Drone Threat

47

Meghan Osweiler’s phone rang. Hardly unusual for the assistant managing editor for foreign and national news at the Los Angeles Times. What surprised her was the message from the unidentified voice on the other end. A woman. It was familiar but she couldn’t place it.

“How do you know about this?”

“It doesn’t matter,” the voice said.

“It’s not possible.” Osweiler’s head ached. She’d missed breakfast and her late lunch was still an hour away. “I have sources in the water department. I would’ve heard about this already.”

“Not if it was labeled a national security issue.”

“How did you get my direct number? It’s unlisted.”

“All that matters is that you confirm what I’ve told you and get the word out. For God’s sake, it’s a public safety issue.”

“I’ll confirm it first. What we do with it after that is up to the managing editor.”

“I know you’ll do the right thing.” The voice went on to provide an address as well as the name of an FBI special agent from the L.A. bureau office, someone Osweiler happened to know.

Osweiler’s phone disconnected. She wasn’t sure if she should shout with triumph over the story of the year — she was already thinking Pulitzer — or race home, gather up her two shelter cats and Yorkshire terrier, and jump on the next plane to Alaska.

Her throat suddenly parched. She glanced at the half-empty glass of water on her desk. She picked it up gingerly with her thumb and forefinger and poured the contents into the wastebasket, then tossed the glass in after it. She called her assistant and told her to bring a can of cold Diet Dr Pepper and a couple of Tylenol from the break room.

It was going to be a long afternoon.

Grafton slipped her cell phone back into her purse, flushed the toilet, and stepped over to the sink, still stinging over the snub of getting cut out of today’s meeting with Lane, Tarkovsky, and al-Saud.

Damn them. Damn them to hell.

She washed her hands. This was the best way for her to keep control of the narrative. Osweiler was a bulldog. She wouldn’t let this story die even if her boss tried to spike it. Osweiler would go over his head or, more likely, step on it — and get his job in the bargain.

Grafton stared at herself in the mirror. Checked her lipstick and her long red hair. Didn’t like what she saw. She frowned. Her hair looked tired. Maybe it was too long.

Time for a change, she decided.

Tamar had been studying Pike’s lake house from a distance all morning. She couldn’t hear the crunch of his tires on the gravel driveway but she watched the black windowless Chinook Charter panel van pull out of his driveway and onto the two-lane asphalt road. She checked her watch. It would take him approximately twenty-five minutes to reach his charter boat in Cheboygan and probably another thirty minutes to load everyone on board for the afternoon excursion, which was scheduled to end at five o’clock. She’d wait fifteen minutes before she moved toward the house just in case Pike forgot something and decided to turn around.

She checked her phone again, hoping Pearce had called her back. She would’ve liked an extra pair of hands on this job, especially his, but he was a big shot in the American government now and probably up to his blue eyes in paperwork and committee meetings. She chuckled.

Poor bastard.

Tamar made her way on foot through the trees, careful to avoid the watchful eyes of the security cameras on the house she’d observed through her binoculars. The cameras didn’t surprise her. If Pike was the threat Mossad thought he was, he’d have a security system in place. If not, it was reasonable for a person in a remote location like this to secure his property from thieves. Either way, she’d anticipated the presence of them and had prepared accordingly.

Fortunately the camera over the entrance facing the lake had been disconnected. Probably needed to be replaced, she assumed. She worked her way around to the side of the house, hugging her shoulder bag close. She was reasonably confident that she couldn’t be identified. She wore a ball cap to cover her angular face, dark hair, and clear green eyes. Her skin was hidden beneath long sleeves and slacks, and she wore blue surgical gloves to avoid leaving fingerprints. The goal was to keep Pike from knowing that anyone had entered his house at all. She easily picked the keyed lock on the electrical panel and opened it up. She flicked off the main power switch, disabling the cameras and likely alarm systems on the property.

Confident that she could move freely about, she dashed to the front entrance, quickly picked the sliding door lock open, and pushed through the heavy curtains. Without lights and the curtains drawn the house was dark. She pulled out her tactical flashlight and smartphone and shot video as she passed through each room as quickly and efficiently as possible, careful not to disturb anything. At this point she was only trying to locate a hidden safe, military-grade weapons, or, best of all, his personal computer — anything to confirm Mossad’s suspicions and, ideally, help locate their missing agent.

Twenty minutes into her search Tamar found the bedroom door with the heavy security bracket and a simple combination lock. Not a problem. Tamar removed an automated lock picker from her shoulder bag and placed it on the lock’s black dial. Two seconds later it popped.

She pushed the door open and stepped in.

Inside she found two long workstation tables loaded with video monitors, keyboards, joysticks, and a virtual-reality headset. At first she thought it was a film-editing suite, but the joysticks didn’t make any sense. Maybe he was a crazy online gamer. That would explain the VR, too. His brief said he had a background in computer science and did some contracting work for the U.S. government in Iraq.

What bothered her was the electronic hum of the CPUs on the floor below. How was that possible? The power was off. Her heart skipped a beat. Had she missed something? She double-checked the security camera in the far corner. It was clearly powered off. What was going on?

Battery backup power for the computers. Of course. She stepped over to a closet door and saw the power cable snaking through the green shag carpet. She opened the door and found three large battery backup systems. Thank God Pike hadn’t thought to do the same with the security system.

She shut the door and turned around. Something caught her eye hanging on the far wall.

It was a small reproduction print in a cheap frame. She recognized it instantly because she had written a paper on French Romanticism for an art course at university. It was Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa. A brilliant piece of work, tragic in subject but beautiful in both its realism and construction. Strange it should be here, she thought, but then again perhaps not. Pike was a boat captain and its subject was the sea. It was the image of survivors on a raft on the verge of rescue having suffered the fate of people lost a long while on the ocean and the hard moral choices the starving often face. Géricault’s meaning was clear, her professor had insisted: Civilizations must sometimes be reduced to savage barbarism in order to survive.

Did Pike know that? Not likely, she decided. He had probably bought the print at a garage sale.

She stepped over to one of the keyboards and pressed the power button. The screen flashed on. It required a password to proceed. That was a lock that Tamar knew she couldn’t pick, but Lev could. He was the best in the business. He was the IT officer assigned to her case and he was on standby waiting for her call. If anyone could break into a secured system it was him. She dialed and he picked up instantly. She pulled out the necessary cable and connectors from her pouch to link her phone to the CPU so that Lev could begin remotely hacking into Pike’s computer. Once connected, she pulled up the rolling executive chair and plopped down into it, leaning in close to the screen to watch Lev move the arrow and operate the keystrokes remotely from his office in Tel Aviv. He was on speakerphone.

“It’s going to take a little while. Not your typical password protection.”

“I’ve got plenty of time. No worries,” she said. “Pike is far away and won’t be back for hours.”

Pike sat in his van on the side of the road, admiring Tamar’s lovely face in his laptop monitor. Her green eyes and sharp nose were slightly distorted because she was sitting so close to the computer monitor back at his house, and the glow of the light from the screen muddied the color of her beautiful bronze skin.

He fired up the engine and put the van into gear. He was very much looking forward to seeing much more of that beautiful bronze flesh in a better light very soon.