“Dr. Wishart? Are you in there?”
No.
“Dr. Wishart, there’s been a leak.”
Chapter Two
OUTSIDE KANSAS CITY-DAYBREAK
Tickets.
I.D.
Rental car papers-the proper rental car papers. She’d used, and abandoned, at least three vehicles between Pierre and Kansas City.
Jerri Bilmer’s hands shook as she sorted the pink and yellow forms for the red Prizm she’d be driving back to the airport. She told herself to get a grip and tucked the papers concerning the blue Cherokee she’d driven in from Pierre to Omaha, the red Ford pickup that had taken her from Omaha to the outskirts of K.C., and that sorry old rent-a-wreck Chevy she’d had in Pierre itself into a manilla envelope addressed to Selena Martin at a P.O. box in East Falls Church, Virginia. The real Selena Martin had died of SIDS in 1974, and Bilmer had kept the alias-and the birth certificate-as one of the “cold” ones in her private repertoire: a just-incase identity and rented drop box that, as far as she could tell, nobody knew about. A lot of people in the service had such identities.
She crossed to the window of the motel room, moved aside the rope of garlic hanging half-hidden by the drapes and angled her head to see into the courtyard without opening the blinds. Still cinder dark, iron dark. The street lamps in the parking lot showed curtained windows all around, shut-in stillness, silence, anonymity. Bilmer hadn’t had much sleep last night, partly because of the smell of the garlic- she’d kept dreaming she was in an Italian restaurant. Like a vampire movie, she thought. If only it were that simple.
She had no idea if garlic was supposed to work against things other than vampires. It hung on both sides of the windows, knotted carefully on strings with a variety of seemingly random objects: old keys (she’d read legends that said iron was supposed to help), forks bought from a local antiques shop and warranted to be sterling silver, aconite and wild roses. Glass shards sparkled on the dresser, the carpet, in the bathroom, because she had carefully broken every mirror and anything that could serve as a mirror. She had no idea what the management of the Crystal Suite Inn was going to say when the maids reported what they found in the room.
Not that it mattered. The woman whose name was on the register didn’t exist, either.
No one was in the parking lot that she could see.
Not that that meant anything.
Was Kansas City far enough away? Had driving rather than flying this far helped? Did it matter?
Crazy people do this, she thought, turning away from the window. She remembered the “psychological observation” at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, required of all service members. Getting to know the look of the crazies, the way their eyes moved and how the muscles of their faces differed subtly from the faces of the sane. The ones who’d come to the White House gate, who’d push through the crowds at any speech; the ones she and her colleagues would have to go check on every couple of months, sometimes in their homes but mostly at St. Elizabeth’s.
The ones who wore tinfoil or collanders on their heads to keep the CIA from broadcasting voices into their brains.
Did they hang garlic and iron and wild roses on their curtains before they could sleep at night?
It was not knowing that scared her most. Not knowing what to expect, not having a plan to deal with it. How could she make a plan when she didn’t know when, or in what form, or from what direction the attack might come?
A minimum of packing. Carry-on, never check-through. Jeans, hiking boots, underwear, a brush. She’d long ago ditched the T-shirts and overalls she’d worn doing maintenance, emptying trash and keeping dust out of underground rooms, had cut her hair and darkened it back toward its normal hue after bleaching it trashy blonde for the job. Bilmer fell gratefully back on routine. She dressed carefully, avoiding both the formality that screamed SECRET SERVICE and the jeans-and-flannel slobbiness that might get her pulled for a security check. A vaguely dowdy leggings-and-top set, Nikes, a big black purse. The Browning Hi-Power she’d picked up a couple of years ago at a gun-show in Texas would be trash-canned in the airport parking lot. It made her nervous to be without one, for the flight, but the chance of getting caught at the airport because of it scared her worse.
These were definitely not people you wanted to mess around with.
She had no idea what she’d say to President McKay when she saw him.
How the hell could she talk about the things she’d heard and seen?
She moved carefully so as not to step on the enormous circle she’d drawn with Magic Marker on the carpet around the room’s perimeter. Plugged in the cheap hot-glue gun she’d bought in Omaha yesterday, glanced at the clock.
Just four. The motel lay close enough to the K.C. airport that she could get there easily but far enough away that it wasn’t a specifically “airport” motel. The Houston-D.C. flight came in at five-thirty, took off again at six. How soon was too soon to be in the airport itself?
Her heart was pounding. Come on, kid! she told herself. You got through Tehran and you got through St. Petersburg.
But in Tehran and St. Pete you knew what to expect. You had some idea of what would be coming at you.
We don’t know how far Sanrio’s gotten, Stuart McKay had said, that afternoon last month beside the fountain in the White House Rose Garden. There’d been some kind of little fete going on, put on by Mrs. McKay for the uptown rich ladies as a fund-raiser, and the music was just loud enough to confuse a directional mike. McKay had signed the other members of the White House detail to keep their distance, and seeing him talking to one of their own, they had.
Not far enough to show results to a Senate committee and ask for regular funding, the President had gone on. Not far enough to convince any of the Joint Chiefs that they should have regular military backing-thank God.
Thank God indeed. Bilmer shivered at the recollection of things she’d seen-or thought she’d seen-in back corridors or at the bottom of those underground stairways at that installation in the Black Hills. Remembered rumors she’d picked up in small towns and badlands bars concerning creatures half-glimpsed in twilight, sounds heard on the wind or objects seen among the eroded rocks or floating in summer-dwindled streams.
We don’t know what they’ve done so far. And we don’t know what they CAN do. Literally. At all.
Stu, thought Bilmer, tucking two film disks and a sheaf of onionskin-thin notes behind the lining of her purse, you don’t know the half of it. She’d considered taking a microdot camera and all the rest of that rig but had abandoned the idea and relied on handwritten notes instead. Would film develop or come out blank?
She didn’t know.
Could they have traced her somehow along the backroads and half-deserted highways down the Missouri valley?
She didn’t know.
She laced up her sneakers, pulled the baggy red sequinned top over her head. Wear what you’re wearing today when you come back, McKay had said. In case someone has to meet you, they’ll know what to look for.
They’ll know what to look for. The very thought made Bilmer antsy, as did the idea that McKay knew she’d be coming in on the 9:20 from Houston, whichever day she came. She was already a week later than they’d planned. And every day multiplied the things that could go wrong.
Nothing will go wrong. She hot-glued the lining back into her purse, replaced the contents: compact, three lipsticks (being careful to use both powder and lipstick on her face), two checkbooks, notebook, a double handful of crumpled ATM slips and grocery receipts from towns that matched her current set of I.D., four pens, a bottle of ibuprofen, three little plastic-wrapped sanitary napkins and a package of tissues. Anything to make shadows on an x-ray and obscure the disks and the papers in the lining. If they tried to stop her at the airport, what shape would the attack take?