“This is Hail,” he said.
“Hail, this is Pepper,” the director of the CIA said. Without waiting for Hail to respond, Pepper asked, “Have you heard from Kara?”
Hail was surprised by the question. At the very least, he had assumed that Kara had checked in with her boss. If Pepper was being straight with him, and Kara had not contacted him, this new information was alarming. Kara was out there by herself with no means of tactical support — doing only God knows what.
“No, I haven’t,” Hail told Pepper. “I was hoping you had.”
“We haven’t heard anything from her for days,” Pepper said.
There was a long and lonely silence on the phone as both men thought, “Where do we go from here?”
Finally, Pepper asked, “When was the last time you heard from her?”
Hail thought the question over and said, “She called me from the tarmac at the Snake Island runway. She said that she was going to fly back to Termez with Kornev so she could work on him.”
“Yeah, she called and told me the same thing,” Pepper said.
Another long silence hung between them.
Hail finally said, “I have a drone watching Kornev’s compound in Termez, and it showed Kornev’s Hummer leave his garage. I didn’t have the assets to track his vehicle, and the SUV has not returned. After I had a drone charged and ready to fly, we flew over to the airport and saw Kornev’s Hummer parked at his Air Cress service. So, we don’t know who left in a plane. It might have been both Kara and Kornev, or whether it was either Kara or Kornev alone. We just don’t know.”
Pepper appeared to be as mystified as Hail.
“All right,” Pepper said. “I’ll let you know if I hear anything, and I would appreciate if you would let me know if she contacts you.”
“Will do,” Hail said, and the connection was broken.
Hail dropped his phone in his lap and looked out across the vast ocean in front of him.
“Where are you Kara Ramey?” Hail said to himself.
His phone made a ding sound indicating he had received a text message.
Reluctantly, he picked up his phone and checked the message.
Hi, Marshall. This is Kara. I’m sorry to just disappear on u, but like I told u, I have my own agenda and need to make myself whole again. I am safe.
Hail read the message, and his heart did a little flip-flop.
He punched his big thumbs at the screen and wrote:
I know this sounds silly, but I was very worried about you. I miss—
Hail thought about it for a moment, and then pressed the backspace key several times. Starting at the end of the last complete sentence, he left a text.
If you need anything, please let me know.
He then pressed SEND and awaited a response.
A minute later, Kara sent another text.
Just an FYI, this is a burner phone. After I am done texting this, you won’t be able to get ahold of me again.
Marshall Hail sensed a finality about the text. It was like a message you might receive from a person intent on committing suicide. He surmised that he was probably reading more into the message than was there. But if Kara was going after the man who had shot her parents’ plane from the sky, then her goal was close to committing suicide.
Hail thumbed at the screen again.
You have my text number. Use it and I will be there. I can help.
Hail sent the message and waited.
He waited the entirety of that long and hot afternoon and the remainder of the night. Before he went to bed on a cot in the barracks — a building without a roof — he checked his messages and saw two words from Kara.
Don’t worry.
But it was way too late for that. Hail had already begun to worry.
The White House Rose Garden — Washington, D.C
I t was raining when president Joanna Weston stepped into the White House Rose Garden. In one hand, she clung to a paperback romance novel. In her other hand, she held a glass of tea. Weston looked up at the new opaque glass roof that had been constructed over the garden. This was the first time she was pleased to have the roof over her. In the past — if it had been raining — she was stuck indoors. Now she could enjoy being outdoors during any type of weather. It remained to be seen if she would still feel that way when the Washington snows arrived, but at least it was an option.
The glass table in the center of the garden had been cleared off, except the three roses in a tall vase. Weston pulled out a chair from the table and kicked off her heels. She propped her feet up on the chair. After taking a sip of her iced tea, she set the drink on the table and began reading.
Fat rain drops made plinking sounds on the glass above, and it was a relaxing sound to the president. She scrunched down a little more in her chair and let her body lean back into the fat seat cushions.
She didn’t hear the drone until it was literally two feet from her. From somewhere off to her left, the drone had flown in under the glass awning, and it made a beeline straight for her table.
The president flinched, and her heart skipped a beat when the small drone knocked over the vase, bouncing off the table, and shattering on the ground.
Three tripod legs began to sprout from beneath the drone as its flexible LCD video screen began to unroll.
Anger rose to a boil inside the president when she recognized it was the same drone Hail had landed on her table weeks earlier. But how? How was this possible? A new opaque glass dome fully covered the Rose Garden, and every electronic signal was jammed.
In one quick motion, the president pulled her feet off the chair and sat ramrod straight. She slapped her book down on the table and watched as Marshall Hail’s face appeared on the screen.
Hail began the conversation, “Good afternoon, Madam President, I mean, Joanna. I hope I’m not interrupting you, but we really need to talk.”
Hail thought the president appeared mad, and her first words proved his assumption correct.
“How in the hell did you land this — this — machine on my table? Do you have any idea what we have gone through to prevent this exact thing from happening?”
The president pointed up at the glass roof and continued, “We installed this glass over the top of the garden to prevent you — and anyone else — from using lasers to pilot drones onto the property.”
Hail thought, although the president had run out of words after her tirade, her anger had not diffused. She was still fuming.
Hail meekly replied, “Well, we have the exact coordinates of this landing spot from the last time we met at your table. All we did was return the drone to the same coordinates. It keeps track of its own X and Y, so it doesn’t need to communicate with anything to return to the same spot. Now, if you had moved the table, it would have probably—”
But the president wasn’t listening any longer. Weston put her arms in the air, expressing her exasperation and looking up at the glass dome. She began to shake her clenched fists and she yelled, “Mr. Hail, you are really trying my patience! Do you realize how much your visits to my table are costing the taxpayers?”
Hail shrugged and said, “If it makes your staff more security conscious and take the proper precautions, I have done my civic duty.”
The president made a face that Hail thought looked a little mad, a little frustrated and a whole lot overwhelmed.
In a tone that sounded like a woman trying to get rid of representatives of Hare Krishna, the president asked, “Why are you sitting on my table again, Marshall?”