Chapter 11
Chapter 11
“W hat?” My voice rising.
Aaron spoke with his eyes closed. “It’s an RFID.”
Camp nodded. “A radio-frequency identification device.”
Aaron continued, “It’s passive. About the size of a grain of rice. Has no battery. Doesn’t transmit a signal. But, when ‘read,’ it triggers a response.”
Camp again: “Like a chip on a credit card. Which means a typical scanner won’t pick it up because it’s looking for a transmitter. Or a battery.”
Stackhouse this time. “Correct.”
“Do the girls know?” I asked.
Aaron nodded.
“How’s it work?”
Stackhouse explained, “Like a QR code. Pass it beneath a camera phone and it triggers a response. That phone begins pinging cell towers, transmitting location. Unbeknownst to the phone’s owner.”
Camp added, “Scanning more phones. More beacons.”
Aaron sat back. “Bones explained it like a homing beacon. Or a sonar ping.”
“Provided your girls can get access to a phone.”
“Bones was certain that would not be a problem.”
I voiced the thought. “Whoever took them would photograph them. Photographs equal leverage.”
Aaron nodded.
“How close do they have to be?” I continued.
Camp this time. “Less than a foot.”
“Where is it in their body?”
Aaron touched the base of his neck.
“Who knows this?” I asked.
Aaron waved his hand across the room. “Us and my girls.”
“Anyone outside this room?”
“No.”
“Esther?”
Aaron shook his head.
I sat back, knowing the answer but voicing the question nonetheless. “But she has one too?”
Aaron nodded. “I convinced our doctor to manipulate lab results from blood work. Order a colonoscopy. He inserted it while she was asleep.”
“But never conducted the colonoscopy.”
“Correct.”
“Wouldn’t she know that?”
He shook his head. “Too small. You can’t feel it.”
That’s when I knew Aaron had one too.
The room was silent for almost a minute. Finally, I voiced the elephant in the room. “So we wait for one of the girls to get access to a phone?”
Camp answered me. “Check.”
Stackhouse flipped open a laptop. “We know they’re working because when they were photographed before being placed on the planes, their facial shots triggered the locator.” He tapped the screen. “We know where that phone is but have no idea if the girls are still within the vicinity.”
Aaron finally spoke. “Murph, we’ve known each other a long time. Traveled some road together. I realize what I’m asking you is next to impossible, but...” He closed his eyes. “You deal in impossible. Have been since we met. I’m trusting you and only you.” A pause. “I need you... to do what you do.” This time a tear spilled down his cheek, betraying both fear and rage. “Bring my girls home. Alive.” He feigned a smile. “Please.”
“What will you do now?”
He glanced at his phone. “Call Esther.”
“And after that?”
He pointed behind him to what was about to become the war room. “Fake it.” Then his composure changed, and when he spoke, he did so as a combat pilot. As a man who’d dropped bombs, shot down enemy planes, and been shot down. “And figure out who did this.”
He reached across the table and handed me a small box. “Bones put you up. Congress approved it last week.”
After Bones rescued Ashley from the trucker’s cab, he was vetted, his background torn apart, every decision unpacked. They must have liked what they found, because he was invited to join, and eventually run, an elite and unnamed government agency created by executive order decades earlier. An agency with a singular task: to seek out and return the victims of high-profile abductions. Meaning, the children of powerful people.
Bound by no geographical lines, the only rule was secrecy, which explained why Bones spent years vetting me. He had to know if he could trust me. To the end. And not only could he trust me, but could he pass the baton? Could I run what he ran? Our work was so clandestine, so hidden, that by design only a handful of people knew about the agency’s existence, which was both good and bad. It meant we could operate undetected without a lot of red tape and make situational decisions quickly on the fly. It also meant we didn’t get a lot of help.
Bones had taken the reins from the previous leader, who’d served several presidencies and begun his own impressive record of rescue and recovery. By the time Bones tapped me at the academy, he held a storied position among the Washington elite, where the rumors surrounding his abilities and successes had reached mythical status. As time passed and those forever grateful children grew into powerful people in their own right—men and women who owned powerful companies and took powerful jobs around the world—the extent and influence of Bones’s own reach exceeded the extent and influence of many of those who employed him.
In short, Bones could do whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted, however he wanted, wherever he wanted, and he asked no one’s permission. A pedestal that even Bones admitted tested the limits of absolute power and its effect on those who wielded it. But his challengers were few and no one opposed him to his face. Why? Because of the long line of people behind him who owed him their life. Simply put, it was difficult to argue with a saved life. Especially if the bullet scars on your body tied back to that rescue. Bloodshed made for an argument without rebuttal. The problem Bones’s success created was that of a successor. Who would take up the mantle?
I was oblivious to all this.
For me, the question that nagged at me was what Bones had been doing on the banks of my island when he rescued me out of Jack’s bear-paw death grip. Why was he there? When I asked Bones, he simply shook his head and shrugged. As if the memory were painful. The issue unresolved.
The address in the locker had led me to a church in South Carolina. Bones had taken up lodging in the attached pastoral retreat that served priests from around the country, allowing them to rest, pray, walk in the woods, and restore their weary souls. In the year prior, Bones had recovered the governor’s niece, but the question of who had taken her remained a mystery. Someone was hiding at the top. A single clue surfaced in her retelling of the story. The clue was a name. Had it been Mark or Jim or Bill or Bob, it would have mattered none at all, but it wasn’t.
The name was Genefrino. And Bones had sent me to tear his playhouse down.
Once I started digging, peeling back the layers, I learned quickly that power was not shared, there was always one person in charge, and he who had the money had the power. Most nights Bones and I would debrief at either his pastoral retreat or some prearranged diner. For my education on the sick and detestable world of human trafficking, it was immersion by fire. I soon found out Bones had forgotten more than I’d learn in a lifetime. In my seminary studies, Bones required that I read the collected works of St. Bernard of Clairvaux, who had championed the doctrine of Christian humility, in which he stated we are all but dwarfs perched atop the shoulders of giants.
It didn’t take me long to learn Bones was my giant.
I accepted the box from Aaron and opened it. A silver bird stared back at me. I shook my head once. “Sir, I don’t want to be a colonel.”
“Tough. You are now.”
“But—”
He raised a hand. “Bones is gone. It was his wish. Who else will take his seat before the committee?”
I wanted no part of this. I spoke more to myself than him: “He knew he wasn’t coming back. So he put his affairs in order.”
As we were speaking, someone knocked on the conference room door. Stackhouse opened it and whispered with a staff member. Closing the door, he looked to Aaron. “Sir, Senator Maynard is requesting five minutes.”
Aaron nodded to Stackhouse.