Incendiary Dispatch. Don Pendleton

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      Despite the vast inventory of attacks that had just occurred, no action plan presented itself. This was not a group of people accustomed to doing nothing.

      Still, not one of them noticed when the time code on the computer screens turned from 8:02 p.m. to 8:03 p.m.

      The phone that Carl Lyons had lifted from the attacker in the lab in Georgia began to ring.

      Everybody in the room looked at it.

      T. J. Hawkins said something under his breath.

      Akira Tokaido’s hand froze over the tablet.

      There was a beep from a computer. Then the peal of an electronics alarm. And then another. The phone rang again.

      “More attacks?” Kurtzman exclaimed.

      “Shit!” Akira Tokaido said. “Coming through the fucking phones!” He sprawled over the conference table, grabbed the phone from Solon Labs and leaped behind one of the nearby terminals. The phone rang again. He snatched at a USB cable and jabbed it into the phone.

      Kurtzman wheeled into position behind a computer of his own. Brognola, having vanished offscreen, saw none of the action.

      “You getting this?” the big Fed’s voice demanded. “We’ve got railroad and bridge alerts! Are you getting this?”

      “Incoming calls setting off the devices,” T. J. Hawkins explained as the cybernetics crew seated themselves at any terminal that happened to be available. “Akira and I were discussing that possibility just before the phone went off.”

      “Tracking the incoming call,” Tokaido said, his voice on edge.

      “What good will that do?” Manning asked Schwarz. “The calls won’t all be coming from the same number.”

      “They’re originating somewhere,” Schwarz said.

      The phone was still ringing.

      “Tell me you got something, Barb!” Brognola barked from far away in D.C.

      “Got it!” Tokaido said. “Tracking back!”

      “How far can you get, Akira?” Price asked with an unreal calm.

      “I don’t know!”

      “Bear?” Price urged.

      “We’re moving!” Kurtzman said. “We’re getting through!”

      “Through to what?” Brognola asked.

      Barbara Price shook her head at him. She wasn’t going to ask for an explanation right now.

      “Got the bastard!” Tokaido said.

      “Seeing it,” responded the low, calm rumble of Huntington Wethers. “Identifying that picocell as a nanoGSM. Sending you the serial number.”

      “I’m accessing the OMC-R,” Tokaido said.

      Hawkins, standing at Tokaido’s shoulder, made a face at Schwarz. “He can access the Operations and Management Center-Radio?” he whispered.

      “I’m in,” Tokaido crowed. His fingers stabbed at the keys. He spoke angrily at the LCD screen. “You are not getting past me again.”

      His fingers stopped. He sat there staring at the screen. Kurtzman pushed back from his monitor.

      “Okay, it’s off,” Kurtzman said. “He turned it off. Akira, you did it. It’s off.”

      “Yeah. I know.”

      “Holy shit. That was fast-ass hackwork, my friend,” Hawkins said, clapping Tokaido on the shoulder.

      “Yeah.” Tokaido didn’t seem to share Hawkins’s enthusiasm. He began typing again furiously. “Gonna cover my tracks.”

      “We know where the picocell is, right?” Schwarz demanded.

      “I can give you a street address,” Wethers confirmed. “In Barcelona.”

      “Let’s go get that damned box!” Hawkins said.

      “Will it do us any good?” Price asked.

      “It just might,” Kurtzman said. “The picocell, the base station controller—the radio operations and maintenance hardware give us a way into the system.”

      “Sounds like a weak link. As soon as they know it’s compromised they’ll stop using it. Or incinerate it,” Price suggested.

      “Maybe not,” Tokaido announced. “There’s a power outage in that end of the city. They’ll have battery backup but I told the Operations and Management Center for the nanoGSM to take steps against a surge. Maybe they’ll believe that was the reason their signals stopped going out.”

      “A power outage caused by?”

      Tokaido grimaced and held up ten wiggling fingers, then kept typing.

      “They’ll never believe the timing was coincidental,” Price replied.

      “I’m creating a record in the OMC of several hours of power fluctuations on the grid,” Tokaido said. “If I’m this terrorist, then I’m gonna dedicate my picocell to my own job. I’m not sharing it with anybody. Which means the picocell’s had low-volume traffic all day until the high volume of signals at 8:04 Eastern time. I’m making it look like the thing was cycling on and off. When the high volume of calls started, it was too at-risk and the system shut itself down again.”

      “A good IT guy will see through it.”

      “They might see through it anyway,” Price snapped. “But we’ll be there if they’re not. Phoenix?”

      “We’re gone,” McCarter snapped, and the room cleared of the five members in seconds.

      “Carmen?” Price said.

      “Transport to Barcelona is standing by for Phoenix Force,” Delahunt replied. Aircraft, like almost all dedicated Stony Man resources, had been standing by since the first attack. “Ground transport will be waiting for them in Barcelona.”

      “Can I get an update here?” Brognola said.

      Price walked to the screen and quickly summarized the rapid-fire chain of events. “We tracked down a specific picocell as the source of the calls going out. A picocell is a phone cell system. An office building might have one for dedicated mobile phone traffic. The hardware’s not large.”

      “How large?” Brognola asked. “Would it need a dedicated IT room? Extra air-conditioning? That kind of thing?”

      “No, Hal,” Kurtzman broke in, wheeling away from his desk. “The picocell itself, the operations and maintenance hardware, the base station, none of it’s bigger than a PC tower. The biggest piece would be a battery backup. That’s a 150-pound box, maybe.”

      “Think СКАЧАТЬ