He was completely on his own. It was not a comforting thought.
Chapter 39
Nick eased the door open a few inches, looking first to the right, where the side wall of the building loomed only a few feet away.
A plastic tarp hung from the ceiling, blocking access to approximately the northernmost six feet of the room, which seemed to be in the middle of a construction project. Nick could see through the opaque plastic that no one was in there. It appeared as though work had been halted for the weekend and the area had been sealed up tightly.
As Nick peered cautiously around the heavy door, he could see that he had been right about this being the technicians' equipment room. Half a dozen replacement radar scopes were lined up on the far wall like soldiers ready to be sent into battle. Stacked high on a wire rack running the length of the wall immediately to Nick's left were various electronic components. They were clearly the innards of equipment the technicians worked with all the time--why else would they be here?--but what functions any of them might perform he had no idea.
All these things registered dimly in Nick's consciousness as he scanned the room, looking for anyone or anything that might pose a threat. He saw nothing. Nick was becoming more and more convinced that the three men he had seen must be inside the Ops Room, since there had been no other sign of them.
In one sense that was good. Nick felt he was in little or no immediate personal danger, at least for now. That meant that the opposite, however, was true for fellow controllers Larry and Ron. If the men with the rifles and handguns had entered the Ops Room, then his two coworkers were in big trouble and maybe already dead.
With this grim possibility weighing on his mind, Nick pushed the door open wider and stepped through it into the equipment room. As he did so, he tripped over something pliable lying in front of the door. Nick sprawled face-first onto the cool tile floor, trying his best to make as little noise as possible as he fell.
He absorbed most of the fall on his elbows, landing on them hard and bruising both of them, but thankfully he managed to avoid splitting his skull open on the unyielding floor. When Nick forced himself to his knees and looked back toward the door, he gasped involuntarily, clamping down his jaw firmly in an attempt to avoid being sick.
Facedown on the ceramic tile floor was electronics technician Harry Tanner. Instantly the pain in Nick's elbows was forgotten.
He scrambled on his hands and knees to Harry's side and placed two fingers lightly on the man's neck behind his earlobe, searching desperately for a pulse and finding none. He stared at the puddle of blood that had soaked through Harry's plaid work shirt and pooled on the floor beneath his body. There was a lot. He was amazed he hadn't stepped in it.
He turned Harry over onto his back and gagged again, watching in horror as the blood of the man who had worked for the FAA even longer than he had--Harry was well past minimum retirement age and had planned on leaving next spring--began spreading sluggishly across the floor, no longer trapped under his clothing. It was just beginning to congeal thickly in spots.
Nick slapped Harry's face as if to wake him from a trance and realized the futility of his actions. Harry was dead. Either he had been working in this room when the fuckers with the guns had come in and surprised him, or else he had seen them and made a desperate attempt to outrun them.
Judging by the shocking amount of blood on the floor, it looked as though Harry may have been stabbed to death rather than shot, although Nick was by no means an expert on the subject. Maybe gunshot wounds could cause all that blood, too. But the thought that the men might have come at old Harry with knives rather than the guns they were carrying seemed somehow more horrifying to Nick than if he had been shot. The intimacy of the violence implied a level of bloodthirstiness that went beyond just killing the man to further their goals. It almost looked as though the killers had viewed it as sport.
A desperate, high-pitched keening noise filled the room, and Nick realized it was coming from him. He was breathing heavily, almost panting, dangerously close to hyperventilating. His hands were shaking as he knelt over the lifeless body of Harry Tanner.
Controllers and technicians didn't normally hang out together at work, but Harry and Nick had had numerous long conversations over the years, and Nick had come to know the man as a gentle soul who loved his wife, his kids and grandkids, and hunting and fishing, in that order.
The initial burst of shock and terror Nick had felt at seeing the armed intruders strolling down the hallway of the BCT as if they owned the joint began morphing into something else. He felt a powerful surge of rage and bitterness and the intense desire to avenge Harry's death, although he had no earthly idea how he might manage to do that.
Nick knew he was reacting not just to the current bewildering and terrifying situation but to the murder of Lisa as well--to the immense jagged hole that had been torn open in his heart with the loss of his wife, a hole he knew he would never be able to close completely. She had been murdered simply because she had stumbled onto something far bigger than she had been prepared to deal with.
It was a lot like the situation Nick found himself confronted with now.
He gently eased Harry's eyes closed. Time was of the essence, of course, but if the killers had not found him by now, their main area of concern was obviously not this section of the building, and he was probably relatively safe, at least for a while. Nick swore softly that he would not allow these killers to escape; one way or another he would provide some semblance of justice.
Nick was surprised to discover he was crying softly. Tears dripped down his nose and fell onto Harry's shirt, mixing with all the awful blood that was beginning to darken and thicken into a sludgelike goo. He whispered, "I'm sorry, Harry." Even in his state of confusion and anger and fear, he knew he was really talking to Lisa, expressing to his dead wife the overwhelming pain and regret he felt, the baseless guilt that ate at him every day, saying it should have been him and not her lying in the ground.
He wasn't sure how long he stayed in that kneeling position, sobbing and kneeling next to Harry's body. Eventually the tears dried, and Nick knew he was leaving himself horribly exposed, sitting out in the open on the bloody floor of the equipment room. If the men who had butchered Harry returned, he would be a sitting duck, and although by now he didn't particularly care whether he lived or died, he found himself burning with the desire to make a statement to these people to whom life clearly meant nothing.
Nick rose silently and padded across the room toward the door. It was time to get help.
Chapter 40
"Connors 712, cleared visual approach Runway 4 Right, contact Boston Tower 123.7." Larry was sitting ramrod straight at the scope. He had just worked a single arrival into Logan, glad for the momentary distraction from the tangible layer of tension that was building inside the TRACON.
He thought about it and almost chuckled, a surprising and unlikely achievement considering the fact that his nerves were strung tight and he felt like he might puke at any moment. "Tangible layer of tension" was the understatement of the decade. It was a goddamned cluster fuck, and the clock was ticking. Hopefully Nick had been able to make it out of the facility and go for help, because the president's plane would be leaving Andrews Air Force Base in less than an hour, and from there it was a short hop to Logan and directly into whatever shit sandwich these lunatics were planning on serving.
The man pointing the gun at him had not said in so many words that Air Force One would be targeted, but what the hell else could it possibly be? Why these guys were all the way up here in Merrimack instead of in East Boston was the question, although with nothing much to do except sit and think, Larry suddenly had a thought that didn't make him feel any better about things.
Who was to say these guys didn't have a group of conspirators in or around Logan? He began to feel woozy and ill when he realized what the plan might be. It was simple and perfect.
The man now lounged next to him in one of the cont
roller chairs, feet propped up on the console in front of the radar scope to his right. The gun pointed steadily in his direction, but at least it wasn't still sticking into his neck. It would be just as deadly if the guy pulled the trigger, but somehow it didn't feel quite as terrifying this way.
He was apparently the man in charge, and earlier he'd had a short, intense conversation with the second terrorist. Larry had been unable to decipher anything, even though they had been standing less than two feet behind him. Then the second terrorist had backtracked out the main entrance to the Ops Room, the same way they had come in.
Where that man had gone and what he was doing now, Larry couldn't guess. Searching for Nick, maybe? Larry supposed it all depended upon whether they believed his lie about Nick calling in sick and the FAA not wanting to pay a controller overtime to cover the midnight shift.
That part was mostly true; they wouldn't have wanted to spend the money. But in the current incarnation of the FAA, where the animosity between management and the controller workforce was all-encompassing, they likely would have forced one of the controllers scheduled to work tomorrow's day shift to come in and work the mid instead, then work short on the day shift.
Allowing the Boston Area to be staffed with less than two controllers on a midnight shift was considered a big no-no, although the Manchester Area--which did the same job in the same room as Boston, albeit with less traffic--worked every single overnight with just one. Larry had no idea why that was, but it had always been that way. He hoped that this guy so casually waving a gun in his face wasn't aware of that fact, although he certainly seemed to have a pretty thorough knowledge about ATC in general and the Boston Consolidated TRACON specifically.
Suddenly a sickening thought occurred to Larry that was so obvious he wondered why he hadn't had it sooner. He was assuming Nick had seen the terrorists when they entered the building and had been able to avoid them somehow, that even now he had escaped the building and was well on his way to calling the authorities.
But how likely was that, really? Wouldn't a much more credible scenario be that Nick had been wandering down the hallway on his way back to the TRACON from the break room, bag of corn chips in one hand and coffee or soda in the other, when these Rambo-looking dudes had come around a corner with their fatigues and their black greasepaint and their guns and put a bullet in his brain?
The odds that Nick had seen them coming and had been able to avoid being captured or killed were pretty frigging slim.
Larry could almost hear the inexorable tick-tick-ticking of the invisible clock in his head. He wasn't sure precisely what these people were planning, but they had gone to a whole lot of trouble and had risked their lives to storm a secure federal government facility protected 24/7 by armed guards, so it was obviously something major. He wondered whether he would still be alive when the sun rose. He felt queasy and washed-out.
The invisible clock in his head continued to tick.
Chapter 41
Brian paced back and forth inside the large conference room adjacent to the foyer just inside the main entrance to the BCT building. The side of the room that fronted the foyer was constructed of six huge glass panels, each three feet wide and six feet high, making it the perfect location to maintain surveillance on the main entrance, which was now the only way into or out of the facility since they had gone around the perimeter and disabled all the other exterior doors.
Brian wasn't clear on exactly why the entrance needed to be watched. The security guards were both dead, and Jackie was sitting in the guard shack at the front gate looking ridiculous in the uniform he had taken off one of the dead guards, waiting to ambush the FBI agent who would arrive soon to monitor the BCT.
The only people inside the building were either being held in the Operations Room at gunpoint or were already dead.
So the idea of cooling his heels in this conference room, guard-ing the entrance to the facility and waiting for--what, exactly?--
seemed more than a little unnecessary to Brian. But this was his assignment from Tony, and one thing Brian had learned early in this little adventure was that you did not deviate from the plan if it had been developed by Tony. The guy seemed perfectly calm and rational, if a little intense for Brian's taste, but behind that calm rationality was a calculating coldness that did not suffer disloyalty well. Or at all. Ever.
Brian thought about how Tony had dealt with the thugs that had tried to disrupt their operation when they had been getting set up in D.C. and shuddered. Tony had matter-of-factly gutted several dangerous men, leaving them for dead, just to send a message.
That message had been received loud and clear, and the remaining thugs had steered clear of Tony and his men ever since. Brian had decided right then and there that he would not allow himself to become Tony's message to anyone else if he could help it.
Besides, there were worse things than hanging out in this cozy little conference room; that was for sure. A long, polished conference table ran virtually the entire length of the room, with comfortable leather business chairs orbiting it like satellites. A retract-able white screen hanging from the ceiling filled one of the smaller walls of the rectangular room.
If the conference room had contained a television, he would have been perfectly satisfied to stay here the rest of the night, but unfortunately for him, that particular amenity had not been supplied. Brian sighed deeply. Nobody said this job would be easy.
In a little while, Jackie would be trudging through the front door, holding at gunpoint whatever unfortunate agent the FBI had sent over to spend the day monitoring the activities of the air traffic controllers who would be working Air Force One into and out of Logan Airport.
Brian had no doubt that Jackie would get the jump on the FBI guy. Jackie was pretty good with weapons, and the agent would likely be a rookie. The FBI wouldn't bother wasting an experienced field agent on a secure federal facility located nearly forty miles from Boston, where the president's plane was going to be landing and where Cartwright would be spending the day.
Brian didn't trust Jackie any farther than he could throw him.
Under normal circumstances, he doubted whether Jackie would even bother keeping the agent alive. But Tony had said that the feeb would be coordinating with the rest of the law enforcement monkeys down in Boston after his arrival at the BCT, so killing him would put the whole operation in jeopardy. Brian knew Jackie was just as intimidated by Tony as everyone else on the team was, so he would damn well keep the agent alive. Fear could be a powerful motivator.
But the arrival of the anonymous and doomed FBI agent would not occur for a little while yet, which was why Brian paced restlessly across the soft pile carpeting of the conference room. He was keyed up and had no way of dissipating all his nervous energy. He wished he had something to eat as he stopped and peered through the plate glass of the conference room and out the glass double doors of the front entrance.
He didn't expect to see anything moving, and he didn't. He stared out the door for a moment and then continued his relentless pacing.
Chapter 42
Nick burst into the hallway at almost a dead run. After seeing what had been done to Harry, his only thought was to do something. He needed to get to the exterior door and go for help.
Nick cringed as a barely perceptible snick indicated that the door had closed behind him. The noise was almost nothing. Normally he would never even have noticed it, but tonight, with three murderous thugs roaming the halls of the BCT, it sounded like the beeping of an air horn or a thunderbolt crashing over his head.
Sighing softly, he turned and peered down the long hallway as he moved toward the exterior door, half expecting to be greeted by the grinning visage of one of the lunatics training a deadly weapon between his eyes. To his relief, Nick discovered that the hallway was empty in that direction, the entire fifty feet or so to the corner, where it curved sharply left and out of sight.
Nick tried to calm his nerves but abandoned the effort after ac
hieving no discernible reduction in the trembling of his hands.
His plan, if you could call it that, was simple. Sneak the few feet to the exterior door, preferably without getting shot in the back, open the door as quietly as possible, and continue on into the night, where he would then stick to the shadows and exit the BCT
grounds and go for help.
He hadn't yet decided whether he dared jump in his car, which would be sitting in the parking lot a couple of hundred feet from the door, or if it would be smarter to try to get away on foot. The obvious dilemma was that if he started his car and the terrorists had someone stationed in the guard shack, he would never make it off the property.
On the other hand, if he was able to get off the property on foot, it was a long hike to any location where he could even access a telephone.
He thought about it quickly and supposed he would have to take his chances on foot. His car was equipped with daytime running lights, which would blaze on as soon as the transmission was shifted into Drive, so he couldn't sneak past the guard shack with no headlights on.
First things first, though. Nick had to make it out of the building alive. He took a deep breath and slipped quietly down the rest of the corridor to the exterior door, moving with his back to the wall as he had done before. His haste of a few seconds ago was gone, replaced by a desire for stealth.
Reaching the door in less than two seconds, he pushed hard against the bar running the entire width of it at waist height. Silence now was an impossibility; this door would make noise as it opened no matter how careful Nick was, so he hit it at a fast walk, hoping that if the door made enough clatter to raise the suspicions of the wrong person, he would be long gone by the time that person came to investigate.
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