Blackout

CHAPTER 35

The two FBI agents searching the main terminal below had moved on. On the second-story mezzanine, a slim, dark-haired, pock-faced man in his late thirties carefully peered around a column to make certain they hadn’t returned. Satisfied, he lifted his arm and spoke softly into a hidden microphone wired through his clothes to a transceiver clipped to his belt.

“Rolf, are you in the clear?”

The response came back in his tiny earpiece. “Yes. We’re both here. Where are you?”

“Stuck at the moment. Two feds are a floor below me, asking about us. I’ll come off this perch as soon as they’re gone. Have you called in yet?”

“You sure you want to hear that now?”

“I’m sure.”

“Well, our leader is not happy. In fact, I’d say our leader’s just shy of homicidally mad, although he’s always so controlled it’s hard to tell.”

The man leaned slightly over toward the balcony, checking the progress of the two genuine FBI agents who had fanned out in the airport after discovering the charade at the South Satellite. It had taken less than ten minutes for the FBI team waiting at the North Satellite to catch on, not enough time to thoroughly search the DC-10 a second time. Somehow the six had escaped, but it seemed impossible.

The man looked down each hallway, satisfying himself it was safe to venture out. He triggered the microphone again. “I knew he’d be furious, but did you tell him clearly what happened?”

“He called it a bad excuse. When are you coming out of there? We need to disappear fast.”

“Why? What are you seeing?”

“Nothing we can hide behind for long.”

“I’m coming out now and I’ll—” The man emerged and turned directly into the barrel of a cocked handgun.

“Freeze!” the gunman snapped. “FBI! You’re under arrest for—”

The bogus agent slammed a left fist into the belly of the genuine agent and rolled away from his extended gun as he grabbed it and diverted it upward. There was an “oof” and the sound of a body impacting the floor. The FBI agent scrambled to right himself, but the sound of four muffled pops put an end to the effort. The agent slumped to the floor in a growing pool of blood, his vision receding into a distant point as he lost consciousness, completely unaware of the presence of a cold metal barrel to his temple that would conduct the coup de grace.

The shooter moved immediately down the hallway, slipped into the nearest stairwell, and walked calmly past two uniformed airport police officers to the door of the terminal and directly into a waiting van, which pulled away from the curb as soon as he was in.

“Trouble?” one of his companions asked.

“Scratch one fed,” he said, patting the gun beneath his coat for emphasis. “What’re the instructions?”

The driver sighed. “Word for word, you don’t want to hear. Lots of accusations of terminal stupidity, yadda, yadda, yadda. We’re ordered to spare no expense, and use no compassion in tracking down those six people and doing them.”

The single-engine float plane was too familiar a sight to attract much attention as it banked over the verdant alpine valley just north of Lake Chelan. The DeHavilland Beaver she had rented at the south end of the lake was a blunt-nosed thing of beauty to pilots who knew her in the North country, as well as those she supplied. A veteran design from a Canadian company conceived in the 1940s and kept forever young by high demand, what the Beaver lacked in streamlined beauty it made up for in brute reliability. Uncounted times in her history, her large, radial engine and three-bladed propeller had rescued some miscalculating bush pilot from an otherwise fatal mistake. Beavers were slow but forgiving, rugged and accomplished mariners, and Kat had always felt a thrill in watching them touch down on water, the floats kissing the surface with a finger-light touch as they slowed suddenly in a cascade of spray and settled down to float instead of fly.

The half-hour flight just above the glassy blue surface of the fifty-mile-long lake had been spectacular; the small aircraft surrounded the beauty of the sharp snow-covered peaks rising to 7,000 feet on either side of the fjordlike upper end. Much of the beauty, however, had been lost to fatigue and worry and the realization that even here they were a target.

Leaving the purloined minivan had required careful thought on Kat’s part. The car had to be left in a place where no one would tow it, report it, or even notice it for a week, and a commercial storage yard for recreational vehicles had been perfect.

“There! See the roof at the end of that driveway down there?” Kat said, pointing out their destination and feeling relieved that it was still there.

“Where’s Stehekin?” Dallas asked.

“It’s an area, not a town, as such,” Kat replied. “The ranger station and motel and a few shops are by the boat landing, which is where we’re going to dock.”

The pilot throttled back the Beaver and turned toward his usual landing spot on the lake adjacent to the diminutive town dock. Kat’s 2 A.M. phone call to arrange a 7 A.M. departure had irritated him, but a charter was money, and it was November. Two weeks later he’d have the Beaver hauled out for the winter, anyway. He had met the client a bit gruffly, but was warming up, especially since the morning had turned out to be so beautiful.

Strange group, he thought. They looked bedraggled and scared, carried bags of groceries but almost no luggage, and their clothes were a mess. In addition, one of them had some sort of problem with his eyes and was wearing a bandage. The thought of criminal activity had crossed his mind, but he couldn’t fathom what such a disparate collection of exhausted people could be engaged in.

Kat was relieved to find a beat-up car, with its key under the floor mat, parked in a shed near the dock, a sure sign that no one else was occupying the cabin. When all of them had left the plane and squeezed into the car, Kat took the pilot aside and handed him $350 in cash and her FBI credential case.

“What’s this?” he asked.

“Open it,” she directed.

He flipped it open and read the laminated ID card several times before looking up with a worried expression. “Did I… I mean, is there something wrong?”

She put a hand on his shoulder. “No, no, no! But I need your help, and this is very, very critical. This is a federal operation, and the people with me are under the protection of the FBI. They’ve crossed some very dangerous people who, quite literally, are a threat to national security. Now, no one knows we’re anywhere around here except you. If you say anything about this charter to anyone, you could well be responsible for the deaths of all these people. That means to anyone, including anyone else who claims to be from the FBI, whether they have an ID like this or not.”

“I… don’t understand,” he said, looking nervously from the car to the female agent before him.

“You’ve heard of the Witness Protection Program?” she asked.

“Yeah,” he said, brightening.

“Good. Then you may know that we don’t even tell other FBI agents about the people under that program.”

“You’re relocating them here?”

“No. Merely keeping them out of sight for a while. Now, I can’t tell you that your pilot’s license depends on your keeping quiet and helping me, but it doesn’t hurt to have friends at the FBI who owe you one. Understand?”

He smiled and nodded. “Yes, Ma’am. I’m very glad I didn’t see you when I was on this solo training flight I decided to make this morning just because it was such a pretty day.”

She smiled back. “That’s the idea. Now, I’ll call you for pickup in a day or two. Will you be all right with that?”

“Absolutely. Don’t worry, no one will know.”

“And no paper trail, okay? No logbook entry, invoice, or company record.”

He nodded, wondering whether the $350 was supposed to be tax-free.

The key to the cabin was exactly where Kat remembered it: hidden inside a small hatch built into one of the logs that formed the stout cabin. She opened the door gingerly, hoping against new alarm systems, and was relieved to find the place clean and ready for guests.

“The caretaker is obviously doing the same good job of keeping this place ready year-round,” Kat said to Dallas, as they turned on lights and fiddled with the thermostat to the floor furnace system. She tried to recall the caretaker’s name. He would undoubtedly drop by at some point to make sure the unexpected guests were legitimate. She would have to plan for that.

There were two hide-a-beds in the main room and two bedrooms that could sleep four apiece in the rustic bunk beds. The kitchen was small but well equipped, and a quick round of sandwich-making preceded a general collapse of everyone, except Kat and Robert, into the various bunks for what they all agreed would be a much-needed sleep through the day and upcoming night.

Kat pulled the blackout curtains and replenished the fire in the main room. She was fighting sleep and trying to stay focused, but was slowly losing the battle. Outside the cabin a beautiful morning was unfolding beneath a clear blue sky, the bright sunshine reflecting off the fifteen-inch layer of early snow covering the peaceful, isolated valley. She had an intense longing to take a walk, but that desire was smothered by a fuzzy blanket of fatigue. The speech in Hong Kong seemed like ancient history. Was it really only a few days ago? It didn’t seem possible.

Kat dragged the old bear rug she remembered from childhood closer to the huge river-rock fireplace and sat with her knees pulled up and her arms around her legs, luxuriating in the warmth of the fire. There were three floor furnaces blazing away in the cabin, but the hearth was the most comfortable spot, and she wondered how many times over the years her aunt and uncle had been able to get away to use the place.

Not enough, she figured, though she knew they loved it. Her aunt was a lusty woman with an equally lusty spouse, as Kat had discovered one summer when she’d come back from a trail ride a half day early and surprised them au naturel and passionately engaged on the same rug. She smiled at the memory, though it had been shocking at the time: Aunt Janine in the full-throated cries of a glass-shattering climax as Kat opened the door, causing her uncle’s head to pop up from an unexpected and intriguing location. Kat had backed out fast and stayed away for an hour before returning, stomping on the porch and making as much noise as possible. When she opened the door, her aunt was busy in the kitchen and her uncle was writing at the table, both of them smiling and looking smugly satisfied.

Robert MacCabe’s footsteps were approaching from the kitchen, and Kat tried to suppress the long-ago memory with a flash of embarrassment, as if he could see the titillating image in her mind. She looked up and smiled at him somewhat sheepishly as he settled onto the rug beside her, carrying two steaming mugs in his hands.

“Kat, I figured it out!”

“What? How to make coffee?”

“No, where Walter hid the information.”

Kat brightened instantly. “Where?”

“I also found enough dark chocolate in there to make real hot chocolate,” he said, handing her a mug.

“Great, but where’d he hide it?”

“Aren’t you going to ask me about the chocolate?” Robert asked.

She shook her head in confusion. “What?”

“The hot chocolate you’re holding. Try it. Then I’ll tell you.”

She looked at the mug in her hand and finally took a sip. “That’s wonderful! Where’d you learn to do that?”

“From a little old chef in Lima, Peru, at the Crillon Hotel. I used to get down there on assignment and order tomato-and-egg sandwiches and a pot of this type of hot chocolate. Chocolate caliente, en español. Nirvana, in any other language.”

“Okay. I’m dutifully impressed. Now, where’d he hide it?”

“His favorite haunt in Washington wasn’t a restaurant. I’d almost forgotten. The ‘LOC’ he mentioned? Library of Congress.”

“What? That would be a needle in a haystack, Robert. The place is gigantic.”

“Not the library itself. The computer. It has probably the most secure library-related computer in the nation, one that’s backed up so many times that short of the complete destruction of the United States, whatever’s on the database will remain in some form.”

Kat shook her head. “You’re telling me Walter Carnegie stored his files on the master computer of the Library of Congress?”

“That’s what I’m telling you, although I won’t know until I can get into the database and look for a file with the file name he gave us.”

“Good grief! Can we do that by phone?”

“I doubt it,” Robert replied. “With that sort of master program, you probably have to be on-site and at the right terminal with the right access code to get into the deep files. So we’re going to have to go to D.C. before the wrong people figure this out as well.”

She sighed and drank some more of the hot chocolate. “Okay. But we also need to find Dr. Thomas, if he’s still in Vegas. Question is, which comes first?”

Robert shrugged. “Hell, since we don’t know what Walter knew, and we don’t know what this Thomas character knows, it’s a toss-up.”

“We do know where Walter’s file is, though. So I think D.C.’s the best start.”

“Okay, but not until tonight,” he said. “We need sleep.”

She shook her head. “I feel almost guilty about this.”

“What? Drinking pure chocolate or sleeping?”

She shook her head as she maneuvered herself to a sitting position. “No. I mean, considering all that’s happened… and here we are in this beautiful place…”

“I know,” he said, staring at the fire.

Kat looked at him in silence, waiting until he felt her gaze and turned to look in her eyes.

“Dollar for your thoughts,” he said, a bit off balance.

“A dollar?” she said, her eyebrows fluttering up.

“Inflation, you know,” he added.

She laughed softly, watching the glow of the fire play off his face, and thought how the perpetual smile around his eyes matched his personality. Kat forced herself to look away. “Robert,” she said, rotating the cup slowly in her hands, “they’re going to shoot down another airliner somewhere. You know that, don’t you?”

He was silent for a long time before nodding. “I do now, Kat. Walter Carnegie understood that, too, and someone killed him for it.”

“The fact that there have been no demands has to mean that they haven’t completed their opening act.” She threw her free hand up in frustration. “So who’s next? Are we going to get a seven-forty-seven impacting the World Trade Center in New York because the two pilots were neutralized on takeoff from Newark or Kennedy? What if they decide to zap the pilots aboard Air Force One as it lifts off from Andrews? What hurts so,” Kat continued, “is that whoever gets hit, the weapon may well be the very one we had in our hands.” She shook her head and sighed, registering only mild surprise when she felt Robert’s left hand on her forearm, massaging gently. “I’m sure it was a weapon.”

“Kat, there’s no sense beating yourself up about what happened in Honolulu. I’m certain that wasn’t the only one like it.”

“I’m not beating myself up,” she said, with an edge in her voice that she immediately softened. “I’m trying to figure this out before it’s too late for another two hundred people. I mean, I’m not trying to be the Lone Ranger, all right? But the fact is, I can’t call Jake, and I really can’t call anyone. I’m trained to be a good team player, and half the time I end up with no team and forced to operate autonomously, which is a trait the boys in the Bureau really love in a female!”

“You’re under some gender-based pressure, I take it?”

Kat widened her eyes. “Whoa. You wouldn’t believe. It amazes me how many otherwise levelheaded, intelligent men are threatened by a woman who refuses to fold up and play the helpless female.”

“And if you do play the helpless female,” he added, “they say you aren’t fit to do a man’s job.”

“Straight from the book Catch 22. But this catch needs its own number,” Kat said.

“How about ninety-nine? Remember Agent Ninety-nine from Get Smart?”

Kat nodded. “Yeah. You’re right. Catch ninety-nine. But it’s also the name of a great women’s pilot organization I belong to, the Ninety-Nines.”

“Even more reason to call it catch ninety-nine.”

“Very well. So named.”

“Kat, a team can consist of two. We’re a team.”

Kat rolled her eyes. “Yeah, well, I can’t deputize you. I’m going to have to go to D.C. alone.”

“What? No, Kat!”

“I need you here to keep everyone safe. I’ll leave you the sat phone. I’ll call if I need help with the details. You need me to call anyone? Your wife, for instance?”

He smiled. “There are probably hundreds of Mrs. MacCabes around the East Coast, but I’m not legally attached to any of them.”

She cocked her head. “What a strange way of telling me you’re not married, not to mention a clever way of obscuring whether you’re divorced.”

He smiled again. “Merely trying to hide the fact that only my housekeeper and my editor care if I’m dead or alive, and I’m not so sure about my editor. Kat, look, I really think I ought to go with you.”

“Not a chance. I need you here.”

Robert sighed. “Well, you may get me fired. I was supposed to be back at work at the Post yesterday.”

“And you can bet the other side knows that, too. No, I’m not very recognizable. But you are.”

“It’s not me I’m worried about, Kat,” he said softly, triggering an unwanted blush. Kat looked away and put down her cup, fishing out the number of the float-plane service. She punched it into the satellite phone before lifting it to her ear, looking for something logical and casual to do with her hands and eyes to avoid looking at Robert. She had no time to deal with the sudden ripple of warmth that was radiating through her body. We’re not alone in some idyllic mountain hideaway as lovers, for God’s sake, Kat chided herself. We’re running for our lives. Get a grip, woman!

The phone was ringing on the other end, and she began to wonder if the pilot had made it back. She could hear Robert’s breathing, and she could feel his eyes on her, which kindled deeper reactions.

The float-plane service answered at last, and the same pilot agreed to a morning pickup. “Another solo training flight’s a good idea,” he joked. “But it’ll have to be tomorrow morning. I’m booked this afternoon.”

“Look, we need to get out of here now.”

“I’m sorry, Ma’am. I’ve got a business to run, too.”

“I’ll pay you double.”

“It’s not about the money, okay? I’ve got a personal obligation and my marriage probably depends on it. The answer is no. I can’t do it. Couldn’t you take the afternoon boat back?”

Robert was gently pulling her sleeve and she turned and mouthed the question “What?”

“You need to sleep! Go tomorrow.”

She sighed, thought, and nodded, rolling her eyes. “All right. Tomorrow morning. Another good day to pick up absolutely no one at the dock and get paid for it.”

“I’ll be dockside at eight,” the pilot replied.

She confirmed the deal, thanked him, and punched off the phone, placing it down at her side with exaggerated care before breathing deeply and turning to Robert, determined to put things back on a business footing. They spoke simultaneously.

“I, ah…” he began.

“The pickup will be…”

He nodded too energetically. “Yeah. At eight.”

“Right,” she confirmed.

“I heard.”

“Okay,” she said, her eyes locked on his.

“I just wish that… you know…”

“This was all over?”

“In a way, yes, Kat, but in a way, no.”

“I know,” she said, smiling too broadly. “It’s such a beautiful place. Be nice to be up here when we weren’t, you know, running for our lives.”

He laughed a bit stiffly. “Not to mention trailing a phalanx of others.”

“Right,” she said. “Our entourage.”

“It’d just be nice to be up here… just the two of us.”

She met his gaze again, and felt the spreading warmth as she fought the temptations running through her mind. For a split second, they moved almost imperceptibly toward each other, then stopped, their eyes still locked together.

Kat mustered the willpower to force her eyes away. “Um, I guess we should… you know, find our respective beds and go sleep for eighteen hours,” she said, forcing the words out, but remaining in place.

“If we must,” he agreed, reluctantly, and slowly got to his feet. He leaned over and extended his hand. She took it, holding on long enough to get to her feet, then pulled her hand away, avoiding his eyes.

“So I’ll see you in the morning,” he said.

“Yep,” Kat said, pretending to study the ceiling, the mantle, and the room. “I’ll wake you before going. I need to brief everyone on the care and feeding of the cabin.” She turned toward the bedroom Dallas had labeled the girl’s room.

“Kat?” he said, his voice low and intense, causing her to turn back and look at him, almost transfixed. She cleared her throat. “Yes, Robert?”

He smiled. “Good night.”

She smiled back. “You, too.”