Because it could pick up unique heat signatures on the other side of walls and use its artificial intelligence to interpret those signatures, no matter how vague. Or to put it another way, it could review the characteristics of a splash of heat, then look at other splashes in a given space around it and compare them to emissions from elsewhere in the room. With that done, it could match them against its extensive in-memory database to tell them apart, as it would when deciding whether it was looking at the bonnet of a fire hydrant or a human head.

But the drone wasn’t wholly unique in that capability. Others had it. What made Little Wing a phenom among drones was that it could go several steps beyond the rest and instantly create visual simulacra of emissions sources and their surroundings. A virtual reality depiction of the room behind the walls, based on what it figured out about the heat patterns inside it.

In his cockpit, Lucas made the sign of the cross as the drone’s camera lens rotated toward the front of the house. His face felt taut and his neck stiff. He’d been nowhere near as tense in Syria once upon a time, using a close relative of Little Wing to take out ISIS butchers in their hideaways.

But this mission was also nowhere the same.

This one was about saving two young children and their father.

And suddenly, now, Lucas could see the kids in his head-up. See the layout of the room around them, like an interior designer’s floor plan, but brushstroked with texture and color. The scene Little Wing generated wasn’t a hundred percent realistic. Nor were its versions of people. But they were easily good enough. He saw the girls in chairs to one side of the window, their wrists and ankles taped. And entering the picture from the right—

His stomach clutching, he straightened behind his controls and said, “Six. From the garage. You see what’s going down?”

“Roger,” Carmody replied. “This is it.”

Grigor entered the living room a step behind Musil, his elbow locked around his neck, holding the Glock up to his head. He had pivoted around his back as he stepped through the fire door, moving in on the agent with the gun.

The girls turned their heads to look from their chairs. Bound, gagged, terrified. Musil saw the helpless bewilderment in their eyes. He had never seen anything worse.

Grigor pressed his forearm into his windpipe, cutting off his air.

“You hunted me,” he said. His voice quiet and level. “Now you pay the price.”

Musil struggled to answer. Grigor’s arm choked the words off in his throat. He tried again, croaked, “You said...wouldn’t...”

“I won’t hurt them.” Grigor finished the sentence. “You die. They watch. And live to remember.”