“All right, do the drill,” Cam told him.
An hour later, after the obligatory, if officially confined, commotion, the chief of the explosives-disposal unit appeared in Cam’s office and handed him a clear plastic evidence pouch containing a plain white envelope. “Your bomb, sir,” he said with a grin.
“Better safe than sorry,” Cam replied, taking the pouch.
“You bet,” the lieutenant said, and left.
A picture and a hand-printed note were inside the envelope. The picture was of Mary Ellen Goode, without the hood this time, sitting in the electric chair. Her hands, arms, and legs were immobilized. There was a cell phone sitting in her lap, from which a white wire trailed beyond the frame. The note said “Your place. Tonight. Late. Face for a face. We see backup, the cell phone starts the fun.”
“If we moved right now,” Tony said, “we could get guys in position before it gets too late.”
“This is a cell, Tony,” Cam said. “More than one guy. They have to be watching. That’s why they made this thing look like a letter bomb. As soon as they saw the bomb-squad robot carry the letter out of the building, they’d knew I’d get their message.”
“You can’t go out there alone, boss,” said Horace.
“How about a Trojan horse?” Pardee said. “You go home alone in a big ole Suburban. ’Cept there’re three guys hidden under some stuff in the back of the truck. Pull it into the garage, shut the garage door, get out, and go inside. Three SWAT shooters already in the house-better odds.”
“Or,” said Billy Mays, “we leak some shit to the media wipes, get ’em out front, bring you out in cuffs for a highly visible perp walk, then haul you off in a cruiser. Get it on the TV for the eleven o’clock follies. Then send out a three-pack and pretend to toss your house. Except we send in a dozen guys, bring out nine. Then the next day, we turn you loose, restart the game.”
“Nice try, guys,” Cam said, smiling. “But we’re forgetting something: These are cops, and probably federal agents. Think of what they can do in terms of listening to our comms, knowing when we’re BSing. Hell, for all we know, one of those three SWAT shooters you want in my house could be in the cell.”
“You can’t go out there alone, boss,” Horace said again.
Cam sighed. “This time, I think I have to. I got that woman into this. I need to get her out. I’ve already lost Kenny.”
He searched their faces, watched them sort it out. They understood exactly what he was talking about.
60
Cam decided to go home to wait for the call. The team, all of whom were SWAT-qualified, went to find out where they were going to assemble.
Mary Ellen Goode had trusted him. She knew nothing that was terribly important, and it was all secondhand at that. And now she was dead meat unless everything worked out perfectly. How likely was that? This is all my damned fault, Cam told himself. He swore as he went out the door, startling some people coming in.
He fed the shepherds when he got home and then checked his voice mail and E-mail. Nothing. He made coffee. The sheriff called. The SWAT team was set up at the law-enforcement center downtown. McLain had called back and said he’d asked for the FBI’s hostage-rescue team but was told that would take twenty-fours to set up. He’d canceled it and said he’d have a tactical team up in Triboro by 11:00 P.M. He’d also offered the services of their latest nightsurveillance aircraft, Owl.
“Okay, I give up. What’s Owl?” Cam asked the sheriff.
“A glider with a small jet engine. It can operate at night, carries a pilot and one agent with some pretty sophisticated night-vision gear. They can get on top of a situation, stay there as long as there’s wind aloft, and they are soundless. Unlike our helos.”
“First they have to call,” Cam said.
“Don’t sit in front of any windows,” Bobby Lee told him.
“I’ve got my mutts,” Cam said, looking at the two shepherds, who were sitting on either side of him, fully aware that something was up.
He went around and turned off all unnecessary lights in his house, then activated the roof spots. The dogs followed him from room to room. He cleaned his Sig. 45 and laid out his tactical gear. He had some more coffee. It was only ten o’clock when the phone rang.
But instead of bad guys, the call was from Jay-Kay.
“I’m on Fifty-two from Charlotte,” she said. “What’s the best way to get to your house?”
“What the fuck, Jay-Kay?” Cam said.
“It’s worse than you think,” she said. “Give me directions, please.”
Forty-five minutes later, she was sitting in his living room. He’d showered and changed into his tactical gear. She was wearing a pantsuit. He offered her coffee, but she declined.
“How did it happen?” he asked her.
“I don’t know. I went out for some take-away right after my secretary left for the day; her son had a soccer game, so she left early. I left Ranger Goode in the apartment, and when I got back, she was gone.”
“And your security systems?”
“No signs of intrusion.”
“Which meant they were feds, doesn’t it?” he said. “Agents, or at least other FBI people who were already in your system?”
“I don’t know,” she said evenly.
“You said it was worse than I thought. They have Mary Ellen Goode. What’s worse than that?”
“McLain and the Bureau are playing you and your sheriff.”
“Playing how?”
“I’ll show you in a minute, but first tell me where your home PC is.” He pointed to the study. She pulled out a package of CDs from her briefcase and went to the machine.
“I’m going to execute a wipe disc on your machine,” she said. “First, we save all your data.”
“Uh, okay, I guess. May I ask why?”
“Because I discovered something while I was showing Ranger Goode some of the Bureau’s case files on this vigilante matter.” She brought up a file-management program. “I found out that the next time you go on-line, there’s a federal computer waiting to suck every piece of data right off your hard drive,” she said, her fingers flying over the keyboard. “I’ve made some other discoveries, Just Cam, and they’re not good ones. I think I’ve been used, as well.”
She backed up all his data files onto the CDs and then put one of her own into the machine. Within ten seconds, the monitor went black.
“There,” she said. “I killed everything but your on-line service and the underlying OS. It’ll go on-line in a minute, and when they trap it, there’s a truly nasty little program that’s going to be swept up along with not very much from your computer. Then, wipe disc.”
Cam wasn’t too sure what “wipe disc” meant, but it sounded dramatic.
“Now,” Jay-Kay, said, getting up from his computer chair. “That coffee?”
They sat down in Cam’s kitchen and Jay-Kay explained that she’d detected an attempted intrusion into her mainframes when she went to AFIS to see if Marlor’s fingerprints were on file. “I have the fire wall from hell,” she said. “My machines are set up to detect an intrusion and swallow it whole, making the intruder think he’s in, when in fact my tigers are going into his machine and wiping out the hardwired machine-language programming. You know, the firmware stuff that starts the boot sequence. They order up a restart on the way out, and the intruding computer goes dark.”
Cam nodded, pretending to understand what she was talking about. “And what happened this time?”
“This time, in the process of blocking the intrusion, the tigers were thrown out. Two IBM mainframes in parallel operation can usually overwhelm most other computers, so this had to be a big federal machine, probably running some NSA code.”
“So what’s the deal?” he asked.
She sighed. “I’m a federal consultant. I have clearance and access. And yet someone within federal LE ordered up an intrusion. I checked with the sys op at the Charlotte field office. I happen to know her and I’ve helped her with some security issues. I made a joke of it: ‘What, you guys bored? Nothing to do on the graveyard shift? You want to mess with my tigers?’”