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President Hannister turned to someone in the room, presumably the secretary of state, and said, “Bring some pressure to bear on this. Get them to pump the brakes. I’m not losing an American citizen because some rich asshole had his honor impugned.”

He then said, “Kerry, do they have anything at all to go on? Any actionable intelligence?”

“Nothing that you haven’t seen, which is to say, nothing. We know they left in a van, but nobody even got a color, forget about a license plate. That’s it. They have the dead bodyguard’s cell phone, but so far have nothing from it.”

Kerry said that without mentioning the whole theft of a cell phone thing Jennifer and I had engineered. Just like he said he would, Kerry had managed to drop it on the path to the bodyguard’s holding cell without the RAW agent accompanying him noticing, and then had maneuvered the RAW agent right over it on the way back. So far, they had gleaned nothing from it.

Kerry continued, “They went through the manifesto webpage, looking for IP addresses and anything else they could find, but so far it’s also a bust. Every bit of it ran into a dead end. One of the terrorists is very technically savvy, that’s for sure. He knows how to move through the internet undetected.”

Secretary of State Amanda Croft, said, “What about the attack Pike stopped? Did they get anything from that or the terrorist’s body?”

“Nope. The drone obliterated him. They have his DNA and fingerprints, but nothing has come from it yet. They’re not as automated as we are and are still running it through various states and prisons to see if they can get a hit on the fingerprints. As for DNA, I doubt that will even matter. They use it in criminal cases to match a bad guy to a crime, but don’t maintain any databases or do systemic DNA profiling.”

“So they have nothing to go on? We’re at the terrorists’ mercy?”

“Well, every time they communicate, they open themselves up to being tracked. They gave their demands in the manifesto, and then sent a message about the government reading it on television through the website, but each time, the terrorist covered his tracks.Eventually—hopefully—the terrorists begin getting worn down and start making mistakes that we can use.”

“That’s it? Wait on them to screw up?”

Kerry glanced at us, then returned to the screen, saying, “Well, there’s Pike’s theory, if you’ll let him run it.”

The SECSTATE said, “What is this theory?”

“You’ve all read Pike’s situation reports. You know he’s run into Chinese pipe-hitters on at least two occasions. His theory is that China set this ball of mud in motion to stop us from executing the rare earth element mine, but then they lost control of their assets. Our biggest lead to finding the hostages was the Sikh bodyguard that Knuckles captured. He tried to abduct Riva Thakkar and would have been a wealth of information, but now he’s dead. The RAW thinks the terrorists eliminated him to prevent him from talking. Pike thinks the same guys who attacked him in Agra were the ones to eliminate him. He thinks it’s the Chinese tying up loose ends to cauterize their colossal fuckup.”

President Hannister said, “So how does that help us?”

“Through Taskforce assets we have the location of what we believe is the control for the entire operation. He’s here, in Jaipur. He very well might know where the terrorists are located.”

Palmer said, “Why not turn this information over to the RAW?”

“Because for one, they’ve discounted the Chinese connection from the beginning. They aren’t going to dedicate assets against this target during the crisis. Two, if the targetdoesknow where the hostages are, do you really want these guys to have that knowledge before your JSOC guys get on the ground? It might be guaranteeing their death at the hands of Riva Thakkar’s rage.”

President Hannister said, “So you want to do this without their knowledge? Without their cooperation?”

“Yes.”

“Do you have his identification?”

“No, sir, we don’t. All we have is a handset that’s talked to both the dead bodyguard and to China.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s Pike’s theory, and I think it’s worth exploring.”

Palmer said, “You can’t just rip a guy off the street because he has a cell phone. It’ll take a lot more evidence than that before we sanction an Omega operation. I’m willing to vote for Alpha and explore the issue, but that’s too thin for an operation.”

It took all of my willpower to remain in my chair. I wanted to stand up and start shouting at the stupidity of that statement. Luckily, we had a ringer in the room.

George Wolffe said, “No offense, but that’s just idiotic. We don’t have days to sniff this guy’s ass to find out if it stinks. In my mind it’s fairly easy: find the handset, and if the guy holding it is Chinese, take his ass down. It’s not like Pike’s going into Chinatown in San Francisco looking for a Chinese. It’s fucking India, and if that handset is in the hands of a Chinese and we know it’s talked to a dead Sikh who tried to abduct Riva Thakkar, then we’d be foolish not to take him down.”

The computer went silent for a moment, then President Hannister said, “I’m not even putting this to a vote. Tell Pike he has Omega authority.”

Yes!

I looked at Knuckles, knowing I had just as big a grin on my face as he did.

Chapter59