After the first week of training, the drone arrived, and Leah began to fly it. At first she flew it only near her cabin in the morning or early evening, learning to steer and getting used to the control mechanisms, seeing and interpreting what the drone’s daylight camera saw. She had grown up playing video games and steering mechanized toys, so the concepts were not entirely alien, but the machines she’d used had been crude and clumsy compared with the drone. It took her time to become a good pilot. When she was competent, she began to fly the drone at night, using the light-enhancing camera and then the infrared heat-detecting camera. In a week she was flying it every night, piloting sorties along the perimeter of the lake.

When she had become expert, Leah went out to perform a surveillance mission with the drone. The ranch to the east side of Ortega’s plot wasn’t a family farm but a big parcel of land that was farmed by a corporation, so there were no people living there. She waited until 3:00 a.m. and parked beside a metal building at the far edge of the ranch to the east of Ortega’s, where her car could not be seen. Then she took the drone out of the trunk and launched it.

She began with a run at high altitude using the infrared camera, searching for the body heat of a sentry or guard, but detected none. The engine of one of the vehicles parked on the hill by the house glowed with warmth from some daylight excursion, but there were no human heat signatures. She surveyed the ranch with the regular night-vision-amplified light camera, taking recordings of what the cameras saw. She was as thorough as she could be, making sweeping runs only a hundred feet above the fields and hillside, covering every foot. She stayed higher above and around the house, but managed to circle it several times, hover over it, swing out along the ridge it occupied and the woods on a plateau beyond it, and then land the drone beside her car.

When she returned to the rented cabin, she transferred the recordings to her laptop so she could study them. There were two doors to the house. They both had steel or iron bars on the outer side. As a cop, she knew that it was so a battering ram would be held a few inches from the surface at first and not break through easily. Each door had two squares on its surfaces, which she guessed were steel plates for stopping bullets.