“Are you positive?” pressed Griffin. “Seems like if he gave it some thought, it would be pretty obvious.”
“All magic tricks seem obvious once you know their secret,” said Desh.
Kira turned to Connelly with a pensive expression. “How are the rest of Rosenblatt’s hexad doing?” she asked.
“They’ve all checked in,” he replied. “And they all followed the evacuation plan perfectly. After I gave them the signal they had plenty of time to get to an airport before this colonel was anywhere near them. I’d like to visit with each of them personally, make sure the transition to ghost is going well, but we don’t have that luxury.”
“Let me guess,” said Kira. “You’re going after Rosenblatt’s family?”
Desh nodded. “Good guess. This Jake will continue to keep them under surveillance. We need to get them started on our version of the witness protection program.” His expression darkened. “We’re going to have to uproot a family with three young children. It’s going to be a nightmare for them.”
Kira met his eyes and nodded sadly. “Omaha is three or four hundred miles from here,” she said softly. “Why not fly?”
“The colonel and I discussed this while van Hutten was being enhanced,” replied Desh. “We have some weapons and other equipment we’d like to have with us that makes flying, uh . . . problematic. Also an RV is kid friendly. The Rosenblatts can live inside until we spring Seth and come up with a more permanent arrangement.”
Kira Miller had made great use of RVs to help her stay off the grid before she had met Desh. They were mobile, and yet when they were parked inside a trailer park they could offer a stable address. And while authorities would leave no stone unturned when it came to residences and hotels, trailer parks would fly beneath their radar, having been stigmatized as bastions of ignorance and poverty. The idea of Ph.D. scientists living in trailer parks was something not likely to ever occur to them. So Icarus maintained a number of these vehicles around the country, with several near their headquarters buildings in Denver and Kentucky.
“Won’t it be dawn when you arrive?” said Griffin. “Wouldn’t it be better to go at night? To avoid satellites?”
“It wouldn’t help much,” replied Connelly. “The NRO has launched several IR and radar satellites that can see in the dark.”
“They’re supposed to be secret,” added Desh, “but the NRO purposely leaks their existence. After one supposedly secret launch they passed out patches with the slogan, we own the night, written on them. Raised a lot of eyebrows in the press at the time.”
Griffin parked next to one of Icarus’s RVs and announced they had arrived. He slid open the side doors of the van and peered inside as his colleagues rose from their seats.
Desh caught the eye of the brilliant hacker and said, “Matt, I need you to take a gellcap. I need you to get as much intelligence on this black-ops colonel and his unit as you can, including this Major Kolke. And we’ll need to find a way to free Seth Rosenblatt. So anything you can learn that would help in this effort would be great. You know the drill. But wait a few hours. I’ll call you beforehand with further instructions.”
“Why wait?”
“While we’re driving, I’ll put myself in this colonel’s shoes and think about how he’ll try to find us. Now that we’ve been compromised he knows our MO. Hiring recruits as consultants, paying them an advance before they fly out, etc. Before now, it wasn’t critical to totally cover our tracks. But now I’ll need you to hack into banks, change the records of Icarus members, that sort of thing. To more properly erase any trails.”
“Makes sense,” acknowledged Griffin.
Kira stared into Desh’s eyes worriedly, and then shifted her gaze to encompass both her husband and Jim Connelly. “Don’t forget about your key rings,” she said.
“We shouldn’t need them,” said Desh. “But we won’t be shy about it if we run into trouble.”
After the raid that had killed Ross Metzger, the core counsel decided they should each carry a single gellcap with them at all times, after all, as a measure of last resort. Kira had devised a gumball-sized container for the pills that attached to their key rings. The container would detect the fingerprints of whoever tried to open it, and if it wasn’t the owner, would dissolve the gellcap inside.
Kira sighed, and lines of worry continued to mar her delicate forehead. “Good luck, gentlemen,” she said. “And be careful.”
15
Desh and Connelly arrived in Omaha, Nebraska just after five in the morning. They had switched off driving duties during the long trip and had each managed a few hours sleep. During the time they were both awake, they had performed a virtual recon of Omaha via computer and had planned out their mission.
They had two objectives: extract Rosenblatt’s family and capture one of Jake’s men to interrogate. They couldn’t waste any opportunity to learn what they were up against. They had come up with an elaborate plan to accomplish these objectives—probably too elaborate—but they had always erred on the side of paranoia and overplanning and it had served them well.
They parked the RV at a campground deep within an Omaha woods and jogged the quarter mile to where they had instructed a cab to meet them. Fifteen minutes later the cab deposited them at a twenty-four hour rental car company where their vehicles were waiting for them, which they rented using false identities.
Desh drove to Rosenblatt’s house in a blue, family-friendly Toyota SUV, with three rented children’s car seats strapped in, amused at himself. It seemed like all he ever drove anymore were RVs, vans, and minivans. Why didn’t any of his missions ever call for expensive sports cars?
When Desh arrived at the professor’s small Tudor home just outside the University of Nebraska grounds, he drove around the neighborhood in ever larger circles to recon the area for physical surveillance, but found none, as expected. Rosenblatt’s family was harmless and would never suspect they were under surveillance. And Jake had no reason to believe anyone would be trying to extract them just now, so a physical stakeout was a waste of effort and manpower.
Even so, the colonel’s men had certainly hacked into the Rosenblatt family’s computers. And they must have been inside their home to gather the video footage that, with special effects added, had been used to break the lanky physicist. While inside, they were sure to have hidden bugs, cameras, and intruder alerts. Seth Rosenblatt was Jake’s only current lead to Icarus, and even though the black-ops colonel thought their leadership was now dead, he would make certain that any communication to or from the physicist’s family was intercepted and recorded.
Desh and Connelly could have devised a cleaner extraction, especially with some of the technology they could access, but in this case flawless execution wouldn’t serve their needs. They needed Jake’s men to come after them, so they could capture one for interrogation.
Desh returned to Rosenblatt’s residence and pulled the SUV quietly into his flagstone driveway. He disabled the alarm and broke silently into the house. He guessed he had from ten to fifteen minutes before the two men responsible for surveillance were alerted to his breach and arrived on the scene. If they arrived while he was still there this would put the Rosenblatts in greater danger, which he didn’t want, but he was confident he could take care of a few men at the low end of Jake’s field hierarchy who had been assigned this tedious job.