Maden Mike - Tom Clancy Firing Point

“No, I mean, if he’s a car guy and he has a garage but he uses it for file storage, where does he keep his car?”

“That’s a great question.”

“I have an idea.”

—

“We’re looking for a key fob,” Gavin said, stepping over pots and pans on the kitchen floor, his head on a swivel. “Tesla has a phone app that will open your car and start it at a distance, but they also make fobs. Find the fob, we find the car.”

“How do we find the car with the fob?”

“You find the fob. I’ll find the car.”

Gavin went over to a key rack screwed into the wall. A couple of lock keys were on it, and probably a spare house key.

“I didn’t see a fob when we went through before,” Jack said.

“Me neither. But I think I can find it.”

Gavin reached into his messenger bag and pulled out a handheld electronic device.

“Fobs put out a constant RF signal that communicates with its paired vehicle. In North America, that signal broadcasts at 315 megahertz, plus or minus two-and-a-half megahertz, depending on the make and model.” He held up the device. “And this, my friend, is an RF signal detector, tuned to the same wavelength range.”

“Seriously? You just happen to carry one of those around?”

Gavin patted his messenger bag. “I have all kinds of goodies in here. Like I told you before, you’re the physical, I’m the technical. Just cross your fingers that Runtso wasn’t paranoid and parked his fob in a Faraday bag.”

Gavin switched on his device. “If Runtso was just a little paranoid, he’d know not to keep it near a door, where thieves can stand outside and capture the signal, amplify it, and send it to another thief standing by the car with a transmitter imitating his fob.”

“Yeah. Everybody knows that.”

“Yeah. Everybody in this house not named Jack. C’mon.”

Gavin found the fob signal and within five minutes found the fob, tucked inside a toilet paper roll lying on the bathroom floor. “Okay, so he was a little paranoid. But there ya go.” Gavin pulled it out and handed it to Jack.

“What good is this if we don’t know where the car is? Don’t you have to be like three feet away for this to work?” Jack hit the button. Nothing.

“You need to be three feet away. I don’t.”

Gavin walked over to a street-facing window and pulled back the curtain. He then pulled out another device and held it up. “Note, one aforementioned amplifier.” He turned it on. “Hit the button again.”

Jack did. They both saw it. A pair of headlights flashed dimly beneath a plain car cover just two hundred feet up the street.

“You didn’t hear the engine start because it’s electric,” Gavin said in a professorial tone.

“Thanks, Elon. I might have worked that one out for myself. We need to check out the car. It might have just the clue we’ve been looking for.”

—

Still confident they weren’t being watched by killer mercenaries, FBI agents, or even curious neighbors, Jack and Gavin lifted the car cover, folded it up, and tossed it into the backseat of the sporty Tesla Midnight Silver Model S.

Jack handed Gavin the keys to the Jeep. “Meet me at the funeral home we passed earlier. We can’t leave it here.”

“Gotcha.”

Jack climbed into the Tesla and drove the short distance back to the Berry Funeral Home parking lot. He pulled the Model S into a spot toward the back where they could work undisturbed and camouflaged by other parked cars. Gavin parked next to him and climbed into the passenger seat next to Jack with his messenger bag in tow.

It only took them a few minutes to pull up the Tesla’s onboard map. From there, Gavin hacked into the car’s hard drive and downloaded all of its GPS records onto his tablet. The GPS data only went back eight months, which was when Runtso had apparently purchased the vehicle.

With the Tesla data on his tablet, Gavin pulled up a map of the area and downloaded the GPS coordinates onto it, generating thousands of blue lines traversing roads all over Knoxville and the areas surrounding it. Two giant nodes stood out far and above all of the others. Runtso’s home, and one other location.

“What’s this place?” Jack asked.

Gavin pulled it up on Google Maps. “No name. Looks like some kind of an industrial park or a distribution facility.” Gavin dropped the little yellow street-level man on the location. The pictures that came up were blurred.

“Wow. Didn’t expect that,” Gavin said. “That’s either a top-secret government facility or somebody paid big bucks to do that.”

“I think it’s time we paid a visit to Runtso’s real office.”

64

Jack and Gavin took the Wrangler for the sixteen-minute trek toward the travel node they identified as Runtso’s primary workplace. They left Runtso’s Tesla parked at the funeral home but took the fob with them in case somebody else finally figured out what Gavin had already put together.

Jack reminded Gavin to play it cool on the drive-by. No finger pointing or phone cameras or even long stares at the place were allowed. He didn’t want to draw any attention from their security people as the two of them made their surveillance run.

They drove past the main gate. The property was protected by a fifteen-foot-high chain-link fence topped with razor wire. Tall lampposts were planted like trees everywhere and lights were fixed to the warehouse walls. The place lit up like a Christmas tree at night, Jack assumed. Security cameras were everywhere.

A simple white sign facing the road displayed three letters: WML, along with the street address. A uniformed guard stepped out of his booth and approached an eighteen-wheeler that had just pulled up. It wasn’t hard to see the pistol on the guard’s hip, even from the road. Several other freight trucks were backed into loading bays. Civilian workers loaded and unloaded the trailers with forklifts and dollies. Jack spotted at least one security man on the loading dock as well, wearing civilian clothes. But his short-cropped hair, physical build, and determined gait gave him away.

It looked like the main offices for the facility were located at this first building. White decal letters with the same WML were stuck on the glass doors leading inside.

Jack drove on farther down the road past a second gate and more security guards. Freshly painted military combat and support vehicles were parked in rows in the expansive yard. A freight train rumbled slowly past behind the property inside the fence. From where he sat on the road, it seemed to Jack that the railroad track was elevated, along with the rest of the property, above the wide and greenish river. Power lines paralleled the train track as well.

Jack kept driving, following Gavin’s tracking program. It beeped when they passed a third gate, indicating that this was the place where Runtso had driven to so many times in his Tesla.

A tanker truck hauling liquid nitrogen was parked just outside the closed gate. The driver was showing ID to an armed uniformed guard while another security man in civilian clothes climbed up into the cab. A second uniformed guard examined the undercarriage of the truck with an inspection mirror.

A dozen refrigerated trucks were unloading. Several were branded with familiar food company names. Jack saw forklifts driven by men wearing insulated coveralls inside the open rolling doors. The same freight train rolling past the other building was now approaching this one, its brakes and steel wheels screeching to a coupler-clanging stop.

Jack kept driving. He knew that security cameras pointed at the road captured every vehicle entering and exiting the gate of this more secure facility. And almost certainly every vehicle driving on the frontage road. He put another mile between him and the distribution facility before pulling into a vacant lot on the side of the road.