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ONE
Morning sun warmed the rain-slick tin roofs, forming blankets of steam that rose in perceptible waves as they buffeted the sixteen-ounce quadcopter drone buzzing over the little town. Panajachel, Guatemala, stood at 5,200 feet of elevation, so the four tiny plastic rotors spun furiously in thin, moist air, the machine moving southeast at a steady pace, its camera taking in everything below.
The town lies on the northern shore of Lake Atitlán, a fifty-square-mile body of water in an immense volcanic crater in the Guatemalan Highlands. A strikingly beautiful place in the middle of a bitterly impoverished country, the town is a way-off-the-beaten-path tourist attraction for budget travelers from all over the globe. Cool in the mornings this time of year, even despite the sunshine, its air is many orders of magnitude cleaner and clearer than smoggy Guatemala City, a three-hour drive to the east.
Few people walked the cobblestone streets at seven in the morning on a Saturday—most visitors were sleeping off Friday night’s bar bill—but the drone’s camera locked on to a trio of young women pounding thick tortillas by a smoky kettle fire next to a tienda, registering their faces in a fraction of a second and then dismissing them as non-targets in a fraction more.
An old man pushing a vending cart took longer to evaluate, his cowboy hat obstructing the periocular region of his face where most biometric identification data was acquired, but in under a second and a half the man turned his head and then his features were registered by the eye in the sky. Almost instantly the drone’s onboard artificial intelligence image classifiers told the machine that he was not the subject it was hunting for.
The device then whirred over a small two-story red apartment building on Callejon Santa Elena, and here a blond woman in a green tank top and jean shorts stepped out onto a balcony and began hanging laundry over a clothesline.
The camera caught the movement, but it did not have the right angle to scan the face because the wet towels she hung to dry were in the way.
Drone Reconnaissance Nineteen, or RC19, kept going; there was no need for it to stop, because five identical airships crisscrossed the sky above Panajachel in search of their collective target, each on a coverage route determined by a pilot working in the back of a rented van below, and augmented by artificial intelligence. Sooner or later, RC23, RC29, or one of the others would pass by this street from a different trajectory and assess the face of the blond woman, just as they had been doing with everyone else in town this morning.
The target was here, the pilot knew it; it was just a matter of pinning down the target’s location.
RC19 flew on down Callejon Santa Elena, heading off in the direction of Calle Principal and the center of town, systematically scrutinizing unsuspecting faces from three hundred feet in the air.
•••
The blonde on the balcony never saw or heard the copter. She finished hanging her towels and then took a moment more to look out over the town and sniff the fresh air. The smell of cooking fires, baking bread, and wet jungle flora were all pleasantly jumbled together.
She closed her eyes and turned her face to the sun. A cooler breeze drifting up from the lake caused goose bumps to form on her bare arms. She smiled a little. She liked it here. No, she loved it here. She could see herself staying a few weeks or more, although she knew that wasn’t the plan.
The plan was to keep moving. She didn’t like the plan, but the plan had kept her alive for four months, so she guessed she’d stick to it.
With a wistful sigh, Russian national Zoya Fyodorova Zakharova stepped back inside the second-story apartment, walking on bare feet through a small bedroom, past a pair of messy twin beds, each set up with blankets and backpacks under the covers to give the appearance of bodies at rest.
She stopped at the open closet door.
A dark-complected bearded man with tousled brown hair lay on the floor under a well-worn but still colorful poncho. He opened his eyes and looked up at her, his legs slightly bent to fit in the small space they both had shared the night before.
Zoya lowered herself down and lay with him, curling up to fit in the closet, tucking herself under the poncho. She rested her head on a pillow taken from one of the beds and faced the man lying there.
“Sleeping in?” she asked, sounding like an American from the Midwest, with no hint of Russia in her voice.
The man rubbed his bleary eyes before speaking. “What time is it?”
“Seven fifteen.”
“I was up for a…couple hours in the night.”
“Again?” The woman propped her head up on an elbow as she looked at him, no attempt to hide her concern. “How many is ‘a couple’?”
“Two a.m. till five.”
“Shit, Court.”
Courtland Gentry rubbed his eyes again. “I’m fine.”
“The insomnia is getting worse, isn’t it?”
“It’s not insomnia. Just having some trouble sleeping.”
“That’s literally the definition of insomnia. The last couple of months…it’s more and more.”
Still smiling, but more emphatically than before, he said, “I’m okay. Really. Just need some coffee.”
