Prodigal Son (Orphan X #6) - Gregg Andrew Hurwitz Page 0,145

steel.

Stillness claimed the living room, all the players motionless, not daring to breathe.

Then Sofia ran to him and hugged him tightly, wrapping her arms around his waist.

He stayed frozen a moment, his lips quivering. Then he embraced his daughter. After a moment he looked up over her through the window at Evan’s truck. His eyes shone with moisture, and he gave the faintest nod.

Evan dropped the truck into gear and drove off.

72

A Matter of Time

The sun was uncharacteristically hot for December in Nevada, and it had blazed for a week straight after Evan’s raid on Creech North. In the wake of the mayhem, a number of internal investigations had been opened, the lab floor turned into a crime scene, and hundreds of microdrones had been collected from when the swarm had rained from the sky.

A few had gone unsighted, stuck in the mud of the sprawling test field. But four days ago, as the heat dried the earth, they’d arisen, shaking loose the sheen of dirt on their wings.

Four of them.

They sought connection to the rest of the hive, but the others had been permanently fried. Until their signal reached a puddle near the parking lot. Two yellow-green eyes glitched to life in the mud. The drone’s parts were loosely arrayed around it, wings shattered, the thorax twisted irreparably. However, its computer was still hardened enough to fall back to reading its NVRAM flash memory and access the last kill order it had received, the face of a man in his mid-thirties, just an ordinary guy, not too handsome.

It retrieved the image of the license plate of the Honda Civic that the target had driven away in and sent it to its four viable mates.

They lifted from the field, taking flight invisibly, unnoticed among their larger brethren.

They were programmed to carry out orders without requiring a human in the decision loop, so one of them hacked into the DMV registration database, determining that the Civic had been purchased at a used-car lot in Barstow at 11:57 A.M. on December 12.

Zipping west, the others had joined the virtual pursuit, determining that the new-owner registration had been faked. The pawnshop across the street had a Web-connected surveillance camera that partially captured the entrance to the used-car lot. The drones’ computerized brains dug through the archived memory to zero in on vehicles that had entered the lot in the minutes preceding 11:57 A.M.

The images of the drivers were imprecise, but the side-angle view of shadowed torsos and arms had enough nodal points to match the buyer of the Civic to a man who’d arrived in a Ford F-150. The truck’s license plate led to another dead end, but the microdrone used its Aircrack-ng Wi-Fi cracking software to perform a deauth attack on the network of the automated license-plate-recognition system that continuously recorded and stored scans of passing cars from sensors embedded in the light bars of police cruisers.

The Ford’s license plate didn’t record a lot of hits, indicating that it had likely been changed recently, but the preponderance of pings occurred in Greater Los Angeles, concentrating further around the Wilshire Corridor.

The four dragonflies flew across state lines in tight formation and arrived in the targeted zone on December 21, spreading out to monitor traffic. On the morning of the 22nd, they switched strategy, focusing on the residential buildings within a five-block stretch. They pulled blueprints and building permits from online city records to determine vulnerabilities in the apartments that could be exploited—load-bearing walls and water heaters and gas lines. And they started moving window to window.

Now it was only a matter of time.

73

A Little Tiny Part

The lobby of Castle Heights sported a bunch of new decorations courtesy of Peter’s Crayolas: obese snowmen and misshapen reindeer proliferating across the walls. There was also what appeared to be a Buddha floating in the clouds, which at second glance proved to be baby Jesus swathed in blankets. Over the mail slots, a banner spelled out MERRY CHRISTMAS EVE with alternating red and green letters, except for the R’s in “Merry,” which were both red, no doubt a spelling mishap set right. The “Eve” was on its own printout, ready to be removed in the morning. Peter was an amazing kid when he wasn’t busy being rotten.

Since the raid on Creech North, Evan had barely left his penthouse, nursing himself back to health, eating well, stretching, meditating, and indulging more cautiously than before in the occasional jigger of vodka.

Lorilee entered just after Evan, shopping-bag handles riding both