Knuckles ignored the question, saying, “What’s the Oversight Council saying? Oglethorpe can wear his military hat, but he can be overruled when it comes to Pike.”
Wolffe leaned back in his chair and said, “There is no Oversight Council right now. Everyone’s working their day jobs, with one member—Amanda Croft—obviously not giving any input. The Council is effectively dead.”
“What about the president?”
“I’m not bugging him right now. Trust me, he has his hands full with a multicountry hostage situation and a possible terrorist attack here in Washington, DC. Right now, everyone’s arguing about continuity of government and whether they need to alert the public or evacuate. It’s a shit show.”
“And that’s why Pike sent us up here. Those idiots at the Capitol can’t even decide if they’re going to work tomorrow in a different state, forget about actually stopping the attack. Brett and I are going to need those DHS credentials again.”
“You can’t do anything here. The Taskforce is forbidden from operating CONUS. I told Pike that. It’s the very reason I wanted you to stay with him.”
Brett chuckled and said, “Seems like nobody’s going to know at this point. The Council isn’t even around to ask.”
Wolffe sighed, then said, “Fuck it. Go sign them out. Tell Mike I said it was okay. You got anything to go on?”
Knuckles said, “I’ve got Creed working on a couple of angles, but nothing so far. What’s Israel doing?”
“Who the hell knows. Their prime minister is on a plane next to Amanda. Mossad may be talking to Kerry Bostwick and the CIA, but they sure as shit aren’t talking to me. If I were to guess, they’re as paralyzed as we are.”
“They got the word about the planned attack in ‘Palestine’?”
Wolffe nodded, saying, “We gave them all we had, but they haven’t told us what they’re doing about it, which is fine, because we aren’t keeping them informed about what we’re doing here in DC, mainly because it’s fucking embarrassing.”
Brett said, “What about Pike?”
“Believe it or not, he’s chasing the hostage plane right now in the Rock Star Bird. They’re both still in the air and running out of places to go, but he’s the closest thing we’ve got to a hostage rescue force. Right now, it’s looking like all three attacks are going to succeed.”
Knuckles heard a knock on the doorframe and turned around, seeing Creed holding a laptop.
He said, “Sorry to interrupt, but I think we’ve found the rental car.”
Knuckles stood up and said, “Where?”
“I don’t know where at this moment, but he’s most definitely in DC.”
Wolffe said, “How did you find it?”
Knuckles explained his theory and Creed said, “We started the morning after the last sighting. There were a total of fourteen infractions involving licenses. We eliminated all extraneous ones, like expired registration or plates that were damaged or too dirty to read, and ended up with three. Two of those were local and went nowhere. One was from Arkansas, and that license pinged in DC at multiple places.”
“Show me.”
Creed put the laptop on the table and displayed a selection of four photos, each one matching the rental car description. One was on the 495 loop, one on the George Washington Parkway, one at a light on a road called Michigan Avenue, and one in a parking lot.
Creed said, “As you can see, most of the sightings are of him moving around, so it’s not a lot of help to locate him, but it does prove he’s here, in Washington, DC.”
Wolffe said, “Can we just put the new license in the system, and when one of these scanners pings it, it’ll send out an alert?”
“Unfortunately, no. It doesn’t work that way. They’re like toll road readers. You can see when someone’s been by, if you go look at all the cars thatdid, but it doesn’t actively search. It’s just a passive recording device that goes into a database. We can, of course, put the new license in the system and have a BOLO to every police department in the area.”
Knuckles said, “What’s this one here, at the parking lot?”
“It’s not a hotel, if that’s what you’re thinking. It’s the National Zoo.”
Wolffe said, “The zoo? Why the fuck would he park there? Surely that’s not the target.”
Brett said, “Maybe he’s going to kill the pandas to get us in a war with China.”
Knuckles said, “Only one way to find out. One thing’s for sure—he didn’t do it to kill time. Creed, do you have a laptop that does facial recognition?”
