“You said you wanted anything off the taps,” Quinn yelled back. “We got two dozen hits; this is the only one the analysts cleared.”
“It’s obviously coded, but what else? Who’s Dusty Evans?”
“Electrician, unmarried, twenty-four. Tested tier four in ninety-two—mathematical—joined the army in 2004, washed out of basic. Punched his sergeant, apparently. A couple of speeding tickets, an assault charge for a bar fight.”
“He was in one of the Vasquezes’ cell phones?”
“No. About three months ago he called a woman named Mona Appismo, who was in Alex’s cell phone.”
“That’s it?” Cooper felt a sinking inside him. For a moment he’d thought he conjured a miracle by sheer force of will. But now he felt himself drifting back to questions for which he had no answers. “This is a waste of time. He’s probably a nobody talking to his pot dealer.”
“Only if he’s got a thing for ditch weed.” Quinn grinned. “Unknown number turned out to be a cell phone in Wyoming. It’s from inside New Canaan. Belongs to a guy named Joseph Stiglitz.”
“And you’re thinking Joseph Stiglitz, JS, John Smith?”
“I’m not thinking it, boss. The analysts are.”
“The voice doesn’t match, does it?” For the last five years, they’d been running the most sophisticated computer search algorithms ever devised to find John Smith. Either the man had never once picked up the phone, or, more likely, he was disguising his voice. Easy enough to do on digital lines.
“No,” Quinn said, “but the phone was bought last month and never used. So who buys a phone but doesn’t even turn it on for a month?”
“Someone who plans ahead. Good thinking. Local cops on alert?”
“Yeah. They know to stay back, too. Luisa is coordinating, and I think they’re afraid of her.”
“Good.” Cooper slid his fingers across the face of the datapad, scanning the hurriedly assembled file on Dusty Evans. An arrest record from the assault charge listed him as six two and 230, hair black, eyes brown, no scars, a skull-and-snake tattoo on his right bicep. In the mug shot Evans looked like a pissed-off young man, his glare at the camera pure contempt.
There was an address in Elizabeth, New Jersey, a working-class burg forty-five minutes west of Manhattan. Vehicle registration for an older Ford pickup. His brief military service record: a fine shot, good fitness, but discipline problems. The helicopter banked, shifting Cooper against the frame. On the horizon he could see a low industrial city, Philadelphia, he thought. City of brotherly love. He remembered talking to Alex Vasquez by bar light, the sour taste of the coffee as he told her that there had been a bombing in Philadelphia that day. It had been a post office, after hours. A silly, pointless target.
Two thoughts rang in his head. First, if Joseph Stiglitz really was John Smith, then Cooper was closer than anyone had ever been to catching the man. And second, there was going to be a major terrorist attack on America today. Or at least starting today; it could be a multiphase strike. For all they knew, Smith could be about to march on the White House. Cooper didn’t have the information to say.