Whitman showed up on schedule, as Cal had been sure he would. The moment Whitman realized that Cal had escaped from Attu, it would have been his top priority to hotfoot it back to his office in Seattle, because as far as he knew, Cal had no inkling that Whitman had been involved, and he would take the greatest precautions to make sure Cal never found out. In fact, if it hadn’t been for Gina and her description of Heavy Tread’s voice, Cal might never have suspected. Also, if it hadn’t been for Gina, he probably wouldn’t have been alive to worry about it.
So he owed her a lot. And as he’d told her that morning when he pulled her into the shower with him, he always paid his debts. In full. With interest.
Whitman arrived at Eielson that afternoon.
They were ready and waiting for him.
CAL IN a blue hospital gown, stretched out in a semireclining position in a hospital bed, white blanket tucked around him up to the waist, an IV taped to his arm, in a white-walled hospital room complete with beeping monitors, should have looked a lot more helpless and vulnerable than he did, Gina thought.
Watching through a two-way mirror from the room next door, she decided that the man looked about as helpless and vulnerable as a rottweiler.
“Boy doesn’t look sick a bit,” Cal’s father observed with disgust. He was beside her, sitting in a cushioned office chair just as she was. With them were two D632 agents, also seated. All of them were focused on the room next door. When she’d been driven to the hospital some hours after Cal had left early that morning, Gina had thought that she was being taken to visit him in his sickbed. It had been obvious to her from the moment she’d been ushered into this adjoining room and discovered that she could both see Cal and most of his room through the two-way mirror—what kind of hospital room had a two-way mirror?—and hear everything that was going on in said room, that something else was up.
Just what it was she wasn’t quite sure, but she was tense with anticipation.
“He had surgery this morning,” Gina pointed out mildly. “To remove a bullet.”
“Outpatient surgery. Could have popped that thing out with his fingers.” The general shook his head. “Doctor told me that it was right there under the skin. Not much worse than a splinter. Damn it, he’s supposed to look like he’s on his last legs. He never could pretend worth a flip.”
Pretend? Gina cast him a sharp look, but was distracted by the opening of the door in Cal’s room.
A man walked in, closing the door behind him. He looked to be around forty, with short, well-groomed, tobacco-brown hair and an open, pleasant face. He was over six feet tall, slightly stocky in build, well dressed in a camel overcoat over a dark suit. Gina supposed he could have been described as possessing all-American good looks, although the broad smile with which he advanced on Cal struck a wrong note in her somewhere.
“Whitman,” Cal greeted him, and held out his hand.
“Was I ever glad to hear from you.” Whitman shook Cal’s hand. “The intelligence I got—it said you were all lost along with the plane. I—”
Whitman kept talking, but Gina stopped listening. His words, uttered in a slow Texas drawl, seemed to buzz around her head like bees. Then she realized that the buzzing was in her ears, and that her ears were buzzing because she was light-headed, and she was light-headed because—
“Gina. Is something wrong?” The general leaned toward her, gripping her hand as it rested limply on the arm of her chair. His hand felt surprisingly like Cal’s, big and long-fingered and strong. The realization gave her something to focus on, an anchor to help pull her back from the dizziness that threatened to swamp her, and she gripped his fingers in turn.
“I know that voice,” she said. “That man was on Attu. He was involved in the murders of my friends.”
“Dr. Sullivan.” The two agents were on their feet. One of them, Captain Brady—thirtyish, bald, medium height, wiry—leaned closer. “Are you sure?”
Gina took a breath, tightened her hold on the general’s fingers. “Yes.”
The agents exchanged glances and left the room. Even as she looked back through the mirror at Cal, at the man talking to him, she realized why she was there: to identify the voice of Heavy Tread.
Just as she had that epiphany, the agents entered Cal’s room and walked briskly toward his bed.
Their guns were drawn.
Whitman turned, frowned at them.
“Lon Whitman, get your hands in the air!” Brady barked. “You’re under arrest.”
AS SOON as Whitman knew the jig was up, and the death penalty was on the table unless he talked, he confessed all.