Blackout

CHAPTER 40

Kat turned off the hair dryer and used her comb to position a few stray hairs before using the hair spray. She shook her head at the brassy platinum blond in the mirror, suppressing a slight twinge of excitement at the prospect of appearing in public in clothes and makeup that she would never wear as herself.

She left the bathroom, relieved to find the door between the rooms closed. She pulled on the dark panty hose and, piece by piece, wiggled into the rest of the costume before inserting her feet into the high platform shoes. She took a long look at herself in the full-length mirror on the wall, distracted momentarily by noise from some members of a visiting high school basketball team whooping it up in the corridor outside.

Kat looked at the girl in the mirror, worried about overdoing the trash-flash. All right, Katrina La Femme. It’s show time! Let’s try it out.

She opened her side of the double connecting door and stuck her leg into the opening, drawing a wolf whistle from Robert, then applause when she entered and struck a pose with hands on hips and head cocked to one side.

“Incredible!” he said, the telephone cradled on his shoulder.

“Cheap, cheap, cheap!” she replied, pretending to chew gum.

More voices were yelling in the corridor, and the sound of footsteps could be heard running in one direction, then running the other way, accompanied by giggles.

“What on earth are they doing out there?” Robert asked.

“Just kids having fun,” she said, moving to the peephole on the door and pressing her eye against it. “Any progress?”

“Hang on,” he said, turning to talk to someone on the other end. Kat turned around just as Robert replaced the receiver with a large smile on his face.

“Let me fire up the computer, Kat. We’ve got a clear track to that file for the next thirty minutes.”

“Wonderful!”

She sat on the edge of the bed beside him and watched as he programmed the right numbers into the computer and waited for it to make the connection with the Library of Congress. Following his friend’s instructions, he found the master file list and keyed a small search routine to find the one hidden file named WCCHRN.

“Okay. This is it. I’m sure no one knew it was there.”

“Did you tell your friend what you were doing?” Kat asked.

Robert shook his head. “No. He owed me a big-time favor and I collected. He’s trusting me not to destroy anything or leave a trail. But without this access, there’s no way we’d be able to get that file. No way.”

“Then if we can get this file downloaded, can we erase all evidence of it?”

Robert shook his head. “With the backups they’ve got? Not a chance. This file will still be around on some computer tape for a hundred years. Maybe forever.”

The file name suddenly appeared by itself on the screen. He keyed in the password “Carnegie” and crossed his fingers.

The screen filled with indecipherable symbols and random characters.

“Damn! He wrote the file in some machine code,” Robert said. “Could be simple, could be impossible. I’m going to download everything first.”

It took twenty-two minutes for the voluminous file from the Library of Congress to transfer through the telephone lines. At last he broke the connection and tried to open what Walter Carnegie had hidden away.

More gobbledygook.

Robert entered more commands, all with the same frustrating result.

“This may not be possible, Kat, without a cryptologist.”

“Would you mind if I try something?” she asked.

Kat brought her laptop in and positioned it to face his before taking over the keyboard with a practiced hand. “I’m using our infrared link to download the file to my machine.”

“Why?”

“Just… a minute. May be easier to do than explain.” When the process was completed, she sat back on his bed and put her computer in her lap, calling up a special program from her files. “This will tell me what kind of format, what kind of language or code this thing is written in,” she explained.

The results popped up almost instantly, prompting a laugh from Kat.

“What?” Robert asked.

“Clever. Not too sophisticated, but clever. He simply converted the file to a picture. I need to translate it back to a word-processing format.” The computer whirred for a few seconds before normal, readable text flashed on the screen.

“Aha!” Kat leaned forward, examining the screen. “This is an index. He’s got a long list of items here, and a cover note dated just a week ago.”

“Two days before he died,” Robert said. “Go on. I’ve got to make a pit stop.”

She began reading, occasionally whistling under her breath. She tore through half a dozen pages before Robert returned.

“Robert, no wonder he was terrified!”

“Meaning?”

“I’m reading his summary. He says that someone in the intelligence community found out he was a terrorist expert with the FAA trying to discover how terrorists could have caused the SeaAir accident. That person came to Carnegie to get his help in blowing the whistle on a major governmental cover-up.”

“That would be our Dr. Maverick?”

She shook her head. “No. Someone else. Someone who lives in the Beltway.” She glanced at the screen and toggled the document back a few pages before looking at Robert again. “According to this, there was a classified presidential executive order several years back that prohibited any U.S. involvement in researching or building laser weapons designed to destroy human eyesight.”

“I didn’t know about that. So we are dealing with a powerful laser.”

“Apparently. He says it was a top-secret project. There are references to it, but he says here he hasn’t discovered the name of the project.”

“Did he say the presidential order was violated?” Robert asked.

She read over the page again and shook her head. “No. You need to read all this, too, but Carnegie says his deep throat told him there had been a major black project run by the Defense Department, which had been doing just such research, and it produced some eye-killing portable lasers. After the President’s order, the weapons were stored, instead of destroyed. But he says they weren’t buried deeply enough.”

“Don’t tell me. They were stolen.”

Kat nodded. “That’s what he says, and that’s apparently the nexus of his panic. The whole stockpile went missing, he says, and because of the potential for havoc and the intense worry about public reaction, as well as the potential backlash against the contractor and the Pentagon, Carnegie’s source told him a huge effort got under way to hide the fact that we’d ever been fooling around with the idea, let alone actually building devices to destroy human eyeballs. He claims here that according to his source, DOD, CIA, NSA, DIA, and NRO were all deeply involved in trying to recover the lost prototypes, and that they were gambling they could recover the weapons and protect the technology before some terrorist group started using them.”

“And,” Robert continued, “they promised that a SeaAir or Meridian — type accident would never occur, right?”

She nodded. “That’s implied here but not stated. Also, he says that the FAA has a radar tape of the Key West area when SeaAir’s MD-eleven went down, and there was an F-one-oh-six Air Force test drone, but no other targets except a shadowy intermittent one they never identified.” Kat looked up at Robert. “Obviously, when SeaAir was shot out of the sky, whoever was begging for quiet had to have known it would all hit the fan if any of those stolen weapons were involved, and that does set the stage. That kind of cover-up would be devastating if exposed.”

“Which is,” Robert said, “precisely what Walter was threatening to do by merely looking into the allegations.”

“As are we,” Kat said, feeling a cold chill ripple down her back.

Robert looked toward the hall where more noise from the teen crowd was filtering through the door. “Lord, Kat. I almost said, ‘when the press finds out about this,’ completely forgetting I am the press. No wonder they went ape when Walter contacted me, even if he never gave me anything.”

“Whoever ‘they’ is,” Kat added. “I mean, we’re coming to these conclusions based on Walter Carnegie’s information and his conclusions, but whatever happened to him, somebody’s been after you, and now us. That’s corroboration of at least some of this.”

“My God, do you realize the implications?” he asked, his eyes getting larger. “If this is half the cover-up he’s postulating, it’s just a matter of time before the truth comes out, whether I break the story or someone else does. Our government knew the potential and did nothing to stop it.”

“And there was time, Robert. According to all this”—she gestured to the computer screen—“there was time to sound the alarm and somehow protect commercial aviation.”

“But how long ago did the theft occur?” he asked. “A couple of months? That could be defensible caution.”

“Try four years ago, according to Carnegie’s source. Since then, there’s been false congressional testimony, possible White House involvement, everything. An initial lie compounded by more lies until the entire administration sits in a tangled web of potentially explosive revelation.”

Robert sat back in deep thought for more than a minute before leaning forward again, his eyes finding hers. “Did he say anything about the group that obtained the weapons? Who they might be? Whether they bought them on the black market or whether they stole the laser weapons themselves?”

She shook her head. “I’ve only read his summary, but he was already obsessed with that question. Was it a Middle Eastern, religious-based group, an organization out to extort huge amounts of money, or what? Maybe, as I suspect, one out to profiteer from disrupting the airline stocks? There’s one thing I can’t quite figure out at first glance, though. Where were those weapons for the last four years?”

Robert looked at her in silence. She cocked her head as she watched the progression of worry. “What’s wrong?”

“Kat, who’s chasing us?”

“Beg your pardon?”

“The alphabet-soup agencies. CIA, DIA, NRO. Did you omit one?”

She shook her head as if to clear it. “I’m not following…”

“Did you omit the FBI?”

Kat’s eyebrows climbed, and she sat back suddenly with a disgusted look on her face. “Forget that nonsense!”

He lowered his head and rubbed his temples. “Kat, I’m sorry, but someone killed Walter, and someone’s been trying their best to get us.” He looked up at her again. “Someone who consistently shows up with what you yourself called impeccable FBI credentials.”

She shook her head energetically, her voice terse and low. “Don’t go there, Robert.”

“Look, I—”

“The FBI is not capable as an agency of giving or carrying out such an order.”

“There could always be renegades,” he said quietly. “Perhaps they’re taking their dedication a bit too far.”

“NO!” she snapped. She put her laptop computer on the bed and got to her feet to pace with her arms folded, staying within a few feet and looking down at him only fleetingly as her agitation grew. She leaned over him again. “No! Dammit, I cannot and will not believe that. Maybe the Company, or rogue members within CIA. But not the Bureau.”

“Loyalty talking, Kat? Or logic? Think how many times your messages and calls to Jake Rhoades have backfired.”

“I admit my first response is based on loyalty. But the FBI could not, and would not, do such a thing, Robert. We’re talking about mass murder in cold blood. You don’t know these people. I do. There are some of the world’s most unapologetic Neanderthals in our ranks when it comes to accepting women, but these are good, solid professional people who live to serve their country and the law. Most of them have doctorates. Juris Doctors, sometimes Ph.D.’s. All well-educated, solid people. They can make mistakes, like Ruby Ridge or Waco, but they—we—could not do the things this murderous bunch has been doing.”

“Well, if not your agency, then who? You and I both know the Defense Intelligence people, DIA, are definitely not capable of such field operations. Nor is National Reconnaissance Office, or National Security Agency. That leaves only Central Intelligence, and I know CIA isn’t a candidate.”

“Oh, wonderful! My main media man can’t believe the spooks at Langley could go out of control, but he believes the FBI could turn renegade.”

“I just know a lot of people at CIA, okay? And I refuse to believe — I hope I don’t believe the CIA could commit such atrocities.”

“Robert, listen to yourself. You hope you don’t believe? That tells me you do believe they’re capable of murder.”

He shook his head and looked away, but she maneuvered into his line of vision, drawing him back. “Robert, remember I said this feels more corporate than governmental?”

“Yes.”

“I hate to say it, but neither my own Bureau nor Langley would be sophisticated or coordinated enough for such an operation. We couldn’t set up and pull off what these people have accomplished, whatever their purpose. There are simply too many managers, too many rules, too many constraints on money, and too many approvals to get, even for covert operations.”

“In other words?” he prompted, his arms folded.

“You asked who’s chasing us? Not government or military, that’s for certain.”

“And that’s raw speculation,” he countered.

“So, what else do we have to work with?”

The head of the team dispatched from Vegas to Seattle hung up the phone and smiled. A single line of computer code had solved the mystery. The hours of connection with Kat Bronsky’s Internet provider had gone through some clever filtering, but it had all originated from the Holiday Inn in the south Seattle community of Renton.

Getting the others to the Holiday Inn parking lot took another fifteen minutes, but creating the unquestioning reaction that four deadly serious FBI agents would trigger in a couple of hotel desk clerks justified the coordination. The frightened, wide-eyed night manager and his one assistant led the way to the back office instantly.

“What do you guys want us to do?” the young man asked.

“First, has either of you seen any of these people?” The pictures of Kat and Robert were laid on the desk, then one of Steve Delaney. The two employees studied them before shaking their heads.

“No, Sir. But we only came on duty at ten P.M.”

“Who was on the desk before?”

They passed over the names, addresses, and phone numbers of the off-duty desk crew, with the caution that two of them were headed out of town.

“We need a printout of every guest you have tonight, and every scrap of information on them, along with all the registration cards.”

The two jumped to comply, standing aside quietly while the pseudo-FBI agents methodically combed the list. One stood at last and motioned the leader over.

“Three possible couples. All three registered this afternoon, paid cash, and indicated a one-night stay. This is my prime candidate. Room four-fifteen. John and June Smith, for Chrissake.”

The leader shook his head. “Smith? You’d think she’d be more creative. Okay, let’s go,” he said, motioning to the others before turning to the night manager. “Say nothing to anyone of this operation. Stay in the office, and do not involve the local police, no matter what happens. This is a federal matter. You help us like you’ve been doing, you’re heroes. You fail to follow instructions, you could be obstructing justice.”

“No problem, Sir!” The manager said.

Two more teens raced down the hall outside of Robert MacCabe’s door. Inside the room, Kat paced around, trying to get used to the platform shoes. She moved to the peephole and looked out, wondering if there was any adult supervision of the group. She saw two of the teens stop suddenly at the ninety-degree bend at the end after running into several dark-suited figures who were striding around the corner. The two groups sorted themselves out and the men continued walking in the direction of Robert’s door, swimming into view in the tiny fish-eye lens. They stopped two doors down across the hall.

“What’s going on?” Robert was asking from behind her, but Kat held her left hand out to quiet him. A cold feeling crept into her stomach as the men positioned themselves on each side of room 415. She pushed her eye closer. The men were pulling guns now, and one of them inserted a card key in the door. He turned the knob, shoved the door inward, and all of them charged inside amid shouted commands.

Kat turned and motioned Robert toward her, then put her eye back to the peephole and whispered frantically out of the side of her mouth. “Go to my door! Put on the chain and the double lock and watch this.”

“What?” he asked.

She explained what she’d just witnessed, noticing when she looked back that a small crowd of teens had gathered at the far end of the hall to watch the show. There were shouts from within the assaulted room and one of the men appeared, dragging a protesting woman in a skimpy nightgown into the corridor. A naked man followed, held between two of the intruders. The fourth one looked at papers in his hand and then at their faces.

“They’re not the ones,” Kat thought she heard him say.

Suddenly the man and woman were pushed back into their room, and the door closed in their faces. All four men regained the corridor and marched in Kat and Robert’s direction. They reached the door and continued without breaking stride, passing the peepholes at full speed and disappearing down the opposite hallway.

Kat turned her back to the door, breathing hard. Her eyes betrayed a rising panic as Robert rounded the corner from the adjacent room in a similar state of upset. “Jeez, Kat,” he began.

“They’ve found us. God knows how, but they’ve found us.”

“They’ve found the hotel, but…”

Kat looked at him for a second. “Get packed. Quickly. We’ve got to find a safe way out of here.”

He nodded and turned, but Kat stopped him suddenly.

“Wait, Robert. That was one couple in one room. They’re looking for the wrong combination. We may have a few minutes before they figure out the possibility that we’d be in two rooms.”

There were loud voices in the corridor again and she looked back through the peephole, unsurprised to see several of the teens talking animatedly about what they had just witnessed. Two of them were almost alongside her door. Kat licked her lips and turned to Robert to whisper, “Quickly, get in the other room.” He complied as she threw open the security lock and opened the door.

“Boys, excuse me,” she said, in as relaxed and sexy a voice as she could manage. Her appearance stopped the young men in their tracks as they looked at a beautiful young woman in a micro-miniskirt, with incredible cleavage, actually beckoning them into a motel room.

“Yes, Ma’am?”

“Could you two strong young gentlemen step in here just a second?”

They gave each other a lottery-winning look and popped through the door, jostling each other in the process. She closed it behind them. Both stood in the alcove and turned to her, the tallest one keeping his eyes focused on her breasts.

Kat reached out and cupped his chin, raising his eyes.

“I’m up here, Darlin’.”

The boy blushed, and his companion snickered; his eyes were equally engaged in mentally recording Kat’s feminine features in intricate detail. “Sorry, Ma’am.”

“Well, I’m flattered you like them, but the rest of the lady needs your help.”

Their eyes grew wider. The chance to help a gorgeous, sexy female in distress, with unknown rewards on the other side, was impossible to resist. “Sure! What do you need?”

“Well, those men who just embarrassed that couple? Did you see that?”

“Yes, Ma’am,” they said in unison.

“They’re looking for me.”

“Why? What’d you do?” the shorter one asked.

“I couldn’t pay all my federal taxes on our farm down in Ellensberg. Lost my husband last year. I’m gonna pay, but I need more time and they want to arrest me.”

“They can do that?”

“Sure can. Look. All I need is a diversion to give me enough time to get out of here. Think you two could divert their attention without letting anyone know?”

The taller of the two grinned. “Yeah, I guess we could do that.”

“What’s your name, Sugar?”

“Ah, I, ah… Billy Matheson… of Yakima.”

“And you, Babe?”

“I’m Bobby Nash. I’m from Yakima, too.”

“Billy and Bobby from Yakima. Matheson and Nash. Your families listed in the phone book? Can I find you that way to thank you later?”

Two heads nodded enthusiastically.

“Okay,” she said, putting an arm around each of them and walking them farther into the room in a huddle. “Here’s what I need you to do.”

The leader of the group of four checked off one of the names on the printout in his hand and leaned against the interior corridor wall, well aware that time was running out. The assaulted couple in 415 would undoubtedly call the police. Perhaps thirty minutes, maybe an hour, but it would happen.

“Sir?”

He looked up and into the pimply face of a tall teenager. Another teen stood nearby. The tall boy was wide-eyed and upset, his eyes darting back and forth as he looked back at the parking lot.

“The desk clerk? He said you guys were really FBI. Is that right?”

“Why?” the leader asked.

“My — my truck… they stole it… right outside!”

“Son,” he interrupted, “you’ll have to call—” He stopped himself. “Wait a minute. When and where?”

The teen was practically hyperventilating. Lord, the leader thought, he’s going to start crying any second. He glanced at the other boy, who looked scared, but wasn’t saying anything.

“Out… there… we just pulled up in my father’s pickup — it’s a blue Toyota — and… and this man and woman pulled me out of the seat and yelled something about commandeering my truck for the FBI, and took off. I never saw a badge. I don’t think they really were FBI. Were they?”

It was the leader’s turn for raised eyebrows. He glanced at his three men and back at the kid. “What did they look like?”

The teen recited the description he’d been prompted to give of Robert MacCabe, and of Kat Bronsky with chestnut-brown hair and a pantsuit.

“Show me the direction they went!” the leader commanded, and propelled the teens toward the door.

“How many do you see?” Robert asked, as Kat peered through the partially opened curtain.

“Four. All piling into a van of some sort. Young Billy must be doing an Academy Award job.”

“That was grace under fire, Kat.”

“It was sex under fire, helped by raging hormones ignited by this outfit.” She turned back into the room. “Okay. Make the call. We have to make sure there were only four of them.”

Robert phoned the front desk. “Those FBI agents who were here. I need to speak with one of them.”

“They’ve gone, Sir.”

“All four of them?”

“Yes, Sir.”

Robert nodded to Kat, who was already in motion toward the door. “Thanks,” he said, putting the phone in its cradle and following her out.

They slipped out a side door and Robert unlocked the car as Kat spotted the two boys, still standing in the parking lot.

“Thanks, fellows. I owe you one.”

“No problem, Ma’am,” said the taller of the two. “They went down the street that way, southbound.” He pointed to the right. “You’d better get going.”

“You, too. Stay in your rooms tonight.”

She plopped into the driver’s seat and waved good-bye, accelerating onto the main avenue in the opposite direction, passing an oncoming black sedan with U.S. Government tags as it pulled into the drive and headed for the motel office.

When it became apparent that they weren’t going to catch the blue pickup, one of the four men called 911 to report its theft and its license number, identifying himself as FBI and asking for the local radio dispatch frequencies used by the police. With a handheld scanner programmed to the appropriate channels, they headed back to the motel, maintaining a fruitless vigil and almost missing the three cars that had gathered near the office, each of them dark-colored sedans with black sidewalls that screamed government.

“Jeez Louise! We can’t go in there!”

“Turn around. TURN AROUND!”

The driver wheeled back onto the street as a city squad car turned in the drive.

“So now what?”

“Back to the jet while we try to figure their next move,” the leader said, his face a study in frustration and anger.