No Fortunate Son (Pike Logan, #7)(69)
We sprinted back to the Grand Place square, putting distance between us and the damage we’d left behind.
48
Kurt heard his phone beep but knew switching to the other line would send his sister over the edge. He glanced at the display and saw it was George Wolffe, his deputy. The man in the passenger seat shouted, “Whoa!” and Kurt realized he was about to sail through a red light. He slammed on the brakes, causing the car behind him to blare his horn.
He said, “Sorry, Creed,” then brought the phone back up. George Wolffe was gone, and his sister was shouting, “Kurt, Kurt, you still there?”
He said, “Kathy, I’m about to get in a wreck in DC traffic. Look, I’ve given you all I have. We’re following up leads as fast as we can, and hopefully something will break free today. If it does, you’ll be the first to know.”
He saw his passenger, Bartholomew Creedwater, answer his own phone, and the traffic light went green. He pulled through the intersection and heard Kathy say, “If they found the pendant in Ireland, why are they now in Brussels? You’re not making any sense.”
Creed held out the phone and mouthed, George. Important.
A magician with anything digital, Bartholomew Creedwater worked inside the Taskforce Computer Network Operations cell—which is to say he was a hacker. Late the previous night, the proof-of-life Snapchat had arrived from the terrorists, and after the NSA had managed to capture the video before it self-destructed, he’d been given a crack at it for clues.
The Snapchat had been sent from a Wi-Fi signal, without touching the cell network, preventing the NSA from gleaning any geolocation data from the telephone architecture. Eggheads in the FBI spent the remainder of the night going through the video image itself, looking for clues. Creed had gone deeper, looking specifically at the digital ones and zeros. And had found something.
The cell used was an iPhone, which had a multitude of applications that accessed location services based on GPS. Keeping his fingers crossed, Creed had dissected the digital image, praying the terrorists had not disabled the feature that geotagged anything taken with the camera. They hadn’t. The video had a geolocation embedded within it. While the NSA furiously tried to track the MAC address of the Wi-Fi signal and the FBI attempted to derive a clue from the picture, Creed had found something better: the actual location where the video had been taken.
Just after midnight, Kurt had launched Knuckles to link up with an FBI HRT team on the ground in Paris, and the administration had mobilized the very seat of the French government. It had taken hours of work, but now an assault was imminent, and Kurt was taking Creed to the Situation Room as an advisor for any stupid questions that might arise from his computer magic. George first calling Kurt’s number, then Creed’s, could mean only bad news.
He put Creed’s phone to his ear. “Hey, Wolffe. What’s up?”
Without preamble, he said, “Grant Breedlove is dead. They found him murdered in his car out on the canal.”
“You’re shitting me?”
“No. Last contact was someone claiming to have information on a story, about the same time we were getting the Snapchat. He left, and nobody heard from him again. They found him this morning. Bullet hole in the head, contact burns. Up close and personal.”
“And? Not to be callous, but why do I care?”
“The president’s going batshit. He wants to know if we did it.”
“Seriously?”
“Well, not just us, but anybody in the intelligence community.”
“He knows better than that. He’s been president for over six years. Nobody would assassinate a journalist over a story.”
“I’m not so sure.”
“Come on. If that were the case, WikiLeaks would have been bloody years ago.”
“Stakes are different now. It’s not an amorphous threat to national security. It’s personal. How far would you go if a journalist was going to jeopardize Kylie?”
“Not that far.”
George said nothing.
Kurt let the silence hang, then said, “So he’s looking at anyone with skin in the game?”
“I don’t know, but it’s threatening to derail Paris operations until he gets answers.”
Just great.
“Is Knuckles set?”
“Yeah. He’s linked up with the hostage rescue guys. They think he’s SOCOM. All the French know is he’s FBI HRT.”
“We got comms with him?”
“Yeah. He’ll report to Taskforce, but your comms in the Situation Room will be coming straight from the FBI.”
“GIGN has the ball?”
“They’re on site. According to Knuckles’s last SITREP, the majority of the Parisian gendarmerie is working the problem.”
“Then the president may not have a say anymore. The French will go with their own protocols.”
* * *
Knuckles softly approached the pack of men huddled around a video screen, wanting to get some information on where they stood. Watching the French conduct their precombat checks, he was growing a little more comfortable with merely being an observer.
As a Navy SEAL, he’d never cross-trained with the Groupe d’Intervention de la Gendarmerie Nationale—the vaunted counterterrorist unit known as GIGN—but they had one of the best reputations of any such element, and watching them plan, he could see why.