He made up his mind, and while he waited for his entrée to arrive at the table, he excused himself and went to the men’s room. Sitting on a throne, he got out his cell phone and turned it on. He had six friends that he thought would do the same for him, if they knew. So he sent them an e-mail. The Chinese were believed to have a bomb at the Norfolk naval base. He had it on excellent authority that the navy was looking, but they might be too late. He advised his friends to leave the area. And, of course, not to tell any of their friends about this. No Facebook, no e-mails, no Twitter, no nothing. Just pack and go. Somewhere safe.
Then he pushed the SEND button and the little telephone sucked the e-mail into cyberspace.
He went back to the table and felt a little better. Yeah, he was taking his family to safety, but he had given his friends a warning. They had families, too. He attacked his hamburger.
Ellie played with her salad. Ate some of it and drank unsweetened ice tea. When she finished, she went to the restroom, taking her purse. She consulted her contact list. Thought about each one as she selected the name. The message ultimately had ten names, after she put over a dozen on and deleted a few after deliberation. She demanded that they tell no one else what she told them. She knew they wouldn’t, because they were trustworthy and they would understand that the news could cause catastrophic damage if it got out. There were another twenty or so people on her list of contacts that Ellie wished she could tell, because they were so nice, but she knew she couldn’t rely upon them to keep the secret, so she sent no warning. She told herself she was just being realistic and, being Ellie, dismissed the moral dilemma of warning some friends and not others without further thought.
When Ellie returned to the dining room, Kat excused herself. She too went to the ladies. She had two good friends from church, almost like sisters, who lived in the Virginia Beach suburbs. They weren’t military, nor were their husbands. They had grown children and several grandkids. She told them the news she had gotten from her husband, not mentioning her source, and advised the strictest secrecy. Although she knew they would know her husband had told her — that was the power of the warning and the reason it would be believed — it wasn’t fair to him to name him. She advised her two girlfriends to get out of the area as quickly as possible, taking their families with them. If nothing happened, well and good. If something did, at least they would be safe. And say nothing to anyone.
She sent the message and took a deep breath. Butler would be angry she sent it, but he would understand. It was he who had demanded she leave the area with her daughter and son-in-law. And the baby soon to be born. What a world this child would arrive in!
Feeling she had done her duty to her closest friends, both Christian ladies who had endured their share of adversity and then some, while not betraying her husband, Kat walked back to the table, left a cash tip, took the bill to the register, paid it with a credit card and accompanied Ellie and Harold to the parking lot and the waiting car.
Sitting behind the wheel with her seat belt on, she sent a text to Butler, who was probably in it up to his eyeballs. “In Fredericksburg,” she typed. She put the phone in her purse, started the car and put it in gear. He never received the text. Kat didn’t know it, but cell phone service to the Norfolk metropolitan area had been disabled on order of the military authorities. For the duration of the security exercise. However, the e-mails the trio had sent did go through, on landlines. The recipients would find them when they turned on their hardwired computers.
At one o’clock in the afternoon Captain Joe Child’s SEALs finished searching the Craney Island Corps of Engineers Depot, across the broad mouth of the Elizabeth River from the carrier piers. They had been at it since dawn. Hundreds of acres of mountains of silt and mud dredged from the mouth of the Elizabeth River and the Hampton Roads estuary over the years made the task one of the labors of Hercules. To truly search that morose, stinking landscape would take a half-dozen bulldozers and a hundred man-years. All his forty men could do was walk over it with metal detectors and look for anything suspicious. That they had done.
Then they tackled the monstrous junkyard of old naval equipment. Bulldozers, vehicles of every kind and description, equipment that went on the highway or didn’t, things taken off ships, stuff no one could name and stuff that was probably a worn-out one-off constructed for some project long forgotten — they looked, concluded that there was nothing there and gathered around their team leaders. Buses were waiting to take them to the next areas on the list. Child used a landline to call Admiral McKiernan, who had demanded to be kept personally informed.
McKiernan called Jake Grafton, who was at CIA headquarters in Langley. “They’ve done Craney Island,” he said. “Results negative. The SEALs said it was like searching a hog pen for a diamond.”
“It must be in the water, under a Carley float, on a tug or barge, somewhere in that yard.”
“Or on a ship. Or it isn’t there at all. I am beginning to like the idea it is on a boat that will come roaring in off the Chesapeake.”
Jets were overhead, helicopters were buzzing around, the base was sealed due to the “routine security exercise,” and Patriot missile batteries were standing by in case anyone penetrated the prohibited zone the FAA had established over the Hampton Roads area. The Coast Guard and navy patrol boats from the amphib base at Little Creek were patrolling around the clock.
“It’s not on a boat,” Jake said. “Too iffy. Too many things can go wrong. It’s there now. It was there yesterday and it hasn’t moved.”
At two o’clock Sarah Houston came in with Jerry Chu’s laptop, thumb drive and cell phones. “I’ve gotten everything I could and sent the rest to NSA. Maybe some of the mathematicians can make something of the crypto stuff, but it will take a long time.” As Jake knew, NSA employed more Ph.D. mathematicians than any other company, university or government agency on the planet.
“Phones?”
“We have the numbers and are working them. Nothing for Zoe Kerry. But you knew there probably wouldn’t be. If she calls him or he calls her, they will ditch the phone.”
And ditto the watcher, Jake thought. If Jerry Chu had a number, it was in his head. And he’d never tell.
“Get a car and take that stuff over to the FBI. Sign a chain-of-custody form and get signatures when you turn it over. Then come back here. You and I need to talk about China.”
“Yes, sir.” She walked out with Tommy’s trophies.
The autumn leaves were all gone, but the sun was out in the mountains of Virginia. I drove along with the top down and the heater going, taking my time. I thought about Anna for a while, then about our times together, all too brief, and then about nothing at all. I wondered where Zoe Kerry was. Not in the States, I decided. She was long gone. Not to China. I couldn’t visualize her in China. She was a Europe kind of person. Germany or France, maybe Switzerland or Italy. Not the Balkans. Not Russia. Certainly not the Middle East or Egypt.
But somewhere.
Gradually she faded and there was only the road, the mountains covered with a forest of naked trees, waiting for snow. Waiting for winter. Under a clear blue sky with lots of sun.