It seemed like minutes had passed before Kat dared to look. What had been the broken fuselage of an Albatross was now a hulk of burning, smoking wreckage indistinguishable as an aircraft. Through the flames and smoke she could see the Caravan sitting undamaged at the water’s edge, its cabin empty.
“Robert?” she called out.
“Right here,” he answered slowly.
“What was that? What happened?”
“I found a signal flare pen in the… first-aid kit. Looks like a fountain pen. It was all I could think of.”
“It was brilliant,” she said.
“Agent Bronsky?” Thomas Maverick raised up from where he’d been examining Jordan James. “The bleeding isn’t slowing.”
Jordan’s eyes were open as he clutched his chest and tried to clear his throat. Kat moved to him, feeling helpless. “Don’t try to talk, Uncle Jordan.”
James shook his head. “No! I must… tell you this. Is he dead? Schoen?”
She nodded.
He nodded in return. “Good. He and Gallagher were crazy. They… they decided there was no price too great to pay to protect the project.”
“The project?”
“Yes. Project Brilliant Lance. Lasers designed to blind and kill. Deep black project. I invested my life savings in Signet Electrosystems, Kat. When I left CIA, I thought… it was the last assignment. I… thought they were a good company, and they had this… this incredible fast-track black-project… contract. It was supposed to be the greatest defense coup yet.”
“Before the nephew of the White House chief of staff lost his eyes?”
Jordan nodded, coughing and wincing. “I was on the board. No one formally told me the… development was… continuing off the books. But I knew it. The arrogance of… an old intelligence hand. ‘We know better than… this stupid President.’”
“Then the weapons were stolen?” Kat asked.
He shook his head, looking at Robert and Thomas Maverick, both of whom were kneeling beside him. “There was no theft. I just let you… follow that… conclusion.”
“And… no leak in the FBI?”
He shook his head no.
“Who is Gallagher?” Kat asked.
“Signet’s CEO,” he replied.
She looked at him in silence for a few seconds. “Schoen mentioned a botched test firing, Jordan. Was the SeaAir crash an accident?”
“Yes,” he said. “They were… doing another… secret test series with an even more powerful version, and someone in… a C-one-forty-one from… Wright-Patterson got trigger-happy and fired… at the wrong radar target.”
“So, the Air Force—”
“Not involved directly. We had the power… to order everything sealed.” He stopped and gasped for breath a few times. “They pulled the test dummy from the F-one-oh-six later… that day, expecting a normal test hit. They knew about SeaAir, but no one… on the test team had any suspicion at all they… might have been involved, let alone responsible. But they looked at… the dummy, and there was no laser hit, even though the cameras showed one. They enlarged the video image… of what the laser had hit, and… two commercial pilots came up, sitting in the crosshairs a microsecond before the laser destroyed their eyes and probably killed them instantly.” He looked at Robert. “This is an incredibly… powerful weapon to be shoulder-fired. It’s… it’s a fearsome thing. I’ve always worried… one could fall into the wrong hands.”
“Such as a terrorist?” Robert prompted.
Jordan nodded.
“But there is no terrorist organization, is there, Mr. Secretary?”
Jordan James looked up at Robert. “Oh, yes, there is. Signet Electrosystems. We… became efficient terrorists, even inventing our own name, Nuremberg.”
“Schoen’s idea?” Kat asked.
Jordan nodded with great difficulty and gasped for breath before continuing. “Under the leadership, if… you can call it that, of our… CEO… Larry Gallagher.”
“Mr. Secretary,” Robert MacCabe said quietly, “are you saying that Schoen did all the rest of this, the Meridian seven-forty-seven, the airport shutdowns, the Chicago crash, just to cover up that accident?”
Jordan closed his eyes for a second and appeared to drift off, then came to. “I… didn’t know what he was doing. I only knew from a phone call to him that something was about to happen… as a diversion. I tried… dear God, I really tried to stop them.” He closed his eyes and panted for breath, forcing himself to stay conscious. “Gallagher… wouldn’t listen. Schoen… wouldn’t. I… suspected Australia or Hong Kong, or even Tokyo, which… is why I had you pulled off that flight, Kat. I knew he was crazy by then. I just didn’t… I… I wanted… you not flying… a few days. Didn’t know…”
He drifted off. Kat could see the pool of blood growing beneath him.
“He’s bleeding out, Kat, and there’s nothing we can do,” Robert said.
Jordan opened his eyes again, fixing his gaze on Kat’s tear-streaked face. She was sobbing silently as she watched his eyes flutter open again.
“I’m so sorry, Kat. I’ve destroyed your faith… and fifty years… of government service. I just… didn’t know what to do. I’d gone from… six hundred thousand net worth to twenty million… all in stock, and it would all be gone. But… if they had time to clean this up… I thought… thought…” He coughed violently and recovered. “I… was too busy being rich and sage. Even had a school… named for me.”
“Who was Schoen, Jordan?” Kat asked softly.
“Former… East German. Defected in the sixties… then CIA. Rewarded for service to the U.S. with a… naturalized citizenship. I hired him at Langley.”
“I’m so sorry, Jordan,” Kat said. Tears flowed down her cheeks, but he had already drifted into a coma.
She sat with him for nearly a half hour as his life ebbed away. A Medivac helicopter summoned by satellite phone sat down nearby at last, but too late.
Kat stood shakily as Thomas Maverick climbed into the helicopter that would carry Jordan’s body back to Hailey, Idaho. “Robert, we’ve got to get to Stehekin,” she said.
“You think there’s any chance he was bluffing?” Robert asked.
She took a deep, ragged breath and looked at him, shaking her head no. “There’s no way he could have guessed the name Stehekin if they hadn’t found them. I’d like to hope they haven’t reached them yet, but I know better. At any rate, we have to find out. And I can handle a Caravan.”
With an in-flight phone call, a park ranger was waiting at the dock with a car when they tied up at Stehekin. They jumped in and roared toward the cabin.
There was a wisp of steam coming from the roof vent, but no smoke from the chimney as they approached the front door. The ranger briefed them on the false alarm the day before. “A local had spotted the front door open with no one around. I checked things out, glanced around inside, noted the remains of a hummingbird feeder and its spilled red syrup on the porch, and then reclosed the door. Everything seemed okay to me.”
Kat tried the door and found it unlocked. She held her gun at the ready as she opened the latch and swung it inward, greeted instantly by the familiar heavy sweet aroma of burned firewood. It was stale, as if the fire had been out for some time.
“Stay here,” she told Robert and the ranger, but Robert stepped inside and stopped, leaving the ranger on the porch.
The door to one of the bedrooms was open. Kat strained to see inside as she moved carefully, calling their names and hearing nothing. “Dallas? Graham?”
The creaking of a floorboard ran cold chills up her spine, but she forced herself to keep moving.