Chapter 12

It was late, and Taylor had been going pretty much straight since being assigned this case three days before. Besides a very short night’s sleep in L.A. and sleeping on planes, he’d been awake since leaving D.C., and could feel the exhaustion catching up to him. He was at that point of the investigation where he’d turned everything over to the techs and all he could do was sit and wait for them to find something, so he had an agent drop him off at a local hotel so he could get a few hours sleep while they worked on the vehicles.

What seemed like ten minutes after he’d fallen asleep, although the lying clock next to the bed said it had been almost six hours, Taylor was woken by another call from Whitaker.

“Yeah,” he said groggily.

“Sorry to wake you up, but I knew you’d want to hear this right away.”

“You found something?” he said, pushing himself up, suddenly more awake.

“Multiple somethings. As you suspected, there was a GPS on your car here. I just talked to the auto techs. It’s not that sophisticated and they said it looks homemade, but they dusted everything and didn’t find any prints. The parts were all off-the-shelf stuff from hardware stores or parts from a dismantled cell phone. The guys who went over it said it was very well done, and they doubt this was her first design.”

“I don’t doubt it. What about the explosive?”

“The C4 itself was from a pallet that disappeared a year and a half ago from an army warehouse in Kabul. The guy who stole it is already in Leavenworth and they’ve found stuff off that pallet in ten different countries. She probably bought it off the black market, which makes it a dead end, since there’s no way to tell how many middlemen would have handled it before it got to her.”

“Yeah, I figured it would be something like that. Anything else in the device?”

“No. Again, most of the parts are either basic off-the-shelf stuff or repurposed internal workings from consumer electronics. She did a good job of keeping everything clean. No DNA, no fingerprints anywhere in the device.”

“Not surprising given what we know about her professional history, but we had to check. So far, I’m not hearing what I should be excited about.”

“I’m getting to it; be patient,” Whitaker said. “The SUV you drove in L.A. wasn’t reassigned yet and was untouched. They checked and sure enough, there was an almost identical GPS tracker under the rear bumper, just like the one you had in Jersey.”

“Let me guess, no prints.”

“Yep. In their sweep, though, they found something else. Inside the car, under the dash, she installed some kind of listening device. They said it looks like it draws a decent amount of power, since it’s sending a full audio stream and not burst coordinates like the GPS, which explains why she wired it into the electrical system for the radio. Like the GPSs, they were disabled and not sending any kind of signal anymore, so there was no way of tracking it back to her, but it’s a good bet she heard every word you said inside the car.”

“That explains how she was on top of us so well and knew what we were doing. I wondered how she was able to get set up for the shot on Randazzo so fast. I knew she must have been tailing us, but she wouldn’t have known where we were going before we got there, and ten minutes to find a good spot to shoot from is pretty tight. Hearing us talking about it in the car, though, she would have been able to get there ahead of us, since we weren’t exactly pushing it.”

“Since she’s still chasing you, I’m guessing you didn’t say anything about where you stashed Finney when you were in the car.”

“No, although I did when I was on the phone to you yesterday, before I went to her mother’s.”

“Where’d you park when you were at the offices up there?”

“The secure garage.”

“So maybe she didn’t have access. You were in a garage she couldn’t access and then at Mrs. Beacham’s. Hard to pull off that kind of thing in broad daylight on a suburban street.”

“It was pretty run down. Good chance no one would have seen it, or cared if they had.”

“Yeah, but she couldn’t be sure you wouldn’t look out the window at the wrong moment or how long you’d be inside. She might be a risk taker, but she hasn’t gone unnoticed this long to get caught doing something like that. She’d want darkness and a fairly set amount of time, just to be sure. The GPS tracker she could walk by, pop it under the bumper, and keep going. In and out in seconds. Breaking into a car and wiring a device into it would take time and she’d be conspicuous as hell.”

“The night we got to L.A., it was late and we went straight to a nearby hotel. We were there for about six hours before heading to the Justice Department offices. She could have done it then. Middle of the night, poorly lit parking lot. Still a risk, but a calculated one.”

“And you’ve been going since you hit the ground in Jersey,” Whitaker said.

“Yep. What are the odds there’s one of these in my car right now?”

After leaving Chelsea’s mother’s house, Taylor had caught a ride back to the local offices and picked up another SUV while the one he borrowed was being gone over. He’d driven it to the motel he was currently in, leaving the SUV out in the parking lot like normal.

“Pretty good. If she needs to find Finney, she’s going to want to do more than just follow you around. She knows you’re investigating her, which means not going back to wherever you stashed him. That might be part of the reason she’s trying to intimidate you into backing off, so you’ll have no choice but to just go back and guard him until it’s time for the trial.”

“Is there any way to know the car is bugged without tipping her off?”

“Yes. There’s a small hand-held detector that can sweep for both GPS and wireless transmissions. It only works when the device is sending, but if she’s just added it and you’re somewhere she might find notable, she’ll be listening, so it’ll be sending. I haven’t checked, but I’m betting the office there has one somewhere.”

“I’ll check with them. I haven’t used one of those. Will she be able to tell if I’m using it or if I found the bug?”

“I don’t think so. It was covered in a training I did forever ago, so I don’t remember the specifics, but I think it’ll just be feedback, which the car will give off from time to time anyway, so as long as the car is running, it’ll be hard to tell one from the other.”

“Okay.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Something proactive, finally. I’m tired of chasing after her. I want to bring her to me.”

“Good luck,” Whitaker said, and hung up.

It was still the early morning, and there wouldn’t be anyone in the offices yet even if he went there, so he went back to sleep for a few hours. Besides not being able to go anywhere yet, he didn’t want to do anything that might tip Chelsea off if she had planted the bug, and if she hadn’t, he wanted her to feel comfortable enough to do it now.

Contrary to Whitaker’s assertion, the Jersey City offices didn’t have the detector he was looking for. It wasn’t that surprising, since they were a small office and New York, which had one of the largest offices outside of D.C. itself, wasn’t that far away, but it meant he had to take a drive across the Hudson.

The detector itself was small, not much bigger than his cell phone. After having the tech run him through how to use it, Taylor made his way out to the car and slid it as stealthily out of his pocket as he could. He was parked in a secure garage, which hopefully meant Chelsea couldn’t see inside, but Taylor didn’t want to chance it.

As soon as the device turned on, it sprang to life. Something within a few feet of him was sending a large amount of data. He’d asked the techs about anything that might cause a false positive, and they’d given him a pretty large list, but none of those seemed to apply. His cell phone was able to generate that kind of data and, encrypted or not, the detector would have picked up the cellular signal but, according to the techs’ instructions, the volume he was seeing now would mean streaming video or audio, neither of which he was doing. He didn’t really see how the device could tell the difference, but between the techs’ assurances and his own conviction that she would have placed another one, he figured it was still a safe bet. If he was wrong, he’d only be embarrassed when nothing happened, which he could live with.

After sending out several text messages, Taylor called Lopez.

“How’s Finney?” he asked when the kid answered.

He’d given Lopez a secure cell phone, but he’d avoided calling him since leaving the two of them at Fort Dix. While he hadn’t even considered Chelsea could be listening to him making calls from the car, he’d had OpSec drilled into his head long enough that he’d done it out of habit. While it was doubtful she could have broken the Bureau’s encryption, army training had been heavy on paranoia when it came to signals counterintelligence, and old habits die hard.

“Restless. He’s demanding we move him to better accommodations.”

“Suggest to him he can always stay in the same room Bartolini used.”

“I told him if he didn’t like it I could drop him off in the middle of Manhattan and we could see how long he lasted on his own, and he quieted down. I gotta say, if this is what private contracting is like, it might not be for me.”

“Be happy for the quiet moments. The other times are the ones that make it not worth it.”

“I remember,” he said, and Taylor could almost feel the phantom pains the kid must be experiencing.

Getting shot up wasn’t something Lopez would forget, although he couldn’t fault the kid for hating the boredom.

“Well, you should be happy now. You’re going to have a little change of scenery. The DA called me this morning and said they need to move up the deposition. He wants us to bring Finney to the DOJ office in Trenton by three this afternoon. I’m heading out now and should beat you there.”

“Do I need to arrange for an escort?”

“No. You’re safer traveling in one car mixing with the traffic than having a convoy that someone will notice. Right now, anonymity is our best protection. We’re meeting in the third-floor conference room I think, but check with security when you get there.”

“Will do. See you then,” he said, hanging up.

Taylor took a moment to go over the plan once more in his head before pulling out of the parking garage, hoping Chelsea was on his tail.

Trenton, New Jersey

Chelsea didn’t wait to follow Taylor to Trenton. She was annoyed it had taken this long, and traveling all the way across the country and back, to find Finney. She’d dealt with tracking people protected by the feds before, but they’d never been as slippery as this guy. Dealing with cops was always harder than dealing with crooks, since the crooks tended to not think about security at all, making calls off burner cell phones, thinking that gave them some kind of anonymity. It was rare that she found one wise guy who realized cell phone scanners had been a thing for twenty years and maybe they should think twice before making calls on them.

Okay, so most of their security measures were built around not going to jail, which meant talking in code and not discussing crimes outright over the phone, but she wasn’t looking for evidence. If she was tracking someone, she was listening to calls to find out where her target was. Half the time, these guys knew there was a hit on them, and they still discussed where they were going to be over the phone. Bunch of amateurs.

Cops were generally harder, although they made up for their actually caring about security with their arrogance. They all thought, because they were cops, that no one was going to try to whack a guy they were standing next to. They’d go to all the trouble to hide someone’s identity, not making direct calls and cutting the witness off from contacting anyone in their life, just to walk them slowly up the steps of a courthouse like there was some kind of magical barrier protecting them.

For a while, she thought Taylor might be different. He hadn’t contacted whoever he had sitting on Finney and when he talked about them to his wife or partner, at least before she’d shot him, he’d made no reference to where Finney was stashed. It was coming up on the time for the deposition and she wasn’t sure she was going to be able to get to her target in time, which had only ever happened once before. Thankfully, for all his precautions, he was as foolish as any other cop. She still had no idea where he’d stashed Finney, but knowing where he’d be was enough.

She knew the Justice Department offices in Trenton had an underground secure parking garage, which meant she wasn’t going to be able to get Finney on the way from the car to the door. She also knew the rest of the building, having thoroughly studied it in preparation for trying to get Finney the first time, before they brought Taylor in. The third-floor conference room was on a corner of the building, with a ton of windows along it. It was the middle of the day, so a thermal scope would be no good if they kept the window shades closed, but these guys loved their views.

She was in an empty office, in a building one down and across the street from the justice building, with a good line of sight to the conference room windows. The actual shooting angle wasn’t great, since she’d basically have to set up in the corner of the room and look down and out the window, giving her a narrow arc to shoot from, but she’d made harder shots. At least everything was going to be stationary.