way in, he’s got a way to remotely monitor all of his units.”
“Anything else?”
“No. I think that’s it. For now.”
“Wait,” said Nicholas, who had been clicking away at his laptop. “There may be one additional item.”
He had asked to see the Thomas paperwork, especially the payment information. “Did you get a hit on the credit card?” Harvath asked.
The little man nodded as he peered at his screen and wrote something down. “It looks like he used a high-value, prepaid credit card for the storage company to draw his monthly rent from. Short of someone paying with cash, that’s one of the top things I’d be looking for.”
“Got it,” said Urda. Taking his checklist, he strode back toward the front of the hangar to update the team at the National Counter Terrorism Center.
Harvath turned his attention back to Nicholas. “Were you able to access the facility’s keypad log?”
“I was, but a big chunk of data from tonight has been erased.”
Harvath wasn’t surprised about that either. “Whoever knocked the CCTV footage offline could have accessed the keypad data.”
“What do you think he had in that storage locker?” Nicholas asked.
“Something that made a very big bang.”
“You don’t think the bang was the explosion of the police car they found?”
“No. I think Deng was doing something at that unit when the cop showed up and he killed him. Maybe he used the police car as a fuse to start a chain reaction. There was definitely something else in there.”
“Any clue as to what?”
Harvath shook his head. “My guess is that it had something to do with the attack. Maybe a bomb of some sort. I think Wazir Ibrahim, the dead Somali, was involved and maybe got compromised, so Deng was sent in to kill him.”
“What about the engineer accessing Facebook from Nashville?”
“Ibrahim is dead. A police officer is dead. And a storage unit went up in a big fireball. Right now, I don’t think it looks too good for that engineer.”
Nicholas opened another window on his laptop. “Well, he hasn’t accessed his Facebook page recently, so you may be right.”
“Or I could be completely wrong. Maybe Deng was sent to kill the Somali and take his place. Maybe he and the Nashville engineer have gone operational and torching the storage unit was intended to buy them enough time to do whatever they need to do. I don’t know.”
That was what was so frustrating. They were steps behind, playing catch-up in a game that was only getting faster.
“What do you need me to focus on next?”
Harvath looked at all of the materials that had been driven to the hangar and organized into sections. Then he looked at Nicholas sitting behind his computer. What made the most sense was to set him loose on what he did best.
“I want you to find me whoever took that CCTV system offline and erased those keypad entry logs.”
CHAPTER 43
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* * *
NORTH KOREA
Lieutenant Fordyce accepted Billy Tang’s rifle and set it against the rock next to him. “For the record,” he whispered, “this is still a really bad idea.”
Tang nodded. “Yeah, I know.”
Fordyce looked over his shoulder at the ridgeline in the distance. Tucker and Johnson would almost be at the top with Jin-Sang by now.
Looking back at the prison camp, he adjusted his rifle and tried to make himself comfortable. Comfortable, though, was a highly relative term. He wasn’t going to feel truly comfortable until they had gotten the hell out of this godforsaken country.
“In and out,” he ordered Tang. “Five minutes tops and not a second longer.”
“Understood,” the CIA operative agreed.
He was dressed in his peasant clothing with his suppressed nine-millimeter pistol concealed underneath. From his shoulder hung Jin-Sang’s canvas bag. It would give him a way to carry what he needed, as well as a place to hide his night vision goggles once he got there. It would also, he hoped, be a sign to the sister, reaffirming that he had been sent by Jin-Sang.
Fordyce watched through his rifle scope as a guard walked slowly by the fence, stopped for a moment, and then moved on. Just beyond was the infirmary where Jin-Sang’s sister, Hana, had been relegated. According to the little boy, neither the official camp doctor nor the prisoner charged with assisting him remained there overnight. If a patient died, so be it. The only things of value the doctor bothered locking up were the medicine and his office. Tang packed his lockpick set just in case.