by S L Shelton
Just as the feed was about to end, the vehicle pulled out of its parking space on the road and began moving again. The imagery concluded about ten minutes after that, with Gaines still moving west on 40.
“Phoenix or Vegas?” John asked over my shoulder, indicating I was to make the call on the next flight.
Neither sounded quite right, but given the two choices, my internal flowchart pushed me to an answer.
“Vegas,” I replied, but it sounded almost like a question it was so laden with doubt.
“I’ll be back in a few minutes. Keep digging to see if you can figure out where he’s headed.”
While he was gone, I went over the crime database information to no avail. Within moments, John had returned with two boarding passes for a flight to Las Vegas.
“Pack it up,” he commanded. “We’ll have to run to catch our flight.”
I closed up my computer, shouldered my bag and jogged behind him toward our new gate. We made it with little time to spare.
On the flight, I thought about our plan and decided it would be much simpler if we could just get tagged coordinate updates.
“If I could get a feed with just coordinate updates, we wouldn’t have to anticipate his direction,” I suggested as we settled into our seats. “We could jump ahead of him and then close in on the tag instead of following him hours after the fact.”
“Can’t use Agency resources to track him inside the US,” he replied. “All I’m getting is raw Satellite data, no fingerprints on a search.”
“Is there a way we can get a feed instead of having to download a whole package then spool it?” I offered.
“We don’t have the tech to do that without filtering first, and that would constitute Agency involvement,” he replied.
I nodded, and then thought for a second. We had been using an awful lot of CIA manpower and satellite access. “Are we off the books or off the reservation?” I asked him, wondering if we were bending the rules or melting them down completely.
“The books. That’s all I can say,” he replied, becoming annoyed with my probing.
“But what if—”
“Look, Scott. My boss is already dancing on a thin line with this, and we can’t do anything that will turn this into reportable action,” he said, lowering his voice but taking a harsh tone. “Before it’s over, I may have to retire someone I trained, someone I consider a friend. So how about cutting me some slack with the twenty questions?”
I shut my mouth and leaned back to take another short nap. A few moments later I heard John quietly say, “Sorry.”
I didn’t open my eyes. “We’re cool,” I muttered. Without opening my eyes, I smiled and asked, “So why can't you just call Mark and ask him where he is?”
There was no answer, but I heard him shift in his seat. I assumed he was looking at me in agitation, so I opened my eye a slit to confirm…yep.
“I mean, you've gone to all the trouble to come out and help him,” I said, turning my head back towards the front of the plane and closing my eyes again. “Is there a reason he wouldn't take your call?”
More silence.
I looked over again to see he was still staring at me, but there was less agitation in his gaze…it looked more like a decision was being made.
“Don't hurt yourself,” I said, knowing his nature made it hard to share info. “I'm just curious more than anything. I figured if that was an option, you'd have done it already.”
“That might have worked a week or so ago when I found out there'd been a search on his cover ID,” John replied quietly. “As soon as the shit with his sister went down, it stopped being an option.”
“You don't think he'd trust you?” I asked.
John shook his head. “We didn't end it on the best of terms… The order he disobeyed and Op he bailed out of—I had to finish it. And I didn't handle the reprimand well.”
“What was it?” I asked, pushing my luck.
He glared at me a second and then softened his expression a bit.
“I can't give you details, but he was ordered to take down a real bad guy before something could happen. The only way to do it was to blow a vehicle. The guy had his wife and son with him and Mark couldn't bring himself to push the button,” John replied quietly after leaning toward me to gain some privacy. “I didn't hesitate.”
I nodded, absorbing the significance of the disclosure. After a moment, I cautiously asked, “Was it worth it?”
“Totally,” he replied without hesitation. “We saved more than three hundred incoming servicemen with that one takedown—but Mark didn't see it that way. He was sure he would've found another opportunity.”
“Could he?”
John hesitated that time. “He might have,” he replied with a note of regret in his voice. “But we play the odds. We have to.”
“You won't get an argument from me,” I replied. “Though sometimes someone else might have a better insight into those odds.”
He grunted his acknowledgment. I'm certain he realized I was referring to Mimon and the rescue of the hostages. His odds had told him to take the field with the SEALs to get the nuclear devices, hostages no longer being the primary objective. I had proven both were possible.
I suddenly wondered if that made him second guess his actions on the Op with Mark and whether that was the source of the regret in his voice.
**
10:15 a.m.—Las Vegas, Nevada
When we arrived in Las Vegas, John went directly to the car rental counter while I stayed with our luggage. I watched as he tapped his foot, impatiently waiting for the clerk to hand over the keys.
He's wound pretty tightly, I thought. I wonder if I should be more nervous.
“Okay,” he grunted as he grabbed his bags and headed to the door. “We're behind schedule.”
Schedule?
On our way to our vehicle, a man approached us from the opposite direction. He looked up at the tower, shielding his eyes from the sun with his hand. At the last second he looked where he was going, but he bumped into John anyway, knocking his and John’s items to the ground along with the man.
“I’m so sorry,” the man said.
“No problem,” John replied, picking up his belongings and helping the man to his feet. “Watch the road, man.”
“Thanks. I will,” the man said before walking past.
John turned to me and handed me a padded envelope from the drop. I took it and tucked it under my arm.
“Real smooth,” I muttered sarcastically.
“It does the job,” he said without looking at me.
We got into the rental vehicle, another SUV like the last. I immediately pulled out my laptop and started it up before removing the pocket drive from the envelope.
“Why do you insist on getting industrial-sized vehicles?” I asked while I waited for my computer to boot up again.
“Have you ever tried to do a PIT Maneuver on an American-made sedan with a Mini Cooper?” he replied sarcastically.
“Okay. I get it.”
“Tell me something,” John chimed as we exited the airport and moved toward the highway. “Why does it take so long for your computer to boot up?”
“Encrypted drive.” I replied, watching the startup routines spool across my screen.
“I have an encrypted laptop. It doesn't take that long to boot.”
“No. The system is encrypted, yes, but the drive is encrypted at shutdown and decrypts at start up—separated by a boot drive,” I replied, grinning as the last of the decrypt routine ran. “If the drive is ever separated from the rest of the system, the disk gets scrambled and it becomes a random five hundred megabyte crypt key. It would take about two hundred years of random super computer crack gens to unlock it.”
He laughed, shaking his head. “And I thought I was paranoid.”
I raised my hand. “System security specialist.”
“The NSA doesn't even go to that much effort,” he replied, still amused by my encryption overkil
l.
“That's why their systems are so easy to hack,” I said, plugging in the pocket drive.
His head snapped around and he glared at me.
“…from what I've heard,” I added with an ironic grin.
As soon as my system was booted up, I started spooling the images. We were just merging onto the highway as I started the review.
Gaines’s Crown Vic had driven to a town called Kingman, Arizona, where it had stopped. I ran all the way to the end of the data feed and it hadn’t moved, so I backed it up to the frame where it had stopped then zoomed in.
The car had stopped in the parking lot of a small park. I toggled the pictures back and forth for a few seconds and saw no other vehicle movement.
I zoomed out again so I could see more of the park and some of the surrounding streets and then toggled back and forth a few more times. On a side street, one block away from the park, a sedan moved, and then another vehicle on the opposite side of the park—a compact car.
I broadened the view again and expanded the time parameters. To the right of the park was the Mohave County Fairgrounds. I ticked the image stream back and forth and after a ten minute loop, I caught movement on the ground, a long human shadow in the early morning sun.
Okay. Let’s look for you on the ground, I thought.
I toggled the time index back to where the Crown Vic had parked and zoomed in again, maximum magnification. There was no movement on the vehicle at all. No people shadows.
Where did you go?
Then I caught a glimpse of a shadow. A couple of pixels in the image that were out of place when compared to the previous frame, in the shadow line of some houses across the street. I followed it a few frames and lost it again.
“This is frustrating as hell,” I muttered.
“What?” John asked.
“The Crown Vic stopped in Kingman, Arizona and stayed there. I’m trying to pick up his ground movement to see where he went, but I get nothing. It’s almost as if he knew when the satellite was going to be snapping his picture.”
“He does,” John said with a smile.
I shot him a smirk. “Yeah. Right.”
“Think about it, smart guy. He’s used SATINT before. Satellites don’t record photos, they record raw digital streams. They’re converted to images with software. The photo package we get is in one minute increments because any more than that would be unmanageable in the field.”
Understanding hit me. “As long as he keeps to shadow most of every minute, there is only a one in sixty chance of being caught by the analyst.” I replied confidently. “Slick! Okay. I’ve got this now.”
I highlighted a human shadow and copied the image data. Then I opened a script window and programmed a search macro using that shadow data as a general basis for a search. I estimated the distance a man would cover at a leisurely pace and calculated concentric circles out from the Crown Victoria at intervals based on those estimates. I then ran the program, looking for human shadows within those circles in areas that would require more than a minute to cross.
I quickly ran ahead several minutes checking to see if there were any other vehicles or any more “human shadow” walkers within my concentric pacing circles. I tracked and removed all tags that had identifiable origins or that couldn't have walked from the Crown Vic in the time allotted, and then I moved forward roughly thirty minutes. With the eliminated tags belonging to locals just milling about, there was only one possible hit.
“Bingo!” I said. The only movement within the “human pace” circles were eight frames of a person of the correct height to be Gaines—calculating from the length of the shadow—moving roughly from the parked car toward a series of long, covered buildings at the south end of the fairgrounds. I ticked it forward a few more minutes and saw an older model, white and red short-bodied SUV—probably a Blazer or a Bronco—leaving the covered building he had been headed for. I tagged the SUV as our primary target.
I rolled it forward another hour and saw only a livestock trailer truck and a delivery truck pull up and then leave almost immediately.
“Okay. It looks like he switched to an older-model, short-body SUV. Red and white,” I said.
“Where is he headed?” John asked.
I moved the time slider all the way out to the image package end.
Uh oh, I thought.“40 West. He’s not going to Vegas.”
“Shit!” John exclaimed and whipped the SUV onto the inside shoulder and through the median. Once we were headed the opposite direction, he floored the gas.
“We’re behind him again—fuck, fuck, FUCK!” he said, pounding the steering wheel with each utterance.
We took Interstate 15 headed southwest. With the head start he had on us, there was no way we would intercept him. The best we could hope for was to get close to him as he got to Barstow. We’d still be almost an hour behind him, even at this speed.
John pulled out his phone and dialed. “I’m going to need a fresh image package at Barstow in two hours. I’ll call again when I’m coming onto the base so they can run it then.”
The person on the other end of the phone said something he didn’t like. A frustrated look spread across his tired features.
“Yes, sir. I understand,” he replied and then hung up.
“This is the last package he can authorize. It’s starting to draw attention,” John relayed.
“Then it won’t do us any good. By the time we get the fresh reel, he’ll be past us and be moving in any direction,” I pointed out.
He paused, and then, with resignation, said, “It’s the best we can do.”
**
12:10 p.m.—Kingman, Arizona
HEINRICH BRAUN had just gotten off the phone with his asset at Homeland Security. The Crown Victoria had gone stationary several hours earlier and they had lost track of Gaines.
Braun knew Gaines wasn’t stopping in Kingman, so he must have changed vehicles here. The delay was costing him precious time, and his mood was turning sourer as the minutes ticked by. If he didn’t locate the man soon, the entire ploy will have been wasted effort, leaving Braun in worse shape than he had been before—and that was something he wasn’t willing to accept. William Spryte was not a man to accept failure.
With the murder of the three men in Colorado Springs, he knew he was now fighting the clock, not only in finding Gaines, but with the added urgency of finding him before law enforcement did. It would be bad enough if Gaines evaded capture and continued his covert investigation—but it would be absolute disaster if the Justice Department got their hands on him and sweated information from him. It threatened the entire Combine operation in the US—possibly globally.
He only prayed Gaines’s status as a flagged ex-Agent was keeping him from using CIA resources. His murder of the three men would certainly not aid his efforts in getting Agency help.
Braun parked on Main Street and went into the local sheriff’s office. He stood at the counter watching a young deputy eat a sandwich and then looked around for any other people—there were none.
“Ahem,” Braun grunted, drawing the deputy’s attention.
The man placed his sandwich down and walked over to the counter, wiping his hands and mouth on a paper napkin as he stopped in front of Braun.
“Yes, sir,” the deputy said. “How can I help you?”
Braun could smell horseradish from the opposite side of the counter. As unpleasant as it was, it reminded him he hadn’t eaten since the previous evening.
“I was wondering if there were any vehicles reported stolen this morning,” Braun said with a thin smile.
Braun wasn’t unaware of the distrust some rural populations had for outsiders, especially ones with foreign accents, so he tried to be uncharacteristically diplomatic.
The deputy looked at Braun with suspicion. But thefts would be reported in the local paper anyway, so there was no reason not to disclose the information.
“What's your interest in the theft?” the deputy asked. �
�I know you don't work for the paper.”
“I'm with Great Western Insurance,” Braun lied. “There's been a rash of stolen vehicles in the state, and we are trying to create a data model of the pattern. Today the computer predicted they'd show up within a twenty-mile radius of Kingman.”
The deputy glared at him, still suspicious.
“It's alright if you aren't able to give me the data,” Braun continued. “We'll get the reports from the insurance companies. But if they are in the area, we might be able to put a stop to it before any more vehicles are stolen—if we get the information in a timely fashion.”
Appealing to the deputy's sense of preemptive law enforcement was enough to push him over the edge.
“Some time this morning, a ’92 Ford Bronco was stolen from the fairgrounds,” he said, looking at his notes from the call earlier in the day. “Two-tone, red and white.”
“Do you have any idea when it was stolen?” Braun asked.
The deputy looked at Braun through slitted eyes. “Some time this morning,” he repeated.
Braun swallowed his annoyance and smiled at the man. “Any other reports of theft or disturbance today?”
“Well…” the deputy sneered, leaning on the counter toward Braun. “A few minutes ago, I got a call from Maple Street. Someone’s dog was barking and disturbing the sleep of a second shifter.” His tone indicated that his helpfulness was at an end.
“Thank you, Officer,” Braun replied. “Have a good day.”
“Can I get your name for the log?” the deputy asked as Braun turned to leave.
“Bill Smith,” he lied and then walked out the door before any more questions could be asked.
The deputy walked out and stood in the doorway as Braun got into his car and drove away. He looked into the rearview and saw the man writing down the license plate as he cruised down the street.
It was of no concern. The license plate was registered to a rental company in Colorado Springs and rented to one “Bill Smith”. There wasn’t even a recognizable photo in the file to match him to.
Braun pulled out his map of the western United States and followed with his finger the route he had been traveling. The closest city was Las Vegas, but a cold chill ran down the back of his neck when he saw where Route 40 led.