Page 66 of Broken Princess

15

Logan

“I don’t understandwhy you can’t track that motherfucker. You’ve managed to do everything else with all of your computer whiz shit.”

I scrubbed a hand across my jaw as I spoke, shoulders slumping against the back of the spare chair in Rowan’s office.

He looked at me and frowned. “Even I have my limitations. You know that.”

I sighed. “I know. Sorry, man. I just really want to find Willow,” I muttered.

“I know,” he replied. “Believe me, I’m trying everything I can think of to find Jamie so we can get to her.”

“Like what?”

He turned back to his computer screen. “I have VIGIL hooked up to his burner phone. If he uses it to talk to any of his most trusted contacts, we might be able to glean some useful info about Willow’s location from that.”

“See, that’s what I don’t get,” I said, leaning forward. “Why can’t you just track the phone like you’ve done with everyone else before?”

“I would, but he’s made it impossible,” Rowan said, bringing up a map on the screen. “See this? It’s his burner phone’s GPS activity from the last sixteen hours. I’ve been tracking it ever since I started suspecting that he might’ve taken Willow.”

“So what’s the issue?” I asked, brows furrowing.

“You know how we use cell phone tower pings to triangulate a person’s location via their phone?”

“Yeah.”

“The phone doesn’t have to be in use at the time. It just has to be on and close enough to cell phone towers to communicate with them.”

I waved an impatient hand. “Yes, I know about all of this stuff.”

“Right. Well, this is Jamie’s activity over the last day.” Rowan pointed to a spot on the map. “He was at Lilith Hall, and then he flew to his family’s summer house all the way up here on the coast of New Hampshire. You see the problem?”

I squinted at the activity log. There was no data for the last several hours at all. “There’s nothing happening,” I said.

“Exactly. But he’s not actually at the summer house anymore. I know because I hacked into their home security system and checked the cameras.”

“So he turned the phone off after he left the summer place, and that’s why we can’t track him anymore?” I asked.

“That’s what I thought at first,” Rowan replied with a slow nod. “But the thing is, we can actually track phones that are turned off, as long as we’ve infected them with a Trojan virus. It forces the phone to continue emitting a signal even if it’s off.”

“Huh. I didn’t know that,” I said. “Is that what you did?”

He nodded. “Yeah. I sent a virus to his phone, but it didn’t work.”

“Shit.”

Rowan turned back to me. “There’s only two ways to get around being tracked like that. The first way is to take the battery out of the phone. That way it doesn’t have the power source to emit any signals,” he went on. “But that would require the person to know that they’re possibly being tracked by the NSA in the first place, and Jamie has absolutely no idea that we’re onto him. So it can’t be that.”

“Right. What’s the second option?”

“Dead zones.”

I raised a brow. “Dead zones?”

“Spots where phones can’t connect to any towers, because there aren’t any within range.”

“Right, of course. Do you think he’s keeping Willow in a place like that?”