Incendiary Dispatch. Don Pendleton
number.”
“They’re originating somewhere,” Schwarz said.
The phone was still ringing.
“Tell me you got something, Barb!” Brognola barked from far away in D.C.
“Got it!” Tokaido said. “Tracking back!”
“How far can you get, Akira?” Price asked with an unreal calm.
“I don’t know!”
“Bear?” Price urged.
“We’re moving!” Kurtzman said. “We’re getting through!”
“Through to what?” Brognola asked.
Barbara Price shook her head at him. She wasn’t going to ask for an explanation right now.
“Got the bastard!” Tokaido said.
“Seeing it,” responded the low, calm rumble of Huntington Wethers. “Identifying that picocell as a nanoGSM. Sending you the serial number.”
“I’m accessing the OMC-R,” Tokaido said.
Hawkins, standing at Tokaido’s shoulder, made a face at Schwarz. “He can access the Operations and Management Center-Radio?” he whispered.
“I’m in,” Tokaido crowed. His fingers stabbed at the keys. He spoke angrily at the LCD screen. “You are not getting past me again.”
His fingers stopped. He sat there staring at the screen. Kurtzman pushed back from his monitor.
“Okay, it’s off,” Kurtzman said. “He turned it off. Akira, you did it. It’s off.”
“Yeah. I know.”
“Holy shit. That was fast-ass hackwork, my friend,” Hawkins said, clapping Tokaido on the shoulder.
“Yeah.” Tokaido didn’t seem to share Hawkins’s enthusiasm. He began typing again furiously. “Gonna cover my tracks.”
“We know where the picocell is, right?” Schwarz demanded.
“I can give you a street address,” Wethers confirmed. “In Barcelona.”
“Let’s go get that damned box!” Hawkins said.
“Will it do us any good?” Price asked.
“It just might,” Kurtzman said. “The picocell, the base station controller—the radio operations and maintenance hardware give us a way into the system.”
“Sounds like a weak link. As soon as they know it’s compromised they’ll stop using it. Or incinerate it,” Price suggested.
“Maybe not,” Tokaido announced. “There’s a power outage in that end of the city. They’ll have battery backup but I told the Operations and Management Center for the nanoGSM to take steps against a surge. Maybe they’ll believe that was the reason their signals stopped going out.”
“A power outage caused by?”
Tokaido grimaced and held up ten wiggling fingers, then kept typing.
“They’ll never believe the timing was coincidental,” Price replied.
“I’m creating a record in the OMC of several hours of power fluctuations on the grid,” Tokaido said. “If I’m this terrorist, then I’m gonna dedicate my picocell to my own job. I’m not sharing it with anybody. Which means the picocell’s had low-volume traffic all day until the high volume of signals at 8:04 Eastern time. I’m making it look like the thing was cycling on and off. When the high volume of calls started, it was too at-risk and the system shut itself down again.”
“A good IT guy will see through it.”
“They might see through it anyway,” Price snapped. “But we’ll be there if they’re not. Phoenix?”
“We’re gone,” McCarter snapped, and the room cleared of the five members in seconds.
“Carmen?” Price said.
“Transport to Barcelona is standing by for Phoenix Force,” Delahunt replied. Aircraft, like almost all dedicated Stony Man resources, had been standing by since the first attack. “Ground transport will be waiting for them in Barcelona.”
“Can I get an update here?” Brognola said.
Price walked to the screen and quickly summarized the rapid-fire chain of events. “We tracked down a specific picocell as the source of the calls going out. A picocell is a phone cell system. An office building might have one for dedicated mobile phone traffic. The hardware’s not large.”
“How large?” Brognola asked. “Would it need a dedicated IT room? Extra air-conditioning? That kind of thing?”
“No, Hal,” Kurtzman broke in, wheeling away from his desk. “The picocell itself, the operations and maintenance hardware, the base station, none of it’s bigger than a PC tower. The biggest piece would be a battery backup. That’s a 150-pound box, maybe.”
“Think they’ll buy the story about the power fluctuations?”
“If they have enough IT skill to look into the source of the problem, and not so much they analyze operational logs—maybe,” Kurtzman said.
“Or maybe they’ll play it safe and just burn it down. They’ll have backup phone systems,” Brognola said. He was staring at his own offscreen monitors. Barbara Price didn’t know what he was looking at. She would have time, soon enough, to assess the latest series of attacks.
“We’re working on tracing the destinations of the phone calls,” Kurtzman announced.
“I’m into the Mobile interface,” Tokaido announced. “I’m looking at the call traces.”
Kurtzman nodded. “Hunt?”
“We recorded some of the outgoing calls. This one to Chicago. It’s not voice. Sending commands to some sort of smartphone app. Pretty specific set of commands.”
“This is a call that went though?” Kurtzman asked.
“Yes.” Huntington Wethers turned to the big screen and brought up a computer map of Chicago, then zoomed in tight. “Right here,” he said.
“Railroad,” Kurtzman observed.
“Commuter rails have been hit heavily in the last ten minutes,” Brognola said. “Two commuter trains derailed in Chicago.”
“Mile southwest of the Metro Wrightwood station,” Wethers clarified.
“That’s one of them,” Brognola confirmed.
“We did intercept calls that did not go through,” Kurtzman stated, but there was a slight question in his voice.
“Yes,” Tokaido said. “Should I trace them?”
“How?” Schwarz said, suddenly alarmed.
“I gotta place a call.”
Silence.
“Several of the numbers are 703s,” Tokaido added.
“It appears—appears—that an app is used to ignite the devices. We’ll know more after we analyze this phone.” Kurtzman nodded at the phone on Tokaido’s desk—the one from the lab in Georgia.
“But it could be just the incoming call itself that does it?” Brognola asked loudly.
“Possible.”
“Allow any incoming call to start the ignition? That would be a foolish risk for the attackers to take,” Schwarz said.
“But not out of the question,” Price said.
“I’m calling this,” Brognola said. “I do know the risks. I know we could be setting off one of these devices. We must follow this