He stepped back, held up a finger, and returned to the maps she had brought.
“Bear with me.” He began tossing papers everywhere, and in doing so, added to the image of insanity. The huge sheets of white snow fell and covered the carpet. Only then did she notice the wheelchair, folded and leaning against the wall. There was no stopping her tears. She let them fall and watched her favorite man slip over the edge. “The question,” he said, resettled, “is what’s his target? And which airport will he use, Dulles or National? The plane has to leave from one of the two airports, right? And that,” he added, “is why I needed you to bring this.” He turned to make sure she was with him and seeing her, he set the map down slowly, a comic who realizes he’s no longer funny. “Don’t give up on me. Don’t do this.”
“It’s over.”
“It’s not over.”
“Kort is dead, Cam. They’ll find Duncan. You have to believe they’ll find him.”
“If you don’t pay attention, you’ll never convince the others.”
“Don’t do this!” she shouted, crossing her arms to fend off the cold, backing away from him.
“I’m not off my rocker, damn it all. I’ve figured it out! Jesus!” he said, pounding the table so hard, he broke the leaf and all the papers spilled out onto the floor, covering his feet. He watched the papers settle and sadness drained into his face. “You don’t believe me? The memo note isn’t all.” He dropped to the floor and dug his pile of snow until he located a particular piece of paper. “Gloria, bless her heart, got me the early reports, including one from the hospital where they took what remained of him—whoever he was.” He tried to make the table leaf work again, and when he failed, walked around to the other side. “The thing about being the lead investigator is that you hold dozens—maybe hundreds—of different pieces of data in your head. One department knows this; they tell you. Another finds out that; they write you a memo. But you’re the only one with all the pieces.”
“What do you mean, ‘convince the others’?” she asked.
“See? You are paying attention. That’s good.”
She stepped closer to him, still afraid, though he had calmed and she found herself drawn to him.
“They would have spotted this eventually. Today, maybe. Tomorrow. Next week. Probably next week, because we don’t like outside reports. We like to generate our own reports. If it’s FBI, then we trust it. If it isn’t … We’d rather wait until one of our own comes in. My bet? No one’s read this report very carefully. And even if they had, they would think it’s a mistake. Why? Because despite all our pissing and moaning about evidence, we trust the agent over all the evidence combined. The lead agent? No one’s going to question what I saw down there. They see something wrong in a report, they’ll order another report. They find that report comes back wrong, they might even order it done again. That’s the way we work—take it or leave it.”
“Spotted what?”
“And I’ll tell you something else: You repeat the same story enough times and you start to look at it real carefully, and I just plain didn’t like the way it sounded. A guy like Kort fires off a couple rounds point-blank at me and misses. Kort? No way. Not from that distance. So why did he miss? Because he needed me as a witness.”
“Spotted what?” she shouted, shaking the paper he handed her.
“Blood alcohol. The hospital didn’t work up a blood type, but when someone does, it won’t match either. But by then it’ll be way too late. The guy who hit the train was six sheets to the wind. Two-point-one-oh blood alcohol level. Smashed. Blotto. Shitfaced. And believe me—the Anthony Kort I was chasing in that tunnel was stone-cold sober.”
She scanned the hospital report and her eyes found the tiny little box: 2.1, it read. Now she did believe, though she didn’t want to. He was back with the maps, tossing things everywhere.
“Okay … Okay … Let’s have a look here. The scale is different … Damn it … Damn it …” He checked the runway map of LAX and that for Dulles and did some math calculations right onto the wood of the table. Then he grabbed the ruler and a pencil and drew a line six inches off the end of a runway, checked his numbers, stopped, measured an angle with Duncan’s protractor, and drew another line. His fingers searched the end of this line. She could feel his disappointment. He leaned closer to read the map. “There’s nothing out here. Nothing at all. Suburbs. Nothing but suburbs. That can’t be it.”
“Nothing where?” she hollered, her confusion overwhelming her.
As Cam threw the Dulles map onto the floor and unrolled the map of National Airport that she had brought for him, he explained impatiently, “The target isn’t the plane. I mean it is, but it isn’t. Not really. The target is on the ground. The plane is the bomb. He’s going to drop a plane, and he knows exactly where it’s going to fall.”
She looked over his shoulder as he did some more math and began drawing lines—this time from a runway at National Airport. “Who would believe it, right? He’s counting on that.” He smelled as if he hadn’t showered, and his whiskers were long. His plotted course ended in the Tidal Basin of West Potomac Park, near the Jefferson Memorial. He checked it twice. “It’s not working,” he said. “It’s not possible. I know I’m right about this. I know the evidence is right.”
She leaned over him. He moved aside, his eyes glazed. He had grown suddenly distant. “Runway thirty-six is the more common,” she said, pointing. He didn’t move. “Depends on the winds.” She took the ruler from him and duplicated the first leg of the 7 he had drawn. She measured the angle off this new stem, and drew the final short leg of the projected flight—where the plane would slip left as it fell. The pen stopped before it reached its destination, before she completed the work, because she had raised her head in disbelief. Cam stared at the point of the pen too. He looked as terrified as she felt. The tip of the pen rested on the Pentagon.
“The meeting,” Daggett said in a forced whisper that revealed his fear. “That must be where they’re holding the meeting!”
The phone rang. He turned and stared at it. “He’s going to crash a plane into the Pentagon.”
“Cam?” she said, drawn by the ringing phone.
He was frozen. “My God. He’s going to kill them all.”
She hurried to the phone and answered it. “Just a minute please,” she added as she reached it out to him. “Quik-Link Courier, or something like that.”
“Daggett,” he said, accepting the phone’s receiver from her. He listened, searched for a pen and, finding one, said, “This Boote, you tried calling him? … Nothing? … Can you give me his home address, please?” He scribbled out an Alexandria address. “You have a Duhning 959 in your fleet,” he stated emphatically. “I’m psychic,” he said, obviously answering the man. “Ground it … What are you talking about: ‘in person’?” He checked his watch. “There’s no time for that. Ground the fucking plane … I’m telling you, I’m FBI! No … No … You can’t call me at the FBI. I’m not at the FBI, I’m home … Okay … Okay … I’m on my way. How long until that plane goes? How long? Shit! You better stall it, mister, or you’ll be looking for work … Damn!” He slammed the receiver down. To Lynn he said, “The guy hung up on me. He wanted to call me back at the office to make sure I’m for real. He thinks I’m a hoax.”
“They have a 959?”
“It goes in half an hour.” He pointed into the dining room. “Take all this stuff to Buzzard Point. To Pullman. Mumford, if you can get to him. Tell him you know the meeting is at the Pentagon. That ought to do it. Explain it as best you can, but whatever you do, get someone to ground that plane.”
She checked her watch. “You’ll make it before I will.”
“Put your foot into it.” He had the front door open. He pointed to the phone. “And have someone check that address for a David Boote. Kort’s doing this one the same way he did L.A. Tell them that. L.A. was nothing but a rehearsal. This is the real show. Tell him I gotta have some backup.”
He said something else,
but she didn’t hear. He was still shouting at her as his van knocked over the mailbox, raced ahead tires screaming, and disappeared down the quiet suburban street.
39
* * *
Carrie Stevenson knew what had to be done. She couldn’t be sure they had left together, and so rather than bang on the door that communicated with the room in which Duncan was kept, she stood and searched the medicine cabinet, remembering this Frenchwoman had put on some fresh makeup that morning. She found a dark brown eye-lining pencil, and with this she wrote SMOKE ALARM on a piece of bathroom tissue.
She stretched out fully then, her ankle bound by the rope to the pipe, and was just able to reach the crack beneath the communicating door. It was a substantial gap, the door having been cut to accommodate the carpet on the other side. She took a drag on the Sobranie and then scratched lightly on the door until she heard the distinct sound of Duncan dragging himself across the carpet. She pushed the tissue through first, relieved as it vanished. Next, she carefully stuffed the cigarette under, butt first. She scratched again. It disappeared.
She sat back and prayed. One of the selling points of this cabin was that the smoke alarm system was tied in directly to the fire station. There was no such alarm in the bathroom, and even if there had been, with her leg bound to the pipe she never could have reached it. But Duncan, because of his disability, had not been tied down, and having been here only days ago with Kort, she remembered the layout of the room well enough to recall the substantial floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. So now, it all came down to Duncan.
Having extracted the toilet paper from the crack in the door, Duncan unfolded it and read the message. From his perspective on the floor, as he rocked his head to look, the white smoke alarm mounted in the ceiling seemed about as far away as the moon on a clear night. It wasn’t until he heard her scratching again that he saw the cigarette, and it wasn’t until he took the cigarette from her and saw it burning that he realized what was expected of him. The moon, hell—it looked more like Pluto.
As he lay there thinking about it, feeling the impossible was being asked of him, the cigarette’s ember spit fire and some ash floated to the carpet like fresh snow. Then he understood: He only had a few minutes in which to accomplish this. The cigarette was half burned.
He tried to carry it by pinching it between his knuckles, but with his hands his only means of propulsion, he resorted to sticking it into his lips, squinting away the smoke and hurrying to the bookshelf. By the time he had dragged himself to the bottom of the bookshelf, his eyes stung and he was coughing. He hauled himself up to a sitting position using the first few shelves. Now, the face of the bookshelf appeared to him a multicolored sheer granite wall stretching impossibly into a sky of white Sheetrock clouds far, far overhead.
Initially, he didn’t think about the task before him as a series of pull-ups, which in fact was exactly what it was. Instead, he thought about the task in terms of the goal: to reach the smoke alarm before the cigarette burned out. With his mind focused on this end, he stuffed the smoking cigarette back between his lips, having taken a moment for fresh air, and began his journey, the dead weight of his legs following behind him like an old dog on a long leash. To him, the shelves were merely rungs to a ladder, and it didn’t occur to him that by the time he reached Hemingway he had the equivalent of two complete pull-ups behind him. Fully airborne, and with two shelves to go, the smoke alarm suddenly seemed no closer, and it was then, as he placed his hands next to each other and began to grunt and heave, that it occurred to him that he couldn’t do this. This was a pull-up and he couldn’t do a pull-up. This consideration, which had the impact of a startling discovery, served to weaken not only the strength in his trembling arms but his resolve. Impossibility had no shades of gray, and for weeks he had proven this impossible.
But then again, he thought, if this was impossible, how had he climbed this far already? A quick glance down confirmed his substantial elevation as well as delivered another stream of stinging smoke into his eyes, which he huffed and blinked away and corrected by looking up again. If he could do two pull-ups, why not four? His father’s voice spoke to him as clearly as if he were standing right there in the room with him: The only way there is through. Now Duncan understood. His attention had been on the smoke alarm, not on his own strength, his own weakness, not on his journey but his destination. Hot ash glancing his chin and falling like stones from the face of the mountain, he refocused his attention on that alarm, and drew himself up. His arms burned and shook like rubber, but he paid no attention. He pulled and strained and lifted himself another shelf higher. Victory was but a single shelf away. His fingers found it and he grunted loudly. Nothing could stop him now. His eyes crept past the final shelf and he snagged his belt on a shelf below. He had reached the summit.
With one hand craning him out toward the center of the room, the other waving the cigarette immediately beneath the vented grate of the plastic smoke alarm, Duncan took his first and last drag of a cigarette in his life, kissing the end as he had watch Carrie do, and drawing the smoke into his cheeks and down into his virgin lungs. He exploded into a ferocious cough, spraying out smoke and spit until the alarm disappeared in his cloud.
His fingers lost purchase and he fell.
Those few seconds of his descent seemed to him like long hours. He had no legs with which to brake his fall. In fact, his legs seemed more like anchors that only served to accelerate him. He had no chance to defend himself. His attention fixed not on the floor below him but on the smoke alarm overhead, where the results of his cough still swirled.
Then, like the buzzer sounding the end of the game, the shrieking electronic cry of the alarm split the air, signaling victory. This stole all of his attention. He hit the floor hard—too hard—headfirst.
It was only as he came to that he realized he must have blacked out, for above the shriek of the alarm he heard sirens in the distance. But he savored this moment of singular victory as no other. His neck hurt like hell, but the scream of the overhead alarm was sweet music to his ears.
No one charged through the door to silence it. No one came in to kill him. “Duncan! Duncan!” he faintly heard Carrie hollering from her side of the door. “You’ve done it!”
40
* * *
As Daggett turned onto the George Washington Memorial Parkway it became immediately clear to him not only that Lynn Greene would be delayed by unexpected bridge construction but that he, too, was about to slow to a crawl. Having left the congestion at the bridge behind, he focused instead on the snarl of vehicles up ahead and was reminded of the recent August afternoon when Bob Backman had lost his life. He wasn’t driving a company car, so he lacked any form of communication, as well as a police bubble, both of which might have served him well, though he wasn’t sure how. In a progression of events all too familiar to any urban driver, distances between vehicles shortened, as did tempers. A chorus of discordant car horns, like white-plumed steam whistles, vented some of this anger. Windows rolled down; heads leaned out. Brake lights flared, blinking in matching pairs, bleeding toward Daggett like a string of Christmas lights, as he, too, found his foot tapping the brake, continuing the chain reaction.
Traffic stopped.
The multicolored necklace, of which his van was but a single bead, lay dormant on the hot pavement, alive, impatient and anxious, restlessly surging forward but without any measurable progress. And whereas the last time he had found himself in this same predicament and had taken several minutes to make his move, this time he hesitated only long enough to force his van through gaps left by unwilling neighbors and onto the freshly mowed grass, where he subsequently abandoned it.
Of the thirty minutes he had given himself at the start of this journey, he now counted only twelve remaining. He had not gone for a run since the morning of discovering Duncan’s abduction two days ago, and this painful reminder of his son’s perilous condition served to lengthen his strides and increase his pace. He ran faster
than he had in ages, even fully clothed as he was. Within minutes, he was jumping dividers and crossing lanes, precariously dodging the hazards of moving traffic, the industrialized section of the airport just ahead. He saw the sign for Federal Express. He saw AVIS and HERTZ. He high-jumped a low steel fence on the run, slapped a car on the hood as it nearly hit him, and ran against traffic. He could just make out the sign for Quik-Link Courier, a hundred yards away.
41
* * *
This time, when Kort examined the wind sock, high above the hangars, he noted with satisfaction that it, too, reflected the change in direction he had first observed out at the gatehouse. Monique, with her position as a vice-president of In-Flite, was to have escorted him onto the field through one of the four vehicle entrances to National’s tarmac. Knowing that she had been a subject of the FBI’s investigation, he could only assume that those at In-Flite would be well aware of the chaos she had caused, and would more than likely detain her for authorities were she to show herself there. However, as she had been quick to point out, at National she was something of a fixture with the gate guards, coming and going as many as several times a day. The possibility that the FBI would have contacted the subcontracting security companies at both airports seemed slim, especially given Kort’s “death” the night before. Nonetheless, the possibility remained, and so, as she drove up to National’s remote east gate, Kort’s hand remained fixed to the butt of his weapon.
“Hi, Charlie,” she said, rolling down her window. Kort unfastened his seat belt and prepared to use the weapon. Monique stopped him with a casual touch.
“New car, Miss Cheysson,” he said.
“Mine is in the shop.”
“Even so, you don’t have a sticker.”
She handed the guard Kort’s guest identification tag and he looked it over, handing it back. “He’s okay. But I don’t know about the car,” he said. “You’re supposed to have a sticker.”
Hard Fall Page 35