Chapter 12

The drive through the inland California scrub seemed to go on forever. By the time Dana made it into and then over the mountains, the sky was just beginning to show the very first hints of pre-dawn light.

Every mile marker she passed between her home in the forested Berkeley hills to Lucca’s barren patch of desert made a part of her scream to turn around, and head north toward Valerie, instead of east away from her. Every mile she drove ratcheted her anxiety higher, but she maintained her course, her hands cramping from their iron grip on the steering wheel.

She trusted Lucca; she’d never been in a situation like this, but there was a reason that she called Lucca, and not the cops. The police would ask awkward questions about how she was tracking Valerie’s phone or accessing her cameras; and anyway they wouldn’t act on a report of an unimportant missing trans girl quickly enough to be of any help- if they acted on it at all. Law enforcement was not known for tiring themselves out trying to help marginalized queer women.

Dana was a planner; with time to think and organize, there wasn’t much that she couldn’t figure out. She struggled with surprises, changes, and unexpected situations, however, and this situation was all three. Lucca, by contrast, was action-oriented, and while occasionally Dana thought them foolhardy, they were not the sort of person to be lost in analysis or debate.

She couldn’t imagine facing something like this without Lucca at her back; and true to form, Lucca hadn’t wasted time explaining or convincing; just told Dana to get here as quickly as possible.

Dana did the math as she drove; even if she could average 20mph faster than the car Valerie was in - unlikely in the first place - it would take three or four hours for her to catch up. It wouldn’t take much lost time here and there (or a little speeding on her quarry’s part) to throw that into double-digit hours, and the tiny advantage they had would vanish.

The car’s clock read a few minutes after three in the morning as she drove through Lucca’s gate; it was already open, something that she had never seen before. She guessed Lucca’s cameras had been tracking her car once it was close enough to the compound. The gate swung shut behind her car, confirming the hypothesis. She pulled up in front of the garage, grabbed her satchel from the passenger seat, and slammed the car door behind her, angling toward the side door she usually used.

Dana was only a few steps out of her car when she heard her friend shout for her from outside. They were somewhere around back from the house, not in their lab as Dana had expected. The desert air just before dawn was quiet, and Lucca’s voice carried, when they wanted it to. Dana veered away from the door and rounded the corner of the structure, and at that moment began to understand the plan that Lucca had in mind.

Lucca was already trotting over to a small white and silver high-wing airplane, sitting on a stretch of new-looking asphalt. Dana knew that Lucca was a pilot- it had been a hobby of theirs for years, as long as Dana had known them. The two had even idly chatted about her project to build a runway on her land, but last she heard, a few months back, it was tied up in agency approvals. Dana wasn’t sure if Lucca had bullied them into granting the approval or found a loophole to build it without; either option would not have been out of character.

Dana sprinted to catch up with her friend.

“We’re-” she started, before Lucca finished the thought for her.

“-flying, yes. I’ll explain once we’re in the air.”

Dana gave them a quick kiss on the cheek as she reached the plane; more reserved than their usual greeting, but the clock was ticking. They climbed into the plane’s cabin. It was cramped, but it had space for four, and a black duffel was crammed under the back seats. Dana’s thigh pressed against Lucca’s as the two squeezed in, and the contact helped soothe her frazzled nerves. She found their presence reassuring, a tacit promise that everything would be alright.

Lucca pulled out a tablet, flipped to a checklist app, and started running through their pre-flight checks. Dana wanted to shake them and scream at them, but she forced her tone to stay level.

“Can’t we skip a few steps, just get going?” Dana already knew what Lucca would say, but worry drove her to ask anyway.

“Slow is smooth, and smoo-”

“-smooth is fast,” Dana finished for her. It was one of Lucca’s favorite sayings, and they had a few. They wouldn’t skip steps, because skipping steps is how you fuck up and die. It was usually one of the things that Dana genuinely appreciated about her friend, and she bit back further comment while they worked down the checklist.

Takeoff was smooth; Lucca was adept at the plane’s controls. Dana was unsurprised- she’d never seen them do anything that they weren’t excellent at.

“Flash drive in the pocket has the code I started on, you’re going to have to get it working.” Lucca gestured toward the starboard hatch by where Dana sat. Their voice was tinny in the headsets they each wore to cancel out the drone of the plane’s engine.

“The tracking code? Building software isn’t my strong suit..”

“It’s mostly done, and we’ve got a couple hours. Once we’re at altitude we can pair, if you need it.”

Lucca’s takeoff was eastward; they banked the plane around as they climbed, and Dana could make enough sense of the instruments to tell they were heading northwest, back toward Reno.

Lucca flipped a couple switches and then let go of the control yoke; the plane continued steadily on.

“Autopilot for a few minutes,” Lucca explained. “We’ve got a cruising speed of about one-fifty over ground. I figure they’re about fifty miles into Oregon by now if they’re on I-5, should take us about three hours to catch up.”

“And then what? You brought a megaphone, we can politely ask them to stop?”

“Well,” Lucca smiled. “That depends. If they’re staying on I-5, we head up to Portland, and wait for them to come to us. They’ll be easy to track somewhere like that.”

Dana frowned. It was better than trying to catch up to them in a car, but not by much. “What if they’re not staying on the five?”

Lucca actually grinned at that. “That’s where it gets good. The highways through Eastern Oregon have a lot of flat, isolated stretches, nice and straight. Did you know it’s legal to land on a highway?” Her grin dimmed just a few percentage points. “Mostly.”

The two were silent for a while as Dana worked on the tracking software. She’d confirmed an issue earlier that week in a new telemetry system for a certain brand of electric car. The company had decided to turn the cars’ onboard cameras into license plate readers, so they could track all the other cars on the road, and in turn sell the data for marketing and advertising purposes.

The problem, for the company, was that they had designed the system as a pull-based API- a company server would ping all the cars periodically, and get a report about what license plates each car had seen and where they’d been at the time.

The vulnerability Dana had found was that the system used an insecure authentication scheme to sign those requests- a simple hash extension weakness; well known to any security expert, but a mistake made dozens of times every day by naïve software engineers. Dana had already captured a valid request, and it was trivial to tack a second request on to the end to have each car send the data to a server she controlled.

The company had decimated their security budget two quarters ago in the pursuit of profit, and Dana was reaping the rewards of that decision.

Lucca had indeed written most of the code, based on the proof-of-concept Dana had handed over to them. Dana just needed to write some glue code to fetch a list of car IP addresses from Shodan, and handle the fact that all they had, for now, was a partial plate.

About an hour later, they had a map populated with dozens of tiny glowing dots; license plate sightings that matched the partial Oregon plate. It wasn’t real-time tracking; they only got a ping when the car was caught on camera. But, there were almost a million of those electric cars on the road in the US, and the majority of them were crawling up and down the west coast.

One track stood out- pings crossing the bridge from San Francisco to Oakland, then up the eighty toward Sacramento before veering off north along the five. The track broke off east well before the border to take a twisty mountain road that eventually led to Oregon’s eastern basins. This was especially good news, because while the car had to crawl around the twists and turns of the topography, Lucca could fly the plane more or less along a straight-line intercept course. Data points grew sparse- a mixed blessing; as they would have less of an idea where the car they were chasing was, but there would also be fewer other cars on the road to create complications.

Dana had flown with Lucca in the past, usually short hops between Reno and Oakland, before they had built their own airstrip. The boredom of those long flights and the steady hum of the engine had often lulled her to sleep. This time, as they flew on into the slowly brightening dimness, the gnawing anxiety kept her awake, and kept her staring at the glowing dots of tracking data slowly marching along the map on the screen in front of her, while the small crosshair representing their plane slowly closed the distance.