Moses Grace taunts Savich by phone and evades capture

Moses Grace taunts Savich by phone and evades capture in a call that briefly gives the FBI a location for the fugitive but not a chance to arrest him. The exchange also provides a new investigative lead, while its eventual resolution depends on a far more sweeping—and tightly concealed—method of tracking calls to Savich’s phone.

The Expected Call

At six o’clock, as Dix Noble’s guests gathered in his kitchen for dinner, Dillon Savich received a call from a number displayed as private. He had been expecting Moses Grace to call again: only four days had passed since Savich first heard the fugitive’s voice. Rather than take the conversation in the kitchen, Savich moved away from the others, first toward the dining room sideboard and then into the entrance hall, where he could speak without being overheard.

Grace’s call was both a provocation and a performance. He greeted Savich familiarly, mocked the FBI’s failure to find him and Claudia, and claimed that they could pass police without being recognized. He presented himself as unconcerned with being evil and described Claudia as his own, while also acknowledging that she sometimes pushed things too far. His taunting manner kept Savich on the line, but Grace controlled what he disclosed and used Caller ID blocking to conceal the number.

The call also linked Grace’s hostility to a woman he said Savich had hurt. Later, Savich told Sherlock Savich that this was why Grace hated him. That personal grievance sits beside the fugitive’s mockery of law enforcement: the call is not simply an attempt to boast, but a way for Grace to make his pursuit feel personal while keeping the underlying history obscure.

Tracking the Caller

Savich had prepared for another call. He pressed enter on MAX, his laptop, which he had arranged to send an instant message to the FBI communications center if Grace contacted him again. A Bluetooth transmitter wired into Savich’s phone also allowed MAX to record the conversation. The equipment turned a private, blocked call into a potential source of both a recording and a location.

The communications center traced the call through Sprint’s Automatic Number Identification system, using Savich’s number as the target phone. Because Grace used a different carrier, the process took time; Caller ID blocking slowed it further. The resulting information placed him within a two-mile radius of a semi-rural area west of Dulles, moving toward Leesburg. Local police and agents were dispatched, but Grace turned off the phone before they could reach him, ending the signal. Savich told Sherlock and Dix Noble that Grace was headed toward Leesburg and that the search was uncertain. Grace had kept talking long enough for the system to locate him approximately, but not long enough for the location to become an arrest.

Savich explained that the legal authority available to investigators had changed the significance of changing phones. Under the wiretap warrants he described as available since the PATRIOT Act, surveillance could cover calls made by an individual suspect rather than only calls from one particular number. Discarding a phone and acquiring another would therefore not necessarily end the trail. Caller ID blocking remained an obstacle, but the suspect’s phone use could still be pursued across carriers.

A Claim That Became a Lead

Grace said that he and Claudia had been at the Bonhomie Club for Pinky Womack’s memorial. Savich knew that claim did not match the surveillance operation: six undercover agents had been present around the club, with hidden cameras, watching who entered. Grace and Claudia had not been inside. Their presence outside, observing the people going in, offered a different explanation for how Grace knew details about the memorial and the officials who attended it. Savich recognized that keeping Grace talking had produced information even though the caller had escaped.

Among the possible leads was a woman Grace cared about, whom he said Savich had hurt. Savich connected that remark to the possibility that she had been kidnapped and later abandoned on a roadside, perhaps with eye injuries. He planned to alert D.A.D. Maitland and directed Sherlock and Dix to return to the kitchen and avoid alarming the others. Sherlock, in turn, planned to use MAX to search for the woman when they returned to the bed-and-breakfast.

The first follow-up brought no arrest. Roadblocks did not find anyone resembling Grace or Claudia, and the phone used for the call belonged to a woman in Hamilton whose purse had gone missing. Savich put MAX to work identifying the possible victim. The investigation pointed to Elsa Bender, who had been taken from a supermarket parking lot about two months earlier and found the following morning on a country road in Westcott. She could not remember the abduction, and investigators had been unable to make progress after she was moved to Philadelphia by her former husband. The connection to Grace remained a lead rather than a confirmed account of what had happened to her, but it gave Savich a concrete next step: he and Sherlock intended to speak with Bender.

The Later Operation and Its Cost

The initial call-tracing method did not end the pursuit. After Grace bombed the Bonhomie Club, Savich’s team devised a more extensive system: Washington, D.C., cell towers were reprogrammed so that a call to Savich’s phone would be routed to the Hoover Building as though it were a 911 call. MAX was fastened to a dashboard, and when Grace called, the operation displayed his location as a moving yellow dot. Unlike the earlier attempt, which yielded a broad area before the signal disappeared, this arrangement was designed to provide a precise location regardless of the caller’s carrier.

Savich said that programming the system was manageable; securing permission to work with cell-phone providers to reprogram their networks was the harder part. Grace’s bombing changed the official stakes. By making him a domestic terrorist threatening the nation’s capital, it brought pressure from senior executive-branch figures to stop him immediately. The operation succeeded in locating him, but Savich described the outcome as quickly fatal for Grace. The pursuit that began with a blocked call and a lost signal therefore ended through a government response whose reach was far greater than the first tracking attempt.

The method also raises a question the narrative does not treat as routine. Dix asked whether anyone calling Savich’s number would have their voice recorded and location displayed in the FBI building, and whether that was legal. Savich answered that it was not usually legal, without offering a broader justification. The later national-intelligence briefing reported that the domestic wireless operation had been decommissioned without disrupting emergency 911 service. It also stated that the one FBI agent injured by gunfire would recover, and that operational security remained intact. The president then requested a letter commending Savich for the briefing and the successful execution of his plan. The episode closes not with a public account of the surveillance, but with its quiet shutdown and continued secrecy.