Free Unmanned (9780385351263) by Dan Fesperman Page A

consultant with two slots to fill. Offering triple what the Agency pays and twice the freedom. Before I even had time to say no, two more called. It’s great for the job market—No Spook Left Behind—but down on the ground?” He shook his head.
    “A mess?”
    “We had an op going last July, sheep-dipped unit near the border pulling an all-nighter on the prairie. They staked out the house of some former source who’d been tipping off our targets. Our Pred isat twelve thousand and I’m in the trailer, watching. Two hours before go time, eight bogeys show up in the opposite quadrant, moving in on the same party. Who are they? Fuck if we know, but before we can lift a finger they storm the house, clear every room, then leave our bad boy dead on his doorstep. Mission accomplished, but by who? Blue badgers? Green badgers? Contractors? We never did find out. They’re all out there, and every damn one of ’em has his own list of HVTs.”
    “Who’s keeping tabs on them?”
    “I asked that question a month before they sent me home. Took it all the way to the desk chief in Washington. Nobody would give me a straight answer. At first I thought they were stonewalling. Now I’m convinced they just didn’t know, which frankly kinda blows my mind. They’ve got a rough idea for numbers, maybe even names. But ops and targets? Spheres of influence? Or who’s shooting at who? Good luck with all that. So naturally you end up with competition—for sources, clients, results. And competition breeds mistakes.”
    “Who’s making them?”
    “Who isn’t?”
    “And that’s what happened with my missile strike?”
    “I’m not the one who can answer that. I just know it’s more complicated than Wade fucking Castle going rogue, or getting his coordinates wrong. He’s king of the hill for this kind of shit, the Agency’s tech guru on both sides of the water. No way it’s just a matter of him being duped by a single source.”
    “Or maybe that’s what you’ve been told to say.”
    “What I was
told
to say was absolutely nothing. I erased the goddamn tape to cover my own ass as much as yours.”
    “It’s not like you’ve given me much.”
    “I’m getting to that. The name of an op, for starters. Wade Castle’s baby from day one. Magic Dimes. As in dropping the dime. You watch cop shows, right?”
    “Ratting somebody out, you mean? Like a drug dealer snitching to the feds?”
    “Except these dimes do the snitching for you. That’s what gives them their mojo.”
    “Are you talking about tracking beacons?”
    “No bigger than a silver dollar, even though they’re called dimes. Slide one under somebody’s couch and he’ll get a rocket down his chimney faster than you can say Osama bin Laden.”
    “That was how Castle marked his targets, by getting his sources to drop the dimes?”
    “Some of them, anyway.”
    “There was no beacon signal of any kind coming from the place we hit.”
    “Not that you knew. When an Agency bird did the shooting, he let the Pred crews in on the signal telemetry. Whenever the Air Force was involved he kept it all to himself, to protect his sources. His only contact with the flight crews was by chat.”
    “That’s how it was with me.”
    Bickell nodded. “Castle likes to play things neat and simple, with minimal interference.”
    “Then how’d things get so fucked up?”
    “Partly because the beacon program grew faster than he wanted. Even before he could set up the first shot, somebody upstairs decided to make it a sort of pilot project, a trial run for interagency use. And not just for overseas use.”
    “For using it here, you mean? Homing beacons for Predators?”
    “Or for any other piece of hardware you might use to carry out remote surveillance on a suspect.”
    “So, for the FBI, too, then.”
    “Plus any of our so-called trusted partners in the private sector. Because if you’re not acting officially, then who needs a warrant?”
    “Sounds sketchy.”
    “If you want