Dawn Warner’s corner office in DC was on the fifth floor of the neoclassical Department of Justice building just under the base of its southwest pediment.
At thirty-three minutes after ten Eastern Standard Time she stood at its window and looked out between the fluted columns over Constitution Avenue at the Smithsonian Museum’s scalloped dome.
Then she shut the big heavy drapes.
On the way back to her desk, she popped the two Excedrin gel tabs in her hand, dry swallowing them. She didn’t know if maybe she wasn’t drinking enough water or something before takeoffs, but she’d acquired a nice sharp altitude headache on the plane coming in this morning from the Cape.
She took off her jacket and hung it on the back of a tufted leather chair. She buzzed her secretary, Roberta, to let in Fitzgerald and Harris.
“We’re in here,” Warner said, pointing over at her suite’s conference room.
Littering the long varnished mahogany table were computers and secure phones and cords. Behind them on the back wall of the dim windowless room was a whiteboard bookended by the two huge and bright American flags Dawn Warner used as background for her TV appearances.
She kicked shut the door as they all slipped on their hands-free mics. Her FBI men took off their own jackets before they all sat before the glowing terminals.
“Do it,” she said to Patrick.
The tall FBI man nodded as he leaned forward and pressed on the speaker of the secure link phone.
“Red team, bring me up to speed,” she said.
“We are inbound from Denver International ten minutes,” Westergaard said.
“Las Vegas, are you there?” Warner said.
They had a UAV over the city now. Eighteen thousand feet above Denver, a high-altitude surveillance MQ-9 Reaper was traveling slow and steady in a wide east-west ellipsis. She could see the slowly moving feed of it on Fitzgerald’s computer screen.
“Yes, ma’am. Right here,” said a deep Southern voice.
“Good. How’s the weather report around the city looking?”
“Crystal clear all day, ma’am. Perfect conditions.”
“What’s your name, Las Vegas?”
“Jhett.”
“Jhett,” Warner mouthed, rolling her eyes at Fitzgerald and Harris, making her FBI men chuckle silently.
“You’re all linked up with the red team there, um, Jhett? Everybody has a good connection?”
“Audio and visual is clicked tight here,” Jhett said.
“Red team, confirm,” Warner said.
“Affirmative. Looking good on this end,” Westergaard said.
“Okay, good,” Warner said, looking from screen to screen. “Give me a look in, Jhett. Zoom in and show all of us the car.”
The reaper feed went down and down and then there was a white Armada flowing on a highway.
“That’s Interstate 25, yes?” said Westergaard.
“Affirmative,” Jhett said. “Southbound.”
“Where do we think their destination is? Any clue? The city?” Westergaard said.
“We have no idea,” Dawn Warner said. “Hagen is running wild so get on them as quickly as humanly possible.”