must have been first class.”
“Thanks, but the entire control room crew was killed and one of Gruen’s people was taken out too, along with Kirk McGarvey’s partner. It was a screwup from the moment it started, and I was the administration’s hotshot who was supposed to make sure shit like that never went down.”
Yablonski gave her a hard, critical stare then nodded. “Yup, you did screw up, but that particular scenario wasn’t in your playbook.”
“It should have been.”
“So you’re taking all the blame, is that it? Instead of analyzing what you let happen, how to guard against it ever happening again, and finding out who did this to us and why, so I can chase down some leads and find out how I screwed up, you’re going to wallow in self-pity?”
She looked away. “Shit,” she said. Mac had said almost the same thing to her, and just as bluntly. And he had handed her a lifeline, which she had temporarily blocked out of her head. She turned back and actually managed a slight smile. “But that was a nice speech.”
“I worked on it all morning, soon as I found out you guys were on the way up.”
Gail took the disk out of her jacket pocket and handed it to him. “This is what we recorded from one of our video cams at the visitors center’s parking lot.” She came around behind his desk so she could watch the video.
“Do we maybe have a suspect?” Yablonski asked, bringing the disk up on one of his monitors. It was nighttime and the parking lot was empty.
She explained about the man on the tour she’d seen at the control-room observation window. “A few minutes later one of my security people called and said a man showed up back at the visitors center, claimed he was sick and drove off. A little bit after twelve.”
“Same guy who caught your attention?” Yablonski asked, fast-forwarding the video.
“I didn’t know it at the time, but I had my suspicions, so I talked to the people at the visitors center who checked him in under the name Robert Benson, a schoolteacher from San Francisco. Same description. He’d told them earlier that after the tour he had an appointment up in Jacksonville. But when he left, he headed south. The wrong way.”
Yablonski had gotten to the section of the recording that showed a man walking across the parking lot to a blue Ford Taurus. “That him?”
“Yes. Can you get the tag number?”
Yablonski paused the disk and magnified the image, centering on the license plate. “Florida, Dade County, Z12 5LS.” They watched as the man got into the car, pulled out of the parking lot, and turned to the south on A1A.
“Didn’t look sick to me,” Gail said.
“Or guilty,” Yablonski said. He pulled up a search program, got into Florida’s Division of Motor Vehicles for Dade County and brought up the tag number. “Hertz, Miami International,” he said. Next, he hacked into the Hertz computer system. “Okay, rented yesterday morning to Robert Benson, San Francisco. Your guy.”
“Has the car been turned in yet?”
“Two thirty yesterday afternoon.”
“Shit,” Gail said. “It’s not likely he left any forensic evidence for us.”
“Probably not. Anyway the car went out this morning on a one-week rental,” Yablonski said. “But we’re not done yet.” He pulled up San Francisco’s Motor Vehicle Department, and brought up Robert Benson’s driver’s license, which included an address, a thumbprint, height, weight, and a photograph.
“That’s not him,” Gail said. “So what the hell happened to the real Benson?” But she knew damn well what had happened to the man, who in all likelihood was lying dead in a field somewhere, or maybe at the bottom of the bay. “Check the city police files.”
“Don’t tell me how to do my job, dear girl,” Yablonski said, already headed in that direction. But they came up blank. Next he hacked into the school district’s mainframe, bringing up Benson’s file. “He’s on vacation, not due back until the fifth.”
“He’s never coming back,” Gail said. “The son of a bitch killed him.”
Yablonski looked up at her. “I’ll go along with that assumption for the moment. But why him, why that particular man?”
“He had a timetable, so he went looking for someone about the same height and weight, and killed him for his identity.”
“That’s a stretch even for a cop. I mean how the hell does he pick out the one poor sap in the entire country who he’s going to pose as?” Yablonski shook his head. “Either your guy is brilliant or he knows something we don’t. And by now he’s long gone, certainly not back to California.”
“Australia or maybe South Africa,” Gail said. “The clerk at the visitors center said he spoke with an English accent — but she didn’t think it sounded like he was a Brit.”
Yablonski glanced toward the plate-glass window, and picked up his phone. “It’s okay, let him in.”
Gail turned as McGarvey said something to one of the clerks, then came across the data center, and walked in. He nodded to Gail.
“Mr. McGarvey, I presume,” Yablonski said. “Good job at Hutchinson Island.”
“Not good enough,” McGarvey said. “My friends call me Mac.”
“Mine call me Eric,” Yablonski said and he rose to shake McGarvey’s hand. “Let me guess, French assigned you to find the terrorists, you asked to have Gail help, and he tossed me in to the bargain.”
“Do you know Otto Rencke?”
Yablonski grinned. “Never met the man, but everybody in my business knows him or knows of him, and we’re all in a bit of awe.”
McGarvey nodded. “He can be a little scary sometimes. I’m going to ask him to give us a hand, and if you’ll agree, I’d like you to work with him.”
“Absolutely,” Yablonski said without hesitation.
Gail explained what they had come up with so far, tracing the man on the video as far as San Francisco, where they’d run into a dead end.
“Not quite,” McGarvey said. “At least you’ve established that he had taken someone else’s identity. Makes him our prime suspect, along with Forcier.”
“But why San Francisco?” Yablonski asked. “Why not Denver, or Chicago, or Indianapolis. According to Gail the people who talked to him said he had an English accent, maybe Australian. So why not Sydney or Melbourne?”
“When we find him, I’ll ask. Do we have any images of his face?”
“Not on this disk,” Yablonski said. “But he took a tour inside the plant, at least as far as the control room observation corridor. He’ll be on some of those disks.”
“If the radiation hasn’t fried them and if we can get in to retrieve them,” Gail said. “But I got a pretty good look at his face so I can give a description to a police artist. Maybe we’ll get lucky.
“What about Forcier? Was he scheduled to be on duty?”
“No, but he had the proper ID card to get inside. It’s likely he met our Aussie and let him in.”
“Could this guy have gotten a weapon or the Semtex past security in the visitors center?” McGarvey asked.
“Not a chance,” Gail said. “But Forcier could have brought the stuff in. Nobody checks the employees. We run a pretty vigorous background check on our people before we offer them a job. I don’t remember Forcier specifically, but he was fully vetted for work in the control room, which meant his background investigation had to have been rock solid.”
“Obviously somebody missed something, so keep trying with the Australian and Forcier. In the meantime I’ll get Otto started, and then take a run out to San Francisco, see what I can dig up.”
“Do you want me to tag along?” Gail asked.
“No. For now just stick it out here,” he told her. “I’ll have Otto call you and you can pool resources. But my guess is that this guy isn’t Australian; you might try South African ex-special forces or the SASS, their secret service.”
Yablonski’s phone rang and he picked it up, but the call was for McGarvey. “Dr. Larsen.”
