'We've got to get rid of that bomb so we can get into the computer,' Grace was telling Knudsen. 'Those trucks in there all have remote computer units. The one inside that building is the host, and obviously it already sent out the detonation command. There's got to be an abort in there somewhere.'
Knudsen gestured with his phone. 'Nearest bomb squad is in Green Bay. We'll get them on a chopper, along with some computer experts.'
'How long?' Magozzi asked.
'Two hours. At least.'
Grace checked her watch and moved her head impatiently. 'Not fast enough. There's less than three hours until those trucks blow.'
Knudsen shot her a furious look, as if she were the enemy. Why the hell was the woman wearing riding boots? Damn things had to be hotter than hell. And that big ugly mutt glued to her leg looked like he wanted to rip his throat out. 'You think I don't know that? I'm waiting for a callback from Bill Turner. He's the best bomb man in the country, but he's in D.C, and we're having trouble locating him. It's Sunday morning. He's probably in some goddamned church somewhere.'
Magozzi looked at the agent who looked both twenty years younger and a thousand years older than he had ten minutes ago, a little surprised by his choice of adjectives. He was starting to sound more like a person and less like FBI, and that was not necessarily a good sign. 'Even if you find this guy in the next few seconds, what's he going to be able to do from D.C?'
'He can walk me through deactivation.'
'You've done this before?'
Knudsen narrowed his eyes at Grace. She sounded like an interrogator. 'No. But we've run out of options. We don't even know where the targets are, those two trucks are already on-site. . . .'
'And filled with sarin,' Bonar said matter-of-factly, and Knudsen jerked his head to glare at him.
'You want to tell me how you know which nerve gas it is?'
Bonar opened his hands. 'The names they gave the trucks, of course.'
Knudsen closed his eyes. Too many people knew too many things these days. The information age was killing them.
'What about all the other information on the screen in there?' Gino asked. 'A bunch of those numbers keep changing. Maybe that's latitude or some of that shit that tells where the trucks are.'
Knudsen shook his head. 'The trucks aren't moving anymore, according to that computer. Besides, I know what those tables are. I've seen them before. They estimate initial dispersal distances based on a lot of factors, like wind speed, direction, humidity . . .'
'Hey.' Roadrunner turned to Harley. 'We could plug those numbers into that stat program and link up with the National Weather Service. What are the chances that any two locations in this country are having exactly the same fluctuations in weather conditions at exactly the same time?'
'Sounds good, but it'll take a while.'
Knudsen was frowning at the two of them, then his face cleared. 'Oh, yeah. I almost forgot. Kingsford County undercover computer crimes, right?'
Grace and Annie looked sideways at their partners.
'Right,' Harley said.
'It was a good thought, but even if we found those trucks in the next ten minutes, chances are they're in an urban area and we won't be able to get them to a safe disarmament location in time.'
'So we're right back where we started,' Grace said. 'We have to get into that computer and find the abort.'
'Looks that way . . .' Knudsen's phone rang, and he jammed it up to his ear so hard that Gino thought it was a miracle it didn't go all the way through his head. 'Knudsen!' he shouted, listened for ten seconds, then threw the phone down on the ground. 'Apparently, Bill Turner took a goddamned fucking Sunday drive in the country with his family.'
Suddenly, Grace jerked her head to look at something, then took off at a run. She stopped at Doug Lee's patrol car and nearly ripped the passenger door off the hinges when she opened it to dig inside. A second later, she was running toward them, carrying a dripping black case. She wiped it on the grass and set it in front of Roadrunner.
'Whose laptop?'
'The guy in the car. He was one of them, but he wasn't wearing fatigues like the others. His job was something else, maybe that setup in the building, since this was where he brought us-someplace he was familiar with, someplace he knew was empty so he could kill us without any interference. . . .'
Roadrunner smiled faintly and popped open the case. 'So he was the geek.'
Annie and Harley had already crowded close to see the screen. 'And geeks always have backups,' Annie said.
The monitor came to life and proved them right.
By that time, everyone else was kneeling or crouching around them, all watching the little laptop screen like wide-eyed kids examining an exotic bug. Sharon was behind Annie, her hand on her shoulder, for balance of many kinds.
Magozzi recognized the first image as a duplicate of what had been on the computer inside the building. 'So it's a sort of a mirror image?'
'It had better be.'
Roadrunner punched a few keys, accessed the programming code, and scrolled down at warp speed.
'What are you looking for, precisely?' Knudsen asked from the back of the group. He was on his knees, getting grass stains on his nicely pressed pants.
Harley answered without looking around. 'All this stuff scrolling by? This is the brain that runs the whole shebang, and somewhere in here, there are command lines that control whether or not that bomb goes off.'
Bonar was staring, shaking his head. 'It all looks the same.'
Gino nodded. 'Alphabet soup with numbers in it. My kid eats that stuff. How the hell do you tell when you find the right line? There must be a million of them in there.'
Roadrunner stopped the scroll and pointed. 'Here.'
Harley looked, then nodded. 'One of those two, anyway. Funny that this guy would be that sloppy on the bomb command lines, when the rest of it looks so tight.'
'They didn't expect Four Corners,' Grace reminded him. 'This was a last-minute setup when they thought they might be discovered.'
'Man, I don't know.' Harley was shaking his big head. 'Could be either one of those two command lines, and fifty percent are some pretty bad odds when you're talking plastique. Let's get this thing in the rig and online and see if it's a talker. If it is, we can work on it on the road while we get the hell away from that building.'
The only bad part of that good idea was that it didn't work. After thirty minutes in the RV trying to connect the laptop to the computer in the building, Roadrunner disconnected the thing from his software analysis unit in the bus and headed for the door, laptop tucked under his arm. 'If there ever was a communications program in here, it's been wiped. No way we can talk to the trucks through this thing, no way we can get into the main computer to stop the clock.'
Magozzi was hurrying after him. 'I thought it was a mirror image.'
'Yeah.' Harley stomped behind. 'But somebody broke a piece off, and that was the piece we needed. Roadrunner, where the hell are you going?'
'To shut off the bomb.'
'Roadrunner.' Grace's voice stopped him when no one else's might have. He turned back and looked down the aisle at her, and then he smiled, which seemed an odd thing to do under the circumstances.
'What is it, Grace?'
'We've got two possible command-line sequences hooked up to that plastique. We don't know which one it is.'
'I'll figure it out. Be right back.'
Knudsen was just outside the RV, talking into his sat phone; Halloran was a respectful distance away, smoking. Knudsen was flapping his hand in front of his face as if all the outside air in the world weren't enough to
