Island Drone Hospital
“We’re going to catch ourselves a traitor.” Red Fidelity 1
Segreti was crossing under the bridge, wheeling his suitcase and thumbing through emails, when a navy-blue sedan screeched into his path. He recognized the vehicle: Dodge Charger, nimble for its size, government issued and freshly washed. The passenger window lowered. Belmont, keeping his hands on the wheel, leaned across to show his face. Two cars behind, irate drivers honked their horns.
“Pop the trunk.” Segreti threw his luggage inside, ignoring the chorus of honks and indifferent to the protests from the people waiting in the taxi line.
He got in the passenger seat, his shoes leaving grimy prints on the vacuumed floorboard of Belmont’s neat interior. Malcolm Belmont, thirty-eight, African-American—his mind and his style just as tidy as his ride; even his suit didn’t allow for a single crease. As a linguist, he spoke everything invented by white people, and particularly relished the reveal when some German fraudster or Russian gangbanger realized Belmont had understood every word.
They cruised towards Newark Liberty’s exit.
“You got through quickly, sir. Thought I was early.”
“I hate airports.” Segreti regarded the concrete layer cake through the dimness of his sunglasses. “They slow me down.” He checked his phone.
“Office?”
“Nah, Bronx. East side, make for Hunts Point.” He tapped his smartphone. Being in motion is what passed for joy in Segreti’s life these days. “That auction? It’s confirmed. And it’s tonight. I want to see this place.”
Segreti and Belmont approached the waterfront at the edge of a lifeless parking lot. A barbed-wire fence guarded stacks of rusted shipping containers. Behind them, the cement factory’s chimneys emitted a chalky smoke. Most of the harbor view was blocked by a giant cargo ship at berth.
“That might be it,” Belmont said, pointing at an island partly visible beyond the ship’s hull, a not-too-distant patch of dark green on the sun-speckled river.
“That’s it.” Segreti had a feeling that this was where he was going to continue his winning streak, be the Bureau’s indispensable man. He stuffed one earphone in and rang Chlebek at her desk downtown. “How do we get there?”
He heard her working her keyboard. “You don’t,” Chlebek said. “Off limits to the public since the eighties.” Clack clack clack. “You can apply to the parks department and charter a boat. But there’s no dock.”
“What’s there?”
“Used to be a quarantine asylum. Hm.”
“What?”
“Typhoid Mary lived there.”
“Let’s skip the history lessons.”
“Nothing but ruins. A hospital, a nurse’s home, that’s about all that’s recognizable.”
Segreti had a moment’s doubt about the intel. But what he had heard this morning in DC overwhelmed any second guesses. “Where’s Ram?” he asked.
She didn’t have to answer. They heard Ram’s car before it rounded the wall of cargo containers. Chevy Impala, giving off a cloud of dust, windshield too covered with dirt to reflect the sun. The Impala parked at a crazy angle beside Belmont’s Charger.
“About time.”
The door flung open, and Ram started to run over.
“Drone!” Segreti shouted. “The drone!”
Ram heard him and waved, pivoted to his car trunk. When he hustled back towards Segreti and Belmont, he was carrying the drone and a control. He unfolded the quadcopter and blew on its main camera.
Segreti pointed to the distant island. “There.”
Ram toggled the control and snuggled his iPhone into its rack. The camera’s view of their shoes popped onto the screen. Ram’s thumbs massaged the panel and the drone shot up with a plastic whiff.
Bhavin Ram, thirty-eight, was born in West Texas and wore the accent like a sheriff’s badge. Got sued by Microsoft when he was twelve for hacking Windows and telling them what he had found. Sometimes wore a ten-gallon hat and told people he liked playing cowboys and Indians because he could never lose.
Ram should be trimmer, Segreti thought. The whisky’s softening his edges. But no one did this job without needing an antidote, something.
The white drone disappeared from eyesight over the East River.
Segreti leaned over Ram’s shoulder, watching the drone’s feed on the iPhone screen. A smudge of blue turned to a blur of greens and browns as the drone followed the island’s coast. It hovered over what looked like a crumbling pier and a blackened gantry.
Segreti called Chlebek. “You getting this?”
“Yes,” she said into his ear. “That’s an old factory. The hospital’s to the south.”
“Roger that,” Ram said, clicking his controls.
The image showed an industrial brick chimney and some sagging remains, and then the drone was headed over a patchwork of grassland and dense foliage.
“Sir,” Chlebek said, “what if there’s nothing there?”
Just this morning, sitting beside the US Deputy Attorney General in a windowless office shielded from every spectrum of wave, Segreti had been told that a source had died for this tip—an asset of BND, the Bureau’s German counterpart.
“Focus on the job,” he snapped.
The drone revealed a big square structure.
“The hospital,” Chlebek said.
“Lower down,” Segreti told Ram. “I want a good look.”
The building seemed to rise up the screen, its bricks ripped askew by relentless vines, its windows black negatives.
“Wait. Go up. That.”
“There’s a light on,” Belmont said, peering over Ram’s other shoulder.
“Go in.”
The building’s wall filled the screen, and the window devoured them. After a moment the interior faded into view. A large hall with clean lines of modern folding chairs.
“Doesn’t look abandoned to me,” Segreti said, ignoring a triumphant impulse.
Chlebek’s voice said, “The infrared is running hot. Someone was sitting there.”
“Do we take a look?” Ram asked.
Segreti was eager to see as much as possible. But it was foolish to stay. “Pull out.”
The drone retreated from the room. The screen jolted.
“What happened?”
Ram’s thumbs worked furiously. “Hit the edge of the window.”
Segreti bit his tongue, letting Ram figure how to back out.
“How much noise that thing make?” Belmont asked.
“Just get clear of there,” Segreti told Ram, calmly.
Ram flew the drone outside. His shoulders relaxed.
“Stay high but let’s see what they’ve done with the place.”
The ground retreated. They saw the old hospital and a clearing and more ruins, and then a big clearing.
“Go down.”
The green-yellow grass filled the screen, slashed by parallel lines.
“Chlebek, are those helicopter prints?” Segreti asked.
“Looks it, sir.”
“Bring it back,” he told Ram.
The view rotated. On the ground, a different kind of movement. A white man in a black T-shirt, long blond hair, running, cradling a long black object, like a rifle without a barrel.
“Time to go.”
The screen showed descending treetops, froze, scrambled, and went blank.
“What just happened?” Belmont asked.
Ram’s hands danced on the console. “The signal’s dead.”
Chlebek said, “That was a radio frequency jammer.”
“Where’s the drone?” Segreti asked.
“Probably in that guy’s hands,” Ram said.
“We’re blown,” Belmont said. “They know they’re being watched.”
“But not by who,” Segreti said. “There’s supposed to be a big event on that island. Tonight. Lots of buyers and sellers. Heavy players only.”
“I removed the memory card,” Ram said. “Scratched out the serial code.”
Segreti turned to Belmont. “The POI still in play?” Their Person of Interest.
“Tremain… yes, sir.”
“We’re going to catch ourselves a traitor.” Segreti gazed at the corner of the island. “Security’s going to be tight. We need to get ourselves a boat.”
“What kind of boat?” Belmont asked.
Segreti smiled. “A fast one.”
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