King and Maxwell

CHAPTER 75

TWO HOURS LATER THE SKIES opened up and Sean looked to the heavens and thanked the man upstairs. It was a quick thunderstorm but it was making a lot of racket. It would be over and done in about thirty minutes; the skies would clear to a spectacular, cleansed blue, and the winds would calm. But right now bucketing rain, heavy, howling winds, and booms of thunder were covering every sound of their approach to the cabin.

He and Wingo had hooked up with Agents Littlefield and McKinney. The man from DHS had been even more skeptical than his FBI counterpart but came around when Sean pointed out the likely scenarios for him. They rescue the kids, they’re heroes. If the kids weren’t there, then they had Wingo, and Sean as an aider and abettor.

But as Sean made his way slowly up the hillside to where the cabin stood in its tiny footprint, his gut was screaming at him that the kids were inside its walls.

Wingo was on his right flank. They had their guns inside their rain jackets to keep them dry. McKinney and Littlefield were approaching from the other side.

Edgar had emailed him the interior floor plans of the cabin that he had dug up somewhere online. It was amazing what the gentle giant could do with his keyboard and a mind filled with more stuff than just about anyone else’s.

Sean wished they could afford him.

There were two rooms in the place of equal size. Sean was pretty sure the kids would be held in the back room because the front had the only exit door to the place. You didn’t put prisoners in a room with a way out. And when Sean drew near enough to the cabin to see the rear window, his deduction was confirmed. There was plywood nailed over it.

He looked at Wingo. “You see that?”

Wingo nodded. “Problem is, we try and get the boards off, the guards will gun them down.”

“Not if we take care of the guards first.”

“There might be one in the room with the kids.”

Sean eyed the vehicle parked in front of the cabin. It wasn’t Grant’s Mercedes, unfortunately.

“Four-seater,” said Sean. “Chances are we have two guards. They have to move the kids, that makes four seats.”

Sean had a comm pack that was wired to units McKinney and Littlefield had. He spoke into his headset.

“We’re in position.”

“Roger that for us too,” replied McKinney.

“Looks like we got two guards and the hostages in the back room.”

“We have eyes on it. How do you want to do this?”

Sean edged closer to the cabin. What he was trying to get was a direct sight line through one of the front windows. But the storm, while covering their approach, was making a visual pretty hard to come by.

He looked back at Wingo and waved him forward. The soldier scampered toward him seeking cover along the way, just as he no doubt had done in the Middle East.

He stopped next to Sean. “What’s the plan?”

“Treat it like combat. What would you do?”

Wingo eyed the surroundings. “Normally, you’d want to draw fire, revealing their position, and then follow up with focused fire or call in an airstrike.”

“Fresh out of F-16s, my friend. Too bad one of our Federal friends didn’t bring a thermal imager. We could see where the body heat was arrayed in there.”

A jagged strip of lightning struck a tree in the distance, severing it in half and setting it on fire. A deafening boom of thunder followed. The split tree toppled to the ground, where the flames were quickly doused by the heavy rains.

Sean watched the smoldering tree for a few moments and then looked at Wingo.

“Here’s what we’re going to do. Thank you, Mother Nature.”

Michelle was being escorted to the White House in a black SUV with four Secret Service agents, two of whom she knew.

“What’s the deal?” she asked one of them as they drove along.

The man shrugged. “Not my place.”

The other added, “You’ll know soon enough. The Man will tell you himself.”

The Man was President John Cole. And from the grim expressions of the four agents, Michelle did not think the Man was in a particularly good mood.

They had made her turn off her phone. No communications. No pictures. No recordings of any kind. She hoped Sean didn’t call while she was out of the loop.

They pulled into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and Michelle was taken to the Oval Office. She was told to wait; the president would join her shortly.

“Tell him to take his time,” Michelle said to herself as the door closed, leaving her alone. She looked down at her phone. She was itching to turn it back on but she knew there were eyes on her in here. This was a White House under assault, with leaks coming from somewhere, and it was making them all paranoid. If she tried to get her communications lines back up, they might just make her disappear. Well, maybe not that drastic, but she didn’t want to add fuel to what looked like a bonfire in the making. She sighed, sat back, and waited for the most powerful man in the world to walk in and further ruin her day.

Edgar Roy’s fingers were hammering the keyboards with – even for him – unusual ferociousness. But things were not going well. Edgar had almost never been beaten when hunting down something electronically. People tried to hide things from him but they never could. He could stare at a wall of screens with information coming in digital packages from the four corners of the earth, and make sense of it while just sitting there. His mind was uniquely designed to function at a high level in complete chaos. He could bring order, reason, and results to situations that seemed impervious to any of those things.

He had been able to track Grant’s Mercedes – that was relatively easy. It was right now parked in a very rural spot more than sixty miles farther west from the address of the cabin that he had given Sean earlier. He had emailed Sean with the information and then turned to his next task. The satellite.

And yet he couldn’t find the eye in the sky that Alan Grant had presumably leased. He might have used an alias of course, or more likely a shell company. Edgar had looked at purely commercial satellites and then government platforms and now he decided to look at the category in between – commercial satellites leased to the government. Sean had told him that Grant was mad at the government. So maybe he was trying to get back at it.

As he was clicking away something caught his eye. He hit other keys, his gaze flitting across two screens. To the casual observer this would be quite a feat, but for Edgar it was actually a break. He was used to staring at fifty screens at the same time. He thought about the request that Sean had made – to track Alan Grant’s Mercedes using GPS. He had done that. Police did that all the time. The GPS chip in a car’s computer brain made such a task relatively simple. The onboard computer systems in cars these days were extraordinarily complex. Yet since they were tied to other systems, they were vulnerable to hacking, just like Edgar had done.

But as the data kept flying over the screen, Edgar Roy got a very concerned look on his face.

This couldn’t be possible, could it?