“Hi! And you folks would be the…”
“Rogers,” the man volunteered.
She looked at the clipboard and smiled. “Yeah. The Rogers clan. You guys are the last customers I’ve got today before I can go home. Okay! We’ve got a new program for families, to get you into the terminal with less stress by getting you on this north elevator. You have your contract?”
The man nodded as he put the minivan in park and unstrapped his seat belt.
Robert squinted to see who was inside the dark-green minivan that slowed to a halt beside them. The door swung open, revealing Kat frantically motioning them inside. In five minutes they were speeding onto the northbound lanes of Interstate 5.
Dallas Nielson leaned forward from the middle of the bench seat in the second row and shook her head. “Honey,” she said to Kat, “I’ve been on some scary adventures in my time, but that slide ride takes the cake. In fact, I could’ve sworn someone shoved me out the door back there.”
“No!” Kat said, feigning shock. “Really?”
“Yeah, really. I was thinking of complaining to the FBI, but what the heck.”
Kat grimaced. “Probably just some pushy teenager.”
“Hey!” Steve said from directly behind her.
Dallas patted Steve on the right knee as she craned her neck to look at Kat. “All seriousness aside, Kat,” Dallas said.
Kat glanced at Dallas. “What?”
“Sorry. Old radio term we’d throw out when we got bored.”
“You were a DJ?”
“Broadcast engineer, actually. In New York. But I DJ’d, too. But then I won six million in the lottery and retired.”
“The lottery. Really?” Kat asked.
“Yep. Really. But now I have a question for you, Jane Bond.”
“And that would be?” Kat asked, shaking her head.
“Having survived a major plane crash,” Dallas began, ticking off the points on the fingers of her left hand, “watched Graham’s wife fall to her death and my friend Britta being blown to bits, been rescued under fire in a helicopter flown by someone who didn’t know how to fly one, escaped from a commie country in a stolen business jet with a criminal for a pilot, fled from a team of FBI agents who weren’t, and sneaked onto a flight that threw us off in the middle of the night somewhere short of the gate in Seattle, could I please ask when the hell this ride is going to be over? I mean, enough is enough, okay?”
“Did I forget to mention,” Kat said, chuckling and holding the palm of her right hand out parallel to the floor, “that you have to be this tall to go on this ride?”
“So that’s the problem!” Dallas snorted.
“I think what Dallas is trying to say,” Robert began, but Dallas turned and glared at him in mock indignation. “Hey, my man! Dallas can say what Dallas was going to say, okay?”
“Yup. Sorry,” Robert replied.
“I should think so!” Dallas sat for a few seconds, then turned back to Robert. “What was I going to say?”
The comic relief broke them all up, all except Graham, who sat silently, staring out the window.
“Oh, yeah. I remember,” Dallas went on. “You appear to be heading someplace, Kat. Would you please tell us where?”
“A cash machine first, then an all-night grocery store,” Kat said.
Dallas looked at Robert and nodded with an exaggerated thumbs-up sign as if affirming a great new idea. “Right. Then what do we do? Buy a quart of milk?”
“In part, yes. We’re going to buy enough groceries for a week. Food, milk, coffee, paper products, personal items. Everything. Then we go to the upper end of a fifty-mile-long inaccessible lake on the other side of the Cascade Mountains where there are virtually no telephones, no traffic, and no assassins, and we hole up there while I try to figure out exactly whom we can trust, and who, on the other hand, is trying to kill us… not to mention shoot down airliners.”
Kat turned to the others. “I… can’t force you to go, but Graham, Steve, Dallas — you’re all in grave danger if you try to go home or call anyone.”
Steve shrugged his shoulders. “My mom will already have freaked.”
Dallas nodded, but Graham Tash spoke for the first time in hours. “I’m… in no hurry, Kat.”
“And Dan?” Kat continued.
“Whatever you think best,” he said firmly. “I’m single.”
Dallas raised her hand. “’Scuse me. One amenities question, please. Are we talking tents, sleeping bags, a Motel Six, or is there, perhaps, a four-star resort nearby?”
“My mother’s brother owns a cabin there,” Kat replied. “He’s never there this time of year, and I have access.”
“Kat,” Robert said. “Are you saying no phones, no sheriff, and no escape?”
Kat nodded. “Except for park rangers. It’s a National Recreation Area.”
“Are you sure we want to be that isolated?”
She negotiated a turn onto the freeway and looked over at him with a sigh. “Robert, I’m making this up as I go along, but the only person in D.C. I can trust my life to told me to find a hole and pull it in after us for a few days while he tries to sort out what’s going on. The best hiding place I know of is Stehekin, Washington.”
“Somehow,” Dallas said, “I get the impression you know this area.”
Kat nodded. “I love the Pacific Northwest, and the Seattle-Tacoma area. I’ve come here many times over the years.”
There was a small, insistent beeping from Kat’s purse, and she fumbled with her right hand to extract the pager while keeping her eyes on the road. She handed it to Robert, motioning for him to read the message out loud.
“It says, ‘Where are you? What happened in Seattle? By the way — NTSB pathology confirms destroyed/burned retina one SeaAir pilot.’”
“Good grief!” Kat muttered.
“What does that mean?” Dallas asked from the back.
Kat turned her head slightly. “It means that the same type of attack that hit you, Dan, and killed your captain, hit at least one of the pilots in the SeaAir crash near Cuba. And that confirms we’re dealing with serial terrorism.”
“Kat,” Robert continued, “he’s also ordering you to call ASAP.”
She shook her head. “That I cannot do.”
CHAPTER 35
The two FBI agents searching the main terminal below had moved on. On the second-story mezzanine, a slim, dark-haired, pock-faced man in his late thirties carefully peered around a column to make certain they hadn’t returned. Satisfied, he lifted his arm and spoke softly into a hidden microphone wired through his clothes to a transceiver clipped to his belt.
“Rolf, are you in the clear?”
The response came back in his tiny earpiece. “Yes. We’re both here. Where are you?”
“Stuck at the moment. Two feds are a floor below me, asking about us. I’ll come off this perch as soon as they’re gone. Have you called in yet?”
“You sure you want to hear that now?”
“I’m sure.”
“Well, our leader is not happy. In fact, I’d say our leader’s just shy of homicidally mad, although he’s always so controlled it’s hard to tell.”
The man leaned slightly over toward the balcony, checking the progress of the two genuine FBI agents who had fanned out in the airport after discovering the charade at the South Satellite. It had taken less than ten minutes for the FBI team waiting at the North Satellite to catch on, not enough time to thoroughly search the DC-10 a second time. Somehow the six had escaped, but it seemed impossible.