Wesley tried to tamp down his own worry. Karen was a grown woman, but this wasn’t like her. “I need you to go by her place,” he ordered Selene before telling their driver to pull over at the next available rest stop. She was supposed to come with him to his first meeting of the day, but that wasn’t happening now.
Selene nodded. “What kind of security does she have?”
“Standard but good. I’ve got the code to her condo, so it won’t be an issue.” He rattled off the six-digit code as they pulled to a stop. The other SUV tailing them stopped also.
“I’ll call you when I get there.” Selene was out of the vehicle and heading to their backup vehicle before he could respond.
Not that there was anything to say. He trusted Selene to do her job without having to micromanage. He had too many crises to deal with on a constant basis to have to follow up with his people. And while Selene was technically done with field assignments, she still did a lot of local, on-the-ground type of work for him when they were in D.C. or Maryland. Which, for her, wasn’t as often, since she was now stationed in their Georgia office. But he’d needed her with him in Germany.
Even though he was close to the meeting point and Selene would likely be at Karen’s place in less than ten minutes, he put in his Bluetooth and speed-dialed one of the analysts at the office. “Run all the CCTVs in a four-block radius of Karen Stafford’s condo in the last two hours.” He gave the address and the name of the park he knew she frequented. “And try to locate her phone.” He wasn’t sure if they’d be able to. She was careful about her privacy. They all were. Her phone was encrypted and he knew she’d taken extra lengths to ensure that she couldn’t be tracked or located. But with their resources they should be able to find it.
“On it. Want to hold?” Elliott asked.
“Yeah.” He scanned a file on his laptop as he waited, reviewing information on other vulnerable targets in D.C. and surrounding areas. After the attack on the Nelson fund-raiser, all the agencies were on high alert and pooling resources to find the missing drone and find who the hell was behind the attack. Even if Max hadn’t been killed, Wesley would have been back in the country anyway because of the current security situation and the very important meeting he had in less than ten minutes.
“What am I looking for?”
“Her specifically. I want to see when she left to go running this morning and when she came back. And document any vehicles in that radius at the same time of her leaving the building. Expand the search for six blocks.” It would likely be a lot of vehicles to sift through, but they had damn good resources to filter through unnecessary info. There was a chance she hadn’t gone running at all, but the weather was clear, so he doubted it.
“All right . . . give me a few minutes.”
Wesley continued reading the classified document on his laptop and included personal notes about places he viewed as being in imminent danger. He’d already started the process to increase the security level at three of them when Elliott spoke again.
“This is weird. I’ve got her leaving her place, dressed to run, but she never came back. She headed in the direction of the park, but then I lost her. There aren’t any CCTVs in a few places around the park and it’s like she just disappeared.”
Wesley’s heart rate kicked up a notch. Karen was smart and carried bear spray. More than that, she knew the dangers in the world and took precautions in most situations. It was one of the reasons he was grooming her for a new position. She looked at things with a critical, realistic eye because she knew how bad the world was—but she wasn’t a cynic. All that didn’t mean she couldn’t have been hurt, though.
“Run the plates of the vehicles leaving the park or anywhere within a two-block radius of the park in the ten minutes directly after she disappears from your view.”
“Running now,” Elliott responded.
“What about her phone?”
“Nothing. Not even a ping that tells me the battery’s out.”
Unfortunately he was probably right. Even with the encryption they should have been able to get a hit on it. Wesley reined in a curse. “Stay on the line.” He pressed MUTE on his earpiece, then pulled out another cell. There was a possibility he was being paranoid, but he didn’t think so. If something had happened to Karen, their window of finding her narrowed with each second that passed.
He called a detective friend who worked for the local PD and requested assistance in a potential investigation. Off the books for now. He and Detective Portillo had worked together on more than one occasion and Wesley trusted the guy to be thorough. After he was sure the locals would canvass the park for any clues on Karen—including looking for her phone—he clicked back over to Elliott.
“What’d you find?”
“Eighty-six vehicles moving in and around that area at the time. Not including vehicles parked. I’ve run them all through the DMV database, and one of them doesn’t exist.”
Wesley straightened at that. “What?”
“Yeah. The license plate itself doesn’t exist in any database. And it’s wrong anyway. The combination of numbers and letters isn’t right to be a real plate for this particular state.”
Wesley knew that in addition to other specific state identifiers, the majority of states used a three-letter, three-number combination for plates.
Now his blood chilled. If he had to guess, someone had simply put two license plates together. It was old-school tradecraft and very effective. Cut two license plates in half and then solder the separate pieces together, creating something virtually untraceable.
Elliott continued. “It’s an SUV and the windows are too tinted, even the front, to get a view of anyone inside. Doesn’t matter what angle I looked at it from. Might mean there’s a reflective shield in place.”
That wasn’t a coincidence. “Focus on the SUV. Track them.”
Though he tried to temper his worry, it was impossible as he waited for Elliott to give him something. Anything. Karen was sweet and while brilliant, she wasn’t trained the way Selene was. If someone had truly taken Karen, she’d have to rely on her wits. Sometimes that wasn’t enough when up against the monsters of the world. She’d worked on too many cases over the last year for him to narrow down what this could be about. But it had to be work related. The use of tradecraft indicated that.
“This isn’t good, boss. . . . The SUV went into a parking garage downtown. I hacked into the internal server of their security system, and chunks of time have been completely stripped out. There’s no way to see what happened once the SUV entered. And I don’t know if the driver timed it, but a dozen vehicles left about ten minutes after the SUV entered. I’m fast-forwarding until now and that SUV still hasn’t left.”
“Run all the plates of the vehicles that left, forward pertinent info to my e-mail, and text me the address of the parking garage now,” Wesley ordered before hanging up and taking an incoming call from Selene. “Yeah?”
“Her place shows no signs of a struggle. Coffeemaker is on. Looks like an automatic thing, so she was obviously planning on coming back. And her clothes for the day are hung up in her closet along with her shoes and coordinating jewelry. Bed’s unmade. No sneakers in the closet.”
Now Wesley’s blood iced over. He quickly gave her the rundown of what Elliott had told him. “We’re treating this as a missing person case as of now. Pull in who you want for a team and get to the parking garage now. I’ve already contacted Detective Portillo, but I’ll let him know that you’re going to coordinate with him. I’ll hook up with you as soon as I’m out of this fucking meeting.” He had a one-on-one with the director of the CIA and he couldn’t miss it. Not when this was a matter of national security and the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians were at stake. There were some things they simply couldn’t talk about over the phone or using any sort of technology. This was one of those times. Having Selene running this op eased some of his tension, but not by much. Not until they found out where Karen was.