already known that she was hiding something from me, had long suffered from a never-admitted sense of exclusion, a nagging feeling that despite sharing Sophie’s life for three years, I still didn’t really know her and never would. She was keeping from me some secret core.
Two days before Lisa Reyes came to our lab, I discovered that Sophie had accessed and reread this message, sent three days earlier:
From: [email protected]
Date: Thu 12 Mar 2010 13:11 EST
Subject: confirmation
I’ve made arrangements to be in Los Angeles on the 21st. Meet me at the Cadillac Hotel on Venice Beach at 6PM. I’ll be checked in as “George Mamatas.” Come straight to my room.
Looking forward to it with great anticipation.
Michael Kostopoulos
When I read that I thought for a few seconds that I might actually throw up. Michael Kostopoulous. I imagined him as tall, dark and handsome, an oily and charming jet-setter, maybe the heir to a shipping fortune, no doubt ferociously good in bed. For two long days every time I looked at her I found myself wondering what she might do with him that she didn’t with me.
How wrong I had been. I should have known right away that Sophie would have no truck with something as small and tawdry as an affair. If she wasn’t happy in our relationship, she would have just dumped me, or sat me down and told me she wanted to try polyamory. Whatever she was hiding was something far more extraordinary than mere infidelity.
Assassinations. Drug cartels. How could Sophie be involved with such things? What could she possibly be hiding that had intertwined her with murder? And why keep it from me? To protect me?
I wondered when it had begun, how long she had been deceiving me. Weeks? Months? Since that day three years ago that Jesse – our lab’s biggest client, and my high-school best friend – had first introduced us?
I wondered when I should confront her. I knew there would never be a good time, but I wanted to unearth some more answers myself first. Otherwise I wouldn’t know if whatever she told me was the whole truth.
A moot point, right now; we probably wouldn’t be alone together again until after we got back from Colombia. Until then all I could do was speculate and seethe.
I closed my eyes. The overwhelming noise of the helicopter was oddly soporific, and I soon fell asleep again. When I woke I reopened my eyes to a surreally beautiful vista of snow-capped peaks rising from the trackless jungle, glittering in the new day’s sunlight, and beyond, an uninterrupted line of blue that had to be the Caribbean. I felt like I was still dreaming. It didn’t seem possible that only sixteen hours ago I had been in Pasadena.
We veered away from the red dirt road we had followed and flew for maybe twenty miles over wild hill country, jagged ridges and valleys covered with raw jungle, laced with plunging waterfalls and whitewater rivers. I took several pictures with my iPhone. The last shot included a tiny silver dot in one corner, which swelled as we approached into a tin-roofed building. As we neared it the timbre of the engine changed, and we descended towards that lonely structure.
It was a one-room school, like something out of
The UAV we had been brought so far to see was inside the school, on the teacher’s desk.
It looked worryingly familiar.
Chapter 5
The damaged drone was spindly and insectile. Its bulbously cylindrical body, about two feet long and the color of gunmetal, hung from wings that were a single six-foot blade shaped like a narrow Japanese fan. A ten-inch-long nose spike protruded from its nose, and a single propeller was mounted at its tail. Two struts extended back from the wing to support an inverted-V tailfin behind the propeller. The right wingtip and tailfin had buckled and warped from some impact, but the rest looked sleek, streamlined, intact.
While Martinez and Reyes spoke in rapid-fire Spanish to the man who appeared to be in charge of the site, Sophie and I examined it drone more closely. A narrow solar panel ran the length of its wing. I supposed the nose- spike was its radio antenna. There was a tiny camera lens at its tip, and another set like a navel in its belly. The body was divided into three components, each covered by user-accessible panels: fuel cell, avionics, and payload, was my guess. The third compartment was open, and empty but for two severed, dangling wires. I supposed, or at least devoutly hoped, that the Colombians had removed the drone’s explosive cargo.
I looked for a part number or familiar component, anything that might identify its provenance, and found nothing. As I did so, a tiny LED bulb set into the body, beside its belly camera, flashed blood red.
Both Sophie and I started at this evidence that the drone was still active.
“Is there any GSM signal here?” Sophie demanded.
Martinez stiffened as he understood, and flipped open his phone with alacrity before relief settled onto his face. “No. Nothing.”
Sophie relaxed. “Bureaucratic inefficiency for the win, for once. Good thing you didn’t bring this somewhere with coverage. Probably has an onboard GPS locator, it’d have told whoever sent it exactly where it was. This isn’t just a weapon. It’s a node of an enemy network.”
Martinez nodded thoughtfully, impressed.
Sophie began to open the other panels, looking for the UAV’s brain. Soldiers peered in through the windows, curious. A big blue dragonfly buzzed through the doorway and began to circle the naked lightbulb hanging in the center of the room.
I said, “It looks expensive.”
“The narcos make billions of dollars every year,” Martinez said. “They can buy whatever they want.”
I didn’t tell him that it also looked an awful lot like the UAVs our lab had designed and built for Convoy, Jesse’s company. Those drones were smaller and cheaper, built of aluminum and fibreglass instead of titanium and carbon fibre, but they had the same general design – and they were controlled by neural networks that Sophie had designed and trained.
The Convoy Emerging Wealth Fund. That name was Jesse’s idea of a joke; the wealth in question was supposed to emerge from the sea. It was a treasure-hunting startup using a network of aerial and underwater drones to look for sunken galleons in the Caribbean. Jesse had never identified the “consortium of investors” who funded him, but they were well-heeled. Just last week he had wired us three million dollars.
Could a drug cartel be using Convoy as a front to purchase Sophie’s neural networks? It sounded almost plausible… except Jesse would never be involved in something like that. I had known him almost twenty years and I was sure of that much. He was a government-hating libertarian, he thought drugs should be legalized, but that didn’t mean he’d work for a murderous cocaine cartel. And his drive to find lost galleons was genuine. He had been fascinated by the Caribbean’s sunken treasure since high school.
But maybe he didn’t even know, maybe someone else at Convoy was responsible. I thought of his Russian girlfriend, Anya. I didn’t know much about her, except that she knew an awful lot about computers for a woman who wore miniskirts and stiletto heels to business meetings, but I knew she had introduced him to Convoy’s investors. Could she be a stalking horse for a drug cartel? It sounded incredible, but not impossible. And it would
