The Kill Chain

by Nichole Christoff

  Stellar Unlimited.

  “Let me guess. She was a project manager there,” I said, tying Rappaport’s information to what Barrett had told me about the CubeSat disappearing before it ended up in the right hands at Niilo Järvinen’s company. Except maybe it had ended up in those hands—Madeline’s hands—after all.

  “Regardless of her job title,” Rappaport said, “she traveled often to the East Coast. She regularly visited a certain government facility here.”

  The lab in Maryland that produced the CubeSat, I reasoned.

  “Did she travel there for work?” I asked.

  “And for pleasure. Madeline Donahue is involved with a robotics engineer employed in its lab.”

  “Robert Fraley,” I breathed.

  “Yes, indeedy. But I understand he may be deceased.”

  And there it was. Out in the open. Nathan Rappaport thought I was a murderer.

  “Jamie? Are you still there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Look, I can help you—”

  “Sure, you can. Tell me why Madeline—or whatever the hell her name is—sought me out. Tell me why she hired me—”

  “I don’t know yet, but I’m working on it. Meet me—”

  “No.”

  “I’m a journalist,” Rappaport confessed, “with the Washington News-Journal—”

  No wonder his name had sounded familiar. And he hadn’t lied when he’d told me he was in communications. He just hadn’t meant in the latest, high-tech sense.

  Rappaport didn’t design cellular networks or provide spin on demand at a public relations agency. No, in an age when traditional broadsheets were headed the way of the dinosaur, the News-Journal was still one of the most widely read—and most influential—newspapers in the nation. And through it, journalists like Rappaport communicated with everyone in the entire country willing to take on new information and weigh it.

  “—we protect our confidential sources,” he insisted.

  “I didn’t kill Fraley,” I told him. “There’s nothing confidential about that.”

  “Do you know who did?”

  “Are you hunched over your notepad, like a vulture, with your pencil in your hand?”

  “Vultures don’t have hands.”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “Jamie—”

  “I don’t even know if Fraley’s dead. His wasn’t the corpse I saw.”

  Silence met this statement.

  “Rappaport, did you hang up on me?”

  “No, no, I’m here. Now, listen to me carefully. Are you saying Fraley’s alive?”

  “I’m saying I don’t know. Except I’m certain someone fed the story of his murder and my supposed involvement to your cousins at the local television newsroom. They even beat the police to the punch. I came to in Fraley’s living room with the story blaring in the background and PD on the way.”

  “I don’t like the sound of that,” Rappaport said.

  Me, neither.

  “I’ll come get you,” he said. “I’ll take you someplace safe.”

  But safe was a relative term.

  “Not on your life, Rappaport. Nice talking to you—”

  “Jamie, listen. This business with Fraley, Donahue, and Stellar Unlimited…It stinks. Initially, I began looking into government endeavors farmed out to private firms in recent years. For instance, the US doesn’t solely rely on NASA to make things happen anymore. It awards contracts to companies like Stellar Unlimited. Jamie, with our government’s secrets in private hands, I think our national security may be at stake.”

  Funny enough, Barrett and Special Agent McIlvoy had both said the same thing to me.

  And I was beginning to agree with them.

  “Through interviews,” Rappaport said, “I found certain names kept coming up—”

  “What names?”

  “Madeline Donahue’s. And yours. Donahue’s been in the Nightingale. Their router recorded her visits to your website again and again.”

  That proved nothing.

  But it was still a hell of a coincidence.

  “Whatever’s really happening,” Rappaport said, “you and I have only crashed into the tip of the iceberg. Help me. Help me break this story wide open, and I’ll do all I can to help you.”

  Could I trust him? I didn’t know. But I was absolutely certain he could do one thing more easily than I could.

  “Find out who fed the story to the TV station,” I told him. “I want a name.”

  Because I was willing to bet that name would lead me to Madeline Donahue.

  “I’ll get it,” Rappaport promised. “How can I reach you?”

  “You can’t. But I’ll…I’ll be in touch.”

  And with a heavy sigh, I hung up.

  It had grown cold in the corridor with me and the forgotten pay phones, or maybe the warmth of the Hennessy had simply worn off. In either case, in the lobby above, the laughter of returning hotel guests echoed roundly. Friends. Lovers. Family. They’d been out making memories together. And what had I been doing?

  My thoughts turned to Barrett. I wondered what he’d learned in Maryland today, what he was up to tonight, and whether we’d ever be able to get our act together. Distance could be measured in more than miles. And sometimes it crossed my mind that maybe we should take the cosmic hint. Maybe we should go our separate ways.

  Admitting that, if only to myself, I’d never felt so alone.

  But maybe alone was how I was meant to be.

  In any case, I knew dwelling on that would get me nowhere tonight. So, I’d go up to the lobby. I’d go back to the bar for a drink and think.

  And when I turned to walk away, the wall of pay phones rang with a jangling shrill.

  Every single last one of them.

  Chapter 13

  The seven phones rang and rang, their clanging bells like fire alarms. The shock of the sound rocked through me. And they kept right on ringing, again and again.

  With itchy fingers and a good amount of dread, I snatched up the receiver closest to me.

  I brought it to my lips.

  “Hello?”

  “Hello!” a man said. “At last, we speak together.”

  The remaining phones had fallen silent.

  I glanced up and down the corridor. Surely, someone was watching me and laughing up his sleeve over this elaborate joke. But there was no one in the hallway but me and my paranoia.

  “Who are you trying to reach?” I asked cautiously.

  “I am speaking to Vivian Sternwood. Or perhaps to the security specialist Jamie Sinclair, yes?”

  His accent was almost undetectable, as if English were not his native tongue but one he’d spoken from an early age. Or maybe he’d grown up speaking a language distantly related to English. Like Swedish. That, however, didn’t strike me as right, either. And then I realized. Maybe he spoke Swedish, but maybe he’d been raised speaking a language from the other side of the Scandinavian Peninsula as well.

  Maybe his mother tongue was Finnish.

  “Mr. Järvinen,” I said. “Good evening.”

  “Please. You must call me Niilo. And we must meet face-to-face. We have much to discuss.”

  “We do,” I agreed. “I have a number of questions for you.”

  “Then you must come to visit me in California. Jamie, I invite you.”

  The idea of hopping on a plane and winging it west just to chat with a genius like Niilo Järvinen made me laugh out loud.

  “I’d love to come,” I told him, “but I’m, uh, not exactly at liberty to make long-distance travel arrangements right now.”

  Or, I wouldn’t be at liberty once I’d checked in at an airline’s departure counter and the authorities descended on me.

  “Go to the hotel’s entranc
e,” Järvinen said. “My driver will be waiting for you. He will bring you to an airport where you can board my plane.”

  His plane.

  “You will come, yes?”

  Since I didn’t have many other options, it didn’t take me long to make up my mind.

  “Yes, Mr. Järvinen. I’ll come. Thank you for the invitation.”

  “You are very welcome, Jamie. And please. You must call me Niilo.”

  He hung up and I stared at the black beast that was the pay phone, then down the line at its brothers. I wasn’t sure what kind of sorcery could make an entire bank of outdated telephones ring at once. But whatever it took, Niilo Järvinen had it.

  Keeping my eyes peeled, I climbed the stairs to the lobby, surveyed the space carefully. Late arrivals—honeymooners from the look of them, with their arms twined around each other—checked in at the desk. Two men, sporting gray stubble and speaking German, crossed to the bar. Four slightly inebriated middle-aged women, dressed to kill in short shorts and skyscraper heels, staggered in from the street and toward the elevators, laughing all the way. But none of them were cops, and that was the main thing.

  Outside, under the hotel’s porte cochère, a smart black Mercedes held pride of place. A young man, blond with a buzz cut and severely tailored black suit, practically stood at attention next to it. The doormen eyed him warily, and the valet captain steered clear of him, but none of them directed him to drive on.

  The Mercedes man offered me a curt nod and a tight smile—and hopped to open the car’s rear door for me when I approached. Without a word exchanged between us, I slid onto the butter-soft buff seat. He slammed the door, climbed behind the wheel.

  I’d drawn the attention of the hotel employees now. Behind the valet stand, a small television flickered with one of the cable news channels. Fraley’s house, patrol cars, crime-scene tape, and my face followed one another in rapid succession. One of the doormen commented to another. A valet snapped a photo of our license plate with his cellphone—but my driver and I were off, pulling away from the hotel and through Friday night traffic in the District of Columbia.

  The chauffeur circumnavigated McPherson Square, ended up in the K Street corridor, and breezed onto the Whitehurst Freeway. The delicate white-and-gold temple known as the Kennedy Center flashed past my window. Ahead, the dreamy spires of Georgetown University grew tall.

  Below the Hoyas’ Hilltop, we angled onto Canal Road, followed it to the Clara Barton Parkway. We left Washington, DC, altogether. And all the way, I kept one eye on the rear window, because all it would take to stop me was one phone call from one of the hotel’s employees to 911.

  The Mercedes picked up speed. We whizzed past the community of Cabin John and closed in on Carderock. These towns were pretty and pretty countrified for being up against a world capital—and I began to wonder if my driver intended to convey me to a remote location within one of them, chop me up into little pieces, and dump me in a pond somewhere.

  He turned, and turned again. The city lights faded behind us. Ahead, I could see nothing more than a hazy glow. We were quite a distance from Dulles International Airport to the west, Reagan National to the southeast, or even Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall to the northeast. And this made me itchy.

  But not half as itchy as the several sets of headlights that had stuck with us, turn after turn.

  “We’re being followed,” I said.

  In a vaguely Australian accent, the chauffeur said, “No worries, ma’am. I’ll deliver you safe and sound.”

  He picked up the handset to a car phone hardwired into the console between the front seats and spoke into it.

  “This is Niilo Järvinen’s driver. We’ll be coming through in a bit of a hurry. If you could accommodate us, please…Thank you.”

  He replaced the receiver and poured on the speed. Behind us, the cars on our tail did the same. And that had to be more than coincidence.

  The road before us became a narrow ribbon of silver, bracketed by ditches, split-rail fences, and dirt driveways. It arrowed toward the haze on the horizon. Blue ground-lights materialized in that mist, like double strings of platinum-set sapphires.

  They framed the runway of an airfield I never knew existed.

  “Private property,” my driver said, “and quite convenient. Wouldn’t you agree, ma’am?”

  But that, as far as I was concerned, remained to be seen.

  I could make out a stout tower now. The orange mesh oval of its radar reflector revolved on its roof. Seemingly toy-sized jets were arrayed against the curved dome of a hangar. Between them and us, an electric fence rose, mounted in masonry block. The road dead-ended against its closed and gleaming metal gate.

  Red-and-blue rack lights ignited on the cars behind us. Ignoring them, my driver punched the gas. The Mercedes leapt forward.

  He’s going to ram the gate.

  I gripped the seatbelt that crossed my chest, braced my feet against the seat in front of me. The chauffeur giggled with glee—just as the gate ground into motion.

  It slid aside. But not all the way. We shot through the narrow opening, metal screeching and sparking as the gatepost and pillar scraped along the sides of the car, certainly ruining the paint job and buffeting me in my seat.

  I turned, looked back the way we’d come. The lead patrol car braked hard. It shivered to a stop as the gate cranked closed, locking the cops out.

  “They’ll order that gate open in a heartbeat,” I told the driver. “They have probable cause to legally enter here.”

  “I daresay they do, ma’am.” He grinned over his shoulder at me. “But you’ll be gone in the twinkling of an eye.”

  Zooming behind the tower, he careened to a halt alongside an Airbus A319, ready for boarding on the tarmac. The plane was small and sleek. And on its tail glittered a gold four-pointed star, big enough to guide a gaggle of wise men to Bethlehem.

  I thanked my chauffeur, bolted from the vehicle before he could get out to open my door for me. Given the circumstances, I figured he’d understand. But I wasn’t so sure the air crew would. At a private terminal, the crew were responsible for security checks. And forking over my ID to the captain as required just might get me apprehended.

  Still, I leapt from the car to find a breathtakingly beautiful flight attendant in a short, tight skirt and jaunty flight cap ready to rush me up the gangplank. She moved surprisingly fast in her mile-high heels. And her startlingly bright smile never wavered.

  An impossibly handsome copilot greeted us at the top of the stairs, which he retracted the second my foot struck the jet’s carpeting.

  “Please have a seat, Ms. Sinclair, and strap in,” the flight attendant said, ushering me to a leather recliner anchored to the floor. “We must leave directly.”

  I did as instructed, not entirely convinced that I’d be going anywhere but jail. Peering through a porthole window, I saw three Maryland State Police cruisers and an unmarked sedan round the squat tower and barrel our way. One of the grounds crew tried to wave them aside with his glowing orange signal lights.

  The troopers practically plowed him into the ground.

  Our idling engines revved to a high whine. The plane rolled forward, picked up speed faster than I thought possible. The heavy hand of g-force pressed me deep into my seat, and a second of near weightlessness announced that we were airborne. We climbed high into the night sky. And then the flight attendant appeared at my elbow.

  “Welcome aboard, Ms. Sinclair.”

  The plane’s interior was a cushioned cocoon of creamy glove leather and bird’s-eye maple, and her golden good looks matched the décor perfectly.

  “I’m Rain and I’ll be taking care of you during our flight. May I offer you wine, a cocktail, or perhaps a mineral water before dinner is served?”

  At the mention of dinner, my stomach growle
d sharply.

  I ordered it quiet and said, “I’d love a mineral water, but do you think I’ll have time to drink it before the authorities order us to land?”

  Rain tossed her head and laughed as if I’d made a witty joke.

  “Oh, Ms. Sinclair, that can’t happen. This is Niilo Järvinen’s plane!”

  She swanned off to pour my water.

  But I couldn’t quite relax.

  I’d rubbed elbows with powerful men and women all my life. As an army officer, my father had commanded others long before I was born. Now that he was a United States senator, I rarely saw him without senior statesmen and captains of industry at his side. My own client list included humble citizens, but also household names. And none of those people could boast that law enforcement wouldn’t dare bring down their plane.

  By the time we entered the Central Time Zone, however, it became apparent that Rain hadn’t been exaggerating. I tried to take solace in this as I dined on roast capon. And when I couldn’t keep my eyes open any longer, and I slid between the Egyptian cotton sheets of the oversized bed Rain had unfolded from a false wall, I tried not to dream about being arrested when the plane touched down. Because after evading the police at that private Maryland airfield, I couldn’t figure my little journey working out any other way. After all, Niilo Järvinen couldn’t be the kind of magnate that could guarantee safe passage anywhere to anyone.

  At least, that’s what I thought before I met him.

  Chapter 14

  Rain woke me gently with recorded birdsong and a steaming cup of jasmine tea.

  “We’ll land in Burbank soon,” she told me. “Would you like to freshen up?”

  The plane had a lavatory with a shower big enough to wash a minivan. Best of all, the water was sublimely hot. Streamlined cabinets on either side of the sink had been outfitted with every organic toiletry under the sun, which was perfect since I was unintentionally traveling light. For just a few minutes, I indulged in exploring the items wrapped in exquisite white-and-gold rice paper. Lemongrass soap and spearmint toothpaste rejuvenated me.

  I emerged from the bathroom feeling more like myself than I had in two days. Breakfast completed the transformation. But the improvement didn’t last long.