120
Rubens bent over the console at one of the stations at the rear of the Art Room, watching the screen of an analyst who was monitoring and assisting police activity in Texas. He had a feed from a Customs Service aircraft, supplying an overhead view as an emergency response team of FBI and border patrol agents surrounded a tractor trailer south of Houston.
A series of links with Homeland Security gave the Art Room access to police networks as well as the FBI. The Texas Highway Patrol had found a truck with Mexican plates apparently abandoned at the edge of an auto wrecking yard. The plates were not on the watch list the Art Room had developed, but otherwise the truck looked very much like what they were looking for.
“No audio?” said Rubens.
“They’re using standard radios,” said the analyst. “We can get to the commander through the Homeland Security line and vice versa, but we don’t have real-time communications with the people on the scene.”
Rubens watched as the emergency response team — essentially a SWAT squad — cautiously approached the truck. Rather than risking a booby-trapped door, they climbed to the top, where they began cutting a hole to get in.
What if he was wrong? What if the warhead didn’t exist or was back in Peru? Babin certainly could be there, hiding somewhere in the Amazon with Tucume.
That mistake Rubens could live with. Far worse was a mistake that led to the destruction of an American city.
“Won’t be long now,” said the analyst.
“You have a list of stolen vehicles from this area?”
“As soon as the alert came in, I got it. I went all the way back to the border, tracing the route. There are only a dozen.”
“Only a dozen?”
“Not many people steal trucks, I guess.”
“Expand the search to include any sort of vehicle, anything large enough to hold a crated weapon. Sixty-six inches,” added Rubens. “Approximately.”
“Are you praying?” asked Johnny Bib.
“Uh, just stretching my back,” said Robert Gallo, twisting up from the floor. Though perhaps prayer would not have been inappropriate — he was having a very hard time nailing down any sort of indication that the container truck had made it into the U.S., let alone where it was going.
“Nothing in the state databases that you can use to find what sort of truck it is?” asked Johnny Bib, coming over to look.
“The states don’t keep very close tabs of trucks,” said Gallo. “I’ve, like, checked through the lists of, you know, road stops and stuff, those weigh-in things. Looked for mismatches and stuff. But nothing jumps out. This kind of isn’t my thing, you know? Searches? And like, what would I check? Vehicles most unlikely to be stopped?”
“I hope that’s not going to become your slogan,” said Johnny Bib. “Defeat.”
“It’s not defeat.”
Johnny began to shake his head back and forth without saying anything. He looked like a kid’s wind-up toy gone berserk.
“What if I looked for the target rather than the truck?” said Gallo. “What I was thinking was, check everything we have related to Babin, right? And then see if there are any links. Jeez, Johnny, could you stop? You’re giving me vertigo.”
“Exactly,” said his supervisor, without explanation. And he turned and walked from the room.
Puzzled, Gallo returned to his computer. He began another set of searches, this time a keyword search of NSA South American intercepts over the past week using “Stephan” rather than “Babin” as a keyword. Not surprisingly, he got about ten thousand hits.
He was about to run a Dredge search on the hits when he noticed that one of the entries on the last page had a name very similar to Babin — Baben. He looked and confirmed that it was simply a misspelling by the computerized transcription programs, which often relied on phonetic spellings and best choices if the intercept data was unclear.
The search system was programmed to find near misses in spelling. But did that tool apply when you were searching in foreign character sets?
Or rather, had the tool been in place three years before when the Babin intercepts were being compiled in Russian and the Cyrillic alphabet was being used?
As a matter of fact, it had. But to keep the tool from matching every possible word, Gallo realized as he played with it, it assumed that the first two letters were
“This isn’t my thing,” mumbled Gallo as he retrieved a list of old databases to apply the new search term to.
121
Rubens stared at the map on his computer screen, showing the area Babin could have reached by now. The purple swatch covered almost three-fourths of the country, with the tip just reaching toward the Beltway below Washington, D.C.
The truck in Texas appeared to have been the one Babin had taken from Mexico. The rear compartment had contained bathtubs — and the bumper had traces of blood. But that was all that had been found. How long the truck had been in the lot, where the blood had come from, what had happened to the bomb, assuming it had been there… no one knew.
All sorts of other leads were being investigated in Mexico as well as the U.S., including the murder of a truck driver near Mexico City and another closer to the border. But real information — the sort that would help them find Babin and the bomb — remained elusive.
At Montblanc’s suggestion, several psychologists had been consulted about the situation; all thought it likely that Babin would try to seek revenge against the people who had wronged him. This seemed rather obvious to Rubens as well.
The warhead’s arming mechanism had to be altered for it to explode. Babin had an engineering background and knew explosives; he was probably capable of doing the work.
But where? And when?
On this the psychologists divided. Washington, D.C., was an obvious target. So was Langley, Virginia, the home of the CIA. Beyond that, it was very possible that any city might do.
And when? Right away, said a narrow majority of the psychologists. He’d been waiting for years and now had his chance. At his own leisure, said the others. He’d been waiting for years and could afford to wait for weeks or months or even far longer.
Rubens thought sooner. But he had no evidence. And evidence was what he needed.
Large parts of the picture were still unseen. What was the connection between Babin and General Tucume? The housekeeper Karr had talked to had been taken into Peruvian custody, but she had apparently supplied very little information. Others in Tucume’s circle were still being debriefed, but the CIA summaries of the interrogations had no references to Babin, with the exception of a very brief appearance in Lima the night before the dam broke on the general. Investigators were trying to track down the men who had been under his command at the time the weapon was found; so far, they had little luck.
