by Dana Haynes
The new driver—another of Calendar’s soldiers for hire, Dyson, also with the look and bearing of a military man—got out without a word. The men opened the truck doors, looked around to see if they were being observed, then transferred the original black boxes of Flight 78 into the newcomer’s truck. Two perfectly identical but fake black boxes went into the first truck.
The drivers nodded to each other, climbed into their respective cabs, and drove away in opposite directions.
Cates opened up a cell phone, hit Redial, and said, “I have the packages.” He disconnected the line, hit the power window, and threw the phone into a field.
LANGLEY, VIRGINIA
“I have the packages.” Click.
In her subbasement listening post, Jenna Scott heard the mercenary’s four words and the click of his disconnect. She punched in a new number. She sent Barry a text: “Alternative packages en route.”
SOUTH OF CRASH SITE
Calendar stood in the bathroom, still naked, and blinked at Andrew Malatesta’s empty case. He felt a red haze behind his eyes, tasted coppery adrenaline at the back of his tongue.
Finally, the sound of gurgling water caught his attention. He frowned, glanced around. The bathroom mirror had been shattered. How? He turned to the case again. It still rested between the wall and the toilet, but the toilet had been ruined, the lid on the floor, the reservoir smashed, water flowing out onto the floor, over his bare feet.
He raised his right hand, stared at the HK. He touched the silencer. It was hot. He’d apparently emptied the chamber, although he couldn’t remember having done so.
He rotated his wrist. Blood trickled down his forearm from a piece of glass the size of a poker chip embedded in the heel of his hand. Huh. He pulled it out, dropped it to the floor.
He inhaled deeply, held it, let it out through his mouth. Again.
He tilted his head to the left, heard his neck pop. Tilted to the right. Pop-pop. He rotated his shoulders, worked out the kinks.
Calendar ripped a towel and bandaged his hand. He picked up all the shell casings, threw them into his luggage. He got dressed, took the ruined attaché case and his luggage to his stolen Chevy Tahoe. He returned to the motel room with a military-grade flare and kerosene. The flares burned so hot, they would leave no forensic trace of themselves behind. He checked the room carefully, looked in the closet and under the bed, found nothing connected to him. He poured the kerosene on the bathroom floor, walked to the door, lit the flare, tossed it into the bathroom, and was pulling out of the parking lot before the first fire alarm sounded.
HELENA
Gene Whitney was supposed to catch a late-morning flight from Helena back to Washington, D.C. One of his principal tasks was to interview the ground crew at Reagan. But that was before the fistfight with the two drunks in the airport bar.
He’d managed to snag a dirt-cheap room in a down-on-its-luck motel near the airport.
Gene woke around 10:00 A.M., found himself lying in his street clothes on top of the thin bedspread, only two hours after crawling into bed, still drunk, still sore from getting popped in the mouth. He had absolutely no idea what the fight had been about. He’d said something or they’d said something, and one side or the other had taken exception to it. Someone had said, “You wanna step outside, dipshit?” and thinking back, blinking up at the popcorn ceiling, Gene was fairly certain he’d been the one to say that. Anyway, he and two locals who were three and three-quarters sheets to the wind already had stepped out by the Dumpster and gone all testosterone on one another. Gene Whitney was a big man. Fat, for sure, but once upon a time that had been muscle and he still knew how to use it. After the two local dipshits had slunk off, Gene returned to the bar and drank until noon.
He rolled over now, feeling his age, and tasted blood on his teeth. One of the locals had gotten in a punch. Just the one, though.
He staggered to the bathroom, pissed, and squinted at himself in the mirror. He’d missed his wakeup call and his flight to Reagan to interview the ground crew.
“Fuck…” he muttered to his reflection, shirt collar up, shirt untucked, bruising around his limp mouth.
He limped back to bed and closed his eyes.
ANNAPOLIS
Renee Malatesta had taken two sleeping pills, which managed only to hold her in an insensate fog of consciousness and limp lassitude that stretched on into the night, minute after minute after agonizing minute.
She must have dozed off in her living room, waking up at 2:00 P.M. with that wonderful, luscious half second of amnesia before she remembered it was likely that Andrew was dead.
She lay on her back, listening to the frogs in the city park, staring at the ceiling. It was a concern to her that she hadn’t cried yet. Crying was natural. Right? She loved her husband. Alas, she didn’t particularly like him.
They hadn’t been living together, but they hadn’t divorced, either. She had had affairs, yes. Brief, cathartic flings. Never with anyone Andrew knew or who traveled in his circles. God knew, when he was in The Zone, she was essentially a widow for weeks. When he was inventing some contraption, some new micro-whatever, he locked himself away for fourteen, sixteen hours at a time, emerging only to eat, use the bathroom, and play soccer. Andrew had solved many intractable problems by mindlessly kicking a soccer ball against a wall, over and over again, his brain a trillion miles away.
All of which was beside the point. Renee loved her husband. And within the next few hours, she likely would receive a phone call announcing his death.
And she hadn’t cried.
Her eyes played about the luxuriously comfortable room, her thoughts, as they often did, turning to the stunning poverty of her youth in Haiti and marveling at where the world had taken her. The bedroom walls were painted a shade of daisy yellow she and Andrew had first seen in the Loire Valley. They had repainted it a half-dozen times to get the color exactly right. The framed photo opposite the headboard showed the two of them, arm in arm, in a winding alley in Toledo, Spain, which reminded her so much of Venice except with steep hills instead of canals.
She squeezed a fistful of the soft, pale-yellow bedsheets, so soft, a thousand-thread count. She turned to look at Andrew’s pillow and recoiled in shock, gasping and rising to her feet, eyes wide, hands squeezed into fists and bunched in front of her throat.
The Colt Pocket Model .25 pistol Andrew had bought her lay on the pillow.
Renee took two steps away from the bed. The small, nickel-plated gun lay on the exact center of the pillow. Like Cinderella’s slipper. But how?
She had no memory of getting it down from its box on the high shelf in her closet. The shelf so high that it required using the step stool from the kitchen. She thought back to the combination of Prozac, Vicodin, and liquor she’d taken last night. Was this their combined effect?
She stepped closer to the bed, paused, bent, and picked up the tiny pistol, the barrel as long as the handle, a little V of nickel-plated iron. Andrew had bought it, against her protest, after a break-in by a pair of meth addicts. That had been more than a year ago. Since the day he’d brought it home, this was the first time Renee had touched the semiautomatic. It was cool to the touch, slightly greasy, although when she rubbed her fingertips together, she realized that was an illusion.
Renee thumbed the release, let the small magazine slide out into her right hand. The magazine was fully loaded. Had it been, before? Maybe. She couldn’t remember.
She retrieved the step stool from the kitchen and returned the .25 to its box on the high shelf.
She went to the bathroom and found the vials of Prozac and Vicodin. She thumbed off the caps, lifted the toilet-seat lid, and stood, for just the longest time, a vial in each hand. After a while, she put the caps back on, lowered the toilet seat, and returned to the kitchen to make a full pot of coffee.
BIG SKY COMMUNITY HOSPITAL
The ER doctors had put Kiki Duvall on whole blood because she’d bled more from the leg wound than she had re
alized. They also offered a morphine drip but she declined, telling them, “I may have to stay sharp.”
Tommy woke up in the adjacent bed with the aid of a penlight in his right eye; his left eye dilated accordingly, which was good.
A young, female doctor asked him the requisite questions. (“My mom? Ah, Ann. She was Ann … Friday. Well, we went down on Thursday. Probably Friday … Other medical conditions? Jesus, a plane just fell on my ass!”)
The doctor determined that his concussion was mild. He was given a private room and sedated.
* * *
In all, eight of the twenty-six passengers and crew survived the crash of Polestar Flight 78. They included the teenage girl with the upper-arm bleeder and the man with the gaping abdominal wound, both of whom Tommy had treated. Other survivors included the woman with the broken ankle, whom Kiki had rescued and Tommy had assisted, and the Middle Eastern man Kiki and someone else had helped carry out of the fuselage.
ANNAPOLIS
Her iPhone rang and Renee snapped it up. “Hello?”
A somber, male voice said, “Is this the home of Andrew Malatesta?”
She dropped to her knees in the middle of the living room. “Yes.”
“Are you a member of the family?”
“Yes. I’m his wife. I’m Renee. His wife.”
“Mrs. Malatesta, my name is David. I represent Polestar Airlines. Ma’am, I’m afraid I’m calling with very bad news. Your husband’s flight? Flight Seven-Eight to Seattle? It crashed last night, outside Helena, Montana.”
Renee’s peripheral vision dimmed. Her eyes stung, they were so dry. Why no tears? she wondered. Why aren’t I crying?
“Mrs. Malatesta, I regret to inform you that your husband died in the crash.”
Renee said, “Oh.”
The line was quiet for a while.
“Mrs. Malatesta?”
“Ooooooooohhhh…”
“Mrs. Malatesta? There’s an e-mail heading your way right now. To the homes of all the families. We’re arranging transportation and lodging for everyone who wants to come to Helena.”
Her mouth fished open but, with no more air in her lungs, the long, low keening noise died out. She slumped back, sitting on her ankles, the long fingers of her left hand stretching down to touch the blond wooden floor, balancing her.
“The e-mail will explain everything. It has my name and number, a twenty-four-hour hotline. There’s a Web site. We are here to do everything in our power to help you in your time of need.”
The caller waited a minute. “Okay. Well … ma’am, our condolences.” And he hung up.
Renee set the phone down gently on the floor. She knelt with her legs under her and steepled her fingers on her lap.
Her eyes were so dry they itched.
WASHINGTON, D.C.
Halcyon/Detweiler’s Infrastructure Subcommittee on Deferred Maintenance met at a mom-and-pop coffee shop in Dupont Circle.
Liz Proctor of the Aircraft Division and Admiral Gaelen Parks (retired) of the Military Liaison Division were already seated as Barry Tichnor entered. Both of them eyed Barry with hostility as he went to the counter and ordered a cup of decaf.
He sat, his thick eyeglasses gleaming.
Parks whispered, “What in God’s name happened?”
Barry poured a little sugar substitute into his coffee and stirred. They waited. “The first field test was a success.”
“Jesus Christ!” Liz exploded, and people at other tables looked over. She lowered her voice and hissed, “Are you fucking kidding me? Seriously? You tested the device on U.S. soil? On a civilian airliner? We don’t have a list of survivors yet but there were twenty-six people on that plane! Twenty-six Americans!”
Barry looked at his spoon and considered using it to gouge out her trachea. But he set it down on a square brown napkin, letting it absorb the residue of coffee and sweetener. “If it’s at all possible,” he said, smiling, “could you avoid using the Lord’s name in vain?”
The others stared at him.
“We have a potential buyer,” Barry said. “It’s a country. An ally, before you ask. They are offering a … hefty sum for the device, if it works. We are looking at what I would refer to as a staggering third quarter, if everything pencils out.”
“India,” Liz said, and got a soft smile from Barry in return. “It’s India or South Korea, but my money says India.”
Barry shrugged. “The point is, the test was a success. The device works. Malatesta spoke to a journalist regarding ways to release his knowledge of this operation to the media. In movies it’s called The Big Reveal. Very dramatic. He was also writing a speech to be given at a technology expo, saying he was giving up his Pentagon contracts and renouncing Satan—that’s us—for experimenting with an illegal device. He hacked into our R-and-D computers. He had rock-solid proof.”
Admiral Parks said, “Oh, damn. Damn, damn, damn.”
“Yes.” Barry nodded. “Damned, indeed.” He took a sip and winced when it burned his tongue. Light danced on the refracting lenses of his thick glasses.
The table was quiet for several seconds.
Liz said, “You’re using…?”
“Someone quite good. We’ve used him before.”
Parks said, “The speech?”
Barry sipped his coffee. “Secured.”
HELENA
The drugs wore off and Tommy Tomzak woke at about 2:30 P.M. on Friday. He slid slowly into consciousness, the firm, comfortable pressure of Kiki Duvall on his left shoulder. She had snuck out of her room around noon and curled up in Tommy’s bed.
She shifted, her thigh sliding across his.
“Hey,” Tommy muttered, his lips as dry as chalk. He blinked a few times and the penny dropped: the flight, the crash, the whole thing. The general sense of dullness that comes only from Schedule I narcotics washed over him.
A headache and dizziness kicked in. “Jesus.”
Kiki kissed his stubbly cheek. “Tommy?”
“Damn, we were…” His vision blurred. “I’m concussed. We gotta get me to a hospital.”
“Tommy, this is a hospital. In Montana.”
He bleared around, realized she was right. “Oh. You okay?”
Kiki leaned into him and reached for the lidded cup on the bed stand. It had a straw. She put it to Tommy’s lips and he sipped the stale, warm water.
“Thanks. You okay?”
Kiki kissed him on the lips. Her face was blotchy and swollen, her dusty red hair a mess, her eyes bloodshot. As luck would have it, her boyfriend’s vision was so blurry from the concussion, he thought she looked beautiful.
“I love you,” he said.
“Tommy? Isaiah didn’t make it.”
He blinked. “He missed the flight?”
“Isaiah died in the crash. He’s dead. Isaiah died.”
“But … No, he…” Tommy’s brain scrambled to make sense of the words he had just heard. “Oh my god…”
Kiki nestled her face in Tommy’s clavicle and cried. He gripped the back of her head in one calloused hand, pulling her close, into his shoulder, and tears poured down his cheeks.
LOS ANGELES
It was not quite 1:30 P.M. Friday, Pacific time, and Ray Calabrese sat in the cafeteria of the Los Angeles field office of the FBI, at a table to himself, coffee untouched and sports page of the L.A. Times open but unread. His foul mood was so palpable, others steered clear of him.
The whole situation with Daria Gibron was eating at him. Ray had met her when she was with Israeli intelligence and had uncovered a right-wing plot to assassinate a member of the Israeli Knesset and blame it on a moderate Lebanese minister. Not knowing whom to trust, she’d turned to an FBI team, led by Ray, in Tel Aviv for a law enforcement conference. The plot had been foiled and Daria had taken a bullet to her abdomen. After recuperating at Ramstein, and knowing that people in her own agency had put a price on her head, she’d emigrated to the States. Ray got her a job translating for Los Angeles’s thriving Midd
le Eastern business community. The job had not been a good fit. To say the least.
During the insanity of the Oregon air crashes, Daria’s actions had led directly to the death of four Ulster Irish terrorists. Her actions had been brave if foolhardy and the FBI had been more than grateful. The bad news: she hadn’t given a damn about the accolades, she wanted to get back into the game.
The FBI had said no. Brave but foolhardy; it worried them. The ATF, on the other hand, liked a little foolhardy. They had an undercover unit working directly with the ultraviolent drug cartels on both sides of the U.S.–Mexico border, trying to cut off the endless river of guns that flow from the United States to the gangs. Daria could pass for Latina and could handle herself in a fight or under the crushing weight of a long-term false persona.
They took her on for a high-risk undercover op. Against the advice of Ray Calabrese’s very strongly worded written statement opposing the move.
As Ray sat in the cafeteria and stewed, Henry Deits, recently promoted to special agent in charge of the L.A. field office, set down a Pepsi and a lemon Danish and pulled out a chair. “Hi, Ray. I haven’t seen you since you got back. How was your vacation?”
Ray folded the sports section and checked his watch. “Fine. I should—”
“And by vacation, I mean: what dumb-ass stunt did you pull in Mexico that has the ATF lobbying mortar rounds into my office?” He took a healthy bite of the Danish and waited.
Ray glowered. Henry continued to wait.
“It’s Daria Gibron.”
Henry Deits moved the paper plate and the pastry six inches to the side, then bent at the waist and rapped his forehead twice against the tabletop.
“What on God’s green earth were you thinking?”
“That operation is a clusterfuck, Henry! The agent in charge is a drug addict. There’s a line in the sand that separates law enforcement from vigilantism, and that unit’s about three miles past that line! If it was just entrapment, that would be unethical and illegal. No, this J. T. Laney character is putting on a road-show production of Heart of Darkness. I’ve investigated. They’re not just planting guns and arresting traffickers. They’re engaging in open warfare! The death toll is rising and Daria is stuck somewhere between live bait and part of a black ops death squad!”