Page 218 of Incisive

Now he’s in the wind and no one has any idea where. He’s dumped all his previous phones and nuked his social media accounts, going completely dark. Authorities discovered his abandoned car four weeks ago, without the license plates, parked on a side street not far from an airport.

And that’s where his trail goes cold because there were no cameras on that street that anyone knows of. And attempting to backtrack and figure out exactly when he parked his car—if he was even the one to do it—will be nearly impossible.

For us, anyway. Because Russia obviously has no desire to help us track him down.

Meaning tracking when, exactly—or if—he flew out will be impossible. There’s no record of him flying in the forty-eight hours before his disappearance was noted. At least, not under that name.

There was also nothing in the weeks before Belyaevskin’s disappearance to indicate that he was making any unusual moves or changes in his routine. The girlfriend’s handlers reported nothing out of the ordinary, and were in fact thinking about winding down their investigation. Because it’s not a crime to be in control of a lot of money.

Until she died and he disappeared. That’s what changed everything.

Because the very last call he made right before he went dark was to a burner cell phone here in DC. No one knows who it belongs to but the phone’s original purchase was tracked to a cash transaction at a convenience store in West Palm Beach the day after the Florida GOP primary earlier this year. The store doesn’t keep security tapes that long.

That burner phone was tracked to calls made to or from other burner phones in London, Prague, California, New York, Idaho, Montana, New Orleans, Miami, Los Angeles, Chicago, Phoenix, and St. Louis. That burner phone’s signal only ever bounced off cell phone towers in DC…

And in and around West Palm Beach, Florida.

Since that final call from Belyaevskin, that burner phone has neither made nor received any calls, leading agents to assume it was destroyed.

The call from Belyaevskin was also the only call recorded between those two numbers.

All of the other burner phones have also gone silent as of…wait for it…

The day Belyaevskin disappeared, after he called the burner cell in DC.

I sit back, trying to fit all the pieces together in my brain before commenting. “I’m guessing that his disappearance bumped his case from so boring it’s a nothing-burger to a priority?”

She grimly nods. “Yes, sir.”

“Please tell me it strikes others as odd that all the other burners went silent at the same time.”

“It does, sir. All the phones were purchased with cash in discrete locations, frequently in the same region as where they pinged off cell phone towers for their calls.”

“All purchased long enough ago that there’s no security camera footage?”

“Yes, sir. Up to two years earlier, in some cases. Individual purchases, not batches, so we can’t attempt to track other phones. And they didn’t make any calls to traceable landlines or cell phones.”

“Is it horrible of me to hope all of this is ‘only’ involving something like drug smuggling? Because otherwise, this indicates a level of sophistication regarding communications concealment that is extremely concerning, no?”

She smirks. “You aren’t the first to make that observation, Mister President.”

* * *

I’m still ponderingthe possibilities about Belyaevskin’s potential involvement in some as of yet unknown plot when Jordan walks into my study a little after noon to notify me it’s lunch time.

He scowls when he sees my expression and pulls my study door shut behind him. “What’s wrong? What happened?”

Technically, I shouldn’t say anything to him. Except he already knows about some of it. And my conversations with him can be protected by executive privilege.

Besides, he has security clearance.

I wave him toward the sofa and start spinning the story and by the time I’m finished his scowl’s even darker than the one I’m certain I was wearing during my PDB.

“This is fucked up,” he says.

“Yeah. Tell me about it.”

“So until we can track him down, or find a common denominator among the burner cells, everything’s at a standstill?”