Chapter 10
Chapter 10
A shley’s South Georgia home encompassed several hundred acres and, since his election, had become more fortified compound than farmhouse. From infrared, motion-activated cameras to more than a dozen full-time agents to dogs to needing three different randomly generated codes to enter the compound to roaming patrols to a sniper team on the rooftop, wrongful or unsanctioned access was next to impossible.
Or had been.
The video was a minute and forty-seven seconds and had been spliced together from six separate chest-mounted NVD cameras and military-grade thermal imagers. The videos followed well-trained operatives, communicating via hand signals, as they bypassed one security protocol after another: stepping over or around alarms and avoiding the more than twenty security cameras.
The position of each personal camera was also purposeful. It allowed us, the viewer, to see the operatives’ hands, which, when not communicating with the team, were “speaking” to us through sarcastic gestures. Someone was playing out a well-rehearsed script: “We’re in control. You’re not.”
The video started with a team of six exiting an SUV and then walking single file through rows of pine trees to the edge of a field, where the team paused long enough for one member to range the distance to the rooftop observation post, which I guessed at close to nine hundred yards. In the next two and a half minutes, the team exercised practiced efficiency as they eliminated nine agents: the sniper-spotter team, two in a “secure” guardhouse on the border of the field, one at the gatehouse, two at a side entrance, and two in a golf cart, maintaining the perimeter and drinking fresh coffee. Save the first two, the remaining seven died from suppressed 9mm rounds that severed the brain stem.
When the team reached the porch, they pulled on gas masks and slipped some sort of outer sole over their boots, entering the house through the kitchen and climbing the carpeted back stairs. They first stopped at the master, sliding a tube beneath the door and releasing a gas into Esther’s room, which put her into a deeper sleep and eliminated her as a threat. During this part of the video, one member of the team pointed at the door, then the tube, then gave the camera a thumbs-up. The hands then pointed to the door and then a thigh-holstered Glock, giving the camera a thumbs-down. This message was also clear. The decision not to shoot Esther was intentional. They let her live. Which means they wanted her to suffer, making them emotional terrorists.
Their next movements revealed the depth of their intel. Ashley had given each of his girls a well-trained Belgian Malinois, and that information had never been given to the press. No pictures existed. The video continued as the teams entered each room. No wasted movement. Nothing to chance. This included the dogs—more emotional terrorism. The video then recorded their silent retreat out of the house carrying three young women back across the field, where they intersected and eliminated an unaccounted-for agent exiting the bunkhouse. The video then cut to double-timing through pine trees, laying the girls in the back of an SUV, driving several minutes, then stripping them and scanning their bodies. After the scan, they were zip-tied, blindfolded, gagged, photographed, and placed into three separate, blurred-out planes resembling private jets. As the taillights of the departing planes disappeared down the runway, one set of gloved hands waved to the camera like Groucho Marx, and the video faded to black, ending with “That’s all, folks.”
The clock on the wall told me they had a five-hour head start, which meant we were looking for the proverbial needle in a hayfield with almost nothing to go on. Camp, having already clicked into operational mode, cleared his throat. “How’d they overcome the sniper and spotter atop the house?”
Stackhouse stepped forward and played the video a second time. “They looped the thermal feed.”
Camp nodded. “Watching the same thirty seconds over and over without knowing it.”
Stackhouse continued, “Rendering the team all but invisible.”
Camp nodded then spoke, again demonstrating his ability to synthesize and summarize large amounts of information. “They had prepped ingress and egress routes based on location of alarms and cameras. They knew where Esther would be and yet they didn’t kill her. And of the eight upstairs bedrooms, they knew exactly where the girls were sleeping, they knew about the dogs, and they had someone in their ear with a bird’s-eye view because they knew when to walk and when not to.”
Stackhouse spoke next. “There’s nothing they didn’t know.”
Aaron nodded. “And nine agents gave their lives...”
I had two questions. “Any idea why or what they want?”
Aaron shook his head but Stackhouse spoke. “No communication other than the video.”
Camp spoke up. “I can think of two reasons.”
Aaron broke the silence. “Revenge for the ten thousand, or...”
I finished his sentence. “To cripple your candidacy.”
Aaron nodded.
Camp again. “Or both.”
I nodded. “If this is an attempt to deter you from running, they’ll keep the girls alive. Send you five-second videos of blindfolded, emaciated, whimpering girls.”
“Death by a thousand cuts,” Aaron said.
“Which will give us time.” I paused. “If revenge, they’ll start an auction, post them on the black web, and sell them to the highest bidder.”
“Giving us much less time,” Camp said.
“And...” Aaron had seen enough of these situations to know what would happen next. His girls had no physical experience with men and... they were his girls. His worst fears were materializing before his eyes. He finished my thought: “They’ll bring a premium.”
Helplessness began to set in. When Summer, Angel, and Ellie were taken, we had the hope of the GPS trackers I’d put into the jewelry I’d given them. Given that the batteries were so small, the signal would only last a week, but at least we had that. There was hope. But not here. When Aaron’s girls were scanned at the SUV, their kidnappers had stripped them of their watches and any other jewelry. Proving they were pros who had done this before, they left nothing to chance. We watched the video a third time, but it was so well edited and produced that it revealed almost nothing.
Watching it brought to mind our IT team, which was second to none. Eddie had come to work with us after I’d rescued him as a kid with a debilitating stutter, which had disappeared not long after joining us. Since then, he’d graduated MIT and knew more about computers, what made them work, and how to break into them than most anyone on planet earth. Second to Eddie was Jessica Peterson. Jess grew up with brothers, possessed a short temper, liked to run ultra-marathons in her spare time, and had a beautiful knack for making room for herself in rooms where she was not wanted or allowed. She had been abused by an uncle as a kid, even being loaned out to his friends, and did not need to be convinced that trafficking was then and is now evil. She had unmatched loyalty, slept little, and had never met a puppy she didn’t want to keep. Rounding out the team was Ben Potterfield, the youngest of the group. BP had graduated Harvard at sixteen, top of his class, and, after refusing offers from every major tech company in the world, went on to develop several multiplayer video games that he later used as a back door to gain access into the military installations, strategies, and plans of America’s enemies, which he then emailed to the president’s personal account, cc’ing the Sec-Def and joint chiefs. He was as uncoordinated a human being as I’d ever met, could not walk and chew gum, wore Coke-bottle glasses out of necessity, and had a nasty battle with acne as a kid. BP didn’t need us and he didn’t need a paycheck. When I asked him why he wanted to work with us, he just shook his head. “I’ve just seen men do stuff.” I had no idea what that “stuff” was. I figured he’d tell me when he was ready. BP was tender, had a huge heart, and was known to cry during rom-com night at the Planetarium. One of his video games hosted a tournament every year. World championship. Teams of two. He won it the first two years running under an alias but figured it wasn’t fair, so now he just monitored the players’ actions and movements because he absolutely hated cheaters. Couldn’t stand them. And he could spot a fake, or the fact that someone was trying to hide something, a mile away. Of great benefit to a code breaker. And a rescuer.
Maybe Eddie, Jess, and BP could pull something from the footage Aaron had received, but I had my doubts.
He glanced at his watch. “In three minutes, I’m going to walk out of this room and share this with my team, who are going to unleash the combined military, intelligence, and media capabilities of the United States government to find my girls.”
Camp interrupted him. “There’s just one problem with that.”
Aaron nodded while Stackhouse spoke: “Whoever did this knows that.”
“And will always be two steps ahead,” Camp responded.
Aaron pointed at Bill. “Bill and I flew together. If I can’t trust him, I can’t trust anyone. Same with you two. But outside of you three, Esther and I have decided we can’t trust anyone. Because we don’t know who did this, and because I do know they did it from the inside, I have to assume everyone from our intelligence service to military to my own Secret Service to my staff is compromised. I can’t trust any intel they give me. I have no way of knowing if whoever quarterbacked this is halfway around the world or sitting in an office down the hall. I have to suspect everyone.” Aaron folded his hands and looked at me, and something akin to anger flashed across his face. Finally, he pointed at Stackhouse. “Anything you need, he’ll get it for you. No questions.” He palmed his face and I saw, maybe for the first time, the full effect of the kidnapping on him. Torment.
I was reeling. And I needed to prepare Aaron. We had so little to go on, and without communication, we were dead in the water. How did I tell him the chances of finding his girls were slim to very slim?
Aaron looked at me. “One more thing.” A pause.
“Years ago, Bones came to me and Esther and painted a picture. Not a good one. One that included my election to higher office along with my continued behind-the-scenes work to support him and you... and the risk to my family. He told me if I did this long enough and well enough, somebody at some time would try to take my girls. At first, we put our foot down.” A pause. “Then Summer and the girls were taken...”
“Right.” I nodded. “The watches. The jewelry.”
“Yes, but Bones said we had to think a step beyond that and assume whoever would come at me would know that and find them, along with any secondary trackers in earrings or a necklace.”
Camp gestured to the video but said nothing. His point obvious. They had.
Aaron continued, “The question became what next? How do we protect them beyond level one? Bones presented us with a subdermal microchip...”
My heart leapt. If Aaron had microchipped his girls, there was a sliver of hope.
He continued, “But Esther put her foot down. ‘Nobody is inserting anything into my girls.’ Said it was the ‘mark of the beast.’”
Silence fell across the room as hope faded. Then Aaron palmed his face and looked at me. “Which makes me a beast.”