62. Chapter Sixty-Two
Chapter sixty-two
Samantha held the phone in one hand. The other hand held a pen. She scratched out the information onto a yellow legal pad as Jankowitz narrated.
Gunn had taken over a situation room on the second floor of the New Building.
She, along with a half dozen techs and assistants were crowded together in a room not much bigger than Sam’s apartment.
A large screen TV on one wall showed telemetry from geosynchronous satellites above Belgrade, for all the good it would do them.
At the moment, the flatscreen showed a black and white image of the city along with a long scroll of information that might as well have been alien Sanskrit so far as Sam was concerned.
It seemed to make sense to the IMINT people.
At the moment, Sam was the highest ranking intelligence office in the room, which meant even if she didn’t have as much time on the job as some of the others, she was technically in charge.
Kearns had quietly retired to her office, leaving Sam to run the show.
Rather than taking it as a sign of confidence, Sam felt pretty certain that Kearns was distancing herself from the operation and any potential fallout.
If Jankowitz and his team managed to collar the bad guys and put a stop to all this, well then Kearns could say Sam was working directly under her and still take all the credit.
If things broke bad, she could throw Sam under the bus.
And it would a runaway bus on fire, headed over a cliff.
Thankfully, for the moment, it seemed CIA was getting out ahead of things.
Jankowitz and his crew had managed to secure the factory.
A fast reaction team scrambled from a carrier in the Mediterranean was en route.
They’d have CDC specialists there within the hour.
Sam allowed herself to breathe easy for the first time in nearly twelve hours.
Though breathing deep in the situation room was no treat. These rooms tended to hang onto sour body odor and stale food smells of past occupants. This one carried the distinct funk of unwashed feet, cold onion rings, and the burnt ozone smell of hot microchips.
While Sam was hunched over a desk scribbling out the details fed to her by Jankowitz, one of the other people—Sam thought he might be one of the IMINT people, but he could have been one of the OSINT people—went for the coffee maker.
Sam tapped a pen against the table top to get his attention, then motioned for coffee.
He nodded.
At the moment, Sam didn’t know half these people’s names.
They had clearance and had been assigned to the task force, or their ID badges would not have been able to open the lock on the door.
It was a bizarre experience being in a room full of strangers and not having time to learn anybody’s name.
The group had taken to looking at each other’s ID badges, or just calling out, ‘hey you in the green sweater’.
No one seemed bothered by it. They were here to do a job.
And if they failed, a lot of people would die. Names could come later.
The man from IMINT—or was it OSINT—wordlessly deposited a Styrofoam cup of steaming black coffee in front of Sam, along with a few packets of cream and sugar.
She thanked him with a nod.
On the phone, Jankowitz was telling Sam that they had hooked up a series of hard drives they’d found to an encrypted laptop and they were sending the data in scrambled bursts.
Sam turned to a pair of techs from the third floor basement. “We ready to receive?”
One of them gave her a thumb’s up.
“Fire away,” Sam told Jankowitz, and reached for her cup of coffee.
“Sounds like the cavalry just arrived,” Jankowitz said. “I hear choppers.”
Sam glanced at a computer screen on the other side of the room which showed the progress of the fast reaction team. The blinking green dot indicated their current location, along with GPS coordinates that put them at the Palilula district in Belgrade.
“Two choppers just landed,” Sam informed him. “They’ll be at your location in minutes.”
“You should be getting info packets now,” Jankowitz said. “Are you receiving?”
Sam turned back to the pair of analysts.
They gave another silent thumb’s up. Large scrolls of ones and zeroes zoomed across their screens, looking like something out of the Matrix. It must have made sense to the computer cowboys because they seemed satisfied with the downloads. Sam said, “Coming in five by five. Good job, Oscar.”
Jankowitz started to say something else and was interrupted by a what might have been a loud clap, or maybe just static. Sam’s phone screen went blank.
“Jankowitz?”
The situation room fell silent. Everybody stopped and turned.
Sam put her coffee cup down. “Oscar?”
She checked the phone. The call had dropped.
Sam tried calling back but got a message informing her that the phone she was trying to reach was not in service.
“The data packets dropped,” one of the computer nerds announced.
“My, God,” someone said and pointed.
Sam turned.
The flatscreen TV with the satellite feed showed a small bloom in the bottom right corner. A normal person might have missed it, or overlooked as a simple technical glitch, something wrong with the feed. But the IMINT people knew exactly what they were looking at.
Goosebumps marched up Sam’s arms in ranks. She felt the small hairs on the back of her neck stand to attention. “Is... is that the factory?”
The man who’d brought her coffee nodded. He stepped closer to the screen, narrowed his eyes and pitched his head to one side. “Looks like enough explosives to take out a city block.”
The temperature of the room plummeted ten degrees. Sam turned back to her phone and tried dialing Jankowitz again. She got the same polite message letting her know the phone she was trying to reach was no longer in service.