Page 53 of No Safe Place

As the others drifted toward the other side of the bar, I faded back toward my booth where my kit bag was.

From it, as quietly as I could, I removed a gray cloth travel bag about the size of a shaving kit. I tucked it into my jacket and then grabbed Colleen and stepped away with her into the smaller part of the restaurant to the left of the front door.

“What’s up?” she said.

I led her to the door of the banquet room and stopped.

“Just stay by this door,” I said as I cracked it. “And if someone comes over, knock.”

“Okay. But why? What’s up, Mike?”

“I’ll tell you in a sec,” I said as I closed the door behind me.

Inside the banquet room, there were four square restaurant tables backed up against the rear wall. One of them was stacked with folded table linens that I placed the gray bag on top of.

The window to the left of it looked out the side of the restaurant into the dark of the gravel parking lot. It stuck fast in its ancient casing about an inch up when I cracked it open, so I had to smack its top rail hard a few times with the heel of my hand to get it open half a foot.

The thin plastic rectangle I took out of the bag was about the size of a paperback book. It had four short segmented arms on its top side and on its bottom there was a little gripper device along with three fish-eye camera lenses in a pyramid array.

As I hit its power button, the little arms of the drone all clicked into the up position and a sound like a tiny Weedwhacker filled the small room.

It was a fishing drone that I had brought along on my road trip. It had a line gripper on the bottom where you clipped in your hooks and bait. With it, you could cast your line basically anywhere, out to unimaginable lengths—five hundred yards or more—and then release everything. It made fishing off the beach especially incredible.

But for my purposes right there and then, I wasn’t interested in the fishing accessories.

I quickly slipped my phone into its Nintendo-like thumb controller frame.

The drone had a 4K camera on it with thermal night vision so it was about high time I sent it up to take a look around.

The buzzing thing tickled my palm as I brought it to the open window and I reached out and slowly let it go and watched it hover there like a freed hummingbird. Then I thumbed the controller forward and up, and its blades made a slightly higher pitched sound as it rose out of sight into the night air up above the restaurant and parking lot.

The firmware for it was already downloaded onto my phone as an app. On it I toggled the camera choice to FLIR thermal and then looked down at the screen as an overhead shot of the roof of the restaurant and the parking lot appeared in glowing purple and pink and orange and yellow.

I made the drone ascend higher and saw the Main Street stores appear and then the block where my Airbnb was. As I halted the drone high above the village a moment later, I saw that to the east, the roadblock in the little canyon on Route 4 on the other side of the river was still going strong. To the west, I didn’t see the BearCat, but I did see a bunch of vehicles and police officers over by the post office on the other side of my rental building.

I sent the drone a little higher as I zoomed closer to the post office staging area. I saw that they had another roadblock several hundred feet north of the post office on Route 4 by the canoe place.

Then I hovered up high over the post office and thumbed the 32X zoom down at the cops in its parking lot. There had to be over a dozen of them milling around. They must have some kind of war room in the post office itself.

I smiled as I remembered all the drone intel we had gotten in Iraq and Afghanistan. How much had that cost? Hundreds of millions of dollars? Now here I was with my own personal eye in the sky. For what? Five hundred bucks?

“God bless America,” I said.

48

I watched some more with the drone. It was chilling that the entire department was there. There was no way they were all corrupt, no way they would all agree to come after a fricking whistleblower for the college.

The chief was no doubt the corrupt scumbag who was feeding the rank and file some super amounts of horseshit.

I also didn’t see any real people. Which was weird to me. There would definitely be people from the surrounding houses trying to figure out what was going on, right?

Had they evacuated everyone? I thought. And why no news vans?

This was bad. Had they cleared out the village and told the local cops that we were what? Terrorists or something? They hit the lights and went into the bar with tactical guys on the bullshit evac story looking for us and something went wrong. Big Joe ran and they killed him.

That was no regular SWAT team, I thought. That was a team of professional hired killers.

It sounded crazy that all this would happen at the behest of a college president. But then again this was no regular college. The billionaire Stone was deeply involved in this after all. And what had Colleen said about the college’s endowment? Thirty-four billion? That was larger than the GDP of many countries. Countries had armies, right? Why not a college?

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