High Heat

by Richard Castle

  The plane made a sharp right turn, throwing Heat off balance again. Then, as soon as the vessel straightened, Heat was tossed backward by the sudden g-force. The pilot had just demanded full power from the twin CFM56-7B engines, which were now kicking out close to 27,000 pounds of thrust.

  Heat slammed into the rear wall of the cabin, then slumped to the floor, momentarily stunned.

  They were on one of the main runways now, accelerating rapidly. This was no cumbersome commercial airliner, weighted down with passengers and their elephantine luggage. This was a basically empty private plane. How long until it gained the necessary speed to get airborne? Twenty seconds? Less?

  Heat willed herself back up, fighting against the plane’s continued surge. She glanced at Rook, who was little more than a blob-like human shape in the distance. He seemed to have worked his way to a sitting position at the end of the bed and was trying to find the wherewithal to stand.

  Their semi-useless eyes scanned around the cabin, looking for something they could use to keep the plane on the ground.

  A fire. They could find a way to start a fire. No. That would kill them long before it would disable the rest of the aircraft.

  The plane’s electrical systems. Could they bust through the ceiling and rip out some wires that controlled the tail section?

  No time. There was no time to do anything. The engines were really pouring out the power now. The plane had that feeling planes get right before takeoff, when gravity makes its futile last stand before finally giving in to the incredible upward forces being exerted on the wings.

  They had ten seconds left, if that.

  “If only there was an emergency brake or something,” Rook bellowed, now teetering unsteadily with his butt off the bed and his legs spread wide.

  “Emergency! Rook, that’s it!”

  Simultaneously, their limited eyesight fell on the emergency exit door in the rear of the cabin. “The evacuation slide!” they exclaimed together.

  Rook got there first, scrambling over to the door and depressing the handle, which was like cocking a revolver. The slide mechanism was now armed.

  Having once freelanced for an airline magazine, Rook could have told Heat that FAA regulations require all aircraft doors come with evacuation slides that deploy in six seconds or less. This would be a test of that capability, one where failure had dire consequences.

  Rook pulled the handle up, which was like pulling the trigger. From somewhere just below his feet, there was a thundering crack of highly pressurized gas exploding. The slide shot out the side of the fuselage. Rook grasped the door with both hands and tossed it out of the way.

  The plane swerved as the slide, now fully unfurled, started skipping along the ground. It was a bulky thing, wide enough to accommodate several adults sliding down it at the same time. It was made of tough vinyl and anchored to the side of the plane in a way that was meant to stay.

  Between the flapping slide and the open door, the vessel’s aerodynamics had been thrown off. There was enough drag to prevent the plane from getting into the air.

  But Legs Kline, or whoever was at the controls, either didn’t know it or wouldn’t admit it. The engines kept screaming, their throttles still jammed against the stop. They were traveling at least eighty miles an hour. The ground beneath Rook and Heat was a blur in the night.

  Heat was trying to summon the courage to leap down the slide when Rook grasped her arm. “Don’t jump,” he said. “We’re going too fast. If the head trauma doesn’t kill you, the road rash will make you wish you were dead.”

  “Okay, so what now?” she said.

  The wind was rushing furiously past the open door. She again had to shout to be heard.

  “Now we crash,” Rook yelled.

  “So let’s prepare for a crash,” Heat said.

  “The mattress,” Rook said. “It’s extra plush and pillow-top. It’ll give us enough cushion if we get it against the bulkhead.”

  Heat scrambled toward the far side of the mattress. They each grabbed half of it and wrestled it until it was essentially acting as padding against the front wall of the cabin.

  Then they wedged themselves against it and braced for the worst.

  As anyone who has ever flown in or out of LaGuardia knows, the airport’s main runways are essentially peninsular, bounded by water on three sides. It treats millions of passengers a year to the specter of a very unwelcome swim if their aircraft veers off course during takeoff or landing.

  And an aborted takeoff was what Rook and Heat had now assured for themselves as the plane hurtled toward the murky darkness of Flushing Bay.

  Still traveling at eighty miles an hour, the 737 plowed through the fence at the end of the runway, bending its concrete-reinforced iron poles like they were pipe cleaners.

  It skidded across a concrete pad and over a thin strip of grass. Then it reached the shoreline, which was buttressed by a thick riprap wall, to protect it from erosion.

  From there, it was a fifteen-foot drop into the drink. The plane seemed to hang over the precipice, floating in midair. It was as if, having gone through a period of ambivalence, the aircraft was now finally contemplating fulfilling the purpose for which it had been so masterfully designed.

  A long time ago, a man named Bernoulli came up with a principle of fluid dynamics that neatly describes how the miracle of flight is possible. An even longer time ago, a man named Newton came up with a law for how two larger-than-atom-sized objects will interact with each other in space.

  For a brief moment, Newton’s universal law of gravitation and Bernoulli’s principle seemed to be having a disagreement. Mr. Newton explained how two bodies attract each other with a force that is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. Mr. Bernoulli asserted that because the pressure in a stream of fluid is reduced as the speed of the flow is increased, air flowing over the curved top half of an airplane wing will have less pressure than the flat bottom half, creating an upward thrust.

  But, really, it wasn’t much of a fight. In this case, Newtown kicked Bernoulli’s ass.

  The plane dropped, its nose splashing into the water at a roughly ten-degree angle, shallow enough that the plane skipped a little bit, its momentum carrying it across the water like a flat rock tossed out into a calm lake.

  But even a skimming stone eventually finds the bottom. As soon as water began flooding the plane’s turbines, the engines came to a halt. Once the forward momentum they had been supplying was no longer available, the plane slowed until it stopped.

  The deceleration was gradual enough that the mattress was more than sufficient to cushion Heat and Rook. When the plane came to a halt, there in the middle of Flushing Bay, they stood up.

  “Feel like going for a swim?” Rook asked.

  “That sounds delightful,” Heat answered.

  They righted themselves and headed for the door. The plane had enough air in its cargo hold and cabin that it would float for at least another minute or so. But not much more. This vessel was not designed for the high seas. Water was already leaking through the bolts and seams of its decidedly non-waterproof underside.

  Heat could hear sirens heading their way. The Port Authority Police, along with every fire and rescue vehicle they could summon, were now racing toward the end of the runway. Farther off, Heat could hear a helicopter and a Coast Guard cutter, closing in from air and sea respectively.

  Heat was about to step onto the slide when another noise, this one much closer, sounded.

  It was the thunderclap of a gunshot.

  Heat and Rook braced themselves. Was this about to become an armed standoff? Were Kline and his men really going to defend a doomed plane even as it sank to the bottom of Flushing Bay?

  But no. Only one bullet had been fired. And Heat could already guess the target.

  “I think Legs Kline just permanently suspended his presidential campaign,” Rook said, reading Heat’s mind.


  “Probably just as well,” Heat said. “I was going to vote for Lindsy Gardner anyway.”

  The next several hours passed in a blur of exhaustion and exhilaration.

  Kline’s security people were falling over themselves to see who could rat out whom faster as soon as they were pulled into interrogation, each trying to outdo the others with how much information they could provide, in hopes of getting the best deal.

  But they were tight-lipped compared to Justin and Preston, who started giving it up the moment they were hauled aboard the Coast Guard ship.

  Lana Kline was apparently not going gentle into that good plea bargain. The only thing to which she had confessed was that she was eager to invoke her right to counsel.

  But the general outlines of what had happened were emerging quickly enough. It was just as Rook and Heat had thought. Tam Svejda had sunk her teeth into Kline Industries as one of the major sources of ISIS munitions. With George Lichman’s help, she had been secreting herself aboard a plane bound for Turkey when she was discovered by Kline Industries security. Lichman had been tortured into confessing everything before he had been killed.

  That still left the problem of what to do with the nosy reporter. The video was, naturally, Lana’s idea, one that Legs had embraced immediately. Politically, there was just nothing better for him than a good terrorist scare three weeks before voters went to the polls. They had chosen to film and distribute the video in New York because they knew it was the media capital of the world. Nothing would assure them more attention.

  The scarf appearing in the video had been Lana and company’s biggest mistake, one made out of the desire to be too perfect. They had wanted to make the video appear low-budget and poor quality, like real ISIS videos. To that end, they had edited it on old equipment that had a monitor with a narrower aspect ratio. They hadn’t even realized the scarf would be in the frame of more modern screens.

  All of this earnest confession had taken place at the Twentieth Precinct, with Ochoa, Raley, Rhymer, Feller, and Aguinaldo tag-teaming on the interviewing.

  Rook had disappeared before first light. He was nearing the deadline for his First Press profile of Legs Kline. The art department balked at having to redesign the cover on such short notice, a difficulty they solved with a small change in punctuation.

  WHO IS LEGS KLINE, REALLY? was changed to WHO IS LEGS KLINE? REALLY?

  At one point mid-morning, Heat snuck a nap. She had already changed out of her uniform and back into civilian clothes. They were the same clothes she had worn the previous day, but at least they didn’t smell like fish and motor oil.

  By six o’clock Thursday evening, Heat had half the precinct—and, more importantly, most of the brass down at One PP—telling her it was time to go home and get some sleep. When she got a text from Rook, saying he had filed his story and would be waiting for her at home, she decided it was time. She texted him back saying she’d be right there.

  She walked out into the sinking sunlight on 82nd Street to look for a cab. She was so bone-weary she didn’t trust herself to drive home or even to navigate the subway. Other than that nap, she had been awake for thirty-nine hours straight, ever since her Wednesday morning had begun just after three o’clock, when she woke up worrying about…

  Her mother.

  Without even meaning to, Heat took a glance toward the bus stop where Cynthia Heat had appeared on Tuesday morning. The pounding in her chest that had made sleep so impossible at 3:23 A.M. was back.

  Her mother was not dead, but Maggs was; and Callan, clearly with help from someone on the outside, had escaped.

  As she hailed a cab and began traveling south, toward the Tribeca loft she and Rook shared, she tried to force thoughts about her mother from her mind.

  But they just wouldn’t leave. Her mother was out there, somewhere. That fact changed every other assumption in Nikki’s existence. And by the time Nikki reached Rook’s place—she was, she realized, back to thinking of it as Rook’s place—she knew resistance to her new reality was totally futile.

  She wouldn’t be able to truly rest until her mother was safe. To pretend otherwise was an act of self-delusion that Nikki simply couldn’t pull off. Finding her mother, saving her mother. That was now the main focus of her life.

  And she had to do it alone. There had been too many bodies dropped already. Whatever was happening, she couldn’t entangle Rook in it. The risk was too great. She was eighteen hours removed from thinking she had lost him forever. She simply couldn’t go through anything like that again.

  The only way to keep him alive was to keep him at a distance.

  As the cab sped away, she knew what she needed to do, even though she already hated it. She pulled out her phone and punched the number for her realtor. Heat got the woman’s voice mail, which was just as well. It would be easier this way.

  “Yeah, hi, it’s Nikki Heat,” she said after the tone. “Look, I know this may seem sudden, but can we take my mother’s apartment off the market? I’m going to need it for a while. Call me if you have any questions. Thanks.”

  She stowed her phone and then, before she could lose her courage, rode the lift up to Rook’s loft.

  As she inserted her key in the lock, she could already hear the sound of Barry White coming through the door. She pushed through it to find Rook, sitting on the couch, wearing a silk bathrobe and a come-hither smile.

  On the table in front of him, there was champagne on ice, a pair of crystal flutes, a silver tray with oysters on them, and chocolate-dipped strawberries.

  “Sorry if I went a little overboard,” he said, pouring a glass for her. “I just thought we had a lot to celebrate. Now come and let me help you unburden your—”

  “Rook,” was all she said.

  “Uh-oh,” was his reply.

  He stopped pouring the champagne, sinking the butt of the bottle back in the ice bucket.

  “What’s wrong?” he said.

  Heat could feel the tears trying to form, but she willed them away. She needed to stay strong for this. She didn’t know if she’d be able to convince Rook or not, but she knew this was the right thing to do.

  She knew it in the deepest part of her heart.

  “As long as my mother is out there, I can’t…I can’t be with you.”

  “What does that even mean?” Rook said.

  “I have to go,” Heat said. “I have to get my head right so we can have a happily ever after.”

  “Where is this coming from? Why are you giving up on your marriage?”

  “I’m trying to save it,” Heat insisted.

  “By leaving me?” Rook said, and the pain on his face almost shattered something inside of Heat.

  Rook rose from the couch. He walked up to her slowly, cautiously. It reminded Heat of the way he had wooed her in the first place, all those years before: cautiously, with tender patience and the recognition that a too-direct approach with someone so damaged would only scare her off.

  “Look, if you have a problem, we have a problem,” he said. “That’s how this works.”

  “No, Rook,” she said. “Not this time.”

  She whirled around and left the apartment before she could see just how much agony she had plunged him into. As she disappeared back down the elevator, she plugged her ears so she wouldn’t hear his tortured voice calling after her.

  She was on a bench, outside the loft. A strategically positioned tree guaranteed he couldn’t look down and see her. But she could still look up at the warmth of the lights pouring from Rook’s place. The tears wouldn’t stop now. She had held them off as long as she could.

  She didn’t know how long she had been there, only that the sun was now down. She had turned off her phone. She knew Rook would be calling, texting, making his pleas and entreaties; he would try logical appeals, emotional appeals, whatever he could attempt. She wasn’t sure she was strong enough to fend them off yet.

  At least three times, she’d nearly changed her mind and walked back up to
the loft. She imagined throwing herself in Rook’s arms. They would cry together, make love, eat strawberries, then cry some more, then make love again.

  It would be the easy thing to do. It would be the comfortable thing to do. It would be the selfish thing to do.

  But Nikki Heat had never been about any of those things. And as soon as she’d thought about what she had to do—taking on an opponent whose dimensions were unknown but likely enormous—she realized she didn’t have a choice.

  Finding her mother had to be her only mission, her only purpose. She would be no kind of daughter until she did. And she would be no kind of wife while she was doing it.

  Finally, when the tears would no longer come, she caught a cab uptown to her mother’s place in Gramercy Park.

  Or, Heat thought, she might as well start calling it what it was again: her place.

  This had been her home, and her home alone, for more than a decade. It would serve as her sanctuary again—or, rather, as her base of operations.

  Bob Aaronson was on doorman duty again.

  “Good to see you, Miss Heat,” he said. “Just checking on the old place again?”

  “Actually, I’m going to be staying here for a while.”

  “That’s wonderful,” he said. “For how long?”

  “I don’t know,” she admitted. “I just don’t know.”

  She rode the elevator up to her floor, thinking of all the nights she had done this before Rook came into her life. She had been alone once and survived. She could be alone again…for a time.

  And then? Then she’d have everything. Her mother. Her husband. It was the greatest happiness she could imagine, a perfect life she had never even allowed herself to consider before.

  All she needed to make it happen was total discipline and focus.

  The door wasn’t sticky this time. It had, after all, just been used. And the air inside wasn’t musty either. She had been there two nights before. The place remained untidy, just as she had left it.

  But as soon as she took a second step inside the darkened space, there was something going off in her mind, some primitive part of her brain sounding an alarm. Whether it was a smell, or a disturbance in the air, or a sixth sense, Heat couldn’t say.