'Someone beat the hell out of him. He's bleeding internally, got a collapsed lung.'
'Zelda Hudson? Where is she?'
'Ask him. He was talking to the cops.'
Jake addressed the man on the gurney. 'Where's Zelda?'
'They snatched her. Came in the door from the roof. Kicked me.'
'Who're they?'
'Schlegel, I think. I don't know. Maybe Schlegel.'
'What's your name?'
'Zip Vance.'
The security door was propped open, so Jake went in. All four of the Washington crew rode up in the elevator. Eight people, half women, were standing around looking lost. One of them sobbed out the story to Jake and Tom Krautkramer. Two men came in through the door to the roof, kidnapped Zelda, flew away in a helicopter.
'And look,' the woman wailed, pointing at Zelda's computers. 'They destroyed six of the computers, three on that desk and three on the other one.'
It didn't take long for Krautkramer to discover that the computers had been destroyed by a self-destruct system. He whispered his findings to Jake, who just nodded, then he used the telephone.
'Looks like we're a day late and a dollar short,' Toad said.
'Maybe.' Jake crossed his arms.
When Krautkramer finished his telephone call, he said, 'I've called our field office to get people over here. We've had an alleged kidnapping and we're on the scene. Doesn't get any better than that. Maybe you'd better go back to Washington without me.'
'I want to talk to Vance,' Jake said. 'You want to come along?'
'Tell him we'll come by in a few hours. I want to question these employees first, learn just what it is these people really did here.'
'You don't mind if we question Vance first?'
'Find the sub, the president said.'
Jake shook hands and headed for the elevator.
In the hospital room, Tommy Carmellini was jarred by the crispness of Jake and Toad's blue uniforms and gold sleeve rings against the white of the sheets and off-white walls. The doctor and nurse hovered nearby, adjusting the IV drips, checking the leads on the heart and respiration monitor.
Vance had four broken ribs and a collapsed lung, the doctors said. They were worried about infection. They had given him a painkiller to take the edge off, yet not enough to impair his impulse to breathe.
Every breath Vance took hurt severely. Still, he wanted to talk, to share the load, and Jake Grafton was the man he picked. When Grafton wasn't angry or lost in thought, he looked like your father might have when you were small, a man you could tell things to because he would understand.
With the medical team out of the room, Vance's story poured out a phrase at a time between rasping breaths. Occasionally Jake asked a question when Vance paused, unsure what to say next.
'It was Schlegel, Willi Schlegel, who snatched her. No, I didn't see him, but it had to be. She didn't really double-cross him, you understand, but she had sold the sub's services to Jouany without bothering to tell Willi. I knew that would piss him off — and she did too — but she did it anyway. I told her not to, but she did it because the money was so good.
'Money was the way she kept score. We — each of us — have more money than we can ever spend, but she wanted more. Wanted a huge fortune. Wanted to be somebody, you know?
'Yeah, we got into people's computers, stole stuff, sold it to folks who paid us major money. Then we went back to the people we had ripped off, told them we had been doing a study of their security system, wowed them with a few things we had learned, and got a contract to tighten up their system to keep the common hackers out.
'Of course it was illegal, but it wasn't really wrong. Ideas belong to whoever can use them, not just to the person who was first through the door of the patent office. That's what the Internet is all about. And for whatever it's worth, a lot of the stuff we swiped and sold hadn't been patented. Or copyrighted.
'Yes, we sold some stuff to the Russians. They were always anxious to buy but rarely had the money we wanted. Me, I would have given them the stuff for whatever they could pay, but like I said, Zelda wanted money. Occasionally they would come up with the bucks Zelda demanded, if the stuff we had to sell was cutting edge. Usually it was. But her main clients were the Europeans, EuroSpace. Willi Schlegel. He had money, real money, and he knew the value of what we had to offer.
'I love her, sure. What can I say? You don't always get to pick whom you fall in love with. She is brilliant. Has these magnificent insights. Truly a first-class mind. But wanted money, a lot of it. For some reason money impressed her. Never understood that.
'Yes, she put the satellite in the water. Worked with Kerr on the software, figured out how to do it, hacked into the NASA system and made the changes. Then, when the rocket was in the water, went in and deleted her changes.
'She recruited the Blackbeard team. Kolnikov refused to take her seriously at first, then finally he did. She had been in the CIA computer and knew all about the Blackbeard operation, the plan to steal a Russian sub. She told Ilin and had him tell the director of the CIA that he knew. That made Kolnikov available, after he had had the training.
'She hacked into the navy's communications system and screwed with Cowbell. There is no technical challenge beyond her. Maybe ordinary rules aren't made for people that smart.
'I don't know where she put the satellite. She never told me and I never asked. At some point I realized that I didn't want to know. Maybe I got scared, I don't know….
'Ilin tried to warn her. She decided to eliminate the worst threat, you. She hired a hitman she had used once before when the mob tried to move in on us. They didn't know what we were doing, but they knew we were making major money doing it, so they tried to muscle in. She hired the guy, and he killed the mob guy. You've probably got it as an unsolved someplace.
'I don't want her dead. You understand? Schlegel will kill her. He agreed to pay her a hundred million to put the satellite in the water, and he's paid just ten. He agreed to pay another hundred million when it's recovered. He'll kill her instead, so she can't talk. And he won't have to pay.
'I never really wanted money. I wanted Zelda, and to get her I thought I would have to play her game. She never set out to hurt anyone; it was the game. You see that, don't you?'
Jake Grafton may have looked like a father figure, but Carmellini noted that he didn't nod, didn't say yes just to please Vance.
'Life doesn't often work out the way it should.' Even Vance seemed to realize that he had been rationalizing.
The doctor came in then, listened to Vance's chest with a stethoscope. 'You gentlemen must leave. He's talked too long as it is. His right lung…'
'Thank you, doctor. Thank you, Zip.'
'You save her, Admiral. If we go to jail, that will be okay. Maybe when we get out Zelda and I will have another chance at life. We've screwed this one up pretty badly.'
There was a pay phone at the nurses' station twenty feet from Vance's room, and Jake used it. 'This is Jake Grafton calling for General Le Beau.'
'He's in a meeting, sir.' 'Get him out of it.'
Sixty seconds later he heard Flap's voice.
'We were about an hour and a half too late, General,' Jake said. 'Zelda Hudson was the brains behind the loss of SuperAegis and the theft
There was a moment of silence as the marine digested this news. 'What now?' he said.
'Well, they didn't kill her. They took her from her building in a helicopter. The FBI will chase the chopper
