Chapter 00

 

 

The screen showed a bird’s eye view of the Manhattan skyline – like one of those cheesy 1960s detective story TV show shots, skyscrapers seen straight down.

At times, the man saw his own face reflected against the image, like the face of God, only not any god ancient’s imagined, one dressed in a white and tie, with glasses a decade out of fashion, and an even more out of date pocket protector out of which the tops of pens and pencils protruded.

And even though he had the power of God, at least God’s wrath, he felt more like a ghost, an archangel perhaps, floating over the heads of humanity with the ability to deliver death at any moment.

But it was not his decision. He didn’t even pull the trigger. His job was to tell others where to shoot, and slowly, as the drone made its way over what many people considered the greatest city on earth, he came closer to a target.

He didn’t like it. This wasn’t Iraq or Afghanistan or any of the other remote places on the planet where inflicting death remotely had little or not impact or accountability, and he wondered what the master brains that orchestrated this latest insanity were thinking in making this happen.

Rumor had said something had gone very, very wrong somewhere in the system. A new catch phrase had risen unofficially in the ranks: no more Snowdens, referring to that foolish clerk that had stolen data few years back and brokered it into a reputation as a modern day Robinhood.

Was there a new one after all?

Had they tracked him to somewhere in New York City that now a clerk like himself had to locate and stop?

“Have you found it?” a voice in his headset asked.

“Not yet, sir,” he mumbled into the tiny microphone that dangled just below his chin. “But we’re close.”

The drone moved down one of the central avenues of the great city, like a hound caught on some electronic scent, pursuing some objective he as clerk was not privy to know of, only that when the drone reached it, violence could occur. Not violence against some perceived terrorist, but some one on this side, some likely American who had like Snowden, misplaced his patriotism.

But this would not kill this person alone. A strike in the heart of this city would kill hundreds, maybe thousands.

Were they so desperate upstairs that they would do so?

Then, the drone stopped. The image became a fixed picture of a grid of streets.

“Sir, we have a problem,” he said.

“What problem?”

“We’re no longer tracking.”

“What?” the voice said, sounding shrill. “How can that be?”

“Someone must have turned off the tracker.”

“Can they do that?”

“It’s tied to the device. If they remove the power source, the tracker stops.”

“Damn,” the voice said. “We’ll have to send a team. Call the drone back.”

A drip of sweat dropped onto his fingers as they moved across the screen activating the recall order.

For some reason, he felt no relief – leaving him with the same feeling he might have had if the apocalypse had been delaying, but glad that it was not at his hand that he ended the world.