Dark Target (41 page)

Truitt was looking at his watch.

“Forty-two hours and twenty minutes,” he said. “I thought we were making good time.”

“We’ll pay you for the full forty-eight,” DeLuca said.

“I’ll jump across and tie a line,” Truitt said. “You tell the others.”

They climbed down the service ladder in single file, with DeLuca leading the way and the civilians bringing up the rear, descending
an endless series of rungs until they saw a square of light at the bottom. A hundred feet up, DeLuca stopped to take an M-12
machine pistol equipped with a silencer from his pack, as much firepower as he could pack in the smallest amount of space.
The others broke out their weapons as well. He stepped softly onto the roof of the elevator and listened.

He heard nothing.

He pried the trapdoor in the elevator ceiling open slowly without making a sound.

The elevator was empty.

He dropped in, then gestured for Sykes, MacKenzie, and Vasquez to follow. When Sykes took a charge of C4 explosives from his
pack to blow the door, DeLuca shook his head and pointed to the “Open Doors” button.

He gestured to Truitt, Yutahay, and Burgess to wait in the elevator, then pressed the button.

The doors opened onto a long empty corridor. The team fanned out, guns ready, carefully searching the rooms that lined the
corridor, four on the right side and three on the left, but they found only empty offices and empty desks.

The doors at the end of the corridor led to a second set of doors, marked “Authorized Personnel Only.” On DeLuca’s signal,
they kicked their way in, Sykes and Vasquez crisscrossing low while DeLuca aimed high.

The control room was empty.

For a moment, DeLuca saw a large screen showing a map of the globe with satellite orbits represented by green lines, but when
an intruder alert sounded, the screen automatically went dark.

They searched the entire compound, but it was empty. Whoever was using the computers in the complex had been doing so from
a remote location. When they searched the hard drives of the mainframe, they were, to no one’s surprise, blank.

“Fool me twice,” Vasquez finally said.

“Where is everybody?” Yutahay asked.

“We don’t know,” DeLuca said. “They were supposed to be here.”

They took the elevator to the top. When the door opened, they pushed through a second door at the end of the hall and found
themselves in the Carlsbad Caverns underground cafeteria, staring at a rack of Coke and candy machines. DeLuca squinted at
the bright fluorescent lights. They took a second elevator to the surface. The sun was just rising in the east. He was glad
to see it. A nondescript van full of soldiers waited by the entrance to the gift shop. The leader introduced himself as Captain
Jones, adding that General LeDoux had sent him to assist. DeLuca told him his team could head on down, but that they weren’t
going to find anything.

“Where to now?” Sykes asked DeLuca as a dozen soldiers scrambled from the van.

“Back to square one, I guess,” he said. “Personally, I intend to see a woman about some oxygen bottles.”

But when they got back to Albuquerque, the Ms. Kitty was gone.

SAMI HAD PUT RAINBOW AND RUBY IN A CAB and paid the driver for the round-trip fare to Seattle, where Rainbow still owned a
home, even though she’d planned to sell it and give the proceeds to Brother Antonionus. She’d decided to go home after Sami
played her a tape he’d made surreptitiously, interviewing Brother Antonionus. Sami had informed him he was going to have to
arrest him, unless Antonionus was willing to make a deal. He played the recording for DeLuca when he got back, using the speakers
on his laptop, which he set up on the bed in his motel room.

“Why should I make a deal with you?” Antonionus said. “I should have you arrested for lying to us about who you were.”

“Undercover officers do that all the time,” Sami had explained. “You can’t have me arrested.”

“And just what is it I’ve done?” Antonionus asked. “Is it legal now for the government to persecute its citizens for their
beliefs?”

“We’re not arresting you for your beliefs,” Sami said. “We’re not even arresting you for scamming people out of their belongings,
though I’m not sure how legal that is. We’re arresting you for aiding and abetting the act of treason. That’s a pretty serious
offense, Malcolm.”

There was a long silence on the tape.

“I don’t know what you mean,” he said, sounding scared. “I’m not aiding or abetting anyone.”

“You’re aiding and abetting your old friend Tom Koenig,” Sami said. “Your old prep school chum.”

There was an even longer pause.

“And just how do you think I’ve been aiding and abetting?” Antonionus said. “Just what is it I’ve been doing that’s so illegal?”

“Disinformation,” Sami said. “There’s nothing new about disinformation, Malcolm. Hitler was great at it. You want to run a
program putting radios in people’s teeth, the best way to hide it might be to have some well-known wacko who no one believes
go on television and say, ‘The government is putting radios in people’s teeth.’ You wanna test-fly Stealth bombers in secret,
you have some discredited wacko saying, ‘The Air Force is flying invisible airplanes…’ See what I’m saying?”

“That’s crazy.”

“That may be, but you’re not. You’ve known what you’ve been doing all along. And if, in the meantime, you can get people to
give you all their money and mow your lawn for you, all the better.”

“There’s nothing illegal about asking people to give you their money,” Antonionus said. “If they’re stupid enough to say yes,
that’s their problem.”

“Or asking them to believe in UFOs?”

“I’ve never asked anybody to believe in UFOs,” Antonionus said. “Every single moron who comes here is a believer before they
ever see me. I just channel their beliefs into more creative venues.”

“And more lucrative for you?”

“As I said, it’s not illegal,” Antonionus said. “Some people give a tenth of everything they make to the Church because they
think it will get them into heaven. Can you prove that any of them are in heaven? Can you prove they’re not? If it’s not wrong
to take a tenth, why would it be wrong to take it all? I’m the beneficiary of some very generous friends.”

“Generous or gullible?”

“Why can’t you be both?” he asked.

“If we checked your phone records, would we find any telephone calls between you and Tom Koenig? Because we can pull your
call logs. There’s no problem there.”

“You couldn’t carry Tom Koenig’s jock strap,” Antonionus said.

“Wouldn’t care to try,” Sami said. “You know he’s going to be arrested for the murder of Cheryl Escavedo, don’t you? The fact
that you were on the scene to tell everybody it was a UFO makes you an accomplice to murder. It does bother me that you let
a little girl watch it. That doesn’t bother you?”

“She’ll get over it,” Antonionus said. “She’s just a kid. You can’t prove a thing.”

“I don’t have to prove anything to arrest you,” Sami said. “We don’t even have to bring you to trial if we don’t want to.
Maybe you’d like to see Cuba? Of course, so would the prisoners at Guantanamo—they’ve been sitting in the sun with bags over
their heads for three years. Does that appeal to you, Malcolm?”

“You can’t do that.”

“I can if you don’t help me.”

Silence.

“What is it you want me to do?”

“I want you to tell me about Tom Koenig. I want you to go public about working for the government to mask their satellite
programs all these years. If you’re lucky, you can get a book deal and be on Oprah. I want you to help us get Koenig.”

“I’m hardly part of his inner circle,” Antonionus said, sounding hurt. “He’s never so much as asked me over to his house.
I think he’s ashamed to admit he knows me. That’s not right, is it?”

“That’s not right at all. Why did Cheryl Escavedo contact you?”

“Cheryl Escavedo never contacted me,” Antonionus said. “I left a message saying I was returning her call, but she never called.
That was planted for you to find.”

“Can you talk about the Key Club?”

“What’s a Key Club?”

“At Decatur Academy. You and Koenig and Hilton Jaynes and Daniel Berman. And others, I assume. You’ve forgotten?”

Silence.

“You can’t talk about that?”

Silence.

“Who are you afraid of? Koenig? Carter Bowen?”

“I’ll talk to you,” Antonionus said in a hushed tone. “Not here. You have to give me time. I’ll have to get my things in order.
I have a chain of businesses I have to protect. I want it on the record that I came in voluntarily. Afterward you’ll have
to take care of me. I’m not even sure the witness protection program is safe enough.”

“We can do that,” Sami told him.

Sami shut the recording off.

“I told him he could come in on his own. I don’t make him as a flight risk—he needs us too much to take off.”

“You played this for Rainbow?”

“Uh huh,” Sami said. “I had to. I couldn’t keep it from her. There’s nothing on it that’s classified. Is there? Should I not
have done that?”

“No, no, that’s okay,” DeLuca said. “How’d she take it?”

“She took it hard,” Sami said.

“She blame you?”

“I guess so,” Sami said. “I’m not sure we were meant for each other anyway. I’m a crusty old bastard from Boston. She could
do better. You know what they say—if you love something, let it go, and if it comes back to you… cuff it.”

“You okay?”

“I’m all right,” Sami said. “I’m good. I’ll get over it.”

DeLuca stared at the laptop.

“How did you tape the conversation?”

“I had my cell phone on in my shirt pocket,” Sami said. “I dialed in to Peg Romano and she recorded it from the RV.”

“Was that your idea or hers?”

“Hers,” Sami said. “Why? Is that a problem?”

“It is for Malcolm Percy,” DeLuca said. “Romano was playing for the other side. When did she take off?”

“She said she needed to have the transmission serviced,” Sami said. “She left this morning.”

DeLuca called his friend Mike O’Leary at the FBI and put out an APB on the motor home and did the same on the military side
through Captain Martin in LeDoux’s office, but he held out little hope. As difficult as it might be to hide a forty-foot silver
motor home, he knew Peggy Romano would have prepared a way to cover her escape well in advance. He suspected the RV was either
inside a semi-tractor trailer on a highway somewhere or in the belly of a C-130 under a false bill of lading.

When he called the Brethren of the Light, he was told that Brother Antonionus was unavailable. When he stopped by the Albuquerque
police department, he learned that Malcolm Percy’s car had been in a car accident, killing the driver and sole occupant of
the car. When DeLuca pressed for details, flashing his B’s and C’s and identifying himself as a member of Army counterintelligence,
he was told that the body had been burned beyond recognition, the white Rolls-Royce he was driving in having crashed into
a bridge abutment on Interstate 25, but the odd thing was that although the car was demolished, the gas tank was intact—the
fire had started in the driver’s compartment before the collision itself. Forensics was testing for accelerants inside the
vehicle.

“It’s like the guy spontaneously combusted,” the sergeant said. “Like you read about in those magazines.”

“Yeah,” DeLuca said, “but you can’t believe everything you read in magazines.”

Before returning to the motel, he stopped by the Japanese tea garden at the park by the river, pausing first at a mall to
make some purchases at a cell phone store. Using a new phone, the account opened under a false name, he called his son, Scott,
in Kirkuk and asked Scottie to lock on to his GPS signal and tell him, again, how far it was to the point on the river. It
took his son a minute. Again, Scott told him it was fourteen hundred feet, off by exactly one hundred yards.

“The mobile ops center we’ve been using…”

“The Ms. Kitty?” Scott asked.

“Yeah,” DeLuca said. “Do you still have the access numbers we used the first time we linked with you?”

“I think so,” Scott said.

“Do you think you could shut it down?”

“Do you mean blow it up?”

“Negative,” DeLuca said. “I just want you to rewrite some of her software. Could you do that?”

“I couldn’t personally but we’ve got some guys here who could,” Scott said.

“Are they busy?”

“Well, there is still a war going on, but yeah, I think I could get them to help. We’d need to know her password to reach
the kernel codes. We could probably get into her system without one but you’d save us a lot of time if you had it.”

“I don’t,” DeLuca said, “but I’ll bet it has something to do with women’s basketball. Try all the last names of all the players
in the WNBA, and if that doesn’t do it, go to the colleges. Start with UConn. Here’s what I want you to do…”

He called a team meeting at the motel bar. He’d told his team to stay low, take the batteries out of their satellite phones,
not go out, not use the room phone, not watch TV in their rooms, log on to the Internet, or interact in any way with the electronic
grid. He’d passed the same message to Walter Ford, who said it was winter break anyway and a good time for him and his wife,
Martha, to take a little vacation.

“We can assume,” DeLuca told Dan, Hoolie, Mack, and Sami, “if Romano was bad, then they know what we know. Everything we’ve
put into our reports and everything we told each other over our so-called ‘secure’ phones. And anything said inside the RV,
which was probably tapped and taped.”

“Who’s ‘they’?” Sami asked. “That’s what I want to know?”

“Wasn’t that what you guys taught us at Huachuca?” Vasquez said. “The first task of intelligence is learning enemy numbers
and locations—after that, you look at intentions. Isn’t that what they say?”

“That’s what they say,” DeLuca said. “Romano was a private subcontractor with DIA for years. LeDoux wouldn’t have used her
without checking her out. The question is, who got to her?”