“You know, I like the ‘us’ part of that, Ms. Bronsky, Ma’am.”
“You do?” she asked, feigning surprise. “And why is that?”
“I don’t know. It’s just that girls with big…”
“What?” she shot back, interrupting him, her eyebrows arching up.
“Guns! Girls with big guns.”
“Uh-huh. And what about them?”
“They turn me on,” he said.
“It’s only nine millimeters,” she added.
“I’d hate to have you say that about me,” he replied.
Kat pulled herself up from the seat, rolling her eyes and trying not to laugh as she pulled the battery and satellite phone from her purse and looked down at him. “You worry me, MacCabe.”
After coordinating with the flight attendants, Kat and Robert unfolded the antenna on the satellite phone, positioning it against the Plexiglas window and verifying the signal indication before she punched in the number of Jake Rhoades’s cell phone.
He answered on the first ring.
“Jake? Kat.”
“Good Lord, Kat, what the hell is going on?”
“There’s been virtually no way I could call before now.”
“Okay, okay. Where are you?”
“Where are you, Jake? Not at headquarters, I hope?”
“No. I came home for a few hours. How’d you know to use this line?”
“I needed to talk to you with minimal chance of being monitored. My previous call to you was intercepted somehow. I think we have a leak at the Bureau.”
“What?”
She gave him a quick synopsis of the bogus FBI team and their near success.
“Jake, I’m… ashamed to tell you this, but we lost the jet, the weapon, and the prisoner.” She filled in the details of watching the Global Express depart, presumably with the weapon aboard.
There was a long sigh from the other end. “Oh, boy. I though we had it just about cracked, Kat. That weapon, or whatever it was, was pivotal.”
“You saved our lives with that fast message response a few hours back. We were in the middle of a lethal charade.”
“I couldn’t fathom what you were doing in Honolulu when we’d been told you were on approach to Midway Island. We had no one waiting in Honolulu. So those names you sent were the aliases.”
“That’s right,” she said.
“They were that convincing?”
“Even the special ID marks and the hologram on the ID card, Jake. These guys, whoever they are, are consummate professionals with access to the best equipment, and on top of that, they’re good actors. I didn’t have a clue.”
“Then there’s nothing you could have done, except, I suppose, call on arrival.”
“They told me Assistant Deputy Director Rhoades had issued a specific order that I was to call no one.”
“Wait a minute, Kat, they used my name?”
“They did. He did. The one calling himself Hawkins. As I said, there was virtually nothing that didn’t fit, until it was almost too late. Do you have any idea how all that information could have fallen into their hands?”
“Did you tell anyone else you were coming, and where? I mean, it may be your satellite phone that’s being monitored.”
“Highly unlikely, given the digital, scrambled nature of the signal. Remember our briefings? We were assured this was one short step down from encryption, and my name isn’t listed anywhere in association with the number of this phone.”
She thought of the conversation with Jordan James, but decided to ignore it. After all, she had never mentioned their destination in that call. “You want to know how I can say conclusively that the leak came from my call to you, Jake?”
“How?”
“An ophthalmologist was waiting. That request was passed only through you.”
“Good Lord,” he said quietly.
“And, Jake, there’s something else. I got a call in flight on the way into Honolulu that was supposedly from someone at Langley. You need to know about this, because the call set me up to believe the show they’d put together.”
“You’re not alone, Kat. We were thrown off, too, probably by the same person falsely claiming to be one of our liaison people at CIA.”
“So what do you make of this?” she asked. “Who on earth are we up against?”
“There’s a theory running around here…” Jake’s voice trailed off.
“Yes?”
“Well, the thing that stopped me is that everything you just described to me reinforces that theory.”
“Which is?”
“That we’re finally encountering what some analysts predicted all along, a terrorism-for-profit organization, and they’re simply clearing their throat to get our undivided attention.”
“You mean mercenaries?”
“Worse. They may be working for themselves — an organization determined to establish their power before they demand a huge ransom not to kill.”
“I hate to say it, but that thought had crossed my mind, too.”
“Kat, this morning the National Transportation Safety Board held a news conference in response to all the media speculation and, in essence, confirmed that SeaAir very likely resulted from the simultaneous loss of both pilots in flight.”
“In other words, the same scenario as Meridian.”
“Except in Meridian, one of the pilots refused to die,” Jake added. “NTSB isn’t saying how the pilots were taken out, and even though the press asked about the possibility of things like explosions and toxic fumes, NTSB says they don’t know.”
Kat thought for a few seconds before replying. “If true, Jake… if the same organization is responsible for both and it’s the start of an unprecedented extortion scheme… then the fact that they have not gone public with any demands means they definitely will strike again.”
“Precisely. That’s the assessment.”
“Good Lord! But would such a group pull out so many stops to kill Robert MacCabe and the other survivors just on the outside chance they knew something?”
“Considering the magnitude of what they’ve already done and the worldwide scope of their operations, I’d say it makes perfect sense for them to bend heaven and earth to get rid of MacCabe and anyone he might have talked to.”
“Including me, of course,” she said.
“Including you. Now. Where do we go from here?”
“Aren’t I supposed to ask you that?” Kat rubbed her eyes and sighed. “I’m exhausted, Jake. We all are.” She gave him a rundown on the condition of the survivors. “I’m not even sure that Honolulu ophthalmologist was legitimate.”
“What I meant, Kat, was where do we meet you when you arrive? This one has got to be done right, and since we’re dealing with a commercial airline, we shouldn’t have another diversion problem.”
“Sea-Tac Airport in Seattle,” she said, passing the expected arrival time.
“We’ll be there in force, Kat, at the gate.”
Kat hesitated, holding back her burning desire to raise the issue of eye-killing weaponry possibly built by the U.S. military, but the question oozed with political danger. Perhaps she should think it through a bit longer before discussing such suspicions with the deputy director of the FBI.
“I’ll call you from Seattle, Jake,” she said instead. They disconnected, and Kat glanced at Robert before sitting in silence a few moments. She wondered if conspiracy theories tended to multiply in direct proportion to fatigue. Why had she held back with Jake Rhoades?
The sudden ring of the phone caught her off guard, and she jumped, losing control of it, batting it in the air and barely catching it and regaining her grip. Robert was trying to suppress laughter, and she smiled somewhat sheepishly as she punched the button and unfolded the antenna.