Velocity (Karen Vail #3)(119)
Vail was starting to perspire, and realized she probably looked ridiculous wearing Robby’s jacket. She pulled it off and said, “They may be waiting for something. Is that garage anywhere near Villarreal’s place?”
“Yes,” Ruth said. “So here’s the plan. The task force will go airborne and assist the search. There’s a helicopter tour business at the airport, right off the strip. They do evening tours of the casinos, so you won’t raise any red flags. You don’t have any identifying markers on that Huey, correct?”
Turino, sitting at the end of the table, a symbolic banishment from the rest of the task force, said, “It’s Marine green. Nothing that says DEA. Against the black sky, we’ll be fine.”
Vail had doubts about the “we’ll” in Turino’s comment, but she let it pass.
“Very good. From there,” Ruth said, “it depends where Hernandez is, where the cartel members are. We can’t formulate a viable tactical plan until we’re sure of where they’re going to be when we move in. We’ve got a SWAT unit on standby, deployed one mile out. I don’t want any cartel spotters catching a glimpse of our rigs hanging around the strip. Even if we move in with their bread truck plastered with fake magnetic plumbing or electrical signs on the side, there’s a chance they’ll be made. I don’t wanna blow this before we have a chance to get close to Hernandez.”
“We’ve got no valid intel whether or not Villarreal truly intends to hand over Hernandez,” Gifford said. “So we’re treating this as a hostile hostage situation until or unless we find convincing proof otherwise.”
“You’ll coordinate with SWAT,” Ruth continued. “When you’ve gotten eyes on the layout of the area and have an estimate of how many there are and where they’re holed up, take up your positions and turn the show over to SWAT. Set down on that helicopter tour business’s landing pad and stay out of the way until the area is secured and Hernandez is safely in custody. Let’s do this right.”
Vail tried not to squirm in her seat. She expects me to sit on the sidelines while they go after Robby? Is this woman serious?
Clar stepped up to the white board. He pulled a cap off the red marker and wrote in abbreviated strokes as he spoke: “First objective. Locate and secure Roberto Hernandez. Second. Identify, locate, and take down members of the Cortez cartel. Now, for those of you who aren’t familiar with Vegas, the strip is almost always densely packed with tourists. If we pull our side arms and start blasting away, it’ll be near impossible to avoid striking innocents. So third objective. Minimize collateral damage.”
“The order of objectives,” Ruth said, “depends on logic, not priority. Clearly it’s of paramount importance to rescue our man. SWAT has been briefed on Velocity, so they understand our challenges. But I want there to be no confusion: given a choice of securing Hernandez or preserving the success of Velocity, we save the life.”
Vail, Dixon, and DeSantos shared a look. They then turned to Turino in unison, who looked away. Vail’s gaze was particularly harsh.
“It’s our assessment,” Clar said, “that Velocity will not be adversely affected by this op. Cortez knows we’d be looking for Hernandez, so any action we initiate will be seen in that light.”
Exactly. Vail kept an unforgiving gaze on Turino until he turned back in her direction. After a long second of silent anger between them, he looked away.
Clar capped the marker and tossed it down. “I’ve brought along an electronic tracking device that’ll assist us in triangulating Officer Hernandez’s position using Sandiego Ortega’s cell signal.” He rooted around inside a charcoal gray rucksack and pulled out a black PDA-size unit. Its top consisted of a dark, shiny glass display, with brushed aluminum sides. He held it up and said, “Meet LOWIS.”
“Lois, as in Lois Lane?” DeSantos asked.
“As in low output wave imaging sensor. L-O-W-I-S. She’s tuned to the quantized discrete-time signal emanating from the ESN—the electronic serial number—of that phone.”
“I’m no physics major,” Mann said, “but it sounds like a similar kind of technology that allows cell towers to identify particular phones on a network.”
“It does utilize that technology, but it takes it a step further. Mobile phones are like two-way radios. They regularly send out bits of data signals, called ‘pings,’ to the nearest cell tower every two or three minutes. It’s a way for the phone and the tower to know where each other is so they can communicate when a call is initiated. The towers forward the location of that phone back to the network. LOWIS uses a smart ping, a unique identifier that we’ve captured and that she’s now tuned for. Which means she’s like a hound dog on a scent.”
“I’ve never seen one of those,” DeSantos said. “And I tend to come across a lot of fancy technoelectronics the government’s got.”
“This won’t show up in any government agency. Not yet. It’s totally experimental. This is the prototype. I built it myself. Well, myself and a buddy of mine in Russia.”
“One other thing,” Gifford said. “The FBI is in the process of remotely turning off the ringer on Ortega’s phone. Once that’s done they’re going to switch on the microphone. That way, if the phone is powered off, we’ll still be able to listen in.”