Act of War

CHAPTER 54

Unpacking the storage units was an agonizingly slow process, but without knowing what was inside each box, they had no other choice.

Harvath had explained to Carlton why he believed the cylinders contained hydrogen and not helium.

“Helium doesn’t explode. That’s why they use it for weather balloons now. Hydrogen, though, does explode. But it also provides much greater lift. If they’re trying to float bombs of some sort, hydrogen would be dangerous, but it would make sense. Plus, seeing that explosion in Tennessee, it’s not hard to imagine that something highly flammable like hydrogen was involved.”

“Why would they want to float bombs?” the Old Man wondered.

“You could get around, or over, a lot of security that way.”

“But you’d be at the mercy of the wind. You couldn’t control where the bomb landed.”

“Maybe you wouldn’t have to,” Harvath replied. “If these were designed to be airburst weapons, all you’d have to do is arm them and launch them.”

“From places like Des Moines and Nashville? Why not do it over major population centers like Los Angeles, Chicago, or New York?”

“Maybe it doesn’t matter.”

“Hold on,” Carlton said. “Even if these weren’t bombs, let’s say they were biological dispersal devices, you would still need them to release their payload over major population centers. Remember the intel saying there’d be a ninety percent mortality rate within a year?”

Harvath nodded.

“Let’s say it’s not biological, but radiological, and it is a bomb of some sort. It still needs to be over a major population center. I don’t get it.”

“What if it’s neither?”

“My answer’s the same even if the device is chemical.”

“We keep looking at this as if the device itself is what’s going to kill people. What if we’re wrong?” Harvath said. “What if it’s something else?”

“Like what?”

They were standing next to the workstation Special Agent Roe had been assigned to and Harvath asked her to pull up a map of the United States on her computer. Once she had, he asked her to highlight the six cities associated with each cell.

“These cities form a chain across the country,” he said.

“And?”

“And what if six devices were not only launched at the same time, but detonated at the same time?”

Roe layered concentric blast radius circles above each city until they were almost touching and the country was blanketed from coast to coast.

“Now,” said Harvath, “what if this wasn’t chemical, biological, or even radiological, but electromagnetic?”

Suddenly, the color drained from Carlton’s face. “An EMP weapon.”

Harvath nodded.

“Everything would stop,” said Roe. “There’d be no electricity, no running water.”

“№ 911. No police, no fire, no ambulances,” Carlton added.

“No Internet. No grocery store deliveries. No deliveries for pharmacies and hospitals. No heat. No air-conditioning. No fuel. No machines to harvest crops. No trucks to deliver them to market. There would be complete and utter chaos. Anarchy. Our entire country would collapse within weeks.”

“That’s got to be it,” the Old Man said. “That’s got to be what they have planned.”

Harvath pointed up at the flat-screens and the situations unfolding in Las Vegas, Dallas, and Des Moines. “What they find in there will tell us a lot.”

“In the meantime, we need to let General Johnson and the President know what we now think this is.” Looking then at Agent Roe, Carlton asked, “Can we get these feeds in the DNI’s conference room?”

“I’m sure you can,” she replied. “I’ll have someone set it up.”

The Old Man thanked her and signaled for Harvath to follow him.

As they arrived at the conference room, Nicholas and Draco were coming from the other direction. Harvath held the door open for them and motioned for Nicholas to be quiet as Carlton picked up the Secure Telephone Unit and dialed the White House.

After he had relayed the information to General Johnson and hung up the STU, Nicholas was nodding. “It makes perfect sense.”

“But we’ve only found three storage units. Four if you count Nashville,” the Old Man said. “Even if we do find units in Baltimore and Seattle, how do we know we have all the devices? How do we know there aren’t more sleepers out there?”

It was an excellent point. Only by completely dismantling the entire plot would they ever know for sure. But to do that, they would need to do more than just uncover a few storage lockers. In fact, Harvath was already convinced that whatever device might have been in the Nashville storage unit, Bao Deng had taken it with him before he had burned everything else to the ground. There was no way he would leave something like that behind.

Harvath was just about to say as much when he saw Agent Roe running toward the conference room.

“What’s up?” he said as she came rushing in.

“Boise,” she replied, out of breath. “You nailed it. Todd Thomas. We’ve got him.”

“You’ve got him?” Nicholas said.

“Not him, but the Xerox machine he used.”

“How?”

Roe looked at Harvath.

“The man using the Todd Thomas alias showed up in Nashville with a just passable photocopy of his driver’s license,” said Harvath. “As long as he was standing in front of you and showed you his real license to compare to, you’d accept it. There was no reason for the storage facility manager to make another copy. We now know he did the same thing in Vegas, Dallas, and Des Moines. That’s what got me thinking.

“If I was going to do this, I’d use a grocery store Xerox machine or one at a small pack-and-ship place and I’d practice. Once I had it to the point where you could read the info but my photo was just dark and out of focus enough, I’d whip out all my other fake IDs and make copies on the spot.”

“And copy machines have hard drives,” Nicholas said approvingly.

Harvath nodded. “They keep a record of everything. All you need is a cable and the right software to access it. Which is what we asked the FBI to do. They looked for public copy machines in and around Boise, paying specific attention to those closest to the free Wi-Fi locations the handler used to access his Facebook accounts. They downloaded as many hard drives as they could find and that data was fed to the NSA.”

“Who then used one of their algorithms to sift the data and look for matches of the blurry driver’s license photos?”

“Exactly,” said Harvath as he turned back to Roe. “What do we know?”

“The copy machine was in a small pack-and-ship place in downtown Boise called Going Postal. They offer PO boxes, shipping services, that kind of thing,” Roe replied. “The hard drive had copies of the driver’s licenses used at the storage units we already know of, plus a license from Washington State and one from Maryland. Now that we’ve got those aliases, we’re pretty confident we’ll be able to track down the storage units in Seattle and Baltimore.”

“How many licenses total were on the machine for this guy?”

Roe smiled. “Seven. Just like you suspected, he practiced with a local, Idaho driver’s license first. We’ve already run it. Unlike the others, this one is legit. It belongs to a fifty-seven-year-old naturalized American citizen of Chinese birth named Ren Ho. He lives in Indian Valley, Idaho, about two hours north of Boise. We’re doing a full workup on him now and the FBI has already scrambled an HRT team. DoE is also sending a NEST team.”

Harvath looked at Carlton. “We need to be there, on site, as soon as they grab him, so we can do the interrogation.”

The Old Man nodded. “Who do you want to take?”

“Sloane and Chase, plus Nicholas for anything we find computer-related.”

“Done. Anything else?”

“Stephanie Esposito.”

“The Agency’s China analyst?”

“I want someone who knows the culture,” replied Harvath. “Who can speak and read Chinese.”

“I’ll call the President and DNI and brief them right now.”

Scribbling down his email address and cell phone number, Harvath handed them to Agent Roe and said, “As soon as we’re in the air, I’ll check my inbox. Please send everything you’ve got to that address.”

“Will do,” Roe replied. “Stay safe.”

“I’ll try,” he said, and then, looking at Nicholas, nodded toward the door. “Let’s go.”