Blackout

CHAPTER 37

By noon Snoqualmie Pass was twenty miles behind them and the Seattle area was visible in the distance. Kat glanced over at Robert as she drove. He had been deep in thought, but stirred suddenly and turned toward her.

“I have an idea,” he said. “Let’s find a motel.”

She gave him a startled look. “Excuse me? I’m not that kind of FBI agent.”

Robert was smiling. “I thought that would get your attention. No, I’m serious. If we can hole up and have time to work the phones, maybe I can save us a trip to D.C.”

“How so?”

“I’ve got a friend at the Library of Congress. If he can get me modem access to the computer, there’s no need to go there in person.”

Kat smiled energetically. “Great! That’s worth a try. Maybe we can get a line on Dr. Thomas as well. We don’t have much time.”

“Let’s get two connecting rooms, and thus two phones.”

“Appropriately conservative, Mr. MacCabe. Any hotel preferences?”

He shook his head. “Something between a Ritz Carlton and a Motel Six.”

She nibbled her lip for a few seconds. “Robert, about SeaAir, I—”

He raised his hand. “Kat, please. We’ve been talking about this and racking our brains for hours, and what did we solve? Nothing. All we have is speculation. We know there’s a group out there, we know they’ve got at least one exotic eye-killing weapon, we know that somehow our government is frightened of them, we suspect a mole at the FBI, and other than that, we’re chasing our tails.”

“There’s a pattern here, Robert, and Carnegie’s message reinforces it.”

He sighed. “Okay, I’ll bite. What pattern?”

“Official misconduct.”

“Say again?” he asked.

“Somehow, this involves something an agency of the U.S. government has done or become involved in that is so wrong, they’re scared to death of exposure.”

Robert fell silent for a few seconds. “You… aren’t suggesting we’re being chased by an arm of the U.S. government?”

“Oh, Lord no!” Kat said quickly. “But whoever these vermin are, when we uncover the full story, this administration is going to be terribly embarrassed.”

“That’s a sobering thought, Kat, but let’s stop talking about it until we get into Walter’s file. My brain is spinning.” Robert reached over and turned on the radio as they continued on I-90 across Lake Washington, tuning across a variety of stations before settling on a newscast reporting the initial response to a major airline accident in Chicago.

“Turn that up!” Kat said.

Kat turned the radio off and looked at Robert MacCabe, whose face was as pasty-white as hers. She swallowed hard. “Undoubtedly…” Kat began.

“Yeah. I’m thinking the same thing.”

“Could be something else, of course. Flight control failure, some sort of massive aerodynamic failure of flaps, or… or a speed brake on one side. Could even be an encounter with the wingtip vortex of another large aircraft.”

Robert was nodding slowly. “But it probably isn’t. Accidents don’t happen much anymore. Here’s the third inside six weeks. We know now two were from the same cause. You said last night it was going to happen again.”

Kat hit the dashboard with the heel of her hand, startling Robert. He looked over to see her jaw set, her lips pressed tightly together in anger.

“Damn! DAMN! Damn, damn, damn, damn!”

“Kat?”

“SHIT!” she cried out.

“You okay?”

She snapped her head around to look at him. “NO, I am not ‘okay.’ I hate being asked if I’m okay when I’m obviously not.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No, don’t be sorry. This is my agony. God! I can’t believe I let you get on that flight in Hong Kong when I should have known you’d be a target, and then I let the evidence, the weapon, and one of the felons slip away in Honolulu because—”

“Because you fell victim to a very professional, very well-done charade that would have fooled anyone.”

“Robert, please don’t try to make me feel better. The one thing my dad drummed into me was personal responsibility. You screw up, you admit it and take the consequences.”

“So how did you screw up, Agent Bronsky? By not being clairvoyant?”

“Precisely,” she snapped.

“Look,” he said, “personal responsibility is appropriate when there’s been a real lapse, but here…”

Kat let out a long sigh and signaled for a right turn. She braked the minivan hard and steered onto the shoulder of the freeway, coming to a lurching halt in a cloud of dust and rearranged gravel.

“What are you doing?” Robert asked in alarm.

“Look at me, Robert.”

“I’m looking.”

“I’m thankful you see me clearly as a female, and I know your male instincts are to protect me, but you’re dealing with someone who is as professional and responsible as you are. Do NOT try to protect me from the consequences of being in the profession I’ve chosen.” She hesitated. “This is why I was going to come alone.”

“Kat, I wasn’t trying to protect you.”

“Yes, you were! You were trying to protect the little girl from feeling bad because she screwed up big-time. I can handle my own self-recrimination.”

“So, if I understand this, I can’t say anything to you that’s supportive?”

“I didn’t say that. I just don’t need you chasing away my faults.”

“Oh, okay. You want only faults? Very well, I’ll give you a fault. You’re too focused on the job to pay attention to the underlying feelings of those around you.”

“What? That’s bull! I’m a psychologist.”

He hesitated, then waved his hand as if to dismiss the subject. “Let’s drop it.”

“Oh, no you don’t. You opened the door. Give me an example.” Robert had shifted his gaze to the road ahead, but Kat leaned around to catch his eye. “You can’t, can you? You know very well I’m sensitive to the feelings of those around me.”

Robert’s eyebrows flared as he turned to meet her gaze. “Really? Then how come you didn’t know how much I wanted to kiss you yesterday?”

A stunned silence followed, Robert as surprised as she by what he had blurted out. His hand went up instantly as he looked away. “I’m sorry, Kat, I didn’t mean… I mean, that just slipped out.”

She reached over and turned his face back to hers. “I’m glad. And I did know, because I was feeling precisely the same way. It was just the wrong place and the wrong time.”

“Wrong time, maybe. Definitely not the wrong place.” He looked at her for several seconds, and a smile slowly spread across his face. “What rotten timing,” he said. “I find a woman who really turns me on, but it’s in the middle of a terrorist crusade.”

“Was that why you came this morning?” she asked quietly.

He shook his head no. “That was part of it, but the major reason was precisely what I told you: the story, the chase, and the need for two minds on the same problem.”

There was a faint electronic warble in the background.

“Is that your beeper?” Robert asked.

Kat reached down to her purse and flipped it open, intensifying the warble. “Yes. I guess I was trying to ignore it.” She adjusted the screen and pressed the button, her expression darkening as she read. “It’s Jake, ordering me one last time to contact him and make arrangements to surrender you and the others as material witnesses.”

“To what?”

She sighed and shook her head. “An act of mass murder, to start with. He’s right. What I’m doing could be viewed as obstruction of justice.”

“Oh, bullshit!” Robert snapped.

Kat was pulling out her satellite phone with a freshly charged battery.

“You’re sure they can’t trace that?” he asked.

“Yes, I’m sure. They can trace it when it uses a ground-based cellular network, but I’m going to program it to stay on the satellite system.”

The phone rang suddenly and she automatically punched the Send button to answer it, realizing her mistake as she did so.

Robert was speaking at the same moment: “Maybe it isn’t such a good idea…”

Kat punched the Off button as fast as possible, hoping whoever was on the other end hadn’t heard anything.

The phone began ringing again, making her jump slightly, and she quickly punched the Off button.

The ringing stopped.

“Could they… track us with that?” Robert asked.

She glanced over, her face betraying deep alarm. “I… don’t know. But let’s get out of here and find that motel. We’ve got a lot of digging to do, and we need to keep on being a moving target.”

The level of tension in the room was almost explosive as several ashen-faced men milled around while one pressed a telephone receiver more tightly to his ear, his face reflecting sudden intense concentration.

“Hold it,” he said, raising an index finger to quiet the others. The temporary office had been set up in an industrial park near Nellis Air Force Base, and the sudden passage of a pair of F-15 Eagles overhead caused him to frown and glance up.

He toggled the phone to get a new line, dialing the number again. “Someone answered Bronsky’s phone… and there was a guy’s voice in the background for just a second. It was like she punched it on and off rapidly. I’m calling back.” He waited a full thirty seconds. “Now she’s not answering.” Suddenly a look of happy surprise crossed the man’s face as he turned to his compatriots. “I don’t believe this!”

“What?” another of them said, crossing toward the first.

“That was the domestic eight-hundred-number for her satellite phone — the one that tries to connect through the cellular system — and it rang.”

“Yeah?” was the response.

“Meaning that when she refused to answer, the system played a message with a little identification tag line. She’s still in Seattle, Larry! We’ve found the bitch.”

“You say there was a male in the background?”

“Yeah,” he said, excited.

One of the men put a cassette in a small recorder and punched the button. Robert MacCabe’s voice from a recent television appearance filled the room. The man stopped it after thirty seconds.

“That voice?”

The other man smiled and nodded. “Sure sounded like it.”

“Then, gentlemen,” the leader said, “we have a double benefit. We know MacCabe is also with Bronsky, and they’re somewhere in Seattle.”

“How about the other four?”

“Who knows. They could have stashed them, or they could be dragging them along.”

There was a moment’s hesitation before all five men in the room dove for various phones. There was a jet waiting at Las Vegas’s McCarren Airport that could have them airborne in twenty minutes.

“What do we take?”

“All the firepower we can drag along. She’s making mistakes. This time we’re gonna nail her cute little ass.”