“He could be practically anywhere by now. Check Dulles, Reagan and Baltimore.”
“That’s the first thing we tried, but if he’s booked on any international flight there’ve been no last-minute additions.”
“Expand the search to domestic flights. But he’ll need documents, money and a clean credit card or two. We either missed his go-to-hell kit at his house, or he’s got a stash somewhere else. A storage locker.”
“How about an APB on his car?”
“He’ll have switched cars by now, and I want to keep the cops at arm’s length. Anyone approaches him is probably going to die.”
“SWAT teams?”
“We need the man alive, Pete. Three nuclear weapons are missing from Quetta, and I think we have to consider the possibility that they’re already here in the country. Only he can tell us where they are and when they’ll be detonated. The man has a timetable, and he’s going to stick with it no matter what.”
“Could be he has a team. Someone local, unless he imported three suicide bombers willing to push a button and sacrifice their lives for Allah. It’s not likely he’d be willing to die himself.”
“Don’t be so sure,” McGarvey said. “He only has a few months to live, so he has nothing to lose.”
“Something else has come up. There’s a federal warrant for your arrest. Came from the White House. The president’s national security adviser.”
“Kalley.”
“That’s right. You’re to be considered armed and dangerous. Which was stupid, actually, because a lot of people in the Bureau and the Secret Service know who you are, and know damned well that you would not open fire on any cop doing their duty.”
Otto broke in, and he sounded excited as he always did when he was on to something.
“Haaris made one call from his cell phone to his house, and pulled up the ADT alarms and monitors. We made sure that the police tapes were gone and no one was watching the place. Soon as he was finished with that call he pulled the SIM card, so I lost him. At least at first.
“I hacked into his house system and went through the recordings from the time he pulled the SIM card until ten minutes ago. But he never showed up. It’s telling me that wherever he’s stashed his walking papers, they’re not there.”
“Why did he go through the bother of doing a surveillance search?” McGarvey asked. “Unless it was to keep you busy.”
“Bingo. But it backfired.”
“Tell me.”
“He had his escape well planned, I’ll have to give him that. I figured that he would need not only papers, but he’d need new wheels. Renting a car somewhere was too obvious, so I started a search within a thirty-mile radius of Campus for self-storage facilities that had units large enough for two cars.”
“Why two?” Pete asked.
“Because he didn’t want to screw around pulling one car out and then parking his Mercedes inside. Might attract too much attention. Just one little detail he figured would help with his margin,” Otto said.
“He would have wanted a place that had no onsite security, other than fences and a surveillance system. Mounted cameras.”
“Right, but he made a mistake. For whatever reason he missed the cameras and at least three people paid for it with their lives.”
“Did someone stumble on to him?” McGarvey asked.
“The manager and two people looking at units. They parked their car up front, and I hacked into the surveillance system and saw it all. He’s driving a five-year-old Toyota Camry, dark blue, with Maryland tags.”
“Where’d he go?”
“We’ll have to put something in the air to find out,” Otto said. “But he lured the three people into the garage, shot them all, then locked up and drove off. Five minutes later it exploded, taking out twenty other units. He either set the explosion, or maybe his aim was lousy and one of them survived and tried to open the door, which was wired.”
“I can retask Flybaby Prime to find him,” Louise said.
The designator actually included a constellation of four Jupiter satellites in moderate Earth orbits, just above the International Space Station, arrayed in such a way that at any given time, twenty-four/seven, one would be above Washington, DC. The program, which had been put in place in the aftermath of 9/11, was classified Top Secret/Flybaby Prime access. It would take practically an act of Congress to retask any one of the birds. But Louise had been one of the designers and first administrators of the system.
“First of all, you can go to jail for the rest of your life, and if Washington is one of Haaris’s targets, you’d be leaving the city unprotected,” Pete said. She was clearly playing devil’s advocate.
“Ten-second snapshots every sixty,” Louise said. “I’ll send the feed to Otto, and he can insert a loop showing just before and just after the ten seconds that the bird would be off task.”
“Make them one second every fifteen, and there’ll be no need for a loop,” Otto said. “I’m working on a recognition program now. My darlings will pick out every dark blue Camry in the bird’s line of sight and read the tag number.”
Louise had already taken her laptop from the kitchen desk, opened it on the counter and turned it on.
“We’ll need to hustle, sweetheart,” Otto said. “We don’t have that wide an angle. If he gets more than a hundred miles out, there’s a good chance we’ll miss him.”
“Don’t wait for me, I’m on it,” Louise said.
Her computer finished booting, and within twenty seconds she had gotten into the NSA’s highest security programs’ mainframe, had entered all the passwords and was in the Flybaby Prime control program.
“Gotcha,” she said. She looked up. “Your call, Kirk. Which way is he heading?”
“Box the compass,” McGarvey said. “North first.”
“Ready, Bear?” Louise asked. Teddy Bear, or usually just Bear, was her pet name for Otto.
“Go,” he said.
Louise expanded the satellite’s view and changed its direction to the north for one second, then brought it back to its original parameters.
“Searching,” Otto said. “You can’t believe the number of dark blue Camrys on the highways. We should send this to Toyota for a commercial.” Two seconds later he was back. “No.”
Louise reprogrammed the satellite to look east, took the one second-snapshot and brought it back.
“Shit,” Otto said.
“What?”
“Dark blue Camry, Maryland tags; it’s our man. He’s heading east on U.S. Fifty just across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge into Delaware.”
McGarvey had it all at once. “Dover Air Force Base.”
“Yes,” Pete said. “He had to get the weapons out of Pakistan. They were put aboard military transports to Dover.”
“From there at least one made it to Washington,” Otto said. “A second to New York. And the third?”
“I’m going to ask him just that,” McGarvey said. “We still don’t know how he’s going to get them out. I don’t think he’ll simply trigger them in place.”
“We can get a NEST team in the air within fifteen minutes,” Louise said.
“If he finds out he’ll push the button,” McGarvey said. “Keep looking for his cell phone. I’ll need to know the second he replaces the SIM card.”
“I’m coming with you,” Pete said.
“I need you on Campus to back me up in case this thing goes south,” McGarvey said.
“Goddamnit, Kirk.”
“If there’s going to be any future for us, you’ll have to start listening to me. At least every now and then.” He could hear her draw a breath. It was dirty pool, but she hadn’t left him any other choice.
“Okay,” she said.
“Promise?”
“Promise.”