CIA HEADQUARTERS, LANGLEY, VIRGINIA
Who ordered the pepperoni pizza?” asked Steve Goodwin as he entered the DTAI workroom with three take-out bags of Italian and a small pizza box.
“Yo,” said Califano, raising his hand.
“Chicken parm for me,” said McCreary.
“Caesar salad,” said Ana.
Several minutes later, Thorne, Goodwin, and McCreary were all seated at the conference table, unpacking their late dinners. Califano remained at his computer across the room, wolfing down slices of pizza between bursts of keyboard activity.
“I feel like we’re missing something,” said Ana, poking at her salad. “I was sure Opal would have some information about that sketch and the remaining ten stones.”
“I know,” said McCreary as he sawed off a huge piece of chicken parm. “I’m worried about those stones, too. There’s no telling what kind of havoc Fulcher and his Russian friends might inflict on the world, even if their intentions are perfectly innocent . . . which I doubt.”
“Well, what are we missing?” asked Ana. “The spec op guys scrubbed Hillcrest and found nothing of particular interest. Neither of the two Ukrainian knuckleheads they took into custody seemed to have any knowledge about the ten stones or the Madaba map. In fact, all we know for sure from those guys is that Vladamir Krupnov was in charge of their group, and he and Sashko Melnik somehow managed to escape today. Whereabouts unknown.”
“Yeah, Fulcher seems to have dropped off the grid, too,” said Califano from across the room.
“They know we’re on to them now,” said McCreary. “They won’t be so sloppy anymore. You can count on that. That’s why I doubt they’re traveling commercial.” McCreary gobbled down his slab of chicken parm and then turned toward Califano. “Any luck tracking private aviation?”
“Nope. There’s way too many flights, and I can’t seem to find any meaningful pattern or connection between any of them. Just random, typical private air traffic.”
“Keep working on it,” said McCreary glumly. He turned his attention back to his meal.
“What about the stuff Holzberg said before he died?” asked Ana. “Are we sure we’ve accounted for everything?”
“Pretty much,” said Califano. “I’m still updating the relevancy engine with the stuff we learned today from Opal and some of the stuff you got from Tom Reynolds. Should be ready for a new data crunch in a few minutes. Maybe it’ll point us in the right direction.”
McCreary sighed. “Look, even if we can’t locate the ten remaining stones, you guys did a hell of a job preventing the Thurmond material from falling into the wrong hands. You should be really proud of that.”
Ana wasn’t having any part of that consolation prize. “It won’t mean a damn thing if ten other pieces of the material fall into Fulcher’s hands. I shudder to think what he could do with that much material.”
“I know,” said McCreary with a heavy sigh.
“Holy shit!” Califano exclaimed.
McCreary swiveled in his seat. “What is it, Michael?”
“I’m an idiot.”
“That’s your big revelation?” said Ana with a dry laugh.
“No, I mean I’ve been trying to track private flights all over the world by their tail numbers. But then I thought, what if the tail numbers are changing? So I wrote a little algorithm to test out that theory, and here’s what I got. A Gulfstream 550 took off from Moscow yesterday morning, bound for Almaty, Kazakhstan. Six hours after it arrived, another Gulfstream 550 with a different tail number took off from Almaty bound for Lisbon. And then, about five hours ago, another Gulfstream 550 with a different tail number left Lisbon en route to Istanbul. That flight touched down in Istanbul about forty-five minutes ago.”
“Same plane?” asked McCreary. “Just repainting the tail number each time?”
“Could be. And I bet you anything it’s Fulcher. He’s on the move.”
“But why would he be hopping all over Europe like that?” asked Ana. “And what’s in Istanbul?”
“I don’t know, but I’m going to find out right now.” Califano let loose a torrent of keystrokes and mouse clicks for the better part of a minute until he finally finished with an exaggerated click of the Enter key. “You guys want to watch?”
They all nodded.
Califano pushed a button, and his display suddenly showed up on the large screen at the front of the room. A stream of data was cascading down the screen, so fast that it was impossible to read. “It’s crunching now. It’ll take a little while.”
Several minutes later, the cascading data finally came to an end, and a small window popped up showing the top five paired IIEs that had resulted from this particular data crunch. Califano expanded the window and centered it on the screen.
Everyone in the room stared at the result, which showed two columns labeled IIE 1 and IIE 2, each pair representing two related pieces of data with particular relevance to the information Califano had fed into the system. The first column consisted of the following five items:
Benjamin Fulcher
Vladamir Krupnov
Sashko Melnik
Joshua Stone
Jasher
The second column consisted of a single geographic location, repeated five times.
“Oh my God,” whispered Ana, shaking her head in disbelief.
“You two better pack,” said McCreary. “Looks like you’re going on a trip.”