He just did what he was told. He was a simple laborer.
“Because you do need a permit if you’re putting in a septic tank, you know.”
The cop’s cheeks and ears were the color of cold borscht.
Dragomir smiled. “No septic tank.”
Tiny muffled cries from the vent pipe.
The policeman cocked his head. His ridiculous ears seemed to twitch. “You hear something?” he said.
Dragomir shook his head slowly. “No…”
The girl’s cries had become louder and more distinct.
“HELP GOD HELP SAVE ME PLEASE OH GOD…”
“That sounds like it’s coming from down there,” the policeman said. “How weird is that?”
63.
“I’m listening,” I said.
Dorothy sighed. “Let’s start with the basic question: How are they getting on the Internet, okay? And I don’t think it’s your standard high-speed connection.”
“Why not?”
She leaned back, folded her arms. “My parents live in North Carolina, right? So a couple of years ago they decided they wanted to get cable TV so they could watch all those movies. Only there wasn’t any cable available, so they had to put one of those satellite dishes on their roof.”
I nodded.
“Once I tried to watch a movie at their house, and the picture kept fuzzing out. Drove me crazy. So I asked them what the problem was, you know, was it always like this, did they call the satellite company to get it fixed, right? And Momma said, oh, that happens a lot, every time a plane flies by overhead. You get used to it. Nothing to do about it. See, they live close to the Charlotte/Douglas airport. Right in the flight path. I mean, the planes are loud. And then I began to notice that, yeah, every time I heard a plane overhead the TV would crap out.”
“Okay,” I said. “If our kidnappers are deep in the woods somewhere, or in some rural area where they don’t even have high-speed Internet, satellite is probably their only way to get online. And you think a plane can break up the signal?”
“Easy. A bad rainstorm can do it too. Satellite works by line-of-sight, so if something gets between the dish and the big old satellite up there in the sky, the signal’s gonna break up. You got a big enough plane, flying low enough, that thing can interrupt the signal. Might only be a fraction of a second, but that’ll screw up the video stream.”
“This is good,” I said. “That noise we’re hearing could well come from a jet engine. So let’s say they’re near an airport. How near, do you think?”
“Hard to calculate. But close enough so when a plane lands or takes off, it’s low enough to the ground to block the path to the satellite. So it depends on how big the plane is and how fast it’s going and all that.”
“There are a hell of a lot of airports in the U.S.,” I pointed out.
“That right?” she said dryly. “Hadn’t thought about that. But if we can narrow down the search, it gets a whole lot easier.”
“I think we can.”
“You do?”
“New Hampshire.” I explained about George Devlin’s cell phone mapping. How we knew that “Mr. X” took Alexa across the Massachusetts border into New Hampshire.
She listened, staring into space. After twenty seconds of silence, she said, “That helps a lot. I don’t know how many airports there are in New Hampshire, but we’ve just narrowed it down to a manageable number.”
“Maybe we can narrow it down more than that,” I said. “Does that creepy website CamFriendz stream in real time?”
“They claim to. I’d say yes, within a few seconds. You have to account for slow connections and server lag time and so on. Maybe the times are five seconds off.”
“So we match up those times with the exact flight times in the FAA’s flight database.”
“They have such a thing?”
“Of course they do. We’re looking for airports in New Hampshire—hell, let’s broaden the search, make it Massachusetts and Maine and New Hampshire, just to be safe—with a flight schedule matching the times of our four interruptions.”
She nodded vigorously.
“And we can narrow it down a lot more,” I said. “Aren’t there two separate interruptions during one of those broadcasts?”
“You’re right.”
“So we have an exact interval between two flights.”
Her smile widened slowly. “Not bad, boss.”
I shrugged. “Your idea.” One of the few things I’ve learned since going into business for myself: The boss should never take credit for anything. “Can you hack into the Federal Aviation Administration’s secure electronic database?”
“No.”
“Well, the FBI will be able to get it through channels. I’ll give Diana a call.”