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The boat was a thirty-one-foot Camano Troll with silver paint and the word Tahlequah on the side. Apparently Dresden didn’t go in for subtlety. Perhaps she’d picked the boat specifically because it sported the name of the mother orca that had carried her dead calf more than a thousand miles.
Nora and Randall were ensconced inside an adjacent boat. Supposedly it wasn’t for rent, but the man had readily taken the two hundred dollars when they told him they had no intention of taking it out on the water.
“Works for me.” He pocketed the money, wished them a good night, and strolled off whistling.
Nora stared out at an evening sky quickly turning to midnight black. Fortunately they’d grabbed sandwiches before accessing the boat. Randall had woken from two hours of solid sleep proclaiming he could eat an orca. It was a terrible joke, but she’d laughed all the same.
Darkness lay over Puget Sound, and Nora’s restlessness was reaching a peak. How could she be exhausted and impatient at the same time? She picked up the binoculars the owner had generously provided and peered through them as Randall tapped away on his tablet.
“Separate teams have been deployed to each dam.” He rubbed at the back of his neck, then resumed pecking on the keyboard. “They are all on-site at this point and currently working to assess the point of compromise.”
“Can they do that in time?”
“If not, they’ll take the dams completely offline until they figure it out.” Randall glanced up at her and smiled. “But those guys are pretty smart. Now that we know the where, the how shouldn’t be so hard to ascertain.”
“You sound confident.”
“I’m feeling good about it,” he admitted. “All except this.”
“Don’t like boats?”
“I don’t like swimming in my clothes in the dark.”
Nora stretched her neck to the left and right, attempting to relax the muscles. “Hopefully it won’t come to that.”
They had both changed into a fresh set of clothes. Randall’s polo was a Fendi that cost more than five hundred dollars. The chino trousers were made by Altea and cost under three hundred. She knew those details because she’d asked. It never ceased to amaze her what Randall spent on clothes. She’d opted for her other pair of black pants and a gray button up blouse. Total cost was less than ninety bucks.
The local police as well as Homeland Security had been brought up to date, but they had orders from the director to remain well back from Dresden’s boat. The professor was an extremist, but she was also quite intelligent. No one doubted that she had a backup plan if the current one was waylaid. Nora and Randall’s job was to disable both.
“Any new activity on her live feed?”
“Nothing since the timer popped up an hour ago.”
Randall had discovered the site by hacking through the back door of her work computer. Fortunately, they’d been able to do all that remotely. There was no reason for Dresden to suspect her plans had been compromised. What was as disconcerting as the live feed—though they were clueless as to what she was planning on recording—was the number of followers she had, which numbered in the tens of thousands.
“More to the point, what is Samantha Dresden planning and why on this boat?”
“I can’t answer that, Randall. All I can say is, you got lucky finding the receipt for this boat in her email files.”
“Lucky? Boss, I’m good. It’s time for you to admit that.”
“Duly noted.” The boat was for sale for over a hundred grand. The twenty-four-hour rental was a mere five thousand. They’d checked, and UW didn’t pay very well. Which made Nora wonder who was funding Dresden, something the folks back at headquarters were working on.
And why spend so much on a boat?
It seemed an odd choice for a radicalized environmentalist.
She squinted through the binoculars. It seemed to her that the sky was lightening. Glancing at her watch she saw that they had just under an hour until sunrise, less than sixty minutes until daybreak, and they still had no idea what was happening. She caught movement fifty feet to the east. “Here she comes.”
Randall slapped the tablet’s cover shut and tucked it into his backpack. He walked gingerly to the front of the boat, sat next to Nora, and picked up the second pair of binoculars.
“Shouldn’t we just arrest her now?”
“We could, but she’s not going to crack as easily as Kathryn.” The petulant teen had morphed into a compliant young woman after Detective Lawson arrived—which was how they’d obtained Dresden’s name. “Our visit to her office didn’t change her plans. You said the receipt for the boat came in two days ago.”
“True enough.”
Apparently Kathryn had met Dresden through an online environmental class. The two had hit it off right away. Over the course of the next six months the professor had carefully groomed the young girl. Undoubtedly she’d checked Kathryn’s school records and realized she had a genius on her hands—literally. Kathryn had already run into trouble for minor infractions such as redirecting big corporate websites to environmental causes and establishing her own WikiLeaks-type presence in Seattle. The juvenile courts had placed her on probation and ordered that she have no internet access. Dresden had taken care of that small problem by purchasing her a state-of-the-art hotspot.
The professor wasn’t wasting any time. She hopped onto the Tahlequah, walked straight to the helm, and started up the engines.
“Let’s go.”
Randall wound his arms through his backpack and jogged after her. They jumped for the back of the boat as Dresden pulled away from the dock.
Nora’s plan was to see where the woman was going, then intercept and neutralize any threat. That plan shattered when Randall tapped her on the shoulder and pointed to the galley. After confirming that Dresden was focused on piloting the boat, Nora followed him.
The C-shaped galley was equipped with a full, if small, kitchen. Nora could just make out a bathroom and stateroom past the galley, but she wasn’t focused on that. Instead her eyes were locked on the stacks of C-4 explosives and the countdown clock displayed on the flat screen television.
“Same as the live feed I was watching,” Randall whispered.
They had fifty-three minutes until daybreak.
Apparently they also had fifty-three minutes until Dresden blew her hundred thousand dollar boat to bits. She definitely wasn’t planning on getting her deposit back for the rental. The question was, who and what did she plan to take with her.
🙛
Randall had been trained to do a lot of things—diffusing bombs wasn’t one of them. Their mission was always to intercept the cyber-terrorist. Often that job included hacking into systems and stopping their nefarious plans, like Dresden’s scheme to disable the dams on the lower Snake River. She’d started that plan in the cyber realm but hoped to complete it in real life—IRL, as the kids liked to say.
But this?
This was C-4 explosives with multiple detonators. He didn’t know where to begin. Sweat slipped down his face, as he lowered his backpack to the floor.
From where they were standing, there were two ways out. They waited as the boat picked up speed, each minute that ticked by causing Randall’s heart rate to accelerate a little more. Nora pulled her weapon and signaled for him to go back the way they’d come. She moved toward the ladder which led to the fly bridge where Dresden remained at the helm station. They would come at the professor from both directions.
Randall pulled his weapon and crept around the back of the boat. He could just make out Dresden on the fly bridge. She was backlit by the night lights of dozens of cruise ships, still anchored in Puget Sound.
That was her plan.
She was going to take as many cruise ships with her as possible. But how did she expect to survive the blast? Or was this a suicide mission?
Nora signaled him from the fly bridge, and they both stepped out into the open at the same moment.
“No need to be stealthy about it. I know you’re there.” Dresden checked the readings on the display in front of her, set the navigation on automatic and turned to face them.
Randall’s heart sank as he saw the rope tied around her waist. She bent to pick up the anchor that was tied to the other end and moved in one fluid step to the edge of the boat.
“Stop right there.” Nora’s voice was steady, calm, commanding.
Dresden only smiled. “Or what? You’ll shoot? Frankly, Agent Brooks, I don’t care.”
“You don’t have to do this,” Nora said.
Normally Randall would be making his way around the back of the perp, but all that stretched behind Dresden was Puget Sound, then Bainbridge Island, beyond that Olympic National Park, and finally the Pacific Ocean.
She’d chosen the place of her last stand well.
“Has it occurred to you that maybe I want to do this?”
“Why? You could live to fight another day.” Nora moved a step closer and Dresden clutched the anchor to her chest.
“People love a martyr. I can do more for Tahlequah with my death.”
“No. You can’t. People will forget you before the next news cycle.”
“So I should, what? Let you arrest me?”
“Sure. Lots of people write books from prison. Yours could be a best seller. Tell the story of the orcas. Tell people why your cause matters.”
“You’re good, and so is your partner Randall Goodwin. Nice job hacking into my system, Mr. Goodwin. Of course I had an alarm set to warm me if someone managed to do that. I’ve been following your moves since you accessed Jonathan’s computer.”
“Why students?” Randall asked. It angered him to think that this woman with her rage and violence would use kids at a time when they were most vulnerable.
“They’re the next generation. This world, this fight, is theirs.”
“It’s your fight, and you were using them.”
“We all use each other. That’s part of the human condition.”
“Put the anchor down,” Nora tried again. “Let us take you back in.”
“That’s not going to happen. You stopped my attack on the dams, but these cruise ships we’re surrounded by, these albatrosses that are the epitome of American influence and arrogance...I will destroy them.” Quick as a whisper in the night, she turned and dropped into the dark waters of Puget Sound.
Randall moved to dive in after her.
Nora reached out, pulled him back. “She’s gone. See what you can do with the explosives. I’ll call the director.”
The director patched them through to the bomb squad. Randall might have been able to disarm one, but Dresden had anticipated that. There simply wasn’t enough time to disarm them all. Even worse, she’d pre-programmed her target position into the ship’s navigation program and the engines were now idling as the boat sat in the middle of the cruise ships’ docking area.
“I want both of you to get out of there, now.” The director’s voice came through clear and strong.
“You’re breaking up.” Nora reached over and muted her cell. “Forget the explosives. Can you hack into the navigation system?”
“I can try.”
It took precious minutes for Randall to free the navigation system from Dresden’s program. Nora immediately piloted the boat toward the deepest waters of Puget Sound. Only then did she unmute her phone. The numbers flashing on the explosives were now under four minutes.
“I need you to pull up the satellite feed and tell me when we’re clear of any other craft.”
No doubt the director had been following their progress and understood her plan. He responded immediately with coordinates and reiterated that he wanted them off the craft before it blew.
“Where does he expect us to go?”
Instead of answering, Nora focused her eyes on the horizon, which was now stained with pink. Daybreak had nearly arrived. They were almost out of time.
“Find a way for me to rig this throttle, Randall.”
He rushed back down to the galley.
Two minutes and twenty-eight seconds.
He returned to her side with a bungee cord, and they wrapped it around the throttle, holding the boat’s engine at its maximum speed.
“Let’s go.” Nora tossed him a life preserver.
As they ran toward the back of the boat, they both fastened the belts of the preservers and pulled the cord that would inflate them.
“Ready?”
“As I’ll ever be.”
The water was cold and dark as he plunged beneath the waves. Bobbing to the top, he spotted Nora and side-stroked toward her. They could hear the Tahlequah’s engines, but the boat itself was now out of sight. Then the morning’s peacefulness was shattered by the explosion. The waves hit them a few seconds later.
Once the waters had calmed, Nora nodded back toward Seattle. Morning was breaking over the city.
Instead of high-fiving her, Randall pulled her closer, as close as they could get while they were both wearing fluorescent life preservers. “That was close.”
“Indeed it was.”
“You think that rope around Dresden’s waist was knotted?”
“Something tells me it might not have been, but that’s a problem for another day.”
The sound of a boat approaching rose over the thud of Randall’s heartbeat. He’d wanted more excitement than sitting behind a computer, but as his granny liked to say, be careful what you wish for.
As they waved at the rescue boat, he realized that they couldn’t possibly stop all the dangers facing America—cyber or otherwise. But today they’d succeeded in stopping one, and for now, that was good enough.
The End
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