Nancy isn’t the only one who knows how to interrogate people.
Finally, Alexandra sighed. “My mission was to infiltrate the OTM. I was to make Fulton fall in love with me, to sleep with him so that the Kremlin might gain some kind of influence. Blackmail, if need be.”
“That explains some of it,” Eric said. “What about the rest?”
“You want to know about the bombs?” Alexandra asked. “Yes. I know of them.”
“Tell me,” Eric said. “What had them so scared?”
“Times were different then, Mr. Wise. Your father understood.”
“You… couldn’t know Eric’s father,” Nancy said. “That was before your time.”
“Vasilii had quite the dossier,” Alexandra said, staring off into space. “It was so long ago…”
“The bombs?” Eric prompted.
“My first mission,” Alexandra said. “I was barely nineteen years old. We smuggled them into the United States in shipping containers.”
“How many?” Eric asked. “Where are they?”
“Five bombs,” Alexandra said, “in cities across the United States. They weren’t placed to cause the most military damage.”
“Which cities?”
Alexandra frowned. “I see the way you look at me. The OTM had a similar program. Where do you think we came up with the idea? I am not some monster—”
“Mother,” Nancy said. “Please. It was a long time ago. There’s no reason to hold back. You can trust us.”
“Los Angeles,” Alexandra said so softly that he almost missed it. “Chicago. Dallas. Pittsburgh. Boston.”
“Why those cities?” Nancy asked.
“They were picked to cause the most psychological damage,” Alexandra said. Her eyes flickered across his face, then to her daughter’s. “The Kremlin figured the best way to beat the Americans was to break their will. To break their will required us to break their spirit. Those cities were picked because the damage to the American psyche would be the greatest.”
“Why not Washington?” Lila Cavanaugh asked before anyone could stop her.
Alexandra smiled thinly. “They determined that killing your leaders might have almost as much of a positive effect as negative.”
They were still staring at Alexandra in shock when the coms dinged. Eric punched the button, and Sergeant Clark’s face appeared on the monitor. “We have a problem.”
“I’m working on a plan,” Eric said. “Are the Gang of Eight really going through with it?”
“It’s not the Gang of Eight,” Clark said. “It’s Frist.”
“John?” Eric’s stomach fell. “What happened?”
“It’s not what happened to him,” Clark said. “It’s what he did to Elliot.”
Nancy turned to glare at him, but he ignored her. “What did he do?”
“He hit Elliot on the head, knocked him out, and fled the base.”
“You’re kidding.”
The camera pulled back. Valerie sat next to Clark in the conference room. “Elliot suffered a mild concussion,” Valerie said. “He’s resting now, but he’s shaken.”
“How did this happen?” Eric asked.
“We think Kara Tulli helped,” Clark said. “She’s missing, too.”
When it rains, it pours. “When?”
“Almost eight hours ago,” Clark said.
“And you’re just telling me now?” Eric asked.
“Deion said you had enough on your plate,” Valerie said. “He’s running point.”
“Did he activate the Implant’s tracker?” Eric asked.
“That’s the first thing we tried,” Valerie said. “It’s not responding.”
Nancy slammed her fist against the table. “Why not?”
Alexandra frowned but said nothing.
“We think Kara took Elliot’s master tablet,” Clark said. “They can use it to disable the tracker.”
“And the kill switch,” Eric said to himself.
“Your pet freak finally broke free of his chain,” Nancy said.
“How is Deion tracking them?”
“Mr. Green,” Valerie said.
“Dewey Green hacked the master tablet,” Clark said. “They disabled the Implant, but they didn’t know the tablet also had a wireless connection buried in the firmware. Dewey’s been tracking them since they left Chicago.”
“Chicago?” Eric asked. “How did they get to Chicago?”
“They smuggled Frist out on a Janet flight,” Clark said. “Tulli forged Elliot’s name on a transfer order.”
“That got Frist to Vegas,” Eric said.
Dewey Green’s face appeared on the screen. “Please. It took me, like, two seconds to find the private flight from Las Vegas to Chicago.”
“Get off the coms,” Clark growled.
“Mr. Green, we’re going to have a talk about inappropriate behavior,” Eric muttered.
“Don’t dismiss him yet,” Karen said. “He figured out how to track Frist.”
She has a point. Dewey has a lot of tics and odd mannerisms, but he always comes through in the end. “What happened then?”
“The tablet connected to nearby cell towers and hotspots,” Dewey said. “I triangulated their position and plotted their most likely path. Kara had a great-uncle in Pleasantville, Pennsylvania. He died last year, and Kara’s great-aunt was put in a nursing home. My probability analysis, and I’m ninety percent sure that it’s correct, says they’re heading to her great-uncle’s cabin in Pleasantville. I told Deion…”
“And?”
“He told me to shut up,” Dewey said indignantly.
“Dewey,” Karen said.
“Uh,” Dewey said. “And then he left.”
“He took Smith’s Gulfstream,” Clark said, “and tried to get ahead of them in Ohio, but he barely missed them. He’s following them now. He’ll take John out at the first opportunity.”
“Excellent,” Nancy said. “At least he understands that Frist is a threat.”
Eric wanted to argue, but his excuses for John had finally run out. John had fled Area 51 at the first opportunity.
I can’t protect him anymore. “Keep me informed,” Eric said. “I want to know as soon as Deion is in position.”
The sun had yet to rise when Kara asked, “You hungry?”
John groaned. The idea of food made him sick to his stomach. “A cup of coffee. That’s all I can stand.”
“There’s a Cracker Barrel coming up. It should be opening soon.”
John nodded but continued staring at the darkness beyond the window. A light dusting of snow had faded to a gray-and-yellow sludge along the interstate, and even though it was early morning, I-70 was already busy with the roar of cars, trucks, and semitrailers.
The drive from Chicago had been a white-knuckle ride where every bend in the road could have led to a police roadblock and Eric greeting him with a 9mm bullet to the head. But each time, the road had straightened and they had continued on unmolested.
He almost wished they had been stopped.
The tablet was full of Elliot’s notes, and the more he read, the more disturbed he became. His outlook was grim. Small nodules in his lungs would slowly strangle his oxygen supply within the next month. Of course, the tumors in his pancreas would probably kill him before then, and if not, the tumors in his liver would do the job.
The news only got worse. Elliot suspected he had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
No matter what I do, I’m going to die, and there’s nothing I can do about it. Maybe a bullet to the brain would be better. Just let Eric shoot me. No pain that way. No suffering.
He glanced over at Kara.