Tampa Tuesday October 11
Kate's phone chimed at precisely 8:00. She finished unpacking her laptop and powered it on. While the computer was booting up, she settled herself at her desk, before checking the incoming text "Good Morning Beautiful."
She answered "Good Morning. You're up early."
"Not as much incentive to sleep in when you're on the deck. Plus I have an early meeting at the Institute. Trying to buy a ship.
"You didn't really sleep on the deck again, did you?
"Yep."
"Rick!"
"I have an idea."
"Uh Oh."
"You wound me, Agent Beckett."
"Okay, Rick, let's hear it."
"How about I bring lunch for the three of us and we can spend some time going over any new data."
"I like the way you think Mr. Castle."
"Okay, see you around 12."
Kate looked up to see Hayley regarding her from the doorway, a mile-wide smile on her face. "Since you were beaming, I'm assuming that was Rick you were texting back and forth with?"
"Yes it was….Beaming?"
"Yep."
"I was just excited that he offered to bring lunch."
"Riiiiiight. Anything popped yet?"
"No not yet, I'm going to try to finish organizing all the data we have. Why don't you get the BOLO issued and call some of the local TV stations and see if they're open to doing a PSA?
"Okay, give me a call if anything comes up." Hayley disappeared down the hall toward her own office.
Kate worked diligently, organizing the remainder of the information they had so far. She knew that soon the higher ups would be wanting progress reports, and she wanted to be ready, she wanted to show that her promotion had not been a mistake.
The buzzing of her phone interrupted her work. A quick glance at her clock as she accepted the call showed 10:47, she'd been working for a while. "Beckett."
"Agent Beckett, this is Piersal over at CSU, I have the results of the radiation scan on the two vehicles. Negative on number 1, positive on number 2."
"Thanks," she sat frozen for a second, a cold numbness gripping her heart and the deadly words running an endless loop through her mind Nukes, they have nukes. She shook off the fear and hit speed dial 1 on her phone. "Hayley, can you come by when you have a minute?"
The phone buzzed again, just as Hayley showed up. Kate waved her friend to a seat and accepted the call. "Beckett…..Okay thanks." She returned her phone to the desktop and met Hayley's curious gaze. "That was FHP, They finished the scan on I-10. No sign of the second SUV. "
"That complicates things a bit, now we have to figure out what No. 2 was doing before it met up at the golf course?"
"It's worse than that," Hayley's eyebrows slid upwards, and Kate continued, "Number 2 tested positive for radiation."
"Oh crap, have you told Rick?"
"No, he'll be here in a little over an hour. I'll tell him then."
"In the meantime, how about we go through some more of the Phoenix tape and see if we can nail down when the second SUV returned?"
"Okay." Kate started the video at the point they had reached the day before, and they both settled back to watch. Fortunately, there was a fair amount of activity, mostly people coming and going at times that likely corresponded to shift changes. Occasionally, there was activity around the lone SUV, but the hideous quality of the video prevented any meaningful analysis.
Hayley stood and stretched, "This is turning my brain to mush, let's take a break."
Kate reached for her mouse, but froze, her hand in mid-air, "There it is!" Instead of the mouse, she grabbed a pen and jotted down the time stamp. "Looks like an elapsed time of 47 hours and 51 minutes."
"Do you have a calculator?" Hayley asked, "I saw how Rick did the analysis yesterday, I think I can do it."
"Sure," Kate pulled a calculator from her drawer and passed it across the desk.
"I make it a radius of 1450 miles plus or minus 50 miles.
"Good afternoon ladies," Rick greeted them,"You two certainly look pleased with yourselves." He held up a Musashi takeout bag "Let's eat and you can tell me all about it." He walked around the desk to give Kate a quick hug as Hayley started pulling containers out of the bag.
"Rick, there's five containers here," Hayley observed, "Is someone else joining us?"
"No, just me being paranoid, the three containers marked with a B are Akahiro's world famous Boom - Boom Shrimp Salad, but I wasn't sure, so I brought a couple of their house salads just in case one of you wanted something different."
"Rick, you're going to spoil us, " Hayley laughed and glanced over at Kate who shook her head in resignation.
"I've been accused of worse things," Rick chuckled. "I for one am going with Boom - Boom." He sat in his usual seat and opened the plastic container.
"Sounds good to me," Hayley selected one of the marked containers and passed the last one to Kate who nodded her acceptance. They ate in a tense silence for a few minutes.
"Bad news, huh?" Rick broke the silence.
"How….." Kate was surprised by the sudden question.
"Because Akahiro's Boom - Boom Shrimp Salad has been known to trigger spontaneous raptures of praise in the most reticent of food critics, and neither of you have made a sound since you started eating." He paused expectantly. Both women failed to respond, so he added gently, "Let me guess, one or both of the SUV's tested positive for radiation."
"Number 2" Kate responded.
"That's not much of a surprise," Rick added calmly, "An unwelcome development to be sure, but a logical progression from what they've done so far."
Hayley spoke up, "It's just a bit unsettling to think that I might wake up tomorrow morning as radioactive dust." Kate nodded her agreement.
"I hear you," he agreed, "That's why we have to catch these bastards. Y'all got any more info.
"The two SUV's didn't travel together on the way to Florida." Kate responded.
"Now that's interesting, gives us a whole new avenue of inquiry." He got a faraway look in his eyes and a grin started to form, a particularly Castle kind of grin. A grin that gave the two women a thrill and a chill at the same time, Leviathan had been summoned and bubbles were already rising to the surface. "Kate, can we look at that GPS data again?"
"Sure Rick, care to share?"
"Sorry, let's pretend we're planning the Claw op, I think that will clear things up nicely. We'll use a technique called back-planning that I was taught at Quantico. We start with the end result - an attack designed to cause the maximum amount of casualties. What was necessary to achieve that result?"
"Everything and everyone had to be in place at the right time." Kate offered.
"And all their actions had to be coordinated perfectly." Hayley added.
"Exactly, We call all of that synchronicity. Now what was necessary to achieve synchronicity?"
Kate was starting to see the picture that Rick was painting, "In this case, all of their assets were arriving in two different vehicles, from two different directions, with two different starting points and all had to arrive at the golf course at the same time."
"So what could interfere with that?" Rick asked.
Hayley laughed, "Lots of things, traffic cops, accidents, traffic in general, and so on.
"Good," Rick acknowledged, "And how would you mitigate that possibility?"
The women thought hard for a second and the answer occurred to Kate "They would meet somewhere out of the way, and drive over together."
Damn, I love this girl, Rick thought. "Correct, the technical term for that place is 'Assembly Area'. What else might you do to pass the time while you're chilling at the assembly area?"
Hayley raised her hand.
"Yes Ms. Shipton." Rick instructed with a chuckle.
"Practice?"
"Very good. This op was planned by a soldier, and I promise you these guys did not just roll up to the maintenance shed and start hooking up gas cylinders. They at least had a dress rehearsal before they jumped off. So my question is - where's the assembly area?"
"Is that why you wanted to go over the GPS data again?"
"Yes, there has to be a stop in there somewhere."
"I can download it to my laptop, we'll see more detail than on my phone." Kate said.
"Good idea. One other thing, I need to revise my statement about the Claw attack being a suicide mission. I've been going back through everything for the last couple of nights and I think the new evidence points to the bad guys planning to break contact after they executed the triple header and do bad things somewhere else. I also don't think we got them all."
"But Rick," Kate protested, "We took out everyone inside the maintenance shed."
"We did, but I'm talking about the other end of the operation, the part near the clubhouse. Some one had sneak in before daylight and place the claymore's. Then someone had to be in line of sight to trigger them at the right time."
"Couldn't the group at the maintenance shed have done that too?" Hayley questioned.
"Could've, but the two locations are pretty far apart for jumping back and forth, and the less scurrying around, the better."
"Rick, the GPS data is finished downloading." Kate stated.
"Okay, if you were planning this, you'd want the assembly area to be as close as possible to the target, as long as you have good security."
Kate nodded her understanding, "How about we zoom in on say the last 10 miles of the route and see what we get?"
Rick and Hayley slid forward in their seats, focused intently on the laptop screen. "What's that?" Hayley pointed at the screen, where an anomaly in the route was clearly visible.
The vehicle had apparently turned off the interstate, traveled about 400 meters to the west, then reversed course and traveled east for a couple of miles to the golf course.
"Kate, can you determine the elapsed time between when the vehicle turned off the interstate and when it crossed back over the interstate on the way to the Claw Thursday morning?" Rick inquired.
"Sure" she replied, and a couple of click's later she had the answer, "Looks like about 20 hours."
"Any idea what's there?"
Hayley spoke up "I know, that's only a short distance from my apartment. It's the old Floriland mall."
"Empty?" Rick queried and Hayley nodded. "That's it then. Road trip?"
"Road trip!" both women agreed.
"Do you two have raid gear? Both women rolled their eyes, and he chuckled, "I'll take that as a yes. Might be a good idea to suit up, you don't know what we'll find when we get there."
"Good idea," Kate hoisted the duffel bag containing her raid gear over her shoulder and headed down the hall to the women's locker room. Hayley trotted off down the hall and around the corner toward her office and her own gear.
When Kate left, Rick sprinted to the parking lot and retrieved his own duffel bag from the Range rover and hurried back to change in the men's locker room. When he returned to Kate's office, the two women were waiting. Rick glanced from one to the other and whistled silently to himself. Who would've thought that black jumpsuits, body armor and a slung carbine could be so darn hot? Kate giggled, "You don't look so bad yourself, Mr. Castle."
Oops "Did I say that out loud?"
"You didn't have to, it was written on your face." Hayley said with a wicked grin.
"Uh, sorry ladies, I didn't …."
"Relax Rick, from other guys it would be creepy, but from you it just makes a woman feel appreciated." Hayley continued.
"Let's get this road trip on the road" Kate suggested, and the three strode purposefully toward the parking lo 50 miles."
Rick drove the Range Rover fast, just short of crazy fast, because his gut was telling him that haste was critical. He had no idea why, but he always listened to his gut.
Kate was on the phone with the Hillsborough Sheriff's Department arranging for their SWAT team to serve as backup and for uniformed deputies to establish a security perimeter. He sensed that Kate was winding down, and offered one point to relay to the Swat Team, "Kate, tell them to hold at least a block away. If there are bad guys there, they're likely sitting on stockpiled WMD, and if they get spooked they might do something stupid."
She relayed the message, and gave Rick a curious look, "How are we going to get close without spooking them"
Rick grinned, "I brought a few friends along that'll handle that part of the operation"
"These friends wouldn't by any chance have been born in the bowels of the Orion Institute would they?"
His grin got wider "Possibly, just possibly." He slowed down to normal speed as they approached the exit for Busch Blvd. They drove west on Busch, passing the Mall on their right. "Hayley is there a relatively secluded spot near the mall?"
"There's a trailer park on the north side adjoining the mall parking lot and several decent size clumps of trees. Take a right on Florida Ave. If you want to check it out."
As Rick made the right turn onto Florida, the two women were intently examining the area around the mall. "Certainly seems deserted" Hayley observed. She noticed a large realtor sign - For Sale or Lease, with a number. On impulse, she pulled out her phone and punched in the number.
"Girl, Who are you calling?" Kate questioned.
Hayley held up her index finger Wait one, "Hello, I am interested in purchasing the old Floriland Mall facility. No, I'm sorry but my client insists on anonymity in the early stages of negotiations, Oh I'm sorry to hear that, an entire year you say. Thank you for your time, if my client decides to proceed, I'll be in touch." She ended the call and grinned proudly. "Guess what , The whole facility was leased two months ago for 12 months paid in advance. The agent said the lessee wanted to use it for storage."
Kate turned to Rick, "Spidey senses?"
"Tingling like mad," He responded and turned into the trailer park, coming to a halt at an empty lot separated from the mall lot by a thick clump of live-oaks. He walked to the rear and opened the liftgate. Kate and Hayley joined him just as he lifted, with a grunt of effort, a metal container with a vaguely military look out of the car and set it on the ground. He opened the container, and both women gasped in recognition, the last time they had seen a metallic frisbee shape like this it had turned a sniper into a glowing ball of plasma.
"A mini Valkyrie!" Kate exclaimed. "You going to zap the bad guys?"
"No, no zapping." Rick responded, "This one is too small to carry the Hammer. But this one carries something even more important for us, a miniaturized cybernetic recon battalion." Both women were looking at him in confusion, so he plucked something small out of a corner of the case and placed it in the tenuously outstretched hand of Kate Beckett.
"It looks like a robot cockroach," Kate marveled.
Rick was carrying a small device that looked something like an electronic key fob, and he pressed a button with a barely audible click and the bug sprang to life and streaked up her arm, across the back of her neck resulting in a startled shriek and a flailing attempt to terminate the bug's existence. The creature cleverly evaded her attacks and leapt the two foot gap to Hayley to the accompaniment of more shrieks and even more violent flailing. Rick pushed another button and the bug leapt onto his arm and shut down. Both women smacked him on the chest with enough combined force that he took a half step back, laughing. "Rick Castle, you can be such a child sometimes," Kate scolded, "If you ever get one of those things within 10 feet of me again, I'll withhold se…er, hugs. For the rest of your life.
"Yeah, what she said" Hayley concurred. "Except for the hug part."
"Hey," an unfamiliar voice intruded, "What are you perverts doing out there?" the source of the voice was an older woman, dressed in a faded housecoat, standing on the front porch of her trailer and brandishing a baseball bat. "If you don't leave, I'm calling the cops."
Kate held up her badge, "FBI, go back inside your home ma'am or I'll have to arrest you. The woman disappeared with alacrity.
Rick went to the Range Rover, still chuckling under his breath. When he returned he was carrying the controller for the mini Valkyrie, identical to the one they had seen at the golf course. He powered up the controller and warned "Stand back,Ladies" and the Valkyrie rose steadily until Rick activated it's stealth systems and it disappeared from human sight.
Hayley and Kate were watching over Rick's shoulder as he flew the Valkyrie toward the mall. They noticed it was slowly descending, and curiosity prompted Kate to speak, "What exactly are you doing Rick?"
"Looking for a way in. I'm going to try the simple stupid approach first, if that doesn't work, then I'll try something else."
"Are you trying to fly the Valkyrie into the mall?" Hayley asked.
"No, I'm going to get the Fire Ants inside."
"Fire Ants?" Kate questioned.
"The robot bugs you had so much fun with earlier. The Valkyrie carries 36 of them. They can do a lot of things, but burrowing through concrete walls isn't one of them. So I have to find an opening of some kind." The screen on the controller showed the Valkyrie was slowly approaching the main entrance with its automatic sliding glass doors.
"Surely, they didn't leave the automatic doors on." Kate scoffed.
"You never know, some things people just take for granted and don't really pay attention to them. The Valkyrie was now at about waist height and it slipped under the arched entrance and approached the doors. Kate and Hayley both gasped as the doors slid open and Rick touched an icon on the screen and 36 Fire Ant robotic scouts tumbled from the belly of the drone, righted themselves and charged through the open door.
The scouts quickly spread out into pre-programmed formations and hurried on, their exquisitely sensitive instruments scanning ahead and cataloging information for transmission to the Valkyrie, which was now hovering a hundred feet above the mall monitoring its tiny charges and relaying their take to their common master. The controller screen was now displaying the take from the Fire Ants, the screen divided into many small windows. One window started to pulse red, and Rick quickly expanded that window and grunted in satisfaction. "Well, well, what have we here?"
Kate looked intently at the screen "Rick, there has to be at least 20 men in there." The screen did indeed show a large group of men gathered around four SUVs that were parked in the mall's central court.
"Yeah," he agreed, "about right." He reached out and maximized one of the small windows. Kate heard the deadly hiss of a breath indrawn through clenched teeth and leaned over to see what had disturbed Rick.
She instantly regretted her curiosity, "Are those what I think they are?"
He grimaced, "If you think they are nerve gas and virus cylinders, then they are exactly what you think they are."
She counted carefully, "Rick, it looks to me like there are 16 of each.
"If they stick to their pattern," Hayley observed from the backseat, "That represents four more attacks."
"That could explain the four SUVs" Kate observed.
Rick minimized the window and continued a systematic scan of the were numerous boxes and cases of equipment stacked around the periphery of the court and parked in one of the four concourses was a small forklift.
"Rick, what is that thing?" Kate's keen eyes had picked up an unusual looking piece of machinery. It was about the size of a large portable generator, but the resemblance ended there; this machine had a piece of tubing, about two inches in diameter and two feet long, protruding from one end and angled upward at a 45 degree angle.
"Whatever else you can say about these mutts," Rick had recognized the device instantly, "You've got to give them points for creativity." He paused for a second. "Kate, it's a fogger, like what the county uses to spray for mosquitoes. They're usually mounted in the bed of a pickup truck, but there's no reason you couldn't stuff it into the back of an SUV."
"Oh crap," both women said together. He just nodded agreement.
Rick selected one of the Fire Ants and switched it from autonomous mode to manual. A touch on the screen brought up a virtual keypad and he entered a series of commands. Pressing execute, he sank back in the seat to collect his thoughts. Kate stirred in the seat next to him, but he preempted her question by explaining "I just took over control of one of the Fire Ants and programmed it run a search pattern consisting of an expanding series of partially over lapping circles. I also stored the image of the fogger, and told it to look for more of them." Another window pulsed red, this time accompanied by a high-pitched chirp that might have come from a cricket with attitude.
Kate leaned closer "Found one, huh?" Rick didn't answer, and she looked up to meet his gaze, The icy glare fixed on the screen raised goosebumps and she implored "What is it Rick?"
"This isn't the same Ant" he stated, cold and deadly, "This is an Omega"
"Omega?" He seemed to make a concerted effort to respond to her question. "Kate, the Fire Ants aren't large enough to carry all the types of sensors that we'd like to use. So we designed multiple versions of the Ant, each with a different sensor. Alpha is the basic type, in addition to optical sights, which they all have, it has infrared imaging capability. Beta has a CO2 sensor, it locates living creatures by their exhalations. Gamma detects plastic explosives. Delta detects chemical weapons, Epsilon detects biological weapons." He paused, seemingly reluctant to continue.
"And Omega…?" Kate queried gently.
"Omega detects radiation."
"Are you saying?" Hayley interjected, "That they have nukes in there now?"
"Looks that way" Rick manipulated the controller, "I'm going to get the Omega's location and see what's there." He maximized a window and the two women leaned closer. The picture showed three large metallic boxes sitting side by side on the floor. The boxes were pushed up against a solid wall that formed the northwest side of the octagon-shaped court.
"What are those boxes?" Hayley asked.
"They're contractor tool chests, made out of heavy gauge steel and heavy as hell." He paused for a second "This is a good example of why children shouldn't be allowed to play with matches."
"Huh?" both women looked at him as if questioning his grip on sanity.
"They've got three critical masses of plutonium sitting within a couple of feet of each other, definitely not cool."
"You mean it could explode?" Kate looked a little pale.
"An explosion is statistically improbable, but that's not the same thing as impossible. The most likely outcome would be a significantly increased neutron flux and people in the area would start showing symptoms of radiation sickness."
"Is there any good news?" Kate asked somewhat facetiously.
"Yeah, at least they're here, and not running around loose. Call your buddy on the Swat team and tell him if the balloon goes up, that his team should take the west entrance and we'll take the north entrance. That way, we'll have the bad guys in a crossfire. Tell them to have the uniforms cover the east and south entrances but not enter, too much chance of friendly fire casualties. Kate, make sure they understand that none of these mutts can leave here alive unless they're in handcuffs. If they let any get past them I'll personally shoot them."
Kate relayed the message and nodded to Rick, "They understand. What do we do now?"
"Try to figure out how to get into the mall without being detected."
"Any ideas?"
"Nope, you"
"No"
Kate's phone rang insistently, and she noticed it was the SWAT commander. When she touched accept, the man's shout was audible to everyone in the Range Rover, "They made us! They made us! Two of those damned SUV's came by and saw us in the parking lot and took off like a bat out of hell."
Rick was watching the controller screen intently, "Looks like someone just got a phone call," he muttered. "Now let's see what they do?" Bedlam erupted among the men in the courtyard. Weapons suddenly appeared and there was a mad scramble for the SUV's.
One man's action was so incongruous that he drew Kate's attention. He was walking deliberately, not scrambling; and he was walking away from the vehicles, not toward them. Instead of a weapon, he was carrying a box, about the size of a lunch-box and there were wires dangling from it. She realized he was walking toward the chests containing the nukes. "Rick, what's he doing ?" the urgency in her voice forced his attention to the window she was pointing toward.
A millisecond was sufficient to recognize the paraphernalia and another millisecond to divine the man's intent. "Damn, he's going to arm the bomb!" He tossed the controller back to Hayley and pushed the start button firing the Range Rover's engine.
"Rick, how long will it take?"
"Anywhere from 30 seconds to a couple minutes depending on how much practice he's had." The vehicle was already moving forward, heading toward a gap in the trees.
Kate needed no prompting, "Go, Go Go!" She spoke forcefully into her phone. "The subjects are attempting to detonate a nuclear device. Go as briefed and God go with you."
She had hardly terminated the call, when the keening cacophony of dozens of sirens pierced the air. The cavalry was on the way, but there was no way they would make it in time. The Range Rover hit the solid pavement of the mall parking lot and Rick buried the accelerator. Range Rovers are obviously not dragsters, but the 500 horsepower supercharged V8 in Rick's vehicle provided a damn good substitute.
The north entrance to the mall was a bit less than a quarter of a mile away and they had 30 seconds to prevent a holocaust. Rick only had time to give the women one instruction "I'm going to put the car between the bombs and the bad guys. At all costs, we've got to keep them away from those bombs until the cavalry arrives."
For Kate Beckett, the 18.7 seconds it took to cross the parking lot seemed to pass in slow motion. Somehow she got her kevlar helmet on, and she thought back to the night when she had told Hayley that Rick frightened her a little and Hayley had propounded her Leviathan theory. She realized now how foolish she had been to be frightened and she prayed as the Range Rover, traveling in excess of 80 miles per hour, covered the last 30 feet to the sliding glass doors barring their entrance to the mall - Arise, Leviathan , Arise.