where it could do the most damage.
At this point Mirza was not piloting all the little aircraft himself; he was only commanding them to fly a prearranged pattern, with a series of execute commands. He could take over an individual quadcopter at any time and get it to do whatever he wanted it to do, but for now he was more a spectator to the programming Tarik’s people had input.
Once out of the woods, the first drone made a left above Clayallee and shot almost straight up to 120 meters, then began moving horizontally at nearly fifty kilometers an hour.
Behind ship one, others came, each twenty horizontal meters apart, each churning the air with small plastic rotors.
With the sounds of traffic, even over this relatively quiet street, the quadcopters could not be heard at this altitude, and they were extremely hard to see under the clouds at this time of the evening.
It took over two minutes for all forty of the quadcopters—two squadrons of twenty—to leave their racks and fly off towards their destination, but the second they had done so, the rear trailer’s doors were slammed shut. The two men who had come from the cab secured the latch, then headed back to the front of the rig, but not before Mirza embraced them both with a firm hug and a wide smile.
He said, “Paradise awaits,” and the men responded in kind.
Then Haz Mirza ran up the street and climbed into the first vehicle, which, like the other, had been kept running. This vehicle had a sleeping berth, and Mirza crawled his way back to the small workstation he’d built there. Taking the laptop from around his neck, he put it on a table and plugged it back into the power and the three monitors secured to the wall in front of the bunk bed. Immediately he focused attention on the center screen to watch the eye drone’s progress up Clayallee.
Both semis began rolling forward simultaneously, then pulled into the parking lot of the Swiss restaurant and turned around to follow after the two squadrons of attack drones.
* * *
• • •
Court wasn’t here for the party—he wouldn’t know a good party from a bad one—but he did have to admit to himself that everyone around him seemed to be having a good time.
The three Poison Apple contractors had done their best to stay near Hanley but not to loom too closely, while Hanley continued to do his best to avoid Ambassador Sedgwick as the Kentuckian walked through the large two-story residence shaking hands.
The home had been built in the 1920s for a wealthy German industrialist. It had been all but destroyed in the Second World War, but it was rebuilt as West German capitalism cleaned up everything to the west of the Brandenburg Gate. Composed of an entryway on the northern side leading to a long wide gallery going east and west, with the main living spaces of the home in the back, in the wings, and on the second floor, the home’s wide and tall rooms were a perfect exhibition space for an art show, and Ambassador Sedgwick fancied himself an energetic supporter of the arts.
The home was nearly filled with artists, dignitaries from around the world who called Berlin home, and local elites, along with a security presence that did not go unnoticed by the gathering crowd. Court heard people commenting on all the armed guards, speculating it had something to do with the attack on the U.S. embassy earlier in the week, though no one seemed at all concerned about anything more than getting a good look at the art and snagging another flute of champagne off the next sterling silver tray that passed by.
Hanley walked through the long gallery, pretending to examine the artwork on the walls and on easels in the middle of the room, a collection of minimalist paintings by the late American artist Robert Ryman, while his three operatives scanned the crowd for threats.
In addition to the ambassador, there would be others here in the crowd who would recognize the deputy director for operations for the CIA, so Court half expected Hanley to get either pulled into a room by Sedgwick himself or asked to leave by one of Sedgwick’s people, but so far the big DDO had managed to eat two plates of hors d’oeuvres while standing out in the evening air in the back garden.
The three Poison Apple operators weren’t eating—it would have been off for bodyguards to snack