Leila watched the image on the monitor. It showed a bird’s-eye view of the bike repair shop, its roof pockmarked by rust and decay, as though a giant had taken huge bites out of it. Heavy rain ran down corrugated valleys and poured through the holes.
She and Wollerton were sitting in the back of a modified Ford Transit cargo van, a block away from the building. Clifton had returned with the vehicle from whatever Huxley Blaine Carter facility he’d delivered the fentanyl patch to. The van was a sophisticated surveillance centre with equipment Leila had never encountered before. Clifton had explained that most innovation was taking place in the private sector. Governments had ceased to be at the vanguard of progress. The Hyperloop, space exploration, medical breakthroughs were all privately funded, and one of the most sophisticated intelligence agencies in the world, Mossad, relied on Israel’s innovative technology sector to keep it at the forefront of the espionage business. Leila was aware of the role of private industry in the spy business, but some of the gear in the van smacked of nation-state levels of investment. The drone she was piloting, for example, was a tiny craft designed to look like a bumble bee. According to Clifton, research had shown they were the least likely of all flying bugs to get swatted. It was only close up that the device’s tiny mechanical legs and synthetic wings became apparent.
Once this investigation was over and she’d found her sister, Leila planned to look into Huxley Blaine Carter’s ties to the US intelligence community. Was he really a private citizen motivated by the death of his father? Or a CIA or NSA operative? His connection to Robert Clifton seemed to suggest the latter.
Leila used the intuitive joystick controls to pilot the tiny drone through a hole in the roof. It flew into a large, disused repair shop. There were benches, a few old tools, piles of rubbish, a TV and a couple of tatty chairs. There was a filthy kitchen off to one side and at the back of the warehouse a row of offices separated from the rest of the space by a long panel of frosted glass windows and doors. There were a couple of army surplus cots in two of the offices, but nothing else, and the drone confirmed what the infrared sensor had shown: the warehouse was deserted.
‘They’ll have cleared out as soon as we escaped,’ Wollerton said.
Leila nodded. Her background on the Red Wolves showed the warehouse had once belonged to Lenny Fletcher, Eddie Fletcher’s father; a mechanic and founding member of the notorious Reaper gang that had been subsumed by the Red Wolves. The place had passed to Eddie after his father’s death, and as she piloted the drone out of the building, Leila considered whether the gang leader knew the horror he was bringing to America.