I had a new item to add to my list of things I didn’t like about being a spy. You can be blown up, kidnapped, stuck with a knife, drugged, have guns pointed at you, and get pigeon poop on your hands. But it’s also quite possible you can die from boredom. Even in the middle of a crisis, if you didn’t pay attention it was hard to keep focus.
Sitting in the intellimobile with Angela and X-Ray staring at grainy surveillance video of really exciting places like bus stops, car-rental counters, hotel lobbies, and especially traffic cams … hundreds of different cars on different streets that went on and on and never, never, ever ended. Well, let’s just say I was sure watching that could result in premature death by extreme monotony. I tried hard, really I did. It was important. But my mind is just not suited to this kind of work and it makes me restless.
I put my elbows on the console and rubbed my eyes. They were burning from staring at the screen. It made me wonder if you also could perish from burning eyes. Probably. My hand automatically went into my pocket and my fingers wrapped around a deck of cards. But Angela had developed a sixth sense for when I was getting fidgety. She glared at me. I meekly withdrew my empty hand and waggled my fingers at her. She shook her head and turned back to look at the screens.
“How many more ways can there be to get out of Chicago?” I groused. “We’ve been at this forever. I think Buddy T. is gone,” I said.
“There’s hundreds of ways, in addition to just driving out by car or any other vehicle,” X-Ray said. “We’ve covered the airports, bus stations, and train terminals. But we haven’t even begun looking at the marinas or private landing strips or—”
I held up my hands in mock surrender.
“Okay, okay, I get it.” In truth, I thought we were wasting our time. It seemed like it would be impossible to find someone who knew how to make sure they weren’t going to be found. The thing is, it wasn’t an easy leap for me to imagine Buddy being involved in planning something bad. The entire time I’d been around him he was overbearing, obnoxious, and a total jerk. But he’d never seemed like he was really evil enough to be involved in a terrorist plot.
“Did you ever imagine Buddy T. could do something like this?” I asked Angela.
She shrugged. “I guess I never really thought about it, but honestly I’d have to say no. He’s a tool, but … I don’t know. All of these terrorists are sort of hiding in plain sight. Leading what looks like a regular life, until they take action. Maybe being such a jerk was part of it. He had us all fooled,” she said.
I thought about that for a minute. Now we knew how the ghost cell always seemed to be around wherever Match was. Buddy never seemed like a good guy. But I just didn’t see him having the stones to be involved in something bad up close. Which is why I believed he’d already scrammed.
The tedium was more than I could stand and I needed to stretch. If I didn’t, there was a better than fifty-fifty chance I would fall asleep. Which would probably lead to Angela tae kwan do-ing me in the back of the head. Fresh air would do me good.
“Where are you going?” Angela asked sharply as I scooted out of my seat.
“Just need a little air. Then I’ll come back in and start with all of the bicycle rental places or something,” I said.
Angela gave me a dismissive wave and I headed toward the rear door of the van. As I passed by X-Ray, I noticed he wasn’t studying video footage like we were. He was looking at photographs. And I recognized them. They were the photos from Miss Ruby’s phone. The one I had managed to steal while she was holding me prisoner.
“What are you doing, X-Ray?” I asked, genuinely curious.
“I’m trying to figure out what the ghost cell is up to,” he mumbled. “Something is … off.”
“I don’t get why we aren’t looking for car bombs. It’s what they’ve used every time so far. Isn’t that their signature?” Angela asked.
“Yes, but there’s also something to be said for changing things up. Not using a car bomb because that is what we’re expecting.”
X-Ray made a clucking sound and shook his head. “Despite what you see on television and in the movies, it’s not that easy to get your hands on that much C-4 or Semtex plastic explosives. It’s heavily regulated. They might be able to buy some on the black market but it would be risky. Especially with every federal agency in the country looking for them. And they already used two in D.C. and four more in Kitty Hawk and San Antonio. I think they’ve got something else planned,” he muttered.
“Like what?” Angela asked. She hit a button, pausing her streaming video on the monitor, and swiveled around in her chair so she could look over X-Ray’s shoulder.
“I wish I knew,” X-Ray said. “There are a lot of images on here. All of them are from different locations and points of view. There are a lot of shots of the skyline from different angles. But mostly it’s pictures of the major skyscrapers, the Sears Tower, the John Hancock Center—there are over sixty buildings in Chicago at least five hundred feet tall. If you were able to take down any one of them, it would cause colossal damage.”
“What do you think is going to happen, X-Ray?” Angela asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. He removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes.
“X-Ray,” Angela said, “when is the last time you’ve gotten some sleep?”
He ignored the question.
“In addition to the photos, Miss Ruby’s phone also gave me access to her e-mail and Web browser history. She had received a lot of e-mail alerts and researched a number of websites about Chicago weather patterns, specifically wind velocity and direction. It just makes me wonder….”
“Wonder what, X-Ray?” Angela said.
“It’s easier to show you,” he said. He punched a few keys on his keyboard.
“I programmed a simulation, using climate data that included wind patterns, humidity, precipitation, and every other climate variable I could think of. Once we determined that whoever we’re chasing wants Malak in Grant Park, I started running possible scenarios, with that location as …”
He stopped and looked at Angela, not finishing his sentence. He ran his fingers over the keyboard again. Up popped a three-dimensional map of the city with several buildings outlined in bright green. There were a lot of squiggly arrows running in the sky over the building images. Grant Park was outlined in bright red.
“What are we looking at?” Angela asked.
“At first I thought the pictures might be potential targets. Either the cell would try to blow them up or destroy them somehow. Take down a Chicago high-rise during a weekday and your casualties would be in the thousands. But it would take a lot of planning and near-perfect execution to do it. These buildings have much stricter security these days. It would require a lot of explosives, which, like I said, are not that easy to get. And—” X-Ray stopped.
“And what?” Angela prodded him. I understood her impatience. X-Ray had a theory. As smart as he was, it was probably a really good theory, and Angela’s mom was in real danger. Angela was going to start demanding answers soon.
“I started thinking. What if the building isn’t the target? What if it’s where they launch the attack from?” he asked.
“What kind of attack?” I asked, trying to ignore the ever-so-slight itching sensation that was starting in the palms of my hands.
“It could be anything,” X-Ray said. “You could have a shoulder-mounted surface-to-air missile and take down an aircraft. You could have some kind of gas or bio-terror weapon to release in the atmosphere. It would be possible …”
X-Ray kept talking but I was no longer listening. Something was tickling the very corner of my memory. It had to do with the Leopard and Malak and the ghost cell, and what X-Ray was saying tied it all up somehow. We now knew it was because of Buddy T. that they kept showing up wherever we did. But I kept thinking about how the whole thing started. Back in Philadelphia, at Independence Hall.
“John Hancock!” I blurted out.
X-Ray stopped mid-sentence to look at me. Angela stared as if I’d lost my mind.
“What about him?” Angela asked.
“He’s the guy who signed his name on the Declaration of Independence in really big letters, right?” I asked.
“Yes,” Angela said. “According to legend, he did it so King George III wouldn’t have to wear his glasses in order to read—”
“I don’t need a history lesson right now,” I said, interrupting. “It’s the John Hancock one.”
“Huh? What makes you think that?” Angela scoffed. But X-Ray was staring off into space, and I knew he was considering it.
Now I had the full-on itch.
“Because they want to send a message not just to the country, but to us. And all of this started in Philadelphia, at Independence Hall with us meeting Malak there. Somehow that’s when they knew, or at least suspected that Boone and the SOS team were on to them. X-Ray, take out all of the other buildings in your little weather pattern simulation doodad except the Hancock,” I said.
X-Ray punched a few keys. The other building outlines disappeared. Only the Hancock Center was left. The wind pattern arrows crossing through the sky above it led directly over Grant Park.
“That’s it!” I said, lurching back to my seat. “Pull up every piece of surveillance footage you can find for all the entrances to that building. Starting from the time Buddy disappeared.”
I know it took longer, but it seemed like it was only seconds before X-Ray had it up and running on our monitors. It took another hour and a half of us carefully reviewing every bit of film before we discovered what we were looking for. We made sure to take our time so as not to miss anything. Then we found it.
According to the time stamp on the traffic cam, just a little over an hour previously, a truck marked “Citywide Plumbing” pulled up to a side entrance to the skyscraper. Three men got out and opened the rear doors of the van. They removed a large crate using one of those big hand trucks, the kind people use to move refrigerators and other heavy stuff. Pushing it up to the building’s entrance, they waited while a security guard looked at a clipboard, checked their IDs, and finally let them inside.
They were all dressed in identical gray overalls with the company logo on the back. Except that one guy wore yellow high-top tennis shoes. X-Ray zeroed in on his face, blowing it up big on the screen. There was no doubt. It was Buddy T.
Fast-forwarding through the footage we saw two guys come back out. The crate was no longer on the dolly. One of them was Buddy T. with his bright-yellow high-tops. The two of them got in the van and drove away.
One of them was still inside.
“X-Ray,” Angela said, “you better find Boone.”