Blackout

CHAPTER 33

A young couple in a holiday mood moved toward a public telephone along the concourse, laughing and talking. The man reached for the receiver, but another arm was already in front of him, reaching for the same instrument. The young man kept one arm around his girlfriend and adopted a reproving glance at the interloper, who in turn fixed the pair with a cold, reptilian stare, his demeanor a whirlwind of fury and challenge.

The young man backed up immediately, pulling his girlfriend with him and raising his free hand. “Oops! Sorry about that.” The adjacent phone booth was empty, but the couple ignored it and quickly headed down the concourse.

The man who’d identified himself as Agent Hawkins yanked the receiver to his ear and punched in a series of numbers. He was perspiring from the marathon search among the various departure gates, and trying to figure out where his charges had gone. The possibilities expanded with each passing second as flight after flight pushed back. The six had vanished without a trace, and the heavy-handed use of the FBI badge had netted him nothing but hostility from the various gate agents.

“Yes?” The voice on the other end was slow and deliberate and in control, quite the opposite from the way he felt.

“This is Taylor, in Honolulu.”

“You’re certainly not going to tell me you’ve lost them, are you?”

“Unfortunately, that’s exactly what I have to report. I’m sorry—”

“You certainly are,” the voice interjected, the slightest hint of anger tingeing the otherwise rock-steady control. “Schoen screwed up, and now you.”

“Sir, look. We did get back the jet, the item in the box, and one of our pilots.”

“Wonderful,” was the sarcastic response. “But the jet can’t run to the wrong people with information that can ruin this entire enterprise, now can it?”

“No, Sir. We did the best we could. They went out a window.”

“We’re almost out of time before the next phase commences, Taylor, and I’ve got too many of you in the field running around on unplanned cleanup missions. Schoen’s the only one left from the Hong Kong debacle, and he’s on the way back. And now this.” There was a long sigh. “Do you believe them to be still in Honolulu?”

“No. We think they slipped on an outbound flight somehow. I’ll have it figured out in a half hour. They’re headed to Los Angeles, Denver, or Seattle.”

“When you’re sure, coordinate the intercept with San Francisco directly, since you have descriptions and names. Provided you follow through in the next half hour, they have time to get in position anywhere in the West. Tell them to expect the FBI to be there in force wherever they land. Those six will have to be taken cleanly before the feds get a chance to get close. And Taylor, my orders are simple: Take those six to the nearest warehouse, shoot them, make absolutely certain they’re dead, secure MacCabe’s computer and destroy it, then ditch the bodies where they won’t be found. Ever. As soon as that’s done, I want everyone to reassemble here.”

“Yes, Sir.”

Kat left the cockpit and gently closed the door behind her, feeling profound relief that they’d reached altitude safely. If there’s a medal for commercial airmen who go above and beyond the call of duty to help the FBI, these guys qualify, she thought.

Captain Holt had listened carefully to her worries that the crash of Meridian 5 could have been the result of an attack against the eyesight of the pilots, and the fear that the same group could come after his aircraft. At the flight engineer’s suggestion, they used maps and pillows and a blanket to block the windscreen on the copilot’s side.

“That,” the captain told her, “leaves at least one of us fully functional. I don’t care what they use, unless they blow up the cockpit, they can’t hurt an eyeball they can’t see.”

“Maybe,” Kat suggested, “that’s the best way to protect all airliners against a Meridian-type disaster.”

“If,” Captain Holt told her, “it’s some kind of anti-eyeball device, and if every flight crew blocks their cockpit windows as soon as they’re airborne, then yes, it will work. But how about takeoff and landing? How about the situation where there’s a hillside or a building nearby that someone could use as a platform to fire that thing you described? As commercial pilots, we’re still going to be vulnerable on every flight, because ultimately, we’ve got to see outside.”

“So there’s no way to defend against someone trying to flash-blind pilots?”

Holt shook his head. “Kat, if somebody’s really going to make a habit of this, we’re sitting ducks. Hell, even an ordinary laser could damage our eyes. It’s happened twice in Las Vegas in the past four years from nothing but show-business lasers. What if that thing you found is an antipersonnel version?”

“Antipersonnel?” Kat echoed.

“I’m an Air Force reservist,” he said, “now retired, but I… let’s just say I knew my way around the intelligence sector during my years in the saddle. I can tell you that one of the things that terrorized us in the fighter community was the prospect that one day the Russians or the Chinese or someone in the Mideast who doesn’t like us a lot would decide to develop a powerful handheld laser for the simple purpose of destroying a pilot’s eyes with one burst.”

“The Air Force studied that?”

He nodded. “For decades. For nuclear blasts, we gave B-fifty-two pilots solid gold-foil eye patches, so they’d have one good eye left if someone touched off a nuke a hundred miles ahead of the attacking bomber. But fighter pilots have to use both eyes, we don’t fly all that much by instruments, like the transports. So what happens when we can’t look without losing our eyes? Simple. We can’t see, we can’t fight.”

“Was anything developed that you know of to — to—”

“Neutralize the threat and protect the eyes? They tried. Nothing worked well enough to be foolproof. A laser or particle beam travels at the speed of light. Any shutter device or goggle device takes too long to close up. If the blast is powerful enough, it’s going to fry your retina. I mean, literally, instantly, and permanently.”

“Good grief!”

“Can you imagine the value of that to a pipsqueak nation with a pitiful air force who’s purchased a hundred or so eye-killing light weapons? They could use Cessnas to neutralize F-fifteens. Bit of an overstatement, but the point is valid.”

“Captain, did we build any? You know, we may want to stamp out biological weapons, too, but if there’s a suspicion the other side’s going to have them, we’ve got to have an even bigger, better arsenal.”

“Ridiculous cycle, isn’t it?” the captain replied evenly.

“But you didn’t answer my question.”

“I don’t need to, Kat. You just answered it yourself.”

She hesitated, smiling thinly. “What was your rank, Captain Holt?”

“In the Air Force? Brigadier general.”

“I rather thought so. Your level of knowledge sounded flag rank.”

“And you’d like to ask me more, wouldn’t you?”

She nodded. “Such as, whether there’s a stockpile somewhere of American-built antipersonnel laser guns.”

Holt smiled. “It’s too bad I can neither confirm nor deny that possibility.”

Kat felt a shiver ripple down her back, but hid it and smiled at Holt as she turned to go.

The captain caught her sleeve. “Kat? If that’s what was used against Meridian and SeaAir… in other words, if those things are being sold… you’ve got to get the word out, no matter how that impacts the economics of airline flying, and no matter where they were built.”

“Understood.”

“No, I mean it. No one’s going to want to hear it. The FAA will want to run for cover and study the threat for a year while the Air Transport Association will want to flatly deny it could happen again. Meanwhile, whatever intelligence agencies screwed up and didn’t see this coming will want to bury the whole thing while their covert-ops people move frantically to crush the organization that decided to use it this time. The public, for their part, will want to stick their heads in the sand and call the threat too technical to understand, and Congress, as usual, will sit around and convince each other that no action is needed. But if these weapons are really out of the bag now and being sold — we’ve got to ban them worldwide, just like land mines.”

Judy, the lead flight attendant, spotted Kat entering the cabin and showed her to the first-class seat next to Robert, who had been looking out the window at the last glow of sunset behind them. Kat saw the wave of recognition cross his face, leaving behind a broad smile.

“Kat! I missed you.”

She returned the smile, feeling extraordinarily good about sitting next to him, as if they’d known each other as old friends for years instead of hours. She could see Dallas sitting with Steve, and Dan seated next to Graham Tash, who had been sleeping but woke up suddenly, turning to look around at Kat.

“How’re you doing, Doctor?” she asked.

He rubbed his forehead and sighed. “Trying not to dream or think,” he said, settling back in the seat.

“How’re you holding out?” Robert asked her.

“You mean, fatigue?” Kat laughed. “I’m walking wounded, and didn’t even have to survive a crash… or see all the horrors you all witnessed at the crash site.”

She started to stand, to pull her satellite phone and a fresh battery out of her purse, but the thought of the captain’s words caused her to sit down again and turn to Robert. “We’ve got to talk. Carnegie knew something very, very vital, and we’ve got to figure out what that was. We don’t have much time.”

“I figured you’d be convinced,” he said.

“Robert, I’m convinced of something else. Regardless of what happened to that SeaAir MD-eleven, the more I’ve thought about it, the more I’m sure that thing we found on the Global Express was an eyekiller. A laser, a particle-beam weapon, an exotic new ray gun… something designed to destroy eyesight. Apparently our military has been studying these things for decades, and that means we’ve been building them as well. I think some very clever bunch of cutthroats has found a new tool to use for international terrorism-for-hire, and they probably stole it from us.”

“Where are you going with this, Kat?”

“To the phone, in a second. I’ve got to report in to my boss, and we need to find out what kind of eye-killing weapons are secretly stockpiled somewhere, and have someone go check to see if there aren’t a few of them missing.”

“The ID plate on that thing did look military and American-made.”

“My point exactly.” She tried to stifle a huge yawn and inclined her head toward the aisle. “I’m going to go splash some water on my face and try to get my hair under control, but if you can stay awake, I think we’re going to need to connect up your computer to one of the sky-phones and go fishing. We’ve got to find out what your friend knew.”

He nodded. “I don’t know how we’re going to do that, but sure, I’ll be awake. I’m too exhausted to sleep, anyway. And I’ve probably crossed the threshold into social unacceptance by now.”

She chuckled, shaking her head. “You know, for someone who’s not only slept in his clothes but survived a major plane crash, a race through the jungle, and a helicopter ride with a maniac for a pilot, you look ‘mah-vellous.’”

“As long as I’m not too ripe. We all used that tiny shower on the Global Express, but I still feel grubby.”

“Well, Sir, you sure don’t look it. Call it jungle chic. I think it suits us.”

Her left hand was resting on the divider between the seats, and Robert had covered it with his right hand so gently she hadn’t noticed until she started to get up. She looked up at him with a little smile and he smiled back and squeezed.

“You know, I like the ‘us’ part of that, Ms. Bronsky, Ma’am.”

“You do?” she asked, feigning surprise. “And why is that?”

“I don’t know. It’s just that girls with big…”

“What?” she shot back, interrupting him, her eyebrows arching up.

“Guns! Girls with big guns.”

“Uh-huh. And what about them?”

“They turn me on,” he said.

“It’s only nine millimeters,” she added.

“I’d hate to have you say that about me,” he replied.

Kat pulled herself up from the seat, rolling her eyes and trying not to laugh as she pulled the battery and satellite phone from her purse and looked down at him. “You worry me, MacCabe.”

After coordinating with the flight attendants, Kat and Robert unfolded the antenna on the satellite phone, positioning it against the Plexiglas window and verifying the signal indication before she punched in the number of Jake Rhoades’s cell phone.

He answered on the first ring.

“Jake? Kat.”

“Good Lord, Kat, what the hell is going on?”

“There’s been virtually no way I could call before now.”

“Okay, okay. Where are you?”

“Where are you, Jake? Not at headquarters, I hope?”

“No. I came home for a few hours. How’d you know to use this line?”

“I needed to talk to you with minimal chance of being monitored. My previous call to you was intercepted somehow. I think we have a leak at the Bureau.”

“What?”

She gave him a quick synopsis of the bogus FBI team and their near success.

“Jake, I’m… ashamed to tell you this, but we lost the jet, the weapon, and the prisoner.” She filled in the details of watching the Global Express depart, presumably with the weapon aboard.

There was a long sigh from the other end. “Oh, boy. I though we had it just about cracked, Kat. That weapon, or whatever it was, was pivotal.”

“You saved our lives with that fast message response a few hours back. We were in the middle of a lethal charade.”

“I couldn’t fathom what you were doing in Honolulu when we’d been told you were on approach to Midway Island. We had no one waiting in Honolulu. So those names you sent were the aliases.”

“That’s right,” she said.

“They were that convincing?”

“Even the special ID marks and the hologram on the ID card, Jake. These guys, whoever they are, are consummate professionals with access to the best equipment, and on top of that, they’re good actors. I didn’t have a clue.”

“Then there’s nothing you could have done, except, I suppose, call on arrival.”

“They told me Assistant Deputy Director Rhoades had issued a specific order that I was to call no one.”

“Wait a minute, Kat, they used my name?”

“They did. He did. The one calling himself Hawkins. As I said, there was virtually nothing that didn’t fit, until it was almost too late. Do you have any idea how all that information could have fallen into their hands?”

“Did you tell anyone else you were coming, and where? I mean, it may be your satellite phone that’s being monitored.”

“Highly unlikely, given the digital, scrambled nature of the signal. Remember our briefings? We were assured this was one short step down from encryption, and my name isn’t listed anywhere in association with the number of this phone.”

She thought of the conversation with Jordan James, but decided to ignore it. After all, she had never mentioned their destination in that call. “You want to know how I can say conclusively that the leak came from my call to you, Jake?”

“How?”

“An ophthalmologist was waiting. That request was passed only through you.”

“Good Lord,” he said quietly.

“And, Jake, there’s something else. I got a call in flight on the way into Honolulu that was supposedly from someone at Langley. You need to know about this, because the call set me up to believe the show they’d put together.”

“You’re not alone, Kat. We were thrown off, too, probably by the same person falsely claiming to be one of our liaison people at CIA.”

“So what do you make of this?” she asked. “Who on earth are we up against?”

“There’s a theory running around here…” Jake’s voice trailed off.

“Yes?”

“Well, the thing that stopped me is that everything you just described to me reinforces that theory.”

“Which is?”

“That we’re finally encountering what some analysts predicted all along, a terrorism-for-profit organization, and they’re simply clearing their throat to get our undivided attention.”

“You mean mercenaries?”

“Worse. They may be working for themselves — an organization determined to establish their power before they demand a huge ransom not to kill.”

“I hate to say it, but that thought had crossed my mind, too.”

“Kat, this morning the National Transportation Safety Board held a news conference in response to all the media speculation and, in essence, confirmed that SeaAir very likely resulted from the simultaneous loss of both pilots in flight.”

“In other words, the same scenario as Meridian.”

“Except in Meridian, one of the pilots refused to die,” Jake added. “NTSB isn’t saying how the pilots were taken out, and even though the press asked about the possibility of things like explosions and toxic fumes, NTSB says they don’t know.”

Kat thought for a few seconds before replying. “If true, Jake… if the same organization is responsible for both and it’s the start of an unprecedented extortion scheme… then the fact that they have not gone public with any demands means they definitely will strike again.”

“Precisely. That’s the assessment.”

“Good Lord! But would such a group pull out so many stops to kill Robert MacCabe and the other survivors just on the outside chance they knew something?”

“Considering the magnitude of what they’ve already done and the worldwide scope of their operations, I’d say it makes perfect sense for them to bend heaven and earth to get rid of MacCabe and anyone he might have talked to.”

“Including me, of course,” she said.

“Including you. Now. Where do we go from here?”

“Aren’t I supposed to ask you that?” Kat rubbed her eyes and sighed. “I’m exhausted, Jake. We all are.” She gave him a rundown on the condition of the survivors. “I’m not even sure that Honolulu ophthalmologist was legitimate.”

“What I meant, Kat, was where do we meet you when you arrive? This one has got to be done right, and since we’re dealing with a commercial airline, we shouldn’t have another diversion problem.”

“Sea-Tac Airport in Seattle,” she said, passing the expected arrival time.

“We’ll be there in force, Kat, at the gate.”

Kat hesitated, holding back her burning desire to raise the issue of eye-killing weaponry possibly built by the U.S. military, but the question oozed with political danger. Perhaps she should think it through a bit longer before discussing such suspicions with the deputy director of the FBI.

“I’ll call you from Seattle, Jake,” she said instead. They disconnected, and Kat glanced at Robert before sitting in silence a few moments. She wondered if conspiracy theories tended to multiply in direct proportion to fatigue. Why had she held back with Jake Rhoades?

The sudden ring of the phone caught her off guard, and she jumped, losing control of it, batting it in the air and barely catching it and regaining her grip. Robert was trying to suppress laughter, and she smiled somewhat sheepishly as she punched the button and unfolded the antenna.

“Katherine? Is that you?” Jordan James asked.

“Yes, Jordan! And you don’t know how good it is to hear your voice… but where are you calling from?”

“I’m at home, using the secure line State installed last week.”

“No one else there?”

“No. Why?”

Once again she ran through the particulars of what had happened, ending with the potentially offensive question she couldn’t avoid. “Uncle Jordan, I hate to ask you this, but are you sure of whomever you talked to at Langley? Because someone intercepted everything I said to you.”

She heard him clear his throat.

“That’s why I’ve been frantic to reach you, Kat. There’s a very serious leak.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying the problem isn’t Langley or my phones, the problem is at the Bureau. You can’t tell them anything until the leak is plugged.”

“That… that’s just… that doesn’t make sense.”

“Nevertheless, you’ve been targeted by someone, and all the information they needed originated with your call to Jake Rhoades.”

“He’s my boss, Jordan! Jake absolutely can’t be—”

“Of course Jake’s not involved. I would be flabbergasted if any real FBI agent is involved, but someone’s got access to the Bureau. You have to trust me now, Kat. Didn’t you just tell me the IDs of those guys in Honolulu were flawless?”

“Yes.”

“Most likely because they were genuine.”

“No! We don’t have any agents by those names—”

“Not the point, Kat. The IDs may well have been fabricated by the same office that prepared your ID. These people have found their way inside. Didn’t they know the language? Didn’t you say they sounded like your fellow FBI agents?”

“Yes.” She felt her head spinning, her resistance to this bizarre idea crumbling in the face of his authority and logic.

“Kat, the problem is deep. Whoever is running this show has access to everything they need to target you and your entourage. I can’t tell you how I know this, because it comes from a startling source, but my one hope is that it’s only a single mole at the Bureau, and most likely clerical.”

She said nothing for a few seconds as she sat with her pulse pounding in her ears, wondering just what was real.

“So what do I do, Jordan?”

“First and foremost, you cannot trust any of your compatriots at the Bureau until we know where the leak is. You have to assume that virtually every conversation goes right offshore to whoever is behind this operation.”

“Offshore? We’re sure of that?”

“Nothing else fits. Remember when I headed the CIA fifteen years ago? You don’t forget the earmarks.”

“You’ve had so many important jobs, Uncle Jordan, I forgot about CIA.”

“Well, trust me, Honey. Where are you headed right now?” he asked.

She thought quickly and decided one communication had been enough. “Jordan, I… don’t think I should speak the words on this line.”

“Of course. That’s a good precaution. But, did you tell Jake Rhoades?”

“Yes.”

“I was afraid of that. Okay, Kat, now listen to me. Whatever you do, do not get off that aircraft the normal way, or run any risk of being intercepted by, or going with, anyone purporting to be FBI agents. If you’ve told Jake, there will most certainly be a party waiting for you, but not the one you want.”

“But Jake will make certain that doesn’t happen again.”

“He got outfoxed in Honolulu, didn’t he? Whoever these people are, they’ll find a way to divert, contain, distract, or otherwise neutralize whomever Jake sends. We do not know what’s real here, and until I can get to the bottom of this — and by the way, I’m taking this to the White House in the morning — until we know where the leak is, you’re going to have to stay out in the cold and tell your own people nothing, because when you do, the information goes right to the enemy.”

“Jordan…”

“No questions, Katherine. Just do it. Your life depends on it. Understand?”

“Yes, but Jordan, I’m an FBI agent. How can I run from my own people?”

“If you don’t, Katherine, I’ll lose you, and we’ll lose those survivors you brought out with you. Look, before your dad died, I promised him I’d try to look after you as much as I could, and this is one where I can guarantee he’d say the same thing: Find a hole, take the others with you, and go hide in it. When you’re secure and certain that no one knows where you are, call me. But not at State. Only on this phone. We need time to ferret out who’s behind all this. And we will find them. Your responsibility is to protect yourself and the five people with you. Just concentrate on that.”

“Okay, Uncle Jordan. Thank you.”

“It’s going to be okay, Katherine.”

She disconnected and sat rubbing her forehead, more confused than ever, and aware that Robert was about to burst with questions.

“An uncle?” he asked, as tentatively as he dared.

She nodded, explaining who had been on the other end of the line.

“The Jordan James?” Robert asked, his eyes flaring as he sat forward. “You know him?”

She nodded. “Longtime friend of my dad’s and a Dutch uncle all my life.”

“I’m impressed, Kat! James is in the same league with John Foster Dulles, Clark Clifford, and Henry Kissinger. The perpetual presidential adviser.”

“That’s my Uncle Jordan.” Kat turned to look Robert in the eye. “Robert, wouldn’t Walter Carnegie have found a way to safeguard what he’d discovered and get it to you somehow?”

Robert nodded slowly. “If there was any way he could. I mean, I don’t know what scared him away or kept him away from our meeting. But he was the typical scientist, and he would have been obsessed with safeguarding whatever he’d found.”

“Then somewhere out there is a predeath message to you from Carnegie with the information we need, or at least clues on how to find it. You agree?”

“Yeah, but where? In a letter? In my E-mail? Stuffed under my doormat? I mean, the possibilities are endless.”

“Not to a panicked man, Robert. We have to think like he was thinking, and see only the options he would see, and we don’t have much time. I’ve got the sick feeling our murderous little terrorist group is getting ready to strike again somewhere, and whatever Carnegie was trying to pass you is the antidote.”

Robert MacCabe sighed. “Then let’s connect the laptop to this incredibly expensive seat back phone system and get busy.”