foil.
“Not much,” Jay answered and Dani heard a collective sigh of relief.
“How much?” Ty asked.
“We tested it a couple of days ago and a few bands in strategic places was enough.”
“Will it cause the system to scramble or show any errors?” Dani asked, grabbing a cup of water from the cooler in the corner. The room wasn't meant to hold more than two or three people.
“No, that's the beauty of it. Something about the composition of aluminum foil makes the machine go deaf for a minute or two, only it doesn't know it.”
“So what's the layout of these machines?” Cotter asked.
Jay nodded in acknowledgment and turned toward the back wall of the room. He pulled down a marine map of Getz's peninsula that showed a series of red and blue Xs surrounding the land.
“The blue Xs are the Hunley monitors. The red ones are the Abram monitors, but we'll get to those later. As you can see, the Hunleys are arced around the peninsula about twenty-five feet apart. It creates a basic ‘wall’ around the land.”
“What's the range of detection?” Dani asked.
“On a good day, the range can be up to fifty feet.”
“Getz chose this option,” Jay said, motioning to the map behind him. “It looks cleaner, but from a security perspective, it's suboptimal because, once you get past the single line of machines, you're over the wall, so to speak. And we didn't feel like arguing with him,” he added and cast a glance at two of his employees who were smiling and shaking their heads.
“Not that Getz's men could do anything to us that we couldn't do to them in half the time. We just didn't like the guy. Real prick. We figured if the system failed he'd get what he deserved anyway,” he added.
Dani glanced at Drew and saw a wry expression on his face. He hadn't been too keen on bringing Jay in but Ty had convinced him. Dani could tell by the smile that tugged at Drew's lips, he was beginning to like the guy.
“Any more questions on the Hunley?” Jay asked. They shook their heads. “We've got it set up in a bay not far from here so we'll take some test runs this afternoon, but we need to go over the Abram system next.” A couple of the guys took the opportunity to grab water as Jay moved toward the second machine sitting on the square table. Dani opted for opening a window. They'd gotten spoiled at her sister's place with all that space.
“It looks like something from the evil empire,” Spanky commented as they all returned to the table. The Abram machine was smaller, shaped like a basketball. Black in color, it had an ominous look to it.
“It not only looks like something from the evil empire, it acts like it, too,” Jay said.
“Meaning?” Dani prompted.
“This is one unforgiving bitch of a system,” Jay shook his head, and stared at the machine, as if trying to puzzle out its motives. “We've got people working on it, working on finding its weaknesses. We haven't found much but we do have two. And they're two substantial weaknesses.
“So, here is how it works,” Jay started, moving in front of the machine and pointing to a small black window. “This machine is custom-programmed for use in a specific area. In other words, if you want to use it in Florida, it would be programmed to recognize sharks because they've got them there and you wouldn't want the system going off every time a shark swam by. And, knowing what we know about the area, we can give an educated guess as to what Getz's systems is programmed to recognize. So here's what we think,” he moved back toward the marine map with the Xs as he spoke. “Given where we are, where Getz's house is, we're going to recommend that you assume anything over three feet long or two feet wide will be recognized.”
“That's not very big and counts all of us out,” Dani pointed out.
“Yeah,” Jay agreed, “That's the bitch of the system,” he moved back to the machine. “As I said, it has two big flaws, and we're going to need to count on those. See these?” he asked, pointing to a series of little black windows. “These are like infrared beams, like the kind you'd see in museum. And, like in a museum, unless you break the beam, the monitor isn't going to pick you up.”
“How many are there on each machine?” Drew