Orbital Disruption Page 15

  This morning Agent Saunders had stood on the doorstep of a judge’s townhouse to receive a warrant. The judge had still been in his bathrobe. Now she found herself in the passenger seat of a California Highway Patrol Eurocopter AS 350 as it swooped in low over the bay. The Dumbarton Bridge passed below them. The pilot was talking to the control tower at Palo Alto’s small airport to request a temporary halt to all flight activities. A few tech billionaires would be late to wherever they were going. So be it.

  Agent Saunders heard a crackle in her earpiece.

  “Saunders, this is Hays. We’re coming off the 101 now, turning onto Embarcadero Road.”

  “Roger,” Agent Saunders replied. “Proceed to the primary staging area. I’m one minute out. No lights.”

  “I copy. No lights. See you on the ground soon, ma’am.”

  “Over and out,” she replied.

  The improbably bright green mounds of the Palo Alto Golf Course passed under the helicopter and the pilot slowed. They were close. On the ground in the distance Agent Saunders could see a convoy of a dozen vehicles including several armored SWAT trucks turning into the parking lot. The pilot made a single pass overhead, banked, and selected a section of the lot that was free of cars. It was a good thing they were doing this raid early in the morning, Saunders thought. By nine the lot would be full and the helicopter would have had trouble finding a clear spot to land on.

  “Wait here in case we need you,” Agent Saunders said to the pilot as they touched down. He signaled his understanding with a thumbs up as Saunders opened the door and stepped out onto the pavement. Keeping her head down and clutching her briefcase, she ran toward a group of agents huddled behind a SWAT truck.

  “Hays, is the team ready?” Agent Saunders asked, her voice taking on the tone of command that came naturally to her at times like these.

  “Yes, ma’am,” her tall, sandy-haired deputy replied and gave her a thumbs-up sign. Several others nodded their agreement.

  Saunders nodded in reply and gave last minute instructions.

  “This is a counter-terrorism operation. The Director himself called me this morning to express the seriousness of the situation. We’re here to arrest two executives of a startup called Excelsior Launch Systems and secure evidence. We don’t expect resistance but keep your eyes open - one of the executives is a suspect in an attempted murder in New York yesterday. So this is not your typical white-collar paper raid. Understood?”

  Again, everyone around her nodded. Agent Saunders wondered if the simple kevlar vest she wore under her FBI jacket was sufficient if this firm really was involved in a major terrorist plot. But there was no time now to reconsider. The helicopter and police vehicles would surely be noticed by the public. They might already be trending on Twitter for all she knew. And the suspect’s office was just one block away.

  Agent Saunders climbed into the front of the SWAT truck. A moment later it joined the other vehicles in exiting the parking lot, driving a block further down Embarcadero Road and then into the next parking lot. With screeching tires, the vehicles raced to the end of the parking lot and stopped in front of a two-story concrete and glass office building that looked like every other building in this part of the valley.

  Saunders lept from the truck and walked briskly to the entrance. Two dozen agents and SWAT team members flanked her. She pushed open the glass door of the lobby and strode in. The wall behind the receptionist desk bore the logo of Excelsior Launch Systems. They were in the right place, at least, Saunders thought to herself.

  The receptionist looked up at the commotion and turned pale. Agent Saunders held her badge out in one hand and declared loudly, “I am Special Agent Saunders of the FBI!”

  The receptionist opened his mouth but no words came out. He turned to face agent Hays as he stepped up next to Saunders.

  “Uh… I don’t understand…” the receptionist stuttered.

  Agent Saunders forced herself not to roll her eyes. Yes, Saunders thought, I am a black woman. I am also a Special Agent of the FBI and I’m in charge of this raid. Hays smirked and tipped his head toward Saunders. The receptionist seemed to catch on and turned back to the woman holding out her badge but he couldn’t manage to speak.

  “I don’t have time for this shit,” Agent Saunders grumbled as she let her badge return to swinging from the lanyard around her neck. She reached into her briefcase and pulled out the thin sheaf of papers it contained. Her team was already fanning out across the lobby, some rushing up the stairs while others began to move past the receptionist into the rows of cubicles.

  The receptionist finally regained his voice. “Hey, um, you can’t go in there without an appointment…” he started to say but was stopped then Agent Saunders thrust the papers in front of him.

  “Yes, actually they can,” Agent Saunders explained. “These are warrants for the arrest of Ruben St. James and Anna Ivanova as well as for the seizure of evidence from the premises of Excelsior Launch Systems. Are Mr. St. James or Ms. Ivanova here now?”

  “Um, I don’t think so,” the receptionist stammered. “I would have to call Mr. St. James’s assistant. I don’t have access to his calendar.”

  Just then a tall woman with long blond hair and a confident bearing strode into the lobby. If she was intimidated by the armed police presence, she didn’t show it.

  “Can I help you?” she asked Agent Saunders.

  “We’re looking for Ruben St. James and Anna Ivanova, Ms…”

  “Dahl. Barbara Dahl. I’m Mr. St. James’s personal assistant. And I’m afraid neither Mr. St. James nor Ms. Ivanova are here today.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that, Ms. Dahl. Can you tell me where they are?”

  “Mr. St. James sent a note last night saying he was traveling to Asia for business but didn’t provide any further details.”

  “And Ms. Ivanova?”

  “Anna keeps her own schedule,” Barbara explained. “I haven’t seen her in the office for a few days and I don’t know where she is.”

  “I see,” Agent Saunders said coldly. “Did you arrange Mr. St. James’s travel?”

  “Usually I do, but this time he handled it himself,” Barbara replied. “I assume he took the company jet but I don’t know for sure. It caught all of us by surprise.”

  “I see. One moment.”

  Agent Saunders took her phone from her pocket, selected a contact from the speed-dial list and pressed it.

  “Joe, it’s Marsha. I’m being told that St. James left last night on the company jet for an unannounced trip to Asia. Uh huh. Yep. Good, get on it. Ivanov isn’t here either, apparently. Yeah, probably still in New York. Make sure Jones at NYPD knows. Ok. Thanks.”

  Agent Saunders put her phone back in her pocket and looked up at Barbara Dahl.

  “We will still need to collect evidence, of course. Let’s start with Mr. St. James’s office, shall we?”

  “Oh shit,” Molly exclaimed.

  Tabitha sat up abruptly. She had dozed off while Molly was working but was awake now.

  “What is it, Molly?”

  “I got back the first orbital plot and assuming continued constant acceleration along its current track…”

  “Oh shit,” Tabitha agreed. “I’ll go get Dennis.”

  Tabitha slide out from behind the table and quickly ascended the steps out of the cabin and onto the deck of the Blue Orchid. Dennis and Esteban were sitting on opposite sides of the cockpit, each leaning against one of the matching helm stations.

  “Dennis, you need to see this.”

  “What’s wrong, Tabitha?” Dennis asked, standing up.

  “Best to show you,” Tabitha replied, turned and descended the steps again into the cabin. Dennis followed her and Esteban came last.

  As Dennis entered the cabin, Molly turned the laptop around to face Dennis. He leaned in to see a simple graphical representation of the inner solar system with the orbits of the planets indicated by colored lines that followed nearly circular paths around the sun.
The orbit of the asteroid 207302 was drawn with a dashed line and was an odd set of looping ovals - the effect of constant acceleration warped by several passes close by Earth until arriving in Earth orbit several years in the future. The orbit of the mysterious second asteroid was more abrupt - it simply curved inward toward Earth’s orbit where it ended.

  “Oh shit,” Dennis stated softly. “The second asteroid is going to hit the Earth.”

  “How precise are those projections, Molly?” Tabitha asked.

  “I’m afraid that with several hundred data points spread across many months it’s pretty precise,” Molly replied. “And Earth is a small target at these distances. For the trajectory to line up exactly with Earth is unlikely to be a coincidence or a data error.”

  “She’s right,” Dennis said. “There’s no way that’s a coincidence. And it fits with Ruben’s decision to turn off the receivers on his ships. I have no idea why but I think he’s trying to make sure that rock hits Earth.”

  “Where will it hit?” Esteban asked quietly.

  Molly turned the laptop around and began typing. A moment later she had an answer.

  “Somewhere around 35 degrees north latitude, 50 degrees west longitude.”

  “That’s in the Atlantic Ocean,” Esteban stated. “Middle of nowhere. I guess that’s a good thing, right?”

  “Um, not really,” Dennis replied. “It depends on the size of the rock but if it’s big enough it would cause a tsunami that could reach the East Coast of the US and the West Coast of Europe.”

  “It’s probably bad news for Bermuda and Iceland, too,” added Tabitha.

  “How soon until impact?” Esteban asked.

  “Just under a month,” Molly replied.

  “That’s not a lot of time to get something up there to intercept it,” Tabitha concluded. “I think we’re fucked.”

  “Either way, it’s time to report this in,” Dennis stated. “I need to send a note to Tony and Jessica.”

  “Let’s do that now and then move to a new location,” Esteban said. “We’ve been here too long.”

  The surveyor was patient. Its propeller pushed its lightweight polystyrene airframe forward at a lazy fifty kilometers per hour, far slower than the delivery drones and passenger aircraft in its area. But patience had its virtues, too. At this speed its batteries could last for several hours. A thin layer of solar panels painted onto the upper surfaces of its wide wings and fuselage extended its range even further on sunny days like today. Flying at an elevation of around one thousand meters over relatively flat terrain it was able to scan high-resolution images covering almost two hundred square kilometers per hour. It would be wasteful in terms of both power and bandwidth to transmit all of the raw data back to its masters so the mind of the surveyor was smart enough to recognize objects that were potential matches to the target. Only these images were sent back.

  Today’s target was a sailboat but the surveyor only knew it as a set of hash functions associated with a collection of roughly triangular shapes, mostly white and most likely against a blue, green or grey background, mottled with waves. It performed similar hashes on the raw imagery it collected and when the hashes matched, it transmitted a snapshot back to its masters. Today there had been a lot of matches. Whatever a sailboat was - and the mind of the surveyor neither knew nor cared - there were a lot of them out on the water.

  Six surveyor drones had been launched an hour earlier from the asphalt pavement outside a warehouse in Kearny, New Jersey. One had flown southwest over Newark Bay and then on to the Arthur Kill between Staten Island and New Jersey. Two had flown south over New York Harbor, one heading further south toward the lower New York Bay while the other angled east to scan the southern coast of Long Island. One surveyor had flown east until it reached the Hudson River and then flew north, following the river up the Hudson Valley. The last two had headed east across Manhattan and the East River and then out onto Long Island Sound.

  Of these last two aircraft, one in particular was covering the north shore of Long Island and the southern half of Long Island Sound. The Sound was only about 8 kilometers wide between Lloyd Point and the southern tip of Stamford but it widened out to about double that distance as the drone travelled further east. The surveyor had already spotted almost a hundred candidate objects so far but its master had rejected each one as not being a match. That changed a moment later.

  The surveyor’s wide angle camera captured a four-kilometer by one-kilometer swath of water and shoreline. The image was broken into small tiles and hash functions converted each tile into a series of long numbers. Those numbers were matched against the target hashes and a handful of matches were found. This process took ten seconds during which the surveyor travelled one hundred forty meters. Next, the surveyor used its gimbal-mounted telephoto lens to capture high-resolution images of the locations which had produced the matches - correcting for the fact that the aircraft was continuously moving. These high-resolution images were transmitted over the network to a cluster of servers in a datacenter in a different state. While the surveyor moved on to take its next wide-angle picture, the servers processed the high-resolution images, looking for a more precise match with the target. For the first time that day, one of the images appeared to be a match. The servers sent revised instructions to the surveyor drone.

  High above the Blue Orchid, the drone banked to the left and began to trace a long graceful circle in the sky. At this distance with its light-colored underside and quiet electric propellers it was very difficult to see or hear. The people on the sailboat below gave no indication of having noticed it but the mind of the surveyor drone wouldn’t have cared if they did - that wasn’t its concern. It simply aimed its telephoto lens at the coordinates where the servers had detected a likely match and snapped photo after photo. As the drone completed a full circle it had acquired images from every angle. These were transmitted to the servers. It consumed a substantial amount of power, cutting several minutes from the drone’s potential flying time, but it was necessary to be sure.

  The servers merged the images of the large sailboat taken from different angles and distances. The resulting three-dimensional model was then compared against the static target images and found to be almost exactly the same. In parallel, a text recognition engine scanned the image for letters and numbers. It found the registration number “NJ 3717 ZW” and the name, “Blue Orchid”. It was a match. The server transmitted a message to a small program running on a portable tablet computer in a construction trailer in Secaucus, New Jersey. The message contained the image and GPS coordinates of the target object and the message: “TARGET LOCATED”.

  Special Agent Marsha Saunders sat in a large conference room at the headquarters of Excelsior Launch Systems. Two other agents sat with her and a dozen large cardboard boxes of documents were stacked on the table beside a jumbled array of computer equipment. The boxes and computers were all wrapped in bright yellow evidence tape.

  An agent stepped into the room, out of breath.

  “I just got a call from Joe Fields. We found the pilots, ma’am.”

  Agent Saunders looked up.

  “The ones who were flying St. James to Asia?”

  “No, ma’am, not exactly.”

  “Then which pilots?”

  “What I mean, ma’am, is that these are Mr. St. James’s pilots but they weren’t flying to Asia.”

  “They weren’t?”

  “No, ma’am. They flew to Spokane, Washington.”

  “Spokane? And Mr. St. James was on board?”

  “Yes, that’s what the pilots say. They just returned to Palo Alto. Landed a few minutes ago. Agent Fields is questioning them now.”

  “Tell Fields I’m on my way.”

  Agent Saunders turned to the agent sitting next to her.

  “Where are we with the tech forensics people? Do we have their emails indexed yet?”

  “Almost, ma’am. Should have it all pulled down, archived and indexed within the hour.” />
  “Ok. I want to know who else knew Ruben St. James wasn’t going to Asia and what business he might have in Spokane.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Please track down the Special Agent in Charge of the Seattle field office, too. It’s Brad Williams, right? Get a hold of him and tell him we’re going to need agents in Spokane ASAP.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Twenty-Five

  The side of Anna’s jacket vibrated. The sensation triggered a flash of pain at the site of her wound. She grunted and quickly retrieved the phone from her pocket.

  “Hey Anna!” Maggie’s voice came through.

  “Hi Maggie. Do you have good news for me?”

  “I sure do. We spotted your missing friends on the south side of Long Island Sound, just north-west of Stony Brook. It looks like they’d just pulled up their anchor and were heading north, possibly toward the Connecticut side of the sound.

  “Thank you, Maggie. How long can you keep an eye on them?”

  “The drone that found them is low on charge so it’ll need to return soon. Bobby is bringing the other drones back to recharge them. As soon one of them is juiced up we’ll send it out to find your friends again. We have six drones in all so they can work shifts. Now that we know where they are we can keep a drone overhead pretty much non-stop.”

  “That is wonderful news. Please let me know if their course changes.”

  “No problem, Anna. Say hi to Sergey for me, ok?”

  Anna laughed and replied. “Ok, Maggie. I will!”