Seth shifted uncomfortably in his chair, but didn’t answer.
“Look,” Jameson said firmly.“We’re in the middle of something important, so whatever you think we need to talk about, it’s going to have to wait.”
“I’m afraid we can’t do that,” Darwin said, holding up a hand to interrupt Jameson while continuing to stare at Seth.“Does NCIS know you’re here?”
“I had a helicopter fly me straight here to the vineyard from San Nicolas Island on the off chance that Jameson would be able to negotiate the return of the Genesis drone.And no, the NCIS doesn’t know I’m here.And before you ask, no, I had no idea Chapman was involved with Jameson’s investment group.If I had, I would have put a stop to it.”
“What, did you think they were selling it to the Boy Scouts?”Cursing silently, Darwin turned his attention back to Katrina’s father.“Bottom line, intel suggests Chapman might be on resort property.And while it would be nice to get the drone back, truthfully, I’m here to stop Chapman before he hurts anyone else.”
“We don’t need your help,” Jameson said sharply, moving around the table to confront him.“We have this completely under control.”
“No, you really don’t.Chapman is the one pulling all the strings here,” Darwin said, pinning the man with a stony look.“I’d like nothing better than to walk away and let you do you, but Katrina seeing her father and brother either dying or going to prison would hurt her, so I’ll do anything to save her from that pain.But doing that depends on the people in this room helping me recover the weapon before Chapman gets away with the thing, or NCIS figures out your involvement on their own.If either of those things happens, there won’t be much I can do.”
“Dad, please,” Katrina said urgently, even as it seemed her father was about to erupt.“I don’t want you or Rhett to go to prison, but that’s the best-case scenario if you don’t start trusting Darwin.You need to help him, so he can help you.”
Jameson’s mouth tightened, but he didn’t say anything.
“Dad and I didn’t have anything to do with the theft of the Genesis weapon,” Rhett said when it was clear Jameson wasn’t going to answer.“And we didn’t know Chapman stole it until Seth showed up and told us about it.”
“None of us knew the weapon was going to be stolen,” Silas offered up in his own defense.“The plan was always to wait a year or so until the Genesis Corporation went into low-rate production for the Navy and then simply divert one drone off the assembly line and sell it to Chapman off the books.He was upset about having to wait, but we never imagined he’d do something like this.”
“Seriously?”Katrina said dubiously.“You never considered a known international arms dealer might resort to theft at some point when he realized you were stringing him along and making him wait?You didn’t get a hint he wasn’t a nice man after the first body was found?”
“We underestimated Chapman,” Jameson admitted quietly.“We knew he had an unsavory background, but we made assumptions about his behavior in our current business environment.I realize now how naive we were.But in our defense, since I talked with Katrina earlier today, I’ve been trying to salvage the situation.”
“How exactly could you hope to salvage the situation?”Asher asked incredulously.
“We’ve been trying to talk Chapman into returning the drone, with the understanding that we’d sell him another as soon as possible.Unfortunately, the negotiations haven’t gone very well thus far.”
Beside Darwin, Katrina rolled her eyes.Even after everything, Jameson still believed he could talk his way out of this situation.People had been murdered, others were almost certainly going to jail, and he was still trying to close the deal.
“There’s one thing I don’t understand,” Upton said.“If Chapman already has the drone, why is he hanging around?”
Jameson folded his arms with a scowl, while Rhett looked at Seth.After a moment, the program manager nodded.
“Chapman is after the Genesis anti-tamper code,” Rhett said, turning back to them.
“What the hell is an anti-tamper code?”Darwin asked, pinning Seth with a hard look, wondering why this was the first time he was hearing about it.
Seth sighed.“When we first started planning for the San Nicolas flight tests, we were concerned the drone might crash into the ocean, where any of a half dozen different foreign intelligence services that regularly patrol that part of the Pacific might recover it.With that in mind, the programmers of the AI mission computer agreed to embed a failsafe subroutine in the weapon that would run the entire time the weapon was on the island.Unless I enter a random series of letters and numbers that make up the anti-tamper code every thirty-six hours, the AI processor will be permanently wiped.If anyone attempts to tamper with the AI circuitry, the AI processor will be wiped.If the Genesis drone is moved more than two-hundred-fifty nautical miles from San Nicolas Island, the AI processor will be wiped.I last entered the code last night just before midnight.”
So, assuming the failsafe system was still working, that meant the drone should stop working by sometime tomorrow morning.
“Why didn’t anyone mention this anti-tamper system back on the island when we asked if there was a way to take down the system?”Darwin demanded.
“I couldn’t,” Seth said.“While I’d been given permission to reveal certain unacknowledged aspects of the platform, the anti-tamper system wasn’t one of them.There are less than half a dozen people within the program who are aware of that particular capability.”
“Why wouldn’t they want everyone to know about this?”Darwin could admit he was more than a little pissed off at the feeling that he was being played.“NCIS would be dealing with this situation completely differently if they knew the drone was going to self-destruct by tomorrow and that someone like Chapman wasn’t going to have their hands on it for long.”
“Which is exactly why the people in charge chose to withhold that piece of information,” Seth said.“Genesis is a one-of-a-kind national security asset.The powers that be want it recovered, not self-destructed.They thought NCIS and the FBI would be better motivated to find the drone if they didn’t know the threat would disappear on its own.”
Darwin had to bite his tongue to keep in the angry response that wanted to slip out at the confirmation they really were being played.
“How can we be sure this anti-tamper failsafe system is even still working?”he asked instead, forcing himself to focus on the bigger picture right now.“The AI was able to disable the telemetry and the flight termination subsystems.Why wouldn’t it do the same with this anti-tamper thing?”
Jameson snorted.“It’s working.Chapman wouldn’t still be communicating with us if it weren’t.He needs that code or his multi-million-dollar weapon becomes worthless.”
“The anti-tamper subsystem was placed behind a one-way firewall, completely out of the reach of the mission computer,” Seth added.“There’s no way for the AI to reach it.The wipe subroutine is the only thing that can pass through that firewall.”
