Manny had extra night-vision gear for the former captives, which let them move at speed through the dense, dark woods.
With Faraday still over Lewis’s shoulders, they made it to the Tahoe without firing a shot. Nobody was waiting for them there. Probably because, while Lewis was hosing down the wooden propane tank enclosure with gasoline, setting it on fire, then putting a few bullet holes in the pressurized tank to light the candle for real, Faraday had gone to the parking lot to shoot out the tires of the vehicles there. The only one he missed was a silver Mercedes he’d spotted in the lane between the cabins, because he didn’t want to start putting holes in buildings where children might be sleeping.
They piled into their ride, Lewis behind the wheel, and roared down the logging road, headlights off. Peter watched behind them but saw no pursuit. At a muddy turnoff, Manny and June helped Faraday limp up the side road. A minute later, the Lexus eased toward them. Carlotta and Ellie left the Tahoe and got into the back seat of theLexus. The group had already decided that Manny would take Carlotta and Ellie to the cabin where Carlotta’s mother had taken their girls, dropping the wounded Faraday at a hospital on the way. Once Faraday’s phone connected to the network, he would reach out to a guy he knew at Homeland. Peter, Lewis, and June would go find Hollis and Vance.
As the Lexus pulled past, Faraday handed June’s work bag, with her laptop and the old maps, out the window to her. “Stay safe, all of you.”
Lewis drove them downhill to the blacktop and headed west toward the city. Once her hot spot lit up again, June turned on the dome light, then opened her laptop and unfolded the paper map of Washington state so Peter could see it from the front seat. “Okay, here’s what I know.” She pointed to the row of numbers written in the margins. “This first number is the digital GPS coordinate for the electrical substation outside the Chief Joseph Dam. That’s here.” She tapped her finger on a cluster of hieroglyphics, then swept her hand across the others. “My guess is, each of these is some kind of power plant. I haven’t run the searches yet.”
Now she ran her finger along Geoffrey Reed’s ruler-straight lines stretching from the power plants toward Spokane and the coastal cities. “These must be the high-voltage lines that connect everything. This whole thing is a schematic of the grid in Washington state.” She handed the map forward to Peter. “These, too. All of them.”
With this crucial insight, Peter spread the map on his lap and looked again at the little symbols, the stick figures and picket fences, the various colored circles and squares marked with dots or lines. He was no engineer, but he’d wired plenty of houses with his dad, and he knew what an electrical diagram looked like. Grid systems were infinitely more complicated than basic home wiring, but the principles were the same. “These circles and squares must be switches and circuit breakers. Reed was marking which ones need to be open and whichones shut. Or something like that. Whatever they mean, this map is his plan of attack.”
Lewis said, “If they can do it remotely, what the hell are they doing with those drones?”
“I have no idea.” Then Peter explained his theory about the armor-piercing rounds. “A hack can eventually get unhacked. But if the grid is down and they shoot out enough transformers, the power will be out for years, maybe decades.”
Lewis leaned in to peer at the map. “So outta these ten, which ones are they gonna hit?”
“With the Messenger’s ego, he’ll pick something big,” Peter said.
“I’ll plug in the rest of the coordinates,” June said. “Read them to me?”
Peter read them out one by one. She typed each number into her mapping app and checked satellite view. “The substation for the John Day Dam. The substation for the Grand Coulee Dam. The Columbia substation. The Bonneville Dam substation.”
“Grand Coulee,” Peter said, finding it on the old paper map. “That’s the biggest generator in the state, right?”
June checked Wikipedia. “Almost as big as all the rest combined. It supplies power to eight states plus parts of Canada.”
“That’s where they’re going. A system failure there will have huge consequences down the line.”
“What about Columbia,” she asked. “That’s a nuclear plant.”
“For that reason, it’ll be extremely well guarded. Anyway, they’re after the substations, not the plants.” Peter looked at the symbols again. “The little picket fences, the stick figures. That’s substation security. See here, the Columbia substation has three fences and four little people. The Grand Coulee has a single fence and no people. No guards.”
“Okay.” June leaned forward between the front seats. “Are we good? We have a plan?”
Lewis kept his eyes on the road. “Let’s go get those motherfuckers. Are we going west or east into the mountains?”
“Lend me your phone and give me the coordinates,” Peter said. “I’ll get us where we need to go.”
June said, “They’ve got an hour’s head start. Before we do anything, I think we should call your friend Kitzinger, tell her what we’ve found.”
He dug Detective Kitzinger’s number out of his memory. This time she picked up. She didn’t sound happy to hear from him.
“It’s one in the morning, Ash. Where the holy hell have you been? You dump all this information on me in a voicemail and then vanish?”
“Did you look into any of it?”
Her voice was indignant. “Of course I did. Not only is it my job, but Captain Durant hadn’t shared any of it. In fact, he told me and O’Donnell if we talked to you or your journalist friend, or if we strayed from the existing avenues of investigation, he’d suspend us for insubordination. Nothing makes a cop more suspicious than telling her not to follow the evidence. Now where are you?”
Using as few words as possible, Peter told her about the abduction, handing himself over to Durant, and the raid at the compound. Then he told her about the maps and the GPS coordinates. She listened silently. He heard the scratch of her pen as she made notes.
“Durant was stalling, trying to wait out the clock,” she said.
“That’s my guess,” Peter said. “Here’s the upshot. We think they’re going to take down one or more electrical substations. Geoffrey Reed built a couple of big drones, and that’s how they’re somehow going to set things off. We also think Reed hacked the various grid systems to set up some kind of cascading failure.” He looked at June. “What am I forgetting?”
She said, “Does the Seattle PD have contacts at the big power companies? I’m guessing their software is compromised. Also, your forensics guys have Reed’s laptop. If he’s got any code on there, orpasswords to any kind of code repository, somebody should take a hard look.”
