“Sorry,” he muttered from behind his mask in English.
The IEF officer’s eyebrow lowered when he heard the English word. A warm smile seemed to spread across his face, judging from the way his mask shifted.
“You are American?” he asked in a thick accent.
Shit, Ethan thought. American. There was a word he didn’t want said aloud. Not when there was an Israeli hit-team cruising around like a quartet of tiger sharks.
“Español,” he muttered.
The man nodded his head. “But, um, you speak English?”
“Si,” Ethan replied. He held his thumb and forefinger an inch apart. “Little bit.”
The officer nodded. Clearly, he was a kind-hearted man who wished to show the meek tourist that Iranian law enforcement officers were just as human as the next person. Ethan had no doubt that, had they met elsewhere and in other circumstances, they would have gotten on swell. Right now, however, he wanted nothing more than to end the conversation.
“Wife?” the man asked, gesturing at Kiana.
Ethan shook his head, gave the man a scared look and held his finger to his lips, as if to say to him, “shush, before you give my girlfriend here ideas.”
The man gave Ethan a knowing look. He then looked behind him at the Qatar Airways desk, where the desk agent was typing away at her computer terminal.
“Barcelona?” he asked Ethan.
“Si,” Ethan replied, trying his hardest to keep from gritting his teeth.
The man nodded. He opened his mouth to ask another question.
Ethan turned and looked at Kiana to rub her arm. He saw, over her shoulder, that the hawk-nosed man with no luggage was watching him openly.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” came a voice in Farsi over the speakers, “would those of you boarding Qatar Airways flight QA 665 please make your way to gate fourteen. Calling all rows for Qatar Airways flight 665. Please make your way to gate fourteen, please.”
Ethan forced himself not to get straight to his feet, but made a show of listening intently to the English repetition of this call. Then he nudged Kiana with an elbow and got to his feet. He smiled at the IEF officer.
For his part, the officer gave him a smile in return and said, “Khoda hafez,” before walking away.
Relieved, Ethan and Kiana joined the queue of travelers.
11
It was at the boarding gate that Ethan was finally certain the Kidon team had successfully identified and tracked them. Ethan hung back while the majority of the passengers––including William and Bretta––boarded ahead of himself and Kiana.
“What are we doing?” Kiana asked him quietly. She was clutching him tightly by his upper arm, her fingers digging into his flesh.
“Checking if my hunch is right,” he told her.
The man with the sharp nose, who had initially aroused Ethan’s suspicions, boarded the plane ahead of the two of them without a backward glance. He smiled as he handed his passport to the staff member at the gate and then strolled on down the tunnel to the waiting Airbus A320-200.
Ethan messed around with the zipper on his bag, his face drawn in a frown as if he was trying to find something he had misplaced.
“What are you doing?” Kiana asked, plucking at his sleeve, and looking around nervously. “Can we please just board the plane?”
“In a second,” Ethan replied calmly. “Stop looking around so obviously.”
While he dug around pointlessly in his bag, he was also surreptitiously checking out the remaining passengers in the lounge. There were a few waiting with children––a tactic which Ethan recognized as a selfless one, which enabled their fellow passengers to get settled before the children got on board. Apart from these people though, there was only a solitary man. He was short and broad and wore cargo pants, a plain blue polo shirt and a white baseball hat and, crucially, a pair of quite serviceable-looking Merrell boots. To the casual observer they were hiking boots, but Ethan knew enough about boots––like any spec-ops soldier or military operator whose life could sometimes hinge on what they were wearing on their feet––to recognize a pair of Merrell MOAB Tactical boots when he saw them.
That left more Kidon somewhere on the aircraft. The question was: what the hell do they look like?
He zipped his bag, straightened and then, taking Kiana by the hand, walked to the gate.
Behind him, the man in the white cap also got nonchalantly to his feet.
“Ah, sir and madam, I was just about to page for any last boarders,” the lady behind the desk said.
Ethan smiled apologetically as he and Kiana handed over their passports.
The woman scanned Ethan’s, but when she swiped Kiana’s across the electronic reader there was an ominous negative noise. Ethan saw a slight frown appear on the woman’s clear face. She tried the passport again. Again it was denied by the computer. The woman tapped a key on her keyboard and quickly glanced at the monitor. Her frown deepened.
Shit.
“Is there a problem?” Ethan asked the woman, still using his daytime television Hispanic accent.
The woman glanced at him, then back at her computer screen.
“Excuse me for just one moment, sir,” she said. Her expression was unreadable.
Kiana was looking with saucer-sized eyes from Ethan to the Qatar Airways staff member as the woman hurried off down the departure hall.
“Remain calm,” Ethan said out of the corner of his mouth. “Let me do the talking, no matter what happens.”
His own mind was far from calm––it was racing––but outwardly he looked as mildly aggravated as any traveler might at an unexpected delay.
He could practically feel the eyes of the man in the cargo pants and polo shirt boring into his back. It was like a cold knife running down his spine. He turned slightly to keep an eye on the man with his peripheral vision.
“But, what if––” Kiana began.
Ethan gave the young woman such a quelling look that the words dried up in her throat.
He ran through his options. Without a passport, Kiana couldn’t board this plane or, indeed, any other aircraft out of Tehran. William and Bretta were seated on the Airbus, no doubt wondering where in the world Kiana and Ethan were. He had a suspected Kidon member on the aircraft and a more than likely Kidon member standing not three paces behind him.
All we need now is my chatty Iranian police friend to show up with more of his inquisitive fellows, and the disaster will be complete.
Ethan had only a flimsy back story to support his Spanish passport. Only William could speak passable Spanish. Their flimsy charade would dissolve like a sandcastle caught in a king tide under the slightest scrutiny.
Damn it.
Despite the obvious futility of the gesture, Ethan’s deeply ingrained training took over. He found himself scanning the immediate area for likely escape routes, identifying and analyzing the most urgent threats and figuring out what objects nearby he might be able to repurpose as weapons, all the while keeping a furtive eye on the other suspected Kidon member.
It was just at the point where Ethan was considering slipping the ballpoint pen in front of him into his fist, that the female staff member reappeared. Ethan braced himself. Kiana’s grip on his forearm tightened painfully.
“I’m sorry for the delay, madam,” the woman said, handing the red passport back to Kiana. “We’ve been encountering some persistent problems with the scanning equipment at the gate. Every now and again we have to scan passports through one of our other terminals. You’re clear.”
Ethan felt the tension that had been winding up in his chest ease at the woman’s words. The sensation was not unlike the releasing of pressure on a gun trigger.
“Oh,” Kiana said, the relief whooshing out of her in a great expulsion of a sigh. “Oh, um, gracias.” She took back her passport and stuffed it into her jeans.
“Please board the aircraft now,” the woman said with a parting smile. “Sorry again for the delay. Sir?” Her gaze flicked over Kiana’
s shoulder to the man next in line.
Not wanting to tempt fate any further, Ethan took Kiana by her hand and towed her into the tunnel that led to the waiting Airbus. The blood was pounding in his ears, the breath coming hard through his nose. The mask almost seemed to be choking him, and all he wanted to do was rip it off and gasp for air. He fought back the feeling with difficulty.
“Almost there,” he said encouragingly to the nuclear scientist at his side. “Almost there.”
Almost where? he thought. Almost trapped inside a giant aluminum cigar tube at thirty-six-thousand feet with four elite Israeli assassins?
“Welcome aboard, sir,” the mask-wearing steward at the door of the aircraft said. “How are you today?”
Ethan ignored her and pulled Kiana inside.
The noise of the twin CFM56 turbofan engines came as a dull roar through the soundproofed fuselage of the Airbus A320, as it cruised at thirty-seven-thousand feet over northern Iran. The flight time from Mehrabad International to Istanbul Sabiha was three and a half hours. The team were seated near the front of the aircraft, all together––Bretta, Ethan, Kiana and William––in the middle row.
Bretta had told Ethan that the guy with the hooked nose had moved further down the plane, without so much as looking at her or William.
Meanwhile, the man in the cargo pants, polo shirt and military-grade boots had stumped past and seated himself about seven rows behind. Meanwhile, the rest of the seats were half empty.
Despite the tenseness of the situation, Kiana fell into an exhausted sleep next to Ethan. The young Iranian woman burrowed into Ethan’s shoulder, clutching him tight while she muttered in her sleep.
On Kiana’s other side, William had adopted an attitude of a peaceful doze. His head was tilted as far back as the economy class seats would allow, the baseball cap that Ethan had supplied him angled down. However, Ethan noticed that every time someone walked past him, the Texan’s seemingly closed eyes would flicker under their lids and he knew that the big man was watching.
When Bretta came back from a trip to the washroom, which had also served as a furtive recce of sorts to case the front of the plane, she looked down at Kiana, where she was cuddled up against Ethan, and from the way her eyes crinkled, Ethan would have sworn she was smirking behind the mask.
“She’s taken a shine to you, huh?” Bretta commented, nodding at the slumbering form. Her tone was level, but there was just a hint of frost coating her words.
Ethan shrugged. He hadn’t spared too much thought as to how Kiana might have felt about him. He was aware that she was, undeniably, extremely attractive. She was physically arresting and, in Ethan’s eyes at least, the fact she was obviously far more intelligent than he only enhanced her appeal. That though, was all completely irrelevant under the current circumstances. The only two things that Ethan really cared about at the moment, as far as Kiana Avesta was concerned, was whether she was within his line of sight and whether she was breathing.
“Did you get a bead on any other potential Kidon?” Ethan asked quickly. The male intuition is, maybe, not quite so acute as the female when it comes to deciphering emotional cues and the like, but he knew that, given enough time, this seemed to be the sort of situation in which he could dig himself quite a hole, if he answered her original question.
Bretta shook her head and took her seat. Ethan had, unintentionally, booked the team into the bulkhead seats for this part of the trip, and so Bretta used the space to stretch her strong, athletic legs out in front of her and cross them.
Seeing her stretch out with that hypnotizing feline grace she had, Ethan was reminded sharply of just how her legs had looked when they were bared, stretched out and clad in nothing but a pair of bikini bottoms in that same fashion on the Bowrider they had hired in the Caribbean. That had been the last time they’d had any time off together, after wrapping up the affair with Al Sifr in Iceland.
Come to think of it, I remember how they looked when she wasn’t wearing anything at all…
“There were a couple of people I wasn’t sure about,” Bretta said, bringing Ethan back from the Caribbean waters off the coast of Saint Croix, “but I couldn’t be sure. Some chick wrapped up in a hoody and sunglasses whose face I couldn’t make out because of a mask, but she had an empty pill packet poking out of one pocket and was snoring, so I don’t think we have to worry too much about her.”
Ethan nodded. “Well, keep a look out.” Perhaps pointless advice, given to someone as skilled and experienced as Bretta, but it felt better than saying nothing at all.
It would be a tense three and a half hours, though none of the DIA members expected anything to go down on the plane itself. Neither of the men that they had pegged as Kidon members stirred from their seats, as far as Ethan knew. The only danger that his extensive imagination could come up with was the very real threat of contact poisons. Getting them onto the plane in the first place would be tricky, but not impossible. If the shoe had been on the other foot, and he had been trying to assassinate someone on an airplane, Ethan might have opted to smear the tip of a ballpoint or fountain pen with something like Ricin or VX nerve agent and nick them with it somehow.
The only problem with that, of course, is that people tend to get pretty cranky about other people stabbing them with stationary, he thought. Couple that with the fact that the poisons can take up to three days to be fatal and the idea becomes less appealing.
No, he was almost positive that, even if the Kidon did try something while the plane was in the air, he and his team would be able to stop them before they reached Kiana.
The plane touched down on Turkish soil about a little over an hour later. After taxiing to the gate, the seatbelt signs turned off with a gentle bing and the sparsely populated cabin began to bustle with people getting their belongings down from the overhead bins.
Kiana attempted to stand, but Ethan placed a restraining hand on her arm and pulled her back to her seat. The thought of poison had drifted back into his head again. If the Kidon were going to try anything along those lines, the confusion of debarkation would be the time to do it.
“We’re going to wait until we’re the last on here, miss,” Ethan heard William telling Kiana. “You just keep that heart-breaking face covered up with your mask and be patient.”
Ethan watched as the other passengers gathered their things, adjusted shawls, hats and surgical masks before starting to file out of the cabin. It was a blessing, in a way, the way that COVID-19 had thinned the amount of people travelling on the flight. There was less jostling, however the passengers seemed to mostly ignore the one-and-a-half-meter rule between people that the Iranian government advocated as a safe distance.
Bretta sat casually in her seat on the outside of the four, watching the other passengers as they moved past. She looked relaxed, but Ethan could tell she was as taut as a bowstring under her calm facade, ready to unleash hell at the slightest provocation. On the other end of the row, William was sitting up. His bulk and height acted as a barrier to anyone that might want to try getting their hands on the scientist next to him.
The DIA team sat and waited for the entire plane to empty. Neither of the suspected Kidon––the man of probable Bedouin ancestry, nor the man with the excellent boots––spared them a glance as they disembarked. Both of them shuffled past the group and ignored the DIA contractors, instead nodding appreciatively to the stewardesses as they went past.
Only when Ethan and the others were the last people on the aircraft, and were getting puzzled looks from the flight attendants, did Ethan say, “All right, let’s go.”
The transfer for this flight really was just that––a transfer from one gate to another. There was no waiting around. The DIA team followed in the wake of the other passengers flying on to Barcelona with that half-walk half-run unique to airports the world over. Without conscious thought, the three operatives formed a sort of protective triangle around Kiana. Ethan took point, while Bretta and William flanked her on either side,
but slightly behind. It was a strange and uncomfortable sensation, knowing without a doubt they were being watched and followed by four people whose sole aim in life was to kill the woman moving in their midst––to kill the three of them as well, if they got in the way.
They only paused once in their journey, so that Ethan could duck quickly into the gentlemen’s bathroom. While he was inside, he locked himself in a stall, pulled out his phone and accessed the untraceable and a secure I2P messenger link. The I2P network––the abbreviated name for the Invisible Internet Project––was a network layer that allowed totally undetectable peer-to-peer communication. In the space of time it might have taken him to urinate, Ethan typed out a message to Sam, giving her a brief rundown of where the team was heading and when they were likely to get there. He did not neglect to mention that fact that they were more than likely being closely followed by a Kidon team. At the end of the message he made a request of his NOC, a request that––though he was not a religious man––he prayed would be granted.
Ethan didn’t catch sight of either Bedouin or Boots while changing gates, and a part of him began to doubt that those two were trained Israeli killers after all.
No, they’re here, somewhere. Watching. Or their friends are.
The gate for Pegasus Airways flight PC 1103 was already open when the four of them arrived. Neither Boots nor Bedouin were still anywhere to be seen. Ethan looked out of the huge window that faced onto the airfield and saw another A320 waiting for them. Once more his cynical brain presented him with an unsettling idea; some of the Kidon team had flown ahead of them, found out what their connecting flight was, and sabotaged the aircraft in some way.
He shook his head. It was doubtful: the Kidon team couldn’t be one-hundred percent sure he and his team would actually fly onward to Spain, not until Ethan and the others actually boarded.
And even if the Kidon team had been sure, they wouldn’t bring down an entire passenger plane just to get to one scientist.
Still, as he led Kiana down the embarkation ramp with Bretta and William following behind, he wished he could be entirely certain about that.
Boiling Point (An Ethan Galaal Thriller Book 4) Page 10