That text message from Somerville to McCorkell went over the cell-phone network via local towers.
There was nothing they could do about being clandestine. Somerville was being watched by the NSA, and they had her phones and emails monitored by computers and presided over 24/7 by a flesh-and-blood agent. That tech agent tracked the last call to her phone to the town of Beaumont.
He passed that intel along the chain.
It pinged in the control room in Fort Meade, from where copies were sent out to the NSA and the military’s Cyber Command. The two-person team handling the tracking of Monica Brokaw and Jed Walker brought up the map of the pay phone’s location and then tapped into Trapwire.
Footage from all the cameras and photographs taken in the town were downloaded. There wasn’t much. The facial-recognition software took two minutes to scroll through several terabytes of data and come up with a match on Monica’s face crossing a road. Then it found her again, a side profile, in the passenger seat of a car, the picture taken from the dash cam of a courier vehicle.
Harrington in the helo, lifted off, the nose tucked down as the Black Hawk raced east.
His starlight communications bleeped. He checked the message. The car was a black Hemi Cuda. It was headed east.
•
When Walker entered the outskirts of Palm Springs he realized that he didn’t know where he was going and he slowed and said, “You know Paul’s address, right?”
“Well . . .”
Walker looked across at Monica.
She gave a shrug.
Walker pulled over at the first non-chain diner he saw and killed the engine, which was steaming from the quick sling along the highway into town. The car park was near-empty, but inside seemed a decent trade. The locals from the neighboring businesses, in getting breakfast. He looked back at the road. He knew that those Feds would not be far away now. He hadn’t noticed any fixed cameras on the highway into town. But time was running out. They needed to keep moving. The engine pinged and hissed with the heat of exhaustion.
“What do we do?” Monica asked.
“How’d you get his address before?”
“I Googled it. Crept around online for a while until I found it.”
“How long?”
“What?”
“How long was that while?”
“Several hours, over a few days until I found it.”
“Great. We don’t have that time. We have several minutes.”
“It wasn’t easy the first time, but it should be now.”
“Because you didn’t know his new name before?”
“I knew it, I’d seen it on that email on Jasper’s tablet. But I was starting from scratch—there’s a couple thousand, maybe more, Paul Conways in the United States.”
“But only one in Palm Springs.”
“Yeah.”
“Okay,” Walker said, getting out the car, then talking to Monica over the roof as she got out. “I’ll order coffee, you do your best to charm some guy to use his cell phone to Google Paul. Fast as you can.”
“In there?”
“In there. You really don’t like diners?”
“It’s just . . .”
“What?” Walker asked, locking the car.
“Nothing,” Monica said.
“Tell me,” Walker said, walking in step next to her, headed for the entry.
“We could go to the local police,” Monica said. “Talk to them, tell them what we’re doing. They could help us.”
“They’d look you up and see an alert in the system and detain us until those armed guys in black arrive.”
“You think?”
“I know.”
“Okay.”
Walker opened the diner door and was steered by a waitress to a booth. He watched as Monica found her mark: a bald guy in a suit with a nervous energy about him. She leaned over the table, her hands on the laminate top, her head tilted slightly, her mouth moving slowly as she spoke.
The guy nodded, and passed his phone to her. She sat down opposite, and started to tap away.
Walker’s coffee arrived. It came with a doughnut on the house. He cracked open the California road-map book and studied the roads of Palm Springs. Five minutes and a coffee refill passed. Monica was still on the phone, sitting across from the bald guy, who kept looking up from his laptop to steal glimpses of her. Walker looked out the window. The sky was clear, just some wispy clouds at the edges of the valley, fingers of vapor pouring over the mountains, toward them. The grip of inevitability.
“Got it,” Monica said, drinking her lukewarm coffee that had been sitting there for nearly ten minutes. She brandished a note on a napkin: Paul’s address. “Not ten minutes from here.”
•
What Monica didn’t know, and what Walker didn’t know, and what most would be surprised at, is that any camera on any personal digital device can be turned on remotely by those in the know and capture pictures and video. If the device has a microphone, it can grab sound too.
The cell phone that Monica had held was a popular model smartphone, designed in America and largely manufactured in China. It had enough computing power to word process documents and render images and play movies and games. Its microphone was good for conference calls, either in the car or lying on a table between a group of people. There were two built-in cameras, pointing front and back, and the one pointing to the front, to the person looking at the screen, was rated at three megapixels.
The NSA called the program Brighteyes. An evolution of the Trapwire system, which covered all fixed cameras as well as the footage on people’s social-media accounts. With Brighteyes, they could turn on any camera or microphone on any phone, even if it was off. And the beauty of the program was that it would search for a facial recognition of all in its field of view.
The NSA tech had the phone’s image of Monica locked and confirmed within five seconds of her picking up the phone. Her location was tagged, and all the details of that phone’s owner were now being worked over by the analysts at Cyber Command. State troopers were already moving to begin surveillance of his work and his home in Anaheim. His phone would be tracked until an agent declared it no longer necessary. He would be questioned until it was proven beyond reasonable doubt that he was not involved in impeding a federal investigation.
The microphone was on and recorded whatever it could pick up, and that was sent as a digital file to the analysts, along with all of the keystroke data and details of what Monica was doing in the phone’s Internet browser.
The Cyber Command heavy hitters in the form of Harrington’s Blue Team were on their way, by road and air, halfway from LA to Palm Springs, rolling fast.