Schellinger’s eyes were cold, her smile colder. “While it’s true that most of the autonomous-combat-vehicle programs were scrapped in the aftermath of that terrible day, and rightly so, we are not going in the same direction. The Department of Defense has made it very clear that there needs to be a stronger and more reliable Off switch that would allow our handlers to be able to take back control at a moment’s notice.”
“How certain are we that people can take back control of these machines?” asked Schoeffel.
“I can absolutely guarantee,” said the major, “that no machine we create — not one drone, fighter jet, tank, or WarDog — will be off the leash. They work for us.”
“What about GPS hacking and computer viruses?”
The major shook her head. “They will all be keyed to a very specific command program that will require new control codes twice per day. Those codes will be generated and sent to commanders and handlers in 128-bit encrypted bursts. And we can use satellites to send random system checks that will require the machines to perform certain quick noncombative functions to prove that they’re not under unauthorized control. Should any system check get an anomalous response, the entire CPU will be isolated and shut down.”
She ran through a number of other impressive safeguards, and gradually Schoeffel found the last of her resistance melting away.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The containers arrived by train. One shipment per week for most of the past year, then two, and in the past few weeks there had been three trainloads. Long, winding snakes of cars that came from factories in Chicago, Lake Forest, Minneapolis, Trenton, Tempe, and Bethesda. Thousands of twenty- and forty-foot containers offloaded into the endless stacks awaiting their ships. Then the bomb carts — special chassis designed to move the cans from stacks to cranes — brought them to the docks in an endless loop. Massive gantry cranes plucked the cans off the carts and set them down on the deck of the cargo ships. The bottom rows weren’t secured by anything except the weight of the cans placed on top, but each additional layer was held fast by twistlocks, lashing bars, and turnbuckles. It was all done with professional efficiency and natural diligence. Loaded, secured, and then gone.
Fourteen days before Havoc, the last of the foreign shipments set sail aboard the MSC William Tell, a Swiss supercargo ship built at the Daewoo Shipbuilding yard in South Korea. It was one of the big ones, with a cargo capacity for carrying more than nineteen thousand of the twenty-foot cans, and a third of the cargo came from those special trains. The rest were filled with tens of thousands of tons of packs of chemicals to be used for spraying and controlling mosquito populations.
Inspection of the cargo was done by men and women who had been in their jobs for years. Most of them thought they worked for the docks, the customs office, or the city of Baltimore. Officials in receiving ports held the same view, as did the thirty-five-man crew of the William Tell.
Most of them were wrong.
Very wrong.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
It started with a girl. That’s what Sean told me.
“Her name is Kya,” he said. “Well, was Kya, but that’s just a street name. That’s her work name. Her real name is Holly Sterman, and she would have been fifteen years old on Christmas Day. She died two days ago.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“It’s the craziest damn thing. One minute she was talking to her mom on the phone and the next she goes psycho and kills two adult men.”
“Gun?”
“No,” he said, “teeth. She bit them to death.”
The world around me suddenly went quiet. “What did you say?”
“Look, Joe,” said Sean quickly, “this is complicated. She was a runaway from Wilmington. A report was filed, but no one looked for her — you know how that is.”
“Yeah, yeah, get back to the part where she bit two guys. Why? Was it drugs? Was she hyped up on flakka?”
There was a nasty and very potent new designer drug on the streets called flakka that was driving many users into fits of screaming rage accompanied by vivid hallucinations. Chemically speaking, it was a cousin to the group of drugs commonly — and incorrectly — known as bath salts. Both are synthetic versions of naturally occurring amphetamine-like substances called cathinones. Flakka variations range from stuff that makes users mildly grouchy to stuff that turns them into violent aggressors. The high is, according to the junkies, worth the side effect. For the record, this is one of the reasons I hate people.
“That’s what I thought,” said Sean. “But no, her tox screen was clean. A little grass, but that’s it.”
“Then what happened?”
Sean told me the basics. Holly was a frequent flyer at one of those roach-infested West Baltimore hotels whose rooms are on yearly lease by people who sublet them by the hour. Not that Baltimore holds the patent on hot-pillow joints. Working as Kya, and with a fake driver’s license that said she was twenty-two, she turned tricks sometimes eight or nine times a night. Sean had been able to piece that together from surveillance video of the hotel that was part of another case being investigated by one of his buddies working a joint thing with the ATF. Kya/Holly was tagged as a likely prostitute working in the same place as the suspect, who was using the place as a showroom to sell handguns to gangbangers. When the gunrunner was busted the surveillance ended, but there was enough for Sean to verify that Holly was a regular, going in and out with a variety of men, none of whom were probably her Bible-study coach.
“And nobody thought to pick up an underage prostitute?” I asked.
“The investigating team handed it off to vice,” Sean explained, “but they had Kya down as an adult. Stupid, really. All they had to do was look at her. Bottom line is she was still on the job when the incident occurred.”
I took a sip of beer. It didn’t taste as good as it had. “Tell me about this incident.”
“It’s really weird, Joe.”
“Try me. Weird is pretty much what I do for a living.”
He ran it down for me, and, yeah, it was weird. The screams, the super, the dead john. He pieced together the details from a hysterical eyewitness report by the nephew of the super and through forensic reconstruction of the scene. The girl somehow overpowered or outfought her customer and then attacked the super, who tried unsuccessfully to defend himself with a baseball bat.
“The bat hit her on the shoulder, Joe,” said Sean. “It was the only injury the super inflicted. Remember that. It’s important.”
The girl tackled the super, grabbed his hair, and proceeded to slam his head against the hardwood floor with such force that his skull split. She didn’t stop there, though. She beat him nearly to death, pausing only long enough to bite his nose and upper lip completely off. The uncle had accidentally knocked the door shut when he was attacked and fell against it, so that the nephew couldn’t force his way in. The nephew said he could hear the sound of his uncle screaming for almost five minutes. Which is a minute shy of when the police arrived in response to the nephew’s 911 call.