But before they could formulate a plan, far less move, Morgan’s phone rang and the screen told him the caller was Natasha Black.
‘Yes, Natasha,’ he said.
‘Chummy’s been on the horn again,’ she told him. ‘He made a call to another mobile number that hasn’t been flagged up before. The peculiar thing is that he just rang it, but there was no conversation, and that mobile is now off the air.’
‘We think he’s triggered several EMP weapons in DC to knock out the radars and radios,’ Morgan said, ‘and that call could have been the activation signal. Our best guess is that he’s steering an armed Reaper drone towards the city. We’re just about to try to take him down. Just to confirm, you haven’t got a more accurate set of coordinates for the location of his phone than you supplied before?’
‘No,’ she replied, ‘but maybe I can help you identify the property.’
‘How?’
‘His mobile is still switched on. I don’t know if that means he’s expecting another call from somebody or if he just forgot to turn it off, but when you get outside the house or wherever he is, text me and I’ll call him up. I can be a phone company executive with an offer that he simply can’t afford not to take. You should be able to hear the phone ringing from inside the building.’
‘Good idea. We’ll do that. Now we’ve got to move.’
The target house was located on a large corner plot, and the area was sufficiently rural that the SWAT team members were able to get to within about twenty yards of the front door without any possibility of being seen by the occupants. But that was as far as they could go, because as soon as the special agent in charge – the fabric nametag on his black combat clothing read ‘Wayne’ – scanned the front of the property with his binoculars he spotted two small cameras covering the road and the short driveway.
‘If we get any nearer,’ he said, ‘we might as well walk over there and ring on the doorbell. Let’s try round the back. There might be cameras there as well, but because of the trees and shrubs we should be able to get a whole lot closer to the building without being spotted.’
They left two of the team members to cover the front of the house with their sniper rifles and the rest of them retraced their path until they were able to step into the open ground behind the property.
Wayne had been right: there was a camera aimed at the lawned area to the rear of the house, but the sides of the property appeared to have no surveillance devices in place, and that omission allowed them to get close without being detected.
‘We need to lose that single camera,’ he said, and moments later two of his men flattened themselves against the back wall of the property and walked sideways until the camera was directly above them. One of the men crouched down, braced himself and used his linked hands and shoulders as stepping stones for his partner to climb up high enough to reach not the camera, but the cable that fed it. He took a pair of insulated wire cutters, in case the camera was fed by mains power, and briskly snipped the cable in two.