He stopped in the alcove of a doorway and queried Sherry on the handheld computer. Her answer shot back as rapidly as before:
Have heard nothing. Now locked out of operation.
He’d have to call direct, but how? He tried to remember what method the team was supposed to use to report back. They were to set up in a remote location of the airfield at Keflavík. There would be no regular phones, but the lead pathologist would be carrying at least a handheld of some sort.
And the base commander would know the number.
Rusty stopped in the middle of a block, realizing he was close to the pay telephones he’d used earlier to call his own condo. The goons on the other end had surely pinpointed that exact location by now. It was best to avoid the area.
Rusty diverted several blocks to the north before cutting across to the east and working his way back down 14th toward the parking garage to retrieve his Blazer. He was worrying about everyone who even glanced his way. There were pictures of him on file at Langley. He would be recognizable in an instant to anyone who’d studied his features.
One block north of the parking structure a sandy-haired young man reading a paper and sitting on a concrete bench got up as soon as Rusty had passed. To his left, across the street, a tall black man in a business suit stood watching the traffic, but Rusty thought he saw him signal someone behind him, possibly the man with the newspaper. Rusty glanced around. The young man was following. He was wearing an overcoat, which might conceal anything.
Rusty quickened his pace, trying to decide if the footsteps behind him had sped up as well.
They had.
The end of the block was coming up. He would need to turn right to get to the garage entrance. There would be an elevator to negotiate, hopefully alone.
The moment of truth would come when he turned the corner. If the man keeping pace behind turned too, he’d know.
Maybe.
Rusty swung around the corner and spotted a small alcove in the facade of the building. He backed into it immediately, trying to blend in with the wall.
As he feared, the young man with the newspaper had made the same turn. He would see nothing of Rusty until he passed the edge of the alcove. Rusty could hear the footsteps. Suddenly the man was near, passing inches away.
He can’t miss seeing me! Rusty thought.
But the man continued on without a backward glance to the end of the block, past the entrance to the garage. Rusty saw him enter a drugstore and disappear.
Obviously well trained, Rusty concluded. And obviously a member of a larger team. He passes, the others take up the point. The ploys of surveillance had been explained years ago by a friend with the FBI.
Rusty scanned the opposite side of the street across traffic. There were people standing in various places waiting for a bus, but no one seemed interested in him.
Yet any one of them could be watching.
He peered out from the edge of the alcove toward the corner from which he’d come.
No one was waiting there either.
But there were cars passing, and scores of windows within view, and if there was a team of at least four people looking for him, they could blend into the scenery.
This is stupid. Pure paranoia. They were in my home, but I have no reason to think they’re here.
Rusty shot back onto the sidewalk and turned into the garage entrance a half block down the street. The lobby was empty, as was the elevator when the doors opened. He walked into the open elevator car and punched the button for the third level down, and waited.
The elevator doors remained open.
He could hear the front door to the lobby opening. There was a polished brass plaque visible from the interior of the elevator and set at an angle to the front entrance. Rusty could see the reflection of anyone approaching. He again punched the button for the third level as he studied the reflection of an oncoming figure, who looked familiar. The image finally coalesced.
It was the man with the newspaper, his sandy hair clearly visible in the brass reflection!
Rusty punched the button with a vengeance now as the man’s footsteps drew closer. In the brass plate, behind the oncoming figure, the front door opened again and another man entered, one Rusty didn’t recognize. He could see two more men standing outside on the sidewalk.
Oh Jesus!
There were only two paths out: the elevator and the same front door.
Rusty tensed to run, calculating the odds, but the elevator doors finally began to close.
Caught off-guard, the man with the sandy hair tried to race the elevator. Rusty knew he was deciding whether to stick his hand between the closing doors. Instead, he stopped and pounded the DOWN button a few times, hoping to stop the process, as Rusty held the CLOSE DOOR button and prayed it would work.
The doors stayed closed, and with agonizing slowness the elevator began to descend.
So now I’m a sitting duck. Great move, Sanders!
They would be racing down the stairs, he figured, and at least one of them would be waiting when the doors opened. He was probably trapped, but maybe if he rushed at full speed out of the elevator, he could catch them off-guard.
Rusty planted himself in the back corner and tensed. As soon as the doors were half open, he sprang forward and rushed through, holding his briefcase in front of him and racing into the garage at top speed, heading toward his Blazer and expecting to hear footsteps behind him—or worse.
Twenty feet from the Blazer he ducked between two cars and turned.
The garage was silent.
There was no one behind him. No footsteps, no voices, nothing.
He stayed in a crouching position for nearly two minutes before hearing the sound of the elevator doors opening again.
The same sandy-haired man strode from the elevator, still carrying his newspaper, looked around briefly, then began walking in Rusty’s direction. Less than seventy-five feet remained.
From where he is, there’s no way he can see me! Rusty told himself, hunching down a bit farther. But if he keeps coming—if he walks past these cars—he’ll see me for sure.
Rusty figured there was a gun in the newspaper. Sherry had said these weren’t mainstream CIA people. Maybe they hadn’t been sent to apprehend him.
Maybe they’d been sent to kill him.
The man stopped behind a BMW twenty feet short of Rusty’s position. He fumbled in his pocket for something. He moved to the driver’s door then, and as Rusty watched in amazement, he climbed in, started the car, and casually drove off.
For several minutes Rusty stayed crouched between the cars, breathing hard, listening to his heart pound, and feeling foolish.
At last he stood up and walked the short distance to the Blazer. He unlocked the rear door and took out the PDA computer before putting his briefcase in. Then he closed the hatch, and was in the process of moving to the driver’s door when a hand grabbed his shoulder from behind.
Rusty yelped and whirled around, pulling away in confusion as he tried to focus on who had found him.
It was Sherry Ellis.
“Sh … Sherry? Sherry!”
“Good grief! Does my hair look that bad?”
“What the hell—?”
“Am I doin’ here? Offer the lady a ride and she’ll tell you. I’d prefer not to stand out here and be a target.”
Rusty was holding his chest, aware his heart rate was at aerobic levels.
They left the garage and drove toward Silver Springs as Sherry started to explain how she’d found him. “I had to find you before they did. Your car phone was broadcasting your location all over creation.”
“What do you mean?” Rusty asked. “My phone?”
“I called your car phone after you sent me one of the PDA messages,” Sherry replied. “You didn’t answer, but it’s real easy to tell when the phone itself is responding. I knew they’d track it down.”
“Responding?”
“Come on. You’re an electronics buff. You know
this stuff. When the cellular system whistles for this phone, it transmits back, ‘I’m right here, but the dolt that owns me isn’t answering.’”
Rusty was shaking his head. “Oh Lord, how stupid. I forgot. It can be tracked whenever it’s on.” He reached down and turned the car phone off, then reached over and switched off the PDA’s cellular circuit.
“So,” she continued, “I got to the cellular company’s techs before the other guys did. They do good work. They have so many cell sites in D.C., they had this sucker triangulated down to a two-block area. I had your license plate. The rest was a simple search based on the idea that you’d bury your car deep. You did. So here we are, on the lam.”
“Sherry, who are the other guys? What on earth have we stumbled into?”
She reverted to dead seriousness.
“There’s a renegade operation in progress, Rusty, concerning Flight Sixty-six. I can’t prove it, but I’m sure of it. It’s outside normal approvals and controls, and no matter who we might call, we’ll simply look paranoid, because they’re leaving no tracks.”
“But they were sloppy enough to leave that supposed Cairo message.”
“They didn’t figure on you. You don’t follow procedures. You’re a maverick who wasn’t supposed to be so effectively curious.”
“Well, they’ve made another mistake. I think I may know what they’re up to, but I haven’t a clue why.”
He told her about the Arabic communication buried on the disk.
“So you did sneak something out! Impressive work! Probably get you ten years in Leavenworth, but impressive, and that explains it.”
“What?”
“I got questioned, gently but pointedly, on whether I, or anyone else on the team, had taken a disk out of the conference room. I was so insulted, I practically spit at them.”
“Who’s involved?”
“Mark, I think. But someone else is behind it. They’ve pulled an end run around Director Roth, and I’ve tried to get him on the phone, but he’s still buried at the White House and not returning calls. I finally figured they were going to get suspicious of the number of trips I was making to the sandbox with my PDA stuffed under my skirt to write love notes to you. I figured I’d better get out of there and find you in person so we could figure out a plan.”
“Which way?”
“What?” Sherry seemed disoriented. Rusty had stopped at the entrance ramp to the beltway.
“Which way should we go?” he asked.
“Heck, I don’t know. Away from Langley, I suppose. Go east, young man.”
Rusty nodded agreement and accelerated up the ON ramp. They rode a few miles in silence before Rusty spoke. “So what should we do? I’ve probably blown my career, but I don’t want you involved.”
She turned and smiled and patted his knee. “I am involved. Anyway, as I said, it’s a renegade operation, and if we don’t get hit first, we’ll probably get medals for exposing it.”
“How? How do we expose it?”
She cocked her head. “What? You mean I’ve come all this way and you don’t have a plan?”
Rusty shook his head and grimaced. “Roth is the key. We’ve got to get to him. He can stop this, right?”
“Stop what? We don’t even know what these turkeys are up to.”
“Sherry, I think they’re trying to help Aqbah shoot down that planeload of people!”
“Why? Why would anyone here do that?”
“To help Aqbah destroy themselves in a flourish of self-righteous stupidity. To position them to be condemned internationally for destroying an airliner full of innocent people, with the idea that maybe the limp-wristed UN could be forced to economically freeze out their renegade client states, Iran and Libya.”
“Libya’s irrelevant. An impotent pipsqueak.”
“Well, Iran sure isn’t.”
“Granted,” she said. “But would Aqbah actually be unable to see the consequences of their actions? Are they that stupid?”
Rusty sighed. “I’ve thought about that a lot the last few hours. I had to remind myself how fanatical and insane the Shiite view of the Western world has become. They would twist the rationale around and consider Western condemnation religiously desirable, a form of corporate martyrdom. At least the insane element of the Islamic clergy in Iran would, and they have Aqbah by the short hairs.”
“So we help them destroy themselves by destroying our own countrymen?”
“Who”—Rusty leaned over and raised his index finger—“who, don’t forget, we have all but declared dead. Sherry, someone in the Company has seized this as a great opportunity. Deliver a coup de grâce to a planeload of people to prevent them from dying in agony—and, with the very same operation, start the end game to eradicate the world’s scariest terrorist threat. No one would ever know of the connection, of course, but if it resulted in Aqbah’s demise, the deaths aboard Flight Sixty-six would not be in vain.”
Sherry recoiled and stared at Rusty. “That’s revolting! But I … I guess I understand it.”
“There’s only one problem,” Rusty said, “and it’s a doozy.”
“What’s that?”
“There’s no hard evidence yet that Flight Sixty-six carries that virus, even though the professor was ill. Our renegades could be shooting down a planeload of perfectly healthy people two days before Christmas. Until I hear the autopsy results …”
“We need to get those results, then,” she agreed.
Rusty recalled the discussion with Jonathan Roth. The autopsy would prove nothing, but it would be an indicator.
“I’ll need to find a phone,” he said. “And we shouldn’t chance using the cellulars.”
Sherry nodded as Rusty continued.
“I just … can’t think of any other plan they could be pursuing, given that Arabic communication.”
“Have you translated it?” she asked.
He shook his head no.
“You could be misinterpreting it.”
He nodded. “I could be. But that wasn’t the CIA benevolent association that trashed my condo this morning.”
She sat in silence for a while, thinking, then nodded, slowly at first, then more energetically.
“Okay. Rusty, if we can provide some proof of what’s happening, maybe we can sell this to Roth in time to stop it. That disk you have may be proof.” She paused. “But that also means it’s a ticking bomb. The author will not want Roth or anyone else in real authority to see it. They’ll be expecting you—and maybe me—to try to get to Roth. They’ll be ready to stop us. Anyone who’d put together a renegade operation like this will be ready to eliminate problems with a gun or a bomb or whatever. Breaking into your place was just an overture.”
“Good Lord, Sherry, these are our own people. They’re capable of killing us?”
They fell silent for nearly a minute.
“Remember what I told you this morning, Rusty? You never really get to know someone in this business?”
“I always thought that was fiction hype.”
“Sometimes it is. But sometimes it isn’t. Remember Iran-Contra?”
“Who doesn’t?”
“Most people don’t,” she said. “Most people will never even suspect the full extent of what really happened, or why. Keep in mind that Ollie North was running a renegade operation, not from Langley but from the White House, for Christ’s sake!”
“While Reagan slept.”
She nodded. “Just because you’ve got an ID card from the CIA doesn’t mean you’re not expendable. Remember, you’re not one of the good ole boys, and neither am I. Now, back to business. What the hell do we do, Kemo Sabe?”
“The Director is still in a coma, I take it?” Rusty asked.
“Still in intensive care at Bethesda. Forget him.”
“Well then, how about Roth himself?”
“I told you, he’s holed up in the White House Situation Room.”
“As a kid I was always told the White House belonged to We the Peo
ple.”
Sherry draped her left arm over the back of the seat and looked at him through squinted eyes. “What are you getting at?”
“Instead of circling the White House at a distance of fifteen miles on the Beltway, why don’t we just go there, find Roth, tell him the inmates are taking over the asylum, and the ball’s in his court?”
“We’d never get in. You can’t just charge the gates. The Secret Service gets very testy when you try something like that.”
Rusty nodded. “You’re right, but I think I know a way.”
Sherry had rested her right elbow on the window ledge and was cupping her chin in her hand as she looked outside.
“We’d better hurry, then,” she said. “If there’s an aerial ambush waiting for Flight Sixty-six at those coordinates you discovered, they’ll blunder into it in less than two hours.”
“Sherry, one thing I need to ask you.”
“Yeah?”
“Are you absolutely certain Jon Roth couldn’t be behind this?”
She looked at Rusty and smiled.
“Absolutely!”
ABOARD FLIGHT 66
The rumor had spread slowly at first, then flared like a brushfire, running in whispered conversations and tearful exchanges from one end of the cabin to the other.
A coach passenger with a tiny worldband radio held against a window had heard the broadcast. The autopsy in Iceland of Professor Helms, it reported, had confirmed the virus. All hope for the humans aboard Quantum 66 was now gone.
They were flying to the Sahara to die.
Shock had left some of the passengers searching for an outlet for the rage and frustration they felt, and suddenly there was a delegation at the cockpit door demanding to know why Captain James Holland had lied to them.
“Look, I don’t know who anyone else is in contact with, but we’re talking to the White House through our company,” Holland said. “I’ve made sure they give us the straight information each time. They’re telling us that the autopsy results are not complete. I called them as soon as I heard this rumor was going around. I’ve told you everything we knew when we knew it.”
“How the hell can we believe anything you say?” a portly man in his fifties demanded. “The world out there says we’re dying.”
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