The Chaos Agent by Mark Greaney EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Mark Greaney
- Language: English
- Genre: Assassination Thrillers
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
Morning sun warmed the rain-slick tin roofs, forming blankets of steam that
rose in perceptible waves as they buffeted the sixteen-ounce quadcopter
drone buzzing over the little town. Panajachel, Guatemala, stood at 5,200
feet of elevation, so the four tiny plastic rotors spun furiously in thin, moist
air, the machine moving southeast at a steady pace, its camera taking in
everything below.
The town lies on the northern shore of Lake Atitlán, a fifty-square-mile
body of water in an immense volcanic crater in the Guatemalan Highlands.
A strikingly beautiful place in the middle of a bitterly impoverished
country, the town is a way-off-the-beaten-path tourist attraction for budget
travelers from all over the globe. Cool in the mornings this time of year,
even despite the sunshine, its air is many orders of magnitude cleaner and
clearer than smoggy Guatemala City, a three-hour drive to the east.
Few people walked the cobblestone streets at seven in the morning on a
Saturday—most visitors were sleeping off Friday night’s bar bill—but the
drone’s camera locked on to a trio of young women pounding thick tortillas
by a smoky kettle fire next to a tienda, registering their faces in a fraction of
a second and then dismissing them as non-targets in a fraction more.
An old man pushing a vending cart took longer to evaluate, his cowboy
hat obstructing the periocular region of his face where most biometric
identification data was acquired, but in under a second and a half the man
turned his head and then his features were registered by the eye in the sky.
Almost instantly the drone’s onboard artificial intelligence image classifiers
told the machine that he was not the subject it was hunting for.
The device then whirred over a small two-story red apartment building
on Callejon Santa Elena, and here a blond woman in a green tank top and
jean shorts stepped out onto a balcony and began hanging laundry over a
clothesline.
The camera caught the movement, but it did not have the right angle to
scan the face because the wet towels she hung to dry were in the way.
Drone Reconnaissance Nineteen, or RC19, kept going; there was no
need for it to stop, because five identical airships crisscrossed the sky above
Panajachel in search of their collective target, each on a coverage route
determined by a pilot working in the back of a rented van below, and
augmented by artificial intelligence. Sooner or later, RC23, RC29, or one of
the others would pass by this street from a different trajectory and assess the
face of the blond woman, just as they had been doing with everyone else in
town this morning.
The target was here, the pilot knew it; it was just a matter of pinning
down the target’s location.
RC19 flew on down Callejon Santa Elena, heading off in the direction
of Calle Principal and the center of town, systematically scrutinizing
unsuspecting faces from three hundred feet in the air.
• • •
The blonde on the balcony never saw or heard the copter. She finished
hanging her towels and then took a moment more to look out over the town
and sniff the fresh air. The smell of cooking fires, baking bread, and wet
jungle flora were all pleasantly jumbled together.
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