Patriot by M.A. Rothman (summer reading list TXT) 📗

police manage to file that mention any of us. They’ll be deleted or modified almost as soon as they’re uploaded.

“Ah, speak of the devil,” Richards said as the door opened and Brice walked in.

The Outfit’s resident tech ops genius glanced over his shoulder. “Oh, is Thompson here already?”

Connor chuckled.

Brice walked over to the mounted screens and opened a panel in the wall. It folded down, revealing a keyboard and smaller monitor. His fingers danced over the keys. “I found something you guys might be interested in.”

The news footage vanished, replaced by what looked like security camera footage of a parking lot with a highway in the distance. A sign at the edge of the parking lot read “Stewart Airport Diner - $8.99 All You Can Eat Breakfast.”

“Hey, I’ve been to that place,” Richards said, pointing at the screen with his mug. “Stopped for breakfast on my way to see a buddy at Orange Lake. Great country up there. Well, when there aren’t machine guns and RPGs shooting everything up.”

“And,” Brice said, sounding annoyed, “their security system is brand new.”

“So? What about their security system?” Connor leaned forward. They hadn’t been able to find any security camera footage of Müller. No plane on the runway, no van driving through airport security, nothing. Brice had previously been more than a little frustrated.

“I’ll explain in a bit. Now, I’ve been through every piece of security footage I could find at the airport and the surrounding businesses. Whoever Müller had cleaning their tracks is good, and I don’t say that lightly. There aren’t a lot of people in the world who could’ve pulled something like that off. My guess is whoever Müller had working for him on security had installed software and network relays well in advance of yesterday’s incident at the mint. Upon leaving, they wiped everything, even the radar signature data and transponder codes.”

“Looks like you’ve got some competition, Marty,” Richards said, grinning.

Brice lifted a finger. “I said he did a good job, not a great one. My work would’ve been flawless.”

“Says the guy who couldn’t find any useful evidence.”

“Until…” Brice typed in a command. “The diner’s brand-new security system, installed just the day before. Check this out.”

The timestamped security footage played, showing traffic along the interstate. A group of people left the restaurant, paused for a conversation, then went to their cars. A red semi pulled into the lot, turned around, and got back on the highway heading the other direction.

Brice paused the video. “Did you see it?”

Richards and Connor exchanged confused looks.

“The semi?” Richards asked.

Connor shrugged. “The people talking?”

Brice let out an exasperated breath. “No!” He rewound the footage and started it again. “Watch.”

As the customers stopped to have their conversation, Brice paused the playback and pointed to the top of the screen. “See?”

Connor stood and moved closer. In the distance, a silver airplane was climbing into the sky. “Holy crap. Is that Müller’s plane?”

Brice nodded. “Yeah. I cross-checked with that local airport. They didn’t have a record for a flight leaving yesterday at that time. Whoever wiped their trail did a great job, but missed the diner’s new video security system. And for some out of the way diner, they actually made it convenient for me, saving the video stream on an encrypted cloud service with particularly good firewalls. Even I’d have a hard time breaking in.”

Richards stood and sipped his coffee. “A system the great Martin Brice can’t hack? Say it isn’t so.”

“I didn’t say I couldn’t do it, I said it was a challenge. The point is, we have footage of those guys leaving.”

The door opened, and Thompson and Annie stepped in. Annie’s right arm was bandaged, and a piece of gauze was taped to her right cheek, but she didn’t look bad—especially considering she’d practically been blown to hell by a nuclear bomb.

“Annie!” Brice said, a wide smile across his face. “I didn’t think you’d be in for a couple days. You look terrible.”

“Why thank you, Marty, you’re so sweet.” She gave him a smile as Thompson helped her into a chair. She looked back and forth between Thompson and Richards. “And trust me, I’m going to be taking some R&R days. You can count on that.”

Connor raised an eyebrow at Richards. “I thought we didn’t get sick days.”

“You don’t get sick days,” Richards said, pointing at Connor.

Thompson was looking at the screens. “Oh good, you have the footage pulled up already.”

Richards threw a hand up. “Wait a minute, how’d you know about this? We’re just now hearing about it.”

“I hear about everything first,” Thompson said, sliding into a chair.

“Right,” Brice said. “So, I’ve enhanced the image as best I could.”

He clicked, and the blurry image of the airplane was replaced by a digitally enhanced picture. He clicked again, and another image appeared: a high-resolution stock image of a plane similar to the one shown in the enhanced photos.

“It’s an L-100 Hercules, basically the civilian model of the military’s C-130. Now that I knew what I was looking for from that diner’s video, I had one of our guys dig deeper into the airport’s security logs from yesterday and uncovered a bunch of stuff. Evidently not everything is logged electronically, even today. The L-100 Hercules landed at Stewart International about five minutes before the attack, complaining of problems with their navigation systems. It turned out airport security was breached soon after the attack had taken place. A U-Haul somehow managed to get through a gate to the cargo area and it made a beeline for the plane. It drove right into the back of the aircraft before anyone knew what was going on. None of the normal alerts went out because the outgoing security systems had been rerouted to a private server an hour before the attack. I’m telling you guys, whoever planned this thing thought of damn near everything.”

Connor took another sip of coffee. “It had to be Müller.”

Brice nodded. “Probably so. The day before, at the golf course near the mint, the automatic sprinkler