Fatal Domain

PART I

By a Thread

Dust in the wind.

Barbie feet.

Star Girl’s second envelope.

A door left open in the night.

CHAPTER 1

THURSDAY, MAY 19

HIGHWAY 17

FIFTEEN MILES NORTHEAST OF CHARLESTON, SOUTH CAROLINA

12:17 A.M.

Søren Beck told himself that it was a dog, or maybe a deer. The thud.

He stopped the car and got out.

Darkness, apart from the narrow beams of his headlights slicing through the fog-enshrouded night.

For some reason, he found himself speaking, his words sounding hollow along the edge of the woods, here on this lonely road: Hello? Anyone here?

No reply.

Of course there was no reply.

Because there was no one else around.

This is what he told himself.

He clicked his phone’s flashlight function on.

Kneeling close to the front of the car, he found blood on the bumper and a wretched dent crunching up the left headlight. Light still streamed out of it, but it was splintery and skewered because of the shattered plastic. A mangled beam of light. Part of it lanced off to the side.

A dog.

It must’ve been a dog.

But there was no fur in the grille on the front of the car.

He’d been texting an associate at the architectural firm where he worked when it happened, when the impact occurred, and now he swallowed a dry gulp of guilt.

You should’ve known better. You do know better.

He searched for an injured animal along the edge of the road and in the ditch just beyond the shoulder, but saw nothing. Crickets chirred loudly. Somewhere in the distance, an owl made its presence known in the night.

The other side of the road. Search over there.

Scrambling out of the ditch, he made his way across the road to the other shoulder and swept the phone’s light before him. A thick clutch of bushes and undergrowth lined the road, clinging tenaciously to the edge of a steep ravine.

There was no sign of an animal.

Of course, with the force of impact, its body might’ve been hurled deep into the underbrush.

Søren was nearly forty years old but kept in shape. He knew he could make it down the incline and back up, but would it be worth it? He told himself that there was no need to investigate.

Blood on the bumper, though.

There was blood on the bumper.

It was probably dead.

Probably.

In truth, he didn’t really want to go down there. Not now. Not at night. Not like this.

For a long moment he stood there beside the shoulder, studying the leaves but finding no sign of blood.

At last, he returned to the driver’s seat of his car, turned off the phone’s light, and tried to figure out what to do.

To calm himself, he pressed his shaking palms against his thighs.

He would go home. Yes. He had another car he could drive for the time being until he sorted all this out.

At least no one was present. No one had seen what had happened. At least there was that.

Just in case it had not been a dog or a deer.

CHAPTER 2

ONE WEEK LATER

THURSDAY, MAY 26

TWENTY MILES WEST OF MADISON, WISCONSIN

The night had long since settled in around us, deep and still and draped in a thick, hesitant silence, as if it were holding its breath and listening in on us, waiting to hear a secret. The waning moon brought just enough light for us to see our way around the rooftop without having to use flashlights. Cool air. A touch of a breeze. Almost enough to make you shiver.

Five abandoned stories below us, the sandstone bluff that the deserted hotel overlooked dropped off another thirty feet or so to the lake, which rippled faintly in the moonlight. A hundred yards away from the base of the hotel, a bone-white Tesla sedan quietly approached the bridge to the compound on the other side of the bay, a quarter mile across the water.

Other than the occasional muffled sound of a truck on the county highway on the far side of the island, the night was hushed and laced with frayed anticipation.

The car crossed the bridge, passed the security gate, and then disappeared into the dark mouth of the complex’s parking garage, leaving the night to itself.

I knelt on the flat rooftop behind the three-foot-tall parapet rimming the building and brought the night vision binoculars up to my eyes. Some NVB models allow you to wear glasses while using them; these, unfortunately, did not. Without my glasses, everything was a little blurry, but it was just too awkward to use the binoculars with them on, so I’d zippered them up inside my jacket’s chest pocket so I wouldn’t lose track of them.

I adjusted the magnification, and it was almost as good as it would’ve been with my actual glasses on.

My friend Gunnar Bane had gotten the NVB while serving as an Army Ranger, before retiring nearly fifteen years ago right around his fortieth birthday. Because of my job, I was aware of some extraordinary advances in night vision technology over the last few years, but these were still legit and plenty adequate for what I was using them for tonight.

Gunnar crouched beside me as I peered through the binoculars at the building across the lake. The room we were interested in lay on the third floor of TalynTek’s headquarters. The expansive, sweeping windows would’ve likely provided employees with an unimpeded view of the lake and the nearby nature preserve, but also served us well in what we were here for tonight. In fact, it was one of the reasons we’d chosen that particular room.

That, and one of the technicians’ affinity for classic seventies rock bands.

Kansas in particular.

The album: Point of Know Return

The song: Dust in the Wind.

When the CEO of the company first acquired TalynTek from a Silicon Valley entrepreneur a few years ago, she’d moved the headquarters from California to this 182-acre island campus in southwestern Wisconsin. The lake that surrounded it and the nearby nature preserve offered seclusion and privacy. From all indications, she’d chosen this location partly for its beauty, partly for its isolation, and partly for the generous tax incentives from the state. Besides, this much land in rural Wisconsin cost only a fraction of what it would’ve cost near a major city or established tech hub.

The computer servers in the room we were targeting were all air gapped and so, presumably, TalynTek’s computer technicians wouldn’t be particularly worried about them being compromised.

Which would make sense, since air-gapped computers aren’t connected to any network or to the Internet.

Most people, even those in cybersecurity, consider air gapping to be a decisive mitigating factor in forestalling cyberintrusion.

And they were right. After all, how do you hack into a computer that isn’t communicating with any other computers, that isn’t connected to them in any way?

That was the question Project Symphony, a Pentagon-funded cybersecurity initiative, was meant to solve.

And, in this case, the music of Kansas helped.

I saw no movement in the room and nothing unusual in the bright lobby on the ground floor, no guards on the series of uniformly lit pathways crisscrossing TalynTek’s sprawling campus. Nothing. Just a calm, peaceful night cradling the island.

We should be good to go, I told Gunnar, who held the drone’s controller in his left hand so he could control it with his right. He was being gentle with that left arm. A bullet had fragmented into his shoulder last month during a shootout and he was still recovering. He hadn’t been complaining about it—never brought it up, in fact—but the surgeon had needed to dig pretty deep to get all the shrapnel out, so I knew it was still an issue, still hampering Gunnar’s movement and keeping him from his beloved push-ups. It wasn’t clear if he would ever fully recover the strength in that arm.

Do it, he said.

Cupping the camera-equipped, hummingbird-sized drone in my hand, I tossed it off the building. It caught air immediately and hovered quietly before us in the night, buzzing only slightly louder than a nearby mosquito might have. Gunnar directed it forward, and it zoomed across the lake toward that third-story room overlooking the water.

According to our intel, we still had eight minutes before the guard would come through on his rounds again on this side of TalynTek’s headquarters—but of course you need to be careful about assumptions. People don’t always follow their routines and schedules, and security personnel who do their job well actually make it a point not to be predictable or stick to specific routes or timeframes.

Tonight, we were doing our best not to take anything for granted.

Something I wasn’t exactly an expert at.

After all, I was one of those pattern-keepers by nature, and was only now, at thirty-seven, learning to pivot from a plan and respond on the fly.

I was learning experientially that, as important as it is to plan, adapting to changing circumstances is just as vital. Spending the last fifteen years working in the deepest recesses of the Pentagon redacting Department of Defense documents hadn’t exactly prepared me to work in the field like this, but, honestly, even after just a few short weeks, I found that I had an affinity for it and I didn’t miss the sub-basement as much as I’d thought I would.

That close enough? Gunnar asked as he maneuvered the drone around the side of the building to get the line-of-sight angle we needed.

Lowering the binoculars, I studied the live video feed on the tablet resting between us on the roof’s layer of fine cinder. Just a little further to the left.

He carefully adjusted the drone’s camera directed at the window to center the computer server in the tablet’s screen.

I tapped the screen twice to zoom in on one of the server’s red, blinking LED operational lights—the third light from the top and second to the left. Those LEDs fluctuate as the computer searches and indexes data. This one was blinking in a slightly and almost imperceptibly different sequence from the rest of the lights, sending us data with the length of each blink.

That’s it, I said.

Check again for guards, Gunnar replied quietly.

I took a moment to do so.

All clear, I told him. Seven minutes and we should have everything we need.

Roger that. He set the drone in hover mode to keep it stationary in the night so we could record the repeating series of shorter and longer flickers of light that the server was emitting. Then, he settled back onto the rooftop to relax a bit and monitor the live feed being recorded on the tablet.

Seven minutes and we would be good.

If all went as planned.

CHAPTER 3

Earlier this afternoon, while a technician named Darrell Strider was listening to Kansas’s 1977 album Point of Know Return, the air-conditioning on that floor had gone out—something we could thank a zero-day vulnerability for.

Zero day simply means that zero days have passed since the vendor realized that they had the bug or the vulnerability. In other words, they know nothing about it yet.

In this case, the DOD had identified a zero-day bug with a component in TalynTek’s network hardware that we were able to capitalize on, and in order to cool things off, Darrell and his team had needed to resort to fans and open windows.

The lake was known for panfish and bass and even, in the deeper water on the north side near the flowage leading into it, walleye. So, it wasn’t unusual for people to fish in jon boats throughout the lake, and the fourteen-footer we’d trolled around in this afternoon wouldn’t have appeared to anyone to be at all out of place.

Adira Halprin, the third and final member of our team, had used the boat’s motor to guide us into position while I tilted a handheld fishing net toward the window we were targeting.

The net was really a signal booster, enhancing what we were using, an idea she’d come up with and the DOD was on board with.

Adira had spent several years with the Secret Service, then worked for Homeland on their Red Team, testing the security of TSA checkpoints, seeing if she could sneak weapons and bomb-making materials past them using ingenious devices like hair dryer guns, blades hidden in curling irons, and plastic explosives in lipstick tubes.

She’d been successful on nearly a hundred consecutive attempts, until her last one in April when someone had betrayed her and given her up to be caught.

That’s what ended up causing our paths to cross, and honestly, in retrospect, I wasn’t upset about that at all. We’d both noticed the chemistry between us right from that first day together and had subsequently started seeing each other, trying to navigate through the unfamiliar territory of being coworkers who were becoming romantically involved.

She was thirty-four, extremely fit, and could handle herself in a fight against just about anyone. She wore her blonde hair short, in a pixie cut, to make it easier to wear a wig if the situation called for it. Her entrancing blue eyes flashed with a deep intelligence and also a flirty playfulness, and when I looked into them it was hard to look away.

The Project Symphony prototype was small enough to fit in a fishing tackle box. In all honesty, it simply looked like an overly thick tablet computer with an external electronic receiver and a small sonic emitter array. It’d been developed through a collaboration between DARPA, or the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency—the Pentagon’s research arm—and a private-sector defense contractor, Paraden Defense Systems, which had supplied some of the components.

Unlike a fishing pole, which was Paraden’s suggestion and would’ve provided us with an omnidirectional transmitter, with the shape of the net, we were able to create a unidirectional one, which was what we needed in this case.

A clever adaptation from Adira.

The Project Symphony research was focused on surreptitious ways of exfiltrating data from air-gapped computers to obtain administration privileges, record keystrokes, detect or hash passwords, upload files, discover log-in credentials, or obtain access to closely guarded root system files—the golden ticket to everything else. Typically, only system administrators have access to those files, but if you can get in, then you can have complete control of the machine.

The capability to hack into air-gapped systems is the future of cybersecurity—a future that has already begun.

In fact, there were two branches of research that the Pentagon had going on at the same time—one that was trying to figure out how to infiltrate air-gapped computers, the other that was trying to stop anyone from exfiltrating data from them. The goal of each of them was to find a way to better protect our secrets.

A little friendly competition.

In this case we were actually doing both—tonight we would be obtaining data, but first we’d needed to get the virus into the system.

Often, compromising a computer was possible by simply getting someone to click on a link or download a software patch or system update or insert a USB drive to set the virus free on the system. Over 95% of compromised systems are accessed in one of those ways.

Project Symphony approached this from a unique angle, creating an asymmetrical threat to our adversaries.

The device was designed to both send data through sound waves and use ultrasound technology to hack into computers that were air gapped and even stored in Faraday cages, which are specifically designed to block radio signals.

To be honest, I wasn’t exactly sure how it all worked, but data can be carried along through sound waves—that’s how music gets from a speaker to your ear, for instance, when you listen to a stereo. So, if you could travel in the other direction, moving through the sound waves back to the source, back into the computer, could you convey information to it? In the simplest of explanations, that’s what the device was doing while we were in the jon boat—transmitting a virus that would help us to exfiltrate the data later.

Which brought us to tonight.

Now, the server was communicating with us, not through sound waves, but through a pattern of optical blinks. We had the Israelis to thank for this idea, specifically the teams at their Defense Force Unit 8200 and the researchers at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev’s Cybersecurity Research Center. The drone tactic was a move right out of their playbook. The Israelis had made more advancements in researching ways to hack into air-gapped computers than all the nations in NATO, combined. All of that paved the way for the innovations that led to the Project Symphony prototype.

I scrutinized the labyrinthine paths of TalynTek’s campus again through the binoculars.

Still no guards.

Taking advantage of the moment, I repositioned myself to get more comfortable as I sat next to Gunnar. So, I said to him, I’ve gotta ask you: How’s that novel of yours coming along?

Pretty good. I’ll read you some of it later.

I’d only met Gunnar a month ago but had found out on the very first day that he was writing a romance novel, which he was hoping to sell to a publisher to earn some money to help pay for his niece, Skye, to go to college. Apparently, ever since he’d left the military, for whatever reason, things hadn’t been quite where he wanted them to be between him and his sister. I didn’t know what’d happened and he wasn’t forthcoming about it, but I knew he believed that if he could help her out financially with Skye’s tuition, it might be a step in the right direction, a way to start mending their relationship.

I didn’t know about any of that, but his heart was certainly in the right place.

Have you decided on a title yet? I asked him.

Still toying with ideas, but I think I’ve narrowed it down.

To?

"Huntress of Desire, Huntress of Passion, or Huntress of the Night. I might actually do a trilogy. Not sure which one to start with, though. The huntress bit is a way to help readers identify the series, he explained. All part of my brand."

Your brand?

It’s a big thing in publishing. Helps your SEO and discoverability.

I see. I scanned again for any sign of guards.

Nothing.

I checked the tablet.

It was continuing to record the seemingly random progression of the computer’s operational light’s blinks, which were happening every second or two.

Short. Long. Short. Short. Long.

But of course, the length of each blink wasn’t random at all.

The computer was communicating with us in a modified version of International Morse Code that allowed for capital letters and keyboard symbols and was sharing usernames, log-in credentials, and root system file passwords.

Later, I would translate the series of longer and shorter blinks to figure out what letters, numbers, and symbols were being transmitted.

If there weren’t any hiccups, we would be out of here within the next few minutes with information that, if we were right, would lead us closer to finding a domestic terrorist we were tracking.

Though I had a law degree, I didn’t want to dwell too long on the legality of what we were doing. The op was sanctioned by the Pentagon, so at least there was that. Colonel Clarke had given us broad operational latitude, and capturing the passwords tonight was certainly within it. Because of the nature of this op, we had warrants for wiretaps. What we were doing was slightly beyond that, and that’s where things became a little murky around the edges. Consequently, we wouldn’t have wanted to try to explain our intentions to the local authorities, which was why we hadn’t notified them beforehand about what we were doing here tonight.

Adira’s voice came through my earpiece. Hey, boys. How’s it going up there in the nest?

I was wondering if you were still with us, Gunnar said lightly.

Just chillin’. She was stationed down below, to the east of the building that Gunnar and I were on top of, keeping an eye on the road leading up to the entrance, monitoring it for any sign of movement or possible incursion. You good?

Golden, Gunnar told her. Should have what we need in the next five minutes or so. You see anyone?

No movement down here. Nothing but a little splashing around down by the water. I’m thinking a beaver or maybe an otter. I checked it out. Didn’t see anything.

The Department of Defense had learned a few things over the last decade from studying the manner in which the most effective terrorist cells and the most innovative corporate teams operate, and there was more in common between their approaches than you might expect. The DOD had found that the management strategies weren’t all that different, and, in our case, had put that intel to work in developing the covert unit that the three of us now served on.

Small. Independent. Self-reliant. Free to adapt and respond to situations as necessary to facilitate optimal outcomes. Taking risks was rewarded rather than punished, and a creative, out-of-the-box approach was valued more than merely following protocol or SOPs. Focusing not so much on how things had been done, but how they might be done. It was a different paradigm than I was used to, but one that seemed to produce results.

We reported directly to Colonel Clarke. With my experience redacting Defense Department files, Gunnar’s military service and private security consulting expertise, and Adira’s background with the Secret Service and her subsequent work in executive protection and at Homeland, we’d been given an extraordinary amount of freedom from bureaucratic entanglements to do our work.

The three of us were part of the effort to track down and take down the Pruninghooks Collective, a group that had attempted to detonate a dirty bomb in Knoxville, Tennessee, last month. Ostensibly, they were a pacifist antinuke group that took their name from a verse in the biblical book of Isaiah that talks about a time when nation will not rise up against nation, people will beat their swords into pruninghooks, and no one will study war anymore. However, the group had gone off the rails, so to speak, when one of their leaders, a billionaire named Janice Daniels, steered them in a whole new, much more radical direction.

She’d become convinced that by precipitating a limited-scale radiological dispersion event, she could sway public opinion away from the use of nuclear weapons and nuclear energy of all types—something she thought would be beneficial for the human race. And she very nearly pulled it off. We’d barely been able to stop the attack, and, in all truth, public opinion had pendulumed away from supporting the use of nuclear energy over the last month, just as she’d hoped it would. So, even though lives had been saved, her plan had, to a certain degree, succeeded.

Now she was on the run and we were after her. Before she’d disappeared, she’d told Adira the dirty bomb was just the beginning. But unfortunately, we had no idea what else she and her associates were planning.

Janice was also the one who’d bought TalynTek from its founder, Cliff Richardson, a few years ago. TalynTek’s board of directors had obviously tried to distance themselves from her, but we suspected she still had ties to the organization, which we were hoping to identify tonight.

We had no idea how many other teams like us were out there. The colonel had been tight-lipped about that, but I’d seen enough intel come through to suspect that there were at least two other teams, similar to us, tracking different domestic terrorist groups: a far-left Antifa offshoot that was fire-bombing crisis pregnancy centers, and a white nationalist militia that was trying to form its own state out on a massive ranch in New Mexico that was nearly thirty times the size of Manhattan. Two eye-popping examples of what the Far Left and the Far Right had to offer. Go far enough in either direction and you’ll find people who believe that violence really is the answer.

We had no official information about the other units; only Colonel Clarke did. This way, we could retain plausible deniability regarding their operations, if it ever came to that.

In most cases, sharing intel was profitable, even vital. However, in this instance we weren’t sure who—besides Clarke—we could trust. Janice Daniels had proven that she had a long reach and over the last year had even managed to bribe Adira’s boss, infiltrating the highest echelons of the Department of Homeland Security.

I was learning that, often, working off the books you can avoid having to cut through a mountain of red tape and get more done. As long as you have people you can trust.

So, in our investigation, we were playing things pretty close to the vest.

Our job: gather the intel, pass it along to Clarke, and trust him to take things from there.

Be careful out there, he’d advised us solemnly at our last meeting. And remember: Don’t trust anyone.

I examined the campus that slept before us in the night.

Three minutes left.

Hey, Gunnar, Adira said.

Yeah?

I heard you earlier. The title ideas for your book. You know I’m a sucker for a good romance novel.

What do you think? Which one do you like best?

"Tough call. I’d probably go with Huntress of Desire."

"Cool. Yeah. Good to know. Oh, I have another idea too that I’ve been kicking around: Huntress of the Hunted."

Um . . . that might be a little too on the nose.

Yeah, he acknowledged. True.

Too bad you’re not writing a young adult fantasy novel, she said. Then the titling process would be a lot easier. Just plug and play.

What do you mean?

"Well, basically, you just use twelve words and pretty much randomly stick them together to name the next book in your series, on the spot. Voilà!"

She’d definitely sparked my curiosity. What twelve words are those? I asked her.

"First, choose one of these: sky, forest, dreams, or night."

"I’ll go with forest," Gunnar said.

"Then add the word of and choose one of these four: glass, bone, ash, and fire."

Bone, he said.

"Right. And finally, just add the word and and then either ice, frost, blood, or stone."

"Let’s say frost."

So, she said, "your YA novel would be The Forest of Bone and Frost."

Huh. I like it.

Your turn, Travis, Adira said. Do you need me to repeat the twelve . . . but I suppose you don’t, do you?

"I should be good. I’ll go with A Sky of Glass and Stone. Wait . . . that doesn’t even make sense."

It’s not supposed to make sense, she reminded me helpfully. It’s supposed to sell books.

"We could also do Dreams of Ash and Ice, Gunnar noted. Or The Night of Fire and Blood. Who’d have ever thought it was this easy?"

I know, right? she said.

Hmm . . . He reflected on that. "Maybe I should be writing YA fantasy. I mean I could maybe do something with angsty teenage vampires or wizards or demigods. I’m not sure if there are enough of those books out there."

I honestly couldn’t tell if he was being serious or not.

You know, Adira said, come to think of it, you might want to stick to adult romance. It’ll give you a lot more freedom to . . . well, to be anatomically correct in your descriptions of physical intimacy.

Aha, he said. Good call.

Over the last few weeks, Gunnar had read us some of his drafts for the love scenes in his book, and . . . well . . . they were memorable—I could say that much with all honesty. Cringeworthy was the word that came to mind. It made for an interesting conundrum since I was now both enormously curious to hear his latest revisions and also dreading it quite sincerely. Both. At the same time.

Hang on, guys, Adira said, her voice tightening. We’ve got company.

CHAPTER 4

I studied TalynTek’s dark campus through the binocs but noticed nothing unusual.

What do you see? Gunnar asked her.

Two people walking along a trail skirting this side of the lake. Hand in hand.

Suspicious? Gunnar said.

You mean, apart from the fact that it’s basically one thirty in the morning and they suddenly showed up out of nowhere, here in the middle of nowhere?

Right. Were you made?

I don’t think so—wait. One of them, the guy, he’s looking at his phone. Now he’s typing on it.

Across the lake, through the binoculars, I saw the guard at the front desk pick up a phone of his own.

They’re onto us, I told Adira and Gunnar, perhaps assuming too much.

But probably not.

Gunnar turned to me. How much time do we have left before you’ve got what you need with the blinking light?

I consulted the tablet. At least another two minutes.

He shook his head. That’s not gonna happen. We need to move.

Using the drone’s controller and being cautious not to jar his left arm too much, he carefully repositioned the drone, easing it back from the TalynTek building.

Wait, I said. Give it a little time.

Through the binoculars, I scanned the building and saw the gate in front of the nearby parking garage lift and two dark SUVs appear, heading for the bridge.

Nope, not assuming too much.

That’s it. We move, he said.

The couple, Adira said, they’re taking off into the nature preserve. I still don’t think they saw me, but somehow they knew what’s up. Pursue and detain, or let ’em go?

Let ’em go, Gunnar said, making the call. He toggled the drone’s controllers and then grunted. I think we’ve got someone trying to hack into our drone, take it over.

I turned my attention to the tablet and saw the feed flicker as whoever it was tried to disrupt the signal, or perhaps track it back to us.

Technology wasn’t exactly my primary responsibility, but over the last fifteen years I’d redacted thousands of pages of Defense Department documents detailing cyberintrusion techniques and ways to counter them, and it was my responsibility to remember the key aspects of what I read. And now I needed to lean into that knowledge.

MIJI is an old military intelligence term that stands for meaconing, intrusion, jamming, and interference. It’s about all the ways to block, confuse, or mislead enemy sensors and navigational signals. And right now, that’s what we were dealing with.

I scrolled to a terminal window to view the coding and check the stability of the firewalls. Tracing the origin of the hack, all I got was a signal bounce through somewhere in Venezuela and then through Kazakhstan, which didn’t make a lot of sense if it was just these guys across the lake. Why go to all that trouble?

Unless it isn’t them.

As I quickly worked at the tablet, the screen flickered and a dense map of code appeared for a few seconds before flashing back to the splintered, pixelated footage from the drone’s camera. This time it was corrupted, blinking into and out of focus. The feed was deteriorating, and our firewalls weren’t going to hold—I could tell that much. I could also tell that I was out of my league here.

How long can you keep ’em out? Gunnar asked me.

Not long.

A shot rang out from across the lake, startling me so much that I almost dropped the tablet.

Okay, brother, you’re up, Gunnar said. Let’s see how good that memory of yours really is. How many random digits can you memorize in a row?

I don’t know . . . I was anticipating what he had in mind and, honestly, I wasn’t sure I could pull it off. I mean, a few thousand, given enough time to study them, but . . .

Well, time’s the one thing we don’t have. I’d say you have a minute, maybe ninety seconds, to memorize those blinks—however many you can get.

It didn’t take long to calculate that, based on the rate at which the server was emitting the blinks, it would likely be a series of several hundred dots and dashes.

Not impossible, but certainly not a cakewalk.

Savants have been known to memorize pi up to 150 digits on the first glance. That wasn’t me. I could memorize two shuffled decks of cards on the first pass, but since you can form meaningful clumps of numbers and combinations with card decks, that was much easier than this progression of visual dots and dashes appearing in no easily discernible order.

Another shot rang out. This time, the round clipped the drone, sending it circling sideways, spinning uncontrollably through the night. The footage tilted and twirled crazily as the irretrievably damaged drone careened downward, out of control, angling toward the water.

Gunnar fought to keep it in the air, but it plummeted toward the lake and finally splashed in. The feed went dark.

That was not a bad shot, he said with clear admiration. Probably AI targeting, but still . . . Looks like we’re dealing with someone here who knows what they’re doing.

He tapped the controller to self-destruct the drone so the tech wouldn’t fall into TalynTek’s hands, but I wasn’t sure if that would work anymore, not with the disrupted and corrupted signal, especially now that the drone was in the lake.

Our options at this point were limited and shrinking by the second.

To avoid being hacked, we hadn’t been transmitting the drone’s feed directly to the Pentagon’s servers, and I didn’t want to start doing so because TalynTek would likely be able to pinpoint our location if we did. The tablet was dying, and I wasn’t going to be able to save it. Not out here. Not a chance.

Gunnar was right; if we were going to save the data, there really was only one option.

Memorize it.

CHAPTER 5

I swiped the video back to the beginning of the recording.

A klaxon cut through the night, screaming out from across the water as a series of searchlights from the complex on the other side of the bay cut on, panned the lake, and came to rest on our building, illuminating it. As the lights swept toward us, Gunnar and I ducked down beneath the waist-high parapet surrounding the rooftop.

Those SUVs are on the way, Adira announced. We’ve gotta go, gentlemen.

You’re up, Gunnar said to me. Time to earn your pay. He unholstered his handgun, which he’d affectionately named Maureen, after an ex-girlfriend, and peered past me toward the bridge.

Even with all of my experience committing esoteric facts, random alphanumeric sequences, twenty-digit routing numbers, and disparate dates and data points to memory, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to do this.

It only took a moment to calculate that I’d need to play the video back at twice the recording speed to even have a chance of getting through to the end before the tablet died or TalynTek’s security forces found us—all while keeping track of the blinks.

I tapped the screen, enhanced the playback speed, then studied it carefully as the progression of longer and shorter pulses of light flashed.

As I concentrated on the length of each blink, memorizing the order, I waited futilely for a pattern to emerge.

No one’s memory is perfect. The idea of having a photographic memory is a myth—research in the fields of neuroscience and cognition just doesn’t support its existence. Mine was sharp, but I wasn’t certain it was sharp enough to do what needed to be done right now.

People who compete in memory events use a variety of techniques to achieve their impressive feats—from memory palaces to mnemonic image methods to peg systems to group compression, and more. Even though I didn’t compete, I’d studied the techniques to help me at work and I’d come up with my own hybrid system of picturing myself walking through a garden and remembering words, digits, and images hanging at different heights from different types of plants. Since the method was three-dimensional and I could arrange the pathway itself into meaningful shapes or letters, if necessary, the system was flexible and, by varying the size and type of the plants, it gave me pretty much limitless options.

Now, I adapted it to remember larger and smaller hedges corresponding to the lengths of the blinks. I pictured myself on that path, passing my hand across a hedgerow on my right side. Tall.