what is suggested. Their actions never took place for you because I stopped them. I had no choice. Hundreds of innocent people would have died. But, you have no idea how glad I was when Carlson figured it out and agreed to be a conduit for what I knew.”
“That’s where I have trouble,” Laney said. “Why didn’t Carlson confide in me. You’ve said we worked together. This makes me feel like I don’t really know her.”
“That was my fault,” Jake admitted. “We should have included you, but enough had happened that I wanted the security of limiting who was aware of me. She tried to convince me otherwise, but I threatened to run and change my name.”
Laney shot Jake a final look as they approached the rental. Jake could tell that Laney still wasn’t convinced, but at least he wasn’t as openly hostile as he’d been before.
Chapter 28
The first two days were mostly spent getting organized. The various groups had to bring together their people, put in place the tasks to be accomplished, and begin making calls and putting out feelers, or visiting the identified locations. This kind of thing took time, something they didn’t know how much of they had.
“This is ridiculous,” agent Lloyd Miller complained loudly at the morning meeting on the start of the third day. “We spent an entire day with the full team I have been given and haven’t progressed more than a couple of blocks from where we started. It will take months to examine all of the possible hiding places with the manpower we have. We need to forget the secrecy, and put out a call for the maintenance people of every building and facility in the area to search for anything out of place. We need to get the police involved. They have far more manpower. Then we might be able to respond to what is found by the people we have.”
Carlson listened to the complaint, knowing the agent’s claim was true. Unfortunately, Jake said they had tried that approach when he’d first been brought to Washington the first time they had dealt with this problem. How could she explain to the frustrated agent that the open search had caused someone to trigger the devices in place, resulting in thousands of deaths? She was aware they could never find all of the hidden devices this way, but Jake had assured her that this approach would yield the clues and information needed to find those behind the plan.
“We cannot risk alerting those behind the placement of the canisters,” she said. “We have to hope your searches will locate some of the weapons, and that by questioning those in the facility we find someone who has seen something that leads us where we need to go. You know how it works.”
Miller shook his head in frustration. “I think we are approaching this all wrong,” he said.
“But you found something?” Carlson pointed out.
“We didn’t find it,” Miller responded. “A broken compressor unit on one of the air conditioners in a mall almost two miles from the museum buildings brought in a repairman. He noted right away that there was something there that shouldn’t be. He called in security, and word got to us.”
“It was the same kind of unit?” Laney asked.
Miller nodded. “There were actually a number of units spread throughout the air conditioners that service the mall. They have all been disabled and are no longer a danger. No one knows when they might have been put in place, by the way.”
Another agent wanted to pursue the matter farther. “All of the units we have discovered are synchronized to a trigger date that is more than three weeks from now. That gives us time if we knew where they were all located. I realize that there is the remote trigger capability, but you explained in yesterday’s briefing that we know the frequency they are using and can monitor for any signals. Why can’t we simply block the transmission at that frequency, and prevent them from triggering the devices? That would allow us to use the manpower as Lloyd suggested.”
“No one knows how to block an area so large,” Carlson explained. “We have raised the possibility and were told it wouldn’t be effective.”
“Any word on the containers and where they might have been manufactured?” Carlson asked, looking at another of the agents. They had to get on to other issues and not get bogged down on an approach that wasn’t going to work.