Act of War

CHAPTER 42

The call with Donald lasted about fifteen minutes. Did he remember the customer who had rented unit 26, Mr. Todd Thomas? He did.

“Why?” asked Harvath.

“I’ve got cousins in Kentucky named Thomas,” said the manager. “I joked that maybe we were related. He didn’t think that was funny.”

“Why didn’t he think that was funny?”

“Probably because he’s Asian and I’m not.”

Bingo, thought Harvath. “Would you recognize him if you saw him again?” he asked, snapping his fingers to get Nicholas’s attention.

“Maybe,” Donald replied.

“Do you have access to a computer?”

“For, like, the Internet and stuff?”

“Yeah,” said Harvath. “For, like, the Internet.”

“I’ve got my phone.”

“Okay, hold on a second.”

Harvath muted the call and asked Nicholas if there was somewhere he could post the picture of Bao Deng so that Donald could look at it.

“Ask him if he does Snapchat,” the little man replied.

“I don’t want to use Snapchat and have it on their server. I want us to keep control.”

Nicholas gave Harvath a URL and told him he’d have Deng’s picture posted in a moment.

As they waited, Harvath asked the manager about Mr. Thomas’s photocopy. Donald explained that while most customers filled out a rental agreement while standing at the front desk, Thomas had shown up with his already completed. Along with it, he had also included a copy of his driver’s license.

“Did you ask to see his actual driver’s license in order to verify it?” Harvath asked.

“Of course,” Donald replied. “But everything matched up. I could read his address, date of birth, all that stuff, so I figured why make another copy? Go green, right?”

Harvath shook his head. There was so much they could have done with that photograph.

Nicholas flashed him a thumbs-up, indicating that Deng’s picture had been posted, and Harvath gave Donald the URL.

After a moment, the manager placed his phone back against his ear and said, “That’s not him.”

“You’re sure?” Harvath said. “Take a look again.”

“I don’t need to look again. The Thomas guy was much older than the guy in your photo.”

“How much older?”

“I don’t know,” Donald said, thinking. “Fifties. Sixties maybe.”

“Is there anything else you can remember about him? Any other distinguishing features? Tattoos? Scars?”

“Not really. He was just kind of a plain dude.”

“Do you remember how tall he was?”

“Shorter than me. Definitely. Maybe five-foot-seven.”

Harvath made another note. “How about what he was driving? Did you get a look at his car?”

“Nope. Never saw it.”

Harvath asked a couple more questions before thanking the man and disconnecting the call. As he did, Urda came back over.

“That Todd Thomas Tennessee driver’s license is bogus,” the FBI agent reported.

Harvath wasn’t surprised. His mind was now going a million miles an hour. He asked the Logans if they would be kind enough to return to the hangar office and wait there. He didn’t want to discuss anything further in front of them.

Once they had gone, Nicholas said, “So, who’s our new mystery Asian man?”

“I think it’s probably safe to call him Chinese,” stated Urda.

Harvath nodded. “Agreed. And if this new guy, Thomas, rented a storage unit in Nashville, we should assume he rented units in the other cell cities, too.”

Urda already had his cell phone back out. “Under the same name?”

“If it were me,” Harvath replied, “I’d use a different name with different ID for each one. I wouldn’t want someone like me connecting the dots.”

“So what should the field offices in the other cities be looking for?”

“We’ve got a male Chinese, in his fifties or sixties, around five-foot-seven, who has used the alias Todd Thomas. With a name like that, he may be trying to not have the paperwork reflect anything Chinese, so that’s something to look for. We know when he rented the Nashville storage unit, so that gives us a date to work backward and forward from. I’d also look for anyone who walked into a self-storage facility with a copy of his or her driver’s license already in hand.”

There was something else about that photocopy, something that bothered him, but Harvath couldn’t place it.

“What else?” Urda asked.

“I’d focus on mom-and-pop operations in quieter, somewhat secluded areas near each city.”

“Without cameras?”

“If those exist, sure. I’ve got a feeling, though, that cameras don’t bother this guy. In fact, they might be a plus. Once he hacks his way in, he’s got a way to remotely monitor all of his units.”

“Anything else?”

“No. I think that’s it. For now.”

“Wait,” said Nicholas, who had been clicking away at his laptop. “There may be one additional item.”

He had asked to see the Thomas paperwork, especially the payment information. “Did you get a hit on the credit card?” Harvath asked.

The little man nodded as he peered at his screen and wrote something down. “It looks like he used a high-value, prepaid credit card for the storage company to draw his monthly rent from. Short of someone paying with cash, that’s one of the top things I’d be looking for.”

“Got it,” said Urda. Taking his checklist, he strode back toward the front of the hangar to update the team at the National Counter Terrorism Center.

Harvath turned his attention back to Nicholas. “Were you able to access the facility’s keypad log?”

“I was, but a big chunk of data from tonight has been erased.”

Harvath wasn’t surprised about that either. “Whoever knocked the CCTV footage offline could have accessed the keypad data.”

“What do you think he had in that storage locker?” Nicholas asked.

“Something that made a very big bang.”

“You don’t think the bang was the explosion of the police car they found?”

“No. I think Deng was doing something at that unit when the cop showed up and he killed him. Maybe he used the police car as a fuse to start a chain reaction. There was definitely something else in there.”

“Any clue as to what?”

Harvath shook his head. “My guess is that it had something to do with the attack. Maybe a bomb of some sort. I think Wazir Ibrahim, the dead Somali, was involved and maybe got compromised, so Deng was sent in to kill him.”

“What about the engineer accessing Facebook from Nashville?”

“Ibrahim is dead. A police officer is dead. And a storage unit went up in a big fireball. Right now, I don’t think it looks too good for that engineer.”

Nicholas opened another window on his laptop. “Well, he hasn’t accessed his Facebook page recently, so you may be right.”

“Or I could be completely wrong. Maybe Deng was sent to kill the Somali and take his place. Maybe he and the Nashville engineer have gone operational and torching the storage unit was intended to buy them enough time to do whatever they need to do. I don’t know.”

That was what was so frustrating. They were steps behind, playing catch-up in a game that was only getting faster.

“What do you need me to focus on next?”

Harvath looked at all of the materials that had been driven to the hangar and organized into sections. Then he looked at Nicholas sitting behind his computer. What made the most sense was to set him loose on what he did best.

“I want you to find me whoever took that CCTV system offline and erased those keypad entry logs.”