Middle Of Nowhere

   "You'll want to see this before eight o'clock . . . at least before eight-thirty. Sorry I've called so late, but I only put it all together just now. By eight-thirty you'll have lost him."

   "Lost him," Daphne repeated, her mind whirring as she realized Osbourne believed he had found him. "I'll be right there."

* * *

Liz knocked on the door to her husband's study, waited a moment and then let herself inside. Krishevski occupied the throne of the recliner while her husband sat in a chair facing him like a child in the principal's office. She paused, looked her husband in the eye, and said, "Phone call for you."

   "No calls right now," he reminded her politely.

   "It's her," she said. "Says it's 'important.'" She drew the quotation marks in the air.

   "I'll have to call her back."

   "I'll tell her," Liz said. She seemed to take pleasure in it. She pulled the door shut, wondering why the music was playing so loudly and what it was meant to cover.

* * *

The AirTyme Cellular Regional Control Center—"RCsquared," Osbourne called it—occupied portions of the twenty-first and twenty-second floors of the Columbia Center skyscraper. Normally such real estate would have commanded quite the water view, but RC-squared was a blacked-out control room that stepped down in tiers to a curving wall of projection screens mapping cellular phone traffic over a seven-state area that included portions of Utah, Nevada, and northern California. It looked like something from Mission Control. Daphne counted seventeen people at computers, all wearing telephone headsets. The room was alive with hushed, indistinguishable voices.

   "Wow," Daphne said, sensing that Osbourne expected some kind of reaction.

   He checked his wristwatch. "We're pressed for time. I wanted to show you what I've come up with. So, if you'd direct your attention to the last screen on the right, Lieutenant Matthews.

   "As I'm sure you're aware," he continued, "the U.S. Congress passed a bill requiring us to geographically locate nine-one-one calls placed from cellular telephones, which presented us with a serious task in terms of the older generation analog phones. The new generation digital phones have GPS chips—Global Positioning Systems—inherent in their technology. But the older analog models without the chips have only their signal.

   "There are several ways to attempt to locate an an

alog cellular phone that's in use, and probably a half dozen companies competing for the best methodology," he continued. "All of these methods were derived from the military. The two most common are DF, direction finding, and TDOA, time difference of arrival. Both are variations on something called triangulation. We use a company out of Canada that has taken TDOA one step further into something called hyperbolic trilateralization. Triangulation and trilateralization work off the same principle: If you have three antennas, all receiving a radio signal from the same source, and you can measure and record the time that a source radio signal arrives at each of those antennas, then you can plot the location of that original source signal. A cell phone signal lights up several towers at a time, sometimes as many as a half dozen or more. These towers pass reception and transmission one to the other in what's called a hand-off, as they determine which is the closer or more optimal tower. Because trilateralization works at very high speeds, constantly measuring the time to base, as we call it, its method of triangulation is far more accurate than many of its competitors. You with me so far?"

   "I think so."

   "The long and the short of it is, the older method of triangulation could take several minutes or even hours to process accurately. This newer method I'm talking about is a real-time system with pinpoint accuracy because it's measuring a cell phone transmission in nanoseconds and plotting the location accordingly. Your problem is this," he stated. "Full government compliance is not mandated for another eighteen months. AirTyme has the hyperbolic trilateralization software and, of course, our firmware network of towers and transmission centers, but the two are not yet fully married. Adding to our difficulty—two of the three towers we may be using to measure time to base may belong to one or more competitors. They will gladly provide us the TDOA data, but it takes time to arrange. We estimate full network compatibility in ten months."

   "You're losing me," she admitted. "You do, or do not have a way to locate that cell phone number Lieutenant Boldt gave you?"