“No.”
“You didn’t? You’re sure of that.”
“Right. The answer is no, we did not.”
“Neither one. Neither sender nor receiver.”
“Correct.”
“Why not?”
Lindsay paused. “How to answer that,” he sighed. “What we got was a snatch of conversation in midstream, so to speak. A few minutes from somewhere in the middle of the phone call.”
“But the satellite intercept-” Vigiani said, not sure of what she was saying.
Lindsay sensed her ignorance and responded in simple language: “It’s actually rare to get the phone number that’s being called,” he said. “Pure happenstance. We’d have to have locked on to the call from the very first second, so we could hear the dialing or the touch tones being punched.”
“It’s really that crude?”
“It’s what the technology allows.”
“Well, what we’d like is for you to have your satellites search for this same encryption scheme again. We figure that whoever made this call will continue to use this encrypted phone, and so now that we know the key, we can just pick up anything in the ether with that configuration, or whatever.”
“Doesn’t work that way,” Lindsay said. “Our satellites can’t tell any particular encryption scheme is being used until the signal is down-linked and examined.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me. Am I talking to the National Security Agency?”
Lindsay’s response was cold silence.
“All right,” Vigiani said, “what do you know about this intercept?”
“We know a number of things. We know it was a digital signal, to start with, which is helpful, because there aren’t that many digital phone signals out there in the ether yet. Soon, that’s all there will be. But not yet.”
“What else?”
“And we know which microwave relay station the signal was captured from, its exact location. It’s the Geneva North microwave relay, numbered Alpha 3021, located on a mountain north of Geneva. If our caller uses this phone again, the signal will likely be transmitted using the same relay. We can target that station.”
“Okay…”
“Also, each microwave relay station uses a known, fixed set of frequencies. We can tell our receiving station to listen in on these frequencies, scan them. Of course, we’ll ask the British, GCHQ, to monitor the same frequencies and process them. If we’re really lucky, we’ll record another signal that won’t decrypt.”
“Fine,” Vigiani said, “but this time get the phone number, okay?”
“Okay, right,” the NSA man said dryly. “You got it. Whatever you want.”
Vigiani got up from her desk and walked toward Sarah’s office. There, gathered around Sarah in a knot, were most of the task force members watching Sarah speak on the phone. Everyone, including Sarah, looked stricken.
“What?” she said to Ullman. “What is it?”
“It’s Duke,” he said without even turning to her.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
Straining to keep a semblance of order and calm, Sarah stood before the MINOTAUR task force. “Whatever our private suspicions,” she said, “we can’t rule out the possibility that Perry Taylor died in a-well, I hesitate to use the word ‘routine,’ but there it is-a routine holdup. At least that’s the way it looks to both the Bureau’s Crime Labs and Washington Police Homicide.”
“In a parking lot in broad daylight?” asked George Roth.
“It was early evening,” she said.
“But the sun was out,” Roth persisted.
“Okay, right, but his car was parked in a fairly remote area of the lot.”
Pappas shook his head, but Sarah couldn’t tell what he was thinking.
“Look,” Roth said, “Baumann wants us to think Taylor was held up. Does anyone here seriously think that’s what happened? I don’t know Taylor. You feebees, tell me: was he a drug user?”
“Of course not,” Vigiani said. “Obviously Baumann did this. Which means he’s in the U.S.”
Russell Ullman, to whom Perry Taylor had been something of a father figure, had been silent for most of the meeting. His eyes were rimmed in red. Now he spoke, his voice weak. “Has Crime Labs looked into the MO of the murders at Pollsmoor Prison to establish a correlation?”
“Yes,” Sarah said. “But there’s nothing.”
“How so?” Pappas asked.
“Taylor appears to have died from bullet wounds in the throat and forehead at fairly close range.”
“What do you think?” Vigiani exploded. “Baumann’s going to leave a signature-a billboard saying, ‘Here I am’? Come on!”
“All right,” Sarah said calmly. “You all may be right.”
Roth asked: “Any similarity between Taylor’s death and the death of your call-girl friend back in Boston?”
Sarah shook her head. “Ballistics tells me no.”
“If Duke was killed by Henrik Baumann,” said Pappas, “that tells us he’s not unwilling to kill a major FBI official, with all the heat that brings down. The question then is, what would his motive be? Nothing appears to have been stolen from Taylor or his car, except a wallet.”
“Baumann might have wanted the ID cards,” Ullman said. “Or he might have wanted to make it look like a mugging.”
“The motive,” Vigiani said, “was to try to paralyze the hunt for him. And if he’d kill Duke Taylor, he’d certainly kill any of us in an instant.”
On Jared’s third day in New York, on a Sunday afternoon, he insisted on going to the park to play. Sarah had worked all day Saturday, and had planned to work all day Sunday too, but at the last moment she relented. It was important for her to spend some family time with Jared. And she could do some work while he played. So they went to Strawberry Fields at West Seventy-second Street, and she read files while he batted a softball around by himself. It would have been a sad sight, this solitary kid in a brand-new leather jacket (a gift from Peter), tossing a ball up into the air and batting it, then running after it and starting all over again, were it not for the fact that he was so clearly enjoying himself.
In short order he had befriended another boy of roughly the same age who took turns pitching to him and then being pitched to. Relieved that he had met someone, Sarah returned to reading Bureau intelligence files on terrorist attempts within the United States.
The truth was, she was discovering, the Bureau’s record on catching terrorists was spotty. In 1986, she read, a domestic group called the El Rukin organization tried to buy an antitank weapon from an FBI undercover agent, intending to pull off some terrorist act in the United States in exchange for money from the Libyan government. A couple of years later, the FBI arrested four members of the Provisional Irish Republican Army who were trying to buy a heat-seeking antiaircraft missile in Florida.
Fine, but what about all the black-market weapons sales that the Bureau didn’t catch? Barely months after the TRADEBOM investigation, which Alex Pappas was justly so proud of, a ring of Sudanese terrorists was arrested in New York, and members of the Abu Nidal organization were apprehended in Ohio, Wisconsin, and Missouri.
Pappas talked of probabilities, but what were the odds, really, that the special working group would catch this terrorist-and without a photograph?
People liked to joke about the World Trade Center terrorists, with their rinky-dink operation, returning to Ryder Truck Rental to get their five-hundred-dollar security deposit back, but Sarah didn’t find it amusing. Sure, the World Trade Center bombers were jokers, clowns, amateurs, but look what they had accomplished. And imagine what a top-notch, professional terrorist like Henrik Baumann could do.
The Bureau had come close to cracking the Oklahoma City case, but so much of it was luck. One of the investigators had found a twisted scrap of truck axle with a legible vehicle identification number on it, and he fed that number into Rapid Start, one of the Bureau’s many databases, and then we were off. That was good, basic scut work-but the Bureau had also lucked out when it was discovered that a nearby ATM video camera had captured an image of the rental truck that contained the bomb. And then a cop happened to stop a guy for speeding, a guy who happened to be driving without a license. How many lucky breaks could MINOTAUR really count on?