CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
The Stakeout
Monday morning, Summer and I staked out the address Wong had provided, a row building of duplex housing in downtown Scottsdale. A surprisingly trendy area, though I imagined Frogman had probably picked it for the proximity to Build-A-Dragon’s headquarters. A drive less than twenty minutes at rush hour, and you could probably bike it in half an hour. We’d arrived at seven a.m. in Summer’s Jeep, which probably woke half of the duplex residents with its rumbling engine. Still, I didn’t want to risk getting recognized in my car and the Jeep had other advantages. Including one Summer had only recently told me about.
“So it’s this knob here, right?” I asked, even though I knew quite well which knob she’d used to tint all of the Jeep’s windows when we’d parked. Evidently it was an electric field tint, not unlike some of the privacy glass at work, and she could adjust it anywhere from transparent to solid black.
She slapped my hand. “It’s dark enough.”
“It’s the coolest feature. Aside from driving over things, that is. Why didn’t you tell me about it before now?”
“Because I knew it would give you ideas,” she said.
“Hmm, ideas, you say.” I darted my hand out, turned the tint to very dark, and moved closer to her.
She put her hand on my chest to hold me off. “See? I was right.”
“What? I’m just testing the system out.” I slid past her arm and landed a kiss on her neck.
She laughed and pushed me away. “I’m serious. We’re supposed to be paying attention.”
“No one has come out of these buildings since we got here.” And in staring at them, I’d not seen a sign of life past the faded exterior and overgrown hedges. “I’m kind of wondering if the place might be abandoned.”
“So much for your intel.”
“Hey, my intel comes from Wong. Take it up with him.”
My phone rang and I glanced at the screen. Speak of the devil. “Hey,” I answered. “What’s going on?”
“We have O’Connell.”
“What’s he doing?”
“Going to work, we think.”
I motioned at Summer to start her engine, which she did. Right after adjusting the window tints and giving me a saucy look. “Where are you?”
“Getting onto freeway, going west.”
“Ten west,” I whispered to Summer, before getting back on the phone. “Ping me your GPS tag, will you?” Immediately after I asked it, I cringed. Technically, Wong reported to me, and it would let me track his phone’s GPS with my own. In his shoes, I’m not sure I’d want my supervisor having that kind of power over me.
He didn’t answer for a few seconds, and I wondered if he’d had the same thought. “Sent.”
I glanced at my phone, which showed the ping location Wong had sent overlaid on a traffic map. “Got it. Don’t let him see you. I’ll call you when we’re closer.” I hung up.
“How far up are they?” Summer asked. She was already getting onto the freeway.
“Not much.” I extrapolated our location relative to Wong’s, and the traffic speed. “Less than a mile ahead.”
She hit the gas pedal hard enough that I was jolted back against my seat.
“Assuming we survive,” I grumbled.
“You want to catch up, don’t you?”
In a few minutes we’d woven our way through the moderate traffic and were approaching Wong’s tiny dot on my phone’s map.
“Wey?” he answered, the Mandarin phone greeting.
“Wey. We’re coming up behind you. Where’s O’Connell?”
“Right lane, four cars up. Black sedan.”
Of course it was a black sedan. Only O’Connell would buy a black car in a city where the average temperature in summer was a hundred and six degrees. Sure enough, a dark sedan cruised in the right hand lane. Summer eased up behind Korrapati’s SUV, which happened to be hovering in his blind spot. Clever girl.
I pointed. “It’s that sedan.”
“Are we sure it’s him?” Summer asked.
“We saw him get in,” Wong told me.
“They saw him get in,” I told Summer. “Be cool.”
Judging by the side-eye that comment won me, I was going to pay for it later. I tried to surreptitiously use my binoculars to get a closer look at the car. The window tinting was just too dark. That was the problem with Arizona: dark glass was always in the way.
“Hey, 007,” Summer said. “We’re trying not to attract attention, remember?”
I had that coming. I put down the binoculars. “Touché.”
O’Connell drove steadily west through the outskirts of Phoenix. Traffic thinned out enough that we could drop back and follow him from a quarter mile. We took turns being the lead car with Korrapati. They had the front position when Wong called me.
“He’s getting off.”
“Really?” I glanced at the map but there was nothing marked on it, not even a road.
“We follow?”
“No, it would be too obvious. Go past and tell me what you can see. Then we can take the lead.”
Wong relayed this to Korrapati. “We’re passing. Plain road on right. Maybe gravel.”
“Copy. Find a place to turn around.” I covered the mouthpiece and said to Summer. “Get ready to turn right.”
Wong had the forethought to ping me with GPS coordinates where O’Connell had turned, so we had a tiny bit of advance notice. I pointed. “Right there. Might be gravel.”
“I can handle it.” Summer barely slowed before she swung us onto the side road. I grabbed the oh shit bar to keep myself upright. We fishtailed once but Summer had it under control before I could really panic. Wisps of dust still hung in the air from O’Connell’s passing, though his car was no longer in sight.
“We made the turn. It’s gravel like you thought,” I told Wong.
“Do you see him?”
“No, but he can’t have gone far.”
“Where the hell are we, anyway?” Summer shouted over the rumble of the gravel road, which was jouncing us pretty good.
“It’s not an established road.”
“You’re kidding.”
I ignored the jab and flipped my phone’s mapping display to GPS mode. Gravel roads often weren’t official on maps, but satellite imagery told another story. The gravel road wound through a few winding S-curves and ended up in a wide basin where, as of the year-old satellite imagery showed, there was recent construction. And not far from the road, either. “Shit,” I said. “Find a place to pull over if you can.”
Summer didn’t so much find a place as create one: a somewhat level piece of terrain beside the road simply became her parking spot.
“Well, that’s one way to do it.”
“You said to pull over.”
She has a point. “It can’t be far. We need to be careful,” I said. “In fact, I think it’s time to play the wild card.”
“Really? Already?”
“Come on, he lives for this.”
Summer sighed. “If you think it’s absolutely necessary.”
I grinned. “I do.” I jumped out of the Jeep before she changed her mind and jogged around back to unload the camera drone. On the way I popped in my earbud and summoned my virtual assistant. “Call Connor.”
The phone barely rang once before Connor picked up, which told me he’d been waiting for us even though I told him I didn’t know how our day would go. He was supposed to be working on his senior thesis for engineering school.
“N-game,” he answered.
“C-horse. Are you busy?”
“Just killing Nazis, but they’ll keep.” He spent more time playing video games than anyone I knew.
“We’re looking at a blind corner and we need the B team.”
He snorted. “I think you mean the A-Team. Version 2.0, if you will.”
“I will not. But fire up your controls, man, because we need aerial recon.”
“What about your reptiles?”
“Didn’t want to risk them,” I said.
“But my drone—”
“Is just a thing.”
“Well, put that thing on the ground so I can get busy saving your asses,” Connor said.
Ten seconds after I’d done that and woken the drone, Connor had it hovering at head level and was getting his bearings. It was a more compact model than the one we usually took geocaching. Four rotors, just enough to hold the high-def camera and the satellite transmitter. All of it the color of desert camouflage. If he lost this thing out in the terrain, we’d never find it.
“Is your video feed up yet?” I asked.
“Oh my God, all I’m getting is some sort of pale monster!”
I glanced up and predictably he had the camera trained on my face. “You’re hilarious.”
“I know. Be a doll and tell me which way.”
I pointed. “The road is over there. Do you think you can follow it?”
“Please.”
The drone swept off, and I had to duck so it wouldn’t clip me. Connor had become a pretty good drone pilot, not that I’d ever tell him so. My phone buzzed with an incoming notification; he’d forwarded me the drone’s video feed. I pulled it up as Korrapati parked behind Summer’s Jeep, almost timidly. We stood in the shade of it and watched the dry landscape zip past on the tiny screen. Wisps of sand dust still drifted in the air from O’Connell’s passing. The drone crested a steep ridge, after which the land sloped downward. Then came one, two, three thin black lines.
“Hold up a sec,” I told Connor. The drone held still and hovered almost as I said it; he must have seen them, too.
“Power lines,” he said.
“Kind of like the idea of following those, in case they’re watching the road. If you can manage not to hit one.”
“I can give you a haircut if I want to.”
“All right, all right. Just get going.” I had that itch between my shoulder blades like we were being watched. I tore my eyes from the screen and looked around. There was traffic on the highway, of course, but nobody seemed to pay us any mind. Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling.
“Well, that’s interesting,” Connor said, drawing me back to the video feed. The power lines snaked downhill from the drone’s position into a shallow basin and into a huge stainless-steel building. Well, technically into a massive transformer connected to a massive steel building. It was at least three stories tall, with dark glass all around. It resembled a medical building and looked completely out of place in the raw desert. Yet there were also large, round skylights along one edge. Two rows of six. Hatching pods.
“This is it,” I said.
“Looks like our building,” Wong said.
“You want me to make a flyover?” Connor asked.
I considered it because I really did want to know how many pods had eggs in them. But desert camouflage wouldn’t hide a drone flying over a steel structure, and we didn’t want to alert anyone to our presence. “No, better keep your distance.”
Connor sent the drone sideways on a slow circle around the facility. “This place is huge. How was it not on any satellite maps?”
“It’s either brand new or paid exclusion.”
“That’s uncanny.”
“It’s his style, though.” Build-A-Dragon’s desert facility, which was called the Farm, had also enjoyed satellite anonymity. “Circle around the back, would you?”
Connor obliged my request, but had to pivot the drone away from the building so that he didn’t run into something. When he got around back and panned over, things got more interesting. There was O’Connell’s car, parked beside the black SUV I’d seen Greaves in at one of the trials. And there was O’Connell, walking in the front entrance with another man. I recognized the doughy frame, slumped posture, and ever-present hoodie.
“Well, that explains why we never saw Frogman. Apparently they’re carpool buddies.”
“Very eco-conscious,” Summer said.
“Yeah, it’s something all right.”
O’Connell used his keys to unlock the front door, and they both disappeared into the shadowy interior. My brother zoomed in the camera and snapped some still images before the door swung closed.
A long balcony ran across the front of the building above the entranceway. It was hard to tell on my little phone-screen, but I thought I saw movement on the balcony.
“Hey, Connor, pan up a little bit.”
He did so, and did something with the camera to widen the view. I saw it then, a sinuous creature pacing back and forth. We’d been so focused on O’Connell and Frogman, we hadn’t noticed it until they went in.
“What is that?” Korrapati asked.
“An attack dragon,” I said grimly.
“There’s another one,” Connor said, panning over and zooming in. It was still hard to make them out in the shade. He flipped to the infrared mode, and their bodies bloomed bright red and orange. They moved with a predatory grace, one at each end of the building.
“Can you get closer?”
“I don’t know, man.”
“Come on, you’re still way out of range.”
He sighed with obvious reluctance. I almost called him a chicken, but it was his drone and therefore his call. Still, I wanted a closer look and we might not have a better opportunity. The drone crept forward across the desert landscape, keeping the entrance and guard dragons in frame. I had a suspicion, and the closer view confirmed it. The lean, muscular frames and powerful jaws gave it away. The image of the dragon that had outshone our infantry prototype, the one that had attacked the compound with such brutal efficiency, was forever burned into my brain.
“They look mean,” Korrapati said.
I shuddered. “You should see them in action.”
The dragons were alert, too. They started tracking the drone when it was still seventy-five yards out. Maybe they saw it in spite of the desert camouflage, or maybe they heard the rotors. Hell, it could have been the vibration the little craft made. First the dragons went absolutely still. Then they hissed at one another.
“I think they’ve spotted the drone, Con. Keep your distance.”
“I will.”
The drone broke off its approach and drifted sideways, giving us a better view of the attack dragons. Their heads moved slowly as they followed it. Then one of them lifted its snout and made a guttural, grunting cry. Three staccato notes.
“Shit,” I said.
“What was that?” Korrapati asked.
“I don’t know. Connor, better get out of there.”
“You don’t have to tell me twice.” He’d just started to turn the drone when two reptilian shapes shot out of the building, heading right for it. At first I’d thought the guard dragons had jumped, but no, these were different models. Flying models.
“Connor!” I shouted into my headset.
“Shit, I see them!”
The little drone sped away from the compound, but the dragons were coming fast. Suddenly the drone just dropped.
“What are you—” I started.
The drone sank, and right when I was sure it would crash, Connor brought up the thrust and leveled out. The drone skimmed over the terrain, making a break for it. We couldn’t tell where the flying dragons were, but his little drop maneuver seemed to have evaded them.
“Back to the cars!” I shouted, moving while refusing to look away from the screen. Summer didn’t need telling twice; she was in the driver’s seat and roaring the Jeep to life in seconds. She hardly waited for me to hop in my seat before making a sharp U-turn. Connor’s drone was not yet in sight, but couldn’t be more than seventy-five yards out. Korrapati was turning more timidly behind us in her little SUV. I gestured madly at her to speed things up. I looked back at my phone just in time to see a triangular, scaly head loom in the video feed. Connor shouted, and then the drone feed went black.
“Shit!” I looked at Summer. “We lost the drone.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah.”
She cursed, but floored it out into the lane. Korrapati and Wong followed us back to the highway.
“Sorry, man. I’ll call you later,” I told Connor, and hung up.
“This is the place you want to break into? It’s crawling with dragons,” Summer said.
“Apparently.”
“I think that changes the plan, doesn’t it?”
“In a manner of speaking. We’re going to need some dragons of our own.”