“I know it.”
“And if you’ve never heard the old adage about there being nothing as dangerous as a wounded bear, let me tell you, it’s the truth.”
The shopping foray had taken just over two hours, and Robert made it back to the motel before nine to find Kat in a hopeful but agitated state.
“Robert, I located Dr. Maverick! He lives in Vegas, but he isn’t home, and a neighbor I got on the phone said he’d shot out of there two days ago.”
“Any idea where he was going?”
She nodded. “An idea, yes. The neighbor gave me some leads. He’s got a place in Sun Valley, Idaho, and I’m betting he’s headed there.”
“Kat, have you considered…”
She raised her hand to stop him. “I know. If we can find out where he is, so can Nuremberg’s goons. But we have no other hard target. I have the address and the phone number, but if he’s there, he’s holed up and not answering.”
“So what do we do?”
Kat pursed her lips. “We slip on a commuter flight in the morning to Sun Valley to look for him.”
She took one of the bags Robert was holding and rummaged around for the hair-coloring product, found it, and held it up. “Good. Exactly what I need.” She moved quickly into her bathroom and waved as she closed the door behind her and turned on the water.
Robert followed and knocked lightly on the door. “You mind if I talk to you while you’re working?”
Kat opened it a few inches and peered out. “Why?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Perhaps the idea that we’ve got a few unresolved issues, like why the hell we’re gambling that a frightened man may go to his mountain cabin instead of off the ends of the earth?”
“Call it a hunch, Robert.”
“Just a hunch? Or intuition?”
“The same professional intuition you said you trusted.”
“Just asking.”
Kat peeked out through the crack in the bathroom door. “When a lady goes through this little conversion process, she doesn’t like to be visible. So go to your room, close the door, and make that call to Tahiti. We’re running out of time.”
A short line of cars was waiting at the curb as a dozen men and women in dark suits spilled out of the lobby of Galvin Flying Service. The special agent-in-charge introduced his team to the arriving force amid a flurry of watch-checking, and waved to the FAA pilots who had flown them in by government jet from D.C. Carry-on bags were loaded and cellular phone numbers exchanged as the FBI team geared up for a rapid trip into the Seattle field office and an intensive all-night effort to find their prodigal sister agent.
As the informal motorcade roared away from the curb, a man with forgettable features sitting in a rented van turned away and lifted a cellular phone to his mouth. “We’ve got company,” he said, reporting the small army of FBI agents.
“Confirms the fact that she’s here, doesn’t it?” the voice on the other end said. “Get back over to the main airport while we keep the search going from here.”
“You having any luck?” the man asked.
“With the help of a little cash, we’re narrowing it down.”
CHAPTER 40
Kat turned off the hair dryer and used her comb to position a few stray hairs before using the hair spray. She shook her head at the brassy platinum blond in the mirror, suppressing a slight twinge of excitement at the prospect of appearing in public in clothes and makeup that she would never wear as herself.
She left the bathroom, relieved to find the door between the rooms closed. She pulled on the dark panty hose and, piece by piece, wiggled into the rest of the costume before inserting her feet into the high platform shoes. She took a long look at herself in the full-length mirror on the wall, distracted momentarily by noise from some members of a visiting high school basketball team whooping it up in the corridor outside.
Kat looked at the girl in the mirror, worried about overdoing the trash-flash. All right, Katrina La Femme. It’s show time! Let’s try it out.
She opened her side of the double connecting door and stuck her leg into the opening, drawing a wolf whistle from Robert, then applause when she entered and struck a pose with hands on hips and head cocked to one side.
“Incredible!” he said, the telephone cradled on his shoulder.
“Cheap, cheap, cheap!” she replied, pretending to chew gum.
More voices were yelling in the corridor, and the sound of footsteps could be heard running in one direction, then running the other way, accompanied by giggles.
“What on earth are they doing out there?” Robert asked.
“Just kids having fun,” she said, moving to the peephole on the door and pressing her eye against it. “Any progress?”
“Hang on,” he said, turning to talk to someone on the other end. Kat turned around just as Robert replaced the receiver with a large smile on his face.
“Let me fire up the computer, Kat. We’ve got a clear track to that file for the next thirty minutes.”
“Wonderful!”
She sat on the edge of the bed beside him and watched as he programmed the right numbers into the computer and waited for it to make the connection with the Library of Congress. Following his friend’s instructions, he found the master file list and keyed a small search routine to find the one hidden file named WCCHRN.
“Okay. This is it. I’m sure no one knew it was there.”
“Did you tell your friend what you were doing?” Kat asked.
Robert shook his head. “No. He owed me a big-time favor and I collected. He’s trusting me not to destroy anything or leave a trail. But without this access, there’s no way we’d be able to get that file. No way.”
“Then if we can get this file downloaded, can we erase all evidence of it?”
Robert shook his head. “With the backups they’ve got? Not a chance. This file will still be around on some computer tape for a hundred years. Maybe forever.”
The file name suddenly appeared by itself on the screen. He keyed in the password “Carnegie” and crossed his fingers.
The screen filled with indecipherable symbols and random characters.
“Damn! He wrote the file in some machine code,” Robert said. “Could be simple, could be impossible. I’m going to download everything first.”
It took twenty-two minutes for the voluminous file from the Library of Congress to transfer through the telephone lines. At last he broke the connection and tried to open what Walter Carnegie had hidden away.
More gobbledygook.
Robert entered more commands, all with the same frustrating result.
“This may not be possible, Kat, without a cryptologist.”
“Would you mind if I try something?” she asked.
Kat brought her laptop in and positioned it to face his before taking over the keyboard with a practiced hand. “I’m using our infrared link to download the file to my machine.”
“Why?”
“Just… a minute. May be easier to do than explain.” When the process was completed, she sat back on his bed and put her computer in her lap, calling up a special program from her files. “This will tell me what kind of format, what kind of language or code this thing is written in,” she explained.
The results popped up almost instantly, prompting a laugh from Kat.
“What?” Robert asked.
“Clever. Not too sophisticated, but clever. He simply converted the file to a picture. I need to translate it back to a word-processing format.” The computer whirred for a few seconds before normal, readable text flashed on the screen.