“Your plane will be ready soon.”
“My plane?”
“You’re headed back to the States.”
She nodded, brooding. “I see.” They hadn’t exchanged a word since their chat on the Otter. She’d been too shocked, too amazed. But in the intervening hours McKinney had begun to process some of the implications.
“I need to call my father as soon as possible to let him know that I’m okay. These phone lines are all dead.”
“You’re not fully grasping the situation.”
“Look, Odin—or whatever your name is—I need to call my father.”
“Isolation protocol. Until further notice, in accordance with Title Ten of the U.S. legal code, you’re prohibited from all contact with anyone on the outside.”
She stared at him in disbelief but tried to maintain her composure in the face of mounting anger. “There’s no reason to treat me like this. I will gladly tell you everything that I know about my research, but you need to realize that I’ve just disappeared in an explosion. My family needs to know that I’m okay.”
He shook his head. “That won’t be possible. The U.S. State Department reported Professor Linda McKinney missing after a bombing in East Africa. The attack was believed to be retaliation for Karbala.”
“Oh, my God . . .” McKinney felt tears coming on, but she didn’t want to seem weak in front of him. Her voice sounded clenched, barely in control. “The death of my mother nearly killed my father. You have no idea what this will do to him. Please, just let me—”
“I know that you actually dying would have been worse. And since Foxy and I risked our necks to save you . . . you’re welcome.”
McKinney paused to get her voice under control. The anger helped. “I’m grateful for you saving me, but there’s no reason why I can’t—”
“There are hundreds of reasons.”
McKinney stared at him, and then shook her head. “No. I will not permit you to make me feel guilty about this. I wasn’t researching biochemical weapons, I was studying the natural world. How people misuse basic research isn’t—”
“Rationalization is a useful survival instinct, but it won’t make any difference with me.”
McKinney glared at him. She felt the walls closing in.
He let a moment of silence pass. “I’m guessing you have questions.”
McKinney took another deep breath to calm herself. “Where am I going?”
“You’ve been attached to a special access program. Our mission is to identify the source of these drone attacks. We think you can help us predict the behavior of these things, which may help us get ahold of one intact—along with all its source code—which could lead us to its creators.”
She searched for a reasonable reaction to unreasonable circumstances and came up empty. Nothing in her broad life experience had prepared her for this.
He studied her, and after a moment his hard expression softened a bit. He motioned for her to sit down on the edge of a nearby desk. “Can I get you some water or a cup of coffee? Tea?”
She shook her head as she leaned back onto the desk.
He sat across from her and folded his arms. “Let me explain how I found you. Maybe that will clarify why you don’t want to reach out to anyone you care about right now. The people behind these drones are desperate to remain anonymous. It’s that anonymity which prevents us from focusing our firepower on them. They will do literally anything to keep it that way—that includes hurting people you love to get to you.”
She nodded slowly. “Okay, I understand. This is just all very strange.”
“Do you know what a ROM chip is?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“It’s a read-only memory chip. Stores machine code, logic that controls electronic devices. A few months back an FBI forensics team at the scene of a Texas bombing dredged up a small piece of wreckage floating in a golf course pond. It was part of an enemy drone that had self-destructed at high altitude over Dallas.”
McKinney recalled the news from some months back. “I remember—the oil company executives. That was a drone attack too?”
“All nineteen of them have been. And there were a dozen others that didn’t succeed.”
“My God.”
“That piece of wreckage the FBI found included an off-the-shelf circuit board with a ROM chip attached. DOD eggheads put the chip into a logic analyzer and decompiled its machine code into human readable form. It was advanced stuff—visual intelligence algorithms. Cyber defense folks searched to see if anything similar was out on the public Web. They got a match to code on warez sites in both Russia and China—but the compiler fingerprint for the executables pointed back to the United States. Again, this isn’t my specialty, but the cyber warfare folks can extract culture codes, MAC addresses, debug time-stamp formats and compiler paths embedded in executables. That led us back to a project at Stanford University’s Vision Lab.”