He emptied the bag while unobserved in a toy store (plenty of plastic there).
At the opposite end of the mall, he caught the shuttle bus to the Holiday Inn, where his car, regular-person clothes, razor, and tub were waiting for him. On the shuttle bus, he bowed his head to pray gratefully. His phone vibrated; he put it to his ear. “Hey.”
“Hi, I’m looking for Laura Haxson.”
“Nobody by that name at this phone.” Zach hung up.
In his hotel room, he hit the dialback.
The view from Jason’s picnic table at the roadside rest, just outside Gillette, was very Hollywood: water towers and steeples above the blaze of fall colors from the old trees. No doubt it would turn out to be seedy and run-down.
His cell phone vibrated; the call was from UNAVAILABLE. “Yeah?”
“Did you want to buy a snowmobile?”
“Yeah.”
“What do you have to trade?”
“Real old F-150.”
“Okay, meet me at a rental property I own, it’s real run-down and doesn’t look good, just bring the truck all the way up the driveway.”
Sounded like WalksWDLord had found a good concealed spot, just as they’d agreed. Jason scribbled directions in ballpoint on his hand. “Got it.”
“I’ve got a shower here.” WalksWDLord explained how to walk to the Holiday Inn. “I’m in Room 215. You can clean up here and then we’ll grab some dinner and be on the road.”
“Very cool.”
Jason prayed that the truck had one more start left in it. He didn’t think the nanospawn would be able to knock out the alternator quite this fast, but shorting out the battery or eating the electronic distributor was well within their reach, to judge by the way the music had gone dead half an hour ago.
He thought about peeking under the hood, but there’d be time enough for that once he got to his destination, and meanwhile it would be better not to let in light, or more nanospawn.
The house with the FOR RENT sign was right where it was supposed to be, and Jason followed the driveway around to the garage in the back.
Jason stripped off coat, hat, gloves, and sweater, and tossed them onto the back porch. Maybe some homeless dude would find them and spread the nanospawn. He erased the cell phone’s recent calls, turned it off, and tossed it over the alley into a toy-crowded back yard to spread more nanospawn.
Jason took out his second pair of clean chem-proof gloves (sprinkled with Drano crystals, inside tied-off condoms) and slipped them on, walked back to the truck, opened the passenger-side door, poured Liquid-Plumr over the top of his pack, rinsed with a bottle of distilled water. He shrugged the pack on.
He left both doors hanging open and the keys in the ignition. On a whim, he raised the hood too, and looked inside by the bright afternoon sunlight.
The battery top had been clean the night before, but now it was covered with fluffy white crystals. The ends of wires everywhere were clotted with colored metal salts, and corrosion mixed with too-bright spots to speckle the whole surface of the engine. Definitely working—good. I’d sure feel like a damn idiot if it wasn’t.
ABOUT THE SAME TIME. WASHINGTON. DC. 5:54 P.M. EST. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.
Heather was huddled with Working Group Jayapura Ground, going over how the supposedly secure TBMW signal had probably been tapped. “A guy in Jim Browder’s Tech Assessment Office, Paulton Shapiro, has cataloged the ways to steal tight-beam microwave signals. The one I think happened here is called phased-interference edge-diffracted scattering, PIEDS, because it’s best adapted to a situation where a beam has to go between very precisely known locations and pass through an aperture surrounded by a conductor, like say the aluminum frame of a window.”
“Is that off-the-shelf tech?” Khang from CIA asked.
“You can’t buy it in a store, but DARPA’s labs have been trying to build them since way back in the Obama administration. Probably fifty countries have experimented with it. Somebody was bound to make PIEDS work in field conditions, sooner or later. It’s not intrinsically expensive, just needs very fast processors and some work-arounds on a couple physics issues. And it makes sense. To take the plane by subterfuge, intact, they needed to go the instant the plane went into radio silence. They knew the right time because the Pawhan/Bell cell set them up so that they were vulnerable to PIEDS. So—”
Cameron tapped her shoulder. “I know I’ve taken you through three working groups in an hour, Heather, but I need you in another one. Please come with me.”
At first she thought she was going to be in Working Group Pawhan Bell because he led her to the conference room where they were, but he just stuck his head in and said, “Dr. Edwards.”
“Coming.”
It was Edwards from the FBI, the one who looked like Popeye and had been at the Daybreak presentation. He nodded politely, and said, “Here we are again.”
“Yeah.” Heather was trying to think of how to ask what was going on, but Cameron hurried on, and the two of them hurried to catch up; he gestured them into a conference room but didn’t go in himself. Lenny Plekhanov was the only person in there. “Hi, do you guys have any idea what Cam’s doing?”
“None at all,” Heather said. “Lenny Plekhanov, this is Agent Edwards—Dr. Edwards, I guess, from what Cam—”
“The doctorate’s in social psych,” Edwards said, “and Lenny and I know each other, we worked on—”
The door opened and an assistant brought in five more people; the four Heather recognized were Reynolds, who was another FBI agent; Robbins, the CIA analyst from the Daybreak meeting; Nancy Telabanian, a quiet woman in a dark suit, who was Lenny Plekhanov’s boss from NSA; and the guy from Deep Black. The one Heather didn’t know was an African-American woman in a colonel’s uniform with the Army’s Cyber Command patch. They had barely sat down and begun shaking hands and getting acquainted when Cam came in and closed the door.
He walked to the end of the table and stood resting his hands on it, as if he might need to lunge out the door at any moment. “Heather, I have to ask right away, bluntly. Hannah Bledsoe told me about your presentation regarding the Daybreak movement this morning, and that whatever Daybreak is, it is apparently already active. Can you assure me that it has nothing to do with this present situation? And whether it does or not, do you see an impact on what’s going on?”
Heather felt the implicit criticism—as Cam had doubtless known she would—in the pit of her stomach. She could feel herself being fitted with the tag that read FAMOUS UNKNOWN IDIOT, the tag that adhered to the officer at Pearl Harbor who saw planes on the new experimental radar and thought they must be a much smaller flight of American planes he was expecting, the intelligence officers who ignored aerial photos of all that Russian construction gear moving into Berlin in 1961, and the FBI administrator who didn’t see anything urgent in so many Saudi men with al-Qaeda links taking flying lessons; she could imagine headlines on a billion screens: DOF COP COULD HAVE PREVENTED DISASTER.
Edwards gazed at her like the eyepits of a skull. “Well, if—”
Cameron silenced him with a glare. At least he understands that I’m thinking.
If the seizure of the Vice President wasn’t connected to Daybreak, it had to be history’s most amazing accidental—
Timing.
The thing their unknown enemy was best at.
“I think,” she said, “that there has to be a connection, even though it’s so improbable that it didn’t even occur to me.” She looked around the room. “Those of you who weren’t at the briefing, how much do you know about Daybreak?”