Mackenzie's Mission

he played the odds that she would call him? They were good odds, she had to admit. She wouldn't have called Yates, and she certainly wouldn't have wasted her tune calling Adrian. It was also a good bet that she wouldn't have wanted to call security. Not a certainty, but good enough that it wasn't much of a risk, either.

So what had happened then? The sensors showed both her and Cal entering the building, then both leaving. He must have had her card on him where the sensor could read it, thereby establishing proof that he hadn't had the opportunity to tamper with the computer program because he hadn't been in there alone. But why hadn't the sensor noticed that there were two cards but only one body?

Maybe the sensors weren't as good as Captain

Hodge obviously liked to believe they were. Maybe they were programmed to catch people without cards, but no one had thought to program it to catch cards without people. Maybe Cal had figured out a way to fool it. There were a lot of maybes, all of them possible. As good as he was with computers, maybe he had somehow gotten into the base computers and logged her both in and out of the building that morning. She didn't know and might never find out.

But what would Cal do now, if he were guilty? If the programs had been tampered with, he would know that analysis would discover it. Would he try to get back into the program and cover his tracks by undoing what he had done, hoping that the analysis wouldn't go any further than a simple comparison? Or would he try to plant more evidence against her?

She had to go with the second option. It was so much more feasible. Why would Cal go to so much trouble only to undo it? No, as long as the finger was pointing toward her, he would be smart to try to make certain it remained pointing in that direction.

Her heart suddenly began thundering in her chest. If Cal were guilty, if he were going to do anything else, he would have to do it tonight, while things were still in an upheaval. Given enough tune, the security net would settle down so tightly that nothing would be able to escape, but there were still windows of opportunity when things first started happening.

She knew the entire laser team was being restricted from the work area, but had their bar codes already been deleted from the computers? The military worked a lot like big business when it came to office work: most of it was done during the day. Since the restriction order had only been issued that night, had Captain Hodge called in someone to enter it into the computer or left it to be done first thing in the morning? Knowing human nature, she would bet on the latter. After all, she was the only one under suspicion, and she was probably under surveillance in the interim.

On a hunch she rolled out of bed and silently walked to the small, old-fashioned crank-out window set high in the wall in the kitchen area. She had to stand on a chair to see out of it. Sure enough, a security police car was parked on the opposite side of the street. In the glow of the streetlight she could plainly see two men in the front seat. They were making no effort to disguise their purpose, but then, why should they? This wasn't clandestine surveillance, but plain old guard duty.

There was no other door.

There was, however, another high, narrow window in the bedroom. In the almost total darkness she carefully made her way back to the bedroom and stared at the small oblong of light in the wall. A man certainly couldn't get through there, and she had doubts that she could, either. Nevertheless, she stood on the bed and peeped out. That side of the street was empty.

Well, there was no point in putting herself to a lot of trouble if Cal was peacefully sleeping in bed. She mustn't let herself forget that he might be totally innocent, that he had indeed verified her story. Innocent until proven guilty was the law of the land, though

Captain Hodge could use a little refresher course in the concept.

She didn't want to turn on any lights, alerting those two out front that she was awake, so she dialed Cal's number by feel. What better way to find out if he was in his quarters than to call him? If he answered, she might even chat awhile.

By the fifth ring she began to have serious doubts that he was there. She let it ring longer, just in case he was sleeping very soundly, but on the twentieth ring she replaced the receiver. Twenty rings, especially since the phones were installed right beside the beds to make certain the occupants would be awakened by any middle-of- the-night phone calls, would wake even the soundest of sleepers. Cal wasn't in his quarters.

She clenched her teeth in anger. Damn him! She had thought he was her friend; she had liked him, trusted him. First Joe, now Cal. Her mind immediately shied away from Joe, because that hurt was too powerful to linger over. It was much safer to focus her anger on Cal.

She stared up at that little window again. Two long, narrow louvered panes that cranked out to let the built-up heat of the day escape. She would have to dismantle the entire mechanism in the dark, and even then, she wasn't certain she would fit through the slot.

Well, she would never know if she didn't try.

Working on lasers and computers had made her familiar with tools, and she never traveled anywhere without a small pouch containing a selection of screwdrivers and pliers, because she never knew when she would need them. She fetched the pouch from the closet and dumped the tools out on the bed. Problem was, in the dark she couldn't tell which tool she needed.

She did have a pencil flashlight and decided she would have to take the risk of the small beam being detected through the window, but it wasn't likely to throw a lighted patch on the ground outside and alert the guards. She climbed up on the bed and switched the flashlight on for only the smallest of intervals, just long enough for her to see that the screws holding the mechanism in place needed a Phillips head screwdriver. Five minutes later the two window slats and the cranking mechanism, in pieces, were lying on her bed.

That had been the easy part. Getting through the window was something else.

She measured it visually. She could angle her shoulders through; her head and hips would be the biggest problem, but her buttocks would compress and her skull wouldn't. She decided to go headfirst, so she could find out immediately if her head would fit through. It would be awful to go out feetfirst, then be stuck with her head inside and the rest of her body outside. Humiliating, at the very least. That is, if she didn't find herself hanged.

First, she had to change clothes and put on some shoes. She shone the pencil flashlight on the contents of her closet, taking care that no light was visible from the outer rooms. Dark clothes would be practical, but she hadn't brought any dark clothes with her. It was

August in the southern Nevada desert; she hadn't anticipated being obliged to sneak around in the dark.

She would stand out like a sore thumb in her light-colored clothes, but there wasn't any help for it. She would just have to make certain no one saw her.

Nevertheless irritated by her lack of preparedness, she quickly pulled on a pair of thin cotton pants and a T- shirt, and defiantly slipped her ED tag into her pocket. If she got caught, they wouldn't be able to say she didn't have proper identification. As an afterthought, she added her keys to her pocket. She could hardly reenter by the window, though if she managed to catch Cal up to no good, she wouldn't have to worry about the guards out front

She climbed up on the bed again, but a minute's experimentation made it plain that she needed to be higher so she could angle through from a more horizontal position. She got a kitchen chair and balanced it on the bed, then climbed up on the chair. It was a wobbly perch, but she was holding on to the edge of the window and wasn't afraid of falling.

One arm and shoulder went first, then she turned her head to the side and eased it through the slot, earning nothing more horrendous than a minor scrape. She wiggled the other shoulder and arm through and braced her arms on the wall below her as she wriggled forward. As soon as her hips were through, she suspected, her center of gravity would shift drastically forward and she would fall on her head, dragging her legs the rest of the way through the window. It wasn't a high drop, but she didn't want to break her neck landing.

To prevent it, or at least slow her down, she hooked her legs backward so her heels were braced against the inside wall, and inched forward some more.

The edge of the window cut into her soft bottom but she ignored the pain and forced herself on through. Immediately she lurched forward and only her hooked legs inside kept her from doing exactly as she had feared. Frantically, she braced her arms again, forcing herself as far away from a vertical position as possible, then cast a fearful glance toward the front of the building where the guards were parked. To her relief, she couldn't see the car