Net Force--Kill Chain by Jerome Preisler

Author:Jerome Preisler [Preisler, Jerome]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hanover Square Press
Published: 2021-03-23T14:12:06+00:00

* * *

Natasha followed Bryan through the woods, sticking close to him on the uneven, root-tangled ground.

“You know what I don’t get?” she said to his back. “Besides Dwight pulling in on the wrong side of the island?”

“What?”

“If it’s him, why didn’t he call us?”

“How do we know he didn’t?”

“Because we would have heard him on my phone,” she said. “He took my number, remember?”

He led them around a clump of rocks. Right and left and right and right. They had left the trail a minute earlier, turning north through the trees to check out the sound of the boat. It was, Bryan explained, the narrowest part of the island, and a shortcut to the side facing the inlet and Eagle Cliff.

“You should check anyway,” he said. “Just in case.”

Which Natasha realized she should have already done. She took it out of the pouch around her neck, looked at its home screen, and frowned.

“Bry, hold up a sec,” she said. “This is odd.”

He stopped and faced her. She was holding the phone out to him.

“It says there’s no signal,” she said.

He glanced at it, made a puzzled face, and handed it back to her.

“I’ll try mine,” he said, and reached into his own pouch.

The puzzlement on his face deepened. His phone likewise had a no-service notification at the top of its screen. He tried to open the internet browser, but there was no data service either.

“How can this be?” she said.

Bryan shook his head. He didn’t know. Their mobile phones weren’t ordinary mobile phones. They were Cognizant Systems Argos-II dual cellular/satellite phones, developed by Adrian Soto, Cognizant’s CEO and cybersecurity director of Net Force. They weren’t supposed to have dead spots. Not in the polar deserts, not in the African jungle, not in the Himalayas, or midocean.

No dead spots, not anywhere in the whole wide world.

Yet both of them were stone dead.

Bryan stared at his display. He supposed he couldn’t rule out network failure. But that was very unlikely. His forehead ceased.

“Bry...”

“Yes?”

“What are you thinking?”

“Something isn’t right,” he said, still looking down at the phone. “These are redundant-matrix phones. Every part of the system has multiple backups. They’re designed to connect even if a server’s corrupted or a ground terminal goes off-line or there’s a satellite malfunction—”

“Can their signals be blocked?”

“What?”

“The signals,” she said. “Could somebody intercept them?”

He glanced up at her. “With a good jammer. At short range.”

She looked at him. “How short is short?”

He scratched the back of his neck. “Like, a quarter mile. Half a mile’s possible.”

“You’re positive?”

“Yes.”

She thought a minute. “So the jammer would have to be on the island,” she said. “Or just off it. Right?”

“Yeah,” he said. “But who’d bother with us? It isn’t like we’re with Fox Team. We’re just a couple of geek wireheads.”

She gave no reply. The woods were quiet around them. Totally quiet.

“I don’t hear the boat anymore,” she said. “You?”

Bryan shook his head. “The engine stopped,” he said. “Probably it’s being tied up.”

“How fast can we get to it?”

“If it’s where I think it is, ten or fifteen minutes,” he said.

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