Hostile Witness: A Kate Ford Mystery

by Leigh Adams

  Hamilton closed his eyes and shook his head. When he looked at her again, he seemed almost sad. “It’s unbelievable, really,” he told her. “The defense of this nation and of a dozen or more nations across the world depends on our ability to keep secret what would aid our enemies if it were revealed. First there was Snowden. Now there’s you.”

  “I’m not pulling a Snowden,” Kate protested. “I’m not looking for classified documents to send out to the newspapers—”

  “Virtually every piece of information you could access on that computer is classified,” Hamilton pointed out. “And I know you don’t want to embarrass the United States government. You want to embarrass Almador and you want to embarrass me. In retaliation for your suspension.”

  “No,” Kate said. “No, I don’t care about the suspension—”

  “I’m going to hand Ballard his ass on a platter,” Hamilton said. “The man is a train wreck of unbelievable proportions.”

  “Well, that’s something we can agree on,” Kate said.

  “You do realize you are never going to work at Almador again.”

  “I thought that had already been decided,” Kate said, “even if Harvey didn’t come right out and say so.”

  “And you’re never going to work anywhere you need a clearance again. I’m not Ballard. I’ll have your clearances pulled two minutes after you’re out of here. All of them. And I can probably arrange to make sure you never work anywhere again, if I feel like it.”

  “I sort of thought you were going to arrange to have me put in jail,” Kate said.

  “Ah,” Hamilton said.

  Kate didn’t know what he was waiting for. If she’d been him, she’d have walked out the door, secured it one way or another, and called security. But Richard Hamilton wasn’t moving.

  He looked her up and down. He looked over the computer station and then at the floor beneath her feet.

  “You don’t have a purse with you.”

  “Oh,” Kate said. “No, no, I didn’t bring one with me.”

  “But you brought a phone,” Hamilton said. “You brought a cell phone.”

  “Yes,” Kate said. “Yes, of course I did. I have it in one of my pockets. I have people with medical problems at home. I need it in case of an emergency.”

  “You’re on a Department of Defense secure computer without authorization, you are looking at classified documents you are not allowed to see, and you have a camera with you.”

  “Oh,” Kate said.

  “Exactly,” Hamilton said. “I think we’re looking at fifteen to twenty. It might be twenty to twenty-five.”

  “Right,” Kate said. Now she really couldn’t breathe.

  “And you won’t be able to deny it,” Hamilton said. “I don’t know how you got in here, but there isn’t a door or an elevator car in this building without security cameras. And that includes the door to this room. We’ll have footage to show that you got into this building and into this room. And if we get a security guard in here, he’ll make you turn out your pockets, and he’ll find the phone.”

  Kate’s brain did a turn around and screeched to a halt.

  “If?” she asked him.

  Kate didn’t think she’d ever seen anybody who could be this calm or go for this long without blinking. She felt as if the man was staring right through her.

  Hamilton suddenly moved away from the door and walked to the computer. He looked at the screen, then moved the mouse to look at a few of the others. Then he stepped back.

  “Interesting,” he said. He took out his cell phone and took a picture of her holding her own opened cell phone in her hand. “You’re going to walk out of this room by yourself. You’re going to walk out of this building by yourself. And while you’re doing it, I’m going to be having you watched. When you’re well away from here, I’ll come out myself. But not until you’re very well away.”

  “Great,” Kate said.

  “You should get moving,” Hamilton said.

  Kate started to back out of the room, but she must have been more panicked than she thought. She bumped against the doorframe as she went, and when she did, she heard a double thump: herself against the door and something heavy hitting the ground.

  Hamilton walked forward, leaned over, and straightened up, holding Kate’s healing stone in his hand.

  She reached for it, but Hamilton was pushing her farther out into the corridor.

  “I think I’ll keep it,” he said.

  And then he smiled at her in a deep and vicious way that made Kate want to run.

  ***

  Kate got moving. Going down and going out, she did nothing to hide her presence in the building. She double-checked her pockets for her keys, her cell phone, and her wallet and headed out into the night.

  It had been bad enough walking in. Now it was even darker—or it seemed even darker—and the ground felt rockier and even more uneven. At one point, she stumbled so badly, she almost turned her ankle. But it was only almost, and she had to keep going, so she did.

  About halfway out, her cell phone began going off, and she stopped for a moment to check it. She had six voice mail messages, all of them from Frank and Jack and all of them saying the same thing: Where are you? Are you all right? Should we call the police?

  This was not good. If they had called the police, there was going to be a fuss. She checked the time on the phone’s clock: 1:35 p.m.

  She made the call. It was answered before the first ring ended.

  “Mom?” Jack said.

  He hadn’t waited to hear her voice.

  “It’s okay,” Kate said. “I’m fine. I’m sorry. I went out for drinks with some friends and we went to this place in the country and I guess there wasn’t service. I didn’t mean to worry you—”

  “Of course I was going to be worried,” Jack said. “You weren’t at the bookstore. We called. The Alice Hoffmann talk doesn’t happen for two weeks. We didn’t know where you were.”

  “Let me have that,” Frank’s voice said from the background.

  While Jack had been talking, Kate had been moving, and she’d been making much better time than she had in the beginning. Worrying about Jack and what to say to him took her mind off the throbbing in her ankle, which was getting worse by the second. It also took her mind off the ruts and rocks.

  “Kate?”

  There were lights just ahead. Street lamps. Small stores. That damned gas station.

  “Daddy,” Kate said. “It’s all right. I’m okay. I’m coming right home. It won’t take me more than half an hour.”

  “You should’ve let us know you were going to be out this late,” Frank said. “You had us both frantic. Are you sure you’re all right now?”

  “I’m just fine,” Kate said. “There’s nothing wrong. I’ll be home any minute now, and I’ll tell you everything when I get there. Just let me get off the phone so I can get there.”

  “All right,” Frank said.

  “Make her stay on that phone until she pulls into the driveway,” Jack said. “I don’t care if she gets a ticket.”

  “Daddy,” she said.

  “That’s all right,” Frank said. “I’m going to hang up now. Come straight home. Call us if anything holds you up.”

  “Yes,” Kate said. “Yes, I promise. Tell Jack I love him. And I’ll be right there.”

  She turned the phone off and shoved it back into her pocket. She forced herself into an aggressive power walk. She was close to completely out of breath. Her throbbing ankle was numb. Her back and shoulders felt like they’d been wrung out like a wet towel.

  She got to the gas station. It was closed and dark except for the brand sign above the price list. She pushed as fast as she could around to the side and found . . .

  . . . three parking spaces.

  All of them empty.

  Eleven

  It was dangerous being out there in the dark, with every store and gas station in sight deserted for the night, but Kate still took a good five minute
s making up her mind what to do next. She didn’t want to make an idiot of herself, and she didn’t know what she was going to say when she made the only phone call she could make.

  But it couldn’t be helped. She called Tom.

  When Tom showed up nearly half an hour later, he was driving a green Subaru instead of his usual silver unmarked police car. Kate didn’t recognize it when he first pulled into the station, and for a panicked moment, she wondered if she ought to hide.

  Tom parked the car next to where she was standing, braking so hard the squeal hurt Kate’s eardrums, and jumped out onto the pavement like Superman emerging from a phone booth.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he demanded.

  Kate ran over to the passenger-side door and tugged at the handle. Locked.

  “Could you please let me in the car?” she asked. “I’m freezing.”

  Tom got in behind the wheel and shut his own door. Kate got in and fussed with her seat belt so that she didn’t have to look him.

  “Let me try this again,” he said. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  Kate’s seat belt was fastened. Tom was not starting the car.

  “I went in to work,” she said. “I mean, I went in to Almador. I figured I had a good shot at being able to get in because my old manager was really disorganized. He should have shut down all my codes and passwords and had my security clearances yanked, but I was pretty sure he wouldn’t have remembered to do all that because he never does. He gets distracted. So I thought I’d go in and use the secure computers.”

  “Let me make a guess,” Tom said. “Secure computers and you need a security clearance to get into them . . . a government security clearance.”

  “Yes,” Kate said.

  “And people who don’t have those clearances aren’t allowed to work on those computers.”

  “Yes,” Kate said again. She really didn’t like where this was going.

  “And,” Tom said, “the only reason you have those clearances at the moment is that some idiot manager forgot to rescind them when you were put on leave.”

  “Okay,” Kate said. “All right. I see where you’re going with this—”

  “See where I’m going? See where I’m going? Are you out of your mind? You just broke into a building you had no right to enter, used codes and clearances you knew you had no right to have—for God’s sake, you must have broken fifty laws. Or worse. I should probably be arresting you right now.”

  “No,” Kate said, “I don’t think so. It’s not your jurisdiction.”

  Tom sent her a withering glance, and she sank a little deeper in her seat. She really wished he’d make the car move, but he gave no indication of leaving.

  “Then,” he said, staring out at the wall now, “you park your car all the way out here.”

  “There’s no street parking near Almador,” Kate said. “And I didn’t want to park in the parking garage because there are all these cameras.”

  “Oh, wonderful. Proof that you knew what you were doing was wrong. And you’ll have been caught on camera. I’ll bet the Almador building has thousands of cameras.”

  “Yes,” Kate said.

  “And then you end up down here, in the dark, by yourself. It’s not the worst neighborhood in the world, Kate, but a woman on her own and unarmed is always a target. Oh, Christ. You are unarmed? You didn’t bring a gun with you?”

  “Of course not,” Kate said.

  “What about something sensible? Pepper spray? Mace?”

  “Do all the people you know go around with that sort of stuff on them all the time?” Kate asked. “Why would I have anything like that? What would be the point?”

  “Not being raped, robbed, and left for dead in the Virginia suburbs would be the point,” Tom said. “Great God almighty. You really are out of your mind.”

  Tom put the key in the ignition and the engine roared back to life. He put his own seat belt on and began backing up.

  He was out onto the road before he spoke again.

  “Was there some point in doing what you did here?” he asked. “Was there really something so important that you had to break I don’t know how many federal laws and a few local ones and risk your life wandering around on your own with no protection? Really?”

  Kate hunkered down. They were out in the neighborhoods now. Most of the houses were dead dark, just like the gas station a few blocks away.

  “I just needed to know what happened in that raid. And to double-check that Turner was dead.”

  Tom actually looked interested. “And?”

  “He’s dead,” Kate admitted, “but not when and how the papers said he was. As far as I could tell, your Jed Paterson person murdered him.”

  “What?”

  Kate outlined the whole thing for him—the raid with Jed Paterson in charge, the attack in Herat and its aftermath, Jed Paterson’s connection to General Solutions.

  Tom’s driving had slowed considerably, and he no longer seemed to be angry at her.

  “So,” he said slowly, “Turner died because he knew about the corruption? Is this a case of corruption?”

  “I think so,” Kate said. “General Solutions reconstructs things. The facility was destroyed by a General Solutions drone. Except—my head is starting to hurt.”

  “There was some kind of ‘bilking the government’ thing going on, and Turner got wise to it. Paterson staged a raid to shut him up, and then General Solutions’ cronies at the Pentagon got the whole thing hushed up. Think about it. It’s the only thing that makes sense. Why else would Paterson kill Turner?”

  “But, Tom, if you look at the records, it doesn’t look like that. It doesn’t look like Paterson knew Turner was there. It looks like there was a drone strike and Paterson brought a team in to finish up, and Turner just happened to be there. But then I can’t figure out why Paterson would kill them all instead of helping them.”

  “I don’t like coincidences,” Tom said. “I especially don’t like double and triple coincidences, and that’s what this would have to be. Paterson is responsible for Turner’s death in a friendly fire incident, and then he comes back to the states and is still working for General Solutions. And the friendly fire incident is covered up six ways to Sunday and that means Paterson’s name is out of it? You couldn’t sell that one to Hollywood.”

  “I’m not trying to sell it to Hollywood,” Kate said. “I’m just trying to figure out what this is. And if it’s connected to Ozgo and the kidnapping and the trial.”

  “Of course it’s connected,” Tom said. “It’s all about Richard Hamilton.”

  Twenty minutes later, Kate was sitting in her own driveway. Tom’s car was still running and the headlights were still on, and the townhouse’s front door was open, too, spilling light onto the front walk. Frank and Jack were there, right behind it. Kate had the impression that Frank was forcibly restraining Jack from bursting through the door to see for himself how she was.

  “All right,” Tom said, “I suppose I—”

  “Would you like to come in for some coffee? I’m sure we could—”

  “Not right now,” Tom said. “They’re going to want you to explain it all to them, and I’m going to want to go back to sleep. You’ve got that track meet thing tomorrow?”

  Kate had to switch gears, fast. She caught herself just in time. “Yes. Yes I do. Jack—”

  But Tom wasn’t listening, and Kate was glad he wasn’t listening. She got herself out of her seat belt and then out of the car, muttering frantic apologies all the way.

  Then Jack did burst through the front door and came running.

  ***

  It was the car that saved her, the car that had been towed and needed to be retrieved from whatever impound it had been hauled off to while Kate was trapped at Almador with Richard Hamilton. If she hadn’t needed to do something about that and do it right away, she would have been trapped in her own kitchen that morning listening to all of Jack and Frank’s scolding.


  In the end, she told them another pack of lies—no, Tom couldn’t help today, Tom had things he had to do—and spent some time on the computer finding the gas station where she’d parked and talking to the attendant to find out where her car was likely to be.

  The impound yard turned out to be all the way on the other side of Almador, near the county line, and the cab fare looked like the budget for a Hollywood blockbuster. Frank dropped her off, threatening to wait for her, but the line was long. She convinced him instead to run by the grocery store to pick up food for the week.

  The impound yard had exactly one employee on duty and approximately fifty people waiting to retrieve their cars. Most of those people were in even worse moods than she was, and the attendant was a dedicated passive-aggressive. The more infuriated a customer became, the slower and more inarticulate he got. At one point, he seemed to be pretending not to speak English.

  It was eleven thirty before she finally reached the attendant’s counter and described her car for him. The attendant gave no indication that he cared or that he’d ever seen it, but he took her keys and went off into the back, where there was a door to the fenced yard. Kate didn’t think she had ever been in such a hurry to get out of a place in her life.

  The attendant came back with a clipboard and pushed it across to her—she had to sign at the bottom, put her driver’s license number in the little box, agree that her car had not been damaged by the people who towed it, and pay $845.02 in fines and towing charges.

  She hauled out a credit card and handed it over. Then she took her keys back and went outside to pick up her car.

  Kate drove around for a while along roads that were neither really urban nor really rural. She and Tom needed help, and she had an idea where they could get it. She made a call and began to head back into town and ended up in her parking space outside of the courthouse. She wandered down the street and looked into the windows of a few of the small restaurants. Most of them were full with the brunch crowd. In the fourth one on the block, she found the man she was looking for. Kate noted the rumpled suit and the hair that looked as if it had been applied to his bald scalp with Elmer’s glue—and then she had it. This might be lucky if she played it right. She went into the restaurant, ignored the hostess, and headed straight for him.