‘A house. In McLean, Virginia. Edgar’s house, to be precise.’
‘Who the hell is Edgar?’
‘It’s a nickname, after the puppeteer and ventriloquist Edgar Bergen. He had a show on American television many years ago.’
‘So who is it?’
‘The man who once controlled your government. A man who now spends his time surrounded by secret service agents tending the rose bushes in his garden, in McLean, Virginia.’
‘I don’t know who you’re talking about —’
‘He’s the man who conceived, funded and managed 9/11. Your last vice-president.’
**
46
Atlantis is close. Judd balances on the Loach’s left skid, one hand clasped to its front strut, the other to the doorframe, a hook held in each. Shirt pasted flat against his chest, he bows his head against the blast of freezing air.
He turns and nods at Corey in the Loach’s cockpit. The little yellow chopper dips towards the expanse of white thermal tiles on the top of the shuttle’s fuselage.
Ten. Six. One metre away. The twin viewports in the roof of Atlantis’s flight deck are right in front of Judd. He leans to look inside, can’t see anything through the reflection off the glass. He shifts position to get a better angle, tries again.
Rhonda. She sits in the second row of the flight deck. Alive. The relief is overwhelming. Judd wants her to look up, to see him, to know he’s there. She doesn’t. There’s no way she can hear the chopper so there’s no reason to look up.
He nods at Corey, who gives him a thumbs up and moves the Loach lower. The skids kiss Atlantis’s soft thermal-tile skin and Judd swings the left hook down.
It slams into a tile, slices down until nothing but its shank protrudes. He pulls on it. It seems to be wedged in tight. ‘Seems’ will have to do. The moment of truth has arrived. He has no reservations. Seeing Rhonda has only strengthened his resolve.
Judd lets go of the doorframe and drives the second hook deep into the shuttle’s thermal-tile skin, a foot to the right of the first. He pulls on it. It’s tight. He grips both hooks as hard as he can then rolls onto the shuttle’s fuselage.
The air instantly catches his chest, pushes him up. His head whacks the underside of the Loach. The hooks squirm in the tiles. Judd uses all his strength to lever himself downwards, his cauterised wound aching from the effort.
Both hooks rip free and Judd is swept backwards —
He slams both hooks down as hard as he can, drives them deep into the tiles. He stops dead and his arms jolt. It feels like his shoulders will pop their sockets. He pulls himself flat then raises his head, sees the viewports are now three metres away. Three metres!
He twists the right hook from the tile, slams it down at an angle. It bounces off. ‘Come on!’ He swings again, angles it. It cuts into the tile. He drags himself forward. He yanks the left hook free, lunges forward, drives it down. It slices into the tile and he wrenches himself forward again.
**
‘You seriously believe the White House was involved in 9/11?’
Henri regards Rhonda. ‘Just the one with the power, the one pulling the strings. Edgar. His president didn’t know, didn’t understand much of anything, as it turned out. He was kept in the dark to maintain plausible deniability.’
‘How could you possibly know this?’
‘The same way I found out who hired us for the job in the first place. I followed the money.’
It hadn’t been quite that simple. Dirk and Nico had kidnapped an upper-level manager at the Department of Defense and tortured him until he gave up his access codes to the encrypted files on the DoD servers, after which he was killed, his severed body parts dumped in the Potomac and, surprisingly, never found. Even with unfettered access to the servers it took six months of forensic investigation before they could locate the funds that bankrolled 9/11. It had cost just over three hundred and twenty million dollars to stage and they traced it to the office of the vice president.
‘So you’ve done all of this, to what, kill someone who used to be the vice president?’
‘Not kill. He won’t be at his house in Virginia. He’s travelling to South-East Asia today. Only his family will be present.’
‘You don’t want to kill him?’
‘I want to take away his life without killing him. I want to destroy his community, his home, his family, irradiate it with something terrible that can never be washed away, deliver him a sadness he can never escape, just as he did to me and so many others.’
Rhonda looks incredulous. ‘You blame this man for your wife’s death, yet you’re about to do the same thing to God knows how many others.’
‘What I will do pales in comparison.’
‘But still, why do it?’
‘Because the truth must be known.’
‘Come on, don’t dress it up as anything other than revenge.’
‘Of course it’s revenge, but it’s more than that. The world must know what happened and the man responsible must be held accountable for it. If innocent people are hurt along the way, well, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.’
‘You’re quoting Star Trek at me? Seriously?’
He can’t help but smile. It’s like arguing with his wife.
‘And why use my shuttle? Why not just fire a missile at his house and be done with it?’
‘Because it must be a grand gesture so people take notice. And what grander gesture is there than destroying the space program, one of the few institutions your country still has pride in?’
‘I gotta tell you this “grand gesture” will be lost on pretty much everyone but you.’
‘No, it won’t, because you will tell the world the truth. You will be my conduit.’ He reaches into the backpack that sits on the chair beside him and extracts a small Sony camcorder.
Rhonda looks at it. ‘You’re going to film me?’
He nods. ‘Then upload it to the net with the satellite phone. It will be online before we reach our target.’
‘I won’t do it.’
‘Oh, I think you will.’ He pulls a satellite phone from the backpack.
She glares at him. ‘I won’t.’
‘Then I will instruct my men to visit your parents when this is over. They live in that little Michigan town near the Canadian border, don’t they? Port Huron. Seventeen Baker Street, Port Huron, if I’m not mistaken. Sky-blue house, one garage.’
Rhonda flinches.
‘You will tell the world the truth, including where all the files detailing Edgar’s conspiracy can be found. And they will listen to NASA’s golden girl, the one who would have been first on Mars.’
‘They’ll know you forced me.’
‘Of course, but they will still hear the truth.’ Henri turns back to the controls.
**
Corey watches Judd drag himself towards the viewports.
The Australian scans the instrument panel. Their altitude is fine. They’ve only just reached 6000 feet and the Loach’s ceiling is over 15000, though the air gets too thin to breathe above 8000 so he needs to watch that. No, his concern is the Galaxy’s acceleration. The Loach is quickly approaching its maximum speed of 225 knots.
They have a couple of minutes at most. After that Corey won’t be able to keep up. ‘Hurry up!’ Corey shouts it, even though he knows Judd can’t hear.
**
47
Rhonda doesn’t know if she believes Henri’s stories of the 9/11 conspiracy but she’s certain of one thing - Martie Burnett did. She had lost her mother when the second plane hit the World Trade Center. Martie might have been one of the smartest women at NASA but she was also deeply Mississippi, southern, where ‘an eye for an eye’ was an accepted form of Old Testament-style justice. Over the years she had sometimes spoken, in vague terms, about taking revenge on those who had killed her mother. Rhonda now understood why.
The ‘get him talking th
ing’ hadn’t worked as Rhonda planned. The Frenchman had talked but he’d also looked at her the whole time. He now stares out the windscreen, seemingly lost in thought. She needs to get him speaking again but not about anything that will make him turn around. She goes with a technical question that, she hopes, doesn’t warrant eye contact. ‘How do you expect to fly this thing through US airspace without getting shot down?’
‘The trick is to be in US airspace for as short a period as possible. We’re going to fly over the North Pole, approach across Canada’s Eastern Territories...’ He doesn’t turn around.
It’s time to straighten, tense, roll. She draws her right arm as far down the flight suit’s sleeve as it will go, straightens it at the shoulder, tenses it and rolls it backwards. The pain is just as she imagined. She reminds herself not to scream and waits for the arm and shoulder to bid each other adieu.
It doesn’t happen. She stops tensing and draws in a rough breath, lets the pain subside. The Frenchman continues talking. She straightens her right arm again, tenses it, rolls it backwards.
It pops out of its socket.
The pain is imperious. Her arm is now at what seems like a 45-degree angle to her shoulder. She bites her bottom lip to stop any sound involuntarily escaping her throat and works fast. Within the suit she drags her right arm back, then up, and bends her hand back to clear the top of the sleeve.
Her wrist gets caught on it because there’s no power in the movement. She pushes again. Bright slivers of pain dance before her eyes.
It flips past the top of the sleeve and drops in front of her stomach. She breathes out, feels perspiration tickle her forehead.
The Frenchman continues: ‘We didn’t have any trouble when we took the Galaxy so I’m not expecting any this time .. .’
Rhonda gives herself three seconds to let the pain subside. One. Two. Three. It doesn’t subside, not even a little. She lifts her hand, searches for the suit’s zipper. Her fingers brush the metal teeth. She pushes her arm upwards.
Grunting. She hears grunting, then realises it’s her. She holds her breath and reaches for the zipper. Her forefinger touches it. It’s large, made of alloy. She hooks the nail over the top of it, pulls down. Another jolt of bright, shining pain. The zipper pull doesn’t budge. She bites her lip harder, tries again. The zipper creeps down the teeth, then gains momentum, slides to her belly.
She pushes her right arm out of the suit. Yes, she’s half-free. Pain pulses through the right side of her body as she wrenches at her left with her right hand. It doesn’t do any good because her dislocated arm has no strength. She scans the cabin, searches for something, anything to cut the plastic tie.
A glint, to the right. She leans to get a better look. Something’s jammed into the crevice between the seat and back of the chair beside her. What is that?
A Fisher space pen. Steinhower’s Fisher space pen, the one his daughter gave him. Just its clicker is visible. He’d misplaced it before he was killed. It seems like a year ago but it’s only been a day and a half. She reaches for it.
Her chair creaks. Her eyes flick to the Frenchman. He doesn’t turn, just keeps talking: ‘... and your country’s air defences are still shamefully porous . . .’
Her shoulder screams. She ignores it. It’s only pain. She stretches her fingers, touches the pen’s pocket clip, coaxes it from the cushions, slumps back into her chair, studies it. She’s never been so happy to hold a writing implement in her life. She thumbs the clicker and the ballpoint nib extends.
‘What are you doing?’
Henri stares at her, his expression dark as thunder.
Rhonda slashes at the plastic tie that binds her left arm with the pen. It doesn’t cut it. The pen is not a knife. She changes tack, rams the pen between her arm and the tie, twists it upwards, grunts as she does it, stretches it.
It snaps.
She’s free.
The Frenchman stands and pivots, drags the Glock out of the backpack, swings it towards Rhonda.
She’s not in her chair. Where is she? The cabin’s not that big —
Silver flashes from behind the pilot’s chair, slices into his shoulder. Ahhh!’
Rhonda had aimed for his throat but the pen is in her left hand so her accuracy sucks. She tries again, slashes the pen in the opposite direction. Henri throws up his left hand, blocks it. She drives the pen down, towards his chest.
‘Fuck!’ It slams into the Frenchman’s sternum, stops dead. She pulls it back, stabs again.
Henri knocks her arm away, aims the pistol at her, finger tight on the trigger. ‘Stop!’ He doesn’t fire. He needs her.
The pen flicks up, hits his chin, cuts deep, drags across his cheek, the pain hot and sour. He wrenches his head away and it slices down his neck towards his carotid artery. He pulls the trigger.
The bullet hits Rhonda in the left shoulder, spins her around. She drops to the floor, lands on her right shoulder, jams it back into its socket. She realises, unhappily, that she brought a ballpoint to a gun fight.
‘I told you to stop.’ Henri stands over her, wipes at the long, stinging wound that arcs across his face and neck. He studies her wound, realises he needs to act quickly. He slides the pistol into his belt line, reaches into the backpack, pulls out the camcorder, opens its screen —
Rhonda flicks up her right foot, nails him in the groin. Henri is instantly wracked with pain and involuntarily doubles over.
Rhonda pushes up with her newly relocated arm and thrusts out her hand, shoves the space pen deep into the soft skin of his throat. Arterial blood gushes and soaks the collar of his shirt as he drops to his knees. He balances there for a moment, with, she is certain, a flabbergasted expression, then slumps to the floor behind the copilot’s chair.
Rhonda stares at his motionless figure in disbelief. There’s no time to process what just happened because there’s too much to do.
She needs to fire the explosive bolts that attach Atlantis to the Galaxy and fly it free. Then she must land it, preferably beside a hospital because she’s not feeling too great.
She pulls herself up - then her head swims and she slumps back to the floor, eyelids heavy. She wants to take a nap. No, she needs to take a nap, right now, except she knows that if she falls asleep she will never wake.
She pushes herself up - but doesn’t even rise an inch. When her head hits the floor her eyes are already shut.
**
48
Judd drags himself up to the twin viewports and peers in. Rhonda lies on the floor of the flight deck, her shoulder a bloodied mess. What the hell happened?! A minute ago she was fine. His stomach turns over. He needs to get inside now.
Instant white-out. He can’t see anything, then the cloud passes and he looks inside again. A body is slumped behind the pilot’s chair. It’s the French guy from the launch. He’s dead, no doubt.
Judd lets go of the right hook, pulls the pistol from his belt. The freezing air buffets him, pushes him off the side of the fuselage. His cauterised wound screams. He grabs the right hook again, stabilises himself, presses the weapon’s muzzle onto the right viewport’s glass panel and pulls the trigger.
The panel doesn’t shatter or break. The bullet just buries itself in the silica-impregnated glass. He grits his teeth and fires into the same spot again. Same thing happens. He pulls the trigger again. Click. No more bullets.
‘Christ.’ He releases the weapon and it’s swept away in the air-stream. He grabs the right hook, twists it out of its tile and swings it at the glass panel. It bounces off. He swings again. It bounces off. He is going to get inside, no matter what. He swings again.
**
Corey watches Judd slam the hook against the viewport like a man possessed. He can’t get in. Sparkling blue catches the Australian’s eye. An ocean glimmers on the horizon. He thinks it’s the Gulf of Carpentaria, but he’s not certain. It’s not far away, a couple of minutes’ flying time at most.
He gla
nces at the Loach’s instrument panel. Altitude is 7500 feet. The Galaxy’s gaining height as it burns fuel and lightens its load. That’s not what worries Corey. It’s the acceleration. Within a minute the jet will reach the Loach’s maximum speed and he will no longer be able to keep up. His eyes flick back to Judd. He continues to smash the hook into the viewport. He’s got sixty seconds to get inside or Corey’s going to have to drag him off.
**
‘No!’ Rhonda forces her eyes open. She takes in the viewports above her. A blur, then something hits one of the glass panels. Then again. She blinks.
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