The Kill Shot

by Nichole Christoff

  Compared to the creep we’d left near the ticket counter, this guy’s suit and trench coat were completely different. That’s to say, rather than black and tan, they were blue and beige. The sunglasses, though, were the same.

  So was his silent stare.

  “Who is he?” I asked Philip. “Scotland Yard? MI5? Is he going to pull Barrett off that plane for what he did to Dalmatovis?”

  “He’s the devil incarnate.” Philip’s fingers tightened around mine. “Listen to me. That man’s very presence means the case has altered—”

  But Katie was already in motion, out of the cart and assisting Armand from his seat. Ikaat clambered after her father, her chest rising and falling as if she might hyperventilate. Barrett took her arm.

  “Jamie,” he called, “we’ve got to go.”

  I couldn’t look at Philip anymore. I hopped from the cart. I just didn’t get very far—because Philip hadn’t let go of my hand.

  “Jamie,” he insisted. “Don’t go.”

  Now, I couldn’t bear to look at Barrett. I was sure he’d heard Philip. I could feel his stony expression from where I stood.

  “Look at your compatriots,” Philip reasoned. “The old man is dehydrated at the very least, and Dr. Oujdad is in shock. I’ll take all of you to a safe house. In a day or so, I’ll charter a plane and send you to the States myself.”

  But delaying our trip for even a minute would be too long, according to my father’s reckoning.

  And after all the dangers we’d encountered, it would be too long according to mine.

  I shook my head. “I have to get on that plane.”

  Philip pulled me to him, pitched his voice too low for Barrett to hear. But the note of panic in it reached me loud and clear. “Then let them go. Jamie, I implore you. Stay with me one more day.”

  I glanced over my shoulder. Katie and Armand were halfway down the gangway. Not so steadily, Ikaat followed them close behind. Barrett, though, remained at the on-ramp’s door. His features had settled into that impassive cop’s mask. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking as he watched me with Philip, and after all he’d done in London, I had no idea what he was feeling.

  But I didn’t need to be psychic to read Philip’s mind.

  If looks could kill, the glare Philip shot Barrett would’ve murdered him on the spot.

  “Jamie, tell me you don’t prefer Lieutenant Colonel Barrett to me. Tell me you won’t join him on that plane.”

  But I couldn’t tell him that.

  “Listen to me, Jamie. I’m in love with you. Doesn’t that mean something to you? Don’t I mean something to you?”

  Of course he did.

  “You and I are two of a kind.”

  But there’s Barrett, my traitorous heart whispered. What about Barrett?

  “Stay with me,” Philip insisted.

  Frustration? Guilt? Both pushed me to the point of tears.

  “Jamie, you don’t understand—”

  “Mr. Spencer-Dean.” The twin of the Anonymous Man had left his post by the window. He glided past us like a ghost. “It’s final call.”

  His pronouncement got my rear in gear—even if it couldn’t straighten out the knot in my heart.

  I tore my hand from Philip’s. “I’ve got to go. I’ll call you when I reach Virginia.”

  Without another word, I left Philip’s side. Without a backward glance, I boarded the plane. Somehow, I found my seat. And as our Boeing 777 rumbled down the runway and climbed through the stratosphere, I tried to turn off my brain. I tried to block out my feelings.

  I’d done the right thing by getting on this plane. I knew I had. I had a professional responsibility to Katie and Ikaat, to Ikaat’s father and my own.

  In the heat of the moment, Philip had asked me to shirk that.

  But that wasn’t what bothered me.

  No, I had to face facts. It was Philip’s desperation that had rocked me to my socks. But why? Because I didn’t love him? Because my track record with love and marriage suggested I couldn’t love anyone? Or because I might be in love with someone else?

  Without wanting to, I glanced at the seat in front of me—and the back of Barrett’s blond head.

  The plane hit its cruising altitude. I snatched a magazine from the pocket in front of me and flipped through it restlessly. I was too antsy to read, too wired to snooze.

  In the seat beside me, Ikaat dozed in an unsteady sleep. I wondered if she was dreaming of America—or having a nightmare. Past her, against the window, her father rested with his eyes closed and his mouth open. In the row ahead of us, Katie’s head was bent over her smartphone. I only hoped she had the thing in airplane mode.

  Next to her, on the aisle, Barrett remained still. Until the FASTEN SEAT BELTS sign blinked off. Then, with a word to Katie, he rose.

  He stepped into the aisle, crouched beside my seat. “What did your friend Spencer-Dean have to say?”

  “What?”

  I hadn’t thought Barrett heard the words Philip had meant only for me. I hadn’t thought he heard Philip plead with me. I hadn’t—

  “You told him about the house outside Cambridge, didn’t you?”

  “Oh, right.” Something akin to relief had me huffing out a breath. “He said he’d look into it.”

  Barrett frowned. “So, to translate, he already knows what’s going on there.”

  “You know, you make an awful lot of accusations against a guy who’s helped you out a time or two. He’s the reason you’re on this plane and not in a holding cell.”

  “Yeah, he’s also the reason I look like I walked into a swinging door.” Barrett touched a finger to the black bruise under his eye. “Think about it, Jamie. That’s not some private citizen camped out in that country house. Not with all that heavy hardware.”

  “You’re saying the British government snatched Ikaat’s father? To what end? To convince Ikaat to stay in England?”

  Barrett shrugged.

  I rolled my eyes—in part because in his apartment, I, too, had accused Philip of maneuvering to keep Ikaat in the country. But that was ridiculous. He wouldn’t do such a thing.

  He and I were two of a kind.

  “When we touch down,” Barrett warned, “don’t be surprised if we’re met at the plane.”

  I nodded. I’d already figured as much. A combination of State Department officials and CIA suits would want to welcome Ikaat the second she stepped onto American soil. And they’d want to whisk her to a secure location for questioning as soon as possible. They’d be good to her, of course. But I doubted it would be anything like she’d imagined the welcome to her new homeland would be.

  “There’s one more thing,” Barrett said. “When we reach Dulles, I’m done.”

  Done. The word made my mouth run dry. But then my temper flared. Because Barrett had chosen a shitty time to tell me he wasn’t interested anymore. Just as Philip had chosen the shittiest moment to profess his love. In short, each man had ambushed me. And ambushes were rarely accidental.

  But then Barrett’s hand covered mine. I realized I was clutching the armrest in a stranglehold. And that he hadn’t meant goodbye at all.

  He said, “I’ll have to report in. There’ll be a debriefing, but your father won’t expect anything more from me after that.”

  I thought of my father. Of how he’d sent me to London and cut me loose once the going got tough. Of how any communication between us would’ve ruined his precious plausible deniability. He’d had very specific plans for me the night he’d visited me at my townhouse. I could see that now. Now that Barrett had proven his abilities, my father would have very specific plans for such a smart and able soldier, too.

  I said, “You don’t know my father very well.”

  “I don’t need to.” Barrett’s thumb stroked the back of my hand. “It’s his daughter I’m interested in.”

  Anything I might’ve said got swallowed up by a groan and grind that tore through the aircraft. Beside me, Ikaat jerked awake. Leaning ac
ross her father, she pressed her face to the window.

  When she turned to me, her eyes were as round as cat’s-eye marbles.

  I peered across her and along the airplane’s wing. Smoke, black and billowing, poured from the jet engine at the wing’s tip. While I watched, the engine’s casing ripped open and blew away. The turbine’s blades stuttered and stopped before flying loose to slam into the fuselage again and again. The plane shuddered with the repeated impact—and it wobbled without its fourth engine.

  And I wasn’t the only one to notice.

  Throughout the cabin, frightened passengers buzzed like scared mosquitoes.

  With a click and a whine, the public address system snapped on.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We’ve had a slight malfunction to one of our engines, but with our three remaining turbines, we’ll reach Reykjavik safely and easily. From there—”

  A second explosion drowned out the rest of what he said. And then a third. The plane pitched and dipped. Passengers screamed. My ears popped as we plunged. Overhead panels popped open. Oxygen masks dropped down to dangle in front of our faces on their clear plastic tubes.

  I fumbled with mine, fighting to get the thing over my nose and mouth like every safety demonstration had shown me. Barrett’s hands, quick and light, helped me adjust the elastic strap. Grateful, I flashed him a thumbs-up before turning to help Ikaat. Her face was as hard as a death mask. Her hands plucked at her seat belt.

  The flight attendants gave up on the PA system. They moved through the cabin, bellowing instructions.

  “Seats and trays in the upright position!”

  “Brace your feet firmly on the floor.”

  “Fold your arms across the seatback in front of you. Rest your forehead against them.”

  Because we were going down.

  They never said it.

  But everybody knew it.

  The wind screamed past the windows as if we were on a runaway freight train. My nails dug into the headrest in front of me as I braced for impact. The plane bounced as its belly struck an ocean wave. And then came the full body slam of the aircraft meeting the sea. The impact rattled every bone in my body.

  After an eternity of bounding over the surf, the plane slowed. It settled at a funky angle—as if the nose and opposite wing were pointing to Davy Jones’s locker buried beneath the waves. I made the mistake of glancing out the window.

  Sky met water at an awkward horizon line.

  For one endless second, there was deathly silence throughout the fuselage. Until everyone exhaled at once. Then no one could stop the wails and cries, sobs and laughter.

  A flight attendant fought her way against the tilt of the aircraft to reach the emergency exit door a couple rows ahead of where we sat.

  Barrett left his seat to help her. Levers thrown, he kicked the door open with the sole of his boot. Like a thirsty dog’s tongue, the emergency slide unfurled from the plane to lap at the water below.

  Some passengers scrambled for the door. Others cowered in their seats. The flight attendants spread out, trying to control the chaos.

  “Remove your shoes. Leave your possessions behind.”

  “Proceed in an orderly fashion.”

  “Quickly, now. Step to the emergency exits.”

  Over the detritus of lost magazines, crushed soda cups, stray footwear, and scattered shopping bags, I herded my party toward the yawning door where Barrett was helping frightened people onto the rubber slide.

  His hand closed over my arm. “You and Katie go first. Get the Oujdads into the same raft as you.”

  “I’m not leaving you here!”

  “I’ll be right behind you.”

  But he wouldn’t be. Not while there were people to help. I knew him well enough to recognize that.

  I’d stay, too, but first I waved Katie to the threshold. At our feet, the slide swayed from side to side. Far below us, black rivulets of the coldest waters cut through the blue sea, and a yellow raft bobbed like a weather buoy.

  Katie clutched my sleeve. “I have to tell you something—”

  “You can tell me in Washington. Take care of Ikaat.”

  Barrett and I grasped Katie’s arms, physically persuaded her to drop to the slide.

  Once she was safely in the raft, Ikaat urged her father to go next. It took all three of us to steady him as he stepped from the plane. His face was as gray as ash—like he was on his way to a massive coronary.

  His daughter followed him willingly.

  “Your turn,” Barrett said.

  I began to protest, realized the last of the passengers had abandoned the plane on other evacuation chutes. That left me with only one thing to do. I crossed my arms over my chest and stepped out into the buffeting breeze.

  My stomach dropped to my toes as I fell from the aircraft’s emergency door. The slide met me at an oblique angle. It scooped me up, shot me down. I fought the urge to scream. Before I could plunge into the sea, the chute brought me up short. The hands of my fellow travelers—strangers before this moment—reached for me. They guided me to a seat in the raft.

  The pilot might’ve planned an emergency landing in Reykjavik, but Iceland’s shore was nowhere in sight. Everywhere I looked, I saw only the Boeing’s rafts—bobbing on the open sea.

  And there was a lot of sea to be seen.

  Our raft rocked on the water like a hobbyhorse. To make matters worse, the North Atlantic wind stung my face, wormed its way under my life vest, and sliced through my cashmere sweater. I felt cold and I knew I’d feel colder.

  Under these conditions, none of us would be able to live out here for long.

  Not even a fit woman in the prime of her life like me.

  For the others, it was worse. Armand Oujdad’s gray face had gone pale. Ikaat’s own fingers were blue where she clung to his hand. I slanted an arm around her. With chattering teeth, Katie huddled close to me.

  Barrett, his cheeks red from the raw breeze, emerged from the slide. He crossed the bobbing raft like he’d done this kind of thing a dozen times before. As a highly trained military police officer, maybe he had.

  He said, “Stay low, out of the wind.”

  He shrugged out of his jacket, wrapped it around Armand while we all hunkered down in the bottom of the boat.

  Katie blinked up at me with her sky-blue eyes. “This is all my fault.”

  I didn’t know how she could say that. She wasn’t a saboteur—and sabotage had brought our plane down. I was certain of it. It was the only way to explain the multiple explosions and catastrophic fail of three of our four turbines.

  “I just want you to know I’m sorry,” Katie said, fumbling with her cell phone.

  Her apprehension was just this side of panic.

  I tried to soothe her. “Katie, sweetie, I don’t think you’ll be able to get a signal out here.”

  Katie wasn’t looking for a signal, though. She was looking for a photo. She flashed me a picture of a capable-looking blonde in her early thirties with a wide smile, a dusting of freckles across her nose, and a familiar string of black pearls ringing her throat.

  “This is my sister, Jamie. I swore I’d do anything for her. Anything. You can understand that, can’t you?” Her eyes burned, as with fever.

  Well, I’d been fool enough to do anything for my father. Now, here I was, lost at sea and pretty darn convinced my life might end this way. I patted Katie’s arm, tried to tune out her babbling.

  She insisted, “Ikaat understands. Look what she’s done for her father. She couldn’t leave him in the hands of those people.”

  Katie rattled on. I did my best to ignore her. I tried to occupy my mind by keeping watch over Ikaat and Armand.

  Barrett, in the meantime, kept watch over the waves.

  Two hours into our ordeal, he sat up straight. Then he stood, turning himself into a signal on the desolate sea. I followed his line of sight to the horizon—and saw a ship growing larger there.

  “It’
s the Coast Guard!” someone shouted.

  But the U.S. Coast Guard hadn’t come to rescue us. We were too far from U.S. shores for that. Thankfully, though, we weren’t beyond the reach of the U.S. Navy. The navy had sent a mammoth destroyer to find us. And her name was the USS Speedwell.

  Chapter 24

  Many of my fellow travelers burst into tears when they caught sight of the Speedwell. Others sobbed once we were safely below her decks. Ikaat didn’t shed a tear until early the next morning when we docked in Hampton Roads, Virginia.

  After a hot breakfast that left me feeling like I could take on the world, Ikaat went up on deck, walked to the rail of the hulking ship with me.

  There, with the Atlantic Fleet’s less-than-picturesque shipyards spread in front of her, she said, “Jamie, is this America?”

  “This is part of it.”

  She silently surveyed the crusty concrete dry docks built by the hands of men, the salt marshes to the south that stank with the odors of low tide, and the mudflats where long-legged shorebirds picked out a living in the sludge.

  “It is beautiful,” she said.

  And she wept.

  Not long after that, a State Department contingent came to meet us, just as Barrett had said they would. Only instead of meeting us in the hustle and bustle of an international airport terminal, a detachment of diplomats came aboard the Speedwell with all the ceremony of a visiting delegation. Roger was among the suits that were all too eager to smile and shake hands with everyone. He’d clearly arranged every aspect of Ikaat’s official greeting, including the promise of continued care and a trip for Armand to the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, via a Life Flight helicopter.

  Armand would be all right, the ship’s doctor had assured us. But the doc had kept him in sick bay after the Speedwell, true to her name, had quickly plucked us from the ocean. Fifty-nine of our fellow travelers had been treated and released for bumps, bruises, a sprained wrist, and whiplash—but it was exposure that had taken its toll on Ikaat’s father. And I doubted the rough days and frightening nights he’d spent in England had helped.