Blackout

by Nance, John J. ;

  “To what?”

  She sighed and shook her head. “An act of mass murder, to start with. He’s right. What I’m doing could be viewed as obstruction of justice.”

  “Oh, bullshit!” Robert snapped.

  Kat was pulling out her satellite phone with a freshly charged battery.

  “You’re sure they can’t trace that?” he asked.

  “Yes, I’m sure. They can trace it when it uses a ground-based cellular network, but I’m going to program it to stay on the satellite system.”

  The phone rang suddenly and she automatically punched the Send button to answer it, realizing her mistake as she did so.

  Robert was speaking at the same moment: “Maybe it isn’t such a good idea …”

  Kat punched the Off button as fast as possible, hoping whoever was on the other end hadn’t heard anything.

  The phone began ringing again, making her jump slightly, and she quickly punched the Off button.

  The ringing stopped.

  “Could they … track us with that?” Robert asked.

  She glanced over, her face betraying deep alarm. “I … don’t know. But let’s get out of here and find that motel. We’ve got a lot of digging to do, and we need to keep on being a moving target.”

  LAS VEGAS, NEVADA

  The level of tension in the room was almost explosive as several ashen-faced men milled around while one pressed a telephone receiver more tightly to his ear, his face reflecting sudden intense concentration.

  “Hold it,” he said, raising an index finger to quiet the others. The temporary office had been set up in an industrial park near Nellis Air Force Base, and the sudden passage of a pair of F-15 Eagles overhead caused him to frown and glance up.

  He toggled the phone to get a new line, dialing the number again. “Someone answered Bronsky’s phone … and there was a guy’s voice in the background for just a second. It was like she punched it on and off rapidly. I’m calling back.” He waited a full thirty seconds. “Now she’s not answering.” Suddenly a look of happy surprise crossed the man’s face as he turned to his compatriots. “I don’t believe this!”

  “What?” another of them said, crossing toward the first.

  “That was the domestic eight-hundred-number for her satellite phone—the one that tries to connect through the cellular system—and it rang.”

  “Yeah?” was the response.

  “Meaning that when she refused to answer, the system played a message with a little identification tag line. She’s still in Seattle, Larry! We’ve found the bitch.”

  “You say there was a male in the background?”

  “Yeah,” he said, excited.

  One of the men put a cassette in a small recorder and punched the button. Robert MacCabe’s voice from a recent television appearance filled the room. The man stopped it after thirty seconds.

  “That voice?”

  The other man smiled and nodded. “Sure sounded like it.”

  “Then, gentlemen,” the leader said, “we have a double benefit. We know MacCabe is also with Bronsky, and they’re somewhere in Seattle.”

  “How about the other four?”

  “Who knows. They could have stashed them, or they could be dragging them along.”

  There was a moment’s hesitation before all five men in the room dove for various phones. There was a jet waiting at Las Vegas’s McCarren Airport that could have them airborne in twenty minutes.

  “What do we take?”

  “All the firepower we can drag along. She’s making mistakes. This time we’re gonna nail her cute little ass.”

  chapter 38

  SEATTLE, WASHINGTON

  NOVEMBER 15—DAY FOUR

  2:20 P.M. LOCAL/2220 ZULU

  Two rooms under assumed names in a nondescript hotel in the south Seattle town of Renton took only a little cash from the proceeds of a quick stop at a cash machine. They settled in to their respective chambers for a few minutes before opening the double doors between them. Kat stuck her head inside Robert’s room, made a snide comment about famous motel art on the wall, and glanced at the phone. “Why don’t you start the search for a way in to the Library of Congress computer, Robert. I’m going to use the satellite phone to call Jake.”

  He nodded and plopped on the bed as he reached for the phone and looked up. “First, I’m going to try to scare up my Library of Congress contact.”

  She partially closed the door and turned on the satellite phone, carefully switching to the satellite system before it had time to connect with a land-based cellular network. She dialed the number of FBI headquarters in Washington, unsurprised to hear the tension and anger in Jake Rhoades’s voice.

  “Kat! Thank God! What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  “Keeping us all safe. There’s a leak back there, Jake. I think you know that. Every time I told you something yesterday, the other side heard it.”

  “What are you saying? Are you accusing me?”

  “Of course not! Don’t be ridiculous. You did your best trying to protect us in Seattle last night, but look what happened.”

  “So what did happen, Kat?” Jake asked. “All I got was a cryptic pager message from you about going underground, then a frustrated team finds you and the others have jumped out of the airplane and run into the night without a trace. I’ve beeped you every hour on the hour since, but you didn’t see fit to call me, though you know a dozen safe ways to do so.”

  “I have reasons,” she said, choosing her words carefully. “I can’t go into it right now.” Any excuses about remote areas and no radio contact could point to a place like Stehekin and endanger the rest of them. She told him, instead, of the last-minute diversion of the DC-10 to a south gate.

  “Yeah,” he said, “we heard, once our team shifted to the South Satellite terminal and found out someone else had been flashing false ID around.”

  “You didn’t collar the bogus group, I assume?” she asked.

  Jake hesitated. “They were one step ahead of us. They murdered one of our Seattle field agents when we tried to apprehend them. Jimmy Causland was his name. Wife, two kids. Five bullets, three to the head, we think with a silencer. Thanks to that encounter, we know these people are real, and we know they’re using fake FBI credentials, but we don’t know who or where they are.”

  “Which is exactly why we’ve dropped out of sight for a few days.”

  “Kat, the Bureau can’t protect you or those survivors if you go solo.”

  “You can’t protect us anyway. Not as long as we have an unplugged leak. Remember what happened last night at Sea-Tac?”

  “Regardless, you’ve got to bring them in immediately. That’s an order.”

  “I need some time, Jake, and I’m not sure how much. Otherwise, if there’s another slipup, we’re history. That group of cutthroats has to be frantic by now, and I’m sure the orders have escalated to ‘shoot on sight.’”

  “At least we now have a name for them.”

  “A name?” she asked.

  “This organization, for want of a better term, is calling itself Nuremberg, as in the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials.”

  “What on earth? Do we know where they are?”

  “Not a clue, though the speculation is it’s an organization fronting for Middle Eastern interests such as Libya, Iraq, Iran, you name it. All our dear friends.”

  “That name,” Kat said, “could also mean this is some sort of retaliatory blood feud with the United States over … something related to war crimes, or the U.S. reaction to someone else’s war crimes. Perhaps Serbia.”

  “We don’t know, but a hand-delivered letter was plopped on CNN’s desk this morning, devoid of fingerprints or usable identification, and reciting enough unreleased facts to convince us it’s valid.”

  “Thank God! So they’ve announced their demands?”

  “No. They’ve announced their existence. The essence of the communiqué is simply that they will continue to establish their ability to de
stroy any aircraft anywhere in the world at any time without telling us how, until we are ready—in other words softened up enough—to listen to their demands.”

  “Oh, Lord. And this was right after the Chicago crash?”

  “Yes. Mentioned it specifically. Kat, the media’s shifting to a new level of hysteria, the White House is putting incredible pressure on us for answers, and your name is being prominently mentioned without much love. Now listen to me carefully. I have all but lost control. I can probably protect your tail here in the Bureau for everything that’s gone down up to now, but when we disconnect here, if I don’t have an arrangement to repatriate you and all of those survivors, the director has ordered us to start hunting you down.”

  “On what grounds?” Kat asked, her voice subdued.

  “Obstruction of justice, possible kidnapping, and perhaps a half-dozen others.”

  “Those people are with me voluntarily, Jake.”

  “The teenager, Delaney, is too young to make that decision legally. His father is stirring up a hornet’s nest to find him and see you prosecuted.”

  “His father?”

  “I don’t have the entire story, but the man’s gone ballistic. He apparently knows his son is with you and is accusing you, and us, of false arrest and kidnapping, and even hinting at sexual molestation.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Jake! Sexual … what kind of nonsense is that?”

  “I’m merely telling you, Kat, that FBI agents do not have the luxury of sequestering people, especially minors, without due process of law and the sanction of their employer. His father apparently has joint custody. He’s within his rights.”

  “So I’m supposed to give up Steve only to see him cut down by automatic weapon fire as he walks to his father’s arms? Now that’s a plan!”

  “We’re expected to do things in accordance with the law, Kat. That’s your oath. You are, after all, a law enforcement officer.”

  “Jake, listen to me. All the people involved, with one exception, are hiding of their own free will, and I’m not with them. I am a long way from where the others are holed up, and I’ve got one of the group with me, and it’s not Steve Delaney. We’re desperately trying to develop leads. Even if I thought it was safe, which it is not, I’d have no way of just turning the others over to you.”

  “But you’re going to have to tell me where they are, Kat.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “DAMMIT! Kat, this is it. This is the last warning. If I hang up without getting what I need, this is your job, and maybe your freedom. You don’t really want to go from promising FBI agent to convicted felon, do you?”

  Kat let out a long sigh. A tense silence on the line hung between them.

  “Inside five days, Jake, right or wrong, fired or not, indicted or otherwise, I’ll come in. If you can’t trust me in the meantime, I’ll understand. But these lives are my responsibility. And Jake … I’m truly sorry to have to disobey you.”

  “I’m sorry too, Kat,” he began, sighing long and loud. She could tell what was coming: “Because as of this moment …”

  She disconnected before he could say the word “suspended” and sat there, biting her lip for nearly a minute before looking up. A grim-faced Robert MacCabe had come into the room to stand quietly, watching her.

  “Robert, I need to warn you about this.” She leaned over the table, trying to keep her voice very low. “I need to make sure you have the option of bailing out.”

  “What are you talking about?” he asked.

  “From this moment forward, anything you do to help me could be viewed as aiding a criminal act, or voluntarily conspiring to commit a criminal act. I have not been formally suspended, as far as I can tell. I didn’t hear any words to that effect. But I have no support in Washington, and they’re treating me now as a renegade.” She told him the details of the phone call. “I hate to say it, but I think you’d better get away from me. Just give me a twelve-hour head start before you call Washington and tell them what you know.”

  “Cut it out, Kat.”

  “Robert, I don’t want you following me into infamy if this ends up badly.”

  He leaned down, face-to-face with her, his arms supporting his weight. “I am not abandoning you. You’re going to need my help. In fact, you couldn’t get rid of me now with a federal court order.”

  FBI HEADQUARTERS, WASHINGTON, D.C.

  Deputy Assistant Director Jake Rhoades looked up from the conference table he had been leaning over, the expression on his face fierce and foreboding.

  “Yes?” he snapped.

  A male agent in his late twenties held up a piece of paper. “Sorry to bother you, Sir, but I was told …”

  Jake grabbed it from his hand. “What’s this?”

  “We’ve located the area her signal is coming from.”

  “Good. Where?”

  “They … can’t pinpoint more closely than about fifteen square miles, and it took tremendous pressure to get the communications company to do it—”

  “WHERE, dammit! Does it look like I’m on vacation here?”

  “Seattle. At least; the general area.”

  “Okay. Thanks. I’m sorry to be grumpy.”

  “No problem, Sir.” The agent turned to go. Jake called after him, causing him to stop and turn back.

  “Sir?”

  “Look, I’ve known Kat Bronsky since she joined the Bureau, and I think the world of her, and this is really painful.”

  “Understood.”

  “You were trying to tell me how you located the signal.”

  The agent nodded, moving back toward Jake. “This is an American communications company operating all over the world, and they did not want to cooperate at first. But their satellites are at approximately four hundred and fifty miles up, over seventy of them, and their computers can triangulate a signal on the ground. It took pressure from friends at the Federal Communications Commission to get their help.”

  “Accurate to within fifteen miles?”

  “They could do better, but they won’t. They have agreed, however, to keep tracking her signal, but they emphasized that’s only because the FBI owns the phone.”

  When he had cleared the door, Jake turned to the others in the room. “Okay, everyone. It’s deployment time. Kat Bronsky is somewhere in Seattle, and we’ve got to find her before the boys from Nuremberg do.”

  RENTON, WASHINGTON

  Robert had turned on the TV in his room and left it on low volume as he worked his way through a series of calls, trying to locate his Library of Congress contact, who was on vacation. Another line was ringing without an answer when something on the screen caught his attention. He reached for the remote when he saw the wreckage of the Chicago plane crash on screen, but the scene changed to one from Dallas, and he toggled up the sound. The anchor was saying something about an airport shutdown.

  Robert replaced the receiver and moved quickly to the door to Kat’s room, finding her between calls. “You may want to see this on channel four,” he said.

  She reached for her remote and clicked to the same channel. Pictures of the huge DFW Airport dissolved to stock shots of passengers milling back and forth in a terminal before cutting to a reporter in front of a mob scene at a ticket counter.

  Thanks, Bill. The scene here at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport is one of uncertainty and upset this afternoon in the aftermath of the apparent cancellation of all flights, in and out, on the strength of a telephoned threat. In the wake of this morning’s airline disaster in Chicago, a group calling itself “Nuremberg” has claimed responsibility, claiming it also is responsible for the crash of an American jumbo jet in Vietnam, and another American airliner off Cuba last month. Two hours ago, someone claiming to be from the same terrorist group announced plans to destroy an airliner either arriving or departing from DFW this afternoon. The result, as I say, has been chaos, with thousands of stranded travelers being given too little information.

  There was a sudde
n scuffling of chair legs as Robert pulled up the desk chair and sat down, glancing back at Kat, who was sitting mesmerized. When the report was over, she snapped off the TV once again and shook her head slowly.

  “So we know their next move. Leverage the terror.”

  “But to what end, Kat?”

  “That’s the question, isn’t it? What do they want?” She stood suddenly and pointed to the chair he was in. “Up, please. I need the chair. Let’s get back to the calls. We need progress. I’m finding no one on planet Earth with the name Dr. Brett Thomas, although I’ve still got a few tricks to try in a bunch of databases. How about you?”

  He filled her in on the vacationing contact.

  “Of course! Naturally, he’d be on vacation when you need him!” Kat said in a sarcastic tone. “Murphy never sleeps.”

  Robert looked puzzled. “Beg your pardon?”

  Kat pulled up the chair Robert had vacated and sat at the desk. She laid out a notebook and reached for the phone. “Murphy’s Law,” she explained, her voice flat.

  “Oh, yeah.” Robert nodded. “‘What can go wrong, will go wrong.’”

  “But do you know the prime corollary to Murphy’s Law?” Kat asked, watching him slowly shake his head as she continued. “Mr. Murphy was an optimist.”

  For three hours they worked in the relative obscurity of their respective rooms, both using their laptops plugged into the phones when they weren’t using the lines for direct calls. Kat had carefully connected first Robert, then herself, to their respective Internet providers through a series of difficult-to-trace eight-hundred numbers. CNN remained on in both rooms, and the various reports and flashes outlined the rapidly developing crisis of confidence in the commercial aviation system as Atlanta and Salt Lake City joined the list of major American airports temporarily shut down by telephoned threats.

  At nearly five in the afternoon Robert entered Kat’s room unheard and moved to her side, a smile on his face.