Net Force--Kill Chain by Jerome Preisler (e book reader txt) 📕

said after a long moment. “What do those guys want from us?”

She was silent. The breeze had picked up. A gust tossed her hair around her head.

“It isn’t us,” she said. “It’s me.”

“I don’t understand...”

She breathed.

“It goes back to when I was growing up,” she said. “I was in a special program. A Russian government program. They were preparing me for something. Training me. From when I was a fucking peanut.”

Bryan shook his head. “You never told me.”

“I couldn’t,” she said. “It’s top secret. Seriously. Or I would have.”

His eyes widened. “Does anybody know?”

She nodded, slowly. “If you mean on the Force... Director Harris. The head of operations, Carol Morse, I think. Most of the big wheels. But Professor Michaels was the first. He pulled strings. Helped me to stay in this country.”

He was shaking his head in disbelief. “I thought you were one of his grad school geeks. Like me.”

She shivered. The wind gusted again. It had a damp, raw edge, but she wasn’t sure that was the reason for her sudden chill.

“I was, and I wasn’t,” she said. “It’s a long story, Bry. The program—it’s called Vershina—Pinnacle—I kind of ran away from it. Three times, to be exact. But nobody ever runs. They don’t let you. When you leave, they catch you. Wherever you go. Except the third time, there was an agreement. A deal. Between Russia and the United States. My father was part of it. Professor Michaels, he worked it out.”

“Back when we were his students?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Before, actually.”

He shook his head. “I still don’t get it,” he said. “If there’s been a deal all this time, why are they coming for you now?”

“I don’t know,” she said. And smiled wanly. “But it really kinda screws with our mini-vacay, doesn’t it?”

His face remained blank. After a long moment, he said. “I’m afraid of those guys.”

“I’m scared too,” she said. “But I can do some things so we’ll be all right. I just have to remember.”

“What do you mean?”

“Things are coming back to me. It’s like somebody flipped a switch in my brain. I’ll explain later,” she said. “Listen, we can’t stay here. We have to move. But first I need you to tell me some things. About phone jammers ... are they frequency selective?”

He nodded. “With the serious ones, you can input white lists. For phones and devices that aren’t blocked.”

“That’s sat and cellular?”

“Yeah.”

Which, Natasha thought, was very bad news.

“Next,” she said. “Can you bring us back to the kayak without using the path? Like, through the woods, where we’d have cover?”

“Yeah,” he said. “There’s a long way around. It follows a creek, so it’s easy to find. But it would take us hours.”

“How many?”

“Two or three. It’ll be night before we reach the kayak.”

Which, she thought, was better news. Though Bry might not realize it.

“All right,” she said. “That’s how we go.”

He looked at her and swallowed. A long, deep gulp that made his Adam’s apple bob in his throat.

“What is it?” she said.

He hesitated. “I know a hiding place near the creek,” he said. “I could bring you there to wait for me, then go check out the kayak myself.”

Natasha let a second or two pass. Then she smiled and took hold of his hand, gently wrapping her small, slender fingers around his larger ones.

“Nice try, Lancelot,” she said. “But we’re sticking together. No matter what.”

They quietly held hands in the gaining breeze. Natasha realized the light had gotten pale and diffuse, as if filtering down through a layer of ground glass.

It was looking like rain, she thought.

Chapter Eight

Chacagua Island/Caribou, Maine

April 14, 2024

“Crap,” said Bill Caldwell. He was seated at his workstation at NWS Caribou, tapping on the computer keyboard. “No luck.”

“I don’t get it,” said Bernadine Mills. She was standing behind him, looking over his shoulder at his monitor. “It’s always come back up before...aside from that day last winter.”

Caldwell frowned.

“Don’t remind me of that,” he said. “I still shiver when I think about going out to the island in that weather.”

She was quiet. Twenty minutes ago, Chacagua’s Internet of Trees feed had gone off-line. Abruptly. There had been several coded error messages, followed by a “Live Interrupted” notification.

Then zip.

Caldwell hadn’t made much of it at first. The recently departed winter’s mishap aside, signal outages happened now and then. Chacagua’s data stream to the NOAA’s terrestrial network still had some kinks, but he’d learned to live with them. The project’s limited government funding had not left much room in the budget for linkage with a state-of-the-art satellite network, so they’d cut costs and contracted with one that was old, fairly inflexible, and vulnerable to solar and atmospheric disturbances.

The interruptions were usually brief. Minutes, a couple of hours on the outside. The one exception having occurred during the January blow Mills had referred to, when the culprit was a loose cable that had started lashing around in the wind and knocked down a transmitter antenna. And even in that case, there were clear warnings. The coax had wiggled and swayed for hours, gradually degrading the signal. Even before it finally broke free of its post, it had been easy to see what was coming.

This outage was different. There were no advance signs. One moment, Caldwell and Mills were evaluating the island’s live data. The next, it stopped flowing.

Just stopped.

Caldwell frowned. Tapping away.

“Our internet speed’s good,” he said. “It isn’t a server problem.”

“I almost wish it was,” Mills said. “That’s more easily fixable than a physical problem on a Sunday. We could get a sysadmin to take a look at it.”

He sat there, looking aggravated. “This stinks, Bernie,” he said. “We’re staring down the throat of a major weather event. Could there be a worse time for the link to fail?”

“I-A-C-G-W-I-W, as we’d say in the Navy.”

Caldwell smiled glumly. “Murphy’s Law,” he said. “If anything can go wrong it will.”

“You’re sharp for a white boy from Aroostook.” Mills breathed out, slowly. “Is there any chance we can get out there for