Will Staeger - Public Enemy

They’d summoned her because there had been activity from one of the sleepers, but Laramie asked a different question first.

“What about our operative,” she said. “Anything?”

“No,” Knowles said, planted in his throne before an array of monitors that had multiplied yet again-the monitors alone now took up one entire wall in the room. “May or may not speak to his status, but I’d say that homing-beacon signal is gone for good.”

Cole came over to join Laramie alongside Rothgeb and her guide in a loose semicircle behind Knowles and the ever-expanding computer setup. Seven additional monitors had been added; the largest offered a highly detailed but entirely static map of El Salvador. A few hours ago, when Laramie had last been in the room, a blinking set of circles, designed to resemble the outwardly expanding circles made by a rock hitting the surface of a pond, had kept the view on the El Salvador screen fairly entertaining. The graphic had represented Cooper’s whereabouts as he approached the drop point in his plane-the homing signal from his GPS device.

Nineteen seconds after the pilot instant-messaged them that he’d “dropped his cargo,” the homing signal, and its accompanying on-screen graphic, had vanished.

The other monitors displayed low-resolution digital signals from six separate videophones of the sort made famous by the embedded reporters during the war in Iraq.

Five of the images were of the exterior of a house or apartment; it was dark outside four of the homes, with dawn just breaking on a fifth. The sixth feed looked like something from a tamer portion of an episode of America’s Wildest Police Videos, a shot captured out the front windshield of a car that appeared to be following another vehicle. The sun had risen already in this image.

Laramie knew this last monitor to represent Scarsdale, New York. The other images were in the central and Pacific time zones, but live, just like the Scarsdale camera. The video was being shot by private investigators, selected jointly by Cole and Laramie’s guide. The PIs were working in teams of two outside the homes of each of the six probable sleepers. The last time she’d seen the sixth feed, it had shown the front of a single-story ranch sandwiched between a pair of nearly identical houses. There had been no apparent activity, outside of a strobing blue light they assumed was the man’s television.

Knowles turned from the monitor showing the map of El Salvador.

“If our operative’s alive,” he said, “there’s a pretty good chance he could be inside the residence by now. We’ve been over it, but seven here is six there-be dark or close to it for another half hour based on the Almanac’s sunrise schedule.”

“Fine,” Laramie said.

She’d left the room once Cooper’s signal had come up blank for an hour and a half. She hadn’t done anything since but sit and stew.

Something was bothering her about all this-the whole scheme as ordered by Ebbers, from the assassination order to the method they were using to perform surveillance on the six potential sleepers-including the plan that would kick into effect once any of the sleepers began to engage in some form of suspicious activity. Laramie hadn’t been able to put her finger on what it was that was bothering her, but after thinking things over in frustration in her room, she’d begun to figure it out. Now it seemed one of the sleepers was up to something, perhaps no good, and that meant one of the parts of the plan Laramie was beginning to have a major problem with would need to be put into effect.

She blinked herself back to the situation at hand and jutted her chin at Knowles.

“Let’s get on with this,” she said. “What’s the story here?”

She noted that the car being followed by the camera was an SUV-same as Benjamin Achar. The ultimate assimilation disguise.

“You got it,” Knowles said. He spun around in his seat and clicked away with one of his mouses. The moving image on the screen zoomed in a notch. “As you can probably guess from the video feed, our boy in Scarsdale’s on the move. Took off around five till seven. In case you’ve lost track, which we all have more than once, today’s Saturday, so he isn’t headed for work. Usually leaves at seven-thirty anyway when he does.”

Rothgeb chimed in. “Based on what we know from the private investigator about the neighborhood, we’ve got a pretty good idea where he’s headed.”

“Ought to see it coming up in a second here,” Knowles said.

Laramie saw Knowles was working the mouse again, making circles with the cursor in the upper right of the video image, where Laramie noticed something vague and orange begin to materialize. It started to look like a sign-and then the sign became legible.

“He’s going to The Home Depot,” she said.

The car-looking to be a Ford Explorer, though Laramie couldn’t be completely sure-turned into the massive parking lot. She could see the store’s rectangular building, somewhat out of focus, in the background of the shot.

“At seven A.M.,” Rothgeb said.

“That’d be the time they open in Scarsdale on Saturdays,” Knowles said. “We checked online.”

The Explorer pulled to the side of the building that appeared to house the garden supply portion of the store and parked there. Laramie saw the quick flash of the white taillight indicators signaling the driver had thrown the vehicle into Park, and then the door opened and “probable sleeper number six” emerged in jeans and a T-shirt to walk into the store.

Twenty minutes later, the sleeper and his Explorer left the parking lot-his SUV loaded with a heavy cargo of what Laramie counted as twenty-five bags of something that they were all assuming was fertilizer, or some mix of fertilizer and something else like grass seed or topsoil that might help disguise the purpose of the purchase.

He didn’t make any other stops-at least not until returning home. They had to watch from a longer-range shot but could still see pretty clearly as he pulled the Explorer into his garage, closed the door behind the SUV, then, seven minutes later, reopened the garage and pulled out again. This time he headed to a gas station-a Citgo-where they watched him fill a number of red canisters with gasoline at the pump. The private investigator’s surveillance distance was growing with every stop, presumably to keep from being seen.

“That’s about all you need,” Cole said, “for a fertilizer bomb of the yield used by Achar.”

“Correct,” Knowles said. “And we’ll have to wait and see, but I wonder whether the others do the same thing when the sun pops up in their time zones.”

“This is not a good thing,” Rothgeb said.

“No,” Knowles said. “And if there are more than six out there, it’ll start to be a much worse thing real quick.”

Laramie thought some more about the things she’d been thinking about in her room.

“Either way,” she said, “we’re going to need to get the tip phoned in.”

The major piece of the plan she didn’t like was the way Ebbers-through instructions relayed by her guide-had told them they were to “blow the whistle” on the sleepers if they spotted anything like they were seeing from sleeper number six now. Rather than order the FBI or local authorities in to apprehend the sleepers, they’d been instructed to arrange for anonymous tips to be phoned in to both the local FBI office and the local county sheriff’s or police department. The tips were to include great detail but would remain anonymous nonetheless.

Cole had expressed his reservations first, and Laramie agreed-it wasn’t even certain such tips would be acted upon once phoned in, and if FBI agents and the local cops did respond to the tip, who knew how the bust would go down? Would the sleeper panic and set off his bomb?