17

 

Katie awoke at 5:30 AM on Monday. She hadn’t had enough sleep, but didn’t want any more. Her night had been filled with nightmares about missing pieces to the terrorists’ multifaceted conspiracy. Flames burned forests. Explosions destroyed cities. People died. And, in her dreams, it was all her fault. The only way to stop her dreams was to stop the attack, no matter the personal risk.

By working into the evening, maybe she could unravel the remaining mysteries surrounding the plot.

If she hurried, she could catch the 6:30 AM Metro bus to campus. No. That would mean she had to ride Metro home tonight. Things tended to get out of control on the buses after dark. Three months ago, an aggressive weirdo had forced her to strip him of his dignity, using a pressure point to take him to his knees. When she let him go, he sought revenge, so she kicked him, sending him to the hospital, accompanied by a Seattle police officer. Then she had to testify in court against the guy. His lawyer tried to blame it all on her. What a mess. She didn’t want to risk a repeat.

Katie would drive in today, get a head start on the work, and then fill in Josh when he arrived.

Two hours later, Katie sat at her desk reading the information on her laptop screen when she heard the sharp click of the lab door. She glanced at the clock on the wall. 8:30 AM. Josh was later than she expected.

He took off his backpack, set it on his desk, and covered a yawn with his huge tight-end-sized hands.

“You, too?” She gave him a warm smile.

He swiveled toward the sound of her voice, a smile replacing his yawn. “Yeah. It’s hard to sleep after three people threaten you with bodily harm.”

“My parents and my granddad won’t hurt you if you behave yourself.” She stepped from behind her desk and walked his way. Something grabbed her foot, sending her stumbling ahead. A power cord.

Josh’s arms reached for her.

She grabbed him to keep from falling and now stood with her cheek planted against his big chest.

His strong arms around her held nearly all her weight.

With her arms hugging him, too, Katie was in no hurry to move.

“I’m behaving myself, Kate. But look at us. Your mom would kill me, or your granddad would turn my head into an asteroid, and—”

She muted his lips with her fingers. “You kept me from falling, Josh. That’s not misbehaving.” When she turned her head up, his brown eyes peered into hers, and his lips were only a few inches away. “This…is misbehaving.” She kissed him softly, sweetly, slowly pulling her lips from his, and returning her cheek to his chest.

I can’t believe I just did that.

Oh, yes you can.

Great! Now she had a schizophrenic argument going on inside her head. What did she think she was doing? She hadn’t thought at all. It was an impulsive, stupid…wonderful, exciting thing to do.

Somehow, in Josh’s presence, the girl, Katie Brandt, seem to disappear, replaced by a woman whom Josh called Kate. Katie, she knew and understood. A comfortable existence. But Kate was mysterious and seemed bent on taking her far from her comfort zone. Admit it, girl, you are a romantic schizo who needs help. Katie blew off the accusation from her left brain, took a deep breath, and released it, trying to slow her racing heart and mind.

The drumming in her ear, coming from Josh’s chest, said one deep breath wasn’t going to cut it here. Soon, she needed to have a serious talk with Josh about them.

“After they kill me, Kate, promise me you’ll clear my name. Convince them that I was innocent.” Josh’s voice bordered on a whimper.

She stepped back, placing her hands on his broad shoulders. “Let me take a good look at you.” Though he hadn’t initiated the kiss, what she saw in Josh’s eyes was more than enough to convict him. “I think we’re both guilty. But I promise not to tell if you won’t.”

“Me…tell? You’ve got to be kidding. I don’t have a death wish. Your mom is scary.”

“But I know how guys are. They brag among themselves. After some of the things I’ve said to other guys in the department to discourage them, if word ever got out that I kissed a fellow geek, I’d never live it down. So, please, promise me you won’t tell.”

“I promise. And you, Kate?”

“I won’t say anything.”

“Should we seal the deal with another—”

“No, Josh. We should get to work on tracking down some people who are a lot scarier than my mom. And here’s how we need to proceed.”

 

****

 

At 5:30 PM, Josh decided to call it a day.

After he walked out of the lab, the door clicked shut leaving Katie alone with a heart filled with loneliness. Something she hadn’t felt in six years. She stuffed her feelings. She would deal with them later.

As she had planned, Katie worked on into the evening. She wanted to complete one task, a bit of programming that would enable her to display her findings graphically to the FBI.

At some point, all research must be justified by showing the results to the customer, usually politicians. With them, a picture was worth a thousand bucks…maybe a hundred thousand.

Katie opened a Perl script in her programmer’s editor and quickly appended a second script, cobbling together a CGI program that would display graphically, on a world map, the communication between the IP addresses she and Josh had logged and inserted into her database.

After a short command-line test, she dragged and dropped her script into the CGI directory of her web server and pointed her browser at the appropriate URL.

A map of the world displayed. It was quickly annotated with the location of each IP address, showing connecting lines between communication points and the number of transmissions along each line. Perfect.

A door creaked behind her in the lab. She whirled and looked for the source of the noise. If anyone else was in the lab, surely she would’ve known. The click of the cipher lock usually got her attention.

Four small offices and one restroom lined a short dead-end hallway at one end of the lab. Except for the server room, the rest of the computer lab was a single large bay with a few five-foot-high partitions sectioning it off into cubicles.

The restroom door stood partially open.

The whole lab was drafty because of the air conditioning equipment which kept the area at a cool sixty-eight degrees. The air conditioning fan was running. It probably had sucked the restroom door open when it came on. Maybe, the ducts had made the creaking noise. Regardless, she should check it out. Keeping the lid on her current work was important for several reasons.

Katie walked past the first two offices in the short hallway, closed the open door, and turned around.

A thump came from the office on her right.

She shivered as a tingling sensation ran up the back of her neck.

This was silly. There was a cipher lock on the lab door to keep unauthorized people out. But she remembered watching others key in the cipher. Unless their body blocked her view, she could read the numbers from several yards away. Once a person got inside the Computer Science Building, an unauthorized entry to the lab was fairly easy to pull off.

Katie wanted to look in the office on her right. But doing so with some kind of weapon in her hand would ease her mind a bit. The computer lab wasn’t exactly ripe with weapons for the picking.

Keeping her eyes focused on the suspicious room, Katie backed to Dr. Scoggins door, the last office on her left. He kept an assortment of external drives on his shelves.

She listened. No more sounds.

Katie turned and scurried around the desk to the shelves behind it.

Outside, a door creaked.

She whirled toward the sound.

Rapid footsteps in the hall.

Panic drove her heart into high gear.

In the doorway, across the desk from her, a hooded figure stood holding a hypodermic needle in one hand.

As her heart red-lined, she sought an explanation. Only one made sense. This was the terrorist dude from Whistler or one of his cohorts.

The hooded figure crept closer to the desk, gaze locked on her.

Maybe she could stifle her fear with words and confirm her suspicions at the same time. “It’s too late, doofus. We know all about your radio-controlled planes and the firebombs.”

The person slid to her left without responding to her insult.

Katie moved to the right, keeping the desk between them.

Still no reply from the person who was systematically trapping her against the back wall, the person who clearly intended to stab her with that needle.

The stalker moved back to her right.

Katie jumped to her left. She needed to force the person to speak, anything to break his concentration on her movements, give her a chance to escape. Four words popped into her mind. She spat them at the black-hooded figure. “Allah is no God.”

A low, animal-like growl came from the stalker. This was a man. No woman could make that sound. The intruder bent his knees, obviously planning to jump onto the desk.

She had to avoid that needle. Katie jabbed him with needle of her own. “And Mohammed was no prophet.”

“Allahu Akbar! Infidel dog! You will die for your blasphemy.” He swept a hand behind him, closing the office door. The man leaped onto the desk, straight at her.

Katie dove under the desk, hugged the floor, and slid under the desk to the door.

When she stood, the two had traded places.

The man circled the desk reaching for her. Flecks of spittle flew from his mouth along with angry words in a foreign language, a language she couldn’t identify.

Katie circled the desk in sync with the man’s movements. She passed the shelves along the back wall and grabbed a portable laptop drive with her right hand. She drew her arm back into throwing position.

The man laughed, a mirthless, mocking sound, more like a barking dog. “You have big bullet, but little gun. Creates big problem for you.” He backed up to the wall. Her assailant was going to jump the desk again.

Katie’s strong, well-trained arm cracked like a whip, elbow, wrist, and then her fingers, which had held the drive like a skipping rock. She sent the device spinning through the air.

The intruder tried to duck. When the man’s head dipped, the drive struck his forehead with a sickening thud. It tore the hood half off his head. Blood splattered on the man’s face, the wall, and the floor. He dropped to his knees, apparently stunned.

Katie jumped to the door, grabbed the doorknob, and twisted.

Fingers clutched her ankle.

She stomped them with her heel.

He yelped.

A sharp sting in the side of her foot.

She jerked her foot away.

The needle fell out onto the floor.

Katie planted another foot stomp on the man’s head, and then yanked on the door. She sprang through it, sprinted down the hall, and continued through the lab until she ran out into the computer science building.

Crashing sounds came from somewhere behind her. Katie glanced back. Where was he?

Her cell lay in her pocket. She hit Josh’s number on her speed dial. Josh? Why hadn’t she hit 911? She wasn’t thinking clearly. Her vision blurred. She stumbled, nearly fell. Katie slipped inside a classroom and closed the door quietly. She had to sit down.

As she stumbled toward a chair, Josh’s voice came through the phone.

“Kate, what’s up?”

“The guy from Whistler attacked me. Stuck me with a needle. Things are fuzzy. Got away, but…”

“I was coming back to the lab, anyway. Be there in a couple of minutes. Where are you, Kate?”

“Big computer science classroom. Hurry, Josh. Think I’m going to pass out…”

 

****

 

When Kate’s voice faded away, Josh’s panic punched the accelerator on his car and his heart. He flew past the parking garage and pulled alongside the computer science building, stopping in a no-parking zone. There he flung open his door, and sprinted to the main entry.

Please, let me get to Kate before he does.

Who was he talking to? No time for introspection.

He yanked the door open, stepped in and quickly scanned the hallway for signs of the intruder.

No sounds. Nothing.

He ran to Classroom A and slipped inside.

Kate’s body lay slumped over a student’s desk near the back of the room.

He ran to her.

She was breathing.

He wrapped his arms around her and pulled her to a sitting position.

Kate’s eyes opened and closed as if she was half awake, half asleep. “You can kiss…if you want to, Josh.” Her words slurred as she spoke. “Won’t mind. Really.”

“Kate, listen. They’ve drugged you. I’m carrying you out to my car and calling 911.”

“Yeah. Like nine ‘leven. Bigger thish time. But, Josh, you can kish me. Ish OK. Wone mind.” She tried to lift her head to his face, and then moaned. “Druuugs. Feel awful.”

He scooped Kate up in his arms and hurried to the hallway. No one in sight.

Josh carried her out of the building to his car, managed to open the passenger door with one hand, and plopped her onto the seat. He scrambled to the opposite side, slid in and hit the door lock.

With several hairpin turns and occasional straight-aways, the driving route across campus resembled a Grand Prix race course. Nevertheless, it was the quickest way to get help for Kate.

After pulling out on to Benton Lane Josh stopped at NE Stevens Way. Maybe he should call 911. He reached for his cell phone, but he glanced at Kate.

She was unconscious.

He grabbed the steering wheel with both hands and shoved the accelerator to the floor. The car squealed around a long, sweeping turn as Josh worked his way across campus to 15th Avenue. He sped along 15th for several blocks before turning onto NE Pacific. With the hospital now a half mile straight ahead, he drove at double the speed limit towards the emergency entrance to the University of Washington Medical Center.

Halfway down the straight stretch, red and blue lights flashed at him in the rearview mirror. Josh punched the gas pedal. Only six blocks to get help for Kate. No cop was going to stop him from doing that.

When he turned into the emergency entrance, the police car was on his rear bumper.

Josh stopped at the emergency entrance, unlocked his doors, and ran around to Kate’s side. By the time he lifted her out of his car the policeman stood beside the patrol car with his hand near his weapon.

Josh gave the policeman a brief glance. “She was attacked by a terrorist who drugged her. If you want to do something useful, search the Computer Science Center for a Middle-Eastern looking guy who’s bleeding.”

“First, I’m following you inside.” The cop followed Josh toward the emergency entrance.

“You’re just going to let that guy get away?”

“Right now, you’re the guy. And you’re not getting away.”

Josh stepped through the emergency entrance.

“Who’s the girl?” the cop asked.

Josh headed toward the emergency room desk and yelled back over his shoulder, “She’s Kate Brandt, the girl who took out the shooter at Key Arena.” Josh turned his attention to the nurse at the desk. “A break-in at the Computer Science Center. She was attacked, injected with something. Was talking incoherently when I found her, then passed out two or three minutes ago.”

After the nurse made an announcement on the intercom, four people in scrubs emerged from a hallway, running toward Kate and him.

Please…don’t let anything happen to her.