‘So how does that prove anything?’
‘Because,’ growled Harper, ‘it shows that I personally accessed and altered the file that was given to Gray to pass on to al-Qaeda — Easton’s itinerary.’
They exited the house. Baxter’s black Suburban was parked nearby, blue lights flashing. Behind it was the empty Cadillac. ‘But the actual file was deleted, wasn’t it?’ said Baxter.
‘It doesn’t matter. The logs establish a chain of contact between me and Gray immediately prior to his mission in Islamabad. If Gray gets hold of them and passes them on to the wrong person, we’re finished. Even without the files, the logs provide enough evidence to start an investigation. And there are plenty of hard-nosed little bastards who’ve been waiting for the chance to attack me.’
‘People like Sternberg?’
‘He’s top of the list, yes.’ Harper spotted someone in the SUV. ‘Who’s your driver?’
‘Reed.’
‘Is he trustworthy?’
‘You can trust all my men, sir.’
‘Good. You drive my car, and tell him to clear the way for us. Oh, and I need a phone.’ Baxter went to the Suburban and issued instructions, returning with Reed’s cell phone and giving it to Harper. The two men got into the Cadillac, the DNI taking the back seat. The vehicles set off. ‘Are your teams still in the field?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Get them there too. I want Gray and Childs dead before the cops or anyone else get involved.’
‘On it.’ Baxter took out his phone, and was about to dial a number when it rang. He answered it. ‘Baxter. Yes? Okay, hold on. The Admiral’s here with me.’ He put it on speaker. ‘Sir, you should hear this.’
‘We got a hit on Dr Childs’ credit card,’ said the man at the other end of the line. ‘It was used at a hardware superstore in Brentwood.’
‘How long ago?’ Harper demanded. Brentwood was in eastern DC, some five miles north-west of Suitland. If Gray was going there, he had a considerable head start.
‘About fifteen minutes.’
‘Why wasn’t I told immediately?’ asked Baxter.
‘You ordered us to get a list of anything Dr Childs or Agent Gray bought. The manager was uncooperative and wouldn’t give it to us without a warrant. We had to wait for a FISC judge to issue one.’
‘Well?’ said Harper impatiently. ‘What did they buy?’
‘I’ve got the list here, sir. It’s, uh… odd.’
‘Just read it out!’
‘Yes, sir. The card was used to buy a compressed air cylinder, a pressure relief valve, an inner tube, a six-foot length of PVC pipe, a hundred feet of rope, a light fitting, five pounds of lead shot, some air hose, a bicycle pump, a roll of duct tape and, ah… two footballs.’
Harper and Baxter exchanged bewildered looks in the mirror. ‘Footballs?’ the latter asked.
‘Yes, sir. American footballs, not soccer.’
‘Okay,’ said Harper in acknowledgement. ‘If there’s any further activity on their cards, inform us immediately.’
‘Footballs?’ echoed Baxter as he closed the line. ‘What the hell do they want with two footballs?’
Chapter 46
Information Retrieval
Adam surveyed the large, windowless building from the rooftop of its darkened neighbour. The blocky structure’s sole relief from anonymity was an unassuming plaque reading WALTER J. GORMAN FEDERAL DATA REPOSITORY; beyond that, the only signage consisted of warnings against trespass. The presence of a US government facility here would draw no comment — the town of Suitland, a short distance outside the south-eastern boundary of the District of Columbia, was home to several minor agencies including the Census Bureau, and not far from the sprawling Andrews Air Force Base.
Even by bureaucratic standards, he knew, the Gorman Building was dull. It was in essence a glorified digital boxroom, one of several around the country built to store tape and disk backups of the gigabytes of information churned out by the American governmental machine every day. Most of the data it contained was humdrum, barely of interest even to the people who created it.
But one file had now become extremely important.
‘So how are we supposed to get in there?’ said Bianca. A high fence topped with razor wire surrounded the entire site. She put down a bag containing some of the items the pair had bought. ‘And what does Levon’s puzzle have to do with anything?’
‘You’ll see,’ Adam replied, making mental calculations. The gap between the two rooftops was about sixty feet over the Gorman Building’s parking lot, but he needed something secure on the far side…
There was a cluster of boxy air-conditioning units set back from the roof’s edge. He squinted, trying to make out more detail in the low spill of light from the street lamps. Lines of shadow became visible: a slatted grille covering an air inlet.
‘Pass me the duct tape,’ he said, picking up the yellow plastic pipe and propping it on his rooftop’s air-con ductwork. As Bianca opened the bag, he lined the pipe up with the distant grille. Harper had many years earlier served as a gunnery officer aboard a destroyer; Adam now used that experience to bolster his own military training. It was a straightforward matter of judging distance and angles of arc to hit the target — the complicating factor was the nature of his ‘gun’.
Bianca watched as he set to work, securing the pipe in position with the strong adhesive binding before starting to connect together the cylinder of compressed air, the deflated inner tube and the valve with lengths of hose and more tape. ‘Oh, I get it!’ she exclaimed as the purpose of the random assemblage suddenly became clear. ‘You’re making a sort of air cannon.’
‘That’s right. It fills the inner tube with compressed air from the tank, then when it reaches a certain pressure the relief valve,’ he tapped the brass device, ‘blows and lets it all out in one go.’
‘Firing the footballs?’
‘Yeah. I’ll put the lead shot in them to give them some weight, then use the pump to inflate them just enough to fill the pipe without sticking in it. Then I attach the rope and the grappling hook.’
‘The hideous grappling hook,’ said Bianca, eyeing the ornate three-armed chandelier. ‘Will it be strong enough?’
‘It’ll do what I need it to do,’ he assured her. ‘When the pressure valve opens, it’ll shoot the ball across to the other roof, and pull the rope with it.’
‘Then you climb across to the roof?’
‘I climb across, yeah.’ His oddly smug smile told her that there was more to his plan than he was going to tell her for now. ‘Go back to the car. We’ll need to move fast.’
‘Do you know what you’re looking for inside?’
‘More or less. There’s a WORM disk—’
‘A what?’
‘WORM — Write Once, Read Many. Like a bigger and more durable recordable CD. It’s got the logs that prove Harper switched the fake itinerary for the real one.’
Bianca looked across at the Gorman Building. ‘When you say “more or less”… does that mean you don’t know exactly where it is? How many disks do they have in there?’
‘A couple of million.’ Her face fell. ‘Don’t worry — Harper knows how to get it.’
‘I hope they haven’t changed the filing system,’ she said. ‘Okay, I’ll be in the car. How long will you be?’
‘I don’t know. Keep watch — you’ll know what to do when you see me.’ He turned back to his improvised cannon as Bianca reluctantly headed for the ladder.
Harper’s eyes suddenly flicked wide open. ‘An air cannon.’