“Well, if not your agency, then who? You and I both know the Defense Intelligence people, DIA, are definitely not capable of such field operations. Nor is National Reconnaissance Office, or National Security Agency. That leaves only Central Intelligence, and I know CIA isn’t a candidate.”
“Oh, wonderful! My main media man can’t believe the spooks at Langley could go out of control, but he believes the FBI could turn renegade.”
“I just know a lot of people at CIA, okay? And I refuse to believe — I hope I don’t believe the CIA could commit such atrocities.”
“Robert, listen to yourself. You hope you don’t believe? That tells me you do believe they’re capable of murder.”
He shook his head and looked away, but she maneuvered into his line of vision, drawing him back. “Robert, remember I said this feels more corporate than governmental?”
“Yes.”
“I hate to say it, but neither my own Bureau nor Langley would be sophisticated or coordinated enough for such an operation. We couldn’t set up and pull off what these people have accomplished, whatever their purpose. There are simply too many managers, too many rules, too many constraints on money, and too many approvals to get, even for covert operations.”
“In other words?” he prompted, his arms folded.
“You asked who’s chasing us? Not government or military, that’s for certain.”
“And that’s raw speculation,” he countered.
“So, what else do we have to work with?”
The head of the team dispatched from Vegas to Seattle hung up the phone and smiled. A single line of computer code had solved the mystery. The hours of connection with Kat Bronsky’s Internet provider had gone through some clever filtering, but it had all originated from the Holiday Inn in the south Seattle community of Renton.
Getting the others to the Holiday Inn parking lot took another fifteen minutes, but creating the unquestioning reaction that four deadly serious FBI agents would trigger in a couple of hotel desk clerks justified the coordination. The frightened, wide-eyed night manager and his one assistant led the way to the back office instantly.
“What do you guys want us to do?” the young man asked.
“First, has either of you seen any of these people?” The pictures of Kat and Robert were laid on the desk, then one of Steve Delaney. The two employees studied them before shaking their heads.
“No, Sir. But we only came on duty at ten P.M.”
“Who was on the desk before?”
They passed over the names, addresses, and phone numbers of the off-duty desk crew, with the caution that two of them were headed out of town.
“We need a printout of every guest you have tonight, and every scrap of information on them, along with all the registration cards.”
The two jumped to comply, standing aside quietly while the pseudo-FBI agents methodically combed the list. One stood at last and motioned the leader over.
“Three possible couples. All three registered this afternoon, paid cash, and indicated a one-night stay. This is my prime candidate. Room four-fifteen. John and June Smith, for Chrissake.”
The leader shook his head. “Smith? You’d think she’d be more creative. Okay, let’s go,” he said, motioning to the others before turning to the night manager. “Say nothing to anyone of this operation. Stay in the office, and do not involve the local police, no matter what happens. This is a federal matter. You help us like you’ve been doing, you’re heroes. You fail to follow instructions, you could be obstructing justice.”
“No problem, Sir!” The manager said.
Two more teens raced down the hall outside of Robert MacCabe’s door. Inside the room, Kat paced around, trying to get used to the platform shoes. She moved to the peephole and looked out, wondering if there was any adult supervision of the group. She saw two of the teens stop suddenly at the ninety-degree bend at the end after running into several dark-suited figures who were striding around the corner. The two groups sorted themselves out and the men continued walking in the direction of Robert’s door, swimming into view in the tiny fish-eye lens. They stopped two doors down across the hall.
“What’s going on?” Robert was asking from behind her, but Kat held her left hand out to quiet him. A cold feeling crept into her stomach as the men positioned themselves on each side of room 415. She pushed her eye closer. The men were pulling guns now, and one of them inserted a card key in the door. He turned the knob, shoved the door inward, and all of them charged inside amid shouted commands.
Kat turned and motioned Robert toward her, then put her eye back to the peephole and whispered frantically out of the side of her mouth. “Go to my door! Put on the chain and the double lock and watch this.”
“What?” he asked.
She explained what she’d just witnessed, noticing when she looked back that a small crowd of teens had gathered at the far end of the hall to watch the show. There were shouts from within the assaulted room and one of the men appeared, dragging a protesting woman in a skimpy nightgown into the corridor. A naked man followed, held between two of the intruders. The fourth one looked at papers in his hand and then at their faces.
“They’re not the ones,” Kat thought she heard him say.
Suddenly the man and woman were pushed back into their room, and the door closed in their faces. All four men regained the corridor and marched in Kat and Robert’s direction. They reached the door and continued without breaking stride, passing the peepholes at full speed and disappearing down the opposite hallway.
Kat turned her back to the door, breathing hard. Her eyes betrayed a rising panic as Robert rounded the corner from the adjacent room in a similar state of upset. “Jeez, Kat,” he began.
“They’ve found us. God knows how, but they’ve found us.”
“They’ve found the hotel, but…”
Kat looked at him for a second. “Get packed. Quickly. We’ve got to find a safe way out of here.”
He nodded and turned, but Kat stopped him suddenly.
“Wait, Robert. That was one couple in one room. They’re looking for the wrong combination. We may have a few minutes before they figure out the possibility that we’d be in two rooms.”
There were loud voices in the corridor again and she looked back through the peephole, unsurprised to see several of the teens talking animatedly about what they had just witnessed. Two of them were almost alongside her door. Kat licked her lips and turned to Robert to whisper, “Quickly, get in the other room.” He complied as she threw open the security lock and opened the door.
“Boys, excuse me,” she said, in as relaxed and sexy a voice as she could manage. Her appearance stopped the young men in their tracks as they looked at a beautiful young woman in a micro-miniskirt, with incredible cleavage, actually beckoning them into a motel room.
“Yes, Ma’am?”
“Could you two strong young gentlemen step in here just a second?”
They gave each other a lottery-winning look and popped through the door, jostling each other in the process. She closed it behind them. Both stood in the alcove and turned to her, the tallest one keeping his eyes focused on her breasts.
Kat reached out and cupped his chin, raising his eyes.
“I’m up here, Darlin’.”
The boy blushed, and his companion snickered; his eyes were equally engaged in mentally recording Kat’s feminine features in intricate detail. “Sorry, Ma’am.”