Half an hour before Titus sat down at his computer to contact Luquin for the first time, a King Air 350 similar to the one Titus had flown in to San Miguel and back took off from the airstrip in the resort of Lago Vista on Lake Travis and headed for Austin, twenty-five air miles to the southeast.
Aboard the ten-passenger Beechcraft were six real estate developers who wanted a closer look at greater Austin. It was a common occurrence in a city that had attracted a lot of development in the past decade. And despite the fact that the economy had slowed all over the country, the roving eyes of developers were never still. Always hoping that the next upturn in the market was just around the corner, they were ever vigilant, thinking that if they timed it right, they could fall right into the money pot again with a well-placed housing development or a shopping mall or an office complex.
With the aircraft approaching Austin-Bergstrom International's tracking range, the pilot radioed the control tower, explained what his passengers wanted to do, and requested permission to circle the city at a specific altitude of twenty-two thousand feet. After a few exchanges of information, the Beechcraft received its permission from the Austin-Bergstrom tower and fell into a series of patterned loops over the city, most of their turns concentrating on Austin's southwest quadrant, where much of the development had been in recent years. It covered both sides of Lake Austin from Emmet Shelton Bridge to the Austin Country Club, a swath of real estate that included some of the city's most desirable neighborhoods.
As the aircraft began its first series of turns, the passengers swiveled their chairs to the cabin walls and opened concealed computer consoles that folded down out of the mainframe. Antennae telescoped out from the belly of the plane, and the technicians put on headphones and powered up their computers.
Each technician wore two earpieces so he could monitor two different radio-frequency transmissions simultaneously. Each was responsible for monitoring a selected range of frequencies in the cell phone bandwidth. Whenever they picked up an encrypted transmission, their computers immediately nailed the radio frequency and time, recorded the plane's position and the angle of reception of the signal. When the coordinates were locked in, they began recording the transmissions and then moved on to the next channel and continued scanning.
The object of this first collection flight was to scoop up as many encrypted transmissions as possible in their two hours aloft. The recordings were transmitted to the team that Burden had told Titus was already in place, a large panel van carrying encryption crunchers who quickly went to work on the content coming down from the Beechcraft. The first order of business was to determine which transmissions were in Spanish. Once the Spanish transmissions were identified, they were sent to Herrin and Cline, who started mapping and analyzing the sources of the transmissions.
Mark Herrin sat at his computer in Titus's guest house and watched the data scroll down the screen.
“Jesus. Good stuff! ”he said into his headset mike. “What kind of technology do they have in that thing?”
“Expensive, ”Burden said from some undisclosed location. When the scrolling slammed to a stop, Herrin saved the information to a new directory.
“Whoa! One hundred and twelve separate encrypted conversations in the southwest quadrant in two hours?!”
“Not a surprise, ”Burden said. “Encryption's gotten to be something of a status symbol these days.”
“But, damn, this many?”
“Well, a lot of people think they have a lot of status, ”Burden said dryly. “We'll get another look when they go back up in a little while. If we're lucky, we'll find something for them to take a second look at. Now we'll wait for the guys in the other van to tell us which of these things are in Spanish.”