Zak broke a lengthy silence. “We’ve had help. From the beginning, someone’s been helping us out.”
“Why do you say that?” asked George.
“There were a couple of places where we were just too shit-ass lucky,” began Zak. “Go back to the beginning. Richard. Do you remember when we got out of Inzar Ghar with Kumar, and we were standing by the main entrance and there were twenty or thirty of Yousseff’s soldiers standing there, pointing guns at us?”
“Not something I care to remember, but yes. That was ugly.”
“And a missile,” continued Zak, “we thought it might have been a Hellfire, took them all out. We thought it was either from a Predator drone or the guys in the Stealth Hawk, but it wasn’t. To this day we don’t know who fired that, but we assume it was our own armed forces, because we assumed they were helping us.”
“Except, now that you mention it,” Richard replied, “it couldn’t have been us because according to DC, we’d gone rogue at that point.” “So who was it then?” asked Khasha.
“We’ve been running too fast to even think about it,” said Richard. “But it’s a mystery.”
“And that happened a second time,” said Zak. “Remember when we were running from the embassy in Islamabad, and there were Predator drones that were shooting at us?”
“I don’t want to remember that part,” Turbee replied.
“Well, they shot three Hellfires at us from close range and they missed each time.”
“I do recall that,” said Richard. “And now that you mention it—”
“Hellfires don’t miss from close range,” said Zak, finishing Richard’s sentence.
“And they missed three times. That does not happen.” Richard scratched his head and looked at one of the computer monitors that Turbee and George had set up. “Three times. Turbee, could someone else have messed with the signal, you know from Edwards Air Force Base, causing the Predators to misfire?”
“Yes, Zak, of course. If you know the access codes, and the encryption, and the frequency and all of those things, yes, anyone can do it. That’s what you wanted us to do—”
“But someone else must have done that,” said Richard, because they missed twice at point-blank range.” “Three times,” said Zak.
“There’s another troubling detail,” said Richard. “We crossed 6,000 miles of ocean in the Allegro Star and they did not find us. They knew generally where we were coming from, and, at some point, probably at around the time that we figured out what to do, they must have figured out that Vancouver was our destination. They would have known what the Allegro Star would have looked like from above. Yousseff would have told them. Then it becomes a question of scouring the ocean and finding us. Now, it’s a pretty big pond and all, but if you know generally the route, that’s where you would direct all of the eyes in the sky to look. And, I mean, there’s a hell of a lot of eyes up there now. Literally hundreds of satellites. These searches are now managed by AI and image recognition software. We no longer have a barn full of people looking at photographs. The whole process is automated, and fast.”
“And they’ve got the ONI database,” Turbee added. “With computerdirected searches that should have been easy. But they never found you guys. Not in the five or six days that it took you to cross the Pacific. The likelihood of them not finding you, when they would know generally where you would be, is just astronomically low, unless . . .”
“Unless what, Turbee?” prompted Khasha.
“Remember how we were able to dodge the image recognition software when we traveled from DC to Vancouver? We went through airports where there are literally tens of thousands of cameras. I got into the various databases and I changed the critical measurements that the software looks for. So when we were caught on camera, which we certainly would have been, hundreds of times, the software would not recognize us as us. You can easily do that for a ship. Just make the Allegro Star shorter, or longer, or wider, give her a few additional features, take a few away. Once you know what you’re doing, it’s easy. Every satellite over the Pacific could have photographed you guys and the system would never have identified you.” “We had help,” Zak nodded.
“Help from someone with incredible computer sophistication,” added Turbee.
“I have an idea,” said Khasha. “You know, the courthouse has hundreds of cameras, and after the attack, they tripled the number of cameras in and around Courtroom 401. Why don’t we go through their hard drives? Maybe we can find something.”
“We can do that,” said Turbee, reaching for a keyboard.
“For once,” said Khasha, “can we do it honestly? We know the sheriffs now. They’re our friends. Let’s just ask them.”
Permission was sought and obtained. It did not take long. The sheriffs identified which eight cameras were either inside the courtroom or immediately adjacent to it.
“There you go,” said Richard. “Have a look at that.” One of the cameras showed that at 9:40 a.m., as soon as Courtroom 401 was unlocked, an Asian man with a slight build dropped a note on top of a stack of notes and papers that Dana had left in the courtroom after Kumar’s testimony. They captured the image and ran it through the CIA, NSA, and FBI databases using the TTIC computers. Within fifteen minutes they had it. Tang Xiao Peng, a security aid to the consular general in the Vancouver Consular Office. A member of the Chinese Foreign Security Services, an intelligence branch with functions similar to the CIA. A Chinese spy.
“There’s our answer,” said Richard. “We’ve been in the employ of the People’s Republic of China. They’ve got the technology to use armed drones. They have the software to manipulate images
