It was only a few minutes later that the peace of the morning was disturbed by a familiar humming sound as an echelon of drones passed over him: small camera drones first, at higher altitude, followed by the bigger ones that had guns and lasers and such. They conducted a crisscross grid search over the area that Laks would pass through next, if he simply stood up and walked in a straight line toward the gun complex. It all seemed a bit silly until he heard Airport Lady’s voice issuing a now familiar set of commands. A few hundred meters away—a place he’d have walked through only minutes from now—a man had just climbed to his feet. He looked like a rag doll. He was wearing one of those camouflage suits—Laks couldn’t remember the name—that was a mess of fabric strips, flopping loose all round, to blur a man’s outline and make him nearly undetectable by the human eye. He was holding his hands out to his sides, making him look even more like a scarecrow.