That was comforting.
“I would probably want the trucks close by,” I said. “Maybe already parked here in the city. Or someplace close. If I were you, I’d search every place a You-Ride truck could be parked right now. Parking garages, alleys, whatever.”
Osborne looked back at me. He didn’t seem impressed with my suggestion. I figured that was because he was already doing that very thing.
Everyone went quiet for a while.
“What about those two guys-Patrick Cahill and Ernie Dwyer? I mean, those guys probably know everything.”
Osborne was shaking his head before I finished my sentence. “We haven’t been able to crack them. Those boys are hard-core. We don’t know if there’s an operation at all, of course. And if there is, I’m not sure they would have operational knowledge. If everything you believe about Randall Manning is true, then he has managed to prepare this entire attack without drawing our attention. It means he’s meticulous. It wouldn’t shock me if the soldiers didn’t know the details.”
We reached the federal building-known derisively by the criminal element as the “brown building”-and drove down the ramp leading underground. I could already see a heightened presence at the perimeter of the building.
“Put on your thinking cap, Jason,” said Lee. “It’s all hands on deck. We need all the help we can get.”
92
The federal agents and I went to the fifteenth floor of the federal building, which appeared to be command central. I’m not usually the nosy sort, and this wasn’t a tour-they were walking me along one wall and taking me into a conference room-but I snuck a few peeks around me. There were projection screens showing satellite coverage of what I assumed to be the city’s downtown and near north. Agents were tapping on computer keyboards and reviewing all sorts of information and speaking into headsets.
I really didn’t have a sense of the scope of this operation. What Osborne had said to me in the car rang true- they reviewed threats or potential threats all the time, on a daily basis, around the clock. Where did this one fall in the spectrum?
Inside the conference room, there were documents lying on a long table. There were dossiers on Randall Manning, Stanley Keane, Bruce McCabe, Patrick Cahill, and Ernie Dwyer. There were photographs of Summerset Farms that looked awfully familiar, as well as shots of Global Harvest International.
There were photographs of a standard You-Ride rental truck, too. It was a yellow truck with a front cabin and then a large cargo area behind. Not the longest model-not quite the size of truck you’d rent to move out of your house-but not the shortest, either. I was no expert, but there had to be plenty of room in that cabin to transport a bomb.
“Stay in here and let us know if anything occurs to you,” said Osborne. “We’ll be in and out ourselves. We’ll have questions, you might have an idea. That kind of thing. Remember, the key is trying to figure out the location of those three trucks. The best outcome is that we stop them before they get anywhere near their targets.”
“I’m impressed,” I said. “Usually you feds think you’re so smart, you don’t need any help.”
He stared at me for a moment, then smiled. “True enough, Kolarich. But if you’re right and something’s about to go down, then we’re way, way behind these guys. We’ve only had a couple of days, and they’ve probably had a year. I’ll take all the smart minds I can get.” He nodded at me. “And you can help, too.”
A nice parting jab. I spent the next two hours reviewing everything I could get my hands on. To their credit, the feds had done a pretty thorough job, on very short time, of trying to put together information on Manning and GHI and all of this. It was probably a good thing that Lee Tucker and I had some history and that, no matter what he may have thought of me on a personal level, I had established some credibility with him. From my circumstantial ruminations, they had managed to do a lot of digging in short order.
I was in a windowless room and time seemed to be a fleeting concept, which was interesting given the ticking clock with which we were working. My watch, and stomach, told me it was approaching dinnertime.
My cell phone buzzed. I didn’t recognize the number, so I didn’t answer. But I listened to the voice-mail message. It was Dr. Baraniq, our expert, in his clipped, precise manner, wondering what the time frame might be for his testimony this week in the Stoller trial.
I’d forgotten to call him and give him the news that there wouldn’t be any testimony. It brought me back momentarily from a terrorist plot to Tom’s case, a case I felt, deep down, that I had botched. I’d been arrogant. I’d overplayed my hand.
I called Shauna to check in. I told her what I could but explained that I was being sworn to silence for now.
“So there’s not going to be an evacuation or anything?”
I sighed. “I don’t know. I don’t think even they’ve decided one way or another. I mean, we’ve put together some facts that look ominous, but the truth is, they don’t know if this is going to happen tomorrow or if it’s going to happen at all. And think what our country would be like if every time they heard some scary chatter, a major metropolitan center just ground to a halt? Think about Al Qaeda or the Brotherhood of Jihad, or homegrown lunatics. They’d set up hoaxes and watch us go crazy chasing our tails, evacuating cities and destroying our way of life. It would be death by a thousand cuts. They’d win without ever killing a single person.”
Shauna was quiet for a long time. “Sounds like they’ve indoctrinated you.”
“I can see their point of view. Me, I think it’s happening tomorrow. I think Manning is timing this so that he attacks our government on the anniversary of what was, for a long time, the single worst attack on American soil.”
“You’d think they would’ve chosen September eleventh.”
That was a good point. I wondered why they didn’t. Maybe because security was too high on that day? The government was far less likely to expect an attack on Pearl Harbor Day.
“Anyway,” I said, “promise me, kiddo. Nobody goes near downtown tomorrow.”
“I promise,” she said.
I walked over to the doorway of my windowless room and looked out. Dozens of dedicated agents were trying their best to separate threats from hoaxes, imminent from distant, likely from unlikely. They were trying to locate three You-Ride rental trucks, rigged with deadly explosives, within a metropolitan population of three million people. They were flailing, grappling in the dark for something, anything.
And so was I. I’d gone through most of the documents on the table, trying to stir a thought or memory, to no avail. The only truth I knew, at this moment, was turning my stomach into a battleground, filling my chest with a poisonous dread.
We had no idea where those three trucks were located.
Lee Tucker walked into my conference room at eleven o’clock that evening. Agents had been in and out of this room over the last several hours, asking questions and throwing out ideas. I had tossed out some of my own. But I could tell, as the night wore on, that nothing I could come up with was getting us anywhere.
Lee looked over a half-eaten pizza and considered a slice. “I should have taken this more seriously from the first time you talked to me,” he said.
I didn’t reply. He was right. But these guys had a tough job, sorting through all this shit constantly.
“Well, it’s over,” he told me. “We’re done looking. We’ve satisfied ourselves that there is no truck containing bomb material within the commercial district. Not on the streets, not in parking garages or parking lots. We’ve gone block by block.”
“What about private residences?”
He shrugged. “There aren’t many of those with garages that could hold one of those You-Ride trucks. They’re ten feet tall. But anyway, anything we came across, we checked. We knocked on doors and got permission or sometimes didn’t wait for permission.” He shook his head. “If these truck bombs really exist-”
“They do.”
“-then they aren’t down here yet.”
