Middle-of-the-night phone calls never bring good news. The secretary of state answered it, anyway.
“Padilla,” she said, trying not to sound too groggy.
“Your man Bennings has caused quite a stir in Las Vegas,” said DCI John Stout. “The EMP weapon he stole from Sandia was detonated over the city about forty-five minutes ago.”
“Are you certain?”
“We don’t make mistakes.”
Like hell you don’t. “Bennings said Popov had a Russian-built e-bomb.”
“I recall you had no proof of that, but we have very good video of Major Bennings and the Russian spy Yulana Petkova stealing the RT-Seven, don’t we? And the damage was limited to a two-square-block area. A Russian weapon would most likely have left a significantly larger footprint.”
“That’s speculation. And neither of us, John, has any proof right now telling us exactly which weapon was used,” retorted Padilla. “What’s the situation on the ground there?”
“Fluid. But the public will never learn an e-bomb was detonated. The bad guys hit a private storage vault and apparently made off with a massive trove of diamonds. I’ll brief the president first thing in the morning.”
“What about Major Bennings?”
“He was captured. Holding the diamonds. He’s being detained at Nellis for now. I’ll be demanding the army rescind the offer of amnesty. Good night.”
Padilla turned off the phone and shook her head. There would be no return to sleep, even fitful sleep, so she got out of bed, pulled on a robe, and padded down the stairs of her Georgetown home toward the kitchen.
CHAPTER 43
Bennings knew that army units sometimes trained at Nellis Air Force Base, but he had never taken part in any training there. The army had their own small post tucked away at Nellis, which Kit hadn’t been aware of. He was aware of it now.
He sat with his hands handcuffed behind his back at a Formica table. His position made the flesh wound to his upper arm hurt, but just a little. Bright fluorescent lights shone overhead in a drab room that looked like it was strictly for meetings, not for interrogations or prisoner detention. Yulana had been taken to a different room.
All of his belongings had been taken from him, but the thing he most needed now was a handcuff key. He’d been in the room for seven minutes and was fairly certain there was no hidden video camera observing him. So he stood up and walked to a table against the wall that held some basic office supplies, but he didn’t see what he was looking for.
He crossed to another table on the other side of the room. A few magazines, a file folder, some kind of report stapled together and then some pages held with a paper clip. He turned his back to the pages, slipped off the paper clip, then returned to his seat.
Within two minutes he’d picked the handcuffs’ lock with the paper clip. He quickly rifled the drawers of a desk and found scissors and a roll of duct tape, which he pocketed.
The angle of the door orientation to the room and furniture arrangement was such that a person entering the room would have to step inside before seeing that Bennings’s chair was empty. So he moved to the side of the door and waited. With luck, one of the MPs who had brought him here would come in to check on him before the serious boys in black suits arrived. He needed to get out, sooner rather than later. He decided to wait five minutes before forcing the issue and venturing out into the hallway.
One minute later the door opened.
Most people are right-handed. So most people use their right hand, their gun hand, to turn a doorknob and push open a door, meaning their gun hand is engaged.
Kit reached around, grabbed the hand on the doorknob, and wrenched it into a wristlock while pulling the body into the room. He had a female MP, a brunette lieutenant, and as she went down to the floor, he pulled her 9mm Beretta free from its holster.
“Don’t make a sound,” he whispered while standing over her, applying the painful wristlock with only his right hand. Using his left hand, he eased back the slide on the Beretta, confirming there was a round in the chamber.
He quietly closed the door, tucked the pistol into his waistband, and bent down. GANZ was the name emblazoned over the breast pocket of her pixelated digital camouflage BDU blouse.
“Lieutenant Ganz, I’ll ease up on the wristlock if you promise not to make any noise. I just want to talk with you quietly, okay? Do we have a deal?”
“No deal. If I talk to you, it will make trouble for me.”
“Tell them I pointed a gun to your head. I’m not going to do that, but you can tell them that.”
“Sorry, no,” said Ganz through gritted teeth. She looked to be about thirty, with blue eyes and fair skin. It occurred to Bennings that she was too pretty to be in the army, meaning she probably suffered a lot of sexual harassment.
Since she wasn’t struggling or making noise, he eased up on the wristlock. “Okay, we don’t have a deal, but I need you to stay quiet.”
She didn’t say anything. Good. “Have you served overseas?” he asked. Better to start her off with some easy questions.
“Afghanistan.”
“As an MP?”
“Civil Affairs.”
“All right, so you’re halfway smart. Tell me why I’m here.”
He could see in her eyes that she was gauging an answer, so he pressed harder on the wristlock. “Don’t scam me, just speak the truth as you know it,” said Bennings as he drilled her with his most intimidating stare.
“Agents are coming to take you into custody.”
“CID?”
“CIA.”
Bennings’s eyes narrowed. “I thought I was being given amnesty.”
“I don’t know anything about that. My MP unit is here for two weeks of desert training. We were supposed to train overseas, but because of budget cuts, they sent us here. Urgent orders came in tonight to do a prisoner transfer of you and Miss Petkova from Las Vegas PD and detain you both here.”
“How long before the agents get here?”
“Any time.”
“Where’s Miss Petkova?”
“The next room. To the right.”
“My belongings?”
“Front desk.”
“How many of you on duty?”
“Five. So why don’t you just give me back my pistol and we’ll forget this happened? You can’t get away. You’re on an army post, and we have orders to shoot both of you if you try to escape.”
Kit registered surprise. “Orders to shoot us? That’s interesting, since we haven’t been charged with a crime.”
“They said you’re spies, that you’re a traitor. And a murderer.”
“The CIA lied, Lieutenant.” Bennings’s eyes darted around the room, his mind racing. Then a sobering thought rocked him. It ran all the way to Padilla and the power politics played by the president’s closest advisers and cabinet members. A radical decision had been made; Padilla was clearly no longer able to protect him.
Bennings hadn’t been applying pressure to the wristlock, but now he released his grip entirely.
“They want me dead,” he said, with quiet certainty.
Ganz looked at him quizzically.
“How many members of your MP unit are here training?”
“About fifty,” she said.
“So if I’m so dangerous, why are there only five of you watching the two of us?”
She hesitated, then: “Those were the orders.”
“And why would I be held in an office and not in the brig? There’s a brig on this post, right?”
Ganz nodded reluctantly. “They specifically told us to put you in an office. I’m not much on questioning orders from my commander.”
He looked at her for a long beat, as if deciding how to play the lieutenant. “Want to know why it was so easy for me to get out of the handcuffs? It’s because they want me and Miss Petkova to escape. So they can kill us. They must already have snipers in place.”