Kat pulled the blackout curtains and replenished the fire in the main room. She was fighting sleep and trying to stay focused, but was slowly losing the battle. Outside the cabin a beautiful morning was unfolding beneath a clear blue sky, the bright sunshine reflecting off the fifteen-inch layer of early snow covering the peaceful, isolated valley. She had an intense longing to take a walk, but that desire was smothered by a fuzzy blanket of fatigue. The speech in Hong Kong seemed like ancient history. Was it really only a few days ago? It didn’t seem possible.
Kat dragged the old bear rug she remembered from childhood closer to the huge river-rock fireplace and sat with her knees pulled up and her arms around her legs, luxuriating in the warmth of the fire. There were three floor furnaces blazing away in the cabin, but the hearth was the most comfortable spot, and she wondered how many times over the years her aunt and uncle had been able to get away to use the place.
Not enough, she figured, though she knew they loved it. Her aunt was a lusty woman with an equally lusty spouse, as Kat had discovered one summer when she’d come back from a trail ride a half day early and surprised them au naturel and passionately engaged on the same rug. She smiled at the memory, though it had been shocking at the time: Aunt Janine in the full-throated cries of a glass-shattering climax as Kat opened the door, causing her uncle’s head to pop up from an unexpected and intriguing location. Kat had backed out fast and stayed away for an hour before returning, stomping on the porch and making as much noise as possible. When she opened the door, her aunt was busy in the kitchen and her uncle was writing at the table, both of them smiling and looking smugly satisfied.
Robert MacCabe’s footsteps were approaching from the kitchen, and Kat tried to suppress the long-ago memory with a flash of embarrassment, as if he could see the titillating image in her mind. She looked up and smiled at him somewhat sheepishly as he settled onto the rug beside her, carrying two steaming mugs in his hands.
“Kat, I figured it out!”
“What? How to make coffee?”
“No, where Walter hid the information.”
Kat brightened instantly. “Where?”
“I also found enough dark chocolate in there to make real hot chocolate,” he said, handing her a mug.
“Great, but where’d he hide it?”
“Aren’t you going to ask me about the chocolate?” Robert asked.
She shook her head in confusion. “What?”
“The hot chocolate you’re holding. Try it. Then I’ll tell you.”
She looked at the mug in her hand and finally took a sip. “That’s wonderful! Where’d you learn to do that?”
“From a little old chef in Lima, Peru, at the Crillon Hotel. I used to get down there on assignment and order tomato-and-egg sandwiches and a pot of this type of hot chocolate. Chocolate caliente, en español. Nirvana, in any other language.”
“Okay. I’m dutifully impressed. Now, where’d he hide it?”
“His favorite haunt in Washington wasn’t a restaurant. I’d almost forgotten. The ‘LOC’ he mentioned? Library of Congress.”
“What? That would be a needle in a haystack, Robert. The place is gigantic.”
“Not the library itself. The computer. It has probably the most secure library-related computer in the nation, one that’s backed up so many times that short of the complete destruction of the United States, whatever’s on the database will remain in some form.”
Kat shook her head. “You’re telling me Walter Carnegie stored his files on the master computer of the Library of Congress?”
“That’s what I’m telling you, although I won’t know until I can get into the database and look for a file with the file name he gave us.”
“Good grief! Can we do that by phone?”
“I doubt it,” Robert replied. “With that sort of master program, you probably have to be on-site and at the right terminal with the right access code to get into the deep files. So we’re going to have to go to D.C. before the wrong people figure this out as well.”
She sighed and drank some more of the hot chocolate. “Okay. But we also need to find Dr. Thomas, if he’s still in Vegas. Question is, which comes first?”
Robert shrugged. “Hell, since we don’t know what Walter knew, and we don’t know what this Thomas character knows, it’s a toss-up.”
“We do know where Walter’s file is, though. So I think D.C.’s the best start.”
“Okay, but not until tonight,” he said. “We need sleep.”
She shook her head. “I feel almost guilty about this.”
“What? Drinking pure chocolate or sleeping?”
She shook her head as she maneuvered herself to a sitting position. “No. I mean, considering all that’s happened… and here we are in this beautiful place…”
“I know,” he said, staring at the fire.
Kat looked at him in silence, waiting until he felt her gaze and turned to look in her eyes.
“Dollar for your thoughts,” he said, a bit off balance.
“A dollar?” she said, her eyebrows fluttering up.
“Inflation, you know,” he added.
She laughed softly, watching the glow of the fire play off his face, and thought how the perpetual smile around his eyes matched his personality. Kat forced herself to look away. “Robert,” she said, rotating the cup slowly in her hands, “they’re going to shoot down another airliner somewhere. You know that, don’t you?”
He was silent for a long time before nodding. “I do now, Kat. Walter Carnegie understood that, too, and someone killed him for it.”
“The fact that there have been no demands has to mean that they haven’t completed their opening act.” She threw her free hand up in frustration. “So who’s next? Are we going to get a seven-forty-seven impacting the World Trade Center in New York because the two pilots were neutralized on takeoff from Newark or Kennedy? What if they decide to zap the pilots aboard Air Force One as it lifts off from Andrews? What hurts so,” Kat continued, “is that whoever gets hit, the weapon may well be the very one we had in our hands.” She shook her head and sighed, registering only mild surprise when she felt Robert’s left hand on her forearm, massaging gently. “I’m sure it was a weapon.”
“Kat, there’s no sense beating yourself up about what happened in Honolulu. I’m certain that wasn’t the only one like it.”
“I’m not beating myself up,” she said, with an edge in her voice that she immediately softened. “I’m trying to figure this out before it’s too late for another two hundred people. I mean, I’m not trying to be the Lone Ranger, all right? But the fact is, I can’t call Jake, and I really can’t call anyone. I’m trained to be a good team player, and half the time I end up with no team and forced to operate autonomously, which is a trait the boys in the Bureau really love in a female!”
“You’re under some gender-based pressure, I take it?”
Kat widened her eyes. “Whoa. You wouldn’t believe. It amazes me how many otherwise levelheaded, intelligent men are threatened by a woman who refuses to fold up and play the helpless female.”
“And if you do play the helpless female,” he added, “they say you aren’t fit to do a man’s job.”
“Straight from the book Catch 22. But this catch needs its own number,” Kat said.
“How about ninety-nine? Remember Agent Ninety-nine from Get Smart?”
Kat nodded. “Yeah. You’re right. Catch ninety-nine. But it’s also the name of a great women’s pilot organization I belong to, the Ninety-Nines.”
“Even more reason to call it catch ninety-nine.”
“Very well. So named.”
“Kat, a team can consist of two. We’re a team.”
Kat rolled her eyes. “Yeah, well, I can’t deputize you. I’m going to have to go to D.C. alone.”