One Rough Man - Brad Taylor [105]
“Okay. I’m game. The folks looking for us know we’re in Atlanta, so we need to do all preparations here, while it won’t give anything away.”
“What preparations do we need to do? How are we going to get to D.C. with the cops chasing us?”
“We have to disappear. We can’t use any credit cards, cell phones, anything tied to either you or me. Right now, the police know we’re in Atlanta, so it won’t do any harm to use your ATM or credit cards here. It’ll just reinforce what they already know. Once we leave here, we can’t use anything that will trigger an alert with the authorities. First thing we need to do is go to an ATM and take out your max amount of money. Next, we need to get to a place that sells prepaid credit cards and cell phones. We also need to get a rental car for local use.”
Something dawned on me. “You don’t have your cell phone with you, do you?”
“Yes. I turned it back on when we hit the U.S. It works now.”
“Turn it off and take out the battery.”
“I haven’t called anyone. Nobody knows it’s on.”
“Doesn’t matter. Your phone talks without you using it. It constantly sends out a signal to make sure it has a tower it can talk to. This signal leaves a trail, essentially telling anyone who wants to check that your phone talked to such and such tower at such and such time. They can track the city you’re currently in and neck it down to which tower you’re near. Depending on the concentration of towers, it can put you within a couple of city blocks. That’s without using any special gear. Trust me, turn it off and take out the battery.”
I had intimate knowledge of the power within the U.S. government and knew that any slip-ups would cause us to be caught fairly quickly. Despite all that, the federal government wasn’t omnipotent. Most fugitives were caught by doing something stupid, like returning to the scene of the crime, or going to a family member for help. Smarter fugitives managed to evade the law for extended periods of time, no matter how much effort was put against them.
A buddy of mine in the FBI had chased a man named Eric Rudolph, a homegrown terrorist who had murdered at least three people and wounded upwards of a hundred because of his twisted beliefs, including the 1996 bombing during the Atlanta summer Olympics. He’d managed to evade the FBI and local police for five years, despite a million-dollar bounty on his head and being on the FBI’s top-ten most wanted list. Great. You’re hoping you’re as good as that sick bastard. Perfect.
64
Harold Standish slowly hung up his phone. Disappointed at the failure at the Atlanta airport, he wasn’t overly surprised. Pike and Jennifer were proving to be more resourceful than he would have thought, but knowing Pike’s background now, he should have anticipated it. He quickly punched in Lucas’s private number.
“It’s Standish. Remember what we talked about yesterday? I need you to execute. Come by the office and I’ll give you the phone you worked on. They’re headed here but I don’t know when they’ll arrive. I’m sure they’ll make contact on the cloned phone.”
After listening for a few seconds, Standish replied, “I’ll be here. See you then.”
Before the Atlanta incident, he’d had doubts that using Lucas was the best course of action. He’d contracted Lucas many times before for simple break-ins to gather information on opponents, but he had never asked him to do anything violent. After hearing what had happened in Atlanta, he saw Lucas as the only solution. Let’s see them get away from someone who doesn’t play by the rules.
SEVEN HOURS AFTER WE HAD EXITED THE METRO AT FIVE POINTS, we pulled into the Sheraton, in Greensboro, North Carolina—about halfway to Washington, D.C. We had robbed Jennifer’s bank account of about five thousand dollars and converted that to pay-as-you-go credit cards and prepaid cell phones. Once that was accomplished,