Strong Cold Dead (Caitlin Strong, #8)(64)
“Daniel Cross wasn’t born a monster, Cort Wesley.”
“Oh no?”
“He was born with a genius IQ. Forty points less and maybe he’s loading a gun instead of planning to build a bomb. Adults failed him at every stage of his life, from his mother all the way to me. And ever since I realized who he was, from that old picture, I’ve been racking my brain, trying to figure what else I could have done.”
“It ever occur to you there was nothing more you could’ve done?”
“Nope, not for a minute.” Caitlin’s phone rang. “Captain Tepper,” she told Cort Wesley before answering it. “I’m off the clock, D.W.”
“Not if you’re wearing your gun, Ranger, and since you’re not asleep, it’s a safe assumption you are. Whatever you’re doing, stop, and get over to the office five minutes ago to join the party.”
“What gives, Captain?”
“If I told you, you wouldn’t believe me. But I can’t tell you anyway, given this isn’t what your friend Jones calls a ‘secure line.’”
“He’s there too?”
“It’s his show, Caitlin, and you definitely want to be here when the curtain goes up.”
60
SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS
Caitlin and Cort Wesley entered the conference room of Company F headquarters late. Everyone else was already assembled, including Doc Whatley, an honorary Ranger named Young Roger, and four unidentified faces occupying equal quadrants of a wall-mounted wide-screen.
“I guess we can begin now,” said Jones from the head of the table, clearly indicating that Homeland Security was in charge here. “Doctor Whatley, chief medical examiner of Bexar County, has been assigned by Homeland to run point on this until CDC and other authorities are totally up to speed.”
Caitlin thought she saw Jones’s eyes glimmer when he said “other authorities.” And then his gaze moved to her, holding briefly, as if he could read her thoughts, before continuing.
“We’ll get to a review of the particulars of yesterday’s incident in Austin shortly. First, I want to cover something goddamn divine Providence has dropped in our laps.”
Jones touched a remote, changing the wide-screen view from the four faces to a shot of three men inside a car. Caitlin recognized the occupant in the back as none other than Daniel Cross. She’d never seen the two in the front seat before.
“The man in the driver’s seat is Razin Saflin,” Jones continued, again seeming to read her mind. “The one seated shotgun is Ghazi Zurif. Both born to first-generation Americans whose parents emigrated from Lebanon and became model American citizens—their children too. Their grandchildren are something else again.”
Jones touched another button on the remote and the screen split into two halves; the left displayed a dossier on Saflin, and the right a dossier on Zurif.
“Our intelligence indicates they showed no interest in Middle Eastern or Arab affairs whatsoever for the first twenty-seven years of their lives. That all changed when ISIS hit the ground running. Suddenly, they began making trips to the home country they’d never visited before—three in all. On each occasion they took side trips to Turkey, where our assets in the region lost track of them. Homeland flagged them for scrutiny by the FBI after incidental evidence showed they crossed over into Syria, at least one report further indicating they had direct contact with ISIS leaders. Our boots on the ground here have tried to reach out to them through traditional social media channels, employing the latest code words, but those overtures have been spurned at every turn, making them a lower surveillance priority, particularly when they exhibited no pattern of activity consistent with homegrown terrorist behavior.” Jones paused dramatically. “That all changed yesterday.”
Jones flipped back to the original grainy picture of Saflin and Zurif, with Daniel Cross centered in the backseat between them.
“This was taken by a local Austin policeman manning a checkpoint a few blocks from Hoover’s Cooking. He did nothing more than rap on their window to ask them to move their vehicle. That’s it. But his body camera caught what you’re seeing now, and our software pinged on their faces.”
Which implies that Homeland has access to every security, police, and maybe even traffic camera in the country, Caitlin thought, picturing a computer the size of the Company F building sorting through the billions and billions of bits of data in search of pings like the one displayed on the wide-screen before her.
“The fact that the two of them are pictured in the vicinity of the attack,” Jones was saying now, “along with who they’re pictured with, there in the backseat, has us operating at DEFCON one in a figurative sense.” Jones used the remote to zoom in on Daniel Cross’s face, turning it even grainier. “This beauty here used the Deep Web to make overtures to ISIS commanders overseas. From what we’ve been able to glean, he claimed to have knowledge of a weapon that could help ISIS ‘kick the shit out of America.’ That’s an exact quote, people. We’ve had eyes on Cross, but until today had never linked him to the likes of Saflin and Zurif. Confession time, folks: two days ago we decided to move in on Cross in preemptive fashion, but my team missed him, by a few hours probably. And now we’re left with the conclusion that whatever he promised to provide ISIS has gone operational, which brings us to the particulars as we know them at the moment.”