Nowhere to Hide (12 page)
Authors: Sigmund Brouwer
Once again, MJ was a surprise to King, summing it up with such clarity. The guy liked playing clown, but that only led to people underestimating him. Which was probably why MJ played the clown.
“To be clear,” Moore said, “you guys are with us? No questions, no doubts?”
MJ stood. “I want to start searching right now.”
King stood, loving how determined MJ was.
Blake stood.
That's when the throb-throb of approaching helicopters reached them over the sound of the noisy air conditioner.
Moore jumped off his chair and peeked through the blinds.
A half-dozen patrol cars had pulled up, red and blue lights flashing.
“They've got us,” Moore said.
Evans said, “Looks like Mundie delivered on his promise. We have nowhere to hide.”
A voice from a loudspeaker outside reached them. “You are surrounded by ground and by air. We have assault weapons. Moore and Evans, you know the procedure. Come out, hands on your heads. Then we'll deal with the three juveniles.”
“This mobile home is a tin can,” Evans said. “They won't use assault weapons to punch holes through it with King and Blake and MJ with us, but there's nothing we can do.”
Moore spoke in a cold voice to Blake and King. “I trusted you when you said you hadn't called 911. I trusted you, and you sat there the whole time, knowing a team was moving in. When my granddaughter drowns, it's because of you.”
“Trust us again,” King said. “We didn't make the call. Blake, toss Evans your phones. Check the call logs.”
Evans said, “Don't bother.”
“Really,” King said. The casual way Evans dismissed them stung King. “We didn't call 911.”
“I mean don't botherâI
do
trust you.” Evans gave a tight smile, understandable under the circumstances. “Somehow they tracked us here. But that doesn't matter. What does matter is how we get out of this now.”
“Sir,” Blake said. “Maybe it does matter knowing how they tracked us. We can use that information later.”
“Later?” Moore said.
King understood and jumped in. “It's clear that you and Evans are going into custody no matter what. But if we three poor, innocent boys who didn't know what you dragged us into are able to go home, we'll still have more than twenty-four hours to try to find Amanda.”
“Poor, innocent boys,” MJ said. “Conned by cold, heartlessâ”
“They get it,” King said, smiling.
“Don't forget lying,” Evans said. “Cold, heartless, and lying CIA agents. I was the one who walked into the hotel room with Mundie on the floor and forced you three to remain silent while I pointed a gun at you and made you leave. Remember?”
“No,” Blake said. “I don't want that to be part of the story. Kidnapping and a weapons charge against three juveniles? If this doesn't get straightened out, that would add another twenty years to your prison sentences.”
“Much better if we play not so smart,” MJ said. “You fooled usâthat's the truth. And when I play not so smart, it's hard to tell if I'm acting.”
Evans shook his head in admiration. He opened his mouth to say something, but the loudspeaker voice blared from outside.
“You have two minutes until tear gas. One minute and fifty-nine seconds. Fifty-eight. Fifty-seven⦔
“Fifty-six,” the loudspeaker continued. “Fifty-five.”
King found that the ticking clock added to his clarity. He loved the feeling of adrenaline. It was hard to believe that earlier in the day, he'd been fighting panic attacks in the safety of his mother's workshop.
An idea struck King.
King said to Moore. “From here, I can't tell that the remote that you're about to pick up is actually the television remote. It could be something to activate the explosives.”
“Explosives?” Moore asked.
“How much extra trouble do you get into if you threaten that the mobile home is full of explosives and it turns out you were bluffing?” King said. “That way, you weren't really holding a gun to our head or anything. It would buy us some time to figure things out.”
“Let me answer that like this,” Moore said. He stood beside the door and opened it a crack, with the loudspeaker countdown reaching them clearly. “Forty-eight, forty-seven, forty-six⦔
Moore yelled outside without exposing his face. “No tear gas! We've got the place rigged to explode if I let go of a timing device. You knock me out, and the whole place blows, taking all of you with us.
Same thing if you shut the power off. I blow everything up. So stop the countdown, and we'll negotiate.”
The voice over the loudspeaker went quiet.
Moore shut the door and gave King a thumbs-up in the dim light.
Moore explained, “Lots of time they cut off the power so it's hot and uncomfortable, and the hostage holders just want to end it and get out.”
“Perfectly played,” King said. “Now, what do you want me to ask them when I get out there? What's going to help us the most when we look for Amanda?”
“I'm sending you out,” Moore said. A statement. Not a question. But still a question.
“Sure. I tell them that you're holding a remote and that I couldn't see it well enough to guess what it was for. Then I bring you back some answers that can help us look for Amanda, and once you get the answers, you let all three of us out, and the two of you surrender.”
“It's good,” Evans said. “It's a good plan.”
Blake said to Moore, “And while King's out there, taking his time getting those answers, I can jump on the Internet. With help from you and Evans, I can get to whatever files you think will help and upload them to an account on the cloud. We'll have ten, fifteen minutes for you to give me the most accurate inside information on Delamarre and Murphy. Also, I'll need access to some internal servers so I can set up a backdoor entrance to get in whenever I want.”
“As in break national security measures and feed you classified passwords that would let you roam the CIA servers?” Moore asked.
“Pretend it's my birthday,” Blake said. “And that you like me a lot. I'll be so happy.”
Moore drew a deep breath.
Evans said. “It's a good plan. And they are all that we have.”
Moore drew another deep breath. “They are all Amanda has. Three teenaged boys and less than twenty-four hours once they are clear to start looking again.”
The loudspeaker from outside blared again. This time, King recognized the voice. It belonged to Don Mundie. Given the short distance by air from Seattle to this side of the Cascades, Mundie must have arrived on one of the helicopters.
“Moore, you're a better man than that.” Mundie's voice was calm and measured. “Let's not make things worse. You don't need blood on your hands.”
“Ignore him,” Moore said. “They've stopped the countdown, and we have a little bit of leverage on them. Let's use it to talk this out completely.”
“I'm arguing that these three are Amanda's only chance,” Evans said to Moore. “By the time they clear interrogation and get back to their parents, the deadline will be down to forty-eight hours. They'll have to sleep, and that means tomorrow morning it will be down to thirty-six hours. If we put them up at our three suites at the hotel and⦔
Evans noticed King squint in an unspoken question.
“I prepaid for all three rooms for a week,” Evans explained. “A suite for you guys, a suite for me, and a third suite five floors up under a different name as a hideout if we needed it. Budget didn't matter for us at
this point. Good thing. If we can get your three families in there as a base, it will be better than isolating you on the island. That is, if Moore agrees to set you guys loose on this.”
King nodded.
“I agree,” Moore said to King, his tone showing that he was refocusing on the urgency of the situation. “First priority. You tell them you agreed to go outside and negotiate only if I sent emails to your parents letting them know about the situation. Tell them your parents are already on their way to the Seattle office. Make it clear that your parents have already responded to the emails. That way, Mundie can't put you in a holding cell and make you disappear for a couple of days.”
“Better yet,” Evans said, “let's go ahead and really send the emails to their parents. With instructions to have lawyers with them and waiting for the boys. We'll cover legal expenses later, I promise. All three families can camp out at the hotel suites tonight.”
“Let's get on it,” Moore said.
Moore turned to King. “When you give them the questions I want answered, they will tell you this is a national security situation and you are not cleared for the information. Tell them to email me the answers within the next fifteen minutes, and if the answers are suitable, we'll surrender and give up the remote.”
“Yes, sir,” King said. He gave Blake a glance. “Can you forward those emails to yourself without a trace so we have the answers ourselves?”
“Nope,” Blake said. But in a blissful way. “But I can take photos of the screen with one of the other devices and upload the photos of the emails to a secret cloud account. When we're all finished, I'll delete everything, erase the phone, and put it on the oven burner. They'll have no way of knowing what we did. That should cover us.”
“We'll put all our devices on the burners,” Evans said. “That will destroy the devices, and the smoke will add credibility to the explosives threat. After we're gone, they won't come in here until the explosives experts give it a thumbs-up.”
MJ said, “I'll turn on the stove so it's as hot as possible when we're ready to discard the devices.”
All this should work
, King thought. The CIA would send the three
of them back to the Seattle hotel, believing that the teenagers had fallen for lies about a situation that didn't exist. Then for the three of them, the race against time would begin to stop the water from filling up the chamber.
“I'm ready,” King said to Moore.
“Good,” Moore said. “The first question you need to get answered before we surrender Blake and MJ is how Mundie managed to get the inside track on this.”
Three minutes of coaching later, King opened the door slowly.
“I'm coming out!” King said. “My name is William Lyon Mackenzie King. My hands will be on my head. Please don't let Moore blow up the mobile home and my friends!”
King eased his way outside and saw Don Mundie behind a group of SWAT guys.
“And Mr. Mundie,” King yelled, “I'm really sorry about the whole sock-in-the-mouth thing!”
A few hours later, Mundie shut the door behind him, moved across the small room, and sat down at a polished table across from King, somewhere in the heights of the downtown building that housed the FBI. It was just the two of them, King in handcuffs.
Until then, King had been sitting alone for twenty minutes. The entire time he was acutely aware of a video camera near the ceiling, the black lens pointing at him.
“I've had a chance to talk to Michael Johnson and Blake Watt,” Mundie said. “They've given me nearly everything I need to know. So all I want from you are a couple details to fill in the blanks.”
“Sir,” King said, “I need to go to the bathroom.”
“Talk first.”
“Badly.”
“Talk first.”
“Really badly,” King said.
“Let's hear why Evans and Moore hired you,” Mundie said. “And by the way, I'm okay if you wet your pants.”
“The other kind of bathroom,” King said. “Are you okay with that? I'm not enthusiastic about it for obvious reasons. When my lawyer gets here, he or she won't like it either. And my parentsâ”
“I don't think you understand,” Mundie said, voice cold. “This is a national security situation, so it falls under the Homeland Security Act. You don't have the rights given under normal criminal charges. That means no lawyer, no parents. Especially because the email that Evans tried to send from the standoff situation never reached his lawyer. You're on your own here.”
King didn't believe that. He thought Mundie was running a bluff. Evans had promised a lawyer, and King trusted Evans.
“I can keep you in a cell in this building for months and not even have to lay charges,” Mundie said. “You have no rights because you belong to the government. You're considered a terrorist, and we make captured terrorists disappear from public view.”
“My stomach hurts,” King said.
“Deal with it. Let's begin with why Evans reached out to you and your friends.”
“For our trip to Disney World?” King asked. “And how we met Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs?”