Puppet Master Page 9

He looked at it suspiciously. Borya’s breath caught. The card was bogus, bought online for a fraction of its supposed value.

  Did he know it? Was he going to call the cops?

  She could get out of the shop easily enough, but it would mean leaving her bicycle behind.

  “Your strip’s peeling off,” said the clerk. “You should get another one.”

  “I, um.” Borya’s mouth was dry. “There’s still money on it and, uh, it’s really my dad’s. So—”

  “I can transfer it if you want.”

  “Uh . . . sure.”

  The clerk tapped his fingers across the cash register, whizzing the card and a new one through the reader on the register. Borya felt frozen, worried that it was a trap.

  “Fifty-five dollars and twenty-five cents left,” said the clerk, handing her the new card. “Your dad likes his coffee, huh?”

  “Lattes,” said Borya weakly. Then she had an inspiration. “Can I have the old card?”

  “It’s worthless now.” He had it in his hand, flexing it.

  “Yeah, but, my dad—I have to show it to him . . .”

  “Control freak, huh?”

  “Anal.”

  He handed it back to her. “Nothing on it now. It’s voided out.”

  “Thanks.”

  Borya’s chest didn’t unclench until she was outside the store. Loading cards up with bogus money was a silly game, easily discovered if the chain’s security people put their minds to it. Disposing of the evidence was the best strategy.

  Transferring balances from card to card—that was something she’d never considered. Did that make it more or less likely she’d be caught?

  Borya hung the bike chain around her neck and walked the bike away, coffee in hand. The possibility of getting caught, the rush of having escaped—it was better than any drug, certainly better than the vodka she snuck from the liquor cabinet.

  She passed the bank. There was someone at the ATM just outside the lobby door.

  Good, thought Borya, spying a bench a short distance away. I’ll drink the cappuccino while I’m waiting.

  It was only after chaining the bike and sitting down that she realized she had forgotten to put any sugar in. She decided she would drink it anyway, as a matter of discipline.

  I have to work on keeping my head straight, Borya told herself, taking a bitter sip. Panicking is the easiest way to get caught.

  18

  Cambridge, Massachusetts

  8:00 p.m.

  Chelsea dug into the suitcase and pulled out a case about the size of a cigar box.

  “These are small UAVs or drones that can stay aloft for eight hours,” she said. “We can use them to trail a suspect.”

  “They look like birds,” offered Jenkins from his spot by the truck. They were in the parking lot of an abandoned warehouse, a spot chosen not so much for its seclusion but for its almost perfect location, equidistant between four of the five ATMs they were going to watch.

  “That’s the idea. We call them Hums. It’s short for hummingbirds—not my idea,” Chelsea added quickly.

  “These can fly?”

  “Uh-huh. Once I assemble them.”

  Chelsea snapped a pair of wings onto the small mech, secured them, then walked a short distance from the van.

  “If it comes toward you, duck,” she told them.

  It was a joke, but they had no way of knowing. Which made it even funnier—to her, at least.

  Chelsea tossed the UAV upward. Suddenly the wings flapped to life, and the small robot began to fly in a circle around the lot. It was programmed to move in an ever-widening upward spiral until it reached three thousand feet; there it would await commands from a transmitter Chelsea had also brought along.

  About half again as big as a hummingbird, the Hums were propelled by their wings, which moved up and down at a rate that could approach sixty beats a second, depending on wind conditions. That was slower than a hummingbird, but not by much; the flying mech glided more than a bird would, reading the wind current and adjusting as necessary. It wasn’t particularly fast—the theoretical limit was twenty knots, though in real-world tests the fastest it had achieved was sixteen.

  “It’s not quick, so I don’t think we can follow a car once it’s out of the city,” she told the two FBI agents as she walked over to them. “But we can get a good picture of the license plate.”

  “That’ll be enough,” said Jenkins.

  Chelsea took another from the case. “We only need four to cover the entire area. They’ll stay aloft for about eight hours, depending on the wind. I do have to recover them. They’re expensive.”

  “Can I touch it?” Flores asked.

  “Of course.”

  He extended his hand gingerly, as if the Hum had been a real bird.

  “It’s made out of a carbon fiber compound and a kind of glass,” explained Chelsea. “It’s stronger than it seems.”

  Flores held it at arm’s length while Chelsea explained some of its features. There was an infrared camera attached in the forward area, about where a bird’s chin would be; this supplemented the guidance sensors located in the upper portion of the head. Unlike an autonomous robot like Peter, the Hum relied on a remote control station to direct it; it couldn’t make decisions on its own. The control unit had a preprogrammed mode for general maneuvers and unguided transport. In other words, it could be told to fly the Hum to a specific point at a specific time, hover there for x minutes, then fly to another point; it would cover that on its own. It could also be told to look for certain events and sound an alert, a function of particular value here.

  Smart Metal had far more capable robots, but Chelsea had chosen these because they were readily available and she was very familiar with the control unit. They were also commercial models; losing one would not be a big deal, aside from the cost.

  Chelsea launched the others in quick succession, then took the control unit into the van and plugged it into the power strip that ran along the bench at the side. While it booted up, she went back to the company pickup truck and took out the antenna assembly, a pair of inside-out umbrellas and whip array that looked a little like the business end of an anorexic devil’s pitchfork. Once they were attached to the roof of the van with the help of suction cups and clamps, Chelsea connected a thick cable to their mounts and ran it into the control unit.

  “I divided up the watch area into quadrants,” she told Jenkins and Flores. “It covers the whole area under surveillance.”

  “How do we fly them?” Flores asked, pointing at the controller. It looked like a bad marriage between a joystick and a laptop. The seventeen-inch-screen was ultra-high def, in sleek glass, and pretty much looked like something you’d see on any high-end laptop.

  The keyboard, though, had four rows of unmarked rectangles running above the joystick, which was flanked by a set of keys arranged in number-pad style. But these had symbols rather than numbers. And aside from an upside-down triangle and an infinity character, the markings bore no relation to anything found on a computer available at Best Buy.

  “They fly themselves. But you can give them verbal commands,” explained Chelsea.

  Flores reached for the keyboard.

  “Don’t touch,” she said quickly. “It’s active during the boot up. Once this part of the screen goes green, then we’re good. It will take voice commands. I have to get the headset,” Chelsea added. “Can I trust you to keep your hands off?”

  “We’re good,” said Jenkins. “No touching the entire time. This is all you.”

  Jenkins settled onto the little bench at the front of the van while Flores checked in with the surveillance teams.

  All this whiz-bang high-tech stuff—his head felt like it was spinning. He had trouble working the cable remote.

  But this was the way of the future. If it didn’t involve a computer screen, it wasn’t real.

  As kids, Jenkins and his brother solved crimes every day—usually several times. Their obsession began with a board
game—Clue—their mom had bought from a garage sale. At the precocious age of seven and eight, respectively, the Jenkins brothers had become the Starsky and Hutch of Danbury, Connecticut. They solved the mystery of the missing cat, the misdelivered newspaper, and countless other crimes, big and small.

  And then, both promptly forgot their obsession midway through high school. James found girls; Trevor found football. It was only after college that the younger Jenkins returned to the idea of becoming a detective, and it was in the most roundabout way: joining the Army after a failed collegiate career, he was recruited to CID by a friend from basic who was now a sergeant. CID—the Army Criminal Investigation Command—was the Army’s investigative corps. The vast bulk of the unit’s work, and certainly everything that Sgt. Trevor Jenkins was involved in, was extremely routine; his most exciting “case” was assisting an investigation into a string of barracks robberies. But the taste excited him, and he soon worked his way to police work, and from there to the FBI, with a brief stint in the Marshals Service in between.

  His brother, James, was a bored industrial psychologist when Trevor joined the Bureau. It didn’t take long to rekindle his interest; when there was an opening in the Behavioral Science Unit, James took all of thirty seconds to decide to apply. Making the switch to a field agent was more difficult, but a foregone conclusion.

  Now he was dead. Trevor Jenkins blamed himself, inevitably.

  “We’re good to go,” Flores told him. “You want me to drop Ms. Goodman off?”

  “She has to go alone,” said Jenkins, snapping from his reverie. “We watch, and move in if there’s trouble.”

  “Got it.”

  Luddite he might be, but the video from the Hums fascinated Jenkins. He’d expected that it would be moving. According to Chelsea and from what he could see on the control screen, the tiny aircraft circled over a set point in what she called an orbit with a five-hundred-meter radius. They were flying slowly, at about five miles an hour, but still, they were moving. So why didn’t the image?

  Chelsea explained that the computer compensated, adjusting the data from the IR sensor in the nose so that the view was always fixed. This was easier for an operator to understand, she explained; more importantly, it provided a set of data quicker for the computer to manipulate.

  “Manipulate, how?” asked Jenkins.

  “Scan it for significant objects,” said Chelsea. “Movement, intensity—it’s all a matter of math. Let’s say we were using the sensor system to monitor an area for forest fires. We want to be able to discriminate between certain heat sources easily. It’s a matrix, really; you want to be able to quickly convert the values, and you want to do everything as efficiently as possible. That’s where we get into the architecture of the processing chip—”

  “You lost me,” said Jenkins.

  “It’s an arbitrary image,” said Chelsea. “A representation of what the computer is actually seeing.”

  That didn’t really help, but Jenkins nodded as if it did. He glanced at Robinson, who was sitting at the side of the van, arms folded, quietly staring at Chelsea, as if he was trying to figure out how to ask her for a date.

  An hour passed. Customers came and went, sometimes in bunches, most often in ones and twos. Nothing suspicious occurred. Robinson began talking about baseball and advanced statistics; Chelsea seemed to know at least as much as he did about them, certainly more than Jenkins.

  “I’m going to stretch my legs,” said Jenkins. “Anybody want anything?”

  “Is there a Starbucks near here?” asked Chelsea.

  “On every block,” said Jenkins.

  “I’ll come with you.”

  “You have to watch the monitor.”

  She took out her cell phone. “It’ll beep if there’s something up. I can pull up the image.”

  Jenkins held the door open for her, feeling a little paternal, though he was a good ten years too young to be her father.

  “They have a lot of Starbucks in San Diego?” he asked as they waited.

  “Every corner.”

  “I’ve never been there.”

  “It’s a good place to visit. The weather’s always nice.”

  “So I hear.”

  They got her coffee—a blonde latte—and one for Robinson, then started back for the van.

  “I’m sorry about Johnny,” said Chelsea. “But there’s hope at least.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you know who was in that truck?”

  “They have a few leads—it’s a local matter.” Jenkins tried to hide his frustration—while he didn’t think the locals would do a bad job, he wanted to be on the case himself. But then he always felt that way.

  “I heard the truck was stolen,” said Chelsea.

  “Yup.”

  “It didn’t seem to be connected to this.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  They walked a half block more without saying anything. Chelsea broke the silence. “Your daughter has one of our prosthetics.”

  “That’s right,” said Jenkins.

  “Your wife mentioned it. Mr. Massina will really help Johnny.”

  “I’m sure he will.”

  “Can he go back to work with you?”

  “Probably not.”

  In fact, it would be almost impossible for Johnny to return to the Bureau, at least in the sort of job he’d had. But that was something to worry about in the future. Right now, he just had to live.

  Jenkins stopped. They were a few feet from the van. He took a long sip from his coffee, thinking of the night when his daughter had been brought into the hospital. It had been a desperate night; he was sure they’d lost her. And then when she’d recovered—seeing her without the leg the first time nearly undid him completely—he’d struggled to try and smile for her even as tears had flowed down the sides of his face.

  His wife had been so much stronger.

  “Your daughter’s away at college?” asked Chelsea.

  “Yeah. USC. She wants to go into film. Be a director.”

  “Nice.”

  “I think she picked the school because it’s on the other side of the country,” chuckled Jenkins.

  “It’s a really good school for film.”

  “I think it’s a tough business,” he said, giving the answer he always gave. “But if it makes her happy.”

  Chelsea’s phone beeped.

  “I think we got something,” she said, reaching for the van door.

  The figure in the infrared was five-eight and thin, dressed in jeans and a hooded sweatshirt. He’d taken something out of his backpack at the ATM, a walkup on the outside of a bank building three miles away. The Hum didn’t have a good enough angle to see what he did with it, but his hands were free as he left the machine.

  “Can you get a picture of his face?” Jenkins asked.

  “I’m trying.” Chelsea slid her fingers around the glass pad at the center of the control panel. She tapped twice, then pinched her fingers. The image changed; they were now looking from a feed focused ahead of the Hum, as if seeing through its eyes.

  The figure was about fifty yards ahead of the Hum, walking quickly. Chelsea directed the drone to circle forward, banking so that it would come around from the front. But before it reached him, the suspect ducked into an alley. As Chelsea urged the drone on, he emerged on a bicycle and began riding back in the direction of the ATM.

  He was fast, very fast—the little UAV couldn’t keep up. The suspect turned left at the end of the block, then rode down a long hill. He was soon out of sight.

  “It’s all right,” said Jenkins finally.

  “I didn’t think he’d use a bike,” admitted Chelsea. “Or be so quick. I could have directed the others to help.”

  “It’s fine. Let’s go check the ATM. Robinson, you stay with the van.”

  Chelsea ordered the Hum to orbit the area, watching in case the suspect came back.

  “I want you to stay in the car while I check the place out,” he tol
d her as they drove. “Just in case.”

  “In case what?”

  “If they’re still around.”

  “The profile on these kinds of criminals is overwhelmingly nonviolent,” said Chelsea.

  “Where’d you hear that?”

  “I did my homework.”

  “Even so.”

  “I can take care of myself,” insisted Chelsea.

  Jenkins laughed.

  “What’s so funny?” she said, more a challenge than a question.

  He glanced sideways as he drove. Her face was taut with anger far out of proportion with the situation, or so he thought.

  “I didn’t mean it as an insult. I just, you know, it’s a question of common sense. Even I’m cautious.”

  “I was back in the car when Johnny got hit. If I’d been with him, he wouldn’t have been.”

  “I doubt that. You would have been run over, too.”

  “I have to go to the bank machine,” said Chelsea. “You said that’s the way we’d work.”

  “Once we check it out, fine.”

  Chelsea waited anxiously while Jenkins walked around the ATM. Finally he waved her over.

  She hopped out of the car, anxious to see what the suspect had planted. Her heart was pounding.

  “It’s clean,” said Jenkins as she approached. “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Nope. Nada.”

  “Damn.”

  “Can you tell if the ATM was used?” he asked.

  “It didn’t trip the monitoring software,” she said. “So, if it was used, there was nothing strange about it.”

  “We’ll keep it under surveillance,” said Jenkins. “But it doesn’t look good.”

  He sounded as if he’d just lost a million-dollar bet.

  19

  Crimea, same day

  After delivering the information to the resistance messenger in Kerch, Tolevi headed back south, this time to a village in the center of the peninsula. He was visiting his mother-in-law.

  It wasn’t a visit in the conventional sense—he wouldn’t see her while he was there. This was best for both; neither could stand to be in the other’s presence for very long. The old lady blamed him for her daughter’s death with a mother’s logic: if he hadn’t kept her in America, her baby would still be alive.