No one matters except Abbott. Kat doesn’t have much political instinct, but she can’t see how Abbott can sign, especially with Tiina Gracheva in the room, once confronted with the images from Voz Island.
She answers the phone. It’s Cage. “I’m ready,” she says, tapping the Accept key on the laptop. A green light flickers on the laptop, and the download begins.
“It’s big. It’ll take a couple of minutes,” says Cage. The download begins.
“Is Abbott using Marine One to get to Hampton Court?” asks Kat, referring to the presidential helicopter.
“Yes. He leaves Chequers at 11:35. Due at Hampton Court at 12:00.”
“Early.”
“That’s how Abbott likes it.”
“Can we get into Marine One’s communications?”
“Audio or video?”
“Video. We can’t get through at Chequers, because it’s run by the British. But we have a brief window when he’s on Marine One.”
“I’ll check.”
“One more thing. Javier Laja’s cell number. The right one. The one he’ll have until he goes onto the soccer field.”
“That’ll be done.”
“Any word from Dad?”
“Not directly. He’s with Sayer, and he’s safe. Sayer’s sitting on the fence and holding his breath like everyone else, I’d imagine.”
“Dad’s the evidence,” says Kat.
“Exactly. Sayer will use him or destroy him. Depends how the wind blows.”
“Hold on,” says Kat. The download finishes. She opens it to the picture of Yulya she first saw a week ago at the Kazakh embassy. “It’s good, Bill. It’s good,” she says excitedly. “We’ll talk in half an hour—after I have the stuff from Liz.”
Kat now has one full copy of the file on the reformatted hard drive. Through the kitchen window, she sees a glimpse of dawn. It’ll be a long day, but by the end, Kat will either have won or be dead.
She dials Liz Luxton.
“Ten sections,” says Liz. “All about twenty seconds. Ready to go. N-now.”
Kat presses Accept on the laptop. The download only takes seconds. Before Kat flips open the file to check, Liz says, “Things are d-difficult. I’ve got to go.”
A photo comes up: Yulya about to murder the peasants. Liz’s line’s dead. Kat redials. A voice says “Incorrect number.”
Luxton’s hand is on her shoulder.
“What?” she asks, more brusquely than she intended.
“The police are setting up a checkpoint at the intersection,” says Luxton calmly. “Come upstairs.”
Kat takes the Colt. Luxton’s got the Glock 18 and the 9mm. The bedroom light is off. Luxton kneels on the bed’s rumpled sheets, ducking his head where the beamed roof slopes down. He points through the gap in the curtain without moving it and moves back for Kat to look.
Two police cars, blue lights turning, parked diagonally, hoods together, block the northbound lane. Officers with flashlights stand on the southbound lane. It’s early. There’s no traffic.
“Over to your right, on the electricity pole at the corner of the school playground,” says Luxton. It takes a moment, but Kat sees a hidden video camera there, pointing straight at the entrance to Cherry Tree Farm. “I missed it,” he says.
Kat looks to her right and sees an English village at dawn, the people not yet awake.
“It might be the camera. Might not,” says Luxton. “They could have found the Land Rover. They could have intercepted your calls. They could have been tracking Liz.”
“Even tracking Cage,” adds Kat. “Or it might have nothing to do with us.”
“Maybe,” says Luxton. “But in minutes, we could be under siege.” He slides off the bed. She lets him take her hand and lead her downstairs.
SEVENTY-ONE
Saturday, 7:01 a.m., BST
The Mini Cooper is registered in the name of Jennifer Tappler. It’s licensed until December 18, was bought less than a year ago, has a 1.6-liter engine, and a tank full of gas. In the back is a torn schoolbook, a model airplane with a broken wing, and a party whistle, along with a floral blue car seat.
Luxton is wearing a yellow jacket with POLICE stenciled on the back below the insignia of the Port of Felixstowe. “It was hanging in the shed,” he says, as Kat gets in. “The port carries weight around here. So it might be useful.”
Kat keeps the laptop and phones with her. She looks behind. A blanket’s on the floor. She leans back, feels the reassuring shapes of the weapons underneath.
“I reckon it’s been set up by local police,” says Luxton. “If it’s a Project Peace issue, they won’t do anything until the big boys arrive. The Mini Cooper’s a locally registered car. There’d be no official record of Simon Tappler leaving the country. There might be none of Jennifer and the kids being gone as well. It’s summer. People travel.”
Luxton drives out slowly, turns right, and heads down the hill and around a curve to the left, where the road narrows even further and dips between high banks thick with high summer grass.
He keeps to side roads, going north. The farther they are from London, the safer they are from detection. He takes a byway that winds past two farmhouses, where dogs bark and tractors have left the road thick with fallen manure and harvested straw.
He drives for more than an hour. The landscape becomes horizon-flat, greens and yellows, dotted with buildings and trees, but no hill or slope for as far as the eye can see. He turns into a track that leads to a forest and stops.
“Keep going,” says Kat.
Luxton looks at her curiously.
“Put us under the trees,” she explains. “Cover from satellite cameras.”
Luxton gets out, leaving his door open. Crisp air fills the small car. He lights a cigarette, walks into the trees, walks back again, paces around. The cell phones and their SIM cards may be compromised, but she’ll have to use them. Tappler’s laptop is so old, it has no means of wireless transmission outside the house.
Six hours from now, Abbott will leave in Marine One to go to Hampton Court. Eight hours, and he will have signed the CPS. If they drive toward London, they won’t get past the first big checkpoint.
Luxton opens the back door, brings out a light machine gun from the back of the car with boxes of ammunition. He’s found a hidden place on flat ground where they can see to the horizon on all sides. To the west, mist rolls low across the fields. To the east, the rising sun creates a pink glow in the sky.
If anyone approaches by land, it’ll be along the track they’ve just driven up. He’ll see them a mile or more away. If they come by air, the Heckler & Koch 13E can damage aircraft up to 400 meters in the air.
Luxton props up other weapons against trees around the car. If there’s going to be a siege, he wants it on his own terms.
Kat opens her door, swings her feet out, sets up the laptop, and opens the file Liz sent her.
It’s brilliant.
Liz has created ten minifilms, five of them straight from Suzy’s History Book. For the others, she has used a fast image technique of juxtaposing images of Abbott against the results of his policies. Yulya is killing the farmers. Yulya and Tiina are handing out share certificates to the surviving family members. Abbott is meeting Tiina at a White House ceremony. Abbott shares a split screen with Yulya.
Faced with a split-second decision while looking at the deaths of unknown people, a U.S. president might do nothing. But if he’s associated with the picture, things will look different.
As Kat copies the files onto the cell phone, Luxton’s shadow appears above her. “If they’re tracking us, they could come at any time. If they go into Tappler’s house and if they find Cranley’s grave and put two and two together, then I guess we have another hour before they come. What I suggest is we wait an hour. You send the files. Then we split.”
Kat leans on the hood, the Colt and an AK-47 automatic next to her. Luxton is at the edge of the trees to the back of the vehicle. They each have a 180-degree fie
ld of view. Kat faces east into the sun. She watches the early-morning pink turn to a blue summer glow. She watches a tractor start up more than a mile away, its sound reaching her seconds later. She smells Luxton’s cigarette smoke drifting through the woods toward her. She sees a car wind down a faraway road and disappear between a cluster of buildings.
She plays back to herself Liz’s last words. Things are d-difficult. I’ve got to go. Kat told Luxton what Liz said.
When she closes her eyes, she hopes to see herself curled up with Luxton, moonlight dancing through the curtains. But she sees Dane’s body, bumping against her in the sea, and the fuselage looming up against her. So she keeps her eyes open and fixed on the farmland in front of her.
No aircraft is in the sky. No vehicle comes toward them. She hears Luxton’s footsteps on fallen leaves. “I’ll watch. You concentrate on what you’re doing,” he says. He stands six feet to the right of the car, where he can see westward through the trees and keep the wide field of view to the east.
She calls Cage. “So can you get the pictures to Marine One?”
“No,” says Cage.
At first she doesn’t take it in.
“Did you say ‘no’?” says Kat. Her voice is raised enough for Luxton to look around. His eyes are steady, not hoping for the impossible, like Kat.
“They’ve put a blanket alert on all signal traffic. They’re aware of a general threat to disrupt the signing of the CPS, but not a specific one involving you.”
An intercept on a general threat involves millions of Internet activities. The intelligence agencies will have authorization to break through passwords and encryptions at will. They will work on words, voice signatures, cell number IDs, IP addresses, vehicle movement, thermal-imaging signatures, biometric and iris data. If you’re suspect and you move, they will track you and stop you anywhere in the world.
Kat knows. Cage knows. They’ve been there and done that.
Cage is telling her that the plan won’t work. In calculating her response, Kat thinks back over the past week, from the moment she saw the photo of Yulya at the Kazakh embassy.
“Friday?” says Kat. “Aliya Raktaeva, trade secretary at the Kazakh embassy, was working for you. Suzy was here in England with data she’d compiled in order to expose and destroy the CPS. She was also working for you and with Stephen Cranley. She sends the data from a ring that was specially engineered. You send me in to get it on what should be a routine job. But Suzy has been betrayed—probably by Simon Tappler. Yulya sends her men into the embassy to intercept the file. They kill the staff. They copy the data onto a SIM, but fail to erase it from the hard drive. The rest of that night’s history.”
“All of that’s correct,” says Cage, “but—”
“So my point is that Suzy was out on the marshes to send the data directly to a satellite. No risk of Internet intercepts.”
“Yes, to an FCA low-orbiting satellite,” says Cage. “That way only we get access.”
“Each orbit is about ninety minutes?”
“Ninety-eight minutes.”
“And that’s why Suzy chose the marshes on the east coast. To meet the satellite orbits under a big sky.”
“Our bird is two hundred thirty-seven miles up. It bounced the signal straight onto our dedicated paths on the NSA’s geosynchronous bird fifteen thousand miles up. We brought that straight down into the Kazakh embassy.”
“When’s the FCA satellite due overhead next?”
“Where?”
Kat gives him the name of the village they passed through. She waits. Luxton grinds a cigarette butt into damp ground. Seagulls dip and wheel over the fields.
“They work in twelve-minute windows. You’ve just missed one. So the next is 11:04 British time. Then 12:42. After that 2:20. Then, 3:58, and so on.”
“We have two slots before Abbott’s on board Marine One.”
“Kat,” says Cage patiently, as if he’s let her go this far but has to stop her now. “Hear me, please. I can’t get it to Marine One.”
“From an NSA satellite, they just might.”
“And how do you plan to get the file there?”
“Same way Suzy did.” She has the ring out of her pocket, balancing in the palm of her hand.
“You have her ring?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“Later,” says Kat. “But will it still work?”
“It should.”
“If we go for the 11:04 slot, can you talk me through?”
“Lay it flat, and see how the corners are chiseled out to take the SIM card. The diamond has been switched—it’s difficult to see with the naked eye—to make an antenna. It’s also the on-off button and allows contact with the satellite, which locks on and draws up the data.”
“How do you know it’s working?” says Kat.
“You don’t. You can’t even test the signal strength. They tell you at the other end that it’s come through clean.”
“Suzy’s did.”
“Then this should. But put the best images first in case the transmission gets lost.”
Luxton keeps his vigil. The sun is burning off the mist. It has the makings of a clear, hot day. A perfect day for a soccer match. A fine day to sign an international treaty. A harvester combine works a field just over half a mile away.
Kat wants to be ready in forty-five minutes, well before the satellite passes overhead. She arranges the files in alternate order, makes sure that Abbott’s face is in the first one. She slots the SIM card into the ring.
She imagines how it might play out: how Abbott will see the images and how his instincts will kick in; how every leader wants to ensure his place in history and how Abbott will decide on his; how he will consult quickly with his advisers on how to withdraw from the CPS for the most credible reason.
Kat gets up, walks to Luxton, drapes her arms around his shoulders from behind, and says, “Thank you.”
He keeps his eyes fixed ahead. “For what?”
“For being here for me.”
He turns around. They’re not on common ground. He’s angry and distant, like when she first saw him. “I’m here for Liz,” he says.
Kat’s about to respond when she hears a bleep from one of the cell phones. She breaks off, goes to the car, where the door is open, with the phones lying on the front seat. The bleep comes from the phone she used to call Cage.
The message is a picture.
SEVENTY-TWO
Saturday, 8:52 a.m., BST
The image lasts fifteen seconds, a moving picture panning across the faces of five people: Nate Sayer, Mason, Max Grachev, Liz Luxton, and her dad. Their arms are pulled behind their backs, probably cuffed. They are sitting on a floor that looks to be made of concrete. They are squeezed next to each other. They all have bare feet. Liz is in a white tank top covered with an unbuttoned red shirt and jeans. The others are wearing the same clothes as Kat last saw them in: Sayer neat, but crumpled; Mason in uniform; her dad with the guard’s outfit from Voz Island. Grachev has only the blue shirt, the jacket gone.
Their heads are bent down, their eyes on their laps. Yulya’s giving them no chance to show defiance. On the final frames, when the camera zooms out, Kat sees a high wall, brick at the bottom and corrugated steel above. The picture isn’t wide enough to show the roof. The building must be large.
Someone else has the camera. Yulya’s standing at the edge of the frame, tapping a pistol barrel against her right knuckle. She turns to the lens and says, “Kat, wait for my call.” Then the picture goes to black.
Kat walks over to Luxton and plays it back to him. “Wait for the call,” he says. “And keep watching east.” He walks to the edge of the woods, his back to Kat. He takes a cigarette out of the pack, puts it to his lips, doesn’t light it, takes it out, drops it to the ground, grinds it in with his foot, squats down, his weapon leaning against his knees, puts his chin in his hand, and looks westward.
Kat has Suzy’s ring ready to transmit. As soon
as the slot opens, Kat will decide. Seventeen minutes later, the call comes.
“Mike,” says Kat. Luxton doesn’t go to Kat. He moves into the position where he can take over her watch and see as much as possible over a 360-degree sweep. This time, the lens is straight on Yulya’s face, no background that Kat can make out.
“Kat,” says Yulya. “In other circumstances, you and I could be good friends. I like you a lot. You remind me of myself. You and I aren’t to blame for the situation we find ourselves in.”
She smiles. It shows up a dimple on her right cheek. “So I want you to listen to what I propose. Is the line clear enough?”
“It is,” says Kat.
“All you have to do to resolve the situation is nothing. After one o’clock this afternoon, once the CPS is signed, you can do what you like. You’ll feel good about it because you will have saved four lives. They’re your lives to do with as you will. Lose them or save them.”
Yulya’s counted wrong—Grachev, Liz, Mason, Sayer, and her dad. Five. Not four. Kat hopes it’s a mistake, a sign that Yulya’s frayed and weary.
The camera jerks quickly away from Yulya to show the five hostages, exactly as they were lined up before. Then comes a distorted crack of gunfire that blanks the screen for a few frames, and when it clears, Mason is slumped, his head falling onto Sayer, whose face contorts into an expression of horror.
A man pulls Mason out of the line. Kat recognizes him as Viktor, from the marshes. Mason’s not dead. Viktor grabs hold of his arm, pulls him out of frame. Mason screams in pain. Kat hears two shots in quick succession.
“Like I said,” says Yulya. “You have four lives to save. All you have to do is nothing, and they will live.”
After Mason, Kat guesses, Yulya’s next target would be Sayer, moving gradually upward in magnitude, in terms of who means the most to Kat.
The next picture proves Kat wrong again. John Polinksi, his hands shaking, holds a pistol to the head of Max, his son. Viktor holds a gun on Liz.
The History Book Page 30