“Yeah, but these guys aren’t going to leave everything out in the open for the satellites to see,” Quinn commented.
“You never know.” Vanessa sat up a little taller in her seat and tapped the photos she held. “They’re going to assume that we don’t know where to look with the satellites.”
Tristan chimed in now. “If we aren’t finding anything, we may need to get those satellites retasked to show us some other areas.”
“Retasking satellites isn’t exactly an easy feat,” Brent reminded him.
“No, but if it will help us stop another 9/11-type of attack, we’ll need to do it,” Vanessa said. “Ellison will take care of that for us, but we can’t be sure that the analysts will have time to find what we’re looking for.”
“Then how do we find the Z-10s?” Quinn asked.
“If we find the leak, we find a source,” Vanessa replied.
“One of our spy planes is also supposed to do some flyovers to see if they can spot anything,” Brent told them. “But I agree with Vanessa. The quickest way to find what we’re looking for may be to find the leak. If it really is someone in Arizona, you can be sure they’re going to be leaving town before the strike.”
“If they haven’t left already,” Seth said as the plane’s engines started up.
Seth sat down next to Vanessa and looked over at her. Her focus was still on the photos she held, her brow furrowed in concentration. His heart did one slow roll in his chest, and warmth washed over him. He was amazed that after carrying around the hurt Vanessa had caused him for so many years, somehow over the past few days he had let it go.
He still didn’t know how they could possibly carve out a future together knowing the demands of their careers, but surely if their love could survive a six-year separation, just maybe they would be able to work something out—assuming they lived through this.
Determined to talk some sense into her about her decision to come to Arizona, Seth bided his time. He waited until they lifted off and he saw Quinn slip on the earphones of his iPod. Beside Quinn, Tristan leaned back in his seat to take a nap.
Seth waited a few more minutes before shifting to face Vanessa more fully. Then he said simply, “Twenty-four hours.”
“What?” Vanessa looked up from the photos she had been studying, her eyebrows drawing together.
“I want you to promise me that after we give you twenty-four hours to meet the critical personnel in Arizona that you will take a transport back to Washington.”
“Seth—”
“Vanessa, I’m worried about you.” He laid his hand over hers. “And I’m afraid that my concern for you will distract me from what I need to do if this situation turns ugly.”
“Seth, it isn’t fair to ask me to leave,” Vanessa said. She looked at Tristan and Quinn sitting in front of them and lowered her voice. “I finally have you back in my life, and now you want me to leave you behind and pray that you’ll come out of it alive?”
Seth looked at her incredulously. “You would rather be there and pray that both of us come out of this alive?”
One shoulder lifted. “If something happens, I don’t want to wonder if I could have made a difference.” She shook her head now as though gathering her thoughts. “I’ve invested over a year of my life to make sure that Ramir doesn’t succeed in attacking the United States, especially on our soil. I can’t turn back now.”
“If we can identify the mole, then will you leave?”
“I can’t give you any guarantees.” She gave his hand a squeeze. “But I’ll consider it.”
Seth let out a sigh. “You know, you always have been a pain.”
“Yeah.” Vanessa nodded and then grinned at him. “I thought you used to love that about me.”
“That was before you started playing spy,” Seth said dryly. “You’d better take a nap while you can. Once we get to Fort Huachuca we’ll be running nonstop until this crisis is over.”
* * *
The moment the door burst open and their escort shouted, “Uncleared!” to the room full of cubicles, the flurry of activity started. Vanessa understood that flurry of activity. She was perfectly aware that the dozen or so employees in the room were busily covering up all of their secret documents to make sure that she, Seth, and Brent didn’t get a look at what they were up to.
She figured she didn’t need to see what they were covering up. She needed to see their faces. Quickly, her eyes scanned the room. Then she took a more thorough look at the occupants.
The first cubicle was occupied by a young administrative type. She turned over two pieces of paper and then looked up with curiosity to see who had come to visit. Her eyes then stayed glued to the men, lingering on Seth a bit too long for Vanessa’s taste.
The older woman at the next desk scooped a stack of papers into a file and looked up at them with impatience. Her body language said that she was on a deadline and that the unexpected visitors were going to put her behind schedule. The man beside her had the opposite reaction. He seemed completely unaffected by the interruption. Vanessa guessed that if anything, he welcomed the excuse to take a break.
One of the employees that occupied a cubicle on the far wall simply covered up his classified documents and then proceeded to go about his business. The man at the next cubicle stood, walked to the desk next to his, and began talking in hushed tones to the woman sitting there.
As Vanessa looked at the other members of this task force, she was somewhat annoyed that she didn’t see any obvious problems. A man rushed out of the single hard-walled office in the area, his face flushed with annoyance.
“Who are you?” he demanded.
“You must be Drew Bauer.” Brent extended his hand. “I’m Lieutenant Miller. This is Lieutenant Johnson and Vanessa Lauton. We need a few minutes of your time.”
“I’m afraid I don’t have a lot of time right now.” He didn’t ask why they were there. Rather he motioned to the young woman beside him. “If you want, you can make an appointment for next week.”
“That will be too late.” Brent’s eyes met his and held. “We need to meet with you now.”
The man let out a frustrated sigh and then looked at the escort with them. “Who told you to bring them in here?”
“Senator Whitmore.”
Another sigh. “Give me a minute.” He turned and walked into his office. A few minutes later he opened the door once more and motioned for them to come inside. “Exactly what do you need?”
“We need to find out who leaked the information about this surveillance system of yours.”
“What?” Bauer looked at them, stunned. He sat down in the chair behind his streamlined desk and motioned for them to take a seat as well, even though there were only two chairs opposite of his desk. Vanessa and Brent both sat with Seth taking up position behind Vanessa. Bauer shook his head skeptically, and his voice was demanding as he continued. “What makes you think there’s a leak? This information has been well controlled since this system was conceived.”
“We’ve seen that, but the fact remains that at least one terrorist group is aware of both this system of yours and the date it is supposed to become operational.”
“That’s impossible.” He shook his head. “Half of the people out in that room don’t even know when we’re going operational.”
“We need to know which half,” Brent told him. “Do you know who outside of your office would have this information?”
“Not many.” He shook his head, then jotted down a list of names and handed it to Brent. “Besides five of us in my office, Hank Rodriguez with the border patrol would know, along with my commanding officer, Adam Garrison, and the Senate Intelligence Committee. I don’t know if anyone else in the senate has this information or not.”
“I doubt it, but we’ll find out,” Brent told him. “And I already have two of my men going to meet with Hank Rodriguez.”
“What about your intelligence oversight committee?” Vanessa asked Bauer. “Surely someone
at the CIA or Drug Enforcement Agency must have this information.”
“General Garrison was very specific that he wanted the operational date strictly controlled.” Bauer shook his head. “You can see why I’m having a hard time seeing how this information could have gotten out.”
Vanessa considered for a moment. “Is anyone in your office on leave right now, or planning to take leave soon?”
“No. Even though only a few people know when we’re becoming operational, everyone has been involved in the testing phase, so no one is allowed to take leave right now. The restriction on leave won’t be lifted for another three weeks.”
“It sounds like you’ve done everything right, but the fact remains that a leak exists somewhere,” Brent said. “We’ll need to talk to these employees.”
Bauer stood up and pulled open the top drawer of a two-drawer safe. He picked up two files on his desk and put them into the drawer, closed it, and then spun the dial. “You can use my office, but I want to sit in on the interviews.”
“That’s fine.” Brent nodded. “If you’ll call the first person in, we’ll get started.”
31
Tristan approached the thin older man who had just walked out of the border patrol office in Tucson. He appeared to be about sixty and looked like he’d spent the better part of those sixty years outdoors. “Excuse me, but could you tell me where I can find Hank Rodriguez?”
“You found him. I’m Hank.” He looked from Tristan to Quinn and then back to Tristan again. “What can I do for you?”
“I’m Tristan Crowther. This is Quinn Lambert. We need a few minutes of your time,” Tristan said in his typical relaxed tone.
Hank looked over their uniforms and asked, “What are a couple of sailors doing in the middle of the desert?”
“We came across some information we need to talk to you about.”
“I need to take a ride down to the checkpoint on I-19. You’re welcome to tag along if you’ve got an hour to spare.”
“That’ll work.” Tristan nodded, ignoring Quinn’s impatience. They both knew that time was short, but they needed whatever information this man could give them. They followed Hank to a government car and proceeded to get in, with Tristan claiming the front seat.
Hank slid behind the wheel and pulled out of the parking lot. As soon as he pulled into traffic he glanced over at Tristan. “So what’s on your mind?”
“How much do you know about the new surveillance system that’s coming online here in Arizona?”
Hank didn’t so much as flinch at the question. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Would you know what we were talking about if I mentioned that Senator Whitmore sent us out to see you?”
“Jim Whitmore sent you, huh?” Hank seemed to consider this information for a moment. He shrugged a shoulder and gave a little nod. “Then you know that all of this is pretty high-tech stuff. And as Jim says, it’s strictly need-to-know.”
“He gave us that line too, sir,” Quinn chimed in from the back seat.
“Can you tell us who in your office falls into the ‘need-to-know’ category?”
“Just me and my deputy, Gordon McAllister.”
“We’d like to talk to Mr. McAllister, too, then,” Tristan told him.
“That’ll be easy enough to do. He’s the one running the checkpoint right now,” Hank informed them. “Now, how about telling me what this is all about?”
“I assume you’ve heard of Morenta.”
“Yeah. Everyone in my office knows about him.” Hank nodded as he merged onto the highway. “Fact is, we think over half the drugs that cross our state line come through him.”
“That would make sense since we think he may be planning a terrorist attack to prevent this new surveillance system from becoming operational.”
“I don’t know where you’re getting your information, but Morenta isn’t a terrorist,” Hank told them, clearly not concerned. “He’s interested in profit, plain and simple.”
“And his profit is going to be dwindling quickly if his distribution lines are cut,” Tristan reminded him.
“That’s true, but I don’t know how he would have learned about the surveillance system.” Hank paused for a moment and seemed to reconsider. “But if he did know about it, that would make sense why we’ve been seeing more activity on our borders the past few weeks.”
“What kind of activity?”
“We’ve had rumors of new camps of illegal immigrants springing up here in Arizona, but we’re having a tough time tracking them down.”
Quinn spoke now. “Is that why you have this checkpoint set up? Because of the rumors?”
Hank nodded. “We can find evidence of people crossing the border, but we can’t track them down. It doesn’t make sense that this many people can simply come into this country and vanish into thin air.”
“How many people are we talking about?”
“From what we’ve seen, at least a hundred on foot in the past week alone. For that many to get through undetected, they had to have some help.”
“What kind of help?”
“Someone had to be providing both transportation to get them past us as well as someplace for these people to stay when they arrived. The only good thing is that when we expanded our search further north, we scored a major drug bust when we found an airstrip northeast of Phoenix, where Morenta was flying in drugs.” Hank glanced over at Tristan and shook his head once more. “But like I said, Morenta’s only interested in profit. He’s not a terrorist.”
“We think he has some help with the terrorist side of things,” Tristan admitted.
Hank glanced over at Tristan for a moment before turning his eyes back to the road. “You’re serious.”
“Yes, sir.”
“What do you need me to do? Do you even know what the target is?”
“We’ve got some ideas,” Quinn said cryptically.
Tristan skillfully redirected the conversation. “Tell us about your deputy.”
“Gordon’s a good man. He’s been with this office for about three years now. Came over from the San Diego office.”
“Does he have family around here?”
“He’s married, but they don’t have any kids yet.” Hank pulled over to the shoulder as they approached the checkpoint. As soon as he put the car in park, he shifted to face Tristan. “I’ve got a lot of family around these parts. If there’s something I can do to help you boys, you let me know.”
“Thank you, sir.” Tristan nodded. “For now, we’d like to meet your deputy.”
“Wait here, and I’ll send him over.” Hank got out of the car and approached two uniformed border patrol agents. As Tristan and Quinn got out of the car, Hank spoke to one of the agents, who looked to be around thirty, and motioned to where Tristan and Quinn were standing.
The man approached them, a quizzical look on his face. “Can I help you?”
“That depends,” Quinn responded, his eyes sizing up the man in front of him. “What can you tell us about Morenta?”
“You came all the way out here to ask about Morenta?” He looked from Quinn to Tristan. “Anyone at the office could have told you that he’s responsible for running drugs across our borders. He’s been a thorn in our side since long before I got here.”
“What about Akil Ramir?” Tristan asked now. “What do you know about him?”
“Who?”
“Akil Ramir. Arms dealer.”
Gordon shook his head. “Sorry. That one’s new to me. If he’s been smuggling guns into Arizona, he must be pretty good to have escaped our notice so far.”
Tristan nodded and shook Gordon’s hand. “Well, thank you for your time.”
Looking a bit confused, he nodded. “No problem.”
As soon as Gordon was out of earshot, Tristan turned to Quinn. “What do you think?”
“I don’t know. Both of them were willing to talk to us, and neither one of them seemed to be hiding anything.”
Quinn nodded in agreement. “Let’s hope Brent and Seth are having more luck.”
* * *
“Any luck with getting those satellites retasked?” Amy asked Rick Ellison when he walked into her temporary office.
“Yeah. It took some doing, but we’ve got the analysts concentrating on northern Mexico to see if we can find those helicopters,” Ellison told her. “Have you heard anything from your team?”
“I’ve got the list of everyone we know of who had access to the operational date. Your finance people helped me research them, but we haven’t found anything irregular. No large cash deposits, no unusual credit card activity. There isn’t anything that would indicate that one of them is on Ramir’s payroll.”
“Then we need to expand our search to the other members of the surveillance task force. One of them might have managed to get the operational date even though they weren’t supposed to.”
“Already on it.” Amy nodded. “Hopefully we’ll have that analysis done within another hour or two.”
“We only have another thirty-six hours, give or take.”
“I know.” Amy sighed wearily. “We’re running out of time.”
* * *
“We’re running out of time.” Quinn paced across the conference room the base commander had given them to meet in. Brent and Vanessa had both stopped to make phone calls on their way in, and Quinn’s impatience to get started was growing more obvious as each minute passed. “If we haven’t found the leak here, we’re never going to find it in time. Besides, it’s probably someone in Washington anyway.”
“He’s right. It’s time we take a more defensive posture,” Tristan agreed.
“I’m way ahead of you.” Seth took the mission plan he had been working on and spread it out on the table. He still had to clear it through Brent and the higher-ups, but he hoped this plan would accomplish his two main goals: successfully defending the United States against the impending terrorist attack and getting Vanessa away from the danger zone.
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