America (49 page)

“We will meet the helicopter at three.” Crozet looked at his watch. “In thirty-seven minutes. If the smoke grenades go into the windows of the furniture warehouse then, the operation should go off reasonably well. Two of the men should be on the street in case she comes out with the employees, one in back in the alley.”

“Is she armed?”

“I could never ask that question of the women. I was afraid of arousing suspicions. It is possible.”

“You have the necessary equipment?”

“Yes. I thought this the best plan.”

“
Bon.
Brief the men and begin.”

*   *   *

“Ms. Hudson, there's a fire in the building next door.” The secretary made the announcement, since the main entrance intercom was on her desk. “The fire department wants us to evacuate, just in case.”

Zelda Hudson glanced at the security monitor. The fireman was wearing a slicker and the usual fire helmet. The side of a pumper truck and men flaking out fire hoses were also visible.

Fire was one of the hazards inevitable with a high degree of physical security, a fact that Zelda Hudson knew well. She had bribed a building inspector to get an occupancy permit when she bought the building and put in offices. He had wanted an external fire escape installed on the back side of the building, and she refused. If the people in the building could go down it, burglars could come up.

Well, there was no help for it now. “Everyone out,” she called over the hum of voices. “Five in the elevator at a time. Zip, would you supervise?”

The employees were already queueing up. In short order the first load went down.

On the monitor she could see smoke billowing from the next building, which shared a common wall. That wall was two-foot-thick masonry and wouldn't burn unless the temperature in the furniture warehouse rose to spectacular levels, but with the fire department at the door, what choice was there?

She looked around at the computers, which were still on-line. Hers and Zip's were the important ones, the ones that they could not afford to lose. On the other hand, better to lose them than to let the FBI get their hands on them. She and Zip had one-ounce charges of plastique inside each computer nestled against the hard drives, with fuses rigged to a battery in case the law cut off the power. All she had to do was push a button under her desk.

She heard the helicopter as the last of the employees boarded the elevator for the trip down. Zip stayed behind. He came over to her desk.

“Aren't you going too?”

“What's the helicopter doing up there?”

“Probably a news chopper getting some footage for the five o'clock news.”

“Zip, it could be—”

“Naw,” he said. “That place next door is a firetrap. It's a miracle it hasn't gone up before this. What we need is a place in the suburbs. We can afford it.”

The whopping of the helicopter was getting louder. It sounded as if the thing were right on the roof.

“Come on,” he said. “Let's clear the building, just in case.”

“You go ahead.” She waved toward the elevator.

“Hell, this isn't a raid!”

“This building is brick and stone. The only thing that could burn is the floor beams, and not unless the fire was downstairs. Go on, leave me here.”

Zip went over to the elevator and pushed the button. He was waiting for it to come up when an explosion rocked the office. He looked up, in time to see the door to the roof disintegrate and two men charge through the smoke onto the landing. The noise from the helicopter flooded the room. One of them stepped onto the wooden stairway, which was rigged with counterweights. As the stairway took his weight, the bottom began descending toward the floor.

Zelda pushed the button under her desk and felt the whump as the charges in her computers detonated simultaneously, bulging the boxes. The screens went black, and smoke began oozing from one of them.

“Freeze!” the man coming down the ladder shouted. He had a weapon in his hand.

Zip went for him. The man chopped down with the pistol and dropped Zip in a heap at the foot of the stairs.

“You bastard,” Zelda screamed and charged him.

The second man was right behind the first. Together they wrapped her up and put her on the floor. As one man held her down the other produced a small box. In seconds he had a hypodermic needle in his hand. He grabbed an arm, squeezed it, and jabbed the needle in.

Zip stirred, tried to rise.

When he gathered his wits, he saw one of the intruders climbing the stairs to the roof with Zelda draped over his shoulder.

Vance rose, swayed, and went for the stairs.

He didn't even see the karate chop that dropped him like a rotten log. Or the foot that smashed into his ribs.

The pilot of the television helicopter was stunned when he saw one of his passengers carrying a woman toward the passenger door. No one had said anything about another passenger. The guy gently put her in the backseat before he could object. She appeared to be unconscious. The second man came running over and climbed in beside the pilot. “Go,” he shouted.

“What's with the woman?” For the very first time, the possibility of being involved in a serious crime occurred to the pilot, and he didn't want any part of it.

“Smoke inhalation. Land us at the hospital helo pad.”

Relief flooded the pilot. “Which hospital?”

“Mercy General.”

The pilot checked the wind and engine while the rotor RPM rose, then lifted the collective.

There was an ambulance waiting at the helo pad. Two uniformed paramedics came over and unloaded the woman while the helicopter idled. Afterward the pilot wondered why the man sitting beside him didn't use the radio to notify the hospital that a smoke inhalation victim was inbound, but he assumed that someone must have notified them on a two-way radio. Perhaps the police.

In any event, the two men got out and one shook his hand. They went over to the ambulance and were helping the paramedics put the woman on a gurney when the helo lifted off.

At Teterboro the customs and immigration officials were properly respectful. The immigration man flipped through the passports, jotted down the numbers, then handed them back. While he was doing that, Willi Schlegel bent over the woman on the stretcher, ensured she was okay, then motioned for the men of the entourage to carry it onto the plane. The ambulance drove away.

“How is she?” the customs man asked the uniformed flight attendant who had talked to him when the plane arrived.

“I do not believe the prognosis was good,” the attendant confided, “but Monsieur Schlegel doesn't tell me much. I merely overheard.”

The customs man nodded. He knew about class status among the filthy rich, or he thought he did.

As the plane taxied out, the two government employees got in their car and drove out through the gate.

Five minutes later the Gulfstream lifted off, and when it reached a thousand feet, made a right turn to a northeast heading, on course for the North Atlantic and Europe.

*   *   *

When the carload from Washington arrived in front of Hudson Security Services, the fire department was putting their equipment away.

“What happened?” Jake asked one of the firemen.

“Some smoke in that furniture warehouse,” the man replied, nodding his head. “No fire. The captain said he thinks someone fired a couple of smoke grenades through one of the windows.”

An ambulance crew was wheeling a gurney from the Hudson building. A man, conscious. Jake looked at his face, which looked like a slab of raw meat. This was where he hit the floor.

“What happened to him?” he asked the attendant.

“Someone beat the hell out of him. He's bleeding internally, got a collapsed lung.”

“Zelda Hudson? Where is she?”

“Ask him. He was talking to the cops.”

Jake addressed the man on the gurney. “Where's Zelda?”

“They snatched her. Came in the door from the roof. Kicked me.”

“Who're they?”

“Schlegel, I think. I don't know. Maybe Schlegel.”

“What's your name?”

“Zip Vance.”

The security door was propped open, so Jake went in. All four of the Washington crew rode up in the elevator. Eight people, half women, were standing around looking lost. One of them sobbed out the story to Jake and Tom Krautkramer. Two men came in through the door to the roof, kidnapped Zelda, flew away in a helicopter.

“And look,” the woman wailed, pointing at Zelda's computers. “They destroyed six of the computers, three on that desk and three on the other one.”

It didn't take long for Krautkramer to discover that the computers had been destroyed by a self-destruct system. He whispered his findings to Jake, who just nodded, then he used the telephone.

“Looks like we're a day late and a dollar short,” Toad said.

“Maybe.” Jake crossed his arms.

When Krautkramer finished his telephone call, he said, “I've called our field office to get people over here. We've had an alleged kidnapping and we're on the scene. Doesn't get any better than that. Maybe you'd better go back to Washington without me.”

“I want to talk to Vance,” Jake said. “You want to come along?”

“Tell him we'll come by in a few hours. I want to question these employees first, learn just what it is these people really did here.”

“You don't mind if we question Vance first?”

“Find the sub, the president said.”

Jake shook hands and headed for the elevator.

*   *   *

In the hospital room, Tommy Carmellini was jarred by the crispness of Jake and Toad's blue uniforms and gold sleeve rings against the white of the sheets and off-white walls. The doctor and nurse hovered nearby, adjusting the IV drips, checking the leads on the heart and respiration monitor.

Vance had four broken ribs and a collapsed lung, the doctors said. They were worried about infection. They had given him a painkiller to take the edge off, yet not enough to impair his impulse to breathe.

Every breath Vance took hurt severely. Still, he wanted to talk, to share the load, and Jake Grafton was the man he picked. When Grafton wasn't angry or lost in thought, he looked like your father might have when you were small, a man you could tell things to because he would understand.

With the medical team out of the room, Vance's story poured out a phrase at a time between rasping breaths. Occasionally Jake asked a question when Vance paused, unsure what to say next.

“It was Schlegel, Willi Schlegel, who snatched her. No, I didn't see him, but it had to be. She didn't really double-cross him, you understand, but she had sold the sub's services to Jouany without bothering to tell Willi. I knew that would piss him off—and she did too—but she did it anyway. I told her not to, but she did it because the money was so good.

“Money was the way she kept score. We—each of us—have more money than we can ever spend, but she wanted more. Wanted a huge fortune. Wanted to be somebody, you know?

“Yeah, we got into people's computers, stole stuff, sold it to folks who paid us major money. Then we went back to the people we had ripped off, told them we had been doing a study of their security system, wowed them with a few things we had learned, and got a contract to tighten up their system to keep the common hackers out.

“Of course it was illegal, but it wasn't really wrong. Ideas belong to whoever can use them, not just to the person who was first through the door of the patent office. That's what the Internet is all about. And for whatever it's worth, a lot of the stuff we swiped and sold hadn't been patented. Or copyrighted.

“Yes, we sold some stuff to the Russians. They were always anxious to buy but rarely had the money we wanted. Me, I would have given them the stuff for whatever they could pay, but like I said, Zelda wanted money. Occasionally they would come up with the bucks Zelda demanded, if the stuff we had to sell was cutting edge. Usually it was. But her main clients were the Europeans, EuroSpace. Willi Schlegel. He had money, real money, and he knew the value of what we had to offer.

“I love her, sure. What can I say? You don't always get to pick whom you fall in love with. She is brilliant. Has these magnificent insights. Truly a first-class mind. But wanted money, a lot of it. For some reason money impressed her. Never understood that.

“Yes, she put the satellite in the water. Worked with Kerr on the software, figured out how to do it, hacked into the NASA system and made the changes. Then, when the rocket was in the water, went in and deleted her changes.

“She recruited the Blackbeard team. Kolnikov refused to take her seriously at first, then finally he did. She had been in the CIA computer and knew all about the Blackbeard operation, the plan to steal a Russian sub. She told Ilin and had him tell the director of the CIA that he knew. That made Kolnikov available, after he had had the training.

“She hacked into the navy's communications system and screwed with Cowbell. There is no technical challenge beyond her. Maybe ordinary rules aren't made for people that smart.

“I don't know where she put the satellite. She never told me and I never asked. At some point I realized that I didn't want to know. Maybe I got scared, I don't know.…

“Ilin tried to warn her. She decided to eliminate the worst threat, you. She hired a hitman she had used once before when the mob tried to move in on us. They didn't know what we were doing, but they knew we were making major money doing it, so they tried to muscle in. She hired the guy, and he killed the mob guy. You've probably got it as an unsolved someplace.

“I don't want her dead. You understand? Schlegel will kill her. He agreed to pay her a hundred million to put the satellite in the water, and he's paid just ten. He agreed to pay another hundred million when it's recovered. He'll kill her instead, so she can't talk. And he won't have to pay.