Chapter 29
Situation Room
The White House
Washington, D.C.
“Where the hell are they going?” Mary Pat asked.
“Do you really have to ask?” the President replied.
They had been in the whizzer for hours, watching Task Force 99 engage with all its wrath.
The entire National Security Council was now in the room, save for the vice president, who was attending a state funeral in Ecuador.
The main screen was the primary focus, a map display that combined the most relevant feeds.
Everyone in the room had a god’s-eye view of the operating area.
And at that moment, the gods were not pleased.
The blue symbol representing Clark’s C-41 was crossing the border into Georgia.
On the road ten miles in front of them was a red dot representing the GAZ truck.
It was moving northward at a steady speed on a lightly traveled road.
Next to the main screen, a small monitor displayed a satellite close-up of the GAZ in near real time.
All the surveillance was being managed by MAADN, seamless visuals from multiple perspectives.
Scrolling at the bottom like a news channel crawl was secondary information.
The speed of the GAZ, potential destinations, and SIGINT analysis confirming that the Georgian authorities had not yet noticed the breach.
It was a level of situational awareness that past decision-makers could only have dreamed of.
Unfortunately, situational awareness was a hollow advantage when your operators were going off script.
Ryan said, “Didn’t we tell Clark that jumping borders was off the table?”
“We did, and I also told the pilots,” Mary Pat replied. “But you know John. He has a tendency to bend the rules in the heat of battle. I could try to reach him on his sat phone, but I’m not sure if we want to turn him around at this point.”
Ryan knew she was right. Clark had a penchant for pressing the limits, and that was precisely what he was doing now.
Yet the President wasn’t completely unhappy about it.
There was a dark side to the man, a hell-or-highwater fury that Ryan abhorred as a commander, but admired as a human.
Everyone, at some point in their life, needed a Mr. Clark.
Right now, the person in need was Lieutenant John Conza.
“No,” Ryan said. “Let it play out.”
He was convinced that the vehicle they were chasing was involved in the downing of SAM 719.
The abduction of Conza only raised the stakes further.
Ryan wanted answers, and the most immediate means of getting them were in the truck Clark’s team was chasing.
They needed to talk to whoever was inside, and hopefully seize, or at least photograph, any equipment in the back.
Do that, and they might learn who had attacked America.
“What do the amber lines signify?” SecDef Burgess asked.
He was referring to projected paths ahead of the GAZ truck. At various points an amber line forked in different directions and eventually became broken, spreading like the branches of a tree.
Mary Pat replied, “Those are statistical projections of where the truck might be going. The numbers at the end of each branch represent the mathematical probability of that path being taken. MAADN considers not only the possible physical routes, but also the suspected intentions of the vehicle operators, things like fuel stops, potential threats, and likely destinations.”
As they all watched, the amber tree suddenly shifted. A solid red triangle appeared ten miles in front of the GAZ.
“What happened?” van Damm asked.
The President said, “I think MAADN just realized that Task Force 99 is still in pursuit.”
Mary Pat surmised, “And the red marker is the projected end of the road?”
“Let’s hope,” the President replied.
—
Four miles south, across the Anacostia River, Kyle Ryan was ignoring the feed that had the White House Situation Room engrossed.
His team had spent most of the day fine-tuning MAADN for the ongoing mission in Turkey.
They’d been following that situation closely, but twenty minutes earlier they were sidetracked by a parallel search.
MAADN was, at the very essence of its digital architecture, an expert in multitasking. For all the processing power spent synchronizing intelligence to support Task Force 99, it had also been silently pursuing another task: the hunt for the missing passenger on SAM 719.
The AI algorithms attacked the problem in reverse chronology.
MAADN began by acquiring the weight and balance paperwork for the flight, verifying that, despite being manifested for sixteen passengers, only fifteen had boarded in Tangier.
This was double-checked using a running hack on the Moroccan Customs and Excise Administration, courtesy of the NSA, which showed that fifteen passports had been scanned prior to departure.
Closed-circuit camera footage from the boarding area, pirated from the local airport authority, further substantiated the identities of all fifteen passengers and crew using facial and somatic recognition.
The process of elimination was a beautiful thing. All that remained was to research the one manifested passenger who had not boarded.
“How should we approach it?” Moose prompted, his fingers poised over a keyboard. Craterly was in the lobby collecting their DoorDash dinner—it was Thai takeout night.
Kyle said, “The name on the manifest is the most obvious place to start.”
“Even if it’s an alias?”
“Especially if it’s an alias.”
Moose typed in “Ronald Hauptman.”
A reply came almost instantly. A false passport under that name had recently been generated by the CIA’s Technical Services Division.
“See what I mean?” Kyle said.
“Okaaay…” Moose replied.
“But that does complicate things.”
“Why? We have access to CIA servers—we wouldn’t have seen this if we didn’t.”
“True, but it’s limited. Most of what we can’t access is in the Directorate of Operations. If this is an ongoing op, anything specific on this alias would be in the most sensitive tier.”
“We could probably get access. Heck, the White House is glued to our feed as we speak.”
“I know, but there might be an easier way. This passport has to be part of a legend, and TSD is methodical. They’ll have seeded previous travel for this identity into immigration systems, most likely in Europe. If we can dig into a few and get a photo, vitals, a nationality…”
Moose nodded. “I see where you’re going.” He made the inputs.
A search on European passport databases in the name Ronald Hauptman produced sixteen hits.
“Sort it by issuance date,” Kyle said, “newest to oldest.”
Again, the results were quick.
Moose said, “Two of them were issued within the last two months. All the others are eight months old or more.”
“Got to be one of those.”
Moose called the two passport photos up and put them side by side on the screen. One was purportedly a German, dark hair and fifty-two years old. The other was Austrian, light hair, ten years younger.
From that starting point, the rest was simple.
With a name and a photograph of each suspect, MAADN began scraping government databases, social media, and news articles.
The German Ronald Hauptman turned up everywhere.
He was the chief technology officer of a middling telecommunications company.
His face and name bubbled up all across the internet: interviews, boardroom photos, Instagram selfies with his family.
Even in its most enthusiastic moments, TSD would never have gone to such lengths to backstop a legend.
The Austrian Hauptman was the opposite. If it was a TSD legend, it had clearly been a rush job—they’d done little if anything to reinforce it. The name and image drew only one hit in the broad seine cast by MAADN, and a damning one at that.
SAM 719 had not departed from the commercial terminal in Tangier, but from a remote facility reserved for diplomats and VIPs.
MAADN acquired footage, as best it could, from every camera within a quarter mile of the VIP terminal.
It ran the face from the suspect passport and got a hit with a grainy picture from the curb in front of the terminal.
According to the time stamp, Ronald Hauptman could be seen getting out of a taxi less than an hour before SAM 719 had taken off.
“Bingo,” Kyle said. “Our no-show passenger.”
“Has to be,” agreed Moose. “But he did show up.”
“Can you run that video?”
Moose went to battle with his keyboard. “All we have is this still capture for now. There’s a problem with the source memory. I might be able to get the rest, but it’ll take some massaging.”
“Have at it.”
“The problem is that this false identity only tells us who he isn’t. This would all go a lot faster if we knew the guy’s real name.”
“True.” Kyle cocked his head thoughtfully. “I see two possibilities.”
“Put MAADN on it?”
“That’s one.”
“And the other?”
“We ask the CIA.”
“You really think they’d give us the name?”
“Probably not. But I know somebody they’d have to give it to.”