Musil drove. In another two miles he would merge onto Whitestone Parkway and then onto the local streets. He was minutes away.

Little Wing reached the inlet to the cul-de-sac at twenty-six hundred feet. Guided by the sensor readings from Raysa Musil’s cell phone, it went gliding high above the street toward their source. Lucas’s mission log would categorize the flight as a DILR—detect, identify, locate and report—which precisely described its actions. His log would also note its arrival time as 3:37 p.m.

The bird was sharp-eyed and exceptionally smart. Sharp-eyed was par for the course: virtually all military and law-enforcement drones carried high-res imaging suites. But Little Wing owed its outstanding braininess to a core machine-learning processor that enabled it to independently distinguish targets of interest from ground clutter, and then collect its intel based on a scalable list of priorities. It could tell a vehicle from a clump of brush, and a fire hydrant from a person—and then decide when one guy was of greater interest than the next. If it simultaneously spotted somebody walking his Jack terrier and another man running past him with his heels on fire, it would tag the runner for a first-look investigation. But if a guy on the same street burst from a house with a submachine gun, the drone would push him up to the top of its priority list. These graduated, near-instantaneous judgment calls required a superior level of machine cognition—the ability to draw probable conclusions from its observations, to interpret the data it gathered and react on the spot.

Keen vision, common sense and a yen for mobile communication devices. The drone was built for hunting people, and people usually carried phones. Since every mobile phone had a distinct electromagnetic footprint—making it a reliable giveaway of someone’s position—they were foremost objects of attention.

Little Wing therefore carried an antenna array that could track a phone’s EM emissions to within inches of its position. If it detected one in its recon box, it would zone in from a high altitude, identify its make and model, and tag its location on its video and pictures.

Lucas saw the results of the bird’s phone sweep on his head-up within a minute of receiving its first imagery of the bungalow and grounds.

It had located two, and within a hundred feet of each other. One, a popular Android, was clearly Raysa Musil’s based on the tracking software installed by her father. Little Wing’s geolocators put it in an attached garage. The second was about two hundred feet away from the garage inside the bungalow. The bird had instantly matched its radiation signature to the spectra associated with a satellite phone—labeling it as an ISAT produced by Russia’s Morsviasputnik telecom.

“Six, you looped in on these readings?”

Six. Carmody’s call sign.

“Got them, yeah.”