* * *
The container truck was at the rear of a warehouse lot, parked near a fence that ran along a road. Lia got out of the car two blocks away and began trotting toward a cluster of small industrial buildings that lay between her and the target.
“We’re about three minutes away from getting the overhead view online,” Rockman said in her ear. “The U-2 is still covering the cargo container park.”
“It’s all right,” Lia told him.
Lia slowed her pace as she reached the buildings. A group of women waiting to start work were standing nearby, gossiping; they glanced at her as she walked toward the back of the building. Lia had a pistol under her jacket, but if challenged she would just back off; the container wasn’t going anywhere and there was no sense upsetting the locals, at least not yet.
A chain-link fence separated the warehouse lot from the yard behind the buildings. Cars were parked close to the fence, blocking her view.
“I’m going over the fence,” she told Rockman.
“Wait until Tommy makes his pass.”
“You sure this is the right truck?”
“No,” said Rockman. “We’re guessing, but it’s a good guess. We think someone was bribed to change the registration numbers around when the container was loaded. The shipment in this truck matches the cargo that was found in the trailer back in the lot. Paper. Here comes Tommy,” added Rockman.
Lia heard Karr “yee-hah” over the communications system. Karr was always a pill, but he was insufferable when working with anyone from the CIA.
Not that he was actually taking things lightly — he had placed a sawed-off shotgun on his lap as he dropped Lia off and had a flash-bang grenade in the armrest in case he had to divert attention and make a quick getaway. But she was sure the poor liaison in the backseat thought he’d hooked up with the teenage son of Genghis Khan.
“Clear,” said Rockman. “Go.”
Lia took a quick glance behind her, then jumped up on the fence. As she reached the top, she saw that the container sat all alone — and that its rear door was ajar.
Not a good sign.
“Señorita?” called someone behind her.
The voice sounded more inquisitive than hostile, so Lia didn’t bother to turn around. Instead, she continued over the top and dropped to the ground on the other side. An older man stood near the side of the building watching her, literally scratching his head.
By the time Lia reached the truck, Karr and their CIA sidekick had circled around and parked their car on the side of the road twenty yards from the container.
“Door’s not locked,” Lia told Karr, who was standing near the fence, shotgun pressed against his jacket.
“Watch out for booby traps.”
“Yeah. Rad detector’s quiet.”
“It would be if it were a bomb, unless you’re right in its face,” said Karr. “You have to get real close. Check the door first.”
“Yeah.”
“Watch for booby traps.”
“You’re getting as bad as Rockman.”
By the time she was sure it was clean, Karr and their CIA sidekick were standing on the ground behind her.
“Nothing,” she said.
“Get back,” Karr told her, taking hold of the long pipe that worked the external door latches.
“I’ll do it.”
“No, no. You stand back,” he said. He waited a second — probably just long enough to see that she wouldn’t move — then threw the door open, ducking around as he did, as if he expected an explosion.
“Empty,” said Jason, standing with his hands on his hips.
Lia climbed into the interior. A few pieces of wood lay scattered on the floor. One was stamped with black letters; half of the word was cut off, but she thought it read baño—bath.
“That would make sense,” said Karr. “Because that factory over there makes bathtubs.”
117
If it had been November rather than early June, Dean would have bagged the biggest buck of his life, a magnificent animal with a rack wider than a limo. Even now, with some months’ worth of growth left, his horns made a magnificent crown at the top of his head.
Dean stared at the animal through his binoculars, no more than fifty yards away, mesmerized by the deer’s haughty stare through the morning mist. Clearly, the buck knew he was here, and yet the beast didn’t seem to care, so assured it was in the wild of the upper Delaware River Valley. It lowered its head slightly, then raised it back upright — a challenge, Dean thought, or perhaps an acknowledgment, before it turned and slowly trotted away.
“Even if it had been hunting season,” Dean told the deer as it left, “I might have let you go.”
He let the binoculars fall to his chest and walked back to the streambed, swollen with the recent rains. He’d come here to clear his head, and he had. What he hadn’t done was replace the clutter with a specific plan on what to do.
He longed for Lia — he could feel the familiar ache in his chest — but where exactly she would fit in his future, he didn’t know. As for everything else, including what he would do for work, all of that would have to wait. For now, he was simply experiencing what was around him.
Something rustled in the bushes ahead. Dean stopped. Before he could raise the binoculars to examine the area, a chipmunk darted out and ran across the gnarled roots of a nearby tree and disappeared. From the noise it had made, he expected something closer to a mountain lion, and he laughed when he realized the tiny rodent was all that was there.
A humbling experience, the woods.
118
The CIA, the NSA, and the Department of Homeland Security had all prepared computer projections on how far a truck could have traveled from Manzanillo in the roughly thirty-six hours since the ship had docked. While the projections differed around the margins, they all agreed on one thing: it was possible that the truck had already crossed the border into the U.S.
“But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t close the border right now,” said Griffin Bolso, the FBI director, as representatives of the agencies involved in the crisis met via videoconference Thursday to update one another and the national security adviser. “We should close it immediately.”
“Closing the border is not going to accomplish much more than we’re doing now,” said Cynthia Marshall, representing Homeland Security. “We’re searching every truck that comes across the border, and traffic is already snarled beyond belief. If we close everything completely, we have to say why.”
“We’ve already said we’re looking for a bomb,” suggested Bolso. “I don’t see why we need to say anything else.”
“The president has reserved to himself the decision on what information to release,” said Hadash, who was chairing the meeting. “Bill, do you have better information on the possible truck?”
“I’m afraid we don’t. At least a dozen vehicles were rented and picked up that day, and two were stolen as well. They’re all tractor-trailer types,” said Rubens. “We think there’s a possibility that someone was hired to help, and the CIA is talking to day laborers in the area.”
“Yes, we are,” said Debra Collins smugly, as if no one else had the right to mention what her people were doing.
Besides the descriptions of the size of the crate and the type of vehicle, the border patrol and police agencies in the area had been given computer-generated images and artist renditions of Babin. It was not known, however, if Babin was with the truck — he had been in Lima while it was in transit and then in Ecuador before it docked. But there was no proof that he had hooked up with whatever accomplices or helpers were transporting it.
“The thing we have to remember,” said Collins, “is that there’s no evidence the bomb is actually coming to the U.S.”
“Where else would Sholk go?” said Rubens. “He wants to pay us back for betraying him. Or rather, pay the CIA back.”
Ordinarily, Rubens hated using the videoconferencing system, but in this case he thought the ca
mera caught her perfectly — her face drawn, her eyes shifting back and forth.
“He’s a businessman, not a psycho,” she said. “He’d try to sell the weapon.”
Resistant to the bitter end, thought Rubens. But at least she was no longer trying to discount the possibility that Babin was alive.
“I’m not saying we shouldn’t be searching,” insisted Collins, softening her tone as she continued. “We have to conduct the largest possible search. I don’t want to be blindsided elsewhere, that’s all.”
“The question I have is how soon to extend the warning beyond the border states,” said Bolso. “And in what degree of detail. Telling these people we’re looking for something the size of a bathtub is just not enough.”
The discussion focused on the allocation of resources to check the highway system in the Southwest U.S. Searching Peru had proved a daunting task. Now the task was even greater. There were hundreds of thousands of trucks in the targeted zone, and every hour the zone’s radius increased by fifty miles. Army troops had been moved in to help patrol the Texas and New Mexico border areas, with aerial reconnaissance being conducted by Air Force, Army, and Coast Guard units. Homeland Security had taken charge of a new task group coordinating the search in the U.S.; the military’s Southern Command was coordinating search efforts in Mexico. General Spielmorph’s group was still in Peru, but some of his resources were being shifted north.
Rubens tapped the key controlling the different available feeds on the conference system, putting Collins on the small screen to his left.
She seemed to be staring directly at him, with all the venom of a cobra disturbed in its den.
If she takes Hadash’s job, I’ll resign, he thought.
Wouldn’t it be better, then, to take it himself?
“All right, thank you, everyone,” said Hadash. “The president wants updates on the hour. We’ll reconvene at ten o’clock, sooner if necessary.”
119
“What do you think the possibility is this has all been a bad dream?”
Lia looked across the aisle of the Air Force 737 that was ferrying her and Karr back to the Washington, D.C., area. He had contorted his huge frame between the seats in an effort to get comfortable.
“I don’t think it was a dream,” she told him.
“A nightmare?”
“No.”
“But it could all be a wild-goose chase,” said Karr. “We’ve been on them before.”
“You mean, what do I think the odds are that there’s no nuclear warhead?”
“Yeah. Look at it this way. Babin or whoever he hired to get the bomb could have been at the border twenty-four hours ago.”
“If he drove like you. And flew over the mountains and desert.”
“If he drove like me. Right. Now, twenty-four hours from the border — he could be just out to D.C.”
“Or he could still be in Mexico, which is the CIA theory,” said Lia.
“Yeah, but they’re always wrong. Good job, by the way.”
“What?”
“With the election cards. And the neo-Marxist wackos in the jungle. That’s all gonna get lost, you know. We’re not going to get any attaboys for it.”
“We don’t need any attaboys.”
“Speak for yourself, Princess,” said Karr, shifting his legs against the seat backs. “I need all the attaboys I can get. And steaks.”
120
Rubens bent over the console at one of the stations at the rear of the Art Room, watching the screen of an analyst who was monitoring and assisting police activity in Texas. He had a feed from a Customs Service aircraft, supplying an overhead view as an emergency response team of FBI and border patrol agents surrounded a tractor trailer south of Houston.
A series of links with Homeland Security gave the Art Room access to police networks as well as the FBI. The Texas Highway Patrol had found a truck with Mexican plates apparently abandoned at the edge of an auto wrecking yard. The plates were not on the watch list the Art Room had developed, but otherwise the truck looked very much like what they were looking for.
“No audio?” said Rubens.
“They’re using standard radios,” said the analyst. “We can get to the commander through the Homeland Security line and vice versa, but we don’t have real-time communications with the people on the scene.”
Rubens watched as the emergency response team — essentially a SWAT squad — cautiously approached the truck. Rather than risking a booby-trapped door, they climbed to the top, where they began cutting a hole to get in.
What if he was wrong? What if the warhead didn’t exist or was back in Peru? Babin certainly could be there, hiding somewhere in the Amazon with Túcume.
That mistake Rubens could live with. Far worse was a mistake that led to the destruction of an American city.
“Won’t be long now,” said the analyst.
“You have a list of stolen vehicles from this area?”
“As soon as the alert came in, I got it. I went all the way back to the border, tracing the route. There are only a dozen.”
“Only a dozen?”
“Not many people steal trucks, I guess.”
“Expand the search to include any sort of vehicle, anything large enough to hold a crated weapon. Sixty-six inches,” added Rubens. “Approximately.”
* * *
“Are you praying?” asked Johnny Bib.
“Uh, just stretching my back,” said Robert Gallo, twisting up from the floor. Though perhaps prayer would not have been inappropriate — he was having a very hard time nailing down any sort of indication that the container truck had made it into the U.S., let alone where it was going.
“Nothing in the state databases that you can use to find what sort of truck it is?” asked Johnny Bib, coming over to look.
“The states don’t keep very close tabs of trucks,” said Gallo. “I’ve, like, checked through the lists of, you know, road stops and stuff, those weigh-in things. Looked for mismatches and stuff. But nothing jumps out. This kind of isn’t my thing, you know? Searches? And like, what would I check? Vehicles most unlikely to be stopped?”
“I hope that’s not going to become your slogan,” said Johnny Bib. “Defeat.”
“It’s not defeat.”
Johnny began to shake his head back and forth without saying anything. He looked like a kid’s wind-up toy gone berserk.
“What if I looked for the target rather than the truck?” said Gallo. “What I was thinking was, check everything we have related to Babin, right? And then see if there are any links. Jeez, Johnny, could you stop? You’re giving me vertigo.”
“Exactly,” said his supervisor, without explanation. And he turned and walked from the room.
Puzzled, Gallo returned to his computer. He began another set of searches, this time a keyword search of NSA South American intercepts over the past week using “Stephan” rather than “Babin” as a keyword. Not surprisingly, he got about ten thousand hits.
He was about to run a Dredge search on the hits when he noticed that one of the entries on the last page had a name very similar to Babin — Baben. He looked and confirmed that it was simply a misspelling by the computerized transcription programs, which often relied on phonetic spellings and best choices if the intercept data was unclear.
The search system was programmed to find near misses in spelling. But did that tool apply when you were searching in foreign character sets?
Or rather, had the tool been in place three years before when the Babin intercepts were being compiled in Russian and the Cyrillic alphabet was being used?
As a matter of fact, it had. But to keep the tool from matching every possible word, Gallo realized as he played with it, it assumed that the first two letters were phonetically correct. So if “Ba” Б (the sound that began “baby”) was entered incorrectly as “Ba” (the sound, in Russian, that began “vacation”), the tool rejected the string as a match. That made sense in most cases, but in this particular instanc
e, a human operator who was a native English speaker could easily choose “B” by mistake rather than “E” and the error would not be picked up.
“This isn’t my thing,” mumbled Gallo as he retrieved a list of old databases to apply the new search term to.
121
Rubens stared at the map on his computer screen, showing the area Babin could have reached by now. The purple swatch covered almost three-fourths of the country, with the tip just reaching toward the Beltway below Washington, D.C.
The truck in Texas appeared to have been the one Babin had taken from Mexico. The rear compartment had contained bathtubs — and the bumper had traces of blood. But that was all that had been found. How long the truck had been in the lot, where the blood had come from, what had happened to the bomb, assuming it had been there… no one knew.
All sorts of other leads were being investigated in Mexico as well as the U.S., including the murder of a truck driver near Mexico City and another closer to the border. But real information — the sort that would help them find Babin and the bomb — remained elusive.
At Montblanc’s suggestion, several psychologists had been consulted about the situation; all thought it likely that Babin would try to seek revenge against the people who had wronged him. This seemed rather obvious to Rubens as well.
The warhead’s arming mechanism had to be altered for it to explode. Babin had an engineering background and knew explosives; he was probably capable of doing the work.
But where? And when?
On this the psychologists divided. Washington, D.C., was an obvious target. So was Langley, Virginia, the home of the CIA. Beyond that, it was very possible that any city might do.
And when? Right away, said a narrow majority of the psychologists. He’d been waiting for years and now had his chance. At his own leisure, said the others. He’d been waiting for years and could afford to wait for weeks or months or even far longer.
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