Protecting Dallas

“Well why didn’t you say anything?”

He shrugged. “No one asked.”

Maddox stared back at me, his mouth open. He looked so funny I actually giggled.

“So… are you going to enlighten us?” I asked.

Kane dabbed at his mouth with the napkin and pushed the remains of his meal away. “Sure.”

For the next few minutes he talked more about his weekend. About how he’d spent time at Nellis, getting all the information he could. Kane’s contacts were impressive; even on the Air Force base, he had plenty of people who owed him favors. He explained there were people even higher than that who owed them favors, and in turn, everything got cashed at once.

It reminded me of something Connor once said, about how saving someone’s life could change protocol. When you realize your very existence on the planet earth is owed to someone else, you tended to take care of that person’s needs no matter what they might be. Even it meant breaking the rules.

Especially if it meant breaking the rules.

“I wormed my way into the motor pool,” he said. “The SUV Connor’s been tracking — the one we chased off? The device is gone now. They found it.”

“Figures,” said Maddox.

“I was going to plant another,” said Kane. “In fact, I was going to put one on every goddamn vehicle in that garage. But then a buddy of mine came up with something better. Something much more useful.”

He reached down and pulled out a tablet in a flat black case. After tapping a few buttons, he turned it around so that it faced us.

“I had this loaded with the past three years of GVT data,” said Kane “And then I made a fuck-ton of coffee, and I went over it.”

I tilted my head. “GVT?”

“Government Vehicle Tracking,” Kane replied. “Keeps a running log of every government vehicle equipped with a GPS system, which by now, is pretty much all of them.”

Maddox let out a low whistle. “Well, shit.”

“Yeah.”

The screen he was holding out to us looked like something straight out of The Matrix — a whole bunch of letters and numbers arranged in seemingly endless vertical columns.

“Well that’s all very nice,” I laughed, “but what are we looking at?”

“Here,” Kane said, tapping the screen.

I saw more numbers, more letters. I was still confused.

“This vehicle,” he said, “has gone out to the same spot in the desert as the SUV we chased.” He shifted his finger a bit. “The coordinates match exactly.”

“How many tim—”

“Once every two weeks,” said Kane. “Going back over two years. Always on the same day of the week — this day — and always at the same time of night.”

Maddox shifted closer to the table. He reached out and pointed with his own finger.

“These are service identification numbers.”

“Yup.”

Maddox’s eyes went wide with excitement. “So we can look up who this guy is!”

Kane swung his head slowly up and down. Somehow however, he didn’t seem as excited as his comrade.

“Already have.”