Thornton looked startled.
“Yeah, we know about the Event. It’s in…” Jake held the countdown watch on his wrist up so Thornton could see. “Fifteen days, nine hours, three minutes and twenty-seven seconds. Keep in mind — you’ll be well underground at that time. This isn’t going to end…well, not pleasantly…or quickly. So if you don’t have anything to contribute you’ll have another opportunity later today.” Jake started to get up.
“Wait.”
Jake sat back down. “I’m listening.”
“You don’t know what you’re dealing with. I can help you understand the technology. I can…”
“You mean the saucers, the anti-gravity drives, going to the Moon and to Mars, how the EMP reflector works, the gold bonds, the trillions in counterfeit hundred dollar bills, the secret university research? We already understand all of that. Now, if you want to talk about the names of people who are at the top of the Phoenix Organization, I’m listening.”
“You pathetic little moron,” Thornton said in a loud voice. “You have no idea of the power that stands against you. Just because you barbarians happen to capture me doesn’t change anything. I’m a sacrificial pawn. You won’t learn anything from me. You’re not worthy of the knowledge we have. You’re just ignorant cattle, nothing more!”
“Give me the name of the person you report to,” Jake said calmly.
“I don’t know! Everything is extremely compartmentalized. It’s run by dead drops and cut outs. Nobody knows who they work for or who works for them. It’s an anonymous network!”
“You knew Sylvia Cuthbert.”
“Who’s that?”
“Your contact inside the NSA,” Jake replied, carefully watching Thornton’s face.
Thornton looked down at the floor. “I didn’t know her name. I didn’t know where she worked. All I knew was the sound of her voice and that the information she gave me was reliable.”
“Who did you pass the information to?”
“I told you, I don’t know.”
“How was the information passed?”
“I used a burner cell phone with preprogrammed numbers. The only thing that remained the same was the sequence of the programmed numbers. Speed dial number one was always the guy I reported to, the rest were people I gave orders to, always in the same order. Every week I got a new phone with new numbers.”
“How did you get the phone?”
“Every Monday night, once it got dark, I would put the phone in a plastic box hidden in the shrubs at the back of my yard. First thing Tuesday morning a new phone would be in the box.”
“Was there any surveillance of the area?”
Thornton gave him a disgusted look. “Do you think I would risk the lives of my family members by doing that? Of course there wasn’t any surveillance. I’m not stupid!”
“Where is the burner phone now?”
“It’s in my briefcase, in my office. By now, my secretary will have locked it in the safe. You’re never going to get it in time.”
“Where is the control center for the satellite located?”
Thornton shrugged. “I have no idea.”
Jake stood up and walked over to Honi and Dave. “What do you think?”
“I think he really doesn’t know anything more than that,” Honi said.
Jake looked at Dave. “Probably true. If I was going to set up a network like that, I’d do it the same way.”
“It would help if we could get his briefcase,” Jake said.
Dave tipped his head toward the back room. The three of them went through the open door, which Dave quietly closed behind them.
“You mean this briefcase?” Dave asked.
Jake looked at the expensive-looking tan leather case. That’s what was inside the satchel one of the soldiers had carried into Senator Thornton’s office.
“We swapped it out. Thornton’s secretary put an identical briefcase with six pads of blank paper into the safe. We have his computer, burner phone and a few other items we picked up in his office. You put on a great show when you arrested Thornton. Everybody was watching you, which gave us the chance to collect some evidence. Nice job, by the way.”
“I didn’t see any of that,” Jake said.
“You weren’t supposed to. Neither was anyone else.”
“So what do we do with Thornton?” Honi asked.
“Can you keep him out of circulation?” Jake asked.
“Sure,” Dave said. “We have the perfect place.”
“Meanwhile, Agent Badger and I have to get back to the NSA building,” Jake said. “Now that we have Thornton’s phone and computer, we will understand more about how the Phoenix Organization’s communication network functions. We have to modify our database.”
When Jake and Honi arrived at the NSA building, Stafford and Ken were waiting for them in the lobby. Honi led them down to B6, area 4.
“Brett,” Honi said. “We have to modify the phone plot. Phones are swapped out every Monday night, so every Tuesday we have new numbers, but the phone sequence within each phone remains the same.”
“Okay. Hierarchal structure?”
“Yes.”
“So the person will call subordinates and his or her boss, but the boss will not call his or her subordinates. That kind of structure?”
“Exactly,” Jake replied.
“Okay. Give me a few. I’ve got to recode the parameters.”
“Here’s Senator Thornton’s burner phone,” Honi said. “Speed dial one is Thornton’s boss, two through five are his crew. I’ll get Tracy started on Thornton’s computer.”
“What about the burner phones we got from General Teague?” Jake asked. “He had three of them.”
“Might make him more important than we thought,” Honi said.
“Or Teague might have created his own network using the same system,” Stafford said.
“Which could help us locate people still working for Teague,” Jake replied.
“And that could help us locate Teague,” Stafford said.
“I’ve been tracing the encoded ID numbers of the phones,” Brett said. “The memory cards disappear and the numbers have been changed. The calls following that change didn’t make sense in our phone plot, so based on swapping out every Monday at midnight, I can eliminate three quarters of the burner phone contacts on the plot. That should help out a lot.”
“It will,” Jake replied. “People work and live in a limited range of places. When people do something secretive, there are only a few places they feel comfortable. If we can match weekly burner phones to a specific set of locations, maybe we can identify the people at those locations during the time the phones are being used.”
“We can do more than that,” Honi said. “We’ve got all of these phone conversations recorded by the Domestic Surveillance Directorate in Bluffdale, Utah. At some point we will be able to match burner phone voice prints with regular phone conversations. Eventually, we can identify everyone in the Phoenix Organization.”
“Eventually?” Jake asked. “How long is eventually?”
“A year or two?”
“In fifteen days, it won’t matter.”
“Well…assuming…” Honi said quietly.
“Okay, guys,” Brett said. “New parameters are in. Let’s see what we have.”
The display with the new parameters took on a whole new shape.
“It’s more like an organizational chart now,” Honi said.
“Something just occurred to me,” Jake said. “Cell towers were the first communications system to come back on line following the solar storm. Land lines are mostly still not working. We had a small amount of notice so we could back up databases and shut down our computers. How long before the solar storm did the cell towers go off line?”