126

Now Jenny’s phone rang.

It was Dell at Langley. “Where’s Marcus?” she demanded. “I can’t get through.”

“He’s right here,” Jenny said. “We were on the phone with Annie.”

“Put me on speaker,” Dell ordered.

Jenny did.

“Marcus?”

“Yeah.”

“NSA just got a hit on that Kairos satphone.”

“Where?”

“It was active for less than a minute, then went dark again.”

“Where, Martha?” Marcus pressed.

“We’re triangulating it now. Somewhere near the corner of West Adams and South Franklin.”

“That’s three blocks from here,” Pete said. “Take a right.”

Marcus turned the wheel hard, sliced across two empty lanes, and took a loop that soon put them on South Wacker Drive. Meanwhile, Jenny speed-dialed the Chicago PD operations center and relayed their location and destination. The last thing they needed now was to be stopped by some overzealous and misinformed cop.

Hitting the accelerator, Marcus blew through a red light at the intersection with West Van Buren Street and then another one at the intersection with West Jackson Boulevard.

Half a block farther, however, he had to slam on the brakes to keep from running a roadblock guarded by two APCs and about two dozen troops from the Illinois National Guard. Looking up, they suddenly saw why. They were directly out front of the Willis Tower. Every soldier was now pointing an M16 at their heads and chests. They were ordered to get out of the vehicle slowly, with their hands raised. Marcus shouted back that they were DSS agents, but for the moment, no one believed them. Using a bullhorn, the commander of the Guard unit ordered them all to lie down in the middle of the street, facedown, arms out. There was nothing they could do but comply. To argue at this point was to risk some overanxious Guardsman opening fire.

They were handcuffed. Searched. Their weapons were taken from them. So were their DSS badges, wallets, and phones. All of these were set on the hood of a vehicle that appeared to belong to the on-scene commander. Taking his own sweet time, the commander called into the Joint Task Force operations center near the stadium, explaining the situation and relaying the names and badge numbers and other relevant details.

Marcus’s phone began to ring again. He could see it shifting and vibrating on the hood of the vehicle. But the commander was not looking at it, much less answering it. A few moments later, Pete’s phone rang. Fifteen seconds later, Jenny’s phone began ringing, too. None of them were answered. They just kept ringing, and Marcus was livid.