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

Mori and her friend weren’t trying to hide from anyone. They had no reason to suspect they were being tracked.

“I think they probably landed on that strip of white beach we saw from the bay.”

Kai tilted his head down at mud. “The hill isn’t as steep there.”

“Right.”

“Be easy for them to drag the kayak above the high-tide line.”

“Right.”

“That’s where they would leave it.”

“Right.”

Tai adjusted the sling bag on his shoulder.

“Let’s go,” he said.

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. “I know a shortcut through the forest.”

Natasha looked at him, her face serious.

“We should hurry,” she said.

Natasha reached out and tapped Bryan’s elbow. The trees had thinned ahead of them, and she could see water and sky through the branches. They were almost at the shoreline.

He paused, turned to look at her.

“We should stay back a little,” she said in a lowered voice. “OK?”

“OK.”

They moved forward more slowly. As they neared the crest of the high, steep bank, the lobster boat came into sight about fifty feet below them. It was, in fact, the Big Dipper, moored with its bow facing out into the bay. A wooden ramp led down from its flat, open stern to the shore.

There was no sign of Dwight Stimson.

Natasha wanted a better look. But not from where they stood. The wide gaps between the trees here offered them a good, unobstructed view of the boat. But those same open spaces would leave them exposed to someone looking up in their direction, and she was suddenly feeling very cautious.

She glanced around, saw a thick patch of thorn bushes and tall perennial ferns a few yards to their right.

“We should go over there,” she said, pointing.

Bryan nodded. When she was behind the brush patch, she dropped into a crouch, motioning for him to do the same.

He knelt beside her. The plants grew all the way to the edge of the bank, partially blocking their view. But Natasha could lean out from behind them and see well enough.

She pulled off her binoculars and handed them to Bryan.

“You first,” she whispered. “Tell me what you see.”

“About the boat?”

“Whatever,” she said.

He bent sideways, raising the binocs to his eyes.

“It’s just too weird,” he said after a minute. “Mr. Stimson always ties up near the shell beach. He has a mooring post not far from where we left the kayak.”

“Can you think of a reason he wouldn’t?”

Bryan shook his head, looking at her. “The bank’s really steep here. Why would he want to climb it?”

She nodded. A thought had abruptly sprung up in her mind as he spoke. She took the glasses and peered downhill. Down at the boggy shoreline.

There were footprints in the mud. Of course there were. There would have to be if someone walked through it. Unless that someone took a long time to get rid of them.

She studied them through the glasses, focusing her optics. They were very large. Made by a big man.

No, she thought.

Not one.

They overlapped in places. Which meant there might