Sandra wiped her hands across her face and felt the blood smear over her skin. Through the cockpit she saw nothing but the desert and she realised with a jolt that the plane was still diving. She reached for the control wheel and pulled back on it, feeling her stomach churn as the plane’s nose came up. She was gasping for breath and her arms were trembling. She looked towards the attitude indicator but her husband’s body obscured it, then suddenly his whole body swung away from the instruments as if he’d only been dozing, but she realised it was the deceleration forcing him back. The shaking in her hands intensified and she forced herself to keep her eyes on the instruments and not on her dead husband. The plane levelled off and she decided to accelerate away from the gunmen below rather than wasting time trying to climb. There was a loud crack from somewhere behind her and then another and she yelled at Jamie to lie down across the rear seats. The rudder pedals abruptly lost their resistance as if the cables had been cut and the Cessna began to slide to the right, with the wind. More bullets thudded into the rear of the plane and she felt the control wheel kick in her hands. “Oh God, the fuel,” she said, remembering the fuel tanks in the wings above her head. She began twisting the control wheel from side to side, jerking the plane around in the air. Mitchell’s body swayed grotesquely, held in place by the seat belt. His blood was dripping everywhere, though thankfully his feet had stopped drumming on the pedals.
Jamie had followed her instructions and was lying across the back seats, sobbing into his hands.
“It’s okay, honey, it’s going to be okay,” Sandra said, though there was no conviction in her trembling voice. Her mind was racing and she couldn’t remember what the emergency procedures were. She closed her eyes for a moment and tried to picture the emergency transponder code. Seven Seven Zero Zero. She took her left hand off the control wheel and fumbled with the dials on the transponder, turning them to the four figures which would set alarms ringing at all radar facilities within range. The wheel jerked in her hand and pulled forward as the plane began to dive again. The engine started to splutter and the whole plane bucked and reared like a runaway stallion. Her hands shook as she keyed in the emergency frequency on the radio: 121.50 MHz. The control wheel began to shudder, making her shoulders vibrate.
“Mom, what’s happening?” screamed her son.
“It’s okay, honey. Stay where you are.” The engine was coughing and the propeller blades became visible as a grey disc as they slowed. Black smoke was pouring from the left side of the engine cowling. According to the altimeter they were a little over a thousand feet above the ground and the vertical speed indicator showed they were dropping at five hundred feet a minute. She clicked on the radio microphone. “Mayday, mayday,” she said. “This is Five Nine Four, position unknown, crash landing.” She couldn’t remember what other information she was supposed to give in a distress call.
The headset crackled but there was no reply. The altimeter was spinning and they were probably too low for anyone to pick up their signal. “Mayday, mayday,” she repeated, then took her thumb off the microphone switch and concentrated on the emergency procedures. She pulled back hard on the control wheel to try to keep the nose up but it suddenly went slack and she knew she’d lost control of the elevators. The dive steepened and the airspeed indicator went above the red line. The plane was diving at its maximum speed but there was surprisingly little sense of movement. Sandra Mitchell became quite detached about her own imminent death. She kept pulling back on the control wheel, knowing that it was quite useless but wanting to do something. She took deep breaths. “It’s all right, honey,” she called to her son. “It’s all right.”
The ground seemed to get no closer until the last hundred feet and then it suddenly rushed up to meet her.
Cole Howard took the pack of cards out of his pocket and slid off the elastic band he’d used to keep them together. He scanned the first one. “Who was Barnum’s partner in The Greatest Show on Earth?” he read. He thought for a while before turning the card over. The answer was J. A. Bailey. Howard sighed. The next question was “What is known as The Englishman’s Wine?” Howard smiled. “Port,” he said to himself. He turned the card over and his smile widened as he saw that he was correct. The telephone on his desk rang, a single burble that let him know it was an internal call. He picked it up as he continued to read the Trivial Pursuit card. “Howard,” he said.
“Good morning, Cole. You busy?”
It was Jake Sheldon, Cole’s immediate superior in the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s office in Phoenix. “Nothing pressing, Jake,” said Howard.
“Can you come up and see me when you’ve got a moment?”
“Sure thing. Now okay?”
“Now would be just fine, Cole. Thanks.”
Howard knew that Jake Sheldon always relayed his orders as requests, often in a manner so abstruse as to cause confusion. A polite suggestion that an agent “come up and see me sometime” was as urgent a call as he’d ever make, even if his office was on fire. Agents new to the office had to be taken to one side and briefed on Sheldon’s management techniques lest they confuse his deferential manner with laziness or complacency. Howard studied one of his cards as he waited for the elevator. “How many notes are there in two adjacent octaves?” Howard frowned, decided the answer was sixteen and turned the card over. “Fifteen,” he read. He showed no annoyance at his mistake, he merely memorised the answer and went on to the next question.
Sheldon’s office was as neat and formal as the man himself, his desk uncluttered, his college degree and legal qualifications lined up on the wall behind him in identical rosewood frames, the blinds across his window as straight as razors. He was wearing a dark blue suit and crisp white shirt, a uniform which he never varied. Sheldon was rumoured to have more than a dozen suits, each exactly the same in colour and style, which he rotated religiously. He looked as if he’d just stepped out of a clothing catalogue, and even though he was sitting behind his desk he still had the jacket on. He had the look of an elder statesman, a senator perhaps, with white hair, a soft voice and fleshy jowls. He closed a file on his desk when Howard entered his office and asked him to sit. “So, Cole, how’s your lovely wife?”
“Fine, sir. Just fine.”
“And her parents?”
“Great. Just great.”
Sheldon nodded. “Give my regards to Mr Clayton when you see him.”
“I’ll do that, sir.”
The pleasantries over, Sheldon handed Howard a videocassette and the file he’d been reading. “I want you to look into this for me, Cole. It’s a strange one, a triple homicide, but there’s more to it than that. A family were flying about sixty miles south of Kingman when their plane was shot down. Normally we wouldn’t get involved in an incident of this nature, but it’s what they saw before they were shot down that involves us. Put that into the VCR, will you?”
Howard took the cassette over to the VCR in the corner of the office, slotted it home and pressed the ‘play’ button. He stood to the side and folded his arms across his chest. A woman’s face appeared on the screen, distorted because she was so close to the lens. She was laughing and Howard could hear a small boy shouting: “Go on, Mom, make a face.”
“Sandra Mitchell, a thirty-year-old homemaker. Her husband, Jim, is flying the plane. They were en route from Phoenix to Las Vegas.”
The camera moved jerkily so that the back of the pilot’s head was in frame. “Dad, Dad!” The pilot turned and gave the boy a thumbs-up.
“They were flying at about three thousand five hundred feet here, there’s a map in the file which will show you their exact position. The local police are conducting a search of the area now, but it’s going to take several days.”
The camcorder panned across the cockpit windows giving them a view of the desert far below. Sandra’s voice called out above the noise of the engine: “Don’t use all the tape.” There was a flicker showing that the video had been turned off and then there were two adults in the
frame, the man and the woman standing proudly in front of their plane. It was a small Cessna, with one propeller. The man was holding in his stomach and his young wife patted him as if telling him there was no need.
The picture flickered and then there was another view out of the window. There was no way of knowing how long it had been switched off. A sandstone butte filled the screen. There was a figure lying on the top, with what looked like a rifle in his hands. The camcorder wavered as the lens zoomed in and focused on a close-up. Then the camera angled down and far below amid the cacti and brush Howard could see some sort of a tower which had been built of metal scaffolding and wooden planks.
“At about two o’clock in the afternoon they saw this structure, and another just like it, and went down to take a closer look.”
The picture swung from side to side as the boy struggled to keep the structure in sight. There was a man on the top and Howard saw that he was holding a rifle. The plane levelled off again and in the distance Howard could make out a group of figures.
The little boy played with the focus control, zooming the lens in and out on the figures standing below in the desert. It wasn’t a pleasant effect and Howard averted his eyes for a moment.
There was a sudden cracking sound and then the woman began screaming. The camcorder swung round and Howard could see there was blood all over the front of the cockpit. The top of the pilot’s head had been blown away. “My God,” whispered Howard.
The boy began screaming and the picture lurched as if the camcorder had been thrown to the side and all Howard could see was the blood-spattered material of the seat cover.
“Mrs Mitchell also had a private pilot’s licence and she took over the controls. Within thirty seconds after the first shot, eight more hit the plane.”
Howard heard the small explosions as the bullets struck home, then he heard the engine splutter and cough.
“The engine went at about the same time, and we think the plane was between a thousand and fifteen hundred feet high at that point.”
Howard heard the woman make a disjointed Mayday call, but there was no reply.
“She put out a distress call on the emergency frequency and set her transponder to the emergency code: that’s how the local Flight Service Station got her position.” Sheldon’s voice was clinical and detached.
The engine noise died and the camcorder must have moved again because Howard could see the ground rushing up.
Howard listened as the boy began to scream and his mother tried in vain to calm him down. The last thing she said was “Please God, no. .” and then there was a sickening crash, and the sound of metal grating and what sounded like the wind.
“At this point the plane is down and the occupants are dead. The camcorder continued to record for a further twenty minutes until it came to the end of the tape. You might as well switch it off now.”
Howard leaned forward and pressed the ‘stop’ button. Just before he did he thought he heard the boy call out for his father but it could have been the desert wind.
“Luckily they didn’t hit the fuel tanks. When the local sheriff got there the camcorder was intact. What you’ve got there is a copy we made. The original is in one of our labs in Washington.” Howard sat down and toyed with the cassette as he listened to Sheldon. “The towers you saw in the video had been pulled down and set on fire by the time the sheriff got there. All the vehicles had gone. There’s no sign of it in the video, but we suspect they also had a helicopter. The investigation you’ll be leading is unusual in that we’re not actually concerned about the victims in the case. All the signs are that they were merely innocent bystanders, in the wrong place at the wrong time. What we want to know is who those people were in the desert, and what they were doing.”
“So it’s not a homicide investigation?” asked Howard. He couldn’t get the woman’s voice out of his head. Trying to reassure her son as the plane plunged to the ground. He shivered.
“Those men weren’t shooting duck out there,” said Sheldon. “They’d spent a lot of time and money setting up those towers, they were obviously rehearsing something. It was a practice run for an assassination. And only an assassination of the first rank would merit such a rehearsal.”
Howard nodded. “The President?”
“Possibly. Or a visiting head of state. Someone with protection, someone they can’t get close to. It wouldn’t be a gangland hit, they prefer to get in close with a shotgun or a handgun to the back of the neck. It has to be political. And it has to be soon. Your job, Cole, is to find out who the hit is, and to stop it. Do that and you’ll hopefully also catch the men who killed the Mitchell family. But that’s secondary, you understand? Your first priority is to put a stop to the assassination.”
“I understand. Do we have any idea who the men are?”
Sheldon shook his head. “The tape is being examined by our experts now. The camcorder is one of those new models with a high-powered zoom lens, which has very high resolution. Our lab will do the initial work on the tape, but I gather that they don’t have the capability for the sort of analysis we might require. That’s one of the reasons I want you handling the investigation.”
“My father-in-law?”
Sheldon nodded. “Theodore Clayton’s electronics company is one of the few at the forefront of this technology which isn’t based in Japan. His help would be invaluable, and the request might be better coming from a family member, don’t you think?”
“I’m sure it would,” Howard agreed. He knew exactly how much Theodore Clayton would appreciate a call for help from his son-in-law.
“I want you to act as FBI liaison with the local investigators, and to organise the analysis of the tape. Any questions?”
“You said it has to be soon. Why do you think that?”
“Whoever is behind this already has his assassins in place, and obviously has a specific venue in mind. The longer they wait, the greater the risk of the whole operation falling apart. I doubt if they’re planning more than a few months ahead. It may be only a matter of weeks or days.”
“What about targets? Do we issue a warning to the President’s security people?”
Sheldon sat back in his leather chair, his palms face down on his desk like a pianist about to begin a concerto. “I’m sending a memo to the Secret Service’s Intelligence Division in Washington, of course, but at this stage I don’t want to go overboard. As yet we don’t know for certain who the target is, and I don’t want to be caught crying wolf. As soon as we know for sure who the target is we’ll throw a cordon around him, but not until then. And there’s no point in issuing a general warning — that would scare too many people needlessly and we’d run the risk of the snipers going to ground. No, Cole, you tell me for sure that it’s the President and we’ll sound the alarm.”
Sheldon paused for a few seconds as if he was having second thoughts. He tapped his fingers on the desktop. “But I think it would be a good idea if you got hold of the President’s itinerary and see if there are any situations where snipers could get at him.”
Howard left Sheldon’s office with the tape and file. He wasn’t looking forward to asking his father-in-law for help.
Mike Cramer looked at his watch, pulled open the bottom drawer of his desk and put his hand on the bottle of Famous Grouse he kept there. He took it out and weighed it in his hand. It was a powerful hand, the fingers strong and the nails neatly clipped. There was scar tissue over the first two knuckles and the skin looked as if it had been out in all weathers. It was the hand of a sailor, a hand used to doing manual work. It was shaking as it held the bottle and the whisky slopped against the glass. Cramer tightened his grip but that just intensified the trembling. He stood the bottle on the desk and looked at the label as he used his foot to close the drawer.
He looked at his watch again. Nine-fifteen. He’d only bought the bottle the previous evening in the off-licence down the road but already it was half empty. Cramer smiled to himself. There had been a time when h
e might have taken a more positive view and thought that the bottle was half full, but those days were long gone. He unscrewed the cap and lifted the neck of the bottle to his nose. He sniffed gently, the way a dog might test the night air, then he took a mouthful, swallowing almost immediately. Cramer wasn’t drinking for the flavour, he was drinking to stop the shakes. He took another mouthful, then another, and then recapped the bottle and put it back into his desk drawer. He had an open pack of Wrigley’s gum on his desk and he unwrapped a piece and popped it in his mouth.
The office was small and windowless. It took up a corner of a large warehouse and was little more than a plywood box with space for two desks, a photocopier, a filing cabinet, a small fridge and five steel lockers. On the wall above the filing cabinet was a chart and Cramer went over to look at it. Two groups were due to start at nine-thirty so he went to check the battle arena.
The warehouse had been built as a place to store goods before they were loaded on to ships on the Thames, back in the days when the east of London was a thriving docks and not just an offshoot of the City’s financial district. As the shipping companies switched over to containers and the river traffic died off, the best of the warehouses were transformed into Yuppie flats and glitzy winebars, but this one was too run down to be remodelled and it had been left to decay. The two young Greek Cypriot businessmen Cramer worked for had bought the warehouse for a song at a time when property prices were falling, and they had turned it into a successful paintball venue where executives could work off their aggression by pretending to blow each other away with paint pellets instead of bullets. There were five floors in the building, linked by a staircase at each end. The new owners had installed fireman’s poles and ladders then had added wooden walls, chain-link fences and other obstacles to make a battlefield which they illuminated with a computer-controlled light and laser system. The top four floors were used for combat, and on the ground floor was the office, along with a changing room and shower facilities, a shop selling paintballs, equipment and clothing, and a large practice area where the players could fire their guns at targets. Cramer went into the shop and turned on the lights. There were no windows anywhere in the warehouse other than in the roof so everywhere had to be illuminated. Racks of sweatshirts and nylon protective clothing were against one wall with a display of goggles and facemasks lined up above them. In a case by the cash register there was a selection of the latest paintguns and cleaning kits. Cramer checked that there was change in the cash register, then went to turn the lights on in the practice area. As he walked across the concrete floor he heard the main door swing open and turned to see Charlie Preston walk out of the sunlight.
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