Behind him, the guard was still lingering in his rearview. No other cars in sight.
Zig took another breath, feeling a bead of sweat roll down from his armpit.
“Let’s go—next,” called the tollbooth guard, a Black man in full camo, MP5 at the ready. The guard was a kid, barely twenty years old. “Welcome to Dover Air Force Base. Who you here to see?”
“I have an appointment,” Zig said, handing over the pass he’d gotten from the visitors center. “At the mortuary.”
37
It came down to cell towers.
Last night, for the first hour or so, Waggs picked apart Nola’s cell herself. No voice mail. No email. And a browser history that had clearly been scrubbed. There were no texts, in or out—and the only recent phone calls were to Barron’s Steakhouse, which Nola had called three different times. No question, Nola was smart. In today’s world, it took work to keep a phone this clean.
Fortunately, in today’s world, even the cleanest phone could still tell you plenty.
“Say ahhhh,” Waggs whispered, clicking on a file named BabelStreet.com.
In Hollywood movies, the FBI and CIA have access to every cell phone in the world, able to track bad guys on high-tech screens with even higher-tech digital effects.
In truth, the U.S. government can barely handle a snow day, much less a state-of-the-art geospatial tracking system. So where does the intelligence community get its data? They license it—for a monthly fee—from private companies like Babel Street, which has a name that evokes the most powerful tower since biblical times: the cell tower.
Every day, through their towers, AT&T, Verizon, and other cell service providers collect zettabytes of information, which they license to Babel Street, which then licenses it to the CIA, FBI, Secret Service, and anyone else who can pay for it.
Clean your cache, dump your cookies, use all the encryption you want. The moment you turn on your phone, the nearest cell tower gets a ping. Put those pings together, and you can see exactly where someone’s going—or where they’ve been. For a few extra dollars, Babel Street will even throw in a mapping overlay onto the data, so you can read it as easily as Google Maps.
“So this is her home base?” Waggs said to herself, leaning on her adjustable-height desk and eyeing the map onscreen, where a bright red dot marked Pennsylvania’s largest botanical garden. According to the cell towers, it’s where Nola spent the most time. “Then you go here,” she said, following lines to other red dots—each one representing a place where Nola spent more than a half hour: a nearby grocery store, a pawnshop, a bar, even a local church. Church of the Grace. Methodist.
Maybe an AA meeting? Waggs wondered, thinking Nola didn’t seem religious. Either way, what caught Waggs’s eye was what wasn’t there: she’d asked Babel Street to run a separate report where they’d show if there were any other people whose cell phone tower patterns pinged in the same order as Nola’s, in hopes of seeing who else might be meeting her. By looking at speed and direction, you’d be able to tell if she were walking, running, or just in a car with someone else. Day after day, it was always the same: Nola’s signal had its own solitary path. No friends. No work lunches. Always alone.
Picking up her own phone, Waggs checked her home screen. She’d texted Mikel early this morning to again apologize for standing him up last night. Still no response.
She swiped to her texts, staring down and trying to physically conjure the three little dots that indicated Mikel was writing back.
The dots never appeared. Waggs turned away from her desk and did that stupid stretch the chiropractor said she should be doing every hour. It didn’t help.
Maybe she should text Mikel again.
No. Don’t be desperate.
Usually, this was when she’d call Zig and he’d make some lame joke that would lift her mood. Right now, though, Zig had his hands full. She wasn’t bothering him until she had real answers.