warehouse in Boston, and another facility in Newport News.”
The location in nearby Newport News and the fact the bank used for the purchase of the canisters had been located there was not lost on the group.
“Have you had anyone check out the warehouse?” Carlson asked.
“Not yet. We just learned of the connection late yesterday. I was planning on sending several agents there today and see what it looks like.”
“I’d like Laney and Bob Trask to go along,” Carlson directed. “Have someone at the Boston office take a look at the facility there, but it is enough farther away, I doubt that would be the one being used. Why use a facility a day’s drive distant, when you have one a couple hours away?”
As the meeting broke up and Jake and Laney headed across the room to coordinate the drive to Newport News with Kirby Shaw. Most of the other agents were making their way out of the room via the rear entrance. Laney jokingly commented to Jake, “I guess we won’t need to delay our start looking up the place on the maps program. You’ve already been there and know the way, right?”
As Laney finished his comment, he realized that two of the agents in the room had looped around and were far closer than he expected. They might have been close enough to overhear the comment.
“Shit!” cursed Laney. His comment had been poorly timed, and he knew he should have kept his mouth shut while in the presence of others.
Jake quickly looked around the room. He recognized one of the men that had wandered close at the time of the unfortunate slip. Don Graper was his name. He appeared to be engaged in a discussion with some of the other recently added agents. Probably trying to decide what their roles would be. He didn’t show any sign of having overheard. There was nothing Jake could do about it anyway.
Rather than drive two vehicles, Shaw suggested they take one of the larger sedans from the motor pool, and the four agents making the trip ride down together. Despite Laney’s comment, Brian Nash, one of the two agents Shaw had assigned the task to, had already printed out maps of where they needed to go. His partner, Matt Hocker, headed off to get the vehicle they would use.
Traffic as much as distance dictated their drive, and it took nearly four hours to drive the one hundred and seventy miles south to Newport News. They wound their way through the unfamiliar city, finding the warehouse district near the port without much difficulty. A combination of the maps that Nash had printed out and the GPS guidance system led them directly to the place. The large warehouse looked much like the others on the long block where it was located. In the half hour they had been watching the place more than a dozen large container trucks had come and gone, bringing in goods that had supposedly cleared customs, and hauling off containers destined to be loaded onto a ship for export.
“One could easily hide a shipment of those canisters in that place,” Matt Hocker announced. “It would take a multi-day search by a dozen agents to find them.”
“They might already have been shipped off anyway,” Nash replied. “The facility that Laney and Trask here checked out, had a number of them. There might be any number of small factories like that where the assembly was taking place. I doubt the large container trucks would be making deliveries to locations we are interested in anyway.”
Nash didn’t realize it, but he had just described the operation. There were multiple assembly facilities scattered around the DC area, and all had been supplied with their allotment of canisters some weeks before. The warehouse across the way still held more than a hundred and fifty of the canisters, but those were destined to go unused.
“I think we’d have to be concerned about small delivery vans of the kind we found in Alexandria,” Laney suggested. “We can’t be certain they had farmed out all of the canisters, and the gas and anthrax have to be coming from somewhere. The agents might be hidden on one or more of those containers, and then are being distributed. I can’t see them attempting to manufacture the stuff in a place as busy as this.”
“It’d be risky to try and bring it in by those containers,” Nash disagreed. “They have to pass through customs.”
“It wouldn’t be the first time money exchanged hands