He’d seen people come and go within the Special Surveillance Group. Some didn’t last more than a month or two. Others quit after a few years. Plenty were sent away. Devin never had a moment of doubt about the job. He may not have been very good at it in the beginning, but he loved it, each field operation reinforcing his attachment to the work. A few years into the job, and he was running with the big dogs. Never looking back. He wondered if people like Rich and the members of his team had evolved the same way. Unconventional people drawn to unconventional work.

Gupta swiveled in his chair to face the team. He was seated in front of two open laptops, one of which would serve as his primary flight-control monitor. A rather expensive-looking remote flight-control transmitter lay on the desk in front of the laptop. Graves sat next to him on the chair they had dragged in from the adjoining room, his laptop screen featuring a satellite map of the target area, which looked as though it was linked to the overall flight system. A small aircraft icon sat in the middle of the map, blinking.

“The launch team is ready, and pretty anxious,” said Gupta. “They gave up on launching from a road and are in a nearby church parking lot. This town is crawling with police. They’ve seen a half dozen cruisers on their tour of southwestern Carmel over the past thirty minutes.”

“My guess is their police department patrols the southern edges of the city pretty heavily, since it connects to northern Indy,” said Rich. “Give them the green light.”

Less than a minute later, the widescreen monitor mirrored Gupta’s screen, giving them a green-scale night vision view from the drone’s nose.

“Everything looks good,” said Gupta. “Here we go.”

The pavement started to rush by, picking up speed as parking lot lines blurred underneath.

“You’re running out of room,” said Rich, noting the same rapidly approaching line of trees Devin had just spotted.

“Oh ye of little faith,” said Gupta, the camera feed suddenly lurching skyward. “And liftoff. With plenty of room to spare. It’s not my first rodeo, folks.”

Graves turned in his chair. “What my friend here forgot to tell everyone is that the Albatross UAV’s flight can be almost entirely autonomous, including the takeoff you just witnessed.”

“Always raining on my parade,” said Gupta.

“That’s because you’re always parading,” said Graves. “Shall I spoil the rest?”

“Go ahead,” said Gupta. “The cat’s out of the bag.”

“We’ve already programmed a series of waypoints that will take the drone over the target from several different angles, giving us a ton of footage to study. We’ll manipulate the surveillance cameras, but that’s pretty much it. It’ll land in the same parking lot by itself if that’s still an option,” said Graves.