The ringing stopped.
“Could they… track us with that?” Robert asked.
She glanced over, her face betraying deep alarm. “I… don’t know. But let’s get out of here and find that motel. We’ve got a lot of digging to do, and we need to keep on being a moving target.”
The level of tension in the room was almost explosive as several ashen-faced men milled around while one pressed a telephone receiver more tightly to his ear, his face reflecting sudden intense concentration.
“Hold it,” he said, raising an index finger to quiet the others. The temporary office had been set up in an industrial park near Nellis Air Force Base, and the sudden passage of a pair of F-15 Eagles overhead caused him to frown and glance up.
He toggled the phone to get a new line, dialing the number again. “Someone answered Bronsky’s phone… and there was a guy’s voice in the background for just a second. It was like she punched it on and off rapidly. I’m calling back.” He waited a full thirty seconds. “Now she’s not answering.” Suddenly a look of happy surprise crossed the man’s face as he turned to his compatriots. “I don’t believe this!”
“What?” another of them said, crossing toward the first.
“That was the domestic eight-hundred-number for her satellite phone — the one that tries to connect through the cellular system — and it rang.”
“Yeah?” was the response.
“Meaning that when she refused to answer, the system played a message with a little identification tag line. She’s still in Seattle, Larry! We’ve found the bitch.”
“You say there was a male in the background?”
“Yeah,” he said, excited.
One of the men put a cassette in a small recorder and punched the button. Robert MacCabe’s voice from a recent television appearance filled the room. The man stopped it after thirty seconds.
“That voice?”
The other man smiled and nodded. “Sure sounded like it.”
“Then, gentlemen,” the leader said, “we have a double benefit. We know MacCabe is also with Bronsky, and they’re somewhere in Seattle.”
“How about the other four?”
“Who knows. They could have stashed them, or they could be dragging them along.”
There was a moment’s hesitation before all five men in the room dove for various phones. There was a jet waiting at Las Vegas’s McCarren Airport that could have them airborne in twenty minutes.
“What do we take?”
“All the firepower we can drag along. She’s making mistakes. This time we’re gonna nail her cute little ass.”
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.”