"Correct," Kian said. "But that's obviously not the only problem. Getting to the island and into Navuh's mansion and leaving with Khiann and his companions is a huge challenge as well. One I'm not sure how we can overcome. Navuh offered to help with both."
"Of course he did." Onegus leaned forward. "At what price?"
"His freedom."
"Can't really blame the guy." Roni reached for the pile of croissants Shai had brought from the café. "He played this like a grandmaster." He found the one filled with chocolate and picked it up with a napkin.
"He's smart," Turner agreed. "But we can be smarter."
That was what Kian had hoped to hear. His mother hadn't given him her answer yet, and he'd called this meeting hoping to find a way to extract Khiann from the island that didn't require setting the Brotherhood's leader free.
The team he'd assembled comprised the best minds, and between them, they should be able to come up with something. William, with his tech genius, Roni, whose hacking abilities bordered on supernatural, Turner, who was the best strategist Kian had ever encountered, and Onegus, the Chief Guardian, who would put everything the others came up with into an action plan.
"We are also pressed for time," Kian said. "Losham, who has probably taken over after Navuh's disappearance, is without a doubt trying to breach the enclosure, and since he doesn't know about the booby-traps, he is likely to trigger them."
"Then we stop him," William said. "We need to do that before we do anything else."
"How?" Kian spread his hands. "Call him and ask him to stop? Put Navuh on the line?"
"No, not Navuh," Turner's drawl was deceptively casual. "One of our compellers."
The room went quiet.
"Are you suggesting that we compel Losham over the phone?" Onegus asked.
"Why not? We've done it before. We can have Toven talk to him, with Mia to boost his compulsion power if needed. Toven can demand that Losham cease all operations on the enclosure immediately." Turner leaned forward. "I'm sure Lokan knowsLosham's phone number. We can even collect invaluable intel about who is running the show and who is gunning for the position while we are at it."
This was such a simple solution that Kian wondered why he hadn't thought of it himself. There were a couple of problems with that. Lokan no longer had his Brotherhood phone, so they couldn't call Losham from a number he recognized, and the other problem was that even if William could fix that for them, Losham might not answer a call from a deserter.
It was also possible that Navuh had told Losham that Lokan was dead in order to avoid having to admit that he'd jumped ship.
"We need to do it right now," William said. "Before Losham triggers the booby-traps, if he hasn't triggered them already."
Onegus put down his half-eaten croissant. "We are monitoring the island, and if the booby-traps are powerful enough to level Navuh's mansion and were triggered, a cloud of dust would have been created that we would have seen. Of what can be seen from the satellite, everything appears to be quiet over there."
"That doesn't mean that it hasn't happened yet." Kian let out a breath. "If the structural collapse was designed to be contained, which is very likely, it wouldn't have triggered the kind of event that would be visible to us from space."
"True," Onegus agreed. "But I choose to be optimistic."
"Calling Losham is a calculated risk," Turner said without addressing the exchange between Onegus and Kian. "He might not be the one who is running things. The enclosure might also be perfectly fine with no one trying to break in, but we are operating under the assumption of the most likely scenario."
"I wonder how far we can push it." Onegus removed the lid from his coffee cup. "If we get the codes from Navuh, could we compel Losham to load the chests onto a boat and bring them to us?"
"He would be stopped by others," Turner said. "He's probably having a difficult time clinging to power as it is. We need an alternative plan."
Roni set down his croissant and licked chocolate from his fingertips. "What about an EMP?"
Everyone turned to look at him.
"Think about it," he continued. "A high-yield, low-altitude electromagnetic pulse device, detonated over the island, wouldn't kill anyone. In fact, it wouldn't even harm any structures, but it would devastate their infrastructure, or more precisely, their technological infrastructure."
William's eyes lit up with the gleam he got when things were moving in the direction of challenging tech solutions. "Roni is right. A properly calibrated EMP would knock out the island's power grid, including their backup systems. We're talking weeks to repair, months possibly. It would disable their sensor arrays, their defense systems, and their surveillance networks. Every computer on the island would be fried. Data storage facilities would be wiped. Communication devices would become useless. Anything digital that is not massively shielded would be destroyed, and any analog devices that rely on power and have any kind of circuitry would become useless. That includes power tools, so any breaching operations would stop."
Turner nodded, looking excited, or as excited as he ever got. "Command and control would collapse. They'd have no way tocoordinate. No way to communicate between different parts of the island. It would be chaos."
"And chaos is our friend," Onegus said. "We might be able to extract Khiann and his friends without encountering too much opposition because, without communication, they wouldn't be able to mobilize against us in time to stop us."
"Their guns will still work," Roni pointed out. "And if they have older style vehicles, or military ones with some kind of EMP shielding, they will be able to communicate by having messages delivered by drivers. The island is not big, so it won't take long to deliver them."
