Kitty Hawk Read online

  I,Q SERIES

  PICTURE BOOKS WITH HIS WIFE, MARIE SMITH:

  B is for Beaver: An Oregon Alphabet

  E is for Evergreen: A Washington State Alphabet

  N is for our Nation’s Capital: A Washington DC Alphabet

  Z is for Zookeeper: A Zoo Alphabet

  W is for Waves: An Ocean Alphabet

  OTHER NOVELS BY ROLAND SMITH

  Storm Runners

  Storm Runners: The Surge

  Storm Runners: Eruption

  The 39 Clues: Shatterproof; Cahills vs. Vespers, Book 4

  Tentacles

  Elephant Run

  Peak

  Cryptid Hunters

  Zach’s Lie

  Jack’s Run

  The Captain’s Dog: My Journey with the Lewis and Clark Tribe

  Sasquatch

  Thunder Cave

  Jaguar

  The Last Lobo

  Legwork (e-book)

  I, Q

  ( Book Three: Kitty Hawk )

  Roland Smith

  Sleeping Bear PressTM

  www.IQtheSeries.com

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are

  either products of the author’s imagination or, if real, are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2012 Roland Smith

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in an information retrieval system in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, taping, and recording, without prior written permission from the publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on file.

  Smith, Roland, 1951-

  Kitty Hawk / Roland Smith.

  p. cm. -- (I, Q ; bk. 3)

  Summary: “The president’s daughter has been kidnapped by the elusive

  and lethal Ghost Cell. Quest (Q) and Angela are in hot pursuit with

  vicious winds and blinding rain thwarting them at every turn.

  It’s a desperate high stakes chase”-- Provided by publisher.

  ISBN 978-1-58536-605-7 (hardback)

  ISBN 978-1-58536-604-0 (paperback)

  [1. Kidnapping--Fiction. 2. Spies--Fiction.

  3. Presidents--Family--Fiction. 4. Stepfamilies--Fiction.

  5. Hurricanes--Fiction. 6. Kitty Hawk (N.C.)--Fiction.

  7. Mystery and detective stories.]

  I. Title. PZ7.S65766Kit 2012

  [Fic]--dc23

  2012029437

  ISBN 978-1-58536-604-0

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  ISBN 978-1-58536-605-7 (case)

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  This book was typeset in Berthold Baskerville and Datum

  Cover design by Lone Wolf Black Sheep

  Cover illustration by Kaylee Cornfield

  Printed in the United States.

  Sleeping Bear PressTM

  315 E. Eisenhower Parkway, Suite 200

  Ann Arbor, Michigan 48108

  © 2012 Sleeping Bear Press

  visit us at sleepingbearpress.com

  For Michael Spradlin. You’re it!

  The President’s Kid

  Willingham Culpepper, aka P.K., sat at the head of the long conference table in the Situation Room beneath the West Wing of the White House. He was in his pajamas, robe, and slippers. Sitting next to him was his father, J. R. Culpepper, the president of the United States. He was wearing a suit, but he had taken off his tie. He was scanning a wall of video monitors.

  Earlier in the evening, P.K. had been drugged and nearly kidnapped by a group of terrorists that had infiltrated the White House.

  “How’s your head now?” his father asked, swiveling his chair away from the monitors to look at him.

  “Still a little fuzzy, but I’m okay,” P.K. said. “What did they give me?”

  “I don’t know, but it was the same drug they gave your sister.”

  His older sister Bethany had not been as lucky as P.K. The terrorists had successfully gotten her out of the White House and were now driving down I-95 in a Chevy Tahoe with her, unconscious, in the back.

  P.K. looked up at the central video monitor. An unmanned drone was following the Tahoe, streaming live video into the Situation Room.

  “I guess I’m confused,” P.K. said. “If we know where Bethany is, why don’t we send in a hostage rescue team to get her back?”

  “We may do just that,” his father said. “But not yet. I think she’s safe for now. Malak Tucker is protecting her.”

  “Who’s Malak Tucker?”

  “She’s an ex-Secret Service agent, who up until tonight I thought was dead. She’s infiltrated the terrorist cell and is trying to find out who’s in charge of it so we can arrest them.”

  By arrest them, P.K. knew his father meant kill them, but he let it go. His father always treated him like he was ten years old, which in fact he was.

  “So you know this Malak woman,” P.K. said.

  “I’ve known her for years. She was in charge of my protection detail. Bethany knows her too.”

  “How big is this cell?”

  His father shook his head. “We don’t know, and that’s the problem. They have managed to infiltrate every branch of government, including the White House.” He nodded at the Situation Room’s locked door. “My staff is on the other side of that door going crazy because I won’t let them in. The reason I won’t let them in is because I don’t know for certain which of them I can trust. Somewhere there’s a list of cell members. We need that list, and this is our best chance to get it.”

  “If Malak has already infiltrated the cell, why does she need Bethany?”

  “She’s only infiltrated it to a certain level. Bethany is her ticket to the upper echelon of the cell. Someone is in charge. Perhaps more than one person. To get the list, she has to gain their trust. Delivering Bethany will do that. As soon as she meets the head of the cell, Malak will … uh …”

  “Arrest him,” P.K. said.

  “Right.”

  “And the SOS team following Bethany doesn’t work for the government?”

  “No. They’re independent contractors.”

  “And you trust this Tyrone Boone guy and his team?”

  “I do. He and his team are about the only people I trust at the moment. I’ve worked with Boone for over thirty years. He’s never let me down. But I have taken some other steps just in case things start falling apart, which they often do. For now, Bethany is safe.”

  A phone on the conference table rang. The president picked it up, listened for a second, then said, “The next person that calls me, or allows a call to come through to me in here, will be fired.”

  He slammed the phone into the cradle, swiveled his chair back around, and stared at the Chevy Tahoe heading south on I-95.

  The Interstate

  Hard rain blew sideways across I-95. I looked at my watch. It was midnight.

  We were in Virginia heading south. Somewhere in front of us was a Chevy Tahoe. Inside the Tahoe was Secret Service agent Malak Tucker, who was supposed to be dead. She was posing as a terrorist known as Anmar, aka the Leopard. She wasn’t alone in the Tahoe. A few hours earlier, she had drugged and kidnapped Bethany Culpepper, the president’s daughter.

  We were all a little tense.

  The Sasquatch-sized ex-spy, Felix, was behind the wheel of our parents’ luxury motor coach, driving about a hundred miles an hour. Lying next to him in the white-leather passenger seat was Croc, the ancient, almost toothless, mongrel with one blue eye and one brown eye.

  Croc was not tense. He was snoring, and drooling, and passing a little gas.

  Felix cracked open the window to get some fresh air.

  Boone, Angela, and I were sitting at the dining table i
n the back of the speeding coach, staring at a laptop computer. On the screen was the infrared image of a car traveling exactly seventy miles per hour down the interstate, seventeen miles ahead of us according to the readout in the corner of the screen.

  “Slow it down,” Boone called up to Felix.

  Felix eased his big foot off the gas pedal.

  “Why?” Angela asked. “We’re miles behind them.”

  “Spotters,” Boone said. “The ghost cell is well organized and extremely paranoid, which is how they’ve managed to survive all these years. They aren’t one step ahead of us, they’re ten steps ahead of us.”

  Angela pointed to the screen. “Right now they’re sixteen point five miles ahead of us.”

  Angela was my brand-new fifteen-year-old stepsister. Two years older than me. (A fact she was constantly reminding me of.) But I’m taller. She was kind of a know-it-all, but I liked her. And she was usually right.

  “Spotters?” I asked.

  “People sent ahead to see if they’re being followed,” Angela answered. “It’s part of countersurveillance.”

  Since we’d met Boone, we’d had to learn a new language. I guess Angela was a little more fluent in spy-speak than I was because of her mother, Malak, the woman riding up ahead in the Tahoe with the kidnapped Bethany Culpepper.

  “Angela’s right,” Boone said. “They’ll have people stationed along the route watching traffic, maybe even running license plates.”

  “Hard to do that at seventy miles an hour,” I pointed out.

  “Not with a point-and-shoot license plate scanner,” Boone said.

  I looked out the window. Bad luck to get scanning duty on a night like tonight.

  “We changed the plates on the coach,” Boone continued. “But if they cross-check the plates, they’ll see they belong to a Ford Fusion. We’ll be busted and the ghosts will vanish.”

  “Poof,” I said.

  Boone and Angela didn’t laugh. Neither did I. I wasn’t joking. There was nothing funny about any of this.

  We called the terrorists the ghost cell because we didn’t know who they really were or what they called themselves. What we did know is that they had just set off two bombs in Washington D.C. that killed or injured dozens of people. But the bombs were just diversions. Their real target had been Bethany Culpepper.

  Boone pointed at the speedometer readout at the bottom of the screen, which was still pegged at seventy miles per hour. “Cruise control,” he said. “They don’t want to risk getting pulled over for speeding.”

  The video was streaming in from an unmanned drone. Vanessa, one of Boone’s SOS team, was flying it from the back of the intellimobile. The president had requisitioned the multimillion-dollar flying bot for our personal use.

  SOS was an acronym for Some Old Spooks. The name started out as a joke, but stuck. The team was made up of exspies, former black-op military guys, a couple of Israeli Mossad agents, two active Secret Service agents, Angela, and me … Q Munoz, former wannabe magician and rookie terrorist hunter.

  The drone was doing a lot more than tracking the car. It was picking up heat signatures from inside it. Four orange blobs. Two in front. Two in back. We figured the two in back were Malak Tucker and Bethany Culpepper.

  We had no idea who the two in front were.

  So Far So Good

  Malak Tucker looked over at Bethany Culpepper. There was a black hood pulled over Bethany’s head—a useless precaution in Malak’s opinion. Bethany was unconscious. The drug they had given her at the White House was designed to cause a stupefying sense of euphoria, followed by a coma-like sleep. It would be hours before Bethany woke.

  Malak took Bethany’s hand and felt her pulse. It was slow, but strong. She had hoped to have Bethany back in the White House long before the effects of the drug wore off, but that was looking more and more unlikely with every passing mile.

  Where are we going? she thought. How long will it take?

  She knew better than to ask the two men in the front seat. To ask would have been a severe violation of cell protocol. And there was a good chance that the men didn’t know themselves.

  Malak looked at their silhouettes. They hadn’t turned around or spoken to her since she had pushed Bethany into the backseat of the Chevy Tahoe two blocks from the White House.

  Both men had blinking Bluetooth earpieces in their right ears. They had received several phone calls, but Malak had learned nothing from their one-word replies to whatever they were being asked or told. There was a good chance that the two men had never seen each other before. There was even a better chance that they had no idea that their passengers were the president’s daughter and the Leopard. The men had gotten their instructions like all deep-cover cell members. By e-mail. The e-mail would have been simple and vague …

  I’ll meet you on the corner of 15th and H at 7:00 PM. I’m driving the white Chevy Tahoe. I look forward to our outing.

  This could be the men’s first mission or their tenth. When it was completed, they would return to their family, friends, and jobs as if nothing had ever happened. The cell members came in all shapes, sizes, ages, colors, and genders. They worked in stores, offices, schools, police departments, the military, and government agencies. The one thing they had in common was that they were willing and able to do anything they were asked, without question, regardless of the risk or consequences.

  Malak guessed there were hundreds of cell members like the two men in the front seat, but there was only one man who knew the exact number, and who they were. She hoped to meet him before the night was over. Bethany Culpepper was her ticket to the inner circle, but she would cash the ticket in at a moment’s notice and throw away everything she had worked for if at any time she thought Bethany would be harmed.

  So far so good, she thought and felt her lips arch into a rare smile. It was a punch line to an old joke about an optimist, which she had heard when she was a Secret Service agent. The optimist falls off the Empire State building. As he flies past each floor, bystanders shout out: “How’s it going?” He shouts back: “So far so good!”

  The driver got a call. He listened, said yes, then ended the call by touching his Bluetooth.

  Malak decided to call the driver Willing and the man in the passenger seat Able.

  Or better yet … Will and Abe.

  She smiled again.

  Two smiles in a row.

  It had been a long time since the Leopard had smiled. She settled back into her seat with her hand on the pistol Abe had given her when she got into the Tahoe.

  So far so good.

  Off the Books

  “Stop shuffling those cards, Quest!”

  “What’s that, Angie?”

  “It’s Angela.”

  “It’s Q.”

  “Fine. Stop shuffling, Q. It’s driving me crazy.”

  I stood up, put the cards in my pocket, and started pacing, which isn’t easy to do in a swaying motor coach.

  Shuffling and manipulating playing cards was about the only thing stopping me from going crazy. Busy hands, my mom calls it. When I get nervous, my hands get busy. If I can’t use my hands, my mind gets busy …

  Until a week ago, my only ambition was to become a famous magician. That’s magician as in magic, not musician as in music, like my three musician parents. My mom is Blaze Munoz. Exactly a week ago, she married Angela’s dad, Roger Tucker. Their single, “Rekindled,” is the #1 hit on Billboard. They were supposed to be on a national concert tour, but right now they were sound asleep in the Lincoln Bedroom inside the White House. The president asked them to spend an extra night. He wanted them to do a joint press conference about fund-raising efforts for the victims of the bombings in Washington, D.C. But this was not the real reason they were in D.C. Boone promised Malak that he would protect us personally, which would be hard to pull off if he wasn’t with us. The president wanted him to go after the terrorists and his daughter. Angela and I were along for the wild ride. Our parents had no idea what wa
s really going on. They thought we were on our way to their next gig. We weren’t alone. In addition to the motor coach, there were two other vehicles stalking the Leopard and her prey. Eben Lavi (a rogue Israeli Mossad agent who had stuck a knife in my neck) and Malak’s father, Ziv (not his real name), were right behind us in our parents’ red Range Rover. Behind them was the intellimobile—the SOS communications surveillance van. Inside the van was a tangle of electronic gear worth more than the 3.5 million-dollar drone. Uly (slightly smaller than Felix, but not by much) was behind the wheel. Vanessa (who was good with a throwing knife) was in the back flying the drone. Next to her was X-Ray (who could eavesdrop on the dead, I think), watching everything.

  The president was watching too, along with his ten-year-old son, Will, aka P.K., short for President’s Kid. Aside from them, no one else in the government knew the president’s daughter had been kidnapped. No one knew that the government had been infiltrated by terrorists either. As commander in chief, his job was to protect and defend the United States. As a father, his duty was to protect and defend his daughter. These two duties were now crashing into each other. He had called at least half a dozen times since we’d left the White House. I wondered what my father would have done if he was faced with the same situation …

  The thought almost made me laugh out loud.

  “Are you okay?” Angela asked.

  “I’m fine.” I had lengthened my pacing route from the bedroom way in the back to the snoring Croc in the passenger seat.

  My bio father is Peter “Speed” Paulsen. He may be the best guitarist in the world, but he doesn’t know what planet he’s on half the time—make that three-quarters of the time. He has two full-time personal assistants to remind him to do things like eat and put on his pants. If I lived with him and got kidnapped by terrorists, it would take him a week to notice I was missing, if at all. I hadn’t seen him since Mom married Roger, because of the restraining order. But I was sure he knew about the marriage. The whole world knew about the Match made in heaven. I was certain he wasn’t happy about it, or their #1 hit.