Dragunov in the secret compartment. Let Stan and Amadullah play whatever game they wanted. Francesca had his own game. He was already thinking about how he might use the Dragunov on Coleman Young or John Wells. Maybe when he was done, he’d give Stan a taste of the rifle, too. Make him a hero the easy way, with one trigger pull. He could see the headlines:
No, Francesca would keep his mouth shut, wait for the right moment to find out what Stan was doing. Check and double-check. Calibrate and recalibrate. At that moment, Francesca understood more than ever why he loved being a Shadow. The trigger pull was the only true moment in the whole damn war. Everything else was a lie.
22
As soon as he hung up with Exley, Shafer started the process of putting together a Facebook profile for “Mindy Calhoun.” Mindy lived in Tempe, Arizona. She was twenty and a business major at Maricopa Community College. Her interests included the Green Bay Packers, Shia LaBoeuf, Kim Kardashian, and “Hot men in uniform! American only!”
Mindy’s profile had a half dozen photos, each naughtier than the next, though none pornographic enough to attract the attention of Facebook’s censuring software. The photos came from Corbis, though with a little help from the Directorate of Science and Technology, Shafer had tweaked them. Anyone who tried to find the originals through the image-recognition engines on the Internet would come up empty.
Mindy had a heart-shaped tattoo on her wrist and a blue mermaid for a tramp stamp. She looked ready for a few years as a Bud poster girl followed by a long career at Hooters. Within minutes of her creation, she had more than a hundred Facebook friends, mostly bots like her who lived in the CIA’s servers. That number was enough to make her credible to the soldiers whom Shafer wanted to friend. He picked guys from the South whose profiles showed no connections with Arizona. None of the facts on Mindy’s page were checkable except for her enrollment at Maricopa. Anyone who called the college would have found out that she didn’t exist. But as Shafer had expected, soldiers weren’t interested in running background checks. Forty-two accepted Mindy’s friend request within twelve hours. Several sent back messages that would have made Shafer blush if he were the blushing type. A couple guys were dumb enough to send pictures, too. Shafer wondered whether he’d been this horny when he was eighteen. Probably. And he hadn’t even been coping with the extra surge of testosterone that came with fighting a war.
After a day, Mindy had enough real soldiers as friends to make her profile believable even to someone who might have reason to be cautious, someone like Tyler Weston. So Shafer reached out to Weston.
And so Shafer had the chance to examine Weston’s roster of 332 friends, including Rodriguez — though not Roman. He worked through them, trying to find the Special Forces officer whom Young had described to Wells. He came up with three candidates on his first pass. But upon closer inspection, none of the three looked right. The first had rotated home a month earlier. The second operated mainly in the mountain provinces east of Kabul, not in southern Afghanistan. The third, a Ranger lieutenant named Allan Rose, operated out of Kandahar, but he had an airtight alibi. He’d been on a mission in Kandahar province on the night Young had seen the suspect at FOB Jackson.
Shafer expanded his search, friending Rodriguez and Roman. But he came up short there, too. Then inspiration struck. He turned to Jake Weston, Tyler’s older brother.
Ninety minutes later, Mindy and Jake were friends, at least by Facebook’s definition. And on Jake’s page, Shafer found D. Lorenzo, who had only two photos in his publicly available profile. The first showed him from the side, wearing a white T-shirt and a floppy hat. The hat hid Lorenzo’s face, but not the oversize ace of spades tattoo on his equally oversize bicep. The ace was a favorite of Delta ops. Under “location,” Lorenzo had posted
Shafer searched public and military records and couldn’t find Lorenzo. He wondered whether the name was an alias. Then he remembered that soldiers who wanted to protect their privacy while still giving friends a way to find them often used middle names instead of last on Facebook. Bingo. Within ten minutes, Shafer had him. Daniel Lorenzo Francesca. He’d joined the Army fourteen years before and grown up a half mile from Tyler and Jake Weston. Before Afghanistan, he’d been based at Fort Bragg, the home of the Deltas. Now his personnel file listed his status as
Shafer called Wells, who was back at Kandahar. Technically, General Nuton had banned Wells from every base he controlled, including KAF. But the airfield was so big that as long as Wells stayed away from Nuton’s headquarters, the general couldn’t know he was there.
“I have good news, John.”
“David Miller.”
“Better. I found the middleman. Name’s Daniel Lorenzo Francesca. He was a sniper in Iraq, Special Ops, and he joined Delta about five years ago.”
“Sniper.”
“He might have killed more guys than you.”
“Unlikely.”
“Jealous, John? He’s finishing his second tour in Afghanistan. Looks like he’s based at KAF.”
“You have a photo?”
“I’m working on it.” For obvious reasons, the Special Forces kept the names and faces of their operatives secret. The Deltas were doubly cautious. “I’ll get one from the North Carolina DMV. I’d rather not tip him yet.”
“He may already know. I’m looking for him.”
“Fair point.” The mole had probably warned Francesca after Wells showed up in Kabul. “Even if he knows we’re looking, let’s not let him know he’s been found. Anyway, his file’s strange.”
“Define strange.”
“As in, he seems to have gotten special language training. A few years ago, he went to the Defense Language Institute in Monterey for six months to learn Pashtun.”
“So?”
“So that’s unusual. JSOC usually views these guys as too valuable to pull them from the field that way. Plus I can’t figure out which Delta unit he’s part of. After Monterey, his assignment is listed as Delta/D71, no company or squad.”
“D71.”
“Correct.”
“You’re sure he’s our guy? You’re putting a lot on this Facebook connection.”
“
“Get me the photo and I’ll see what Coleman says.”
“I’ll do better than that. I’ll get you six guys and you can run a lineup.”
“Good. And let’s say Coleman recognizes this guy. What then? I go talk to him? Ask him about his heroin trafficking? Because I have a feeling that’s not going to do it. And I don’t think CID or the Deltas are going to want to hear about it either.”
“I have a plan.”
“Do tell.”
“Three steps. The first at Kandahar, the second here, and the third at FOB Jackson.” Shafer explained.
“I don’t like it,” Wells said when he was finished. “It feels like tying a goat to a tree and waiting for the lion to show up.”
“Except the goat’s got a gun.”
