by David Wind
COPS, SPIES & P.I.’S
David Wind
Four thrillers to take you on a journey from the past to the present, through the worlds of terrorism and serial murder, espionage and noir mystery.
Contents
THE HYTE MANEUVER
THE SOKOVA CONVENTION
THE MORRISY MANIFEST
ANGELS IN MOURNING
Author’s Notes
About the author
Available Novels by David Wind
Previous Novels by David Wind
A listing of David Wind’s previous novels is at the end of this eBook Edition, along with the author’s notes and bio. [Click to view]
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
To Bonnie and Terry V., my die-hard proofreaders
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NEWSLETTER
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All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2016 by David Wind.
All novels contained in COPS SPIES & PI’S are a Copyright © of David Wind.
The Hyte Maneuver
By: David Wind
This is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and events are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, places or incidents are coincidental and not intended by the author.
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This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
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Dedication
To Bonnie M—for all the usual reasons and so many, many more.
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Acknowledgements
Without the willing help of the following people, this novel could never have been written. To these people go my deepest personal thanks arid appreciation: Detective Sergeant Joseph Clabby, NYPD retired; Dr. Melvin Swartz, Professor of Clinical Psychology. retired NYPD Officers; from the R. Bruce McLane Security Agency: Bruce McLane, Frank Knowles, Dennis Crosby, Mike Villare, and Susan Collins; Mark Breithaup, Investigator, Rockland County Medical Examiner's Office, and a special acknowledgment to a man on the Job, at One Police Plaza, who wishes to remain anonymous
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What They’re Saying about The Hyte Maneuver
ALA Booklist (American Library Association)
“...This excellent thriller is enhanced by the careful detail with which police investigatory procedures are described, by the presence of a sharp protagonist in Hyte, and by more than a few clever plot twists....” —WL
KIRKUS REVIEW “...Half Thriller, Have whodunit, not half bad... Nicely handled stereotypes, from people to places to emotions.... Biggest asset is Hyte, who wears well enough to become a series hero.”
Author’s Note:
This novel was written prior to many of the developments such as the now extremely common use of cell phones; the cessation of the majority of people smoking, the first bombing of the World Trade Center on February 26, 1993, and the horrendous follow up of September 11, 2001.
What I had begun to write, in 1987, was a novel about terrorists infiltrating the country; however, my publisher did not think terrorism should be the focus of the story, so it became a story of the results of an act of terrorism.
Yet, I did not update the book, because I believe the story itself is even more relevant today, because it could happen today, tomorrow, or at any time.
While reading, it will remind you of just how much the world has changed in the few years following publication of this novel with technological advances and the increase in terrorism.
David Wind
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THE HYTE MANEUVER
Chapter One
TANGIER, MOROCCO, JUNE 1988
It was a clear night, dark and moonless. Humidity gave the hot night air a fetid taste as the caustic salt tang of the ocean mixed with dry desert breezes.
At Tangier’s barely modern airport, the air further debased by burned oil and airplane fuel, was stifling. The darkness girdling the airport was broken by the occasional lights of planes taking off or landing; the sounds of their engines contrasting to the stillness of the Moorish landscape.
Beneath this tarnished Arabian night sky, a lone security guard walked his rounds of the Trans Air maintenance buildings and hangars. The last Trans Air flight of the day, serviced two hours before, sat on the runway, its engines building power in preparation for takeoff. Trans Air Flight 88 was one of three planes that would leave Tangier between now and midnight.
The guard liked this last half of his four-to-twelve shift. The quiet hours suited his disposition. The guard, his tan uniform darkened in inkblot splotches of sweat, reached the white concrete and steel supply-maintenance building just as the engines of the 727 screamed out their fury. Turning, he watched the plane rise into the sky.
Flight 88 was airborne. The guard looked at his watch. On schedule.
He stepped inside the maintenance building. A minimum of light was used at this late hour, just enough to illuminate the gray cement walkways. The air was stuffy, laden with the scent of spilled disinfectant.
Footsteps emanated from the center of the long building; three workers moved out of the shadows and came toward him. The guard stopped. When the workers reached him, they nodded in passing. The guard waited patiently for the three to exit and close the door behind them. Then he punched in the time on his handset and continued toward the back of the building.
The guard took his job seriously, for he enjoyed the benefits that came with it. Work was not easy to find in Tangier, where dozens of men with hungry families waited to step into another’s shoes. Pay did not matter, work did. The guard was smart enough to do his job properly.
Still, he was human enough to allow himself a little latitude. His shift was the least observed, and his sector not considered a terrorist priority. Indeed, there had not been any terrorist trouble at the airport in months—not that he didn’t sympathize with the Palestinians who had lost their homeland and had to strike out in order to regain it. At least they weren’t as religiously fanatical as others.
The guard shuddered. Having lost a younger brother in Iran, he was well acquainted with the stifling oppression of Moslem religious rule.
The guard reached six small and independent storerooms, twenty feet from the rear of the building. He checked the first five methodically, making sure that each door was secure.
At the sixth, he unlocked the door and stepped inside. He put the Detex clock recorder on a waist-high shelf. According to the device, it was eleven forty-five.
He reached behind a pile of towels on the fourth shelf and fished around for a few seconds. A momentary panic rose, ebbing quickly when his fingers touched the cool glass of a bottle. The guard had followed this same routine for the past five years. In three areas of his sector patrol, he’d hidden similar bottles of liquor. He needed those occasional drinks to get him through the nights.
He took a drink, swallowed greedily, and took another before capping the bottle and putting it away. While the alcohol was warming him, he took out an unfiltered oval cigarette, loosely packed with dark Turkish tobacco, and lighted it with a stainless steel Zippo. The lighter had been a gift to his father during World War II.
The high flame, dancing about the cigarette’s tip, gave a ghostly illumination to the small room. From the corner of
his eye, he sensed something not right in the shadows; that elusive something did not register on his senses until he’d snapped the lighter shut and taken in a lungful of smoke.
It came as an afterthought, the impression of a jumbled form in the corner of the storeroom. Reaching out, he flicked on the overhead light.
The guard focused on the corner. At first, he thought it was a discarded tarp. Yet something about the haphazardly placed canvas puzzled him. Soon the reason came. There should be no tarps in this room. And the dark stain? Oil?
A painful memory surfaced. He had gone to Teheran to find his brother. Instead of his brother’s animated and jovial face, he found rows upon rows of shapeless forms covered by white canvas. Dark and random stains marred their uniformity; stains just like those on the tarp in the corner of the storeroom.
Oil glowed black. This was blood.
The guard pulled the tarp back. Bile rose in his throat at the sight he exposed. Two dead men lay naked in a bath of their own blood. He knew them both.
Their heads hung at impossible angles. Their necks slit almost all the way through, transforming the skin between their shoulders and chins into gaping, red-rimmed mouths. Painted in blood on their foreheads was a single Arabic word: Adulterer.
The guard’s stomach convulsed. A thin rivulet of liquor and stomach fluid disgorged from between his pinched lips and struck the cement floor with a flat, wet sound.
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Captain William Haller’s hands manipulated the controls, much the way a man lovingly caresses the familiar curves of his woman. Haller’s breathing was slow and regular, betraying none of his inner tension. His blue eyes scanned the instruments with a practiced glance, noting not what was right but seeking anything that might be wrong.
“Altitude,” Richard Flaxman, copilot of Trans Air 88, said to the pilot.
Haller exhaled. For him, the takeoff was always the tensest part of the flight. “Control, this is Trans Air 88, leveling off to thirty-five thousand feet.”
From forty miles behind Flight 88, came the surprisingly American voice of the Tangier air traffic controller. “Roger, Flight 88. Closest approaching traffic, Pan American Flight Charlie three-six, bearing two-one-seven, five miles east at twenty-four thousand feet. Have a nice trip 88. Good luck, Bill, I’ll miss you. Air Traffic Control Tangier, out.”
The voice belonged to expatriate Toby Mathers. Once considered the hottest jet fighter ace in Vietnam, Toby was now a legless senior air traffic controller for Tangier International Airport.
“Roger that, Control. We thank you. Trans Air 88 out,” Haller said, easing his tense grip on the controls.
Haller’s short-cropped hair fit his weathered face well. He was that rarity among commercial pilots: a captain who insisted upon and received the respect of his crew, in much the same way as a military man.
“How’s it feel?” the copilot asked as he studied Haller from the corner of his eyes.
Haller scratched his jaw with the back of his thumb. “I don’t know yet.”
“I think I’d either be extremely happy, or so damned depressed I’d have to be carried on board,” Flaxman said.
Haller didn’t want to think about it, but he had no choice.
This was his last flight. When he touched down at Kennedy, it would be all over.
At fifty-five, with twenty-two years on the record sheets of Trans Air, Haller was retiring from active flight duty to take over the vice-presidency of Allied Air Freight, the world’s number three air freight carrier. A public relations coup, he thought bitterly. He was a trustworthy and experienced face to sell to the corporate men who made the shipping carrier decisions.
“It’s a good move, Bill,” Wyman Van Pelt, Chairman of Allied Charter said when Haller signed the contract that gave him an annual income of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. “Your name will give people confidence in Allied. And,” he’d added with a smile, “it will also make you quite wealthy.”
The son of a bitch, Haller thought, knowing how cleverly his brother-in-law, Van Pelt, and Haller’s wife had maneuvered him into leaving the airline before he had planned.
“Be right back,” said Flaxman, breaking into Haller’s reverie.
Haller nodded. His eyes flicked to the windshield, watching the reflection of the copilot as Flaxman made his way to the engineering panel. He heard the low sounds of Flaxman and the flight engineer speaking. A moment later, Flaxman laughed, slapped the engineer on the shoulder, and went out the rear of the cabin.
The door closed, leaving Haller alone in the subdued illumination of the cockpit, listening to the chatter emanating from his headset. The sights and sounds mingled together in a smothering reminder that this was his last flight.
He swallowed past the thickness in his throat, unable to stop wishing that this flight would not end. Not tonight. Not ever.
Later, Captain William Haller would remember this wish.
Chapter Two
In the first-class galley, flight attendant Elaine Samson was setting up the drink cart of champagne for the first-class passengers. Behind her was senior flight attendant Joan Bidding. Bidding was crammed into the recesses of the narrow stainless steel flying kitchen, checking over the list of first-class passengers. There were eleven—the entire flight was only forty percent full.
“Two major VIPs,” she said, tucking a stray strand of hair into place.
“How major?” Elaine asked.
“J. Milton Prestone, former senator from New Mexico. The other is Cristobal Helenez. He brought his wife along.”
Elaine nodded. “I had him on a flight from Paris two months ago. Nice enough. We have time for a quick smoke?”
Joan looked at her watch. “Sure.”
Elaine took out a Salem and lighted it. She leaned against the tray wall. Although not tired, Elaine’s insides ached, somewhat pleasurably, somewhat painfully. “God, why do I punish myself with copilots?”
“Flaxman?”
“He can’t just enjoy it; he’s got to go for the Trans Air duration and frequency record. Jesus.”
“That’s the price you have to pay. Are you coming to Haller’s farewell party?” Joan asked.
“I promised Flaxman I’d go with him. It’s really too bad, you know. I like crewing on Haller’s flights.”
Joan smiled, showing the perfect teeth that had been part of the prerequisites when she had applied to the airlines, eighteen years before. She had made the minimum five-foot-six-inch height by two inches. Her weight, at age thirty-six, was the same one hundred and twenty-three pounds she weighed when she’d started with Trans Air.
“How long have you known him?” Elaine asked.
“It seems like all my life. My first flight was on his plane.”
“Does it feel strange?”
“No. It makes me think about getting through the next two years and retiring.”
“And do what?”
“Stay home with the kids. Enjoy them and Ron for a change.”
“And be bored out of your mind,” Elaine said just as a call bell went off. “Time to get to work.”
“Not bored,” Joan Bidding said. “Content, happy, but not bored.”
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The first-class cabin of Trans Air Flight 88 was mostly dark; the late-night snack served two hours before. Now most of the passengers were either reading or sleeping.
The attendants had removed the food trays, served the second cups of coffee, and poured the after dinner liqueurs.
Bill Haller stepped into the first-class cabin. A half hour or so after reaching the midway point in the flight, he left his copilot in charge of the plane. His practiced gaze flicked over the seven rows in first class. A twinge of memory carried him back to the time when first-class seats dominated the aircraft and the powerful men in business and politics occupied those seats. That was before the days of corporate jets that could match the commercial airlines in size and speed.
Of the fourteen first-class seats, eleven held
passengers. Not bad, Haller thought. Earlier, when he had looked over the passenger list, he had recognized several names. Occupying seats 2C and 2D was a man he knew only by reputation—J. Milton Prestone. Just before flight time, Prestone’s private pilot had called Haller and explained the situation that had put the former senator on Haller’s flight: a blown engine oil seal.
In seats 4A and 4B, were Mr. and Mrs. Cristobal Helenez. He had been required to know who Helenez was—after all, the Portuguese financier owned a seven percent block of Trans Air.
Seats 6A and 6B belonged to Jonah and Anita Graham. When he glanced at them, only Mrs. Graham, whom he had never met, was there. The lavatory sign read OCCUPIED; which was where Graham must be.
Over the years, Haller had come to recognize the quiet and dignified businessman who was on no less than a half dozen of his Middle East flights each year. He had learned, on one of those flights that Graham was the president of a specialty mail order house catering to middle and upper income consumers.
Two weeks after speaking with Graham, the first of four annual issues of the Graham International catalogue had arrived at his home. Haller, impressed by the products, had ordered several.
Haller walked through the cabin to the coach section. Looking down the aisle, he experienced a sharpening of the melancholy dogging him since takeoff. He suddenly thought that making his final tour had been a mistake. He should have stayed in the cockpit.
On his left, a little girl sat alone in a window seat. He motioned to a stewardess. “Is she flying alone?”
The stewardess nodded. “Her name is Lea D’Anjine. She’s going to New York to meet her new parents.”
“Adoption?”
“She’s from one of the mission orphanages.”
Haller looked at the little girl and, despite himself, gave way to another memory of the past, when children regularly visited the cockpit. That changed with the advent of the airplane hijacker. It was another of those things Haller missed—seeing the children stare with awe at the instrument panels, and at the pilots.