Page 77 of Into the Gray Zone

“It means that wherever those other watches were, they were transmitting from their phone to this phone, and this phone was recording them as all being in the same place. That’s all. I know, I get it. It’s nothing. That’s what I was trying to say.”

“Wait, are you saying someone was trying to hide their location through this phone?”

“No. Their own phones would still have the data from their watches. If you found their phone, you’d see where they’d been. They weren’t hiding anything.”

“Then why do it?”

“I don’t know, Pike. That’s why I said it was nothing. I’m not sure why they did it.”

“But this phone was transmitting that data?”

“Yeah, like they all were. If you had access to the phone, you got the data.”

“Wait, slow down. You said that the other Garmin watches, tied to other phones, were sending their data tothisphone?”

“Yeah. That’s what I meant by ‘spoofing.’ Why?”

“Can you show me where the other watches are located? Can you give me a history of their movements from this phone?”

“Yeah... I think so. The phone recorded it all.”

“Get me that, right now. Send it to the tablet.”

I hung up and turned to Brett. He said, “What was that all about?”

I said, “We just found the other terrorists. I think the Chinese were tracking them, and they found a way to get around it. He’s sending the data to us right now, and when we get it, we send it to Knuckles for Nadia to sort out.”

We gathered around the tablet display and I saw Creed halfway around the world working a cursor on the screen. It was like magic. He punched one button, highlighted something else, and the phone lit up, pulsing. The cursor kept working, and four icons appeared on the screen, along with a ton of breadcrumb trails tied to numbers, so much that the screen was overridden with them.

Brett said, “What the hell is that?”

I called Creed back and said, “We’ve got a mish-mash of shit over here. I can’t see anything.”

He said, “That’s the complete picture for the last forty-eight hours.”

“But there’s not even a map, just a bunch of dots and numbers.”

“The dots are the trail the GPS recorded. The numbers are the lat-long.”

I gritted my teeth and said, “That’s no fucking help, Creed. I need this on a map, so I can see.”

“So you don’t want to know the actual grid?”

“I will after I see a map.”

He huffed and said, “Hang on.”

Five minutes later, the screen cleared, showing a map of India, the dots and icons tiny in the center. He came on the phone and said, “Now?”

“Yeah, I have the whole continent, but the icons are microscopic.”

“So zoom in. You want me to do that too?”

I felt a little embarrassed and picked up the tablet, putting the phone on speaker. I hit the plus button on the map, and it started closing in on the trail. It showed all four moving from Delhi to Agra, then two to Jaipur, followed by a third, with one remaining behind.

Jaipur? That’s not good.

I said, “Can I separate this by last known grid for each? No trails?”

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