“He’ll want to keep her alive until five o’clock. So he can show that she’s still alive. He’ll want to keep his options open.”
“Okay, but then at five, whether he gets the money or not, whether there’s a last-minute hitch or not, he’ll kill her anyway.”
“I agree.”
“So what’s the point, Nick?”
“To give me until five o’clock today to find Alexa,” I said. “Now I want you to go back to your idea about locating him based on the schedule of plane flights, the interruptions in the satellite signal.”
“What’s to go back to? That’s a dead end. Didn’t you tell me the FBI didn’t find any matches in the FAA database?”
“Yes, I did.”
“And you think they’re wrong?”
“Not at all. I think they searched all flights in the FAA database. But I don’t think they searched all flights.”
“You don’t? Why not?”
“Because the one thing I know is the U.S. military. And I know that they don’t like to share information on military flights with pencil-neck civilian geeks in the federal government.”
“Military flights?”
“There are military air bases in Maine and Vermont and New Hampshire. They each keep their own flight logs.”
“Online?”
“Never.”
“Then how do we get to them?”
I picked up the phone and handed it to her. “The old-fashioned way,” I said.
85.
Dorothy assigned Jillian to pull up a list of all companies in New Hampshire that rented or leased construction equipment.
There were almost nine hundred.
Even after narrowing it down to just “earth-moving equipment” and “heavy construction equipment,” we had close to a hundred. It was just about hopeless. We’d have to get extremely lucky.
Meanwhile Dorothy spent two hours on the phone with military air bases and Air National Guard air traffic controllers. I had to get on a few times and throw around names of generals in the Pentagon who probably didn’t remember me. But when she walked into my office with a wide grin on her face, I knew she had something for me.
“What’s a KC-135?” she asked.
“Ah. The Stratotanker. Made by Boeing. Mostly aerial refueling tankers, though some of them have been reconfigured as airborne command posts. Let’s hear it.”
“We got a hit. Each one of those interruptions in the video signal coincides exactly with a KC-135 flight out of the Pease Air National Guard Base.”
“Meaning what? They’re in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.”
“No, no,” she said. “Not that simple. The kidnap site could be anywhere from about five miles to forty miles away.”
“You can’t narrow it down? Like by triangulating or something? Don’t you digital forensic techs always triangulate stuff?”
“Not enough data points to do that. All I have is three cutouts on the video, about ten seconds after three KC-135s take off.”
“You’ve got plenty,” I said. “You know the direction the planes took off toward, right?”
“True.”
“You probably know the speed the planes generally take off at, right?”
“Maybe.”
“You should be able to get within ten miles, I’d say. Do I have to do all your work for you?”
I tried to head off the Look with what I thought was a disarming smile. But it didn’t work. I got the Look anyway.
Then my BlackBerry rang. I glanced at it, saw it was Diana.
“Hey,” I said. “You got the photo I sent.”
“More than that, Nick,” she said. “I think we found him.”
86.
I didn’t say anything for a long moment.
“Nick?”
“You found Zhukov?”
Diana’s voice was taut, louder than normal. “We got a hit on his phone.”
“New Hampshire?”
“Right. Just west of Nashua.”
“He must have switched it on.”
“Listen, I have to go. We’re deploying up north.”
“Where?”
“A forward staging area in a parking lot a couple of miles away from the target site.”
“You’re deploying with the SWAT team?”
“They’re calling in all assets, operational or not. They want me at a surveillance point outside the SWAT perimeter.”
“Give me the exact location.”
“You can’t be there. You know that. It’s a Bureau operation. You’re a civilian.”
I inhaled slowly. “Diana, listen. I don’t want her to die in the middle of some big noisy SWAT team operation. I want her alive.”
“So do they, Nick. Their number-one priority is always victim recovery.”
“I’m not talking about intention. I’m talking about technique.”
“Our SWAT guys are as good as you get.”
“I’m not arguing.”
“So what are you suggesting?”
I closed my eyes, tried to focus. “What’s the location?”
“A house on a country road. It looks deserted, from the satellite imagery.”
“Is there land?”
“It’s a farmhouse.”
“Secluded?”
“What’s your point, Nick?”
“Is it just him, hiding out there? Or is that where he has Alexa buried? It makes all the difference in how you approach him.”