Harvath was just about to say as much when he saw Agent Roe running toward the conference room.
“What’s up?” he said as she came rushing in.
“Boise,” she replied, out of breath. “You nailed it. Todd Thomas. We’ve got him.”
“You’ve got him?” Nicholas said.
“Not him, but the Xerox machine he used.”
“How?”
Roe looked at Harvath.
“The man using the Todd Thomas alias showed up in Nashville with a just passable photocopy of his driver’s license,” said Harvath. “As long as he was standing in front of you and showed you his real license to compare to, you’d accept it. There was no reason for the storage facility manager to make another copy. We now know he did the same thing in Vegas, Dallas, and Des Moines. That’s what got me thinking.
“If I was going to do this, I’d use a grocery store Xerox machine or one at a small pack-and-ship place and I’d practice. Once I had it to the point where you could read the info but my photo was just dark and out of focus enough, I’d whip out all my other fake IDs and make copies on the spot.”
“And copy machines have hard drives,” Nicholas said approvingly.
Harvath nodded. “They keep a record of everything. All you need is a cable and the right software to access it. Which is what we asked the FBI to do. They looked for public copy machines in and around Boise, paying specific attention to those closest to the free Wi-Fi locations the handler used to access his Facebook accounts. They downloaded as many hard drives as they could find and that data was fed to the NSA.”
“Who then used one of their algorithms to sift the data and look for matches of the blurry driver’s license photos?”
“Exactly,” said Harvath as he turned back to Roe. “What do we know?”
“The copy machine was in a small pack-and-ship place in downtown Boise called Going Postal. They offer PO boxes, shipping services, that kind of thing,” Roe replied. “The hard drive had copies of the driver’s licenses used at the storage units we already know of, plus a license from Washington State and one from Maryland. Now that we’ve got those aliases, we’re pretty confident we’ll be able to track down the storage units in Seattle and Baltimore.”
“How many licenses total were on the machine for this guy?”
Roe smiled. “Seven. Just like you suspected, he practiced with a local, Idaho driver’s license first. We’ve already run it. Unlike the others, this one is legit. It belongs to a fifty-seven-year-old naturalized American citizen of Chinese birth named Ren Ho. He lives in Indian Valley, Idaho, about two hours north of Boise. We’re doing a full workup on him now and the FBI has already scrambled an HRT team. DoE is also sending a NEST team.”
Harvath looked at Carlton. “We need to be there, on site, as soon as they grab him, so we can do the interrogation.”
The Old Man nodded. “Who do you want to take?”
“Sloane and Chase, plus Nicholas for anything we find computer-related.”
“Done. Anything else?”
“Stephanie Esposito.”
“The Agency’s China analyst?”
“I want someone who knows the culture,” replied Harvath. “Who can speak and read Chinese.”
“I’ll call the President and DNI and brief them right now.”
Scribbling down his email address and cell phone number, Harvath handed them to Agent Roe and said, “As soon as we’re in the air, I’ll check my inbox. Please send everything you’ve got to that address.”
“Will do,” Roe replied. “Stay safe.”
“I’ll try,” he said, and then, looking at Nicholas, nodded toward the door. “Let’s go.”
CHAPTER 55
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BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS
Four out of the five princelings had done a good job. They had practiced excellent tradecraft and had not brought any surveillance with them into Chinatown. The fifth princeling, though, had been atrocious. Not only had she dragged a tail along behind her, but she had also brought her cell phone.
Cheng could forgive her for the tail; even the best operatives made mistakes. The phone, though, was unforgivable. From the moment he had first picked her up on the surveillance cameras, she had been either talking or texting. She was oblivious to the things going on around her. It infuriated him, because if she had chosen to ignore this part of the protocol, she had likely ignored everything else she had been taught. The arrogance. This was not a game.
The restaurant was noisy, crowded. It was filled with boisterous American Chinese. There was a fish tank with cloudy water. Everything smelled