The Queen pbf-5

by Steven James

  “Whose prints are they?”

  “Becker Hahn’s.”

  That made sense; he was one of the Eco-Tech members whose photos Alexei had forwarded to me, but I couldn’t understand why the Lab had taken so long to identify the prints. Maybe someone’s been tinkering around on AFIS, deleting data? The same person who got into the ROSD?

  “But,” she said, “here’s the big news. Angela found he was on the same flight last week to Milwaukee as Dana Murkowski, an alias used by Cassandra Lillo. She and Becker traveled up here together.”

  “Cassandra Lillo?” I was stunned. “What? Are you sure?”

  “It’s confirmed.”

  Why wouldn’t her alias’s name have been on a watch list!

  Weatherford and I arrived at the lobby and I hustled him toward the front door.

  Last winter I’d tracked a team of-for lack of a better term-domestic terrorists who were trying to steal a classified military device that could be used to cause a stroke or a catastrophic cerebral event in another person. Cassandra Lillo was a scientist who’d partnered with her father and my NSA friend Terry Manoji to steal the device and sell it to the Chinese. Right before she was taken into custody Cassandra had said to me, “You have no idea what we have planned.”

  I’d thought she was talking about the device.

  Was she talking about this? About something now?

  Cuffing Weatherford again, this time to a table near the hotel entrance where I could keep an eye on him, I exited the building to get my computer from the cruiser.

  A tirade of thoughts, of puzzle pieces.

  I remembered Cassandra’s escape in November: a transfer order to send her to another detention facility had come through, and during transport she’d strangled one guard and overpowered another, permanently disabling him, before making her escape. Later, the request for transfer was found to have been caused by a computer glitch. I’d never believed that, and now, in light of everything that was going on, I was even more convinced it was not a random processing error.

  At the car, I grabbed my laptop.

  At least the submarines are on alert. At least that’s covered.

  “Pat? Are you still there?” Natasha asked.

  “Yes, sorry.” Cassandra’s father and Terry are both dead, both out of the picture. I turned back toward the hotel. “Is there anything else in the report that I need to know?”

  “Not that I can think of.”

  “Stay where you are. Watch out for Alexei. And find out where Jake is.”

  “I will.”

  Terry was a spy for the Chinese government.

  Eco-Tech consulted with foreign governments. We knew about Brazil and Afghanistan, but it was possible Truth often hides in the crevices of the evident.

  Secretary of State Nielson was in Tehran this week in bilateral talks with Iran about their nuclear program.

  As soon as I entered the lobby I pulled up Margaret Wellington’s cell number and punched it in.

  Tessa and Amber had just finished cleaning up the glass from the shattered painting and were putting the garbage can and vacuum cleaner away in the kitchen when the electricity went out.

  This far out in the country with no street lamps or city lights, the house was immediately swallowed in a deep, corporeal darkness. The two women each had a flashlight that Amber had scavenged. Tessa flicked hers on. A moment later so did Amber.

  The beams of light slit the kitchen’s black air like long, narrow knives. Tessa saw the flash of her own face as her flashlight beam danced across the framed photo that Sean had shown her earlier of her at her mother’s wedding, the picture in which she was smiling, lighthearted, a photograph that seemed like it must have been taken in another life.

  “Are you any good with starting fires?” Amber asked. “I’ll give you first dibs.”

  Tessa had seen Patrick start fires a bunch of times on the camping trips he’d managed to drag her along on. “Sure. I’ll give it a shot.”

  82

  8:12 p.m.

  48 minutes until the transmission

  I found a chair on the far side of the lobby, away from Weatherford and the three guests who were chatting near the front desk. Just as I’d finished opening up my email program on my laptop, Director Wellington answered: “Pat.”

  “We found Kayla,” I said promptly. “It looks like she’s all right. We’re going to get her to a hospital as soon as possible. Alexei escaped.”

  “Leads?”

  “No, listen, a couple things: first, we need to see if Eco-Tech has any ties to Iran. The timing of Nielson’s visit there this week with all of this going down, it can’t be a coincidence.”

  “I’ll talk with him.” Brisk answers. Everything right now was forthright and down-to-business.

  “What about the schematics to the ELF station. Why haven’t you sent them?”

  “I did send them. An hour ago.”

  “I’m looking at my email right now. There’s nothing here.”

  No email from Natasha either.

  And nothing from Angela.

  “Agent Bowers. The email was sent.”

  “No…”

  Oh.

  Wait.

  This morning Alexei hacked into your account.

  No!

  “Chekov might have gotten into my account, downloaded the file.”

  “How could he get access to your email?”

  “He has a source. An inside man. I don’t know who.”

  Valkyrie?

  Is Valkyrie someone in our government?

  I told Margaret the address of a gmail account I keep so I don’t have to give credit card companies my Bureau address. “Resend the file. I’ll download it from there.”

  “I’m not at my desk.” I noted the change in her tone that you hear when someone you’re talking with on the phone starts moving around. “It’ll take me a minute to log into my office computer.”

  “Did you know Cassandra Lillo traveled up here with Becker Hahn, one of the Eco-Tech activists?”

  A pause. “I hadn’t heard that.”

  “Her father was-”

  “I know who her father was. Sebastian Taylor.”

  “An assassin.”

  “Yes.”

  “And he trained her to kill, just like-”

  “Yes.” Impatience in her voice. “I’ve read the files.”

  “After you send me the schematics, can you get in touch with the CIA and see if Taylor was ever on an assignment at a location where Chekov might have been present?”

  “You think they’re related?”

  “Taylor and Chekov-both assassins-then Taylor’s daughter shows up here while Chekov is in the area? It seems like too much of a coincidence for them not to be connected somehow.”

  I remembered my conversation with Angela and her list of who she thought might be able to hack into a nuclear sub, and, taking everything I knew about this case and the one in San Diego into account, I tried to process the implications.

  Cassandra Lillo? Could she be Valkyrie?

  Someone hacked into the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation computers to help her escape… Someone called Ardis’s phone from Egypt, accessed the DoD’s Routine Orbital Satellite Database… The name Dana Murkowski didn’t raise any red flags at the airport…

  You’d need a world-class hacker to do all that.

  A world-class hacker.

  It felt like the puzzle pieces should have been interlocking before my eyes, but I still couldn’t see the big picture.

  Truth often hides in the crevices of the evident.

  “One more thing. This is going to sound crazy, but Terry Manoji. Find out from the CIA if he’s still alive. I’m wondering if-”

  “He is.”

  “What?”

  “He awoke from the coma four months ago.”

  I pounded the arm of the chair I was sitting in. “How come you never told me!” The people near the front desk looked my way, offered me j
udgmental looks, then returned to their conversation.

  “Do not raise your voice at me, Agent Bowers.” Margaret’s tone was cold and censorious. “It was not your concern. Terry Manoji’s contacts in China have close ties to three terrorist groups in Pakistan, one of which is Al Qaeda. The CIA concluded it would be in the best interests of national security to keep his existence and his whereabouts a secret.”

  “All right.” This was unbelievable. “I hear what you’re saying, but where is he?”

  “Don’t worry, he’s at a secure loca-”

  “Don’t give me that, Margaret, you know-”

  “Enough, Patrick.”

  Through the window I saw the blue-red-blue flicker of overhead lights from an approaching cruiser.

  Julianne. Finally.

  “He was in a coma,” I said. “Is he still in a hospital? Still recovering? Because if he is, nearly every one of their systems would be connected to the internet, and anything that’s connected to the internet can be hacked into. Given enough time he would find a way to get in-”

  I caught myself in the middle of my thought.

  Anything that’s connected to the internet can be hacked.

  Hacked into.

  One keystroke away from Armageddon.

  “Margaret, all the indicators are pointing toward someone sending an ELF signal to one of our subs. We have to assume it’s-”

  “That’s covered,” she replied. “The DoD raised the alert level to DEFCON 2."

  “Have ’em raise it again.”

  “Patrick,” she responded curtly. “The military needs evidence not just conjecture to make an escalatory decision like that.”

  I wanted Julianne to help me clear the other part of the basement, make sure no one from Eco-Tech was still lurking downstairs. I started toward the door.

  Becker has no history of violence, but Cassandra does. There were two sets of boot prints outside the laundry room of Donnie’s house. She was there.

  “This guy Becker Hahn was at the Pickron home, and Cassandra, Terry’s old partner, is working with him.” The clues were like filaments, narrow, encircling each other, dancing, flirting, never quite touching. “The call to Ardis’s phone following the murders on Thursday came from Egypt. If that’s where Terry’s being held, I’d say that’s enough evidence to move forward.”

  Margaret didn’t reply immediately. “I’ll get the schematics to you and track down Terry Manoji. You-find a way to get to that base.”

  Julianne arrived, and after we’d confirmed that the other section of the basement was unoccupied, I took Weatherford to her car and had her lock him in the backseat so we wouldn’t have to keep an eye on him when we went to get Kayla Tatum.

  While Tessa worked at the fire, Amber sat beside her in chilly silence. It made Tessa uneasy and she knew she needed to do something, say something to help her. But she had no idea what in the world that might be.

  Three armed CIA agents burst into Terry Manoji’s room, strapped his wrists to the arms of his wheelchair, and began methodically searching the room.

  Despite himself, Terry felt a tiny wisp of concern.

  Without consulting his phone he didn’t know exactly what time it was, but he did know that in less than forty-five minutes Cassandra would be sending the ELF signal and eleven minutes after that Jerusalem would cease to exist and he would be free-but someone had obviously tipped off the CIA that something was up.

  Terry’s phone was tucked beneath one of his useless thighs. As long as the men kept him restrained in the wheelchair he would be all right.

  But if they decided to move him to the bed, it would be another story.

  As he watched the CIA agents scour the room, he began to quietly formulate an appropriate response in the event that they tried to transfer him out of the chair.

  83

  8:20 p.m.

  40 minutes until the transmission

  Julianne Doerr and I arrived in the room where Alexei had left Kayla.

  Officer Doerr, a sturdy, serious-looking woman in her early forties, reassured Kayla, “I’m going to take you to the hospital so we can make sure you’re all right.”

  But even as she said that I realized that in the spate of phone calls over the last few minutes, I hadn’t been thinking clearly. You never let a victim ride in a police car with a suspect and you never let a civilian ride in the front of a cruiser, so if Julianne took Kayla to the hospital, Weatherford would need to stay here with Lien-hua and me-but that wouldn’t work, since Margaret had been clear that she wanted us to find a way to get to the ELF base.

  Quickly, I called Natasha again, arranged for her to come over and transport Kayla to the hospital. Officer Doerr agreed to take Weatherford to the sheriff’s department for questioning, since he was already in her car, then she and Lien-hua helped Kayla, who was still somewhat groggy, to her feet.

  On the way up the stairs, I thought about Becker Hahn, Alexei, Cassandra, Terry; the loose, tangential web of associations that seemed to tie them all together.

  And Valkyrie? Where did Valkyrie fit in? Was there psychological significance to the code name after all, as Lien-hua had postulated?

  I like cases in which facts are solid, verifiable; you lock them into place and move on; you discover a truth that you can’t disprove and it gives you a basis on which to build your investigation. However, this week I felt out of my element, forced to deal with facts that didn’t quite mesh and hypotheses that squirmed out of my grasp as soon as I tried to pin them down.

  Maybe I did need to trust my instincts more.

  When we hit the lobby, Lien-hua and Julianne waited with Kayla for Natasha to arrive, and I flipped open my laptop to check my gmail account to see if the information from Margaret had come.

  It had.

  She’d sent a short text message with an attached, password-protected PDF file. In her note she mentioned that the CIA’s analysts hadn’t found any evidence of instances in which Taylor and Chekov’s paths might have crossed. Also, they were sending their interrogators to Terry’s room “to confirm that he has had no access to the internet.”

  I unlocked the PDF file, and though only moments earlier I’d been optimistic that the schematics would help us, now that I was finally able to examine them, I found their thoroughness and attention to detail frustratingly disappointing.

  There were three levels to the underground base, that much was clear: an entry bay for some kind of freight elevator that led to the surface, a middle level of crew quarters, and a command center and power generation facility below that. Eight tunnels led from the facility, but there was no clear indication of where-if anywhere-they might be accessed.

  These can’t be the most detailed or up-to-date files.

  Why would Margaret send me these?

  As I studied the diagrams, Natasha arrived. Julianne led Kayla to her and Lien-hua strode toward me.

  The underground ELF base was located near the coordinates in the center of the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest where the aboveground station had been. The forest service roads haven’t been plowed, we’ll never be able to get there by “Well?” Lien-hua stood beside me, and I tilted my laptop so she could see the screen. She studied it. “Is that the only entrance?”

  “It’s the only one visible on this set of maps.” I pointed to the tunnels that spread away from the station. “But I find it hard to believe that there would only be one way into the base.”

  “Always leave an escape route.”

  “Right.”

  “Where do the tunnels terminate?”

  I shook my head. “There’s no way to tell.”

  Unless “Hang on.” I closed my eyes and visualized the topography of the area surrounding the old ELF site, evaluating the terrain and comparing it to the snowmobile trail map I’d studied my first night up here. Carefully, I rotated both maps in my mind, overlaying the features.

  Donnie took longer than he needed to when getting to work on Mondays and Fridays…
/>
  “They would have to staff the station…” I said, thinking aloud. “That means getting people into and out of the base undetected. But in such a small, close-knit community, how could you do that?”

  Opening my eyes I studied the schematics again, scrutinizing the precise geographic orientation of the tunnels. “Where could strangers regularly arrive and leave from without raising any red flags?” I mumbled, but even as I said the words I realized where one of the tunnels, if it were long enough, would lead.

  “Oh, Lien-hua, that’s it.”

  “What? What are you thinking?”

  “Renovations in 2004. It would have been the perfect time to-”

  She gave me a sudden look of comprehension. “What? You mean here? The hotel?”

  “A National Historic Landmark can’t be torn down. The government was protecting its investment.” I was on my way to the door, laptop in hand.

  “Where are you going?” She quickened her pace to catch up with me.

  “Weatherford. He knows more than he’s been letting on.”

  The fire was slowly growing large enough to warm Tessa and Amber, and they’d pulled a couch close and now sat together, silently watching the flames. Amber had lit some candles, and the room smelled of sweet vanilla and crackling, burning pine. Just a few feet away, the storm churned outside the window.

  Amber drew out her cell, called the bait shop. “Sean, the electricity went out.” Tessa could tell she was leaving a message. “Pat and Lien-hua had to leave. I’m here with Tessa.” A long pause. It seemed like Amber might start crying again. “I’m sorry about everything tonight. About things with Patrick back… I love you

  … um… if you get this, call me. Okay?”

  After she hung up, Tessa tried to reassure her. “I’m sure he’ll be back soon. You guys’ll figure things out, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Even in the dim, flickering light Tessa could see a storm of loneliness burdening Amber’s face, but before she could say anything else to try and cheer her up, Amber said, “Did Pat give you some sleeping pills earlier tonight?”