Troubleshooters (Jackson Chase Novella Book 2) Read Online Free PDF Page A

her eyebrows, wondering about this possible connection.
    Sterba explained, “When Gaddafi fell, the bunkers were raided. Hundreds of thousands of artillery shells went missing, along with small arms, light weapons, and, most seriously, MANPADS—man-portable air defense missiles. The rebels used some, but much of the stores have spread across the continent. They’ve found their way into the hands of every terrorist group from the Islamic Magreb to East Africa.”
    “There are hundreds of thousands of artillery shells unaccounted for?” Chen asked.
    Sterba nodded. “And it only takes one or two to make a car bomb. Or four, apparently, to bring down a sizable portion of a hotel.”
    “How can they be detonated?”
    “Any way you’d like. Simple command det, timer, cell phone, the homemade pressure plates they used all over Afghanistan. Basically, anything that can close a circuit.”
    Lieutenant Kahembe motioned towards one area of the kitchen where the reinforced concrete floor opened to a large hole all the way down to the gravel beneath the foundation. “We believe this was the location of the blast.”
    “What was this area of the kitchen used for?” Sterba asked.
    “Food storage,” Lieutenant Kahembe replied. “Items that don’t need refrigeration.”
    “So the device was brought in with the supplies.” I said.
    He nodded. “Most likely.”
    I looked up. Above the hole, or, more accurately, the crater, the damage went what appeared to be three levels up. The explosion had been far enough from the central spine of the building to find the weak points towards the front of the hotel. The end result was a blast that moved up and out, completely destroying dozens of rooms and the front of the hotel.
    “Have you recovered any parts of the device?” I said.
    “A few,” Lieutenant Kahembe said. “I will show you.” He led us towards the back of the hotel, where a large patio faced an expanse of grass and a swimming pool. The local police had laid out a tarp and arranged the small pieces of suspicious debris much like one would lay out pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. While there was little that hadn’t been completely vaporized, some fragments clearly came from an artillery shell.
    Kahembe reached down and picked up two small bits of wire. The rubber insulation had burned off, but the ends of the wires showed small fragments of solder. One still held the tiniest piece of circuit board.
    “Our best guess is that this connected to some sort of radio device used as the detonator,” he said.
    Chen was looking at the small piece of circuit board. “Can I take a look at that?” she asked.
    He handed her the tiny piece of evidence, and she moved into the sunlight. We followed, watching her turn it over and bend one of the wires back.
    “There are actually two types of circuit board here. This one,” she said, pointing, “is pretty basic. It’s the type you use when building any homemade device. But if you look closely, there’s a bit of green on the other end.” Her fingernail moved to a spec attached to the solder at the opposite end. “That’s from a proper circuit board. And given the small bit of blue plastic that’s hardened into the side of it, I’d say it’s from a cell phone.”
    Kahembe’s eyes darted between Chen’s eyes and the tiny fragment in her hands.
    “Can you get access to local cell provider databases?” Chen asked.
    “Yes,” Kahembe replied, knowing what she was looking for. “But even if you can match a phone used here to the phone at the other end of the call, I would suspect disposable phones were used. They are very easy to find here, unfortunately.”
    “That’s true, but it’s likely that some other identifiers, like the EINs, came through on the handshake with the local switches. They could give us additional data points.”
    “Miss Chen, I worry that we don’t have capabilities to follow something that complex,” Kahembe replied.
    Joe recognized the perfect opening