Red Right Hand by Chris Holm

Author:Chris Holm
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2016-09-13T04:00:00+00:00

The plan was Cameron’s.

“So,” she’d asked as they sped north from Palo Alto, “this Segreti guy you’re looking for—how do you expect to find him?”

The highway had been eerily devoid of traffic. In the wake of the attack, it seemed Bay Area residents were staying home.

“I’m working on it.”

“You mean you have no idea.”

“I mean I’m working on it.”

“Are you open to suggestions? Because I spent most of our flight thinking about it, and I have a thought. A couple, actually.”

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s hear ’em.”

“First off, it seems to me the most logical place to start would be the family from the video.”

“Too risky,” he replied. “Anybody looking for Segreti would be onto them, which makes approaching them dangerous.”

“That’s not an issue if you look into them online.”

“Which I’m guessing you did.”

“Yup. First, I combed through their social media—the parents are on Facebook, the mom’s on Pinterest, the eldest child is on Instagram and Snapchat—but found no pics of Segreti or anyone who looks like him in their lists of friends. Then I hacked the parents’ e-mail—”

“You did what?”

“—but none of the searches I ran turned up anything of interest. It looks to me like bumping into him was a chance encounter.”

Hendricks thought back to the video, which he’d watched on Cameron’s laptop a couple dozen times on the plane before dozing off. “Yeah, that seems to track.”

“But I still think they’re worth questioning. They might’ve seen which way he went or gotten something useful out of him before the camera rolled—”

“Much as I’d love to, we can’t. If I were the Feds or the bad guys, I’d put someone on the family as a matter of course, which means they’re off-limits to us.”

“But what if I—”

“Seriously, drop it. It’s not going to happen. What else have you got?” Hendricks felt bad slapping her down, but after the mess at the Salty Dog, he couldn’t afford another sloppy play, and approaching the Restons qualified.

“If you didn’t like my last idea, you’re going to hate this one.”

“Why don’t you let me be the judge of that?”

“You ever heard of COWs?”

“Sure. Big, dumb, tasty things, go moo.”

“Not cows like dinner,” she said. “COWs like cells on wheels.”

“Can’t say as I have.”

“A COW is basically a cell-phone tower attached to a trailer that can be rolled into an area as needed. It’s meant to support the existing system when there’s an increase in demand, which could be due to anything from the Super Bowl to September Eleventh. Hell, during Obama’s inauguration, they brought in twenty-six of them to accommodate the million-odd spectators, most of whom expected to be able to live-tweet and Facebook the event.”

“Okay,” he said. “Now I know what COWs are. The question is, why?”

She held up a picture on her phone for him to see. “That’s why.”

He took his eyes off the road just long enough to glance at it. The image was grainy but seemed to show precisely the sort of device she’d described. It was in the

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