Deep Sleep (Devin Gray #1)(75)

“The launch team is ready, and pretty anxious,” said Gupta. “They gave up on launching from a road and are in a nearby church parking lot. This town is crawling with police. They’ve seen a half dozen cruisers on their tour of southwestern Carmel over the past thirty minutes.”

“My guess is their police department patrols the southern edges of the city pretty heavily, since it connects to northern Indy,” said Rich. “Give them the green light.”

Less than a minute later, the widescreen monitor mirrored Gupta’s screen, giving them a green-scale night vision view from the drone’s nose.

“Everything looks good,” said Gupta. “Here we go.”

The pavement started to rush by, picking up speed as parking lot lines blurred underneath.

“You’re running out of room,” said Rich, noting the same rapidly approaching line of trees Devin had just spotted.

“Oh ye of little faith,” said Gupta, the camera feed suddenly lurching skyward. “And liftoff. With plenty of room to spare. It’s not my first rodeo, folks.”

Graves turned in his chair. “What my friend here forgot to tell everyone is that the Albatross UAV’s flight can be almost entirely autonomous, including the takeoff you just witnessed.”

“Always raining on my parade,” said Gupta.

“That’s because you’re always parading,” said Graves. “Shall I spoil the rest?”

“Go ahead,” said Gupta. “The cat’s out of the bag.”

“We’ve already programmed a series of waypoints that will take the drone over the target from several different angles, giving us a ton of footage to study. We’ll manipulate the surveillance cameras, but that’s pretty much it. It’ll land in the same parking lot by itself if that’s still an option,” said Graves.

“Several passes will attract too much attention,” said Berg. “I think one or two at most. Right?”

Devin wanted to jump in and answer, but he held back and let Graves handle the concern. The FBI’s SSG had a division that fielded a variety of drones—fixed wing and shaped like the Albatross along with a wide selection of rotary wing–like quadcopters. They came in handy when surveilling from a distance, especially drones like the Albatross.

“The drone is capable of gliding unpowered. We’ve programmed it to gain significant altitude well outside of audible detection range from the neighborhood before turning toward the target for a long glide. The citizens of Carmel will hear some buzzing overhead, but not around the golf course. And we’ve arranged the waypoints, so each altitude climb will occur in a different cardinal direction from the target. Check it out.”

The monitor changed to show the planned flight pattern, which resembled a flower with several petals. Exactly what he expected. Graves and Gupta knew what they were doing.

“Drone is climbing and tracking toward the first waypoint,” said Gupta.

“This is nerve-racking,” said Marnie, putting a hand on Devin’s shoulder. “I’m expecting the Barbers to have a pool party in full swing.”

He squeezed her hand for a moment before taking it away.

“And we are in glide mode,” said Gupta. “Activating surveillance suite.”

The monitor’s screen split in half, the left side showing the green night vision view from the nose. House lights burned bright, creating the vague outline of an extensive neighborhood. A patchwork of light and dark green in the distance somewhat resembled a golf course, though Devin probably wouldn’t be able to guess that if he didn’t know what he was looking for. The right side of the screen showed a gray scale infrared image of roughly the same picture on the left, but far less defined. A few dozen “hot spots” appeared close to where the lights had previously burned bright, representing people outside of their homes, backyard grills, hot tubs, and firepits.

“Marking the target house for reference. You’ll see a distance to target and the distance to our closest point of approach, which will be directly down one of the fairways,” said Gupta, a blue square appearing in the distant left of the gray scale image. “We’ll start with IR to see if we can pick up anyone in the yard or immediate vicinity, then switch to night vision for a detailed look.”

Nobody said a word as the distance rapidly decreased. When the square started to drift left, he knew without looking at the numbers that the drone was nearing its closest point of approach. On cue, the camera panned left to track the target as it passed. Devin knew what he was looking at before Gupta started to explain. This looked like a once-in-an-operative’s-lifetime opportunity.

“I have two hot spots in the backyard. One is definitely the hot tub. Another is the grill,” said Gupta. “Wait. Hold on. I have what looks like two people in the hot tub. Switching to night vision.”

“You might want to close your eyes,” said Devin.

Marnie took her hand off his shoulder. “Seriously?”

When the image shifted back to night vision and zoomed in, Gupta started laughing.

“I think it’s safe to assume the kids aren’t home,” said Marnie. “Unless that’s one of their kids.”

“Can you zoom in any further,” said Berg, “and pull up pictures of Mr. and Mrs. Barber?”

“Are you sure? I’d like to keep my dinner down,” said Gupta.