“So we know their next move. Leverage the terror.”
“But to what end, Kat?”
“That’s the question, isn’t it? What do they want?” She stood suddenly and pointed to the chair he was in. “Up, please. I need the chair. Let’s get back to the calls. We need progress. I’m finding no one on planet Earth with the name Dr. Brett Thomas, although I’ve still got a few tricks to try in a bunch of databases. How about you?”
He filled her in on the vacationing contact.
“Of course! Naturally, he’d be on vacation when you need him!” Kat said in a sarcastic tone. “Murphy never sleeps.”
Robert looked puzzled. “Beg your pardon?”
Kat pulled up the chair Robert had vacated and sat at the desk. She laid out a notebook and reached for the phone. “Murphy’s Law,” she explained, her voice flat.
“Oh, yeah.” Robert nodded. “‘What can go wrong, will go wrong.’”
“But do you know the prime corollary to Murphy’s Law?” Kat asked, watching him slowly shake his head as she continued. “Mr. Murphy was an optimist.”
For three hours they worked in the relative obscurity of their respective rooms, both using their laptops plugged into the phones when they weren’t using the lines for direct calls. Kat had carefully connected first Robert, then herself, to their respective Internet providers through a series of difficult-to-trace eight-hundred numbers. CNN remained on in both rooms, and the various reports and flashes outlined the rapidly developing crisis of confidence in the commercial aviation system as Atlanta and Salt Lake City joined the list of major American airports temporarily shut down by telephoned threats.
At nearly five in the afternoon Robert entered Kat’s room unheard and moved to her side, a smile on his face.
“How’s it going?” he asked, his voice causing her to jump slightly.
“Didn’t see you come in,” she said, turning back to the screen. “So far, still nothing. How about you?”
“Well, for a while all I’d learned is the date and time of Wally’s funeral, and the fact that two more threats have been received since we’ve been here, shutting down Atlanta Hartsfield and Salt Lake City Airports. This group, Nuremberg, is really flexing its muscles.”
“Or it’s a field day for kooks with phones,” she said, watching him sit down.
“But I finally located my friend on vacation.”
Kat sat forward. “Where?”
“Tahiti.”
“Good grief! Will he help?”
“He will, if he can. He should be on a public phone at a secluded beach right this minute trying to arrange special research access, while a scantily clad young woman puts whatever they were doing on hold.”
“You just had to get that in, didn’t you?” she asked, her face cradled in her right hand as she leaned on the desk and rolled her eyes.
“Okay, I’m envious.”
“So he’ll call you back?” she asked, changing the subject. “How? Surely you didn’t give him this number?”
Robert sat on the bed and frowned at her. “Of course not. I’ll call him back. But I’m worried about those phone card numbers. Aren’t they traceable to you?”
She nodded. “Yes, but not immediately.”
“You’re sure?”
“I can’t be one hundred percent sure, but it’s a decent guess, and we can’t use the satellite phone for everything.”
The computer chirped. Kat raised a finger and turned back to the screen, typing in a few keystrokes.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“A listing of scientists on a little-used database. I’ve been unable—” She sat forward and typed in another command. “Wait… a… minute! Wait just a darn minute!”
“What?”
“Just… a name I saw… triggered an idea. Hold on.” Several seconds elapsed as Robert maneuvered around behind her, his eyes focusing on the screen at the same moment a name and short dossier came into view.
“Wait, Kat. That’s not Thomas?”
She was shaking her head in excitement. “No, it’s not! Carnegie was fuzzing things up. The guy we’re looking for isn’t Brett Thomas, it’s Dr. Thomas Maverick.”
“What? Are you sure?” He leaned over her shoulder, following her finger.
“Look at his pedigree, Robert. U.S. government contractor positions in for the last twenty, almost thirty years. Los Alamos; Oak Ridge, Tennessee; NASA; and then Las Vegas.”
“Why Vegas, I wonder? What’s out there?”
“I’m not sure. Probably a lot of contractors. Nellis Air Force Base is in Vegas, or maybe he’s just retired.”
“But there’s no Thomas?”
She shook her head. “No Ph.D. issued anywhere in the Western world in the past sixty years to anyone even remotely close to that name. But this…”
“Bret Maverick. James Garner’s character in that classic TV show. Clever way of reversing the names. No address?”
“Don’t worry. Now that I know his name, I’ll find his address. Get back to work. Call Tahiti. Try not to drool too much.”
“We need to eat sometime, Kat.”
She shook her head. “Not yet. First we need answers.”
In five minutes he was back in her room with a long face.
“What?” she asked.
“He can do it, but not before this evening. There’s a window every night in which they update the computer. That’s the only time he can add an authorized user.”
“So how long?”
Robert looked at his watch. “It’s five-thirty now. He said to call him back about nine-thirty tonight, our time.”
Kat looked deeply worried. “I wasn’t planning for us to stay that long. I don’t know who might be closing in on us.”
“How, Kat? How could they find us?”
She sighed. “The telephone calls, my mistake with the satellite phone. I don’t know, but I’m very concerned about staying here a second longer than we have to.”
“Gut feeling? Because I trust a professional’s intuition.”
She nodded. “Another thing I’ve been thinking.” She gestured to the edge of the bed. “Sit, please.”
He settled in on the bed next to her chair, and she sat back and looked at him for a few seconds. “Let’s go back over this… see if we’re missing anything obvious.”
“Okay.”
“First, we lose the MD-eleven over Cuban waters to something that fried the eyes of at least one pilot. We know that for a fact.”
“Right.”
“Next, Meridian Five is attacked with a similar weapon — some sort of electromagnetic weapon — and you, yourself, live through the crash.”
“Yes.”
“And now we have a crash in Chicago, with this group claiming responsibility and using the name of the German city of Nuremberg, and now issuing threats to shut down major airports.”
“Right. Possibly.”
“Okay, but why? These people have gone to a tremendous amount of time, trouble, and expense to kill and frighten. Why are they doing it?”
“Probably money, as we thought before. Maybe power has something to do with it, too, but my first guess is money.”
“Why?” she asked, leading him slightly.
“Because… they’re so well organized and financed?”
Kat nodded enthusiastically. “Precisely. But they’ve made no demands. Now, maybe they’ve made no demands because they are just trying to soften us all up, but what if the chaos itself is their objective?”
Robert leaned closer, studying her face. “What do you mean?”
“I was thinking about this a few minutes ago, Robert. How can you make lots of money from seriously undermining the airlines? How about selling their stock short, or softening up the industry for financial takeovers? We’ve been thinking this is terrorism for political gain, directly or otherwise. But while we’re expecting direct extortion or ransom demands, they may already be getting precisely what they want from collapsing airline market prices.”