Carl answered for him. "Renner was right. This goes pretty far up the chain of power. Shelley's worried we're going to find out who he is, and he's pulled out the big guns to stop us."
Doug chuckled darkly. "If I were him, I'd be a bit more worried about Renner."
Gene's grin held no humor at all. "Get out of the car. We've got to get out of the crowds before Homeland Security releases this picture to the public. Sam, keep working on Shelley, and get Adams to clear me. We'll make our way to Gabrielle's as best we can."
"Will do!" The order was like giving a kid candy. "Be careful, guys."
Carl replied for them, "We will."
They stepped out of the car into utter pandemonium.
Chapter 24
February 2nd, 9:28 PM EST; J. Edgar Hoover Building, Sub-basement Four; Washington, D.C.
With two TVs and three computer monitors devoted to the situation in San Francisco and a message left on Adams' cell, Sam got back to work on Shelley's identity. All she had to go on was a cellular phone number, a fake name, and the fact that he worked for the federal government in Washington, D.C.
The average person would be terrified if he knew just what the government could find out about him, and writing code on the fly to mine data was Sam's bread and butter. She'd fueled up on jelly doughnuts and Mountain Dew from the mini-mart down the street, and was ready to work. She cracked her knuckles and set in for a marathon of data-crunching. Here comes Big Brother, Shelley. Come out, come out, wherever you are! For several hours Sam forgot about her teammates, San Francisco, nuclear warheads, and even food.
Using the Homeland Security database of cellular phone patterns, she traced the daily route of Shelley over the past eighteen months. Almost every weekday he started in Springfield, Virginia, moved to Washington, D.C. along the 395 artery, and went back home. That narrowed the suspect list down to eighty-or-so thousand people. His weekend patterns were all over the place, but nothing stuck out. The phone never left the greater Washington area.
She restricted the list to government employees and cut the original number by almost a third. She eliminated over twenty thousand more when she compared vacation records and sick time with the cellular tracking data, and even more than that when she added a cross-reference of the time clock databases of all government agencies. There were a lot of people who didn't actually punch a clock, so when she finished that, she still had more than eight thousand possible names.
She cut out the people on scheduled trips and conferences outside of Washington when the phone was on and in the D.C. area. That shortened the list by a few hundred people. Ninety percent in a few hours wasn't bad, but it wasn't good enough. She stared at the screen, unmoving. Her mind raced.
Sam chuckled at herself and eliminated the women. MacUther had told them Shelley was male and didn't use a voice scrambler. That could have saved a lot of time. Thirty-eight hundred people left. She sighed and looked at the clock. She'd been at it for five hours. What else, what else? She tapped her finger against her bottom lip. MacUther didn't mention anything about an accent, so she took a guess. She eliminated non-native citizens and late immigrants. Twenty-nine hundred people.
Who are you, Shelley? Come to Mama so she can spank your naughty little butt. She had a thought and smiled. You can afford to hire mercenaries to kill people for you. Her fingers flew across the keyboard, cutting everyone with a net worth of less than two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, barring primary residences. That was probably too low, but she needed to be somewhat conservative. He could be using government funds. Six hundred and twenty three people.
What else do I know that can narrow this down? In the next hour she wrote a program to track as close as possible the exact position of the cellular phone on an hour-by-hour basis. The granularity of the data was terrible. She only had what cell tower covered the phone at any given time, which gave her almost nothing at all. The one thing it did give her was the exact time the phone crossed from one cell area to the next.
She tapped her bottom lip. Doesn't I-395 have HOT lanes? High-Occupancy Toll lanes were special highway lanes for car-poolers, but also for people willing to spend extra money to drive faster from point A to point B. A wealthy government-type would almost definitely use them.
She looked up the locations of the HOT toll booths and overlapped them with cellular coverage maps. One HOT lane on 395 was within a quarter mile of a transition from one cell to the next. She cross-referenced the cellular travel patterns of the phone with government-owned EZ-Pass (HOT) toll card records, fed the new information into her program, and looked at the screen. A picture of a man in his late fifties or early sixties stared back at her.