Nowhere to Hide (18 page)

“I thought that might happen,” King said. “Time to bring in the big guns.”

Her eyes widened.

“Our parents,” King said. “They're going to find it very interesting that our room was bugged. And since you're not CIA, they're going to be as curious as we are about who sent you and what you expected to get from us.”

CHAPTER 43

King had been at Seattle's FBI building on Third Avenue twice before. The first had been during the Dead Man's Switch episode—the FBI had put him into contact with the CIA, and that's where he'd met Evans. The second time was yesterday, when Mundie had questioned him and Tanya Daniels had freed him. The CIA had used the FBI offices for meetings following the arrests of Evans and Moore.

The building, with concrete gray ribs and reflective windows, stood across from a Starbucks. King knew what to expect going inside and didn't hesitate, walking across polished granite tiles to the receptionist.

“Hello,” he said. “I was here yesterday with Don Mundie, who is a deputy inspector general for the CIA. It's urgent that I speak with him again.”

“Sir,” the receptionist said with a scornful curl of her lip, “this is the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

She had been chewing on a fingernail as he approached. He glanced at her nails. Chipped nail polish. She was in her midtwenties and smelled slightly of body odor. King's judgment was that the woman wasn't particularly motivated to make decisions outside of her job description.

“Yes,” he said, knowing that if he stopped being polite, he had no chance of getting through to her. “I know it's FBI. But the CIA doesn't have a Seattle office, so CIA agents have used the offices here before. I know that because I was here yesterday. It's urgent that I speak with Don Mundie.”

“I suppose I could call someone who could call a supervisor, but it may take a while.”

“It's very urgent,” King said. He thought about his conversation with Mack.
Should a person lie to save a life?

King went with the truth. “I can't tell you the details because if I do, the girl involved will be killed. But I need to speak to Don Mundie.”

“Oh my,” the receptionist said in bored voice. The scornful curl came back to her lip. “Such pressing matters. You should try something original, like a conspiracy about UFOs hidden at Roswell.”

King fought his frustration. He said, “Bomb.”

“What!” The scornful curl snapped into a straight line of lips pressed in anger. “I know you're joking,” she said. “But that kind of threat can get you put in jail. And the paperwork for me is crazy. So don't go there, okay?”

“You mean for a bomb threat you have no choice but to press some kind of button?”

“Please,” she said. “Don't go there.”

“Can you get the supervisor here immediately? Otherwise…”

“So,” she said, scornful again. “Let me get this straight. You're threatening to bomb-threat me?”

“Bomb,” King said, tired of messing around. “There's a bomb in this building and it's going to go off in less than ten minutes. I know because I'm the one who planted it.”

He caught a slight movement of her hands under the counter. He guessed she was pushing an alarm button.

Within seconds, he was surrounded by agents with assault rifles.

“Thanks,” he said to the receptionist. “That's all I needed.”

CHAPTER 44

Don Mundie glared at King across a conference-room table on the seventh floor of the FBI building. King had been waiting only a few minutes, standing by the window and watching people in the plaza across the street wandering in and out of the Starbucks.

“I don't care how many lawyers you have,” Don said with gritted teeth. “A bomb threat at a federal building—that's a minimum five years in a penitentiary.”

“I don't think that's the issue here,” King said.

“Then tell me the issue,” Mundie said. “Now that it's just you and me. Instead of you and me and Mommy and Daddy and the lawyers that Mommy and Daddy bring with them.”

“The issue is that one of our hotel rooms was bugged. I don't think it was you who bugged the room. So that leads to the question of why Moore and Evans would do it.”

“You have a great imagination, son.”

“No,” King said, “just a friend who is nearly a genius. The bugs operate on an analog basis.”

“You found them then?”

“No, we heard them. We swept the room with a Sony AM/FM radio.”

Mundie squinted.

“The radio had a jack for earbuds. As we were talking, Blake tuned the radio up and down the spectrum. The bugs transmitted our voices to the radio. Because he was wearing his earbuds, whoever bugged the room didn't know we'd found them.”

Mundie squinted again. “You can find bugs like that?”

“You have to understand the difference between analog and digital.” King remembered Blake's explanation. “Digital sends out data in packets. It's all or nothing. Analog sends it out in waves. It can be crackly or clear, but you can adjust for that with volume. So, yes—”

“What I meant is that a cheap radio can do a bug sweep? When I think of the budget money we use for—”

“Sir,” King said, “I'm not here to inform you that the room was bugged. Now that I've established that fact, I'm asking who would bug the room. And who learned last night that our parents told MJ and Blake and me that we couldn't work for Evans and Moore.”

“Exactly. That was part of the agreement with the legal team you brought in here yesterday. That if there was so much as a hint of any future involvement—”

“Sir,” King said, conscious of time slipping away, “our parents told us that last night in room 1010. They made it loud and clear that we were to drop everything. So loud and clear that it was loudly and clearly transmitted through the listening bugs in the room.”

“I still don't see an issue here.”

“Because about an hour after that, we were contacted by the president of the United States, asking our parents to reconsider.”

Mundie laughed. “This is getting better and better. You know, I was mad when I was called from the airport to come back to this office. Now I've got a good story to tell my friends in Washington. That some schmuck kid thought he could get me to believe the president asked him to get involved in a CIA operation behind the back of the inspector general.”

Mundie stopped laughing. “Okay, it's not funny anymore. Because this means you think I'm so stupid I'd believe you.”

“There's a reason I asked for a room with a computer hooked up to a television screen,” King said. “I'd like you to watch a private YouTube video.”

Mundie glanced at his watch. “I have five minutes. After that, I'm on my way back to the airport. And the only reason I'm not going to press charges for your little bomb-threat stunt is that I don't want the paperwork. And I don't want to have to come back to Seattle.”

King went to the computer, and when he clicked the keyboard, the screen at the front of the conference room brightened.

He jumped on the computer's Internet browser, found YouTube, and put in his account settings to get to the video Blake had uploaded.

The video opened with the president of the United States staring from the screen at Don Mundie and saying the words, “Hello. Thank you for taking the time to meet with me. Parents, I hope I can change your minds because I need the help of your three sons.”

King hit pause because he heard the sound of a falling chair. He looked over to see Mundie on his feet, hands on the table, chair on the floor behind him.

Mundie was staring at the screen as if he'd just witnessed the start of World War Three. His mouth opened and closed a few times as he struggled to speak.

“Yup,” King said. “The president of the United States. Or as MJ and Blake and I like to call him, POTUS.”

“Keep it frozen there,” Mundie said when he found his voice. “I've got to cancel my flight.”

CHAPTER 45

Mundie surprised King with his next move because Mundie moved past King to a pad of paper at the end of the table and wrote,
This room is probably bugged too. SOP
.

“I'm canceling my flight,” Mundie said, “because you've gone too far. It's one thing to make a bomb threat at a federal building, but to fake a video that impersonates the president of the United States—that I can't ignore. I've brought in a pair of zip-tie handcuffs just in case, and now it looks like I'm going to have to use them. I'm going to cuff you and take you to your parents. Got it?”

Mundie winked at King.

This was a threshold moment. Was Mundie pretending to pretend, just to get cuffs on King? Or was Mundie taking King seriously?

Mundie must have caught and understood King's hesitation.

Trust me
, Mundie scrawled on the note.
This is seriously a national security situation, and I need your help without the FBI knowing it.

With all the lies, King thought, how does a person decide what's true?

He decided Mundie's initial reaction—the chair falling, the hands on the desk, the jaws moving silently—was real.

King held out his hands.

Mundie slid out plastic zip-tie handcuffs from a pocket. Then he grabbed the entire pad of paper and put it in the inner pocket of his suit coat.

And King became Mundie's prisoner, paraded out of the FBI building in front of grim-faced agents who couldn't quite manage to conceal their glee that a teenage boy was being punished for trying to play big-boy games in the wrong sandbox.

Inside Mundie's rental car, Mundie dug out a pocketknife and cut the zip-tie handcuffs.

“Good thing about my clearance level,” Mundie grunted, “is that I can have a pocketknife when I fly. Now let's find a place to talk.”

Mundie drove them to a park near a public library.

He pulled the car over, stepped out, threw money into a meter, and hurried King to a bench in the shade of a tree. Hopeful pigeons hopped toward them, but Mundie scattered them with a wave of his hands.

“We record any meetings with representatives of other agencies,” Mundie said. “I have to assume the Feebs would do the same to me. Cooperation only goes so far.”

Mundie let out a breath. “Talk.”

“About the video? I can show it to you from my iPhone.”

“Don't need to see the rest immediately. I want your impressions of it.”

“The president said he had asked Evans and Moore to assist him with something so secret that no one else in the CIA could know about it. Like there were bad agents, and Evans and Moore had to root them out.”

“Okay,” Mundie said. “You believed it?”

“Yes. At the time.”

“You made the assumption that I might be one of the bad agents?”

“Yes.”

“Yet you came to the FBI building to reach me and allowed me to cuff you.”

“Yes.”

“You have a reason for it?”

“Yes.”

“Ready to give me more than a one-word answer?”

King nodded. “First, MJ and Blake and I agreed that it was strange that the president didn't call us by the names that Evans did. He called us William and Michael instead of King and MJ. But the bigger question was how the president could know he needed to change our parents' minds. That led us to discovering the bugs.”

“You've covered this already.”

“So who was bugging us and feeding the information to the president? If it was someone from the good faction of the CIA, then the good faction was already involved, and he could use them instead of us because the good faction would have known about Evans and Moore. But the president told us that no one else knew about Evans and Moore, so it couldn't have been the good faction.”