The Queen pbf-5

by Steven James

  “Set down your weapon,” she told him firmly. Donnie had pushed himself to his knees, and now she pressed the barrel of her FN Five-SeveN to his forehead. “Or I’ll make you watch him die. I’ll give you five seconds.”

  Donnie squeezed his eyes shut. Trembled in fear.

  While Solstice waited for the MA to comply, she took in the cavernous room.

  It was an octagonal Spartan chamber twelve feet high, sixty feet across. Lit by fluorescent lights and supported by a dozen thick concrete columns, the space reminded her of the lower level of a parking garage. The eight tunnels containing the electromagnetic transmission nodes merged with the entry bay, fingering out in all directions, one from each wall. Thick cables snaked down each of the tunnels.

  Solstice noted narrow gauge railroad tracks in two of the tunnels, and based on the orientation to the elevator shaft, she calculated that the one on the left would be her escape route. In addition to the tunnels, a stairwell to her right led to the second level of the base. A nearby utility closet housed the hydraulic lines and machinery override for the concrete freight elevator and power supply relay station for the transmission nodes.

  Bypassing a countdown and not really wanting to let on that she was bluffing about killing Donnie right now, she nodded toward the MA and told Tempest, “Take him.”

  The former Marine slipped his AR-15 around his back on its shoulder sling and moved unflinchingly toward the MA. “Set down your weapon and you won’t get hurt.”

  The man wore a radio on his belt, but it had an attachment with the speaker mic clipped to the front of his shirt collar beside his chin. As Tempest approached him, the guy went for his radio. Tempest kicked the gun from his hand, then spun and smashed his face with the heel of his other foot. The MA went down hard. Only then did Tempest tase him.

  He let it go on for a while.

  At last he cuffed the dazed man.

  “Why didn’t you tase him first?” Squall asked.

  “What’s the fun in that?”

  Solstice was really beginning to like this guy and realized she should have used him against Chekov rather than that useless thug Clifton White.

  Well. Live and learn.

  She turned to Donnie Pickron, who was still on the ground, a deep gash seeping blood down his forehead.

  “Pick him up,” she told Eclipse, who brusquely yanked Donnie to his feet, held him in front of her in an iron grip.

  “I told you not to cry out,” Solstice said to Donnie. “Not to try to alert them.” She raised her sidearm, held it to his head for a long satisfying moment, then lowered it and pulled out her phone. “You just killed your wife.”

  “No!” Donnie struggled to get free, but Eclipse held him fast. “Don’t!”

  “Gag him.” Squall stepped forward and obeyed. Solstice gestured toward the MA. “Him as well.”

  Squall pulled out another gag.

  “Cover the passageways,” Solstice ordered. “Tempest, get the stairwell. Cyclone, set up the comm relay so we can call out on our cell phones.” Cyclone looked at her curiously, but after a wink from Solstice, she bent over the dials and a moment later nodded toward her.

  Donnie was staring desperately at the phone, shaking his head, trying in vain to pull free from Eclipse.

  While everyone took their positions, Solstice tapped at the cell’s screen. Of course she wasn’t really calling out, but Donnie either didn’t realize that or wasn’t thinking clearly.

  “I told you earlier that I am not a woman of idle threats.”

  He was trying to cry out beneath his gag.

  She spoke into her phone, to the empty air, “Do it. Yes. The wife.” She held the phone to Donnie’s ear so he could hear the recorded gunshot, and when he did, his eyes went wide with terror. Then she turned the screen so he could see the video she’d taken on Thursday of Ardis’s body lying dead on the steps. Donnie’s strength failed him and his legs gave way. He would’ve dropped to the ground if Eclipse hadn’t been supporting him.

  “Lizzie will also die unless you do what we brought you here to do. Now, do you understand?”

  Distraught, grief-stricken, broken, he nodded. He closed his eyes.

  She glanced toward the MA, who now lay gagged with his hands bound behind him with plastic ties. She relieved him of his radio, then had Cyclone go to the override panel and release the cover platform above the shaft and send the elevator back up for the rest of the team.

  Although the base itself wasn’t large, she knew that the tunnels surrounding her stretched for miles to accommodate the 1,100 four-foot long, graphene-based ultra-capacitors driven into the bedrock to produce the electromagnetic signal that the twenty-eight-miles’ worth of aboveground lines had delivered until they were removed back in 2004.

  A few moments later the other team members arrived in the entry bay.

  Stepped out of the shaft.

  “Squall, Cane,” said Solstice, “get the two prisoners. Most likely, the other MAs will reconvene in the control room when they don’t hear from their buddy. I don’t want to have to wander around looking for them. We wait until they try to radio him, then we move. Cyclone, readjust the RF jammer so we can hear when they try to contact him.” She indicated toward the stairwell. “Tempest, Eclipse, you’re on lead.”

  The team members posted themselves where they could cover all the entrances to the tunnels and waited for the green light from their leader. She didn’t realize it, but part of the reason for their unswerving loyalty was the news Squall had secretly shared with them earlier that afternoon: that in truth Dana Murkowski was not just their leader, she was the one who had planned everything from the beginning.

  Valkyrie.

  A person who would not put up with things being mishandled.

  We pulled into the driveway and parked beside Sean’s pickup truck.

  I reviewed-Amber’s snowmobile was still at the hospital, Lien-hua’s rental was out of the picture, Tessa’s rental was at Lindberg’s Bar near Hayward.

  Well, at least we still had the cruiser, Sean’s pickup, and Amber’s Subaru here at the house in case we needed them.

  We trekked through the snow to the door.

  Sean and Amber had two spare bedrooms, one of which Sean’s son Andy used when he visited in the summers. I chose that room, and Tessa and Lien-hua agreed to share the other one, which was also the room where Tessa had slept last night.

  They trooped down the hall, and I went to put my things away.

  68

  Not a shot fired.

  And although Solstice didn’t mind violence when it served a necessary purpose, she was glad for the lack of fatalities, because keeping all the hostages alive for the time being gave her more options as things moved toward the 9:00 deadline when the sub would finally be in position.

  Tempest and Eclipse found the other two on-duty MAs waiting for them in the control room, almost as if the men had attended Solstice’s meeting earlier in the day and positioned themselves precisely where she needed them to be in order to make it easiest for her team to subdue them.

  After a brief standoff, her people disarmed and restrained them, located the off-duty MA waiting to ambush them in the crew quarters, and took him down as well.

  The four Navy information warfare officers who were manning the base had raided their small arms locker but hadn’t had the opportunity to use their weapons once.

  And now they weren’t going to get the chance.

  All eight naval personnel had been herded into the recreation room, where they now lay, gagged and securely bound.

  Solstice posted Eclipse with a semiautomatic rifle to keep an eye on them, just as she’d planned, and then, to slow down any potential law enforcement or Bureau response, she sent Cirrus and Squall to disable the rudimentary freight elevator they’d ridden down. She made it clear she wanted the slab covering the top, barring entry to the shaft.

  “How will we get out when we’re done?” Squall asked her.

  “I’ve go
t that covered,” she assured him. “There’s a room beside the elevator, all the machinery is in there. Do what you have to do.”

  As a testament to their belief in her, the two men obeyed without any further questions or need for explanation.

  Now on the lower level, she gazed around the control room at the display boards, computers, HDTV and plasma monitors, stylish glass desks, and holographic cryptogram decoding stations. Yes, this was more like it-a stark contrast to the austere Cold War appearance of the upper level. That place had reminded her of a concrete crypt; this room looked a lot more like a twenty-first-century military communication center.

  She sat Donnie down at one of the keyboards, flipped open her laptop, connected it to their system. He looked like he was in shock at the death of his wife, still completely unaware that she’d already been dead more than forty-eight hours.

  When Solstice removed his gag, he didn’t resist, pull away, respond. She bent and spoke softly into his ear. “All right. Let’s get started.”

  Tessa, Lien-hua, and I finished getting situated in our respective rooms while Sean removed his two deer heads and mounted muskie from the living room wall and put them in the garage so Tessa wouldn’t be freaked out. Amber threw together some leftovers, and we all gathered in the kitchen and ate in a somewhat subdued silence.

  When we were done, Tessa migrated downstairs to the TV room, carrying a book that at first appeared to be a Gideon Bible from the motel, but I realized I had to be mistaken; I couldn’t imagine her reading a Holy Bible, let alone taking one from the Moonbeam. Amber and Sean went to work on the dishes, Lien-hua disappeared into her room to work on her profiles and follow up on Natasha and Jake’s progress, and I set up a workstation in Andy’s room.

  Outside my window, in the light migrating around the corner of the house from the porch, I could see that the falling snow was coming down in a frenzy again. As the wind writhed over the roof, some snow ascended in updrafts, while other flakes rushed sideways in the storm, not so much falling as skirting parallel to the ground. It was as if the storm had caught its breath and was panting forward into the night with a renewed sense of purpose and urgency.

  As I flipped open my computer, Amber showed up at my door, holding two bottles of medication and a roll of athletic tape. I’d learned my lesson last night, and this time, rather than end up alone with her in the room, I met her in the hall.

  She handed me the tape and one of the bottles, which I now saw was Advil. “For your ankle,” she said.

  “Thanks.” I was eyeing the other bottle.

  “Oh, this is for Tessa,” Amber explained. “She left her meds at the dorm.”

  “Her meds?”

  “She asked if I might be able to fill her prescription for her, but obviously I wasn’t able to get to the pharmacy today.” Amber handed me the bottle. “Anyway, these are mine. Over the counter. But they should help her sleep.”

  Sleeping pills?

  I looked at her curiously.

  “Oh.” She realized what I was thinking. “You didn’t know she was taking anything.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “I’m sorry, I wouldn’t have… She didn’t tell me.”

  I accepted the bottle. “It’s okay.”

  Tessa had never claimed that she wasn’t taking prescription meds, so she hadn’t technically lied to me, but still, in a way, I felt deceived.

  “I’ll make sure she gets them.” I didn’t really know what else to say. “Thanks.”

  Amber didn’t leave immediately. “I’m really sorry about last night. The note. Everything.”

  “Don’t worry about it. It’s all in the past.” There was obviously a lot more we could talk about, but I just offered her the words that were foremost on my mind: “Maybe you could reconsider with Sean, though? Try working things out? Give it one more chance?”

  She looked as if she were going to object, then said softly, “We’ll have to see.” Quietly, she stepped away.

  It wasn’t much, but maybe it was a start.

  Before sitting down at my computer, I took some Advil to deal with the sharp pain returning to my ankle, then wrapped it tightly with the athletic tape.

  I decided to deliver the sleeping pills to Tessa later, when it was a little closer to bedtime-and after I’d had a chance to process the fact that she was taking prescription medication that she hadn’t told me about.

  Over the last few months I’d thought we were becoming closer, beginning to confide in each other more. I wondered if I’d done or said something that had betrayed her trust.

  She’s old enough. It’s legal.

  Yes, but that wasn’t exactly the issue.

  Putting personal matters aside for the time being, I directed my attention back to the case.

  There was a lot to cover:

  (1) Follow up with Margaret about the ELF station, specifically get those base schematics or details on how to access the facility.

  (2) Narrow down the search parameters and try to deduce where Alexei might have left Kayla Tatum.

  (3) Touch base with Angela about her team’s progress in identifying Valkyrie and deciphering the “Queen 27:21:9” sequence.

  (4) Evaluate the newspaper clippings and news footage, and watch the videos that the ERT had found in Reiser’s trailer.

  First I tried contacting Margaret, but, unable to reach her by phone, I left a vm and then, to cover my bases, also sent an email requesting the ELF schematics.

  I moved on to the search for Kayla.

  Even though I’d analyzed Chekov’s travel patterns earlier, I decided to start over and take a fresh look at the data, hoping to do so as quickly and yet as thoroughly as I could.

  After pulling up the geoprofile that I’d started at the motel, I went online and overlaid the findings against a satellite view of the area from two days ago, before the storm clouds had covered the sky.

  And I began to study the map.

  Donnie’s eyes were bloodshot, his voice barely audible. “So what about Lizzie?”

  “I have no intention of harming her,” Solstice said truthfully.

  “How can I know you’re not going to…”

  She tapped at the computer screen. “Just verify the deactivation codes and everything will be fine.”

  Leaving him under Cane’s supervision, she found Cyclone and had her acquire a voice sample from one of their captives, Chief Warrant Officer Dickinson. It took a little convincing, but at last he unwittingly gave her enough of an audio sample for a voiceprint by answering a few harmless questions about the base’s fitness room and the food prep area.

  Utilizing the same software they’d employed yesterday to persuade Donnie Pickron that his wife was still alive, Solstice had Tempest call the Pentagon through the web-based router, and, pretending to be Chief Warrant Officer Dickinson, he assured the Navy that the sat comm lines had simply gone down in the storm and not to worry. “I came to the surface to let you know,” he said, and then told them a reference number Donnie had looked up to verify his identity as that of the chief warrant officer.

  It wouldn’t hold off the Defense Department’s suspicions forever, but at least it would help buy the team a little more time.

  Then, Solstice returned to Donnie’s side.

  “When do you want to send the signal?” he asked her falteringly.

  She looked at her watch. 5:44 p.m.

  Three hours and sixteen minutes.

  “It’s going to be a little while. Just get everything set.”

  For now, sit low, monitor the JWICS, and wait for the USS Louisiana to sail into position in the Gulf of Oman for the 9:00 p.m. ELF transmission.

  From the very start, Valkyrie had been aware that things could go either way.

  After all, $100,000,000 is a lot of money, and when that kind of dollar figure gets put into play, people’s allegiances have a tendency to become malleable.

  So far, Valkyrie had been careful to remain invisible, undetectable while playing
people’s loyalties, their agendas against them.

  Everything was a distraction layered inside a distraction.

  Yes.

  Wednesday night, Valkyrie, not Kirk Tyler’s partner, had been the one to film Erin Collet leaving the mall in San Antonio while her father, Dashiell Collet, was being interrogated by Tyler.

  Valkyrie had been the one to kill Tyler’s cohort even before Erin Collet exited the back of the mall. Then Valkyrie was the one who’d taken the fresh corpse’s button camera and worn it while following Erin to the car.

  Valkyrie was the one who’d drugged her and left her in the vehicle before detonating the cell phone that took off Kirk Tyler’s head.

  And of course, Valkyrie was the one who’d sent Alexei Chekov to dispose of Tyler’s body, and arranged for him to speak with Rear Admiral Colberg in Virginia.

  And now, Valkyrie was the one making sure everything was going to come together at 9:00.

  Tonight, the queen would go up in flames, the Eco-Tech ideologues would be out of the picture, and Valkyrie’s future would be wide open and bold with possibilities.

  With $100,000,000 to fund them.

  69

  6:02 p.m.

  2 hours 58 minutes until the transmission

  The geoprofile pointed me toward the region east of Woodborough, and I sent word to Tait, who’d since left the sheriff’s department and was now on patrol, to have his men begin searching homes as well as outbuildings and barns in the area. “Start with the ones that are heated. I don’t think Alexei wants Kayla to die.”

  I checked my email and voicemail but still hadn’t received any word from Margaret. I tried her number again, and it went directly to voicemail. Annoyed, I left another message for her to call me and to send those schematics as soon as possible.

  Earlier in the day, Alexei had hacked into Lien-hua’s cell phone and received, and then interpreted, the signal from somewhere. I knew a few hacking tricks myself, but I didn’t know how to back trace a closed-route wireless loop to find where its receiver might have been.