“Right. Watch.”
McKinney saw a luminous human form run from her cabin. This was apparently infrared imagery, highlighting heat sources. She watched herself sprint into the jungle, where she was soon lost beneath the dense canopy. Moments later an object streaked into the frame and impacted on her cabin—whiting out the screen.
She looked up at Odin. “I don’t understand what’s happening.”
“You were the target of a drone attack tonight, Professor McKinney.”
“A drone attack—wait, you know my name.”
“We know everything about you. Age thirty-two, born in Knoxville, Tennessee, undergraduate degree in evolutionary biology, UCLA, masters and postdoc work in entomology, Cornell University. Recently acquired a full professorship and a research grant for your work modeling Hymenoptera social systems. You’re a Bills fan. You hate peas. Shall I go on?”
She stared blankly at him.
Foxy was again tuning the kora as he muttered, “Social media’s a bitch. . . .”
McKinney was now fully awake. “You said a drone attack.” She narrowed her eyes at Odin. “How were you . . . why were you here?”
“Like I said, we’ve been surveilling you for several days.”
“But why?” McKinney then shouted, “And why the hell didn’t you warn me? I could have been killed!”
“Calm down.”
“I’ll calm down when someone explains to me what the hell is going on. Why was I drugged and kidnapped?”
Odin spoke in soothing tones. “The research station has armed security, Professor. What would have happened if you called out for help? Innocent guards could have been hurt trying to defend you.”
“Who are you people? Why would a drone attack me?”
He held up a calming hand. “We’re here to help you.”
“Then you should have warned me instead of—”
Odin shook his head. “This is a secret operation, Professor. I needed to be certain they were targeting you. We had to wait until the last possible moment.”
“That who was targeting me?”
“That’s what we’re trying to find out.” Odin turned the tablet screen back toward him and started tapping at it again. “Until tonight we haven’t been able to predict the target of these drone attacks in advance. But you solved that for us.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Let’s take it one step at a time.”
“Why would someone send a drone after me? I study ants.”
“Here . . .” He turned the Rover back toward her.
McKinney could now see a close-up infrared view of her own bungalow and its corrugated tin roof. There, hovering around her window, was a dimly visible object. A pizza-pan-sized four-rotor flying . . . thing. She could barely make it out as it moved from window to window with the thoroughness of a bee at a flowering bush.
She stared at the screen in disbelief. “None of this makes any sense.”
“Looks like a modified Chinese F50 airframe, but that doesn’t really tell us anything about its firmware or who sent it. I could buy a hundred of these off the back of some truck in Dubai or Moscow.”
She was still watching the evil-looking insect float outside her living quarters, her own glowing heat signature visible in bed through the window.
“As near as we can tell, the parent drone sniffs out its victims by their IMEI.”
McKinney still watched the screen. “I don’t know what that is.”
“International mobile equipment identity. Every mobile phone has a unique number burned in at the factory. That ID can be used to pinpoint the location of a specific phone anywhere in the world within fifty meters.”
McKinney had a vivid image of her iPhone charging next to her bed.
“But that’s not accurate enough to deliver ordnance. So the parent drone carries a spotter that it launches to confirm the presence of the target. The spotter descends, and we think it searches the vicinity, looking for the victim’s face—probably uses a cheap pocket camera face-detection chip to make a list of human faces that it compares with target photos it already has in memory. We’ll know more if we can catch it.”
“Where would it get my photo?”
“Facebook, LinkedIn, university profile. That’s a trivial problem.”
She watched in horror as the spotter drone suddenly projected a grid of hundreds of infrared dots across the interior of her cabin—across her very body—in a light spectrum she hadn’t seen as she lay in the darkness.
“Registration grid. Once the target is confirmed, it uses an IR laser to send a coded signal back to the parent, clearing it to attack. That’s how we knew when to make our move.”