Pinnacle Event

27

“What do you mean they lost him?” Winston Burrell’s voice boomed over the videoconference speaker in Dugout’s high-tech man cave. “How the fuck could they lose one guy when they had intelligence agents from half the nations in the world in and outside the hotel?”

“I don’t know. Neither does Bowman,” Dugout explained. “They know he was at the dinner and returned to the hotel, made the call, slept, then disappeared. Never checked out of his room at the hotel. Hong Kong Police say he hasn’t flown out of the city or crossed into Macau or Mainland China, at least not under the name Johann Potgeiter. My search of their databases shows the same thing.”

“This guy is now our one lead at the moment to whoever bought the bombs,” Burrell said. “It’s great we have a lead finally, but not so great that you have no fucking idea where he is. You have to find him.”

“Well, I did trace the call. It was not really to somebody in LA, so it does not mean that there may be somebody in LA with a bomb.”

“It doesn’t mean there isn’t, either,” Burrell replied. “Where did the call go?”

“The 310 number was a bouncer, it switched the call to a mobile with a 236 area code number: Vancouver. And it was actually moving around downtown Vancouver when it took the call. Since then, it’s been off,” Dugout explained. “I don’t know where it is.”

“Fucking find Potgeiter. Either in Hong Kong or in Vancouver, if that’s where he’s going. Does al Qaeda have a cell in Vancouver? Didn’t they do something up there during the Millennium rollover?”

“We think that’s where he’s going, based on our transcript of his conversation and the guy on the 236 end saying ‘Come to me,’” Dug answered. “I’ll look into any AQ cells in BC, but I doubt it.”

“Well, this just means we were right to extend from the air and seaports to the land crossings,” Burrell seemed to be talking to himself, reassuring himself that his decision to all but close the borders with Canada and Mexico was the right call. “Of course Ottawa and Mexico City are going batshit. Violation of NAFTA, blah, blah.”

“I don’t think it’s going to be sustainable for long. GM won’t be able to assemble cars or trucks. They ship parts back and forth, to and from plants on both sides of the Canadian border. Same with the maquiladoras, the factories just over the border into Mexico,” Dugout said.

“I know. Half the Cabinet is waiting in the Roosevelt Room to complain,” Burrell admitted. “We’re going to have to deploy National Guard troops to augment Homeland Security doing the inspections. And after I get battered by the Cabinet, I have to go see a gaggle of Allied ambassadors who are complaining that containers are backing up already in Rotterdam, Tokyo, and everywhere else. I know it’s not sustainable to search everything coming in to the U.S., but that’s what the Homeland Security Secretary announced last night and that’s what we’re doing until you find the bombs. So find them, before the entire world economy dies of constipation.” Burrell clicked off at his end.

Dugout swiveled in his chair to look for guidance from his boss, Grace Scanlon, who had been sitting off camera listening to the video call. “So, I am very glad that when I replaced Bowman, I did not inherit the care and feeding of the National Security Advisor. Very glad that Burrell chose to give that job to you. And you get all those meals at his Club,” she said smiling at Dugout.

“You know that not a single person in the world thinks that the Homeland Security Secretary decided on her own to conduct a ten-day Border Control Exercise nine days before the election,” Dugout observed. “Every media outlet thinks there is some threat that they won’t admit to.”

“I think it was the White House that leaked the story that there may be al Qaeda hit teams coming to poison water supplies,” Grace Scanlon said. “That’s better than people guessing that it’s actually nukes we’re looking for.”

“The media will figure that out fast enough,” Dugout countered. “They’ve deployed all of the Nuclear Emergency Support Teams. They’re using Geiger counters at all the ports, airports, land crossings.”

Director Scanlon walked to the window and looked down on the river. “The Republicans are loving it. Shows that we need a hard-line President. Strong on defense. Tough on terrorism.”

“They will love it even more if all the Democrats in the cities realize that the urban areas might be nuked and flee to the countryside without voting,” Dugout said, walking up to the window and standing next to her. “That’s my fear, millions of people clogging roads and falling all over each other to get out of Dodge. That could be next.”

“There’s something wrong with this. Something we’re missing. I know you and Burrell don’t buy the Taiwan idea. I’m not there yet, let’s wait to see what happens in Taipei when we confront them.”

“Winston is convinced it’s al Qaeda,” Dugout noted.

“Maybe he’s right.” She looked straight at Dugout. “If a nation state bought themselves a ready-made nuclear arsenal, why would they be operating out of Canada? Only a terrorist group would be up there, getting stuff ready to come down here.”

“I know, Ray and Mbali are going to get on a Cathay Pacific flight to Vancouver because they think Johann Potgeiter is en route there,” Dugout said. “I think that’s largely because they don’t know what else to do. Don’t just stand there, fly on.”

“The new Dynamic Duo,” Grace laughed. “They must make an odd-looking couple. Meanwhile, keep running Minerva, have the software find the correlations that humans can’t see. It’s there somewhere. Who hired the off-duty cops in Vienna to follow Ray, the hit team in Cape Town, the car bomber in Jaffa? Who paid for the heist near Pretoria? How did they get the tritium out of the country? When the bombs left Madagascar, where did they go and how? You have a lot of leads there, Duggie. Run them down. You have to give the Bowman some arrows.”

Dugout began with the audio recording of Johann Potgeiter making the call from the hotel room in Hong Kong. Dug checked the time the call was made, precisely. Then he examined the record of the mobile telephone tower closest to the hotel and checked what calls were made from the area of the hotel at the exact time of the recording. There was a German mobile calling Los Angeles.

Next, he checked on the telephone number in Los Angeles. Then he began to trace the movement of the German mobile phone. He pulled up the name of the owner of the German mobile from a database in Frankfurt and then he checked airline reservations for flights booked in that same name. There was one, originating in China, going to Korea, and then to Vancouver. The passenger had also booked a rental car for Vancouver.

As he kept monitoring the phone owner’s movements, Dugout started the process of hacking into the video surveillance system of the Vancouver airport and the Canadian immigrations system. Then he hacked into the Hertz reservation system and then into an SUV through its GPS navigation system. He was ready to see where it would be driven.