of them ever went back.
I read that three times. It didn’t make any more sense the second or third time.
SW: thirty drones a day for more than a year makes approximately 12,000 drones in total.
I goggled at that number for a second before responding.
JK: no way. not possible.
SW: i wish you were right but you’re not.
I shook my head violently at the screen.
JK: no. the money doesn’t add up. twelve thousand drones at half a million $ per is six billion dollars. plus costs to build the factory and fabrication plant, plus shipping, security, sundry. call it ten billion. even ortega’s not that rich. And they would have had to have started years ago.
SW: exactly, exactly, exactly. ortega couldn’t have done it. only major nation-states can plan and commit resources like that.
SW: my increasingly terrifyingly plausible worst-case scenario is this: the g8 is just a test run. a nation-state – china? russia? iran? – has been using ortega as a deniable sockpuppet to smuggle 12,000 drones into america, and is now preparing a massive drone attack that will bomb the usa back to the bronze age.
SW: it’s the only theory that explains everything.
SW: please tell me i’m wrong.
Chapter 59
I stared at the screen. I felt like the whole world was wobbling around me, and the blood in my veins had frozen into icewater. I had watched six drones destroy a heavily guarded military compound. Six more had killed more than a hundred New Yorkers. I could hardly begin to imagine the havoc that twelve thousand might wreak on an unprepared nation.
It was crazy, it sounded like some apocalyptic conspiracy, far too terrifying and gargantuan to be true – but it explained so much. Who had retrained Sophie’s drones with new capabilities: a whole team of military experts somewhere. Why Dmitri had lied to me: they had always intended to let me go eventually, so I could support the “it was all the drug cartels” story. Why they had attacked New York and planned to attack the G8: nothing to do with Ortega showcasing his wares, both of those attacks were probes, testing the waters to see what defenses the West could muster. They had a gun to America’s head and were checking to make sure it wouldn’t blow up in their hand if and when they pulled the trigger. The G8 attack doubled as a decapitatation strike, eliminating leadership and sowing chaos before the real assault began.
My fingers typed my thoughts:
JK: holy
JK: fucking
JK: shit.
SW: indeed.
SW: where are you? can i come see you?
At that irrational rage flared in me again.
JK: anya and jesse and i are a little busy trying to save the g8. also, I’m the world’s third most-wanted man or something, thank you so much for that, so i’m kind of trying to minimize my social calendar just now.
SW: sorry about that. don’t worry, we’ll get it all sorted out when this over. please believe me. everything was necessary. i’ll explain when i see you.
I couldn’t believe she actually thought she could explain all this away. As if what she had done to me just needed to be fixed, like an engineering problem, and everything would be hunky-dory again.
I logged out. Between the sudden enormity of the stakes, and the poisonous feeling that curdled in me every time Sophie said anything personal, I couldn’t take any more. Besides, it didn’t matter what I said or thought. Sophie and Jesse and Anya would take things from here. They were the extraordinary ones. What I did had never been relevant. Even my triumphant escape from Mexico had been redundant.
I made my way back up to the greenhouse, drawn there by instinct. Its fecund sights and smells were somehow life-affirming, and just then I needed all the affirmation I could get. I sat on the wrought-iron bench and stared at nothing, awed sick by the magnitude and horror of what Sophie had suggested. Twelve thousand kamikaze drones in the USA, armed and ready to be launched on an utterly devastating attack.
But no, it was too crazy. How could anyone plan to hit the USA with a crippling military attack and still hope to remain anonymous?
Then again, after such an attack, America might be too busy dying to mount any investigation. With twelve thousand drones you could wipe out most major power plants, refineries, pipelines, airports, hospitals, dams, bridges, rail lines, communications centres, server farms – the whole country would shut down for weeks. I tried to imagine New York and L.A. with no power, gas, communications or food deliveries, for maybe a month.
It was a terrifying thought. The USA was built on fragile infrastructure, as the 2003 power outage and Hurricane Katrina disaster had proved. If that infrastructure was all destroyed at once, there would be looting, riots, maybe even starvation before stability was reestablished, weeks or even months later. The economy would collapse like a punctured balloon, and take decades to recover. And that only if the enemy didn’t follow up the first crippling blow with others.
But it wouldn’t happen, I reassured myself, because we had a secret weapon. We could still use Sophie’s override to shut down their drones, and the enemy didn’t even know it existed. The only people who did were me, Sophie, Jesse and Anya.
The enemy. The power behind Ortega, if Sophie was right. Who?
I decided to go back and re-establish IM contact. What she had done to me was unforgivable but we had to work together now. There was too much at stake.
I stood and walked about twenty paces away from that metal bench. Then I stopped, hesitated a moment, and turned back.
Something nagging at my brain. That little piece of paper on the empty plot across from the bench, the one with the spiral diagram and the flowery footnotes – it looked oddly familiar. Not the diagram. The distinctive handwriting. That big, flowery, and somehow feminine cursive script. It looked very much like the writing on the note I had found in Jorge Ortega’s torture chamber.
A weird coincidence. My mind playing tricks on me in a stressful moment. I turned and walked away again. This time I got as far as the door to the greenhouse.
Then I turned back again, and returned to the bench again, and stared at that little piece of paper again.
It looked a lot like that note in Mexico.
Anya’s handwriting? Probably. This greenhouse garden seemed to be her personal fiefdom.
But of course it couldn’t have been Anya’s handwriting in that horrifying room of blood I had found deep beneath that abandoned military academy in Mexico. Right? Anya and Kharlamov couldn’t be on the other side, working for the shadowy forces behind Ortega.