Stag1’s wife woke up the morning after her husband was taken and found the front door unlocked. They always locked their door. She could see faint lines of dirt or mud tracked in on the carpets as well, so she sat on the couch in the living room and told her children to play outside. She did not turn on the TV. She sat. After she’d fed her children their lunch she went to the backyard, put on plastic gloves, and thrust her hands into the compost pile. The compost covered a large section of ground, but they had dug a shallow hole in the middle of the pile and her hands found it. Then she found the phone wrapped in plastic and took it out of the compost pile. The battery and SIM card were separated and wrapped in plastic inside the larger plastic bundle. Intel did not have the phone from the compost pile traced. In fact, it was the first time it had been used. Stag1 bought the prepaid phone and the SIM card from different countries and buried them immediately. He’d never even turned it on himself, but now his wife took the phone, the battery, and the SIM card inside. Then she washed her hands and charged the phone for a few minutes. She put the SIM card in, turned on the phone, and called the wife of her husband’s dead nephew as she’d been instructed. The wife she called had remarried the man the Americans referred to as both Pike1 and Iris1. The two code names were given to the same person. After the call, Stag1’s wife hung up the phone, removed the battery and SIM card, and smashed the pieces with a hammer. Then she threw the broken plastic in the trash, packed bags for her family, and hoped her husband would return.
The call was too short to monitor the weak phone signal originating outside the home around lunchtime, and even if it could be monitored, the number couldn’t be tracked. It had existed for only a moment. Iris1’s wife told her new husband that Stag1 had been taken. He in turn immediately left for the mountains. His men had dug underground tunnels into the pupil years before. The tunnels led to the small shacks so the men could enter the pupil and move around the entire area underground without ever appearing to have left.
The bomb had been constructed inside the pupil and buried from inside by using a tunnel under the front door. No surveillance videos were able to detect it, but they did detect smoke. The smoke originated not from a fire to keep the inhabitants warm, as the operators supposed—the inhabitants had blankets for that—but rather from the cooking of the TATP used to detonate the device. Intel had been monitoring the very preparations for the deaths of Hagan, Dalonna, Massey, and Cooke all along.
After his release, Stag1 immediately gathered up his family and the silver piece-of-shit van picked them up and drove them into the city as they had planned. Drones followed the van during the whole ride, but as the bombing didn’t happen for hours after his release, nothing seemed amiss. By the time the bomb blew, Stag1 and his family had picked up the wife of Iris1 and disappeared among the masses. Intel’s been looking for Stag1, his family and the driver, and the piece-of-shit van ever since.