Renner finished and waited for Hail to respond.
“What about the ping that is being emitted from her phone and giving away our position?” Hail asked. “Is there any way to kill that?”
Renner nodded and said, “Sure. On land her voice traffic and Internet would go through cell towers. The CIA would know generally where she was by identifying the position of the cell tower. But out here in the middle of the ocean, all of her Internet traffic goes through our Wi-Fi, our switches, our routers and our firewall. The blip is a common stream of data. So all we have to do is packet sniff that stream and cut it out before it hits our Internet uplink.”
“It’s as easy as that?” Hail asked, being an expert in nuclear physics but a not so smart in the area of advanced networks.
“The hard part is the initial set up; identifying the stream that is sending out the blip and writing the routine to extract it. But after that’s set up, the script just runs by itself.”
“How long will it take to set up?” Hail asked.
“It’s already done,” Renner replied. “If not, I wouldn’t have her phone sitting here sending out blips to the world and giving away our position. It would be back in the safe.”
Hail grunted his approval.
Renner asked, “So what are you thinking?”
“I think that we need to play the CIA game,” Hail told his friend.
Hail started putting all the contents back into Kara’s purse.
“You’re going to give it all back to her. Aren’t you?” Renner asked.
“I can’t think of a better way of knowing what our good friends at the CIA are up to. Can you? We record every call that is made and then give it a listen. We’ll hear Kara’s side of the call and the bonus is we will hear what Pepper has to say. It’s best we know what they’re planning before it becomes a problem.”
Renner thought for a moment. “Don’t you think that she can pass on some information about us that can hurt us in some way?”
Hail looked conflicted.
“If you run down all the intelligence that she could pass on to her agency, then it would break down in three different categories. First, the CIA would want to know about our ship. So far, Ramey has only seen a restaurant, the conference room and the Mall. She will see more, but we don’t have anything on board that the military doesn’t already have. Well, except for our drones.”
“What about our railgun?” Renner reminded Hail.
Hail skipped over that issue and continued.
“I think it’s very important that she’s not permitted access to our designs or given access to our lab or our production and modification areas. But all of those areas are already badge access only. So one of us would have to take her into those areas, and that’s not going to happen.”
“Makes sense,” Renner said.
“Second, I’m not comfortable with her knowing our numbers. The CIA doesn’t need to know our crew’s headcount, especially the combined numbers on all of our ships. I also don’t want her people to know how many ships we have or how many Hellfire drones protect our ships and such. I would also exclude the number of manufacturing plants we have on dry land, as well as the numbers of countries we consider our clients.”
“Sounds prudent,” Renner agreed.
“And third, I don’t want the CIA to know about any of our long term plans. The CIA has their own agenda. And as we can already tell by this new operation that was thrown at us, they would like nothing more than to make us their bitch. I don’t want to become part of their agenda. As always, we want to remain as self-sufficient as possible.”
“Then why is she here?” Renner asked, but he already knew the answer. He was just calling Hail out on it.
“You don’t get something for nothing, my father always told me,” Hail replied. “Most of the time my father was an asshole, but much of the time that asshole was right about the basics. I’m sure that every time we want something from the CIA, we will get a bill. And we can’t pay that bill in money. They don’t want our money. They want an action of some type. And as long as it doesn’t take up too much of our time or our assets, then that’s the price we’ll pay if we want to keep getting intelligence from them.”
Langley, Virginia ― Central Intelligence Headquarters
The Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Jarret Pepper, had called an impromptu meeting with his Directorate of Operations, Paul Moore and the Directorate of Analysis, Karen Wesley.
Instead of the conference room, Pepper had instructed them to meet him in his office. The meeting was basically an operational update and he didn’t think it would take long.
“So where did the plane land?” Pepper asked Paul Moore.
“It landed in Morocco.”
Pepper looked perplexed.
“Where in Morocco?” he asked.
Moore spun around a globe that was sitting on the edge of Pepper’s desk. He took a moment to orientate himself with the earth and then pointed at a long strip of tan.
“Right there,” he said. “The Dakhla Airport in the Western Sahara of Morocco.”
Pepper and Karen Wesley looked closely at the place where Moore’s finger had been.
“Why would the put down there?” Pepper asked. “It’s nothing but desert.”
“They put down for the same reason that we had to break off surveillance. They needed fuel. The AWACS that was tracking them had to refuel as well. With no tankers in that area, it had to leave the theater.”
“So where did they go after that?” Pepper asked.
“We don’t know,” Moore responded blamelessly. “We don’t have assets at all in that region of the world. The closest asset we have to Morocco is a DHC-6 Twin Otter aircraft out of Spain, but that’s eight-hundred miles away. Too little, too late.”
Pepper was frustrated.
“What about her phone?” Pepper asked Moore. “Did we get any blips off of it?”
Moore shook his head no, but said, “Yes, but we didn’t get enough of them to zero in on the location. At some point the phone stopped sending blips.”
“How could it do that?” Pepper asked.
“Thrown into the water, destroyed, inside a metal room, buried, lots of reasons,” Moore explained.
“So what you’re trying to tell me is that we have no idea where our CIA agent is?”
“The few blips we got were loosely traced the southern part of Indonesia. Maybe Jakarta.”
Pepper huffed sarcastically and said, “That’s wonderful.” He placed his own finger on the globe and drew a box. “That means we are talking about six-thousand square miles. Right?”
Moore said nothing.
“Have you communicated with her,” Karen Wesley asked Pepper. “I’m assuming you didn’t call us here just for that information.”
Pepper composed himself.
“Yes I did,” he said as if he was the only person who did any work around the place. “Kara called me on Hail’s phone. So that might indicate that they had taken her phone from her, but I think it’s something else. Kara used the word shipshape in our conversation, which is a code word that means she is on a ship. She also pretended to mute the phone and I overheard Hail’s crew talking about making a run for the South China Sea, so they are definitely on a ship.”
Moore said, “That would account for her phone not sending blips. If she is surrounded by iron, then the signal can’t get out.”
“Correct,” Pepper agreed. “Also, as predicted Hail’s people asked for the location of the Huan Yue.”