“Give me a few hours and judge for yourself,” Kurt said.
Rudi raised an eyebrow of suspicion and opened the driver’s door. “I will.”
At the American consulate building in Guayaquil, Rudi spoke to the ranking official and clearance to use the communications suite was soon provided.
A quick look at the room revealed a high-tech masterpiece: consoles everywhere, flat-panel displays, computers and keyboards, even a virtual reality headset. All connected through encoding and decoding machines.
Kurt explained. “During my stint with the CIA, I had to use the consulates a few times. I was always impressed by the amount of technology they packed into one small space. It was often better than the stuff we were using on the outside since it didn’t have to be portable.”
Joe and Emma sat down wearily. It had been a long forty-eight hours. Only Kurt seemed to have any spring in his step.
Rudi remained guarded. He hadn’t slept much. When he wasn’t deflecting questions about NUMA commandeering a cargo ship or fighting off pressure from Steve Gowdy and the NSA to rein Kurt in, he’d been ducking calls from the fruit company and NUMA’s general counsel. So far, they had nothing to show for all the commotion. Eventually, order and sanity would have to be restored, if only to satisfy Rudi’s own sense of discipline.
Kurt placed his backpack on the central table and unzipped the main compartment. He pulled out a scuffed and dented piece of equipment. It was a dull-orange color and plastered with Russian writing on all sides.
“What is that doing here?” Emma asked, jumping from her seat.
“I pulled it out of your case while we were flying,” Kurt said.
“Obviously,” she replied. “But why? I was ordered to send it back to the lab. It’s NSA property now.”
Kurt held up a cautioning finger. “Actually, based on the law of Admiralty, this flight data recorder is the property of NUMA . . . Or, perhaps, the Russian Air Force, since it would be hard to prove they’d abandoned it or relinquished an ownership interest in it. But, as we’re not sending it back to Moscow, I took it upon myself to assert NUMA’s claim.”
Joe clenched his teeth and shrank down in his seat a bit.
Rudi sighed and looked up at the ceiling, perhaps wondering why the gods had placed Kurt Austin in his life.
Emma just stared at him. “Gowdy is going to flip out.”
“We’re protecting him,” Kurt said. “There’s a leak in his department. The bomber and the Typhoon prove it.”
“And you know this how?” Emma asked.
“Think about it,” Kurt said. “The Nighthawk goes off course and vanishes. At the same time, in the same vicinity, a Russian supersonic bomber falls out of the sky and crashes into the sea. We mistake one crash for the other and race to the location only to find a top secret Russian submarine already on the scene. That’s not a coincidence.”
Emma sat back. “No, it’s not. But I don’t see how that indicates a breach of security.”
“Don’t you?” Kurt said. “To reach the search area when it did, that submarine had to leave Murmansk several weeks ago. And it’s not the only vessel to end up in the right place at the right time. There are two separate fleets, one Russian, one Chinese, both steaming across the Pacific at flank speed right now. Both made up primarily of deepwater search-and-salvage vessels, both within a day’s sailing of a crash site that didn’t exist forty-eight hours ago, despite the fact that their home ports are ten thousand miles to the east.”
“The fleet movements are suspicious,” Emma admitted, “but explainable. Both units were on maneuvers, training exercises. The Chinese and Russian liaison teams informed us about them months ago. It’s a little thing we do to keep from starting World War III.”
Kurt didn’t back off. “Of course they informed you months ago. Because they knew the Nighthawk was going to go down months ago.”
“How could they know that?”
“Because they’re the ones that brought it down.”
“Brought it down?”
He nodded. “By hacking the Nighthawk’s command system. Codes that are jealously guarded by your NSA friends at Vandenberg. Which means the NSA has a mole, a very highly placed one, and that gives me every good reason not to share this flight data, or anything else, with them.”
She went silent. Kurt let the words sink in.
“You’re out on a very long limb here,” Rudi said. “Even if some of those assumptions are true, it doesn’t . . .”
“No,” Emma said, interrupting him. “Kurt’s right.”
All eyes turned her way.