“Okay,” he said. “Let’s hear ’em.”
“First off, it seems to me the most logical place to start would be the family from the video.”
“Too risky,” he replied. “Anybody looking for Segreti would be onto them, which makes approaching them dangerous.”
“That’s not an issue if you look into them online.”
“Which I’m guessing you did.”
“Yup. First, I combed through their social media-the parents are on Facebook, the mom’s on Pinterest, the eldest child is on Instagram and Snapchat-but found no pics of Segreti or anyone who looks like him in their lists of friends. Then I hacked the parents’ e-mail-”
“You did what?”
“-but none of the searches I ran turned up anything of interest. It looks to me like bumping into him was a chance encounter.”
Hendricks thought back to the video, which he’d watched on Cameron’s laptop a couple dozen times on the plane before dozing off. “Yeah, that seems to track.”
“But I still think they’re worth questioning. They might’ve seen which way he went or gotten something useful out of him before the camera rolled-”
“Much as I’d love to, we can’t. If I were the Feds or the bad guys, I’d put someone on the family as a matter of course, which means they’re off-limits to us.”
“But what if I-”
“Seriously, drop it. It’s not going to happen. What else have you got?” Hendricks felt bad slapping her down, but after the mess at the Salty Dog, he couldn’t afford another sloppy play, and approaching the Restons qualified.
“If you didn’t like my last idea, you’re going to hate this one.”
“Why don’t you let me be the judge of that?”
“You ever heard of COWs?”
“Sure. Big, dumb, tasty things, go moo.”
“Not cows like dinner,” she said. “COWs like cells on wheels.”
“Can’t say as I have.”
“A COW is basically a cell-phone tower attached to a trailer that can be rolled into an area as needed. It’s meant to support the existing system when there’s an increase in demand, which could be due to anything from the Super Bowl to September Eleventh. Hell, during Obama’s inauguration, they brought in twenty-six of them to accommodate the million-odd spectators, most of whom expected to be able to live-tweet and Facebook the event.”
“Okay,” he said. “Now I know what COWs are. The question is, why?”
She held up a picture on her phone for him to see. “That’s why.”
He took his eyes off the road just long enough to glance at it. The image was grainy but seemed to show precisely the sort of device she’d described. It was in the middle of a broad expanse of pavement, enough dotted lines visible on either side of it for six lanes of traffic at least. In the background, out of focus, Hendricks saw some kind of tent.
“I take it this is somewhere near the bridge?”
Cameron nodded. “That’s a detail of a still I pulled from CNN. They’ve set up a command center for the rescue effort right outside the toll gates, and they brought in that tower to support their data needs.”
“And?”
“And I think that we should hack it.”
“Come again?”
“It’s not as crazy as it sounds. I did some digging on the dark web about that model. Turns out, it’s an old one and easily exploited. So I talked to a gamer buddy of mine-an off-the-grid crypto-anarchist type who siphons off of local cell systems when he wants to go online-and he sent some code to get me started. I tweaked it to suit our needs, and the end result’s a program that’ll gain us access to all the data passing through that tower-calls, texts, photos, you name it.”
“I’m guessing you’ve never broken into one of these before. How do you know it’ll work?”
“Code’s code. It’ll work. And it sure beats knocking on doors.”
“Assuming we could get access, what would we do with it?”
“Anything we want!” she said. “See, unlike the Super Bowl or Obama’s inauguration, there aren’t a bunch of these towers, because there’s not enough demand to warrant them. There are only eight hundred or so full-time residents in the Presidio. Most of the residents and all the businesses are clustered on the western edge, which is served by several towers atop buildings in the city proper. So almost all the traffic on that mobile tower is directly related to the bridge investigation, and almost every aspect of the bridge investigation is passing through that tower. Witnesses’ cell-phone pics. Written statements. Surveillance feeds, probably. There’s a good chance all we need to do to get a bead on Segreti is run the data through some keyword searches and facial recognition.”
“Jesus,” Hendricks said. “That’s incredible.”
“Right?” she replied, obviously pleased by his compliment. “But there’s a catch. A big one.”
“What’s that?”
“The tower can’t be hacked remotely. The program has to be physically inserted into a port on the control panel for this to work. And the tower’s parked right next to, like, half the law enforcement agents in the state.”
Hendricks fell silent for a mile or so, thinking.
“How hard is it to install?” he asked finally.
“Not very. Insert a thumb drive, maybe execute a few commands.”
“So you’re saying I could do it?”
“If I walked you through it, maybe. But if you fucked up, the techs responsible for keeping the tower operational would know immediately.”
“Then I guess I’d better not fuck up.”
As Hendricks rounded the corner onto Lombard Street heading east, away from the Presidio, it was all he could do not to look at the agent manning the gate. He’d left his sweatshirt in the car, and he carried the backpack Cameron had bought for him over one shoulder. A navy windbreaker, its nylon stiff and crinkly with newness, was tied around his waist and whispered to itself with every step. “Has the guy at the gate got eyes on me?” he muttered.
“Yeah,” Cameron said, her voice tinny through the cheap Bluetooth earpiece. “But he doesn’t look particularly interested.”
“Be sure to tell me if that changes.”
“Roger that,” she said.
Hendricks strolled casually down Lombard, then took a right onto Baker Street, a wide, tree-lined drive where stylish, single-family row houses with oversize bay windows and roofs of Spanish tile sat shoulder to shoulder with funky midcentury multi-unit buildings. Peppered in between were local businesses: grocer, bistro, bar, dry cleaner. It was midafternoon. The sky was clear. The sun was warm and bright. Hendricks suspected this area, which exuded a friendly neighborhood vibe, would typically be bustling with activity and good cheer on so lovely a Sunday as this. Sidewalk brunches. Dog walkers. Newspapers read on narrow balconies. But today, the streets were empty of cars save for those parked at the curb. Businesses were shuttered, blinds drawn. People were afraid.
It broke Hendricks’s heart. He’d seen this kind of fear too often overseas. Children cowering behind their parents’ legs as drones passed overhead. Wide eyes peeking around parted curtains as war erupted in the streets. We played our part in the name of freedom, Hendricks thought, but what good were our reasons to the innocents we killed or displaced? All our fighting ever seemed to do was feed the military-industrial beast, which profited mightily from every ratcheting of tension, every escalation of conflict, every convoy attacked, every hovel destroyed.
When war became big business, shareholders were bound to demand more of it, regardless of how many young men and women it left abandoned, rudderless, adrift. Too many of them found solace in extremism, only to discover the life vest they’d been tossed was laced with explosives, and thus the beast was fed again. The fatter it got, the greedier it became, like a rat that learned to push a button or an addict who lived needlestick to needlestick.