by Mg Gardiner
An automated voice answered. “Welcome. Please enter your PIN number.”
Hair hanging in her eyes, she thumbed in the PIN. The automated voice told her she had 85 credits remaining, and prompted her to place a call.
“Press the destination number, followed by the pound sign.”
She entered the number of the First Royal Bank of Antigua.
“Now enter the number you wish to display on caller ID.”
She entered Grissom Briggs’s cell phone number.
“To use your normal voice, press one. To alter your voice to sound like a man, press two.”
She pressed two.
Lawless had his phone pinned between his shoulder and ear and was scribbling on the inside of his wrist with a pen. He jogged over and held out his arm. Written on it was a string of numbers and the names Grissom Briggs and Jade Riggs.
“If you would like to record the call, press four.”
She pressed it. The number rang.
“First Royal Bank of Antigua.”
She began.
Harker had a map out and was checking the radius of the quarantine cordon. He was tired, felt like sand was scratching his eyes. There were only three roads he could see on the map. It was a USGS topographical map, highly detailed, every creek and goat track labeled.
If the Worthes wanted to get out of the quarantine zone, they’d have to take a paved road. They might have resources, but not enough to go through the outback. And if they did try …
When his phone rang, he answered with annoyance. “Harker.”
“It’s Lawless. What assets do you have for air support?”
Harker’s ulcer flared. “Now you want my support?”
“Curt. I need to know.”
Harker continued to look at the map. Air support was coming, but from Albuquerque—a hundred miles away.
“Inbound. Why do you ask?”
“Zoe’s with Danisha Helms, taking cover in an airplane graveyard near Alamogordo. And Danisha thinks Grissom Briggs may be closing in on her. We need to extract her.”
Harker straightened. “Give me the precise location.”
He stared at the map. He was twenty-five miles from the airplane graveyard. He had a small crew of FBI agents and deputy sheriffs. The SWAT team was in Roswell, as were the Roswell PD’s helicopter and the state police’s traffic airplane. All the rest of the law enforcement assets under his command were arrayed at the perimeter of the quarantine zone. Helms and Zoe were in the dead center of it, as far from all of them as it was possible to get.
“I’m on my way,” he said.
“How long?”
Waving at another agent, he ran for the car. “Twenty minutes.”
Lawless said, “I’ll be there in fifteen.”
“That’s right, hon,” Sarah said, stretching her words, giving them a hard edge. “B-r-i-g-g-s. Now read that account number back to me.”
Though to her own ears her voice sounded as female as ever, she knew that on the other end of the line, the bank manager heard a male voice, maybe with a threatening undertone.
The woman read back everything, in her own lilting voice: the transfer instructions, the account number, the name on the account to which the funds would be credited.
“And the amount?” the woman said.
“All of it.”
“The entire amount?”
“That’s what I said.”
There was a clicking of keys. Behind Sarah, Lawless ended his own call and whistled at her and Nolan. He ran to his car.
Why was Lawless suddenly in a rush?
“Mr. Briggs?”
“Yes,” Sarah said.
“That will be three million, four hundred ninety-one thousand U.S. dollars and twenty-seven cents, transferred to your account at the Bank of the West. Minus our transfer fee of fifty-one dollars.”
Three million? Finally she said, “When?”
Lawless started his engine. He eyed her through the windshield. Waiting. Impatiently. Something was going down.
The bank manager said, “The transfer will be effective by close of business today, pending confirmation.”
“Confirmation of what?”
“Per instructions put in place when the account was opened, I will call you back to verify all details before the transfer is executed.”
What? “No.”
“I’m sorry, but those instructions must be followed.”
The landscape, the arroyo and dry creek bed and the thirsty trees, seemed to shimmer in her vision. “I’m going to be out of phone range this afternoon. I’m in New Mexico, and cell coverage is unreliable. I’ll need you to e-mail the confirmation to me.”
The manager paused. “I’ll have to check whether that will be acceptable.”
Lawless waved to her, beckoning. She gathered her things and ran to the car. Nolan was already in the shotgun seat.
To the bank manager, she barked, “Get with the twenty-first century. The e-mail will come through ten times more reliably than a call. Let me give you the address.”
Hesitation. “Very well, give it to me. But I’ll have to verify whether that will be satisfactory.”
She slammed the car door and Lawless took off. Tossed back against the seat, she said, “The address is Worthe-dot-Briggs at Gmail. Worthe with an e.”
“That’s—”
And phone reception died. The call was cut off.
“Dammit,” she said. “Get out of this arroyo.”
“Did you do it?” Nolan said.
“Almost. Not yet. Maybe. Get into clear air, where I can get online. I have to set up a Gmail account.” And pray that the address wasn’t already taken. “Where are we going and why so fast?”
“Harker’s sending men and air support to get Zoe and Danisha. But they’re all on the periphery. I think the airplane graveyard’s ground zero, and we have to assume Briggs and the women are closing in. We have to get there first.”
65
At the listing chain-link gate, Lawless stopped the car. The gleaming expanse of dead airliners and warplanes stretched on far beyond their ability to see, hulking sarcophagi, some six stories tall, desiccated and steely under the morning sun. The white sand made the light unbearable. Sarah put on her sunglasses.
Nolan said, “What are you waiting for?”
The car idled, sunlight glaring off the hood. Lawless stared through the gate. Sarah turned in her seat and scanned the view up and down the highway. She saw nobody on the road, not even glints off distant windshields. She felt as isolated as she ever had.
“One of us needs to stay here and watch for anybody coming. The FBI, SWAT. Or the clan,” she said.
She needed to get to her little girl. She felt an ache like a magnetic force, pulling on her to get inside and get hold of Zoe.
Lawless said, “It’ll be best if you stay here, Sarah.”
Because he was armed. And trained. And good at extracting people, clear into new lives.
“I’ll stay.” She pointed at a jetliner parked next to the road just inside the fence. “I’ll climb in the cockpit of that 727 and watch the road. It’ll be high enough to see for miles in all directions.” She checked her phone. “And I have a signal.”
She also had a live e-mail account for Worthe.Briggs. She hoped she’d get confirmation from the bank in Antigua soon.
Lawless said, “If Grissom and the women are already inside, they might hear us coming. We have no intel, no way to know where they are. If so …”
“Call me if you can.”
She had her Glock, in her messenger bag, with a full magazine and two extra clips. “I hit the target’s head thirty straight times at the range in OKC. I’ll come if you need me.”
Lawless held her gaze, silently reminding her: hitting a paper target was different than hitting a live opponent who was firing back. As if she could ever forget that, with Nolan sitting in the front seat.
She opened the door. “I’ll come if Zoe needs me.”
She climbed out into the rising heat. Lawless drove through the gate. She strode through after him. The ground, once she stepped off the asphalt, was powdery and white.
The back stairs of the 727 were down. She jogged up them and into a murky interior, lit by striped light through empty windows. The passenger seats were gone. She made it to the cockpit and climbed into the cramped pilot’s seat. It was hot, close, the sun screaming off the nose of the plane. But, facing east, it was also reflecting off the windshield. She didn’t think she could be seen.
The dead planes weren’t the only equipment in the graveyard. In the distance sat a gigantic crane. Hanging from its tall arm on cables was a dark metal blade the size of a kitchen counter. It was an airplane guillotine. Beyond the crane, looking like a mechanical Tyrannosaurus rex, was a demolition excavator. At the end of its long neck were jaws four feet wide, with a set of heavy steel teeth. It was designed to rip jetliners apart.
She took the Glock from her bag. She shoved her phone in her back pocket. She watched.
Ninety seconds later a glint on the horizon turned into a silver Navigator. It slowed at the gate and turned in.
Fell was at the wheel.
Fell nursed the Navigator through the half-torn gate into the airplane graveyard. Beside her, Reavy dialed Grissom.
“We’re here,” she told him.
Reavy sounded thin. She looked pale. She’d been drained, Fell knew. But it all combined to give her the look of a cut piece of glass, clear and sharp and ready to slice.
“Okay,” she said into the phone. “You got a definite bead on where they went?”
She listened some more. “Then we need to cut them off. Pinch them between us so they can’t get away.”
A few seconds later she hung up. “Half-mile ahead. Turn left, he’ll meet us and we can close on them front and behind.”
Reavy wiped a hand across her forehead. Though the AC was blasting, she was sweating. “We’re gonna get Little Miss Golden Eyes. We’re gonna get her, and I’m gonna stick Keller like a pig.”
Sarah scrambled from the pilot’s seat. She cast a last-gasp look out the windshield and past the fence at the highway. She saw nobody else coming. Not Harker, not the state police, not a wayward longhorn. And no air support. She was lost among a thousand airplanes and not one had the power to lift her and her baby out of there.
She ran down the length of the jet, pulled her phone out, and called Lawless. He answered while she was running down the back stairs, from shadow into blinding light. Silver, white, blue sky throbbing above.
“Sarah?”
“They’re here. Reavy and Fell, driving the silver Navigator. Headed your way.”
“Call Danisha. Where are you?”
“Coming.”
She ran.
Briggs put the pickup in low and eased forward, creeping up to the turnoff where Helms had gone in with the red SUV. When he reached it, he stopped, idling. The rutted path ran deeper into the boneyard between two rows of heavy aircraft. It ran for a good mile, but he could see that it ended at the fence. There was no gate down that way. They were still inside.
His phone rang. He ignored it.
He didn’t see Helms but he knew which way she’d gone. He turned the wheel.
In the heated interior of the jetliner, Danisha took off her hat and tossed it aside. On her hip was the holster carrying her SIG Sauer. She kept hold of her phone. She listened. She heard only the ticking of metal as it warmed in the sun, and the hiss of sand hitting the fuselage in the breeze.
Zoe watched her, solemn and observant. Danisha tried not to let her face show her fears and concern. This had to end. Zoe needed out of this, and right damn now.
She crooked a finger. “Come here, Boo.”
But Zoe tucked her chin into her chest and didn’t move. Her little stuffed mousie hung from her hand. She turned and climbed over metal floor struts and leaned against the fuselage to peer out an empty window.
“They’re all gone,” she said.
Danisha climbed after her. Gently she put a hand around Zoe’s waist to nudge her back from the window.
“Who, honey?” she said.
“The birds. Look.” She stared into the sea of sun-burnished aluminum outside. Her voice waned to a murmur. “They all flew away. Everything’s gone.”
Lawless tossed his phone to Nolan and turned down a hard-packed gypsum trail between two rows of planes.
“Call Danisha. Warn her,” he said. “And tell me if you spot Fell and Reavy.”
Nolan fumbled with the phone, shoulders crimped. “Jeez. They’re … Jesus, they’re here?”
“Sarah just saw them come through the gate.”
He drove past one airplane and another, wheels and landing gear flashing by the windows like picket fencing. “And try to get directions from Danisha.”
This was a dry forest of metal, a ruin that extended for miles. He didn’t have Danisha’s precise location. He didn’t want her to make a run for it without him there to provide cover. But if he couldn’t find her, that issue was moot.
Nolan dialed, and a moment later said, “Danisha, they’re in here. We got to get you out. Where are you?”
He put it on speaker. Danisha’s voice came through, quiet and clear and strained. “Half a mile in, there’s a crossroad. Left, another half mile to a soft sand track.”
Damn. Lawless realized he had gone too far—he’d passed the crossroad. “The track, does it come out anywhere?”
“Yeah, it intersects the hard sand road that runs along the inside of the fence.”
The fence was not far ahead. “We’re nearly there. Coming.”
“Do we need to move?” she said.
“Are you out of sight?”
“Yes.”
“Stay put for now.”
At the fence he turned left. Along the road just inside it, the hard sand rushed beneath the tires. And too late he saw the intersection, the soft rutted track, ninety degrees to the left, a narrow lane between jumbos and a row of military bombers. He drove past it, Nolan saying, “Hey, hey …”
He braked, reversed, skidded backward to the turn.
About four hundred yards along the rutted path sat Danisha’s red SUV, under the wing of a KLM 767.
Beyond it, at the far end of the path, was the white F-150 pickup driven by Grissom Briggs. It was turning down the track, headed straight for them.
66
Fell roared along the hardpan toward the center of the boneyard, bouncing so hard that the wheel bucked and Reavy guttered low cries of pain. Planes flashed by on either side. Reavy reached between her legs and picked up the shotgun from the foot well.
“Watch for them. All of them,” Fell said.
Grissom wasn’t answering his phone. That meant he was on the verge of action. It also meant he couldn’t tell her exactly where to find him. She looked for breaks in the crowd of dead planes, checking for signs of where Zoe was being hidden. She drove past heavy construction equipment, cranes and diggers with chomping steel teeth.
Reavy pointed. “Try that way. Right.”
Fell skidded around a corner. Sand flew into the air. She roared through a herd of Army-gray bombers with their chopped wings lying beside them on the ground.
Reavy ducked and peered below the bellies of the jets. “Stop—I see a car.”
Fell swerved to a stop. About a quarter of a mile away, parked beneath the wing of an airliner, was a shiny red SUV. Reavy tossed open her door, hopped out, and headed for it, limping hard, the shotgun at port arms. Pistol in her hand, Fell broke into a run and caught up.
She said, “I can’t see anybody in the SUV.”
“Ladder’s leaning against the wing of that jet,” Reavy said. “Bet they climbed up and hid inside.”
Distantly, Fell heard an engine. “Grissom’s coming.”
Beneath the field of jets she glimpsed rolling tires and blowing dust. From far away the F-150 was barreling along a rutted sand track toward the empty SU
V. But she heard a second car. It was closing in on the SUV from the opposite direction.
“Not just Grissom. Somebody else,” she said.
They kept running. Along the rutted track a black sedan skidded up and stopped next to the jet and the parked red SUV. Out jumped two men.
The first was the U.S. marshal, the dark-haired man who had shot at her when she tried to run him down outside the sheriff’s station last night. The second …
She slowed. Reavy limped past her, wheezing, her face set.
“It’s Nolan,” Fell said.
Reavy grunted. Fell ran, off balance, stunned, seeing everything in painfully bright detail. He wasn’t dead. He was here. Alive.
“Nolan?” she called.
He looked around and saw her.
Reavy turned to her, face flat. “Shut the hell up. He’s with the marshal.”
Grissom’s truck drew nearer, roaring along the track. From the black sedan the U.S. marshal lifted out a Remington 870. He racked the slide and motioned Nolan behind the car. Then he stretched across the roof and leveled the shotgun at Grissom.
For a second Nolan stood motionless, gazing at Fell. He raised his hands together and steepled them in front of his lips.
Prayer, greeting, plea …
Reavy groaned with effort and pain and started to lift the Mossberg. Nolan saw it. As if he’d been fired from a slingshot, he ran, ran like a crazy animal, to the ladder that leaned against the wing of the 767. He began climbing.
Fell kept running. “Nolan,” she yelled. He wasn’t dead. He was …
He was going after his little girl. He was trying to get Zoe.
He was halfway up the ladder to the wing of the jetliner when Grissom leaned out the window of the truck and started firing.
Running flat-out, through shade and light beneath the wing of a dead airliner, Sarah heard gunshots. Pop, pop, pop, pop. She gasped and her skin shrank.
Zoe.
She heard more shots, from a different gun, deep and sharp. Gripping the Glock, she ran out onto a rutted path. She saw a scene of converging chaos.