Jennifer said, “Once it’s talking, it’s like any other cell phone, correct?”
“Essentially, yeah.”
“So if you gave us the city block, couldn’t we use Growlers to locate it?”
I thought,Well, of course we could. Why didn’t I think of that?Actually, since it was right in Creed’s wheelhouse, he should have thought of it before he even turned on his laptop. The Growler was a small piece of kit that acted like a cell tower, tricking phones into connecting to it as the “strongest” signal and thereby trapping the handset and allowing us to refine its location. It would suck in every phone in the area for a split second, then kick all of them out back to the real cellular infrastructure, only stopping when it hit the one it was looking for. It was a disturbance in the cellular force, as it were, and would cause some dropped calls, but it was effective.
I said, “That would work, wouldn’t it?”
Creed looked a little embarrassed. He said, “Well, yes, it would. I was going to mention it, but you have to be pretty close for that to work. The Growler is a dismounted tracking device. It won’t work citywide.”
Jennifer said, “What about the Rock Star Bird? It’s got one built in, and we could range a lot more than a city block.”
I shut that down right away, saying, “We can’t get air clearance to have the Rock Star Bird punching holes in the sky above Buenos Aires for half a day. We’d have to lay that groundwork beforehand about a maintenance flight or something.”
I returned to the screen and said, “But a ground-based system will be able to lock on within a city block, right?”
“Yes, it will. Do you want me to do it?”
I thought about the risks and rewards. We only had another twenty-four hours until the Israeli prime minister and the secretary of state arrived, so I was pretty much out of options, short of hoping to spot the van on our dinner run tonight. I looked at Jennifer and said, “What do you think?”
She said, “I think it’s worth it. It’s a fifty-fifty chance that it’ll even alert in the vehicle, and we don’t even know if they’ll notice.”
I turned back around and said, “Go ahead and do it. We’re standing by. Get George Wolffe in there while you’re working. I need to talk to him.”
He left the screen and I said to Jennifer, “Give the team a warning order. Search teams will be you with Aaron and me with Shoshana. They know everyone who went to the mosque in Brazil on sight, and can confirm the target. Knuckles is in charge of the assault element, same as he was at the hotel. I want him ready to roll as soon as I call, either to the van or to whatever we find when we get to the van.”
She left the room in a hurry, and I heard someone speak from the computer. I saw Wolffe on camera and said, “We’re going to try something tricky here. I just wanted you to be aware.”
I gave him a rundown of everything we’d just discussed and when I was done, he nodded and said, “Sounds like a solid plan. Let me know what you find.”
Which is why I loved him. Anybody else would have wanted to put a beacon up my ass and a UAV overhead before beginning to execute, but he acted like I’d just described my plan for making dinner and was just going to wait to eat when it was ready.
I said, “Thanks, sir, but there’s something else.”
I saw him exhale and he said, “There always is with you. What is it, you might have to blow up a police station to get to them?”
“No, no, not here. I was just talking to Creed about that other spike. The one in the United States. He tells me he tracked the vehicle to Nashville, but then it disappeared again.”
“Yes, that’s correct, but we have people on it.”
“Sir, you know that means one of two things: either there’s no license plate readers east of Nashville, or he’s switched plates.”
“We get that. You aren’t the only smart guy in the room.”
“Sir, if he didn’t switch the plates in Tucson, but did after he got to Nashville, it means he’s learned somewhere along the way that we’re tracking him. He’s no longer using the credit cards for the same reason. We can’t just sit back and wait for him to appear, because he’s not going to. Have you looked at the route from Tucson to Nashville? He’s making a beeline to the East Coast. He’s headed to a target. Maybe New York City, Baltimore, Philadelphia, or Washington, DC.”
“Pike, I get it. The Oversight Council gets it. The National Command Authority gets it. Nobody’s treating this as nothing to worry about.”
“They may allgetit, but none of those people know how tostopit. I do. Let me send Knuckles and Brett and get some expertise on this. It’s what we do.”
“You need the team there. That’s your mission right now.”
“I have Aaron and Shoshana here right now, so I have extra manpower. I can spare some expertise.”
He said, “Pike, there’s no way I’m getting authority for Taskforce operations on US soil. It’s just not going to happen. It’s strictly forbidden by the charter, and for good reason.”
While the need for Project Prometheus had become apparent after 9/11, when it was originally created there had been a fear of it turning into some sort of American Gestapo force, since it was already operating outside the bounds of the US Constitution. The remedy had been simple: by our charter, we were forbidden from operating CONUS.
