Blackout

CHAPTER 38

Two rooms under assumed names in a nondescript hotel in the south Seattle town of Renton took only a little cash from the proceeds of a quick stop at a cash machine. They settled in to their respective chambers for a few minutes before opening the double doors between them. Kat stuck her head inside Robert’s room, made a snide comment about famous motel art on the wall, and glanced at the phone. “Why don’t you start the search for a way in to the Library of Congress computer, Robert. I’m going to use the satellite phone to call Jake.”

He nodded and plopped on the bed as he reached for the phone and looked up. “First, I’m going to try to scare up my Library of Congress contact.”

She partially closed the door and turned on the satellite phone, carefully switching to the satellite system before it had time to connect with a land-based cellular network. She dialed the number of FBI headquarters in Washington, unsurprised to hear the tension and anger in Jake Rhoades’s voice.

“Kat! Thank God! What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

“Keeping us all safe. There’s a leak back there, Jake. I think you know that. Every time I told you something yesterday, the other side heard it.”

“What are you saying? Are you accusing me?”

“Of course not! Don’t be ridiculous. You did your best trying to protect us in Seattle last night, but look what happened.”

“So what did happen, Kat?” Jake asked. “All I got was a cryptic pager message from you about going underground, then a frustrated team finds you and the others have jumped out of the airplane and run into the night without a trace. I’ve beeped you every hour on the hour since, but you didn’t see fit to call me, though you know a dozen safe ways to do so.”

“I have reasons,” she said, choosing her words carefully. “I can’t go into it right now.” Any excuses about remote areas and no radio contact could point to a place like Stehekin and endanger the rest of them. She told him, instead, of the last-minute diversion of the DC-10 to a south gate.

“Yeah,” he said, “we heard, once our team shifted to the South Satellite terminal and found out someone else had been flashing false ID around.”

“You didn’t collar the bogus group, I assume?” she asked.

Jake hesitated. “They were one step ahead of us. They murdered one of our Seattle field agents when we tried to apprehend them. Jimmy Causland was his name. Wife, two kids. Five bullets, three to the head, we think with a silencer. Thanks to that encounter, we know these people are real, and we know they’re using fake FBI credentials, but we don’t know who or where they are.”

“Which is exactly why we’ve dropped out of sight for a few days.”

“Kat, the Bureau can’t protect you or those survivors if you go solo.”

“You can’t protect us anyway. Not as long as we have an unplugged leak. Remember what happened last night at Sea-Tac?”

“Regardless, you’ve got to bring them in immediately. That’s an order.”

“I need some time, Jake, and I’m not sure how much. Otherwise, if there’s another slipup, we’re history. That group of cutthroats has to be frantic by now, and I’m sure the orders have escalated to ‘shoot on sight.’”

“At least we now have a name for them.”

“A name?” she asked.

“This organization, for want of a better term, is calling itself Nuremberg, as in the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials.”

“What on earth? Do we know where they are?”

“Not a clue, though the speculation is it’s an organization fronting for Middle Eastern interests such as Libya, Iraq, Iran, you name it. All our dear friends.”

“That name,” Kat said, “could also mean this is some sort of retaliatory blood feud with the United States over… something related to war crimes, or the U.S. reaction to someone else’s war crimes. Perhaps Serbia.”

“We don’t know, but a hand-delivered letter was plopped on CNN’s desk this morning, devoid of fingerprints or usable identification, and reciting enough unreleased facts to convince us it’s valid.”

“Thank God! So they’ve announced their demands?”

“No. They’ve announced their existence. The essence of the communiqué is simply that they will continue to establish their ability to destroy any aircraft anywhere in the world at any time without telling us how, until we are ready — in other words softened up enough — to listen to their demands.”

“Oh, Lord. And this was right after the Chicago crash?”

“Yes. Mentioned it specifically. Kat, the media’s shifting to a new level of hysteria, the White House is putting incredible pressure on us for answers, and your name is being prominently mentioned without much love. Now listen to me carefully. I have all but lost control. I can probably protect your tail here in the Bureau for everything that’s gone down up to now, but when we disconnect here, if I don’t have an arrangement to repatriate you and all of those survivors, the director has ordered us to start hunting you down.”

“On what grounds?” Kat asked, her voice subdued.

“Obstruction of justice, possible kidnapping, and perhaps a half-dozen others.”

“Those people are with me voluntarily, Jake.”

“The teenager, Delaney, is too young to make that decision legally. His father is stirring up a hornet’s nest to find him and see you prosecuted.”

“His father?”

“I don’t have the entire story, but the man’s gone ballistic. He apparently knows his son is with you and is accusing you, and us, of false arrest and kidnapping, and even hinting at sexual molestation.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Jake! Sexual… what kind of nonsense is that?”

“I’m merely telling you, Kat, that FBI agents do not have the luxury of sequestering people, especially minors, without due process of law and the sanction of their employer. His father apparently has joint custody. He’s within his rights.”

“So I’m supposed to give up Steve only to see him cut down by automatic weapon fire as he walks to his father’s arms? Now that’s a plan!”

“We’re expected to do things in accordance with the law, Kat. That’s your oath. You are, after all, a law enforcement officer.”

“Jake, listen to me. All the people involved, with one exception, are hiding of their own free will, and I’m not with them. I am a long way from where the others are holed up, and I’ve got one of the group with me, and it’s not Steve Delaney. We’re desperately trying to develop leads. Even if I thought it was safe, which it is not, I’d have no way of just turning the others over to you.”

“But you’re going to have to tell me where they are, Kat.”

“I can’t do that.”

“DAMMIT! Kat, this is it. This is the last warning. If I hang up without getting what I need, this is your job, and maybe your freedom. You don’t really want to go from promising FBI agent to convicted felon, do you?”

Kat let out a long sigh. A tense silence on the line hung between them.

“Inside five days, Jake, right or wrong, fired or not, indicted or otherwise, I’ll come in. If you can’t trust me in the meantime, I’ll understand. But these lives are my responsibility. And Jake… I’m truly sorry to have to disobey you.”

“I’m sorry too, Kat,” he began, sighing long and loud. She could tell what was coming: “Because as of this moment…”

She disconnected before he could say the word “suspended” and sat there, biting her lip for nearly a minute before looking up. A grim-faced Robert MacCabe had come into the room to stand quietly, watching her.

“Robert, I need to warn you about this.” She leaned over the table, trying to keep her voice very low. “I need to make sure you have the option of bailing out.”

“What are you talking about?” he asked.

“From this moment forward, anything you do to help me could be viewed as aiding a criminal act, or voluntarily conspiring to commit a criminal act. I have not been formally suspended, as far as I can tell. I didn’t hear any words to that effect. But I have no support in Washington, and they’re treating me now as a renegade.” She told him the details of the phone call. “I hate to say it, but I think you’d better get away from me. Just give me a twelve-hour head start before you call Washington and tell them what you know.”

“Cut it out, Kat.”

“Robert, I don’t want you following me into infamy if this ends up badly.”

He leaned down, face-to-face with her, his arms supporting his weight. “I am not abandoning you. You’re going to need my help. In fact, you couldn’t get rid of me now with a federal court order.”

Deputy Assistant Director Jake Rhoades looked up from the conference table he had been leaning over, the expression on his face fierce and foreboding.

“Yes?” he snapped.

A male agent in his late twenties held up a piece of paper. “Sorry to bother you, Sir, but I was told…”

Jake grabbed it from his hand. “What’s this?”

“We’ve located the area her signal is coming from.”

“Good. Where?”

“They… can’t pinpoint more closely than about fifteen square miles, and it took tremendous pressure to get the communications company to do it—”

“WHERE, dammit! Does it look like I’m on vacation here?”

“Seattle. At least; the general area.”

“Okay. Thanks. I’m sorry to be grumpy.”

“No problem, Sir.” The agent turned to go. Jake called after him, causing him to stop and turn back.

“Sir?”

“Look, I’ve known Kat Bronsky since she joined the Bureau, and I think the world of her, and this is really painful.”

“Understood.”

“You were trying to tell me how you located the signal.”

The agent nodded, moving back toward Jake. “This is an American communications company operating all over the world, and they did not want to cooperate at first. But their satellites are at approximately four hundred and fifty miles up, over seventy of them, and their computers can triangulate a signal on the ground. It took pressure from friends at the Federal Communications Commission to get their help.”

“Accurate to within fifteen miles?”

“They could do better, but they won’t. They have agreed, however, to keep tracking her signal, but they emphasized that’s only because the FBI owns the phone.”

When he had cleared the door, Jake turned to the others in the room. “Okay, everyone. It’s deployment time. Kat Bronsky is somewhere in Seattle, and we’ve got to find her before the boys from Nuremberg do.”

Robert had turned on the TV in his room and left it on low volume as he worked his way through a series of calls, trying to locate his Library of Congress contact, who was on vacation. Another line was ringing without an answer when something on the screen caught his attention. He reached for the remote when he saw the wreckage of the Chicago plane crash on screen, but the scene changed to one from Dallas, and he toggled up the sound. The anchor was saying something about an airport shutdown.

Robert replaced the receiver and moved quickly to the door to Kat’s room, finding her between calls. “You may want to see this on channel four,” he said.

She reached for her remote and clicked to the same channel. Pictures of the huge DFW Airport dissolved to stock shots of passengers milling back and forth in a terminal before cutting to a reporter in front of a mob scene at a ticket counter.

There was a sudden scuffling of chair legs as Robert pulled up the desk chair and sat down, glancing back at Kat, who was sitting mesmerized. When the report was over, she snapped off the TV once again and shook her head slowly.

“So we know their next move. Leverage the terror.”

“But to what end, Kat?”

“That’s the question, isn’t it? What do they want?” She stood suddenly and pointed to the chair he was in. “Up, please. I need the chair. Let’s get back to the calls. We need progress. I’m finding no one on planet Earth with the name Dr. Brett Thomas, although I’ve still got a few tricks to try in a bunch of databases. How about you?”

He filled her in on the vacationing contact.

“Of course! Naturally, he’d be on vacation when you need him!” Kat said in a sarcastic tone. “Murphy never sleeps.”

Robert looked puzzled. “Beg your pardon?”

Kat pulled up the chair Robert had vacated and sat at the desk. She laid out a notebook and reached for the phone. “Murphy’s Law,” she explained, her voice flat.

“Oh, yeah.” Robert nodded. “‘What can go wrong, will go wrong.’”

“But do you know the prime corollary to Murphy’s Law?” Kat asked, watching him slowly shake his head as she continued. “Mr. Murphy was an optimist.”

For three hours they worked in the relative obscurity of their respective rooms, both using their laptops plugged into the phones when they weren’t using the lines for direct calls. Kat had carefully connected first Robert, then herself, to their respective Internet providers through a series of difficult-to-trace eight-hundred numbers. CNN remained on in both rooms, and the various reports and flashes outlined the rapidly developing crisis of confidence in the commercial aviation system as Atlanta and Salt Lake City joined the list of major American airports temporarily shut down by telephoned threats.

At nearly five in the afternoon Robert entered Kat’s room unheard and moved to her side, a smile on his face.

“How’s it going?” he asked, his voice causing her to jump slightly.

“Didn’t see you come in,” she said, turning back to the screen. “So far, still nothing. How about you?”

“Well, for a while all I’d learned is the date and time of Wally’s funeral, and the fact that two more threats have been received since we’ve been here, shutting down Atlanta Hartsfield and Salt Lake City Airports. This group, Nuremberg, is really flexing its muscles.”

“Or it’s a field day for kooks with phones,” she said, watching him sit down.

“But I finally located my friend on vacation.”

Kat sat forward. “Where?”

“Tahiti.”

“Good grief! Will he help?”

“He will, if he can. He should be on a public phone at a secluded beach right this minute trying to arrange special research access, while a scantily clad young woman puts whatever they were doing on hold.”

“You just had to get that in, didn’t you?” she asked, her face cradled in her right hand as she leaned on the desk and rolled her eyes.

“Okay, I’m envious.”

“So he’ll call you back?” she asked, changing the subject. “How? Surely you didn’t give him this number?”

Robert sat on the bed and frowned at her. “Of course not. I’ll call him back. But I’m worried about those phone card numbers. Aren’t they traceable to you?”

She nodded. “Yes, but not immediately.”

“You’re sure?”

“I can’t be one hundred percent sure, but it’s a decent guess, and we can’t use the satellite phone for everything.”

The computer chirped. Kat raised a finger and turned back to the screen, typing in a few keystrokes.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“A listing of scientists on a little-used database. I’ve been unable—” She sat forward and typed in another command. “Wait… a… minute! Wait just a darn minute!”

“What?”

“Just… a name I saw… triggered an idea. Hold on.” Several seconds elapsed as Robert maneuvered around behind her, his eyes focusing on the screen at the same moment a name and short dossier came into view.

“Wait, Kat. That’s not Thomas?”

She was shaking her head in excitement. “No, it’s not! Carnegie was fuzzing things up. The guy we’re looking for isn’t Brett Thomas, it’s Dr. Thomas Maverick.”

“What? Are you sure?” He leaned over her shoulder, following her finger.

“Look at his pedigree, Robert. U.S. government contractor positions in for the last twenty, almost thirty years. Los Alamos; Oak Ridge, Tennessee; NASA; and then Las Vegas.”

“Why Vegas, I wonder? What’s out there?”

“I’m not sure. Probably a lot of contractors. Nellis Air Force Base is in Vegas, or maybe he’s just retired.”

“But there’s no Thomas?”

She shook her head. “No Ph.D. issued anywhere in the Western world in the past sixty years to anyone even remotely close to that name. But this…”

“Bret Maverick. James Garner’s character in that classic TV show. Clever way of reversing the names. No address?”

“Don’t worry. Now that I know his name, I’ll find his address. Get back to work. Call Tahiti. Try not to drool too much.”

“We need to eat sometime, Kat.”

She shook her head. “Not yet. First we need answers.”

In five minutes he was back in her room with a long face.

“What?” she asked.

“He can do it, but not before this evening. There’s a window every night in which they update the computer. That’s the only time he can add an authorized user.”

“So how long?”

Robert looked at his watch. “It’s five-thirty now. He said to call him back about nine-thirty tonight, our time.”

Kat looked deeply worried. “I wasn’t planning for us to stay that long. I don’t know who might be closing in on us.”

“How, Kat? How could they find us?”

She sighed. “The telephone calls, my mistake with the satellite phone. I don’t know, but I’m very concerned about staying here a second longer than we have to.”

“Gut feeling? Because I trust a professional’s intuition.”

She nodded. “Another thing I’ve been thinking.” She gestured to the edge of the bed. “Sit, please.”

He settled in on the bed next to her chair, and she sat back and looked at him for a few seconds. “Let’s go back over this… see if we’re missing anything obvious.”

“Okay.”

“First, we lose the MD-eleven over Cuban waters to something that fried the eyes of at least one pilot. We know that for a fact.”

“Right.”

“Next, Meridian Five is attacked with a similar weapon — some sort of electromagnetic weapon — and you, yourself, live through the crash.”

“Yes.”

“And now we have a crash in Chicago, with this group claiming responsibility and using the name of the German city of Nuremberg, and now issuing threats to shut down major airports.”

“Right. Possibly.”

“Okay, but why? These people have gone to a tremendous amount of time, trouble, and expense to kill and frighten. Why are they doing it?”

“Probably money, as we thought before. Maybe power has something to do with it, too, but my first guess is money.”

“Why?” she asked, leading him slightly.

“Because… they’re so well organized and financed?”

Kat nodded enthusiastically. “Precisely. But they’ve made no demands. Now, maybe they’ve made no demands because they are just trying to soften us all up, but what if the chaos itself is their objective?”

Robert leaned closer, studying her face. “What do you mean?”

“I was thinking about this a few minutes ago, Robert. How can you make lots of money from seriously undermining the airlines? How about selling their stock short, or softening up the industry for financial takeovers? We’ve been thinking this is terrorism for political gain, directly or otherwise. But while we’re expecting direct extortion or ransom demands, they may already be getting precisely what they want from collapsing airline market prices.”

“Are the stock prices down today?” he asked.

She nodded. “Big-time. As much as a ten-percent drop. If this continues, they’ll go into free fall.”

“Then… we should be looking for someone buying a lot of airline stock at the bottom, or selling them short?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know, but it’s logical. Millions for billions.”

He was following her logic. “In other words, this whole thing is built on cash.”

“Lots of it, especially when you consider that skilled covert operatives with zero morals and good shooting skills are not plentiful and take large amounts of money to hire.” She shook her head and sat back. “No… money’s behind this in more ways than one. It has to be. Maybe it’s just Saddam Hussein or some wild-eyed Middle Eastern country or, God knows, maybe Slobby Milosevic, the butcher, throwing cash around to accomplish what they can’t do directly, but somehow this feels more corporate, um… more professionally organized and impersonal and nonpolitical.”

Kat reached over and turned up the television, using the remote to surf through a dozen other cable channels, and entirely missing her own image as it flicked across the screen.

“Wait!” Robert said suddenly, pointing at the TV. “Go back.”

“What?”

“That looked like you!” he said.

Kat gave him a puzzled look as she backtracked two channels and stopped.

“There,” Robert said. “You’re off the screen now, but that’s the channel.”

The TV news reporter was standing outside FBI headquarters in Washington.

The station cut to an interview with the senior Delaney, who was dripping concern and anger and righteous indignation at the FBI for kidnapping his son without a warrant, following his narrow escape from the carnage of a plane crash in southeast Asia. He was saying, “I just want my little boy back safely. I don’t know whether this woman has ransom on her mind, or whether she’s a sexual predator, but I want her prosecuted.”

Kat hit the mute button and turned wordlessly to Robert, her eyes huge, her mind completely stunned. Finally she managed to get her mouth to work. “Did… did… you, good grief, sexual predator? Good Lord!”

“I don’t believe that!” Robert said, his eyes still on the screen.

Kat was on her feet, pacing the floor and gesturing wildly toward the screen. “I’m screwed! Not only did he just call me a pervert on national television, he just spread my face over a hundred million households! Or was that cable?”

“No, that was a broadcast channel, but probably more like fifteen million.”

“Holy moley! I can’t believe this. Suddenly I can’t even walk outside without running a high risk some guy in an undershirt swilling a beer will look up from his TV set long enough to spot me and call in the militia.”

She sat down hard beside him on the bed. “I’ve just been checkmated.”

“Well…”

“I mean, unless I adopt a disguise or something…”

Kat shot to her feet again before he could reply and paced to the door, then returned to lean over the desk, where she began scribbling something.

“Are we a team?” she asked, her head still down as she wrote. She glanced up at him, sensing his puzzlement.

“Of course. Why?”

“I need you to go find a store and get me some things.”

“What do you need?”

She straightened up, her expression deadly serious. “You mind being seen with a blond tart?”

“A… what?”

“Will it hurt your reputation if a platinum-blond bimbo is hanging on your arm, popping gum?”

“Kat, what on earth are you talking about?”

She handed him a list. “This is what I need.”

He took it and began reading. “Leather micro-miniskirt, size six, A-size panty hose, medium-size lacy blouse, either Revlon or L’Oreal platinum-blond hair-color kit, platform shoes…” He looked at her with a blank expression.

“You know. High platforms, useless for anything other than advertising for male attention and twisting ankles.”

“Oh.”

“They should be flashy, but not too much so. You decide. The only hope we have is to change my image so drastically I can hide in plain sight. I’ve got to look so tarty, no one would believe for a second I even know how to spell ‘FBI.’ Not flashy enough to draw a crowd, but trash-flash five-and-dime tacky.”

“We’re talking Jerry Springer?”

“Oh, definitely.”

Robert was shaking his head. “Believe me, this will do it. I’ll never be acceptable in polite society again.”

“That assumes you were before,” she said, smiling.

“Ouch!”

“Seriously, can you get all that?”

He checked his watch. “If I can find the right store, but I’ll have to move fast.”

“It may be embarrassing, Robert. That’s a lot of girl stuff to buy.”

He sighed and smiled thinly as he got to his feet. “You know, Kat, I was just trying to conjure up an image of the FBI Academy course that trained you to do this.”

She smiled. “The classes were boring, but the lab work was fun.”

“I’ll bet.”