Page 58 of Jasper
Donnie glances up. “Striker was telling us about how those guys ran you off the road a while back? Why do the Hyenas have a hard-on for harassing you in particular?”
“Probably because I’m the only one who might be able to take their club down before it gets into full swing.”
Striker nods without lifting his eyes. “Recon before escalation. That’s standard op.”
“Except these assholes aren’t standard. They’ve got wild edges but smart hands underneath. Let’s not underestimate them.”
Striker starts prying the shell open, careful not to damage the circuits underneath. “I never do, brother.”
Sitting back down with my old man, I want to be eyes-on for whatever they pull out of this fuckin’ thing.
Mitch hooks into the drone’s mainboard with a micro connector. The other end runs into a black box that feeds into his laptop. I watch lines of code scroll as he taps out commands with quick, rhythmic strokes.
“We’re in,” Mitch says after a few minutes. “The drone ran local storage with no wireless offload. Good news for us.”
“Bad news for the Hyenas,” I mutter under my breath.
Striker pulls out a heat tool and starts warming the adhesive around the flash chip. “Once we have the SIM card free, I’ll dump the data into an isolated environment. There will be no chance of triggering a fail-safe or trace. You’ll get raw video, uncompressed. Depending on their setup, we might even pull GPS tags.”
Mitch types another command and leans back. “Firmware’s basic. Nothing military. But it’s custom-loaded. Hyenas paid someone to flash this thing with a stripped-down OS. Makes the boot time faster, and it doesn’t leave a log trail.”
I nod, filing that handy bit of information away. The Hyenas prefer to jump in, do damage, and then make their escape. It’s the most primitive kind of warfare imaginable. But this proves they’ve got someone with brains on their team. Either someone in their ranks is smarter than they show, or they’ve partnered up with outside help.
“Do you have a timeline on how long this is gonna take?”
“Ten to pull the SIM card. Maybe another twenty to scrape the memory and decompress the files.”
“I’m gonna wait and see what you pull from it.”
They get back to work without another word. I stay close, watching the shell of the drone come apart piece by piece. The frame makes a grating sound as Striker cracks it open, exposing the guts. Wires, chips, circuits, soldered traces. I don’t need to know the names of every component to understand one thing. This little machine saw more than it should have, and I’m going to find out exactly what.
Striker finally digs the SIM card out and puts it into a reader the size of a cell phone, and clicks it into place. Mitch keys in a series of commands, eyes glued to the screen. The software running on his laptop isn’t flashy. Just a grid of file paths and blocks of code blinking in soft green.
“The SIM card was formatted in four partitions,” Mitch explains. “There’s a primary video cache, a backup log, a metadata map, and something encrypted. Probably corrupt. I’ll flag that last one for later.”
“Start with the video cache,” I tell him.
He doesn’t nod, but his fingers fly across the keyboard.
The first video boots fast. A window pops open with a timestamp in the top corner. There is no sound, just clean, steady footage. It takes me a second to realize that it’s Tessa’s street. The drone floats over it smooth, locked in hover mode. The image is crisp enough that I can see the shine off the chrome on my bike. Then the frame shifts. A slow pan down the driveway. The drone was watching us before the fire—maybe even long enough to track movements. My gut tightens.
“That’s minutes before the bike lit up,” I tell them.
“Matches the timestamps,” Mitch replies. “Camera auto-adjusted exposure. They were trying to record in varying light. That’s not casual fly-by shit.”
I already knew that. Still doesn’t make it easier to watch. Two men jump out of the hedges, pour motor oil all over my bike, light it up and disappear, barely looking up at the drone. My bike burns everywhere the oil touches. The drone caught all of it in high definition.
Striker leans in closer. “Scan forward. See what else they were tracking.”
Mitch scrolls through the footage. The screen glitches once, skips, then lands on a new location.
Not the driveway. Not even near it.
The view is higher. “It’s clearly been zoomed in from high altitude. There are fewer trees.”
“It looks like this is somewhere near the edge of town.” I lean in, squinting my eyes.
A building comes into view. It’s pale gray stucco with a gated perimeter. I see a silver SUV parked in the driveway. A man and a woman walk out of the house, followed by two really young children—boys. One of them turns towards the camera just enough for the angle to catch his face. It takes half a second to place him. Mayor Charles Redman.
