She bit back a desire to challenge Kerney's suppositions and let him finish up.
He looked at her expectantly, waiting for a response.
"Interesting," Sara said.
"That's it?"
"For now."
"You're usually not so noncommittal."
Sara toyed with her academy class ring.
"I have to think, Kerney. You've thrown a lot at me in a very short time."
"Do you think I'm overreacting?"
"I don't know."
"I've caught you off-guard."
Sara replied with a weak smile. After a hellish week at the Command and General Staff College, made worse by draining bouts of morning sickness, she'd come to Santa Fe concerned and worried about Kerney.
Now that she knew more, it meant the timing was wrong to talk to him about the strong maternal feelings that were shifting her focus away from the army and making her yearn for a real home life.
They had yet to resolve the issue of whether or not Kerney would join her at her next permanent duty station or remain in New Mexico. She doubted he'd willingly transform himself into a full-time military dependent. So in theory, she'd be married and a mother. But in practice she'd be raising a child as a single parent, with occasional visits from a distant, part-time husband. The prospect held little appeal.
Her next assignment after school would most likely be a fast track staff position at the command level that would require twelve hour days and seven-day weeks.
She'd known women officers who'd left husbands and children behind for three-year assignments. And women who, for the sake of their children, had branch-transferred to jobs that cut short their advancement and froze them at their current rank until retirement.
Women like Sara, who'd been promoted ahead of schedule only to resign from active duty because their family life was suffering.
She reached out and took Kerney's hand.
"Let me think about it some more."
They drove home in silence. Kerney was tense, on guard, his eyes searching the rearview mirror. She believed he was being watched, followed, and spied on, that he'd been threatened with consequences if he didn't back off on the investigation. Over dinner he'd sidestepped her question about the risks he was taking with assurances that everything was under control. That, she didn't believe.
She decided she needed do more than just think about what Kerney had told her.
"I want to review your case material," she said.
"You're not part of this. It's not your problem."
"I'm not asking for permission, Kerney."
Kerney shot her a sidelong glance. A stern expression greeted him.
"Fine. You can look at it when we get home."
"I'm not staying with you tonight."
Kerney slowed the truck and gave Sara a long look.
"Why not?"
"Because I want to draw my own conclusions."
"You don't believe me?"
"Did I say that?" Sara asked in an icy tone.
"Take whatever you want, Colonel."
"Don't be sarcastic, Kerney."
Kerney pulled up at the cottage.
"Are we fighting?"
Sara jumped out of the truck.
"Yes, but for now it's just a skirmish."
Chapter 12
Sara booked a four-hundred-dollar suite at a downtown hotel, called for a cab, and hung up.
"I can give you a ride," Kerney said.
"Weren't we supposed to spend the weekend looking at some property?"
"We were."
"What's it going to take to get you to move out of here into something decent?"
"Enough free time to do it," Kerney said.
"You've got about six months," Sara said, patting her still-flat stomach.
"This baby isn't going to wait any longer than that."
"We won't be living here when the baby comes."
"Where will we be, I wonder." She made a dismissive gesture.
"Never mind."
Kerney followed her into the bedroom.
"Is that what you wanted to talk about?"
"Not now." Sara's gaze skimmed across the clutter of paper, files, and tapes, her eyes frost-green.
"We'd be up all night and I'm too tired for a marathon."
"Should I come to the hotel in the morning?" Kerney asked as he sorted through case notes and materials, passing pertinent items to Sara.
"Call me first," Sara said.
He gave her field notes, progress reports, document inserts, lists of names, lists of informants, and duplicates of Bobby Sloan's investigative reports.
"Perhaps we could meet at the hotel restaurant for breakfast," he said.
"I don't have much of an appetite in the morning, these days," Sara said.
"Just call, okay?"
He gave her Sloan's summaries of the videotape contents, his own chronological event log, crime-scene photographs, and transcripts of recorded conversations.
"Okay."
He pointed at the audio- and videotapes. Sara shook her head and zipped everything into her travel bag.
The taxi driver sounded his horn.
"Let me send the cab away," Kerney said. He passed her one of the new cell phones and a new number to use to get in touch.
"I'll take you to the hotel."
Sara grabbed her coat and stuck the cell phone in a pocket.
"I don't want you to. I'll see you tomorrow."
Kerney watched her walk out the door, wondering what they were really at odds about. He decided it was a bit of everything: the investigation, the baby, the marriage, the army, the cheerless cottage he lived in, their busted weekend plans.
Sara confirmed his observation when he heard the taxi door slam shut.
Two blocks from the Santa Fe Plaza, in the basement of the federal courthouse, Tim Ingram, just back from El Paso, reviewed transcripts of police radio transmissions and phone calls made to and from the Santa Fe Police Department.
Nothing appeared to be out of the ordinary.
Once a bomb shelter during the early days of the cold war, the basement had been converted to a sophisticated listening post that targeted suspected foreign agents working at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, thirty-five miles away. Within recent years a British Army major on detached duty at the lab and a visiting Israeli physicist had been uncovered trying to stick their hands into Uncle Sam's cookie jar of nuclear weapon secrets.
Four operators sat at consoles in the sealed room. Two worked the SWAMI data that flowed into computers from phone lines, cell phones, and wireless Internet devices. Much like the NSA computers, SWAMI automatically scanned for millions of key words and phrases and immediately downloaded any that were programmed for intercept. The current operating program was case specific to the Terrell-Mitchell containment operation.
A woman manned a Carnivore unit that tapped into the Santa Fe Police Department's on-line computers and retrieved electronic communications.
The fourth technician monitored vehicle tracking devices planted on key police department units, watched real-time video of the front of Kerney's house, and taped audio transmissions from external remote listening stations and the fixed bugs at the police department, Kerney's residence, and the state police chief's office.
Every person on duty was a member of a team of military intelligence specialists who'd been handpicked as watchers, listeners, and monitors.
When SWAMI launched in three months as a private corporate enterprise, every illicit, suspicious, or fraudulent electronic or wire transfer monetary transaction flowing out of Colombia would be tracked and either seized or frozen.
Because SWAMI could burrow into the data banks of financial institutions around the world, it would violate international laws, compacts, and trade agreements, and intrude on the sovereignty of nations.