Act of War (31 page)

Harvath had never seen Nicholas as engaged and as positive as he had been since coming to work for the Carlton Group. In addition, Nicholas
now had a woman in his life. Something to do, someone to love, and something to look forward to. The man had discovered the three keys to happiness. Harvath was happy for him.

The large, private hangar the jet had taxied into had been converted into a gargantuan war room. The filing cabinets from the office were all lined up, boxes and piles of paper sat on folding tables, and desks had been brought in with power strips connected to long extension cords that ran across the floor of the hangar to various outlets.

Nicholas’s eyes focused on all of it. Taking in a deep breath, he sighed and said, “Paper. How provincial.”

Harvath understood. Nicholas preferred to work in the digital realm. He did, too. Even so, if there were answers in those files or on the computers, between the two of them, they would find them.

“Are those my research assistants?” he asked, pointing to an older couple sitting in the glassed-in hangar office.

Harvath nodded. “Mr. and Mrs. Logan. They own the self-storage company. I’ll be helping out, too.”

The little man shook his head. “It’s going to be a long night.”

•  •  •

While Nicholas had been in flight, Harvath had interrogated the Somali cab driver. Bao Deng had indeed been his customer, there was no question about it. But other than what he had already told the police, the Somali didn’t know anything else. He was a dead end, so Harvath had decided to focus on the storage facility. Now that Nicholas had arrived, they were able to get to work.

Where Nicholas was mathematical, Harvath was visual. Thus, they came at the problem from two different directions. Like two teams tunneling through a mountain from opposite sides, they hoped to meet in the middle and find their answer there. Mrs. Logan worked with Nicholas and her husband worked with Harvath.

Harvath had a lot of questions, starting with the CCTV footage. According to the Logans, they used an inexpensive, wireless camera system. It came with an Internet app that allowed them to remotely check in on
their facility from home. From time to time it was known to drop offline and could be fixed only by someone in the office rebooting it manually. Despite those facts, Harvath had doubted it was a coincidence that it had picked tonight to go down again.

His next question had to do with the specific layout of the self-storage facility. Mr. Logan located an old survey of the property in one of the file cabinets, brought it over, and laid it on the table he and Harvath were using.

Based on the blast damage, the Fire Department had approximated the general vicinity of the blast. Harvath circled that cluster of storage units as his ground zero and started there.

“What information do you have on these?” he asked. “Twenty-six, twenty-seven, thirty-six, and thirty-seven.”

Mr. Logan walked back to his file cabinets and began searching for the paperwork. Though he and his wife kept some things on computer, he preferred pen and paper. Every rental agreement required a signature and he had kept copies of everything.

“Are there any unusual customers that stand out in your mind?” Harvath asked as the man conducted his search.

“You see all sorts of people in the storage business. ‘Unusual’ is kind of a loose term.”

“How about suspicious?”

“We get our share of those, too,” said Logan, a pair of reading glasses perched on the end of his nose as he combed the files. “We always have to watch out for people using the units for illegal activities. Sometimes, people will take one of these deeper units to hide a stolen car until it can be chopped up. Sometimes they even do the chopping inside, late at night. That’s why we make sure the police have the gate code, so they can patrol any time they want.”

Harvath remembered seeing the keypad. “Does everyone use the same code?”

“No. Each customer gets their own unique code. That way, if they don’t pay their bill, we can freeze them out. We put an additional lock on their unit, too.”

“Do you keep a record of when the gate is accessed?”

“We do. It feeds to our computer system.”

Harvath looked at Nicholas, who was sitting across one of the desks from Mrs. Logan. “I’m on it,” the little man said.

“The other thing we have to watch out for is people trying to cook meth,” Logan added. “I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s what caused the explosion. Chemicals stored in one of the units.”

Harvath doubted it. It would take a lot of chemicals to cause an explosion that size, but anything was possible.

After locating the agreements for the four units, Logan returned to the table and handed them over.

Harvath placed them in a grid and looked at the names on the top sheets. “Ring any bells for you?”

Logan turned each of the rental agreements to the last page and laid them in a row. Each contained a photocopy of the customer’s driver’s license. As he studied them, Harvath asked Mrs. Logan to come over and look at them, too.

“Nothing?” Harvath asked after several minutes.

Both of the Logans shook their heads.

Harvath looked at the third photo in their impromptu lineup. He could barely make the guy, Todd Thomas, out. “Why is this one such poor quality? It looks like a copy of a copy.”

Mr. Logan picked it up and examined it more closely. “I don’t know, but it wasn’t done with our Xerox machine.”

“How do you know?”

He picked up the other applications, looked at their dates, and said, “Because our machine’s in excellent condition. We bought it new and barely use it. Besides, look at the other copies. They’re fine.”

Harvath looked for himself. Logan was right. The two agreements that had been processed before the blurry Thomas photo were crystal clear, as was the one that came after.

“I’ve never heard of a Xerox machine just having a bad day.”

Mrs. Logan drew her husband’s attention to something on the Thomas agreement by tapping the bottom of the page.

“What is it?” Harvath asked.

“We didn’t take this application,” Mrs. Logan said. “Donald did.”

“Who’s Donald?”

“Don is our manager,” replied Mr. Logan, shaking his head. “He’s a nice young man, but he doesn’t always have the greatest eye for detail.”

“My husband is being generous,” Mrs. Logan interjected. “He means Donald is lazy. Half the time I lose sleep at night wondering if he remembered to lock up, or if he left all of the lights burning.”

“Do you know where he is now?” said Harvath.

“Probably at home asleep.”

“Do you have his number? I’d like to talk to him.”

Mr. Logan nodded and fished a worn address book from his breast pocket. As he searched for the number, Harvath waved Urda over and asked him to run the names and driver’s license numbers of the clients on the four storage unit agreements.

Urda wrote them all down and then stepped to the front of the hangar to make his call. When Mr. Logan had found the page with his manager’s phone number, he held it up for Harvath to see.

Pulling out his cell phone, Harvath punched in the number.

“When Donald answers, just tell him that there was a fire and we’re trying to locate one of the customers whose unit was damaged.”

Mr. Logan nodded and Harvath handed him the phone.

T
he call with Donald lasted about fifteen minutes. Did he remember the customer who had rented unit 26, Mr. Todd Thomas? He did.

“Why?” asked Harvath.

“I’ve got cousins in Kentucky named Thomas,” said the manager. “I joked that maybe we were related. He didn’t think that was funny.”

“Why didn’t he think that was funny?”

“Probably because he’s Asian and I’m not.”

Bingo
, thought Harvath. “Would you recognize him if you saw him again?” he asked, snapping his fingers to get Nicholas’s attention.

“Maybe,” Donald replied.

“Do you have access to a computer?”

“For, like, the Internet and stuff?”

“Yeah,” said Harvath. “For, like, the Internet.”

“I’ve got my phone.”

“Okay, hold on a second.”

Harvath muted the call and asked Nicholas if there was somewhere he could post the picture of Bao Deng so that Donald could look at it.

“Ask him if he does Snapchat,” the little man replied.

“I don’t want to use Snapchat and have it on their server. I want us to keep control.”

Nicholas gave Harvath a URL and told him he’d have Deng’s picture posted in a moment.

As they waited, Harvath asked the manager about Mr. Thomas’s photocopy. Donald explained that while most customers filled out a rental agreement while standing at the front desk, Thomas had shown up with his already completed. Along with it, he had also included a copy of his driver’s license.

“Did you ask to see his actual driver’s license in order to verify it?” Harvath asked.

“Of course,” Donald replied. “But everything matched up. I could read his address, date of birth, all that stuff, so I figured why make another copy? Go green, right?”

Harvath shook his head. There was so much they could have done with that photograph.

Nicholas flashed him a thumbs-up, indicating that Deng’s picture had been posted, and Harvath gave Donald the URL.

After a moment, the manager placed his phone back against his ear and said, “That’s not him.”

“You’re sure?” Harvath said. “Take a look again.”

“I don’t need to look again. The Thomas guy was much older than the guy in your photo.”

“How much older?”

“I don’t know,” Donald said, thinking. “Fifties. Sixties maybe.”

“Is there anything else you can remember about him? Any other distinguishing features? Tattoos? Scars?”

“Not really. He was just kind of a plain dude.”

“Do you remember how tall he was?”

“Shorter than me. Definitely. Maybe five-foot-seven.”

Harvath made another note. “How about what he was driving? Did you get a look at his car?”

“Nope. Never saw it.”

Harvath asked a couple more questions before thanking the man and disconnecting the call. As he did, Urda came back over.

“That Todd Thomas Tennessee driver’s license is bogus,” the FBI agent reported.

Harvath wasn’t surprised. His mind was now going a million miles an hour. He asked the Logans if they would be kind enough to return to the
hangar office and wait there. He didn’t want to discuss anything further in front of them.

Once they had gone, Nicholas said, “So, who’s our new mystery Asian man?”

“I think it’s probably safe to call him Chinese,” stated Urda.

Harvath nodded. “Agreed. And if this new guy,
Thomas
, rented a storage unit in Nashville, we should assume he rented units in the other cell cities, too.”

Urda already had his cell phone back out. “Under the same name?”

“If it were me,” Harvath replied, “I’d use a different name with different ID for each one. I wouldn’t want someone like me connecting the dots.”

“So what should the field offices in the other cities be looking for?”

“We’ve got a male Chinese, in his fifties or sixties, around five-foot-seven, who has used the alias Todd Thomas. With a name like that, he may be trying to not have the paperwork reflect anything Chinese, so that’s something to look for. We know when he rented the Nashville storage unit, so that gives us a date to work backward and forward from. I’d also look for anyone who walked into a self-storage facility with a copy of his or her driver’s license already in hand.”

There was something else about that photocopy, something that bothered him, but Harvath couldn’t place it.

“What else?” Urda asked.

“I’d focus on mom-and-pop operations in quieter, somewhat secluded areas near each city.”

“Without cameras?”

“If those exist, sure. I’ve got a feeling, though, that cameras don’t bother this guy. In fact, they might be a plus. Once he hacks his way in, he’s got a way to remotely monitor all of his units.”

“Anything else?”

“No. I think that’s it. For now.”

“Wait,” said Nicholas, who had been clicking away at his laptop. “There may be one additional item.”

He had asked to see the Thomas paperwork, especially the payment information. “Did you get a hit on the credit card?” Harvath asked.

The little man nodded as he peered at his screen and wrote something down. “It looks like he used a high-value, prepaid credit card for the storage company to draw his monthly rent from. Short of someone paying with cash, that’s one of the top things I’d be looking for.”

“Got it,” said Urda. Taking his checklist, he strode back toward the front of the hangar to update the team at the National Counter Terrorism Center.

Harvath turned his attention back to Nicholas. “Were you able to access the facility’s keypad log?”

“I was, but a big chunk of data from tonight has been erased.”

Harvath wasn’t surprised about that either. “Whoever knocked the CCTV footage offline could have accessed the keypad data.”

“What do you think he had in that storage locker?” Nicholas asked.

“Something that made a very big bang.”

“You don’t think the bang was the explosion of the police car they found?”

“No. I think Deng was doing something at that unit when the cop showed up and he killed him. Maybe he used the police car as a fuse to start a chain reaction. There was definitely something else in there.”

“Any clue as to what?”

Harvath shook his head. “My guess is that it had something to do with the attack. Maybe a bomb of some sort. I think Wazir Ibrahim, the dead Somali, was involved and maybe got compromised, so Deng was sent in to kill him.”

“What about the engineer accessing Facebook from Nashville?”

“Ibrahim is dead. A police officer is dead. And a storage unit went up in a big fireball. Right now, I don’t think it looks too good for that engineer.”

Nicholas opened another window on his laptop. “Well, he hasn’t accessed his Facebook page recently, so you may be right.”

“Or I could be completely wrong. Maybe Deng was sent to kill the Somali and take his place. Maybe he and the Nashville engineer have gone operational and torching the storage unit was intended to buy them enough time to do whatever they need to do. I don’t know.”