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A uniformed officer wearing a shiny white belt and holster stood, nearly at attention, outside the door with orders not to let her leave the room.
Before he'd left, Rossi had said to him sternly: "Qualcuno la deve accompagnare alla toilette," which was pretty clear, even in Italian.
Though Ercole had taken the evidence to storage, the charts were still in place, on the easels surrounding them, and Sachs had created a new one--about their prey, Gianni, the terrorist Ibrahim's accomplice.
Gianni (cover name)
--Believed to be in Naples area.
--Associate of Ibrahim, who is presently believed to be in Libya, mastermind of terror plots in Vienna and Milan.
--White, though dark-complexioned.
--Italian.
--Described as "surly."
--Large build.
--No known distinguishings.
--Curly dark hair.
--Smoker.
--Knowledge of and access to explosives.
With such a sparse description and no helpful physical evidence--and with Ali Ma
ziq unable to provide details, after the drugging and electroconvulsive treatment--Rhyme, Spiro and Sachs decided that the best way to track him was through phone calls made to and from the mobile of the refugee he'd run: Ali Maziq.
Both the Postal Police and the domestic Italian spy agency had spent the night establishing calling patterns to and from the phones. They could identify Gianni's phone, from which he'd sent and received calls to and from Maziq, and learned that Gianni had also frequently called and received calls from a landline--a cafe in Tripoli. It was undoubtedly the phone Ibrahim was using, not a mobile, for security's sake.
Gianni's phone, however, was now dead; he'd have a new one. And it was this new mobile they needed to find, so they could triangulate and track it--or at least tap the line and see if he gave away his location or more about his identity in conversation.
Massimo Rossi returned to the office and regarded the occupants, debating a strategy to discover Gianni's new number. Spiro explained the situation.
Rossi said, "A landline, hm. Clever of him. In no small part because there has always been antagonism between Italy and Libya--we occupied them, you know, as a colony. And now our government is angered by their approach to the immigrant crisis--which is no approach at all. No one in Tripoli or Tobruk will cooperate with us."
Dante Spiro said, "I must say I can think of a solution."
Everyone in the room turned his way.
He added, "The only difficulty is that it is in a small way illegal. A prosecutor could hardly suggest it."
"Well, why don't you tell us," Rhyme suggested, "hypothetically?"
New York has been called the City That Never Sleeps, though in fact that motto applies only to a few isolated establishments in Manhattan, where expensive liquor licenses and early work schedules keep the place pretty well shut down in the wee hours.
Contrast that with a very different burg, a small town outside Washington, DC, where thousands labor constantly in a massive complex of buildings, day and night, no holidays, no weekends off.
It was to one of those workers, a young man named Daniel Garrison, that Charlotte McKenzie had placed a call a half hour before, at Dante Spiro's coy suggestion.
Garrison had some fancy title within the National Security Agency, which was located in that never-sleeping town: Fort Meade, Maryland. But his informal job description was simple: hacker.
McKenzie had sent Garrison the information about the coffeehouse whose pay phone Ibrahim had probably used to communicate with Gianni about the terrorist plans. Now, with the okay from bigwigs in Washington, Garrison was overseeing the effort of a very earnest, hardworking bot, as "she" (the NSA officer's pronoun) prowled at lightning speed through the records of Libya Hatif w Alaittisalat, or "Telephone and Telecom." Theirs was not, Garrison had reported, a difficult "switch to run an exploit on. Stone easy. I'm embarrassed for them. Well, not really."
Soon Garrison's bot was plucking records of calls between the pay phone in the Yawm Saeid--Happy Day--coffeehouse in Tripoli, where Ibrahim hung out, and mobiles in the Naples area: scores in the past day, many hundreds over the past week. Apparently--and unfortunately--the landline was a popular means of communicating with those in southern Italy.
