“No time, and even if I could launch a missile, I wouldn’t know where to shoot it. Right now I don’t know where the drone is.”
Julia just leaned against the counter and folded her arms.
“Jesus, that is not helping,” Angel said. She couldn’t even look at Julia.
“What about — I don’t know,” Wilkes said. “When they taught us to infiltrate buildings, they said, if the doors are locked, make ’em open the doors. Set off a fire alarm so they all come rushing out. Or just set the place on fire.”
“What does that have to do with anything?” Angel demanded.
“I’m just trying to think a different way. You know, outside the box. Or inside the box in this case. Listen, the drone is jamming us, right? What if we jammed it? Like, its radar or something.”
“Possible,” Angel said, “but then it still has its cameras and the best pattern recognition software money can buy. If its radar went down, it would just ignore the radar. Unless — unless we spoofed it.”
“What’s spoofing?” Julia asked.
“That’s when, instead of jamming a signal with white noise, you actually send a false signal. Make the radar think there’s something in front of the drone, that it’s about to collide with another plane or something. It would veer off course.” She shook her head. “But that’s no good. Again, it’s got that camera. It would check the camera, see there was nothing there, and ignore the radar. And there’s no way to spoof the camera — at least, no way we’re going to make happen in five minutes.”
“Okay,” Wilkes said. “But if we had more time, how would we—”
“Wait,” Angel said.
A look of utter concentration came over her face. She put her hands out at her sides as if warding off distractions.
“Wait,” she said again.
“Okay,” Julia said. “We’re waiting.”
Angel looked her right in the eyes. “The drone has that fancy camera. But the bombs don’t.”
“How does that help?” Wilkes asked.
“We wait until it drops its bombs. These aren’t Hellfire missiles, they’re Viper Strikes. They’re guided after they drop. Guided straight to their targets, by GPS.”
“Okay,” Julia said.
“So we don’t spoof the drone’s radar. We spoof the entire GPS.”
“You’re going to kill thousands of people,” Hollingshead sputtered. “Just to make the president look like a fool.”
“No,” Norton said. “I’m going to kill thousands of people so that the president looks weak. So that it’s clear to everyone he can’t control his people through ordinary channels. Even if he doesn’t declare martial law on his own, Congress will insist on it. I have a few senators I can count on. And once martial law is declared—”
“ — the military will be in de facto control of the entire country,” Hollingshead said, nodding. “And you control the military. You’ll be given the justification to do whatever it takes to restore order. You’ll have power over every aspect of American life. You’ll tell people where they’re allowed to move, what time they have to be inside at night. You’ll have the power to nationalize whole industries and commandeer any goods or services you claim to need. And of course, suspend all elections as you see fit, until the time of crisis has passed.”
“And I’ll be the one who decides when that is,” Norton pointed out.
“The people will be very angry,” Hollingshead said. “They’ll hate this. But they won’t blame you — after all, you’ll just be doing what the president asked you to do. They’ll blame him.” Hollingshead very much wished his hands were free. He would have liked to polish his glasses. It was what he did when he needed time to think. “Simplicity itself. A flawless plan. I suppose one doesn’t rise to a vital cabinet position if one isn’t a little brilliant.”
“Thank you, Rupert. That actually means a lot,” Norton said, with a genuine smile.
Hollingshead grinned back. “Of course, it won’t last. Tyranny never does. The people will revolt.”
Norton opened his mouth to say something more, but he was interrupted by the sound of more gunshots out in the hall.
“Do you suppose,” he said when silence fell again, “that was mine or yours?”
“I imagine,” Hollingshead said, “we’re about to find out.”
Chapel had lost so much blood he could barely stand upright, but he was still strong enough to shoot. He leaned against the wall of the storeroom, right next to the door. He closed his eyes — the better to hear the approaching guards, he told himself. It had nothing to do with the fact that he was about to pass out.
He could hear them getting closer. Since his only plan relied on getting off two perfectly placed point-blank shots the second he stepped into the hallway, he wanted them as close as possible. He forced himself to wait, to concentrate.
He kept thinking about the fact he hadn’t said good-bye to Julia. Not properly, anyway. Nor had he told Angel what she’d meant to him over the years.
He hoped that she knew.
He forced open his eyes.
He stepped out into the hall and started shooting.
“More,” Angel said. “One more. Come on!”
At least now Julia could understand what showed on the laptop’s screen. It showed a simplified map of Washington, covered in tiny red dots. Each of those was a cell-phone tower. As Angel seized control of them, one by one, they turned green.
“I don’t understand,” Julia said. “I thought the drone was jamming all the radio frequencies.”
“It is,” Angel said. “Those towers aren’t getting any phone signals through. But GPS is different. It was designed by the military, originally, and it includes a technology called DSSS to get around jamming. Anything I send through those towers, if it uses DSSS, is going to look like GPS coordinates. If I can send the bombs fake coordinates, I can fool them into hitting the wrong targets.”
“Doesn’t GPS come from satellites, not cell towers?” Wilkes asked.
“Yeah. The drone would know it was being fooled, but the bombs aren’t smart enough to tell the difference. Any radio signal with DSSS looks the same to them. The trick,” she said, tapping at her trackpad until another tower turned green, “is to get enough towers up and running. The bombs are still getting real GPS data from the satellites. That signal is still stronger than what I’m putting out. But if I can take over enough cell towers, I can overwhelm the satellite signal and fool the bombs.”
Wilkes started to ask another question, but Julia put a hand on his arm and shook her head. Angel needed to concentrate.
On the screen another tower turned green. And another. Angel nodded encouragingly. Then she spat out an obscenity as one of her green towers turned back to red.
Wilkes bent his head down to whisper to Julia. “Is this going to work?”
“No idea,” Julia told him. “Normally I’d say it was impossible. But it’s Angel. So — maybe?”
On the laptop, three more towers turned green.
A fourth.
Two more.
“Please,” Angel said. “Please just work.”
Julia glanced out the plateglass windows of the bakery, as if she could see the drone out there. As if she could see the bombs falling from the sky.
“Please,” Angel said.
“Please.”
A logic gate in the electronic guts of the Gray Eagle clicked open, and a signal moved forward through the maze of its processors. A circuit was completed and a command issued.
Under its belly, four clamps opened simultaneously. The clamps were all that held the Viper Strike bombs to the drone, and now they dropped away.