“On what grounds?” Kat asked, her voice subdued.
“Obstruction of justice, possible kidnapping, and perhaps a half-dozen others.”
“Those people are with me voluntarily, Jake.”
“The teenager, Delaney, is too young to make that decision legally. His father is stirring up a hornet’s nest to find him and see you prosecuted.”
“His father?”
“I don’t have the entire story, but the man’s gone ballistic. He apparently knows his son is with you and is accusing you, and us, of false arrest and kidnapping, and even hinting at sexual molestation.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Jake! Sexual… what kind of nonsense is that?”
“I’m merely telling you, Kat, that FBI agents do not have the luxury of sequestering people, especially minors, without due process of law and the sanction of their employer. His father apparently has joint custody. He’s within his rights.”
“So I’m supposed to give up Steve only to see him cut down by automatic weapon fire as he walks to his father’s arms? Now that’s a plan!”
“We’re expected to do things in accordance with the law, Kat. That’s your oath. You are, after all, a law enforcement officer.”
“Jake, listen to me. All the people involved, with one exception, are hiding of their own free will, and I’m not with them. I am a long way from where the others are holed up, and I’ve got one of the group with me, and it’s not Steve Delaney. We’re desperately trying to develop leads. Even if I thought it was safe, which it is not, I’d have no way of just turning the others over to you.”
“But you’re going to have to tell me where they are, Kat.”
“I can’t do that.”
“DAMMIT! Kat, this is it. This is the last warning. If I hang up without getting what I need, this is your job, and maybe your freedom. You don’t really want to go from promising FBI agent to convicted felon, do you?”
Kat let out a long sigh. A tense silence on the line hung between them.
“Inside five days, Jake, right or wrong, fired or not, indicted or otherwise, I’ll come in. If you can’t trust me in the meantime, I’ll understand. But these lives are my responsibility. And Jake… I’m truly sorry to have to disobey you.”
“I’m sorry too, Kat,” he began, sighing long and loud. She could tell what was coming: “Because as of this moment…”
She disconnected before he could say the word “suspended” and sat there, biting her lip for nearly a minute before looking up. A grim-faced Robert MacCabe had come into the room to stand quietly, watching her.
“Robert, I need to warn you about this.” She leaned over the table, trying to keep her voice very low. “I need to make sure you have the option of bailing out.”
“What are you talking about?” he asked.
“From this moment forward, anything you do to help me could be viewed as aiding a criminal act, or voluntarily conspiring to commit a criminal act. I have not been formally suspended, as far as I can tell. I didn’t hear any words to that effect. But I have no support in Washington, and they’re treating me now as a renegade.” She told him the details of the phone call. “I hate to say it, but I think you’d better get away from me. Just give me a twelve-hour head start before you call Washington and tell them what you know.”
“Cut it out, Kat.”
“Robert, I don’t want you following me into infamy if this ends up badly.”
He leaned down, face-to-face with her, his arms supporting his weight. “I am not abandoning you. You’re going to need my help. In fact, you couldn’t get rid of me now with a federal court order.”
Deputy Assistant Director Jake Rhoades looked up from the conference table he had been leaning over, the expression on his face fierce and foreboding.
“Yes?” he snapped.
A male agent in his late twenties held up a piece of paper. “Sorry to bother you, Sir, but I was told…”
Jake grabbed it from his hand. “What’s this?”
“We’ve located the area her signal is coming from.”
“Good. Where?”
“They… can’t pinpoint more closely than about fifteen square miles, and it took tremendous pressure to get the communications company to do it—”
“WHERE, dammit! Does it look like I’m on vacation here?”
“Seattle. At least; the general area.”
“Okay. Thanks. I’m sorry to be grumpy.”
“No problem, Sir.” The agent turned to go. Jake called after him, causing him to stop and turn back.
“Sir?”
“Look, I’ve known Kat Bronsky since she joined the Bureau, and I think the world of her, and this is really painful.”
“Understood.”
“You were trying to tell me how you located the signal.”
The agent nodded, moving back toward Jake. “This is an American communications company operating all over the world, and they did not want to cooperate at first. But their satellites are at approximately four hundred and fifty miles up, over seventy of them, and their computers can triangulate a signal on the ground. It took pressure from friends at the Federal Communications Commission to get their help.”
“Accurate to within fifteen miles?”
“They could do better, but they won’t. They have agreed, however, to keep tracking her signal, but they emphasized that’s only because the FBI owns the phone.”
When he had cleared the door, Jake turned to the others in the room. “Okay, everyone. It’s deployment time. Kat Bronsky is somewhere in Seattle, and we’ve got to find her before the boys from Nuremberg do.”
Robert had turned on the TV in his room and left it on low volume as he worked his way through a series of calls, trying to locate his Library of Congress contact, who was on vacation. Another line was ringing without an answer when something on the screen caught his attention. He reached for the remote when he saw the wreckage of the Chicago plane crash on screen, but the scene changed to one from Dallas, and he toggled up the sound. The anchor was saying something about an airport shutdown.
Robert replaced the receiver and moved quickly to the door to Kat’s room, finding her between calls. “You may want to see this on channel four,” he said.
She reached for her remote and clicked to the same channel. Pictures of the huge DFW Airport dissolved to stock shots of passengers milling back and forth in a terminal before cutting to a reporter in front of a mob scene at a ticket counter.
Thanks, Bill. The scene here at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport is one of uncertainty and upset this afternoon in the aftermath of the apparent cancellation of all flights, in and out, on the strength of a telephoned threat. In the wake of this morning’s airline disaster in Chicago, a group calling itself “Nuremberg” has claimed responsibility, claiming it also is responsible for the crash of an American jumbo jet in Vietnam, and another American airliner off Cuba last month. Two hours ago, someone claiming to be from the same terrorist group announced plans to destroy an airliner either arriving or departing from DFW this afternoon. The result, as I say, has been chaos, with thousands of stranded travelers being given too little information.
There was a sudden scuffling of chair legs as Robert pulled up the desk chair and sat down, glancing back at Kat, who was sitting mesmerized. When the report was over, she snapped off the TV once again and shook her head slowly.