*
Dryden and Rachel reached the edge of the superstore’s lot at a run, and stopped to survey the scattered cars parked there. Most were clustered at the front of the building, probably belonging to the store’s third-shift employees, but a handful were parked out at the periphery. Maybe they’d been left there by workers pulling a double shift, who’d arrived last evening when the lot was full.
Dryden led the way to the nearest of the outlying vehicles, a dark green Taurus. The more commonplace the model, the better; anything they took would be reported stolen within hours, and Rachel’s pursuers had access to police communications. Blending in would be critical. Dryden gave the Taurus only a passing consideration, however, because it was new enough that it almost certainly had a smart key; it couldn’t simply be hot-wired.
They moved on, skirting the rim of the lot toward the next group of vehicles, forty yards away.
*
Lowry muttered his thoughts aloud as he entered commands to target the satellites. “Number twelve, frame at three by three kilometers. Number fifteen, slave to twelve, index outdoor biologics, human. Number four, slave to twelve, ditto command.”
Complementing the Mirandas’ remarkable hardware was a software suite right out of a conspiracy theorist’s worst nightmare. A Miranda could be instructed to canvass an area the size of a town, and isolate all human figures who were not inside man-made structures. One satellite could count the targets in a wide frame, while another two or three could set to work zooming in on each of them for close-up shots. Throughout the process the birds could communicate with one another so as to efficiently divide up the workload. The whole operation would take less than thirty seconds.
It was already under way.
On the first monitor was the wide frame of the town, the land and ocean showing up as cool black. Sharp points of bluish white light indicated homes and other heat sources.
On the next three monitors, still frames began to pop up: the tight snapshots of human targets, coming in from the other satellites. The first image showed a group of people encircling a superbright thermal source.
“Beach campfire,” Lowry said. “Tell it to ignore?”
Gaul nodded. Lowry instructed the system to disregard that target.
Other snaps showed Curren’s team rendezvousing with him at the van. Gaul had ordered them back to it moments earlier, so they could move on Rachel and Dryden as soon as their location was available.
As more still shots came in—a woman walking a dog, a tall man taking out the trash—it became apparent that the Mirandas were choosing their targets in a progression from west to east. In this case it meant they’d started at the shore and proceeded inland. Probably a default setting of the software. Gaul stared at the monitor showing the wide image of the town. It extended about a mile and a half in from the coast to some kind of shopping center on the far right. The Mirandas had now indexed all of the outdoor targets on the left half, and would have the right side finished in another ten to fifteen seconds.
*
There was only one vehicle in the outer reaches of the lot worth considering; Dryden settled on it even before getting close enough to know whether it was locked. It was a Ford F-150 pickup from the early nineties, possibly the eighties; it would have nothing in the ignition but copper wires and insulation. He found the driver’s door locked—no surprise there—but, ducking to look through the cab, saw that the passenger side was not. Rachel, running ten feet behind him, understood; she diverted to the passenger side, got in, and reached across to open Dryden’s door. He slid in behind the wheel.
*
Two thousand thirty-one miles above the Rockies, fleeing southeast toward the Gulf of Mexico at just under four miles per second, Miranda Fifteen kept its lens platform pointed at El Sedero and snapped rapid-fire shots of the human targets on its list. Target seven, captured and sent. Target eight, captured and sent. Target nine—the onboard computer faltered. There was no target nine at the stated location. Miranda Fifteen automatically communicated this error to Miranda Twelve, the satellite running the master frame and assigning targets. Miranda Twelve replied that target nine had vanished 2.315 seconds earlier; there was no longer a signature of two human beings outdoors at that location, but instead a signature of two human beings inside a vehicle, 99.103 percent likely to be a Ford model F-150 manufactured in 1988. The last command string from the operator had specified only human targets outdoors; therefore target nine was no longer valid.
Miranda Fifteen considered this dilemma for 485 nanoseconds, the time required to run all three of its what-if algorithms, and determined that this was not a problem the human operator needed to be troubled with. It ignored target nine and moved on.