Chapter 4 #2
She cut the squash fast and methodical, focused on it rather than us, which let my eyes drift to the tiny little white halter top still straining against her rack.
“So we don’t give them a physical target to scan,” she continued.
“We weaponize their data-dependency. Best I can tell, they rely on automated target recognition software — algorithms that scan satellite feeds for specific signatures. We fashion the leak late at night, so by the time they get around to looking, they see one person in a bed — but it’ll actually be a body-sized dummy.
It’ll take some finagling to get it in the neighborhood of ninety-eight degrees and keep it there, but someone’s probably figured it out.
And, while the proxy is malfunctioning to leak data, we upload a file to a dark-web node.
Something that looks like a backup of my investigative notes, and we make it difficult but not impossible to follow the trail back to the cabin. ”
The brilliance of it hit me like a gut punch. Tits and brains with that ass really should be illegal.
“A digital mirage,” I murmured, the corners of my mouth twitching. “To a satellite, the cabin looks occupied. To their network sniffers, it looks like you uploaded your work and went to sleep. They see exactly what the algorithm wants to see: a soft target, sound asleep.”
And that meant the club could scatter in the vicinity in our animal forms. Two bears a quarter mile south, five wolves a few hundred yards north, a turtle just inside the treeline, a bobcat prowling some field mice, and they probably wouldn’t even see owls and hawks in the trees.
Once the team arrived, we could change to human form, step into our clothes, grab our weapons, and converge on the team they’d sent to handle a single woman — probably two weapons specialists and a geek, but even if they doubled that, we’d be fine.
But Storm didn’t know we were shifters, so she was off on a different plan.
“Yes, exactly,” she said, “and while their automated toys are hyper-focused on a cabin three hours away, we’ll have hidden cameras routing to a foreign server, or maybe a local porn farm to cut down on distance and hide in the traffic.
We hear what they say, we see their faces, we see what they brought with them.
Also, we know how long it takes them to arrive. ”
Squatch blinked, looked at her like she was speaking fluent Martian, and gave a low chuckle. “Well damn, blondie. Kinda glad you’re on our side.”
“If, hypothetically speaking,” I said, “we had toys that could hide us in the woods, so their toys won’t see us, we could do more than just observe.
They’d show up with a small team, thinking they were taking on a single sleeping woman, and then a dozen bikers would storm the cabin.
Not saying we kill all of them. I figure we’ll take some alive, and maybe we get answers and maybe we don’t, but we’ll keep them captive.
Their team goes dark. Doesn’t check in. Doesn’t return.
We take them with us in a truck with a huge Faraday cage in the back, so none of their tech, even the stuff surgically implanted, can phone home. ”
She grinned. “And then we can use our cameras to see who shows up looking for them.”
Squatch was right. This girl had a tactical head on her shoulders. She wasn’t just smart; she had a streak of calculating, cold-blooded strategic creativity, and I wondered who’d taught that to her.
The only weak part of her plan was the dummy, since there wouldn’t be movement or breathing, but we could put an owl or hawk shifter in an upstairs bedroom with a window open, and he or she could change to their bird form and fly away when the SAC team came through the downstairs doors.
“They’ll follow the truck,” Squatch said. “Nothing we can do about what they can see from the sky. This only works if we can figure out how to misdirect where the truck goes.”
“Well, if you have toys that let you hide in the woods without being seen, I have to think you’ll come up with a way to hide the truck,” Storm said.
She was annoyed we clearly weren’t going to share info about how we’d hide, but she was smart enough to know asking wouldn’t get her anywhere.
But Squatch was right. The satellites would follow the thermal trail.
I was a little surprised they hadn’t done that with Storm when she’d left the airport, unless they’d lost her on the interstate and hadn’t been able to pick her up again once she exited.
Or maybe they hadn’t started looking until she was already gone.
But that wouldn’t be the case with their team. They’d have overwatch from the start.
“It’d mean getting deep underground, right?” I said, thinking out loud.
“Not unless it’s either superdeep, or it’s magic ground that can stop their SAR satellites,” Storm said.
I stared at her, wondering how the fuck she knew about Synthetic Aperture Radar satellites, and she figured out what I was thinking without me saying a word.
“I kinda went into a deep research rabbit hole once I realized who I’m up against,” she said with a small shrug.
“I had no idea what an SAR satellite was three weeks ago. I’ve had basic hacking skills for years, which I learned from my best friend’s hacker boyfriend back in college, and I learned about sigint and stuff from a SEAL I dated for a couple of years, but…
” She shook her head. “The dive into the publicly available stuff the CIA is capable of now was an eye-opening experience.”
“Copper Hill,” Squatch said, and I smiled.
“Yes, genius bigfoot,” I said, razzing him.
“Plenty of cabins to rent in those mountains, and Freckles’ grandpa will be able to tell us the perfect abandoned railroad tunnel.
We come out miles from where we went in, and they won’t have any idea where to look for us.
” Another thought occurred to me, and I added, “If they follow us with drones, we’ll have to disable them so they can’t follow us through the tunnels, but that should be easy enough, assuming the drones can’t shoot out our tires or EMP the truck. ”
But we have our own directed EMP toys, thanks to Brain in Chattanooga, so we should be able to take their drones out from the start to negate that.
And bonus, whatever copper and silver was left above us would help deflect their satellites.
Storm stopped cutting and stared at me. “A geological blind spot.” She blew out a breath.
“I know you commented how calm I was when I told my story, but the truth is, I was stressed. I trust Bud, but… I had no idea of your capabilities. The past couple of minutes have taken a huge load off my shoulders. Brains and brawn don’t often show up in the same bodies.
It’s good to know you guys are the exception. ”
I couldn’t resist. “Yeah well, right back atcha, but with tits and brains.”
She rolled her eyes and went to the refrigerator, pulled eggs and milk out, and walked to my canister labeled FLOUR. “Where’s your cornmeal? And I don’t suppose you have bacon grease or beef tallow?”
“I’ll handle the steaks while ya’ll do the sides,” Squatch said.
I got what she needed, started tossing the potatoes with olive oil and a handful of spices, and said, “We’ll need to do some heavy research so we know everything we can about them before we create the trap.
We have ways of getting information out of even the most hardened and trained government agent, but it’s possible we’ll learn what we need online, so the need for the trap goes away. ”
She nodded while she stirred the squash. “I’m good at finding shit online, but if you have a high-level hacker who can help, he might dig some stuff up I haven’t found.”
Meanwhile, the entire conversation had floored me.
The woman I’d pegged as a ditzy blonde was a fucking logistical genius, and when she didn’t know something, she knew where to go to educate herself.
I was going to have to be careful with this one.
There probably wouldn’t be an opportunity to go to turtle for a while, and that was fine, but I needed to make sure nothing clued her into the fact I’m more than human.
All of us would, for that matter, because Storm was clearly a fucking Sherlock Holmes at picking up on clues and making correct deductions.