Page 26 of The Devil's Ransom

I knew that didn’t matter to Knuckles, but he also knew that if Jahn was tossed in a dumpster somewhere, it meant he would lose the thread of those who killed Carly. He really wanted that phone lock.

I’d put Brett on him to keep him in check—one of the few men who could—and then dialed the phone. I was given some seriously bad news.

Apparently, Blaisdell Consulting had been hit with some type of ransomware attack, and all of our systems were now shut down and firewalled from the rest of the intelligence community architecture to prevent the spread. It had already infected numerous of our cover organizations, and would have infected my own company, Grolier Recovery Services, except for the fact that we’d been out in the wild with the systems basically turned off.

Knuckles heard the conversation and I saw him getting agitated. I held up a finger and said, “Put George or Blaine on the phone.”

I waited a minute, and then Blaine came on, saying, “Sorry about that, Pike, this just happened, and it’s a disaster. How is the exfil going? You’re conducting exfil tonight, right?”

“No. That’s why I’m calling. Take a seat, because things have gone bad.”

“What?”

I told him what had transpired, from the moment we’d picked up Carly until right now, and he was suitably shocked. When I was done, because he was a good leader, he didn’t question anything I’d said, only driving forward. He said, “Carly? What about her body?”

I said, “The CIA is going to have to deal with that. She was under official cover, right?”

“Yeah, she was. Because of Kerry.”

“Well, I hate to give him that situation, but it is what it is. The reason I’m calling is I need a phone tracked. Jahn’s phone. I have the number, but Creed is saying you guys are worthless now.”

“Jahn’s probably dead.”

“No. No, he’s not. If he was going to be killed, they would have done it when they killed Carly. They wanted him alive, and I’m going to find him.”

“Pike, we have no ability to find that phone. If he’s captured, they’ll have him out of the country in twenty-four hours. He’ll be gone before we can inject something into the traditional intelligence architecture. I’m sorry about Carly’s loss, but you need to get out of the country, and I need to start the chain to get her covered and extracted. I need to talk to Kerry Bostwick.”

I looked at Knuckles and knew that wasn’t going to be enough.I said, “I’m not leaving here without him. And youdoneed to talk to Kerry Bostwick, because the phone Jahn was using is in the CIA database. Carly told me that, and I need its IMEI. I’ll find the phone myself with my own assets.”

The Rock Star bird had an IMSI grabber built into the nose. Basically, it was a device that pretended to be a cell tower and would suck in every cell phone within range by tricking the phone to establish contact. The IMEI was a select number assigned to every single cell phone on earth, and the grabber would discard all phones until it hit the correct one. Once it was locked, we could triangulate the location, but I needed the IMEI to make it work. A simple phone number wouldn’t cut it, as that was tied to the SIM card and not the phone.

“How are you going to do that over the entire city?”

He had a point. The IMSI grabber wasn’t strong enough to suck in phones at a distance, because it would be competing with local cell towers. The aircraft would have to fly a grid pattern, basically mowing the lawn in the sky in the hopes that it would register.

“It’s all I’ve got, sir. Please.”

He said, “Let me see what I can do. Give me the number.”

I did, and then got our aircraft moving to Dushanbe. It was only about a thirty-minute flight, but with the pilots getting scrambled out of bed, more like an hour. I turned to the room and told them the situation, then said, “I need someone who knows how to work the system in the plane. That’s you, Knuckles.”

I wanted to get him out of the fight, and this was the way to do it. I didn’t need him going full crazy on an assault. And hewasqualified on the system in the plane, having used it on several different missions.

He said, “Nope. Not going to happen. We find that phone, and I’m going on the assault. Don’t even ask me that.”

I knew we were about to come to a head, dreading the fight. This had become personal, which was bad. Veep came forward and said, “I can work it. Let me do it.”

Veep was a combat controller from the Air Force Special Operations Command, meaning his job, outside of shooting, was controlling multiple different aircraft using everything from a Dixie cup and string to the most cutting-edge radio gear on earth. Truthfully, his expertise was exactly this. And I appreciated him defusing the situation. Although all he’d done was kick the can down the road, because I would still have to control Knuckles.

I nodded and told him it was his mission. Three hours later, after flying a pattern in the sky over the city, he got his first lock. Forty-five minutes after that, he had a grid, and transmitted it to us. Jennifer had pulled up the location on her computer, and we were in business. Except we couldn’t get any information on the target itself like we could in the past through the Taskforce. It would be a cold hit.

I looked at the surrounding area as Brett and Knuckles came around to the screen, saying, “Okay, Jenn, I want you on the building across the circle. See it? Two-story structure? Can you get to the roof?”

She looked at the building and said, “Yeah, I can get up that.”

Jennifer was a little bit of a freak when it came to climbing, and I knew she could use the bricks, copper gutters, and balconies to get to the roof as soon as I saw it, but I wanted to hear her say it, and by the way she did, I could tell she wasn’t sure about the mission.

She turned to me and said, “Pike, all we really have is a lock ona phone. We don’t know if he’s there or not. We don’t know anything about the place. You sure you want to go assault a building in a foreign country with this little bit of intel?”

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