Empires Will Fall (An Eva Driscoll Thriller Book 5) by Alan McDermott

Author:Alan McDermott [McDermott, Alan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-02-24T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 25

Monday: Washington, D.C.

‘What do you mean, gone!?’

When Philip Morton had assigned Zulu team to the Harper family, the only report he’d expected to receive was that they’d secured the requested information. Instead, the targets who should have been unaware of their fate had disappeared.

Morton turned to the operative sitting at one of four computers in the Special Domestic Activities control center. ‘Have you been monitoring all communications in and out of that house?’ Morton barked.

‘Yes, sir! There’s been nothing for the last two hours.’

Morton cursed. The day had started off so well. Harper had called in to work and said he was taking a personal day, which meant the entire family would be home all day. Easy pickings. Someone must have tipped them off. There was no other explanation for it. If they’d just gone out for the day, they would have left by the front door and taken their car and their phones.

He was confident that no one in this room had been responsible for the leak. None of the operatives were allowed to bring personal devices into the control center, and they only had use of one shared toilet across the hall, the entrance visible through the glass wall. Morton checked it out anyway, just to be thorough, but there was nowhere to hide a dime, never mind a cell phone. The tank was hidden in the wall, and there was no toilet paper dispenser, just a single, half-used roll. After feeling around the back of the bowl and under the sink, he was satisfied that no one had called the Harpers from the john.

Back in the control center, Morton took out his own cell. As the head of the department, the rule didn’t apply to him. He typed a message into Juno, where all his instructions came from. There were no written orders, no phone calls that could be intercepted or recorded. Everything went through the app.

Re Panacea: Harper family missing, presumed on the run. Suspect they were warned. Sending ops to bring in Mitchells ASAP. Advise on Kline?

While he waited for a reply, he instructed the team assigned to the Mitchells to go to their places of work and bring them in.

‘Use your NSA credentials and take them to the black site,’ he told the team leader. ‘Once you have the information we need, get rid of them.’

The SDA sat under the National Security Agency umbrella, and though it was extremely rare for his men to identify themselves, there was a protocol in place to mitigate any harm caused. Morton told an operative to create a report in the database to say that Clara and Lance Mitchell had been brought in to help with a case and were then released.

‘Which case?’ the operative asked.

The guy was new, just a month into the role, so Morton cut him some slack. ‘Create one. A hit and run on the freeway that they take to work and back. Say they were potential witnesses. No need to go any further than that.

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