“I’ll get you what I can,” Biery said. “He’ll tell you where it’s at. You guys have some talent in the persuasion department if I remember correctly. If he tossed it, sunk it in water, did anything short of burn it, I can probably recover some of the data.”
“He’s not talking,” Ding said. “Ever.”
“Ah,” Biery said. “So someone killed him and took his computer.”
Clark gave an absentminded nod, unseen by Biery at the other end of the line.
“Looks that way,” Ding said.
“Any sign the killers tore up the house?” Biery asked.
Dom and Jack both shook their heads.
“No,” Ding said. “Just one dead dude.”
“Ackerman was a computer guy, right?” Biery said. “Into enough secret stuff to get him killed. I’m betting he had a second computer with all his secret shit on it. All the stuff he was using to anonymize his Web searches show he was paranoid as hell.”
“
“I said he was paranoid,” Biery said. “Not talented. Anyway, he was a computer guy, so there’s no way he only had one laptop. I’m betting he’d keep another computer hidden somewhere in the house except when he was actually using it.”
“Look under the towels if there’s a linen closet, places like that. It won’t be anyplace that would damage the hard drive.”
Dom closed the freezer door and shrugged. “So not in here, then…”
“Got it,” Jack said, pulling apart the top of the dining room table and taking an HP laptop out of the space meant to store the extra leaf. A slip of paper fell out when he opened the computer.
“Looks like a phone number,” Adara said, doing a quick search on her phone. “Sixty-two is the country code for Indonesia,” she said. “And 431 is the city code for… Manado, wherever that is.”
Ryan read the number out loud so Biery could hear.
“Now we’re cookin’,” Biery said. “I’m sure I’ll be able to get you something as long as I have control of the computer, even remotely.”
“We’ve been here too long already,” Ding said. He moved his finger in a circle over his head. “Let’s get on the road,” he said over the radio, for Midas’s benefit. “We’ll link up at the hotel and let Gavin do his magic. In the meantime, bud, see what you can dig up on that number.”
“Copy that,” Biery said. “I’ll be here waiting to hear from you.”
Clark was already on the phone ordering up the plane when Ding ended the call. With Lisanne on leave, he spoke directly with the chief pilot.
“Hey, Helen,” he said. “John here. I need you to get the Gulfstream geared up for a possible trip… Good chance we’re heading for Indonesia. A place called…” He squinted to see the screen on Adara’s phone. “Manado.”
David Huang spent two hours completing a surveillance-detection run before meeting Michelle Chadwick in the small Virginia burg of Great Falls. Counterintelligence personnel from any number of U.S. government agencies had the habit of following low-level members of foreign missions because they were suspicious over some intercepted e-mail or phone call. Sometimes it was completely random. Huang assumed he was immune from such surveillance since he was posing as a Canadian lobbyist, but he could never be sure. The Ministry of State Security had assured him that his passport was a genuine document with a false name. Still, there was always a chance some peripheral investigation by the Canadians had discovered something about his passport. He might have been filmed meeting with Chadwick. His handler might have been discovered. Weak links could be mitigated but not done away with entirely. So Huang took the long way out of D.C. and ordered Chadwick to do the same.
The lengthy drive gave the Chinese agent’s support team time to watch for any agents trailing him while he doubled back in heavy traffic on the Leesburg Pike, got off and then on again at consecutive exits, or simply drove ten miles below the speed limit on the Beltway.
He’d come out here with his wife before, just to drive the twisting country roads and look at the houses. These weren’t the McMansions of the nouveau riche in other parts of D.C. where capitalist bureaucrats went deep into debt for just the right neighborhood and lobbied to put their kids in private schools they could ill afford. Great Falls was old money, expensive real estate, painted wood fences, and massive horse barns surrounded by forests of hickory and oak. It was too rich for a CIA officer on a government salary to buy a house unless he came from some kind of family. There were still police, but not like inside the Beltway, where it seemed every other person was an armed federal officer.
Huang arrived early and sat in his white Range Rover, sipping a Diet Coke and watching the wind whip the plum trees, when Chadwick’s BMW SUV pulled into the parking lot. Neither of them had brought a cell phone. What was the point of running surveillance detection if you carried your own tracking beacon around in your pocket?
