When Boone reached the intellimobile in the hotel garage, X-Ray and Vanessa were nearly ready to roll. Boone had lived a long time but it never ceased to amaze him how quickly X-Ray could move his seemingly endless stacks of equipment from any hotel or motel room, or wherever they were set up, into the van in a matter of minutes. His fingers flew over a couple of switches and keyboards and in seconds he had the monitors up and running and could call up a visual of just about anything. It was a marvel to Boone.
The old roadie slid into one of the seats in between Vanessa and X-Ray, who handed him a Bluetooth headset. He slipped it into his ear. “Give me an audio check,” X-Ray said.
“Felix, Uly, where are you?” Boone asked. X-Ray gave him a thumbs-up, signaling the headset was working perfectly.
Felix’s voice came back. “The SUV is in the wind. We’re three blocks out from the warehouse and circling in a large radius. We’ve been looking for a roost where someone could sit and run countersurveillance, but so far there’s nobody hiding, as near as we can tell. Do you want us to go search the warehouse? It’s at the end of a dead-end street and difficult to approach without being seen, but we could give it a try.”
Boone swiveled his seat to look at a monitor showing a map of the area surrounding the warehouse. It was in a fairly quiet part of town, but a few blocks from a couple of surface streets that led to freeways. The SUV could be anywhere by now.
“What about the tracker?” Boone asked X-Ray.
“No good. The battery is dead. I can get Felix and Uly inside the warehouse, if you want. See if they left anything behind,” X-Ray said, looking up at a monitor showing the now empty interior.
“No. We can’t waste the time,” Boone said. “Felix, Uly, head back toward the concert. It’s the biggest event going on right now. It’s the logical target. But don’t assume that all four guys will stay with the vehicle. Get eyes on every white SUV in the vicinity that you can. Start rolling now.”
Boone’s eyes bore into the map of downtown San Antonio. With the crowd control and streets blocked off for the concert, everything was out of sync. In the older city center, streets ran at odd angles and crisscrossed everywhere. There were literally a half-dozen points where a car bomb could wreak havoc in a big way.
Of course the ghost cell could be sending the SUV somewhere else. But Boone didn’t think so. He believed they knew someone was watching them. Or at least they suspected it. They would think the government was looking for the SUV even if they weren’t hearing any chatter about it on police scanners or through their own network. Boone and his crew had rescued Bethany Culpepper without anyone outside the cell and the SOS knowing. Keeping the hunt for a single SUV quiet would be easy compared to that. It could be they had decided to take it off the board and hide out for a while. But he doubted it and he didn’t have time to consider the cell’s master plan. There was a car bomb somewhere in San Antonio. The only safe assumption was that they would deploy it where it would do the most damage.
That meant the concert or something near the Alamo was the target.
“All right, everyone, listen up. Felix, when you get back here, grab the sniper rifle and get on the roof of the Emily Morgan Hotel. It’s going to give you the best view of the traffic approaching the concert. Uly, Vanessa, and I are going to patrol the area around the concert crowd, starting with the perimeter. We’ll work our way in toward the stage. I’ve got a feeling at least a couple of them will be in the crowd or somewhere very close by.”
“Copy that,” Uly said.
Boone opened the side door of the intellimobile.
“Where are you going to be, Boone?” Vanessa asked.
“I’ll be around,” he said.