Parowski stared at her.
Susan nodded. “You.”
He glanced up at Kat Lopez, then back at Susan. He smiled. Then he laughed.
“I thought you were going to ask me to herd some votes for you on the Hill.”
“I am,” she said. “I’m going to ask you to do that. But as the Vice President and the President of the Senate, not as the Congressman from Ohio.”
She raised her hands. “I know. It feels like I’m throwing this is in your lap, and I am. But I’ve been putting feelers out, and holding little hush-hush secretive meetings for the past six weeks. You’re the name that comes up again and again. You’re the one with massive popularity in your own district, and broad appeal across the entire northern tier of the United States, and even in conservative working class districts across the south. And you’re the tireless campaigner who can ride hard with me when the time comes to run for reelection.”
“I’ll do it,” he said.
“Take your time,” Susan said. “I don’t want to rush you.”
His smile became broader. Now he raised his hands, almost as if imploring the heavens. “What can I say? It’s a dream come true. I love what you’re doing. You held this country together at a time when it could have splintered apart. You were a lot tougher than anyone gave you credit for.”
“Thank you,” Susan said. If he could have seen her in the early days, weeping alone in this very room when she thought ninety thousand people were going to die from the Ebola attack, would he still think that?
She nodded to herself. Probably more than ever.
He pointed at her with his thick index finger. “I’ll tell you something else. I always knew that about you. I can read people with the best of them. I learned it as a kid, and I saw it in you years ago, when you first came to DC. Ask anybody. When June sixth came, I told people don’t worry, we’re in good hands. I told that to the people who were still alive on the Hill, I told it to the TV shows, and I told it personally to at least ten thousand people in my district.”
Susan nodded. “I know that.” And she did know it. That little fact had come up again and again in her meetings. Michael Parowski has your back.
“You need to know something about me, though,” he said. “I’m big. Physically I’m big, and I have a big personality. If you’re looking for someone to stand in the back and fade into the wallpaper, then I’m probably not your guy.”
“Michael, we vetted you eight ways to Sunday. We know everything about you. We don’t want you to stand in the background. We want you upfront, being yourself. We want your strength. We’re rebuilding a government here, and in a sense, we’re rebuilding people’s faith in America. It’s hard work, and it’s a lot of heavy lifting. That’s why we picked you.”
He gave her a sidelong look. “You know everything about me, huh?”
She smiled. “Well, almost everything. There’s still one mystery I’d like to solve.”
“Okay, I’ll bite,” he said. “What is it?”
“When you pull the old ladies aside at events, what do you whisper to them?”
He grunted. A funny look came into his face. It nearly transformed, decades of wear and tear dropping from it. For a few seconds, he looked almost (but not quite) innocent, like the hardscrabble child he must once have been.
“I tell them how beautiful they look today,” he said. “Then I say, ‘Don’t tell nobody. It’s our little secret.’ And I mean it, every word of it.”
He shook his head, and Susan thought it was almost with wonder – at people, at politics, at the sheer magnitude and audacity of what people like he and Susan did every single day of their lives.
“It works every time,” he said.
CHAPTER SEVEN
11:45 a.m.
Atlanta, Georgia
“Is Mr. Li okay? I haven’t seen him here in quite a while.”
The man was small and thin, with a narrow and hunched back. He wore a gray uniform with the name Sal stitched over one breast. He kept a cigarette lit and in his mouth at all times. He talked with it in his mouth. He never seemed to see any need to take it out until it was finished. Then he lit another one. In one hand, he carried a heavy pair of bolt cutters.
“Oh, he’s fine,” Luke said.
They walked down a long, wide cinderblock corridor. It was lit by sputtering overhead fluorescents. As they walked, a small rat darted in front of them, then scurried along the bottom corner of the wall. Sal didn’t seem to feel the rat was worth commenting on, so Luke kept his mouth shut. He glanced at Ed. Ed smiled and said nothing. Trailing behind them, Swann coughed.
Li’s space was in a large old warehouse building which had been subdivided over the years into many smaller spaces. Dozens of tiny companies rented spaces here. There was a loading dock at the far end of the corridor, and the corridor itself was perfect for loading up dollies and rolling product in and out.
Sal seemed to work as some kind of manager or custodian of the place. He had initially been hesitant to cooperate. But when Ed showed him his FBI identification, and Swann showed him his new NSA badge, Sal became eager to please. Luke didn’t show his badge. It was his old Special Response Team ID, and the SRT didn’t exist anymore.
“What kind of trouble might he be in?” Sal said.
Luke shrugged. “Nothing too major. Tax trouble, trouble with trademark and patent infringements. About what you’d expect from a guy bringing stuff in from China. You must see it all the time, am I right? I was in Chongking a few years ago. You can go into the warehouses along the waterfront there and buy new iPhones for fifty bucks, and Breitling watches for a hundred and fifty. They’re not real, of course. But you wouldn’t know the difference to look at them.”
Sal nodded. “You wouldn’t believe the stuff I see come in and out of here.” He stopped in front of a corrugated steel door, the kind that slides up from the bottom. “Anyway, Li seems like a very nice man. He doesn’t speak much English, but I’d say he gets by on what little he has. And he’s very polite. Always bowing and smiling. Not sure how much business he does, though.”
The metal door had a clasp with a heavy lock. Sal lifted the bolt cutter and with one quick snap, chopped the lock right off.
“You’re in,” he said. “I hope you find what you’re looking for.”
He was already moving down the hall toward his office.
“Thanks for your help,” Ed called to his back.
Sal raised one hand. “I’m an American.” He didn’t turn around.
Ed bent over and pulled up the door. They observed what was visible before going in. Ed stuck his hand inside and slowly waved it side to side, up and down, looking for trip wires.
It wasn’t necessary. Li’s warehouse was unprotected by booby traps. More than that, it seemed long abandoned. When Luke flipped the switch, half the overhead lights didn’t work. Plastic-wrapped pallets of cheap toys were stacked in rows in the gloom, and covered with green tarps. Boxes of generic, no-name household cleaning products, the kind that would turn up in dollar stores and odd lot outlets, were piled in one corner, nearly to the ceiling. Everything was blanketed in a thin film of dust. The stuff had been sitting here for a while.
Li seemed to have imported a shipment of junk to keep up appearances, then never bothered with it again.
“The office is over there,” Swann said.
In the far corner of the warehouse was the door to the small office. The door was wood, with a frosted glass window for the top panel. Luke tried the knob. Locked. He glanced at Ed and Swann.
“Either of you guys have a pick on you? Otherwise, we have to go back down there and explain to Sal about how organized crime has cornered the market on year-old discount store crap.”
Ed shrugged and took his keys out of the pocket of his jeans. The key ring had a small black flashlight on it. Ed held the flashlight like the world’s smallest night stick, and smacked it against the window, smashing the glass in. He reached through the hole and unlocked the door from the inside. He held up the flashlight for Luke’s inspection.
“It’s like a pick, only more direct.”
They went in. The office was bleak, but tidy. There was no window. There was a three-drawer filing cabinet, which was mostly empty. The bottom drawers each had a few folders with shipping manifests and receipts. The top drawer had a few power bars and small bags of pretzels and potato chips, plus a couple bottles of spring water.
There was a long wooden desk, with an old desktop computer on it. On one side of the desk were the kind of deep drawers where people often kept files on hangars. These drawers were locked.
“Ed?” Luke said.
Ed walked over, grabbed the handle of the top drawer, and wrenched it open with brute force – to the naked eye, it looked like a parlor trick, one deft snap of the wrist breaking the lock. Luke knew better. Then Ed proceeded to open each drawer in turn using the exact same technique.
“Like a pick,” he said.
Luke nodded. “Yes, but more direct.”
There was nothing much in the drawers. Pencils, pens, faded pieces of stationery. An unopened pack of Wrigley chewing gum. An old Texas Instruments calculator. In one of the drawers, on the bottom, were three CD-ROMs in dirty plastic cases. The cases were marked with letters A, B, and C, written in magic marker on scraps of masking tape. The case with the letter B on it was cracked.
Swann sat down to the computer and booted it up. “Pretty low-tech,” he said. “This thing is probably twenty years old. I’ll bet it’s not even hooked to the internet. Sure. Look at this. It’s from a time before cable hookups, and from way before wireless. There’s nowhere to plug in a Cat 5 cable. You want an internet connection on this thing? Anybody here remember dial-up?”
To Luke, it didn’t make sense.
“Why would an advance man from a country known for sophisticated hacking have a computer that isn’t even on the internet, and almost couldn’t be on it, even if he wanted it to be?”
Swann shrugged. “I have a couple guesses.”
“Do you care to share them?”
“The first is that he’s not Chinese at all. He’s not part of any sophisticated anything. The hack that took the dam out wasn’t particularly advanced. That dam’s system was ripe for the plucking. He may be part of a group with no government backing.”
“If he’s not Chinese, then what is he?” Luke said.
Swann shrugged. “He could be American. He could be Canadian. He has high cheekbones and flat facial features, which could mean he’s Thai. He’s a big guy, which could mean northern Chinese. He could be an American of Asian descent. I didn’t get anything from being in that room with him that indicated any nationality. But I wouldn’t peg him as Chinese just because he has a Chinese passport.”
“Okay, what’s your second guess?” Luke said.
“My second guess is they went low tech so no prying eyes can see what they’re doing. You can’t hack into something that isn’t connected. If Li is not on the internet, no one can read his files. The only way to access them is to come here to this godforsaken warehouse in a crummy industrial district on the outskirts of Atlanta. The only way to find out this warehouse even exists is to torture Li, or in your case, threaten to torture him. And that’s something which never should have happened in the first place, because Li was supposed to kill himself before he was caught. The people who were supposed to find this computer were Li’s handlers, or in a worst-case scenario, Sal would find it when the rent money ran out. Then he would either toss this old computer in the trash, or sell it for ten bucks.”
The computer screen came on and asked for a login code.
Swann gestured at the screen. “And that, right there, would have been enough to stop Sal in his tracks.”
“Can you beat it?” Ed said.
Swann almost smiled. “Are you kidding? These circa 1994 encryptions are a joke. I was breaking these things when I was thirteen years old.”
He typed in a command, and an old black MS-DOS screen appeared in the top left corner. He typed in a few more commands, hesitated for a moment, typed in a few more, and Windows returned, no longer asking for a password.
When the desktop loaded, Swann clicked around for a few moments. It didn’t take long. “There are no files on here,” he said. “No word processing documents, no spreadsheets, no photographs, nothing.”
He glanced at Luke over his shoulder.
“This computer’s been wiped clean. The hard drive is still here, and it functions, but there’s no evidence of anything. I think our friend Mr. Li might have pulled a fast one.”
“Can you get the files back that were deleted?” Luke said.
Swann shrugged. “Maybe, but I can’t do it here. Could be there were never any files to begin with. We’ll have to remove the hard drive and bring it back with us to NSA to know for sure.”
Luke sagged the slightest amount. Generally, he had a lot of confidence in his ability to read people. But maybe Swann was right. Maybe Li had pulled a fast one. His terror seemed real enough, but maybe he had faked it. Why would he do that? He had to know that Luke was coming right back for him. There was nowhere to run.
“What about the CDs?” he said. “Let’s check those.”
Swann picked up the first one, marked A. He held it between two fingers as if it had something contagious on it. “Sure, why not?”
He slid the CD into its slot. The computer suddenly began to rev like an airplane preparing for takeoff. A moment passed, and then a window opened. It was a list of word processing files. The files had names that followed sequential patterns, most often with a word and then a number. There were dozens and dozens of files.
The first word in the list was “air,” and it went from “air1” through “air27.” A later word that seemed interesting was “grid,” which went from “grid1” to “grid9.” In between those two on the list was the word “dam.” It went from “dam1” to “dam39.” Much later, there was “rig1” to “rig19.” Also, “train1” to “train21.”
“Should I start with air?” Swann said.
“Okay.”
Swann pulled up air1. The words at the top served as a title of sorts. John F. Kennedy International Airport, New York City.
“Uh-oh,” Swann said.
There was a brief description of the airport, including opening date, its location by latitude and longitude, the number of flights and passengers per year, major airlines it served, and more. Then there were several pages of photographs of the terminal, a New York City map with the airport indicated, and then several maps of the terminals. Past that, things became technical – long lists of data appeared, a blur of numbers and letters. Swann went quiet as he pored over it.
“Houston, we have a problem,” he said finally.
*
The black SUV raced through city streets, headed for the highway.
Luke was on hold, trying to reach the President. In the background, he could hear both Ed and Swann working their own telephones.
“I’m going to need a team of analysts to dive into this stuff,” Swann said. “That’s right, as soon as I can get it all uploaded. No, it’s all on CD-ROM. I can’t do it right now. I’m in a car. Yes. There’s a base just outside of town here, Naval Air Station Atlanta, and we’ll be there in a little while. I assume somebody will lend me a system with a CD slot. Why do you think he put it on CD? So nobody could hack it, that’s why. It was in a drawer in a locked office in a locked warehouse that nobody knew about.”
Ed was nearly talking over Swann. “I need you to put me through to the FEMA camp in Chattahoochee National Forest,” he said. He paused for a moment, listened to what was said on the other end.
“I promise you, it exists. Try Camp Enduring Freedom, or Camp Nowhere. I was there this morning. There’s a guy named Pete Winn. I don’t know what his title is. Camp director, maybe. Swimming instructor, I don’t know. Yes, I know there’s no listing for the camp. I need this guy Winn anyway. He has a prisoner. He will know the one. We have confirmed information that we received from that prisoner. Yes, I repeat that. The prisoner is now a high-value prisoner, highest possible value. We are en route to that location. We need that prisoner prepped for further interrogation. I want a twenty-four-hour guard on him, and video surveillance. Prisoner is a flight risk and suicide risk.”