“You mean . . .”
“I mean if they’re forcing her to do something by holding the children hostage, what are they forcing him to do?”
“You didn’t hear it from me,” Joe said, “but I’m told the CIA is already wondering the same thing. Supposedly Westgate’s about to get the chance to explain himself in person.”
Kurt considered that progress. He sat up and pulled the pulse meter off of his finger, causing the monitor to flatline. An alarm sounded, bringing a nurse. She shut off the chirping, checked Kurt’s vitals, and called a report into the nursing station.
As she left, new visitors arrived: Hale from the CIA with his ever-present partner, Col. Lee.
“You’re lucky to be in a hospital,” Hale said, “and not in a North Korean prison camp.”
“Or one of ours, for that matter,” Col. Lee added. “You two almost caused a second Korean War.”
“Technically,” Joe said, “the first one never actually ended. There was no peace treaty, only a cease-fire. So it would really be a continuation of the first war.”
“You think this is funny?” Col. Lee asked.
“No,” Joe said. “But I think the fact that Kurt and I discovered a threat to South Korean security in the form of a secret tunnel from the North has to count for something.”
Hale gave Col. Lee a look that said He has a point.
“You’re both very lucky,” Col. Lee said. “Lucky you didn’t end up dead or in a North Korean gulag. Lucky that Kim Jongun is denying any such tunnel exists and claiming these are all imperialist lies rather than admitting two dozen of his men were killed in the skirmish. Lucky that calmer heads prevailed. It’s taken three days for the sides to calm down. But tensions are almost back to normal.”
Kurt was glad to hear that. “Maybe we went too far,” he said. “We’ll definitely be more careful next time.”
“Sorry, Kurt, but there’s not going to be a next time,” Hale said. The words were delivered with a tinge of regret, even sadness.
“What are you talking about?” Kurt said. “We’ve proved Sienna is alive. We know these people have her and the other hackers on that list. We have to go after them before they do something terrible.”
“The trail’s gone cold,” Hale explained. “There are no leads left to follow. Than Rang is locked up in a maximum security prison, surrounded by guards and lawyers, and he’s not talking to anyone. Your mystery woman and the hackers have vanished without a trace.”
“What about Acosta?” Kurt said. “He took our tracking device. You should be able to activate it and find him.”
“We tried that,” Hale said. “No luck.”
“This country is a peninsula,” Kurt pointed out. “Considering the roadblock to the north, it might as well be an island. They can’t just drive off into the sunset, especially when they’re supposed to be under surveillance.”
“We’re watching the airports and all the major harbors,” Hale said, “but we’ve seen nothing so far.”
Acosta wouldn’t be fool enough to book a commercial flight. There were too many other ways to get out. Hundreds of merchant vessels steaming in and out of Korean ports every day. Beyond that, there were thousands of small watercraft or privately owned jets.
“And even if something does turn up,” Hale added, “it won’t be your job to follow up.”
Kurt narrowed his gaze, all but burning holes in Hale with his eyes.
“I’ve been on the phone with your boss back in D.C.,” Hale said. “He agrees with me that NUMA’s involvement in this situation has run its course and is now at an end. If any other leads do surface, they’ll be followed up on by Central Intelligence or Special Forces personnel under the direction of the NSA.”
Kurt knew the sound of a dismissal when he heard it. It sucked the air right out of him. He glanced over at Joe.
“I spoke with Dirk too,” Joe said. “He wanted you to know, ‘It’s time to let this go.’ ”
Kurt leaned back against the bed. If there was an emptier feeling on Earth, Kurt hadn’t felt it. They’d been so close. He’d finally found Sienna. He’d actually had her in his arms. Now she was gone . . . again.
“The doctors insist you’re ready to be discharged,” Hale said. “We’re going to move you immediately, since we have reason to believe that Than Rang or even Acosta may have agents hanging around who’d like to kill you both. You’ll be flown out of here at dusk on a military C-17 headed for Guam. From there, it’s on to Hawaii and some R & R. Enjoy it, if you can.”
Kurt didn’t respond, and Hale straightened up and made his way toward the door. He stopped to offer one more comment before he left. “I’ll give you this, Kurt. You put on one hell of a show.”
As dusk fell, Kurt and Joe were driven to an American air base and a battleship-gray C-17 that sat on the tarmac, illuminated by a series of floodlights.
They entered from the tail ramp, cleared by a loading officer, who was busy strapping down a Humvee and some other tarpcovered equipment, and were offered seats near the front.
Kurt dropped into his seat, dejected and exhausted. Joe offered a few jokes to cheer him up, but Kurt didn’t have it in him. He sat in silence and stared straight ahead as the huge four-engine transport taxied and then took off into the dark sky.
As they climbed to altitude, Joe fell asleep, but Kurt found he couldn’t close his eyes. He racked his brain for one more avenue to explore, one tiny thing they might have missed that could lead them to Sienna, the other hackers, and whoever was behind a plot that Kurt was certain hadn’t truly begun to unfold yet.
Try as he might, he came up empty. And as the drone of the engines and the chill of the cabin numbed him, he stood and walked toward the front, stopping to stare through the small window in the aircraft door.
The sky was dark up ahead, but with a line of light on the horizon. Silver lining, Kurt thought, how ironic. As drained as he was, it took Kurt a minute to realize that there should not be a silver lining up ahead. If they were headed to Guam, they would be flying into the teeth of the night. They’d only been airborne a few hours and, despite the time zone change, it couldn’t be anywhere near dawn yet.
He looked backward. The sky behind them was pitch-black. “We’re going the wrong way,” he said to himself.
Before he could hazard a guess as to why, the cockpit door opened and a familiar figure stepped out.
“Hiram?” Kurt said.
Seeing Hiram Yaeger outside of the NUMA building was like running into the high school principal out on the town somewhere. It was off-key somehow. Adding to that effect was Hiram’s clothing: instead of his trademark T-shirt and jeans, Yaeger was zipped up in an olive drab military flight suit, with his ponytail tucked up into an Air Force ball cap pulled down tight over the top of his head.
“Are you undercover?” Kurt asked, half joking.
“In a way, I am,” Yaeger replied. “Dirk wanted me to brief you in person.”
“Brief me about what?”
“The mission.”
Kurt paused. “I thought there was no mission,” he said. “In fact, Tim Hale gave me the distinct impression that if I pushed it any further, I might end up in a stockade somewhere.”
Hiram laughed. “Hale is actually rather fond of you, from what I hear. He was very impressed with everything you two accomplished in such a short time.”
“So why the cold shoulder?”
“It was for Colonel Lee’s benefit,” Yaeger said. “And anyone else who might have been listening, for that matter. We think the Korean Security database has been hacked. And we’re not too sure about our own or the DOD’s. So we figured we’d lay out a story for Colonel Lee to enter into his system while I came here with handwritten notes to get you up to date.”
“Handwritten? That must have been hard for you,” Kurt joked.
“You have no idea,” Yaeger replied. “Might as well be using a slide rule or an abacus.”
Kurt laughed, happy to see a friendl
y face in an unexpected place for the second time in as many weeks. “So what tidings do you bring, O messenger of the realm?”
Yaeger waved at a pair of seats that faced each other. Kurt took one seat as Hiram sat across from him and zipped the flight suit down far enough to pull out a manila folder he had tucked inside. “An awful lot has happened while you were napping in that Korean hospital.”
“Good or bad?”
“A little of both,” Hiram said. “As soon as Joe positively identified Sienna Westgate among the group of people that had been smuggled out of North Korea, the administration went into overdrive. Brian Westgate was called in to explain himself. In the middle of a tirade about how Phalanx was unbreakable— even if someone had Sienna in their clutches—he suffered a mental breakdown of some kind and what we thought was a stroke. Turns out he’d been given the same treatment as you. They pulled a chip from his occipital lobe. A team from the FBI found prescription drugs in his house that had been tampered with and laced with memory-inhibiting compounds. He’s recovering and under guard for his own protection.”
“Does he remember anything?” Kurt asked.
“Not much. Seems they worked his mind over worse than yours.”
Kurt sat back. He’d harbored a natural dislike of the Internet billionaire ever since he’d learned of Sienna’s engagement to him. And from the beginning of this mystery, he’d been certain Westgate had some part in it. Finding out that Westgate had been given the same rough treatment and had been used as a pawn in some bigger scheme put Kurt in the odd place of feeling he’d misjudged the man. He could only imagine what was going through Westgate’s mind at this point.
“They pulled him from the yacht,” Kurt said, remembering what he’d heard. “After they escaped in that pod and the storm had passed, they put him in that raft and waited for someone to find him.”
Yaeger nodded. “Seems likely,” he said. “The thing is, with both Brian Westgate and Sienna compromised, it’s become obvious to everyone that Phalanx cannot be relied upon to protect the computer systems and networks it’s been tasked with guarding.”
“What’s being done about it?”
Yaeger sighed. “Everything that can be,” he said. “A crash effort is under way to pull Phalanx and replace it with alternate systems. In addition, other security measures are being strengthened and reviewed. Some systems are being disconnected from the grid entirely.”
“A step in the right direction,” Kurt said. “But when the people behind this mess realize that Sienna is no longer useful to them, neither she nor her children are going to last very long.”
“No,” Yaeger agreed. “The most likely outcome has them being killed. The group behind all this will simply start over. Whatever their ultimate goal is, they’ve spent considerable time and energy trying to bring it to life. Nothing we’ve seen suggests they would give up.”
“Any idea what they’re up to?”
“We’ve detected a massive increase in hacking attempts but no clear pattern,” Yaeger said. “We think they’re trying to disguise their true objective.”
“Which means we have to find them,” Kurt urged. “The only way this ends is if we stop it at the source.”
Yaeger nodded. “And that brings me to why you’re here and flying west with the night instead of east to Guam. We have a new lead. And, strangely enough, you’re the one who gave it to us.”
As he spoke, Yaeger pulled another photograph from the file folder. Kurt had seen it before. It was the picture he’d taken of Calista on the deck of Acosta’s yacht.
“Max has finished the facial recognition analysis on your mystery woman.”
“Any hits?”
“Not at first,” Yaeger replied. “We checked through the civilized world’s DMV bureaus, passport-issuing organizations, and court archives. Even Interpol. No matching photographic record of this woman exists. So I asked Max to scan all publicly available images and see if we could find a counterpart.”
“There must be billions of photos out there,” Kurt said.
“Trillions,” Hiram said. “Many trillions when you include video images. Even for Max it was a big task. Took three full days. And when she finally came up with an answer, I almost asked her if she was joking.”
“I didn’t know computers could joke,” Kurt said.
“Max has been known to pull a prank or two. But this time she was serious.”
Hiram produced another photo, this one copied from an old three-by-five glossy. It showed a handsome couple in their thirties. Gathered around them were three children, two boys and a girl, who looked to be the youngest child. Judging by the clothes, the photo had probably been taken in the mid-eighties.
“Nice-looking family,” Kurt said. “Who are they?”
“The woman’s name is Abigail Banister,” Hiram said. “She was a telecommunications expert.”
Kurt studied her. Aside from the clothes, the woman could have been Calista’s twin.
“The man is her husband,” Hiram continued, “Stewart Banister. He was a satellite guidance specialist. They’re English. They disappeared while on safari in Zimbabwe twenty-eight years ago. At the time, there was some suspicion that they’d defected to the Eastern bloc. It seems British Intelligence had a low-level alert on them because of certain political beliefs and some old friends they’d made back in their college years. Though, for reasons that will become clear to you shortly, the world soon learned that such was not the case.”
Kurt had an idea where this was going. “The woman looks just like Calista. And the little girl . . .”
“According to Max, her facial structure shows an eightynine percent correlation with those of the woman you know as Calista. Once we did a computerized age progression, using her own features and those of her siblings and parents, we end up with a ninety-six percent correlation. For all intents and purposes, it might as well be a fingerprint match.”
“You’re saying the little girl is Calista?”
Yaeger nodded.
Kurt had great respect for what Hiram and Max could do— certainly they’d pulled off near miracles before—but this seemed like a shot in the dark. “Is there any way we can prove what you’re suggesting?”
“We already have,” Yaeger said.
“How?”
“DNA analysis.”
Kurt raised an eyebrow. “Where’d we get her DNA from?”
“From you,” Yaeger said. “You had Calista’s blood all over you, not to mention a few strands of black hair caught in the buttons of your coat. Joe pointed it out to one of the CIA techs when he got to the hospital. They were smart enough to save the samples. We’ve since matched Calista’s DNA with surviving relatives of the Banister family.”
“So the girl in this picture is Calista,” Kurt said.
“Her real name is Olivia,” Yaeger said.
They looked so normal. “Are you telling me these middleclass suburbanites left England, faked their disappearance, and started some kind of international crime family?”
“No,” Hiram said. “The real story is much sadder than that. As I told you, they disappeared while on vacation. The father resurfaced six months later when he was shot to death in Bangkok. His hands were bound, his face was bruised, and he was clearly trying to escape from someone when he was gunned down. The responsible party was never found. A year after that, the bodies of the mother and the two boys were discovered.”
“Where?”
“In a dilapidated lifeboat drifting off the coast of Mozambique.”
Hiram passed another photo over, this one of the lifeboat as it was discovered. The three bodies were covered, but there were several containers at their sides. Here and there, Kurt saw patches to the rotting wooden boat and a pair of makeshift oars. In one corner was a broken splint of wood and a tattered bolt of cloth that might have been used as a mast and sail.
“They died of dehydration,” Hiram explained.
“No water in those containers?” Kurt asked.
“Perhaps at first,” Yaeger said. “But if that’s what they held, it wasn’t enough. Based on the condition of the bodies, the coroner guessed they’d been in the boat for at least two weeks, maybe three. Not enough water for three people for that much time. Not even if those containers were filled to the brim.”
Kurt looked back at the photo of the smiling family and guessed at the sequence. “Somehow, Calista got left behind. Maybe they knew there wasn’t enough water for four and were hoping three could make it.”
“Who knows,” Hiram said. “The only thing we’re sure of is that the smiling little girl in that picture has been with whoever took her for almost three decades.”
“She doesn’t know, does she?”
“She may remember some of it,” Hiram cautioned. “She would have been four when they were abducted, five going on six when her mother and brothers made what we can only assume was a desperate attempt to escape. But considering what we’ve learned about people in captivity, it’s highly probable that whatever memories she had of the situation have been suppressed. Between Stockholm syndrome and the human desire to survive, the mind can be bent into accepting even the strangest of things. In her case, as a young child, it would probably have been as simple as just making her part of a new family.”
Kurt considered the irony. “She’s gone from abductee to abductor.”
“She wouldn’t be the first.”
Kurt nodded. Looking at the photo, he felt sorry for the little girl who’d become Calista. But his main concern was the madness she and her partners were now spreading over the world.
“So this is a break for us,” he said. “If we find the people who took her, we find the mastermind behind all this.”
“Exactly our thinking,” Hiram said. “Which leads us to a leap of faith. Take a look at the old lifeboat in the picture. Can you make out the name stenciled on the upper plank?”
Kurt squinted. He could see a discoloration, but that was it. He shook his head.