Falling Stars Read online

  They watched in wonder as the drone lowered a black cord. A microphone? Were they hoping for an impromptu interview? That was a step too far. While Lawrence studied the unfamiliar contraption, the cord flicked closer and lassoed CJ’s waist. Before either of them could do anything but scream, the drone yanked CJ into the sky. It rose straight up and then stopped, leaving CJ hanging like a yo-yo on a string.

  Lawrence had no idea what to do. Should he call the police? Wait for instructions? Try to find something to cushion CJ’s fall? The drone was just hovering there, about thirty meters up.

  “Call for help!” CJ shouted over the hum. He was clinging to the cord with both hands despite the fact that it remained wrapped around his waist. Lawrence would be holding on too. He’d never survive the fall if it let go.

  Obeying his husband’s command, Lawrence ran back toward the house. They left their phones inside to avoid unwelcome distraction while working out. As he slid open the patio door, CJ’s ringtone struck his ears. Lawrence snatched the screaming cell off the end table and read the caller ID. It didn’t list a number or say, “Caller Blocked.” It read, “Answer Me.”

  “Hello.”

  “It will cost you $10 million to bring him down slowly. Or you can select the fast option for free.” The voice belonged to a middle-aged woman. It was clear, commanding—and familiar.

  “What?”

  “Our ransom demand is $10 million.”

  “Are you serious?” Lawrence ran back out into the yard. The drone was hovering, CJ was dangling, and nobody was laughing. “Of course you’re serious. I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”

  “Go back inside. Make the transfer.” The call ended.

  Lawrence stared at the screen. The phone pinged and a text message popped up listing banking information. He ran for his computer.

  As a Chief Financial Officer, Lawrence was conditioned to be wary of fraud and scams. Those alarms were ringing now, even though the veracity of the threat was beyond question. They didn’t have the cash equivalent of $10 million in their personal account, but the corporation did. Was ransom for a CEO a legitimate corporate expense? Of course it was. How could he be thinking about accounting at a time like this? CJ’s life was on the line. It was automatic. He couldn’t help it. Finance was his comfort zone. His retreat. He loved the black and white certainty of numbers when the walls closed in. Oh, goodness. Focus!

  Lawrence typed in all the transfer details, fumbling a few times in his nervous haste and wasting precious seconds. He double-checked all the numbers and hit “Transfer.”

  The computer thought. And thought. And thought. He glanced back and forth between it and the open door. The drone’s rotor wash was blowing leaves across the hardwood floor.

  Lawrence began banging the table. “Come on!”

  “Transfer Complete.”

  He ran back outside with a prayer on his lips and hope in his heart.

  23

  Skolkovo

  Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

  ACHILLES ENJOYED an insider’s perspective on the startup world. His father and brother had both been senior executives at high-profile Silicon Valley ventures, and his home was but a mile from Stanford, the epicenter of modern invention. That said, he knew little about the state of drone technology.

  He quickly discovered that drone manufacturers were popping up like coffee shops. The U.S. alone housed over 300. And they weren’t all concentrated in Silicon Valley. Knowledge centers were developing all over the industrialized world. There were now dozens of drone-manufacturing communities that could hide The Ghost in plain sight.

  So where to start looking?

  Normally, Achilles could make a few calls and have knowledgeable friends point him in the right direction; however, his situation was anything but normal. In a stroke that was nothing short of masterful, Ivan had arranged to have half the federal government looking for him—wasting their time and isolating Achilles.

  Achilles wasn’t particularly concerned about getting caught. He knew how to beat the system, how to avoid tripping triggers, raising flags, or rising above the crowd. But the isolation complicated and constipated his investigation. And the government could always get lucky.

  Achilles wheeled his chair back from the computer hutch and looked over at his partner. She was actively clicking away.

  The Internet hub at their boutique hotel was smaller than the business centers commonly found at chains catering to corporate clients, but it did provide a couple of PCs with Internet connections. “Any luck?” he asked.

  “Yeah, you were right. This was much easier than I’d ever have expected.”

  Excitement and surprise washed over Achilles, tinged with a touch of skepticism. “What did you find?”

  “Well, I’m not sure about the specific company yet, but it’s got to be somewhere at Skolkovo.”

  Achilles felt like a fool. Skolkovo! Of course. Coming from Silicon Valley, he’d subconsciously been America-centric in his search. Jo, by contrast, had applied logic to a blank slate. Since they were trying to track down Ivan the Ghost, she’d looked at Russia first.

  Russia doesn’t typically come to mind when you think of technical innovation. Historically, they’d made their share of scientific breakthroughs. Certainly, the Soviet Union had been a leader in certain military, medical and aerospace niches. But if there was a single globally successful consumer product or service coming out of modern Russia, Achilles couldn’t name it. Russia relied on its vast reserves of natural resources to power its economic engine.

  Achilles recalled that former President Medvedev had tried to alter Russia’s technological trajectory. At least on paper. In 2010, he founded and funded a whole city designed to develop breakthroughs. A Moscow suburb. The Skolkovo Innovation Center.

  Achilles remembered wondering if the new technology park would go anywhere. Most of the Russian government’s grand plans were really schemes to siphon rubles from public coffers into personal pockets.

  Now that he thought about it, however, Achilles recalled a newsflash about a high-tech world conference being held there. The Technology Olympic Games or something like that. The news had shown a clip of Moscow’s mayor bragging that the Skolkovo Hypercube now represented innovation much the way the Eiffel Tower symbolized culture. Achilles had let the political hyperbole go in one ear and out the other. But perhaps it wasn’t a complete boondoggle.

  “Show me what you’ve found so far.”

  Jo pointed to her screen. “Skolkovo is organized into five technology clusters: Biomedical Technologies, Energy-Efficient Technologies, Information Technology, Industrial Technology, and Space & Telecommunications Technology. I’m not sure if drones count as Space Technology or Industrial Technology.”

  “We could figure that out by looking at the companies in each.”

  “You’d think, but it’s not so easy. Skolkovo’s latest annual report boasts 191 companies in the Industrial Technologies cluster and 170 in Space & Telecommunications, but it doesn’t catalog them, and I haven’t been able to find a list online. I expect the numbers have also grown since that publication, given all the infrastructure development that appears to be going on.”

  Achilles and Jo spent another half hour searching independently. Finding nothing drone-specific, Achilles again rolled his chair back from the hutch. This time Jo looked over at him. Her expression told him she hadn’t found the detail they were looking for either. “One thing’s clear,” he said.

  “What’s that?”

  “We’re going to Moscow.”

  Jo blinked a few times. The fire in her eyes seemed to dim a bit more with each closure of her eyelids. “When we were talking about Katya, you told me your history with Russia was complicated. That you’d be wise not to return and tempt fate.”

  “It’s a risk.”

  “Isn’t it also exactly what Ivan will be expecting?”

  “If he’s there, I’m sure it is.”

  “And isn’t Ivan always two step
s ahead?”

  “More like six.”

  “So we’ll be playing right into his hand.”

  “I can’t think of another way to play it. Can you?”

  Rather than answering his question, Jo asked one of her own. “Doesn’t that make it the very definition of a trap?”

  “It does indeed,” Achilles said, rising from his chair. “Should keep things exciting.”

  24

  Tipping

  San Francisco, California

  RIP CRADLED THE PHONE, hung his head, and cursed. With the Directors of both the CIA and the FBI looking over his shoulders like a pair of parrots, and the war room chaotic as a sports bar on Super Bowl Sunday, Rip had made exactly zero progress in his hunt for Kyle Achilles.

  The assassin had simply vanished.

  Rip shouldn’t have been surprised. Achilles wasn’t just CIA. He’d been the guy they sent to find people who couldn’t be found. Still, between the press coverage making the public vigilant and the intelligence agencies all programming their electronic eyes, he’d hoped for a break. Naively, he knew.

  Reality was, when individuals jazzed up with patriotism decided to help out by remaining vigilant, more often than not they spotted someone they thought might be the suspect in disguise. “I saw the man who killed the CIA chief, that Olympian. He shaved his head and grew a mustache, but I’m sure it’s him.”

  What a quagmire.

  A swamp to slog through.

  There was a reason the faces on the FBI Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list didn’t change much from year to year. Smart people motivated to stay hidden were hard to find when they had the whole world to hide in. Announcing Achilles’ name had created the illusion of progress, but by tying up resources investigating false leads, the publicity had done more to hinder the investigation than to help it.

  The electronic searches weren’t proving to be any more helpful.

  Hollywood had conditioned people to believe that eyes in the sky could scan faces the way AFIT, the new AFIS, did fingerprints. The perception was accurate, to a very limited extent. Facial recognition programs worked well in office buildings, where employees came and went through one or two carefully monitored doors and everybody allowed to enter was catalogued. But once you went beyond controlled buildings, the situation became hopeless.

  There was no nationwide surveillance network to access. Larger cities had individual systems for monitoring activity hubs, busy roadways and bus terminals. But their cameras were neither designed nor positioned for facial recognition. Airports weren’t much better. For the TSA to catch Achilles, he’d have to use his own name, or linger in front of a camera without a disguise. Rip had a better chance of winning the lottery than he did of getting that call.

  There were special electronic surveillance setups at key locations around the globe, but they couldn’t be activated en masse. The false-positive numbers on those systems were very high, so the manpower requirement would be insane. They could only be used when you knew where your target was headed. Rip had no idea where Achilles would be going, if anywhere at all. He might already be sitting back on a remote beach with a cold beer in his hand and warm waves on his toes, all set to lie low for years.

  Rip had held high hopes for reeling Achilles in by capturing his fiancée, but Katya Kozara had vanished. She had phoned her sponsor at Moscow State University with a heartfelt apology for having to manage a family emergency, and hadn’t been seen or heard from since. The FBI’s Moscow office was not optimistic.

  Katya’s apartment had yielded no actionable clues to her whereabouts, but it had provided insight into Achilles’ psychology. They’d found CIA-grade tracking devices in the purse and shoes she’d left behind. How insecure does a man have to be to track his woman’s every move?

  As Rip rose to return to his corner office, an office not likely to be his for much longer, his cell phone buzzed. He checked the screen. A Moscow number.

  Rip looked skyward, said “Please,” and answered. “Ripley Zonder.”

  “Agent Zonder, this is the call you’ve been waiting for.”

  The voice wasn’t Russian. Rip was no linguist, but he recognized a French accent when a female was talking. Something about the ooh la la always tickled his ears. “Glad to hear it. Who is this?”

  “Your investigation is going nowhere, but not for the reason you think. It’s going nowhere because you’re looking in the wrong direction.”

  “Good to know. What’s the right direction?”

  “Thank you for asking. The answer is up.”

  “Why should I be looking up?” Rip asked, thinking I just did. “As much as I like the sound of your voice, I’m going to be hanging up if you don’t get more specific, fast.”

  “There was no video of the shooting on the Top of the Mark. No video. No witnesses.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Wrong question, but I’ll answer it anyway. Your boss told me and everyone else during the press conference. He said you’re looking for Kyle Achilles.”

  Rip caught a reflexive follow-up on the tip of his tongue. In situations like this, where an informant wanted to tell you something, it was best to let them stick to their script. “What’s the right question?”

  “Ask yourself why you should be looking up.”

  “I’d rather ask you.”

  “Good idea. Here’s your reward. If you look up, you might see the real shooter.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “Find video showing the skyline around the hotel at the time of the incident.”

  “Why don’t you save me the trouble and tell me what I’ll see if I do?”

  “It’s not a matter of trouble. It’s a matter of believing, as per that old axiom. Gotta go now. Good luck, Agent Zonder.” She hung up.

  Rip sat back down. He wanted to avoid the inevitable hijacking that would occur as he walked from the conference room back to his office. Requests for signatures or a moment of his time. He wanted to process the unusual conversation without interruption while it was fresh.

  The call was unusual in both origin and content. It came from Russia, but the caller was French, and she’d somehow obtained the number for his cell phone. Then she spoke as an equal with a style that was both vague and direct. Had the investigation been going well, or had she said anything inaccurate, he would have hung up or transferred her to the tip line. Well, maybe not. He liked the sound of her voice and the stimulation of her wit. But she’d been spot on, and more. She’d pushed his buttons with the facility of someone who’d worn his shoes.

  Rip wondered why she’d held back. She obviously wanted him to believe that Achilles had not killed Rider. She obviously wanted him to think she knew who had. Why not tell him? The answer, Rip decided, related to motivation. She wanted to make him curious.

  By arousing his curiosity, the witty woman with the ooh la la voice had ensured that he’d do exactly what she wanted: look for video—not of the hotel and surrounding streets, he’d already done that—but of the skyline.

  Walking back to his office, Rip found himself believing that this just might be his lucky break. And that wasn’t all. He found himself hoping to hear from her again, and maybe even to meet her. Ooh la la.

  25

  Spark

  French Riviera

  THE SUMMER OF HIS ELEVENTH YEAR, Ivan made a fantastic discovery, one that forever changed his life. He was goofing around at the Metro stop on his way to football practice when his ball smacked into the turnstile. Hard. Forcefully enough to dislodge a side panel and send it clattering across the stone floor while creating an echo that turned heads.

  Ivan wanted to run, but he couldn’t follow that instinct. The noise had attracted the gaze of a policeman, and he needed to retrieve his ball.

  With slumped shoulders and downcast eyes, he picked up the fallen panel and attempted to press it back in place. The edges slid into their assigned slots, holding the panel snugly, but the screw that secured the union was missing.
When he didn’t find it on the floor, he removed the panel to search inside. He didn’t find the screw, but he did find a surprise.

  The metal box that caught the Metro riders’ money was missing its lid. With the side panel removed, he could steal heaping handfuls of five-kopek coins—if no one was watching.

  A backward glance revealed that the policeman had returned his attention to the attractive lady selling newspapers. A sideward glance, however, showed the tollbooth attendant to be staring in his direction. Her expression surprised him. It wasn’t disapproving or disciplinary. It was fraught with fear.

  He replaced the cover without the screw, retrieved his ball, and turned toward the booth rather than the down escalator. Keeping his eyes locked on the attendant, he approached the window.

  She was a large woman, with ratty hair, a red face and thick wrists. She looked capable of picking him up with one hand, but she leaned back as he approached. Just a little, but enough.

  “Give me a ruble and I won’t tell.”

  Her lips puckered and her face contorted and her gaze shifted over his shoulder.

  Ivan looked back toward the up escalator. The policeman was still there. Checkmate.

  She slid him a ruble.

  The note was worn and crumpled, but the rush from receiving it was the greatest of his life. He said, “I’ll be back tomorrow,” and Ivan the Ghost was born.

  Twenty years later, Ivan made a similar discovery. A gift that would keep on giving. He felt that same euphoric rush looking at LeClaire’s $10 million as he had that one ruble note. He hadn’t just earned it. He’d earned it by spotting an opportunity and acting—boldly.

  Like the realization of what was really happening at that Moscow Metro turnstile, the idea for Raven originated with a simple spark of insight. Ivan relived the memory as Michael pointed the Tesla east from Saint Tropez and began the drive back to Silicon Hill.