Cut and Run

by Ridley Pearson

  “The additional processing power,” she said. “Did he, by any chance, set up grid computing for you?” Before Miller could answer, she asked, “Has anyone checked the network logs?”

  “Good God,” Miller mumbled. To a confused Larson he said, “I assure you the oversight was unintentional.”

  “What the hell are you two talking about?”

  Miller held up a finger. “She just might be onto something,” was all Miller would give him.

  Miller’s office, a sanctum of order, overlooked a campus lawn and intersecting pathways. An extra chair had to be brought in, crowding the space.

  Miller worked behind his desk, consulting two computer screens and an accordioned stack of printouts.

  Hope explained to Larson in a hushed voice: “Grid computing is the poor man’s supercomputer. Any personal computer or server, at any one time, is only using about fifteen percent of its processing power. You link machines together, you take advantage of the headroom-the unused processing power. You link together a thousand, or ten thousand, you have what amounts to a homemade supercomputer.”

  “What we’ve just established,” Miller explained, “is that our grid, the one Leo set up for us, has shown massive additional usage from midnight to seven A.M. for the past three weeks.”

  “Markowitz has been using the system undetected,” Hope interjected. “With everyone asleep, he has six or seven hours of power processing available. He’s been working the swing shift.”

  “We were focused on our Cray and our Silicon Graphics. But someone tapping directly into the grid? It’s so obvious in hindsight, but at the time-it’s so new to us-it just wasn’t on our radar.”

  “Can we shut him down?” Larson asked.

  Miller looked up sharply, meeting eyes with Hope, who then said, “No, no! You don’t want to do that.”

  “Yes, we do.”

  “Each night he stays on the system for hours,” Hope said. “Dr. Miller can peek behind that curtain and trace what port he’s coming in on, which Internet provider he’s using.”

  “We’ve collected enough data points-six nights’ worth. We’ll identify the ISP and, with their help, should be able to nail down his exact location. If he’s moving around, that may not help you. But if he’s stationary…”

  “Of course he’ll keep moving,” Larson said. “He’s not going to give us a way to find him.”

  “Unless he’s innocent.” Miller made sure he met eyes with Larson. “You’re in such a hurry to prosecute him.”

  “He could be being watched, or like me, maybe they hold something over him,” Hope said. “He doesn’t dare send out a distress signal, for fear of being caught, but he’s smart enough to leave us an electronic trail to follow.”

  “We’ve interviewed his extended family,” Larson said. “There’s nothing they gave us to suggest extortion.”

  “Nothing the family’s willing to share, at any rate,” Hope said.

  Still working the printouts, Miller observed, “Only Leo would understand the risks involved by using the same entry port, the same ISP, night after night. If he is remaining stationary, if we are able to trace it, then it has to be intentional. He’s leaving you a string to follow.” Looking up from the paperwork, his finger still marking a spot, Miller said, “And if you’re smart, you’ll follow it.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  A woman with bright green hair passed Rotem’s office. She wore a black cape and had pointy ears. He thought she must be part of the secretary pool, but the lime green hair threw him. Do they have Goths working here now? He hoped like hell she wasn’t one of his deputies.

  Reminded then of yet another Beltway Halloween he felt burdened by his responsibilities as a father, restricted by the twenty-minute drive to a safe neighborhood where they’d trick-or-treat with friends, the fathers drinking a little too much as the mothers went door to door with the kids. He felt the day slipping away from him, the quitting hour quickly approaching, even though it was barely after lunch. He slid the well-marked legal pad in front of him and reconsidered his list of priorities. He drew a few arrows and then pushed the pad away, feeling helpless. The discovery of a mole in their midst, and the ongoing investigation into damage done, had crushed morale within Fugitive Apprehension. Rotem’s mood wasn’t much better.

  He’d had a latte and some biscotti for lunch and was already beginning to feel hungry again. With four meetings scheduled this afternoon, he had his work cut out for him.

  Wegner entered his office without knocking. A redheaded man so thin he couldn’t find shirts to fit, Wegner’s boyish face belied nearly a decade of experience in the department. His deodorant failed to mask his body odor. A desk jock devoted to intelligence gathering, he approached his job with the eagerness of a field operative.

  “May have something.” When overly excited, one of Wegner’s most annoying habits was his tendency to either truncate his sentences, leaving the recipient to decode them, or talk so quickly you couldn’t understand a word. Or both.

  Rotem had not heard from Larson. Nor had he tried to make contact. He had two dead officers-murdered-and a safe house that was no longer safe. Larson would find cover and check in. He’d recalled Hampton and Stubblefield, who’d both been pursuing Markowitz leads. With Rotem’s department in disarray, Wegner’s enthusiasm seemed surreal.

  The man placed a printout in front of Rotem, gave him about an eighth of a second to examine it, and then began talking at a furious rate. Rotem slipped on a pair of reading glasses.

  “ATC. General aviation aircraft. Flight plans, into the greater St. Louis metropolitan area. Last thirty hours. Current as of one-zero hundred… a little over an hour ago.”

  Rotem had reported the missing child to the FBI’s St. Louis field office, requesting they make it a priority. He’d not told them who Penny was, nor how she connected to WITSEC or FATF, nor that Laena was missing. Train stations, rental-car agencies, bus stations, truckers, truck stops, and state troopers were all on the alert, as were the general aviation airports and St. Louis International.

  Rotem didn’t recall requesting that one of his guys work with Air Traffic Control’s computerized flight plans. He hadn’t asked anyone to filter general aviation for first-time visits to the area, but he wasn’t complaining.

  “Give me the short form,” he told Wegner. “And slow down.”

  “Homeland Security requires ATC to track every bird in the sky for variations from their regularly filed flight plans. Since the abduction of the Stevenson girl, ATC has recorded a half dozen first-time single-engine aircraft into the St. Louis area, and we’ve accounted for the pilot and the reason for the visit in each case. Eleven twins, most of which simply landed and refueled. Employees at FBOs are encouraged to keep track of passenger pickups and drop-offs, something initiated by Homeland. All FBOs have been advised of the little girl. Intel gathered an hour ago from ATC concerns”-he leaned over Rotem and turned the page, directing him to a line about halfway down-“a fractionally owned private jet. In and of itself, it’s not too remarkable; in the past day we’ve logged seven privately owned jets landing there for the first time. But in each case, the paper trail made sense-that is, the fractional owner was a corporation, or at least a known entity, and the passengers listed on the manifest checked out. This one,” he said, tapping his finger strongly on the open page, “is the exception. We’ve been on the horn with Sure-Flyte, the corporation that sells and maintains the fractional ownership fleet, and we’ve also run a background on the fractional owner-a corporation out of Delaware -and it’s murky, to say the least. Past flights, and there haven’t been many, have been Seattle to Providence, round trip. Seattle to here, Washington, D.C. Seattle to Reno a half dozen times. Always originating with a passenger in Seattle. The passenger names listed on the manifests are for people who certainly exist-of course they do-but I’m betting ten to one they’re recent victims of identity theft. You look at their incomes, these people did not ride a private jet around the
country.”

  “Is Homeland involved?”

  “They’ll be all over this once they hear about the aliases.”

  “Let’s delay that for now,” Rotem said. “Where’s it scheduled to land?”

  “That’s what caught our attention. The pickup is Washington, Missouri. It’s a small strip west of St. Louis, just big enough to handle a jet like this. And get this: no tower, no FBO. No witnesses. Sure-Flyte has never, let me repeat that, never, landed one of their jets at the Washington strip.”

  “A private jet of dubious ownership,” Rotem repeated, “landing for the first time at a strip just out of town where no one is likely to see who gets on or gets off.”

  “And the first time a passenger flight for this company did not originate in Seattle. Which is why I brought it up here in person rather than put it into the paper mill.”

  Wegner lived in an office cubicle where the only light came from fluorescent tubes and the only smells from his armpits or the coffee machine. For a reward, Rotem felt tempted to bring him as a field-side spectator for the day-to see his efforts in action-but decided he needed him on the front line of paperwork.

  “You may have saved a life, Wegner.” Rotem watched as the man grew a few inches taller. “Maybe more than that. Maybe many more.”

  Wegner lingered a little too long.

  “Now get back to it,” Rotem said, already growing impatient with him.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  A thunderstorm cracked wildly with twenty minutes to go before the scheduled landing.

  With the small girl bound and gagged in the trunk of the stolen car, Paolo sat off a farm road across a small poured-concrete bridge to the east of, and with a good view of, Washington Memorial Airport ’s landing strip. He’d rigged the car’s jack to make it look as if he were dealing with a flat. In fact, he could drive away, leaving the jack behind if needed. By car, he was less than five minutes from the tarmac and the sole hangar. On foot, they would have to cross a farmer’s field, ten to twelve minutes if the girl stayed on her feet; but this option would allow him to abandon the stolen car in the woods along the creek and thereby limit the evidence connecting the kidnapping to this airfield. He waited. Which would it be? He’d been told the pilot had his cell number.

  He couldn’t get the image of the girl out of his mind: dripping wet head to toe, caught between the motel bed and the TV, a stunned look of surprise as he came through the door.

  He’d waited for her to say something. And she, him.

  Finally, he broke the silence. “Get out of those clothes and dry yourself. You’ll catch cold.”

  She turned around and headed for the bathroom.

  “I need you to do something for me,” he called after her.

  She stopped just outside of the bathroom and turned to face him as if expecting more from him.

  “It’s the duty of every prisoner to attempt escape,” he said. “Once,” he added, “and only once. I’d have done the same thing.”

  “I want my mommy.”

  This stung him but he said, “I’ll hurt you if you do that again. Hurt you bad. Count on it. But no one’s going to kill you, Penny. Least of all me. That’s a promise.”

  The kid never flinched. “I want my mommy.”

  “Get out of those clothes. The motel has a washer/dryer. You can wear one of my T-shirts.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  His eyeball had swollen and blistered to deformity. Yellowish fluid leaked in bursts down his cheek. For a moment his eye would actually feel slightly better; then the stinging would return, escalating to unbearable pain, and then it would squirt out its foul juice, and the cycle would repeat itself.

  “I need you to do something icky,” he told her. “Something’s in my eye, and it has to come out.”

  “I don’t like icky things.”

  “Neither do I. But you’re going to have to do this.”

  A few minutes later she had changed and opened the door for him. Her clothes lay in a heap by the front door-all but her socks, which she refused to take off. She wore his Oakland Raiders T-shirt like a dress.

  He mopped up the bathroom floor with a towel and had her sit on the counter while he held his damaged eye open to the bright light.

  He described the melted contact lens and pointed to it. “You’re going to have to pinch it, and pull it off,” he instructed. “I tried, but I couldn’t see what I was doing.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “Yeah, you can.”

  “No, I can’t.”

  “You act like this, and you’re going back in the closet. You help me out, and there’s ice cream and cartoons.”

  “What if I hurt you?”

  “You’re going to hurt me, but it’s not your fault. Just pinch and pull, okay?”

  “It’s disgusting.”

  He tried to think of other kids he knew-kids who lived on the Romero compound. He said, “What if it was a kitty cat with something in her eye? Would you help the kitty?”

  A reluctant “Yeah?”

  “So forget it’s me. Pretend it’s a kitty cat, and you’re the only one that can help it, the only one who can save it. Can you do that?”

  “Maybe…”

  “We’re going to do this now. You and me. Ready?”

  “I guess.”

  “Okay.” He pried open his bad eye, gritted his teeth, and watched as the two little fingers converged, blocking what little sight he had.

  A moment later he screamed. It stuck to her finger like stubborn mucus, and when she shook it off it landed on the bathroom floor, a little glob of yellowish goo.

  “I got it!” she said. “I got it.” Without thinking what she was doing, she almost hugged him, then shrank back.

  “You got it,” he said, swallowing a scream. His one good eye met hers, and for a moment, neither knew what to say.

  The assigned hour of 2:37 P.M. growing near, Paolo checked his watch repeatedly, his good eye rotating from the distant airfield to the airspace above the field, to the rearview mirror, and back again. He’d covered the injured eye with an athletic headband worn askew on his head, a makeshift eye patch.

  Arrangements had been made immediately after reporting he’d lost all sight out of the eye. He’d hoped Philippe might simply decide to send him a partner, possibly with some medical supplies, so that he could complete the original assignment. The jet coming either meant anxiety over the hostage situation or a loss of faith in him, so he looked ahead to the landing sick with nerves. His future was in the hands of others, the outcome a plane ride away, and Paolo felt desperately out of control.

  The first car he saw could have been nothing. It pulled off the two-lane road on the north side of the airstrip and into a dirt turnout in front of a farmer’s maintenance shed or hay barn. When no one climbed out, Paolo kept his eye on it.

  But it was a second vehicle, a dark four-door much like the first, that got his heart pounding. If he had it right, and he wasn’t sure he did, he’d seen this same car already. It had driven past the airstrip’s entrance. Now it had backtracked and entered. It drove up to the strip’s only hangar, where a man wearing a sport coat climbed out. A moment later the hangar’s electronic door opened slowly, and then this car pulled inside, meaning there was a second man behind the wheel.

  Before the hangar door came fully shut, Paolo had his motor going. He rocked it off the jack and backed up across the small bridge. He took a rural road south, into farm country, having plotted this course as an escape route in advance. It was hilly and wooded out here, an easy place to lose a tail if necessary. He drove fast, but not too fast, his one good eye jumping from the road ahead of him to the road behind.

  Cops or feds, it hardly mattered: Philippe had been clear about what he should do should anything go wrong.

  Radio silence-no phones, no attempts to contact the compound. No e-mail. No faxes. He was on his own, his only assignment to get the little girl to the compound as soon as possible.


  Crossing the stream for the second time, Paolo slowed and tossed his cell phone out the window into the water, ending any possibility of triangulating his location. It landed with a small splash.

  He and the girl were on their own now. Bad eye or no bad eye, he had an assignment he intended to carry out. He felt strangely relieved. By the grace of God he’d been given a chance to redeem himself, to prove his worth.

  He crested a hill, already planning how to replace the stolen car in case it had been reported. He tried not to think of the implications of what he’d just witnessed at the airstrip, how close he had come to being caught.

  Tried not to think of what he’d do if Philippe ordered him to kill the little girl.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  In a surprisingly short time, Dr. Miller traced Markowitz’s Internet access backward from the university grid to a physical address in Florida. Armed with that address, and hoping the Markowitz-Romero-Penny connection would hold, Larson drove Hope to Springfield and chartered a King Air twin engine to Tampa, topping out his credit card and forcing him to call in for a “preapproved” home equity loan.

  Late that same afternoon, Larson drove a rental car past a cattle farm’s unmoving windmill that stood in a field of lush green grass intermittently shorn by gray longhorn cattle looking worse for the wear in the Florida heat.

  Stretching high above the flat green horizon, eighty-foot-tall telescoping steel poles held clusters of powerful gas-vapor highway lights that trained down onto the cloverleaves and rest areas. A blessing in hurricane season perhaps, but an eyesore on any other day. The occasional building crane loomed in the distance, reaching for the rare cloud like a bony finger. Randomly placed cell towers also rose from the green jungle, looking for all the world like derelict oil rigs. The only other break in the perfectly blue sky came from a musical staff of high-voltage wires strung across the highway. These were images one absorbed on the flatness of Interstate 75, heading south from Tampa: orange construction cones; bumps of black road tar in a sea of powder gray concrete; a set of smokestacks belching in the far distance.