“You could, but it wouldn’t work. Those transmitters are line-of-sight devices. Their antennas have to be visible to the satellite for their signal to be picked up. They’d only work if you glued them to the roof.” She paused and added, “Which might actually work if they’re driving eighteen-wheelers, or some other tall truck.”
There was a disappointed silence in the room until I asked, “You said, ‘those’ transmitters. Did that imply there’re others?”
Abby smiled broadly, and before her sister could stop her, she blurted out, “Sure there are. We’ve got eight of them right here-”
Judy held up her hand. “Hold it. Hold it. How do we know what’s going on here? We can’t just give you a bunch of stuff and wave you out the door. Abby’s talking about cutting-edge equipment-the hardware equivalent of Beta copies-samples. Companies lend them to us so we can work out the kinks. If they get into the wrong hands, we’re in serious trouble.”
“By ‘wrong hands,’ you mean competitors, right?” I asked. “That wouldn’t be a problem here. These are crooks, not patent thieves.”
“And,” Sammie added, “we’ll draw up a document right here and now, assuming total liability.” I resisted knocking her on the head for that one, nodding in agreement instead.
Abby got to her feet. “Come on, Judy. Lighten up. You know darn well we’re expected to beat the shit out of those units-and lose ’em, too, if it comes to that. That’s why we got ’em in the first place, and we signed a waiver.”
She crossed the room to one of the cabinets, unlocked the top drawer, and returned with a plastic box. She opened it, extracted what looked like three small wafers, and laid one in each of our hands. “Latest technology. Designed to track birds in flight.”
I cradled it in my palm, barely feeling its weight. “This talks to a satellite?”
Abby looked pleased at my incredulity. “Yup. And-what’s better-it’s more powerful than the collar we showed Sammie. I can’t say we’ve ever put it in a car trunk, but the makers say it should work. We’ve only had ’em for a week or so.”
I held it up to the light and examined it more closely. I then fixed Judy Coven eye-to-eye. “They would be perfect.”
Judy bit her upper lip thoughtfully. “Abby’s right,” she finally admitted. “We’re not at risk as much as I said. I would like that document, though, in case things do go sour. Companies like ours are plowed under all the time by one lawsuit or another, and I don’t feel like joining them, especially over some deal you won’t tell us anything about.”
Sammie rolled her chair over to one of the desks and grabbed a sheet of paper. “Done.”
I turned the wafer over to Abby Coven. “How do they work, exactly?”
She dropped it back into the plastic box. “The tradeoff is the power supply. The larger units can emit pretty much a continuous signal, so the satellite can track it around the clock. Depending on the size and configuration of the battery, the unit will work from a few days to several months. These little guys can’t do that. They talk to the satellite periodically. The less they talk, the more the power source lasts. We heard they’ve used units kind of like these on monarch butterflies. ’Course, those emitted only once every few days, so they’d last for weeks. In any case, the rate of frequency can be programmed in.”
“And how are they picked up by you?”
This time, it was Judy who rolled her chair across the floor, stopping before one of the computers, which she switched on. “The technology is called GIS, for Geographical Information System. Just as an example, here’s a grid of downtown Brattleboro.” She tapped on the keyboard a few times, and brought up a colorful, slightly fuzzy version of a topo map, with the elevations marked in earth-colored hues, complete with a shadowing effect that made the screen look three-dimensional. I instantly recognized the confluence of the West and Connecticut Rivers, with the looming mass of Mount Wantastiquet hovering on the New Hampshire border.
“What we receive from the sending unit-via the satellite-,” Judy continued, “are the coordinates for latitude and longitude. Those are logged into the computer and appear on the screen as a single white blinking dot.”
A dot like what she’d just described magically presented itself. “I’m cheating here,” she said. “The units aren’t activated, so I just entered in some data. The fastest those wafers can work is once every ten minutes, so every ten minutes you’d get a new dot on the screen, assuming the unit was moved.”
“How long will the battery last at that rate?” I asked.
Judy looked up at me. “I don’t remember. We haven’t really fooled with these much.”
“A week,” said Abby from behind us. “That long enough?”
It wasn’t a question that bore much thought. “Should be,” I said.
I tapped the screen with my fingernail. “You can call up all of Vermont, just like you did Brattleboro?”
“Yup.”
I pointed to several small boxes containing numbers. “These are the coordinates?”
Judy hesitated. “That’s where they’d show up. This is fake, though-I mean, I wrote them in. Real data looks different. It fluctuates a lot. The Department of Defense corrupts all satellite-linked GPS readings somewhat-some kind of paranoid antimissile hangover from the Cold War. They call it ‘selective availability.’ Part of the program here corrects for that, though, so it’s nothing much to worry about.”
Anatoly spoke for the first time, slowly and carefully. “This is legal, outside the military?”
I laughed, thinking of how improbable that would seem to a lifelong resident of the old Soviet Union. “Yeah-pretty neat, huh?”
I turned back to both Coven sisters, suddenly concerned, and pointed at the oversize computer. “The problem is, though, that all this only works if you’ve got one of those and know how to work it. Isn’t that right?”
Judy’s hands fell from the keyboard and she looked at the screen in a new light. “Yes. I’m afraid so.”
“Where’re you going to be operating from?” Abby asked.
Sammie and I glanced at each other and then at Anatoly, who gave a barely perceptible shrug. “We don’t know yet. It might be dangerous, though. You couldn’t be there, if that’s what you were thinking.”
Abby smiled. “I like a good time, but I’m not that interested. Maybe we could manage it all from here and send you the results.”
That piqued Sammie’s interest. “How?”
“Simplest way would be over the Net-as e-mail. It would be slow, but unless you have the right equipment and a trained operator, I don’t see how else it would work. This way, all you’d need was a laptop with a modem and access to a phone line.”
“And you two at the other end,” I added. “I don’t know how that part would work. If things got hairy, you could be spending a lot of time in that chair.”
The Covens exchanged looks.
Anatoly pulled at my sleeve and whispered, “This is not good.”
I got up and walked with him to another part of the room, keeping my voice low. “Maybe not, but it’s all we got. You can stay here with them, babysit us, or tell your boss you canceled the whole idea on your own.”
He didn’t answer, his choice already clear.
“Could be good publicity,” Sammie was coaxing the two sisters.
I was amazed at her callousness. In point of fact, these women could also end up with their reputations and business ruined. But I added, almost instantaneously, “And maybe some compensation. I know better than to speak for the chief on financial matters, but we’ve found money before for emergencies like this.”
After a telling silence, Judy finally nodded. “Okay, what the hell. I’m assuming you don’t have a laptop?”
We all shook our heads.
“We’ll set you up with everything, then. Just make sure a full inventory is added to that document you drew up.”
Sammie laughed at the pure absurdity of the suggestion. “You got it.”
Chapter 20
Georgi Padzhev opened the door of the motel room himself, his eagerness transparent. “Did you get what we need?”