After drinking enough to wet her mouth and take the edge off her thirst, she covered her face with icy-wet palms. The cold helped her focus.
Still, even with closed eyes, she could not get the image out of her head. As she had fled the burial cave, she had glanced back in time to see the flash of brilliance, hear the thunderclap. Screams and cries chased her into the deeper woods.
Why did I drop my pack?
John Hawkes had sworn the C4 was safe. He’d said she could fire a bullet into one of the explosive charges, and nothing would happen. So what went wrong? Already scared, she came up with one frightening possibility. Had someone from WAHYA witnessed her flight out of the cave and telephoned in the detonation command?
But why would they do that, knowing people were around?
No one was supposed to get hurt.
She hadn’t had any time to think. For the past two hours, she’d been running headlong through the woods, as fleet-footed as any deer. She kept hidden from the air as much as possible. She’d already spotted one helicopter as it skimmed past a ridgeline. It looked like a news chopper rather than law enforcement, but it still sent her diving for the thicket.
During the remaining hours of daylight, she had to put as much distance as possible between herself and any pursuers. She knew they’d be looking for her. She pictured her face being broadcast across the nation. She was under no illusion that her identity would remain a secret for long.
All those cameras . . . someone surely got a good picture of me.
It was only a matter of time before she was caught.
She needed help.
But whom could she trust?
4:35 P.M.
Washington, D.C.
“Director, it looks like we finally caught a break.”
“Show me,” Painter said as he stepped into the darkened room, lit only by a circular bank of monitors and glowing computer screens.
Sigma’s satellite com always reminded him of the control room on a nuclear submarine, where the ambient light was kept low to preserve night vision. And like a sub’s control room, this was the nerve center of Sigma Command. All information flowed into and out of this interconnected web of feeds from various intelligence agencies, both domestic and foreign.
The spider of this particular web stood before a bank of monitors and waved Painter over. Captain Kathryn Bryant was Sigma’s chief intelligence expert and had grown to become Painter’s second-in-command at Sigma. She was his eyes and ears throughout Washington and a savvy player in the internecine world of D.C. politics. And like any good spider, she maintained a meticulous web, casting strands far and wide. But her best asset was an uncanny ability to monitor each vibrating filament of her web, filter out the static, and produce results.
Like now.
Kat had called him down here with the promise of a breakthrough.
“Give me a second to bring up the feed from Salt Lake City,” she said.
She winced slightly, placed a palm on her belly, and continued to type one-handed on a keyboard. At eight months along, she was huge, but she refused to go out early for maternity leave. Her only concession to her condition was that she’d abandoned her usual tight dress blues for a casual loose dress and jacket, and allowed the curls of her auburn hair to drape past her shoulders, rather than pinning them up.
“Why don’t you at least sit down?” he said, and pulled out the chair in front of the monitor.
“I’ve been sitting all day. Baby’s been doing a tap dance on my bladder since lunch.” She waved him closer. “Director, you need to see this. From the start of the investigation, I’ve been monitoring the local news programs over in Salt Lake City. It wasn’t difficult to hack into their computer servers and look over their shoulders as they readied their evening news broadcasts.”
“Why?”
“Because I figured it’s damn easy to hide a cell phone.”
He glanced quizzically at her.
She explained. “From the number of people who witnessed the attack, the odds were good that someone got a picture or video of the bomber. So why no footage?”
“Maybe everyone was too panicked.”
“Perhaps after the bomb, but not before. If you start with the proposition that a photo was taken, why wasn’t it turned in to the police? I followed that line of reasoning. Greed is a strong motivator.”
“You think someone hid footage of the bomber to make a few bucks.”
“To be thorough, I had to assume that. It would be easy enough to hide a phone during the chaos. Or even e-mail the footage and erase the record. So I canvassed the broadcast logs for tonight’s local news in Salt Lake City and came across a file at an NBC affiliate labeled ‘New Footage from the Utah Bombing.’ ”