“I think … he’s gone,” Steve said at last, taking a deep breath.
“For now,” Dallas replied, her whole body shaking. “Why isn’t he hibernating? Would someone please talk some sense into that dumb bear?”
“Some of them go down late,” Dan said. “How big was he?”
“Big enough. A black bear. Probably four hundred pounds,” Graham replied. “We need to figure out how to board up that window in case he decides to return.”
Dallas took Steve by the shoulders and turned him to her. “What happened, Steve? Why’d you go outside?”
“I wanted to!” he snapped, squirming out of her grip.
“Where’d you find him? And no, you can’t keep him just because he followed you home.” Dallas motioned toward the front porch.
“Down by the river. He was down there just sitting in the dark by the edge and I walked right into him and scared him. He didn’t like it at all.”
“Steve, did you see anyone else out there?” Dallas asked.
“No.” He shook his head.
“You’re sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure,” Steve said, looking scared. “Why?”
Dallas looked at Graham before replying, her face grim. “Because I found a second set of fresh footprints out there that followed yours from the forest.”
She saw Steve’s eyes get big and the blood drain from his face.
“Really? Someone was following me? They were human footprints?”
She nodded.
“Where, Dallas?” Dan asked.
“Less than a hundred yards from the cabin,” she replied.
“Then,” Dan began, motioning in the general direction of the door, “someone’s already here and watching us.”
Another thud reverberated through the cabin, this time from the opposite side.
“Oh, wonderful,” Dan said. “There are two predictable behaviors for a bear. One, he sees people and he leaves. Two, the promise of food outweighs his natural fear of humans. Did you have any food with you outside, Steve?”
Steve nodded. “I took a roll with some meat in it. See? It’s still here in my pocket, wrapped in a napkin.”
Dan’s mouth tightened. “So now he knows where there’s food. Eating is a bear’s primary focus in life.”
“Which means?” Graham asked, his eyes on the back windows. The scraping and bumping continued, punctuated by the same cries of irritation.
“Which means we’ve got a bear problem,” Dan replied.
“There are shutters on that broken window,” Graham said. “I guess we’d better get them closed.” He handed the gun to Dallas and moved to the window, checking both sides before leaning through the destroyed frame and pulling the shutters.
“Without seeing them,” Dan said, “I can’t tell, but even if those shutters are well made, they’re only going to slow him down. When he tries to come through that window—and he will—we’ll have to be ready to shoot. You’ll get one chance.”
“I know it.”
“And if you’ve never heard the old adage about there being nothing as dangerous as a wounded bear, let me tell you, it’s the truth.”
SEATTLE, WASHINGTON,
RENTON AREA
The shopping foray had taken just over two hours, and Robert made it back to the motel before nine to find Kat in a hopeful but agitated state.
“Robert, I located Dr. Maverick! He lives in Vegas, but he isn’t home, and a neighbor I got on the phone said he’d shot out of there two days ago.”
“Any idea where he was going?”
She nodded. “An idea, yes. The neighbor gave me some leads. He’s got a place in Sun Valley, Idaho, and I’m betting he’s headed there.”
“Kat, have you considered …”
She raised her hand to stop him. “I know. If we can find out where he is, so can Nuremberg’s goons. But we have no other hard target. I have the address and the phone number, but if he’s there, he’s holed up and not answering.”
“So what do we do?”
Kat pursed her lips. “We slip on a commuter flight in the morning to Sun Valley to look for him.”
She took one of the bags Robert was holding and rummaged around for the hair-coloring product, found it, and held it up. “Good. Exactly what I need.” She moved quickly into her bathroom and waved as she closed the door behind her and turned on the water.
Robert followed and knocked lightly on the door. “You mind if I talk to you while you’re working?”
Kat opened it a few inches and peered out. “Why?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Perhaps the idea that we’ve got a few unresolved issues, like why the hell we’re gambling that a frightened man may go to his mountain cabin instead of off the ends of the earth?”
“Call it a hunch, Robert.”
“Just a hunch? Or intuition?”
“The same professional intuition you said you trusted.”
“Just asking.”
Kat peeked out through the crack in the bathroom door. “When a lady goes through this little conversion process, she doesn’t like to be visible. So go to your room, close the door, and make that call to Tahiti. We’re running out of time.”
KING COUNTY MUNICIPAL AIRPORT/BOEING FIELD,
SEATTLE, WASHINGTON
A short line of cars was waiting at the curb as a dozen men and women in dark suits spilled out of the lobby of Galvin Flying Service. The special agent-in-charge introduced his team to the arriving force amid a flurry of watch-checking, and waved to the FAA pilots who had flown them in by government jet from D.C. Carry-on bags were loaded and cellular phone numbers exchanged as the FBI team geared up for a rapid trip into the Seattle field office and an intensive all-night effort to find their prodigal sister agent.
As the informal motorcade roared away from the curb, a man with forgettable features sitting in a rented van turned away and lifted a cellular phone to his mouth. “We’ve got company,” he said, reporting the small army of FBI agents.
“Confirms the fact that she’s here, doesn’t it?” the voice on the other end said. “Get back over to the main airport while we keep the search going from here.”
“You having any luck?” the man asked.
“With the help of a little cash, we’re narrowing it down.”
chapter 40
SEATTLE, WASHINGTON,
RENTON AREA
NOVEMBER 15—DAY FOUR
11:15 P.M. LOCAL/0715 ZULU
Kat turned off the hair dryer and used her comb to position a few stray hairs before using the hair spray. She shook her head at the brassy platinum blond in the mirror, suppressing a slight twinge of excitement at the prospect of appearing in public in clothes and makeup that she would never wear as herself.
She left the bathroom, relieved to find the door between the rooms closed. She pulled on the dark panty hose and, piece by piece, wiggled into the rest of the costume before inserting her feet into the high platform shoes. She took a long look at herself in the full-length mirror on the wall, distracted momentarily by noise from some members of a visiting high school basketball team whooping it up in the corridor outside.
Kat looked at the girl in the mirror, worried about overdoing the trash-flash. All right, Katrina La Femme. It’s show time! Let’s try it out.
She opened her side of the double connecting door and stuck her leg into the opening, drawing a wolf whistle from Robert, then applause when she entered and struck a pose with hands on hips and head cocked to one side.
“Incredible!” he said, the telephone cradled on his shoulder.
“Cheap, cheap, cheap!” she replied, pretending to chew gum.
More voices were yelling in the corridor, and the sound of footsteps could be heard running in one direction, then running the other way, accompanied by giggles.
“What on earth are they doing out there?” Robert asked.
“Just kids having fun,” she said, moving to the peephole on the door and pressing her eye against it. “A
ny progress?”
“Hang on,” he said, turning to talk to someone on the other end. Kat turned around just as Robert replaced the receiver with a large smile on his face.
“Let me fire up the computer, Kat. We’ve got a clear track to that file for the next thirty minutes.”
“Wonderful!”
She sat on the edge of the bed beside him and watched as he programmed the right numbers into the computer and waited for it to make the connection with the Library of Congress. Following his friend’s instructions, he found the master file list and keyed a small search routine to find the one hidden file named WCCHRN.
“Okay. This is it. I’m sure no one knew it was there.”
“Did you tell your friend what you were doing?” Kat asked.
Robert shook his head. “No. He owed me a big-time favor and I collected. He’s trusting me not to destroy anything or leave a trail. But without this access, there’s no way we’d be able to get that file. No way.”
“Then if we can get this file downloaded, can we erase all evidence of it?”
Robert shook his head. “With the backups they’ve got? Not a chance. This file will still be around on some computer tape for a hundred years. Maybe forever.”
The file name suddenly appeared by itself on the screen. He keyed in the password “Carnegie” and crossed his fingers.
The screen filled with indecipherable symbols and random characters.
“Damn! He wrote the file in some machine code,” Robert said. “Could be simple, could be impossible. I’m going to download everything first.”
It took twenty-two minutes for the voluminous file from the Library of Congress to transfer through the telephone lines. At last he broke the connection and tried to open what Walter Carnegie had hidden away.
More gobbledygook.
Robert entered more commands, all with the same frustrating result.
“This may not be possible, Kat, without a cryptologist.”
“Would you mind if I try something?” she asked.
Kat brought her laptop in and positioned it to face his before taking over the keyboard with a practiced hand. “I’m using our infrared link to download the file to my machine.”
“Why?”
“Just … a minute. May be easier to do than explain.” When the process was completed, she sat back on his bed and put her computer in her lap, calling up a special program from her files. “This will tell me what kind of format, what kind of language or code this thing is written in,” she explained.
The results popped up almost instantly, prompting a laugh from Kat.
“What?” Robert asked.
“Clever. Not too sophisticated, but clever. He simply converted the file to a picture. I need to translate it back to a word-processing format.” The computer whirred for a few seconds before normal, readable text flashed on the screen.
“Aha!” Kat leaned forward, examining the screen. “This is an index. He’s got a long list of items here, and a cover note dated just a week ago.”
“Two days before he died,” Robert said. “Go on. I’ve got to make a pit stop.”
She began reading, occasionally whistling under her breath. She tore through half a dozen pages before Robert returned.
“Robert, no wonder he was terrified!”
“Meaning?”
“I’m reading his summary. He says that someone in the intelligence community found out he was a terrorist expert with the FAA trying to discover how terrorists could have caused the SeaAir accident. That person came to Carnegie to get his help in blowing the whistle on a major governmental cover-up.”
“That would be our Dr. Maverick?”
She shook her head. “No. Someone else. Someone who lives in the Beltway.” She glanced at the screen and toggled the document back a few pages before looking at Robert again. “According to this, there was a classified presidential executive order several years back that prohibited any U.S. involvement in researching or building laser weapons designed to destroy human eyesight.”
“I didn’t know about that. So we are dealing with a powerful laser.”
“Apparently. He says it was a top-secret project. There are references to it, but he says here he hasn’t discovered the name of the project.”
“Did he say the presidential order was violated?” Robert asked.
She read over the page again and shook her head. “No. You need to read all this, too, but Carnegie says his deep throat told him there had been a major black project run by the Defense Department, which had been doing just such research, and it produced some eye-killing portable lasers. After the President’s order, the weapons were stored, instead of destroyed. But he says they weren’t buried deeply enough.”
“Don’t tell me. They were stolen.”
Kat nodded. “That’s what he says, and that’s apparently the nexus of his panic. The whole stockpile went missing, he says, and because of the potential for havoc and the intense worry about public reaction, as well as the potential backlash against the contractor and the Pentagon, Carnegie’s source told him a huge effort got under way to hide the fact that we’d ever been fooling around with the idea, let alone actually building devices to destroy human eyeballs. He claims here that according to his source, DOD, CIA, NSA, DIA, and NRO were all deeply involved in trying to recover the lost prototypes, and that they were gambling they could recover the weapons and protect the technology before some terrorist group started using them.”
“And,” Robert continued, “they promised that a SeaAir or Meridian–type accident would never occur, right?”
She nodded. “That’s implied here but not stated. Also, he says that the FAA has a radar tape of the Key West area when SeaAir’s MD-eleven went down, and there was an F-one-oh-six Air Force test drone, but no other targets except a shadowy intermittent one they never identified.” Kat looked up at Robert. “Obviously, when SeaAir was shot out of the sky, whoever was begging for quiet had to have known it would all hit the fan if any of those stolen weapons were involved, and that does set the stage. That kind of cover-up would be devastating if exposed.”
“Which is,” Robert said, “precisely what Walter was threatening to do by merely looking into the allegations.”
“As are we,” Kat said, feeling a cold chill ripple down her back.
Robert looked toward the hall where more noise from the teen crowd was filtering through the door. “Lord, Kat. I almost said, ‘when the press finds out about this,’ completely forgetting I am the press. No wonder they went ape when Walter contacted me, even if he never gave me anything.”
“Whoever ‘they’ is,” Kat added. “I mean, we’re coming to these conclusions based on Walter Carnegie’s information and his conclusions, but whatever happened to him, somebody’s been after you, and now us. That’s corroboration of at least some of this.”
“My God, do you realize the implications?” he asked, his eyes getting larger. “If this is half the cover-up he’s postulating, it’s just a matter of time before the truth comes out, whether I break the story or someone else does. Our government knew the potential and did nothing to stop it.”
“And there was time, Robert. According to all this”—she gestured to the computer screen—“there was time to sound the alarm and somehow protect commercial aviation.”
“But how long ago did the theft occur?” he asked. “A couple of months? That could be defensible caution.”
“Try four years ago, according to Carnegie’s source. Since then, there’s been false congressional testimony, possible White House involvement, everything. An initial lie compounded by more lies until the entire administration sits in a tangled web of potentially explosive revelation.”
Robert sat back in deep thought for more than a minute before leaning forward again, his eyes finding hers. “Did he say anything about the group that obtained the weapons? Who they might be? Whether they bought them on the black market or whether they stole the laser weapons themselves?”
>
She shook her head. “I’ve only read his summary, but he was already obsessed with that question. Was it a Middle Eastern, religious-based group, an organization out to extort huge amounts of money, or what? Maybe, as I suspect, one out to profiteer from disrupting the airline stocks? There’s one thing I can’t quite figure out at first glance, though. Where were those weapons for the last four years?”
Robert looked at her in silence. She cocked her head as she watched the progression of worry. “What’s wrong?”
“Kat, who’s chasing us?”
“Beg your pardon?”
“The alphabet-soup agencies. CIA, DIA, NRO. Did you omit one?”
She shook her head as if to clear it. “I’m not following …”
“Did you omit the FBI?”
Kat’s eyebrows climbed, and she sat back suddenly with a disgusted look on her face. “Forget that nonsense!”
He lowered his head and rubbed his temples. “Kat, I’m sorry, but someone killed Walter, and someone’s been trying their best to get us.” He looked up at her again. “Someone who consistently shows up with what you yourself called impeccable FBI credentials.”
She shook her head energetically, her voice terse and low. “Don’t go there, Robert.”
“Look, I—”
“The FBI is not capable as an agency of giving or carrying out such an order.”
“There could always be renegades,” he said quietly. “Perhaps they’re taking their dedication a bit too far.”
“NO!” she snapped. She put her laptop computer on the bed and got to her feet to pace with her arms folded, staying within a few feet and looking down at him only fleetingly as her agitation grew. She leaned over him again. “No! Dammit, I cannot and will not believe that. Maybe the Company, or rogue members within CIA. But not the Bureau.”
“Loyalty talking, Kat? Or logic? Think how many times your messages and calls to Jake Rhoades have backfired.”
“I admit my first response is based on loyalty. But the FBI could not, and would not, do such a thing, Robert. We’re talking about mass murder in cold blood. You don’t know these people. I do. There are some of the world’s most unapologetic Neanderthals in our ranks when it comes to accepting women, but these are good, solid professional people who live to serve their country and the law. Most of them have doctorates. Juris Doctors, sometimes Ph.D.’s. All well-educated, solid people. They can make mistakes, like Ruby Ridge or Waco, but they—we—could not do the things this murderous bunch has been doing.”
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