Darkness(92)

“Hello, General.” Cal turned to face his father. Neither offered to shake hands. The devil of it was, they looked alike. The old man was heavier, jowlier, more squinty-eyed. Plus the silver hair. And the full uniform. But the resemblance was unmistakable.

“You in trouble?”

“I was going to call you when I landed. We need to talk privately.” Cal put a hand on Gina’s arm, drew her forward. His father had already raked her with a look, and, knowing his father, Cal knew what the old man was thinking: this was one of Cal’s quickie chickies, as he called them. Only Gina wasn’t, as Cal meant to make clear. “This is Dr. Gina Sullivan. She’s a professor at Stanford. Gina, meet my father. Major General John Callahan.”

“How do you do, General,” Gina said with perfect, exquisite composure, offering her hand.

With a quick, glinting look at Cal, who knew that he was thinking something along the lines of DOCTOR Sullivan? You’re coming up in the world, his father shook hands. “Pleasure to meet you, Dr. Sullivan.” His attention returned to Cal. “What can I do for you?”

It was cold, and windy, and Cal wasn’t about to leave Gina standing around on the tarmac while he answered that question. On the other hand, his business was urgent—and private.

“We can talk here, but I’d like Gina to wait in your car,” he said. For security purposes, to thwart any possibility of being bugged or spied on, having an unscheduled conversation in the great outdoors was probably as good as it got.

His father looked at him, nodded, then said to Gina, “Dr. Sullivan, if you’d care to—” and made a gesture toward the limo.

“I’ll just be a few minutes,” Cal told her. She nodded and headed for the limo. He waited until she was ensconced in the rear seat—the airman who still stood at attention by the rear flank of the car opened it for her—and then drew his father away until they were standing alone on the tarmac.

Then he told him everything.

“We’ve got Detachment 632 here on the base. They can check that flash drive of yours out,” his father said. Detachment 632, Air Force Office of Special Investigations, specialized in counterintelligence investigations, among other things, and their capabilities and reach were absolutely on par with the CIA’s or any other government agency’s. Cal had known that D632 was based at Eielson, which was another reason he’d chosen the base. Along with his father’s clout, which would get the wheels rolling instantly.

“I don’t want to hand the flash drive over to you out here. It’s probably best if as few people as possible are aware of its existence.”

His father was looking thoughtful. “We’ll drop Dr. Sullivan at the hotel here on base—I presume you don’t want to stay in my house”—which was an absolutely correct assumption, especially since Cal was planning to share a room with Gina—“and take that thing over to D632. They’ve got hella good IT specialists.”

Cal wasn’t sure how much his father knew about IT specialists, but as that had been more or less his plan for the flash drive, too, he agreed, with one proviso.

“Gina stays with me.” When the general gave him a look that Cal knew was a prelude to some kind of lecture along the lines of This is not the time, keep it in your pants, he added, “She’s a witness. She heard the man who I think might be Whitman talking, and she can identify his voice. If anyone knew, if Whitman knew, he’d pull out all the stops to eliminate her.”

His father frowned and jerked his head in the direction of the motorcade surrounding his limo. “You don’t trust those boys to protect her?”

“I don’t trust anybody to protect her. Not until she listens to Whitman’s voice and identifies it, or not.”

“You think this Whitman will come if you tell him to? Won’t he suspect you’re setting him up?”

Cal shook his head. “I’m going to let him think I’m wounded—which I am, by the way; I took a bullet in the side a couple of days ago, no big deal—and that’s why I came running here to Eielson and my dear old dad. He wants that flash drive, and he’ll come get it. And he doesn’t know Gina heard his voice.”

His father frowned thoughtfully, then nodded. “All right, then. Get in the car and let’s go.”

They were both striding back toward the car when Cal said, “Oh, and a crew ought to be dispatched to Attu. There’s at least ten dead and a hell of a mess out there.”

His father snorted. “Sounds like the story of your life. I’ll pass the word on.”

Then the airman was opening the door for them and Cal slid in beside Gina.

Twenty minutes later, the flash drive was in the hands of IT specialists at D632. And under the supervision of a cadre of fully briefed D632 agents, Cal was dispatching a message to Whitman. Using code and the secure phone connection that he’d told Gina about on Attu, he relayed the information that he was wounded, at Eielson, and had a flash drive given to him by Rudy: the “proof” Whitman had been seeking. Only Whitman was going to have to come and get it, because Cal wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

After that, he and Gina sat down with his father at the cafeteria in the building and had a quick meal. He was starved, and he and his father weren’t exactly chatty at the best of times, so once Cal made a courtesy inquiry about the well-being of his stepmother—his father had been married to his second wife, a very nice former flight attendant named Sharon, for ten years—and learned that she was fine and, at that moment, visiting her mother in Chicago, most of the conversation took place between Gina and his father. By the end of the meal, the old man was calling her Gina (nobody ever called the general anything but “sir” or “General”) and making her smile as he caustically recounted some of Cal’s teenage exploits.