Free Critical Mass by Whitley Strieber Page A

been a local thing—Kenneally and his buddies trying to protect themselves.
    This was why when an FBI arrest team had appeared at the door of Jim’s room at the little motel he had known instantly that he was facing a far larger problem than he had imagined—than he could have imagined. Local guys on the take couldn’t cut orders that would send the FBI after somebody. That would have to be done from above.
    It had been eleven thirty at night when he’d entered the lobby of the little motel and called out, “Excuse me,” in the gentled voice of a tired salesman. The clerk had appeared. Jim had shown his driver’s license— a driver’s license, not his own—paid his forty dollars in cash, and left the lobby. The whole transaction had taken under five minutes.
    Always careful, always overdoing it, he’d parked the old truck some distance from his room and gone through the interior of the motel to reach it. He hadn’t used the radio or the television, or even turned on the lights.
    He had been in the process of making his emergency call when he had noticed a change in the pattern of light under his door. He’d looked at it. Only one possibility—somebody was out there. He’d thought it might be the clerk, suspicious of so late an arrival. Then Jim had seen the knob move. He’d gone into the bathroom but found it to be windowless. There was a double door that communicated with the next room down the line, and he’d used that. He had no bag with him, no luggage. But he did have some skill with locks.
    The mechanism had clicked, but it had not disturbed the snoring, scrofulous drunk in the cigar-choked room Jim had entered. He’d stepped quickly to the exit door, cracked it, and seen a sight that had, quite simply, stunned him almost to paralysis.
    There were FBI agents there, four of them, an arrest team.
    As he had ducked back out of sight, they had broken down his door. They hadn’t been wearing assault gear, just those inevitable business suits of theirs, muscle-packed worsteds, a cut below the sharkskins the Russian FSB cats wore.
    He’d stepped into his neighbor’s bathroom and stood there for half an hour. Aside from that first crack of the breaking door, there had not beenanother sound. Given the absence of luggage and the fact that Jim had been in the room no more than five minutes, he allowed himself to hope that they would conclude that they had been misdirected.
    High-end tracking was the only way he could have been found. To gain access to the kind of satellite data needed to track somebody, you needed high clearances. You needed power.
    The FBI team might have been following orders, just executing a warrant. But who could generate that warrant? Certainly not Arthur Kenneally. Jim had to assume that he was facing an organization of unknown dimensions that was embedded in the American enforcement and intelligence communities.
    He’d faced it, he thought, in 2002, when he had first suspected that the U.S. system in the Middle East was compromised. It was big, powerful, and damned effective. It had not taken them long to get on his tail.
    It was the most dangerous penetration of American security in the history of the country, and he couldn’t even begin to think how extensive it was, or who was behind it, or where it went. He couldn’t afford to worry about it, not now, not yet, not with work like this to do.
    Arthur Kenneally’s attack had made it clear that the bridges were a problem, but the appearance of the FBI at Jim’s door told him that he was right about this bomb. It was real, it was here, and somebody very far up the ladder was protecting it, and God help the American people.
    He had waited in what turned out to be the bathroom of a guest called Charles E. Madison, and fortunately the agents had made no effort to extend their search into Mr. Madison’s room.
    An hour later, Jim had taken Madison’s driver’s license and a couple of his credit cards, then opened the door and