Deadly Dozen: 12 Mysteries/Thrillers

by Diane Capri

  The other man looked unconvinced.

  “What? You don’t think there are any lady FBI agents? Don’t you watch TV? They’re everywhere on the tube. It’s the latest thing.”

  “I suppose. It’s just that she looks so …”

  “Small?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “Who gives a shit about that?” the man answered, his gun still poking Kristin in the back. “It’ll make her that much easier to control.”

  Kristin could see immediately that the man stationed inside the conference room was the one she was going to have to work on to get out of this mess. He was barely older than a kid, and he seemed much less sure of himself, less hardened, than the other guy.

  She turned to him and said quietly, “It’s not too late to put a stop to whatever it is you’re doing here. No one has gotten hurt yet—”

  The man standing behind her laughed. “Oh, really? That’s a good one. Tell that to the two dead security guards or the two FAA guys who rolled up to the gate just before you and died about ten seconds later. Tell that to the electronics technician cooling in a pool of his own blood right now. You have no fucking clue what’s going on here, missy, so just shut your friggin’ mouth before I blow your pretty head off. One more dead asshole makes no difference to me whatsoever.”

  Kristin’s blood ran cold. The man was dressed in a torn and filthy – and bloody – security uniform, which he had undoubtedly taken off one of the guards he had killed, so presumably he was telling the truth about the other dead as well. That meant these people had murdered at least five innocent men tonight. This changed everything. They had nothing to lose and thus could not be reasoned with. What could you offer a person like that?

  Nothing.

  She decided to try a different tactic: to gather a little information that she might be able to use to her advantage later, assuming she lived that long. “How many of you guys are in here? Is it just the two of you?”

  The man behind her said, “Shut up. You’re not in charge here; we are. The only reason you’re still alive is because we can use you, but if you piss me off, I’ll shoot you in the back of the head right where you stand. One shot. End of pretty FBI agent. We can do what we need to do without you, so don’t go getting the idea that you’re going to stay alive just because you’re a cute little thing wearing a Windbreaker that says FBI on the back.”

  Kristin swallowed hard and said nothing.

  “That’s better, baby,” the man said mockingly. “Now, let’s do a little business, shall we?”

  She didn’t answer, so he continued. “We know that you need to coordinate with your superiors and notify them that everything is hunky-dory up here in the sticks before President Cartwright’s plane enters Boston’s airspace. Do that now.”

  With mounting horror, it dawned on Kristin that the armed invasion had nothing to do with this facility, at least not specifically. It was all about Air Force One. These men were part of a much bigger plot involving the president.

  Shaking her head, Kristin said, “Come on, guys. Be reasonable. You know I can’t do that.” She smiled at the man in black and then turned the same reassuring, high-wattage smile on the man standing behind her.

  He stepped around her and moved to the conference table, his gun never wavering. It was now pointed directly at her chest. With the pistol, he gestured at the cell phone hanging in a leather holster at her hip. “Make the call.”

  She locked eyes with him. “I can’t do that.”

  He nodded, taking two steps forward and then stopping. He was now standing directly in front of her, invading her personal space. He smelled of sweat and blood and death.

  Kristin refused to look away. “I can’t do it,” she repeated.

  Without another word, the man lowered his gun and shot her in the knee.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  Nick was back in the technicians’ equipment room, searching with increasing desperation for something to use as a weapon against the man holding Larry hostage in the ops room. He had abandoned the ETG training room is disgust and backtracked, not knowing what else to do.

  As he dug through the stockpile of tools and equipment, his gaze fell on a soldering gun, propped in its stand with the metal tip used to melt lead sticking straight up in the air. If Nick could get close enough, maybe he could use it to burn the man, but although it would certainly be painful to the guy, the soldering iron would not even come close to providing the kind of knockout blow Nick needed. If anything, it would probably just piss the man off, and he’d kill Nick slowly and painfully, instead of shooting him between the eyes.

  He shook his head. The soldering gun was definitely out.

  A pile of screwdrivers lay heaped in two big bins, one containing the standard, slotted kind and the other filled with Phillips head models. These looked a little more promising. Nick found several of both types of screwdrivers that were heavy and at least twelve inches long, clearly designed to allow the technician access to hard-to-reach areas. Maybe he could use one of these.

  Still, Nick knew that the odds of him taking down an armed terrorist with a screwdriver were slim. Even if he was able to get close enough to bury the tool in the man’s head or neck, a possibility that seemed unlikely, what were the chances he could hit the exact spot he needed to incapacitate the man? Especially since he didn’t have any idea where that spot might be.

  The basic problem was the same as it was with the soldering iron—he could probably inflict some damage on the man, but it would likely not be enough. Nick knew he would get only one chance. Once the advantage of surprise was lost, the fight would be over quickly.

  A utility knife lay open on a workspace, its one-inch blade exposed. Whoever had been using the tool had never retracted the blade when he was finished with it.

  He closed his eyes and pictured himself plunging the razor-sharp blade into the neck of the terrorist and realized that as tempting as the utility knife appeared to be as a potential weapon, it suffered from the identical problem as that of the screwdrivers: he would have to be much more precise than he was capable of in order to have any chance of success.

  In the hands of a competent fighter, the utility knife or any of the other tools he had considered may have been able to subdue the terrorist in the TRACON, especially when combined with the element of surprise. But Nick knew he was far from a competent fighter. The last time he had even been involved in a physical altercation was in fifth grade when he had been thoroughly whipped on the playground. By a fourth grader.

  Frustrated and afraid, Nick’s temper boiled over. He thumbed the metal switch to retract the blade on the knife, then turned and threw it as hard as he could at the back wall. It thumped into the opaque tarp hanging from ceiling to floor that was being used to segregate the construction zone from the rest of the room and fell harmlessly to the floor. The knife clattered onto the ceramic tile a couple of feet from Harry’s lifeless body.

  Nick stared at Harry, overwhelmed by a feeling of desolate hopelessness. What had been done to the older man was horrific, brutal, the ultimate violation. Suddenly it seemed of utmost importance to cover him, to take some action to lessen the obscenity that had been perpetrated upon him. Eventually his body would be found, and the thought of countless investigators, all of them disinterested strangers, seeing this quiet, kind man lying on the floor where he had been brutally hacked to death, so horribly exposed, dried blood crusting the tile around him, seemed like an insult to the man’s memory. He deserved at least a little dignity.

  Nick knew that he had bigger issues to worry about, things that at the moment were far more critical than some lame attempt at preserving the dignity of a man who was beyond caring about his appearance. Maybe this suddenly seemed so important because Nick was exhausted and the situation taking place just one floor above him seemed so utterly bleak. He was fresh out of ideas about how to handle the terrorist, so perhaps this was just a way for him to avoid dealing with the terrifying reality of the p
resident’s plane being shot down, with the corresponding likelihood that he would also be a casualty, another lifeless corpse leaking blood all over the federal government’s property.

  Regardless, whatever the reason, Nick could not ignore the growing feeling, the compulsion really, that he needed to cover Harry. It was risky, sure, because if a terrorist were to reenter this room and see Harry’s body covered with a shroud, it would be clear that someone was here, that there was a person running around the building unaccounted for. The terrorists would undoubtedly begin searching for him and would find him easily. The only reason he had avoided capture this long was due to the simple fact that they were unaware of his presence.

  Still, what was the likelihood that they would return to this unimportant room tucked away on the ground floor? As far as the terrorists were concerned, they had eliminated the only potential threat: the technician who had been working down here. There was no one else alive in the building that they were aware of, and their focus was going to be on the radar room, especially now that Air Force One had to be getting very close to Boston’s airspace.

  The risk seemed relatively small, and Nick could not shake the feeling that it was critical he take care of Harry. He looked over at the tarp hanging just a few feet from the body. It would be perfect to drape over Harry, so he would not be on display like some gruesome Halloween decoration for everyone who came through here to gawk at when this nightmare was over.

  Time was of the essence. He should not be wasting what precious little of it he had left by worrying about Harry, who was beyond help. But to Nick, that lifeless, desecrated body represented every horrifying second that had passed since he saw the three men walking down the hall.

  His mind was made up. Nick grabbed the utility knife and walked two steps to the tarp. Reaching as high as he could above his head, he sliced the heavy plastic in a horizontal line, stopping and sawing through the reinforced seam at each edge. The large piece of plastic drifted down, momentarily covering Nick and making him look like a poorly conceived Halloween ghost.

  He turned and draped the tarp over Harry’s body, choking off a sob as he did so. It was more than big enough to cover the entire area, including the puddle of blood that had worked its way a couple of feet in every direction from Harry’s chest.

  Nick knelt beside the body, now fuzzy and indistinct under the makeshift shroud, a shapeless lump on the floor. “I’m so sorry,” he whispered, knowing the words were hopelessly insufficient but unable to stop himself from saying them.

  For some reason, Nick felt better, more at ease, which was crazy. His situation was no different than it had been a few moments ago; it was worse, in fact, because as he had been caring for Harry’s body, the clock continued to tick. The president was now a little bit closer to Boston and a date with a Stinger missile, and Nick, Larry, and Ron were undoubtedly a few minutes closer to being massacred themselves.

  Still, Nick felt irrationally calm and clearheaded. He stood and turned toward the door, and as he did so, his gaze swept across the construction site that had been cordoned off and concealed by the plastic tarp.

  He stopped in his tracks and did a double take, then stood perfectly still and stared, frozen in wonder. Among the tools and supplies stored neatly on a rudimentary table made up of a two-by-eight plank placed across a pair of sawhorses was the weapon Nick had been searching for.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  Larry’s hands were shaking so badly he wasn’t sure he would physically be capable of taking the handoff Boston Center was attempting to give him on Air Force One. As the high-altitude facility controlling traffic over all of New England, plus a portion of New York State, Boston Center was the last link before the BCT—Boston Approach Control—in the air traffic control chain that had begun working the giant Boeing 747 from the time it began taxiing for departure at Andrews Air Force Base.

  Giving and taking handoffs on airplanes in the NAS—the National Airspace System—was almost entirely an automated affair, especially at busy, high-density facilities. In order to transfer control of an aircraft to another facility, or to another sector within his own facility, the controller simply made a keystroke entry and then manipulated what was known as a “slewball,” similar in design and purpose to a computer-game controller, to move a cursor across the radar scope to the target representing that airplane. Then he would simply punch a button on the keyboard, initiating the radar handoff.

  The target would begin flashing on the receiving controller’s radar scope and would continue flashing until the receiving controller used his own slewball to move his cursor to the target and press the button on his own console. The target would stop flashing on the receiving controller’s scope and would begin flashing on the scope of the controller initiating the handoff, indicating that the receiving controller was now prepared to accept separation responsibility for that airplane. The handoff was then considered complete, and the airplane would be permitted to enter the receiving controller’s airspace. Communications transfer would follow.

  It was a simple automated procedure that controllers performed hundreds of times during the typical workday, so ordinary that to seasoned radar controllers it was as natural as taking a breath of air. See a flashing data block, observe the digitized radar target and recognize the airplane, and take the handoff.

  The controller initiating the handoff would instruct the pilot to contact the receiving controller on his or her specific radio frequency. When the pilot checked in on that frequency, the controller would issue specific instructions to ensure the separation and sequencing necessary for that airplane to depart, land, or transit the airspace.

  Taking a handoff. Simple.

  But not for Larry, not today. Operations Manager Don Trent, First-Line Supervisor Dean Winters, and at least one representative of the FBI or the U.S. Secret Service were supposed to have arrived in the facility by now to oversee the operation. None of them had shown up, which could mean only one thing—they had been stopped by the other terrorist, the one who had duct taped Ron to his chair and then left the room. It was inconceivable to think it could be a coincidence; that they had all run into traffic or overslept. Not with Air Force One flying into Boston. Screwing up in that way was a career ender in the FAA and undoubtedly even more so in the FBI or Secret Service.

  Larry wondered if any of them were still alive or if they had simply been murdered and disposed of, and his hand began shaking even more. He could feel the irresistible force and sheer brutal power of the gun pressed against his neck just under his ear. The terrorist stood behind him now and seemed nearly as tense as Larry, although Larry didn’t see how that could possibly be the case.

  He heard the man whip a cell phone out of a pocket and punch a key. Moments later he said, “It’s time … Yes. Ten minutes.”

  It would take approximately ten minutes for Air Force One to reach the point in Boston’s airspace where the terrorist with the gun was insisting Larry vector it. The president of the United States had roughly ten minutes to live.

  Larry rolled his cursor out to the target representing the president’s airplane. Normally the data tag corresponding to an airplane read something like ABC123, which represented aviation shorthand for ABC Airlines Flight 123. Air Force One was represented in air traffic control facilities everywhere simply as AF1.

  The cursor reached the target, still flashing patiently as the data block moved steadily toward Boston’s airspace, and Larry stabbed at the button that would alert the Boston Center controller that Boston Approach Control was accepting the handoff on Air Force One. He missed the button entirely. He tried again and managed to strike the button, but this time the cursor wasn’t placed directly over the target, so nothing happened.

  “Damn it,” Larry muttered softly.

  The man rapped the gun against the side of his skull.

  Bright colored lights exploded in Larry’s head. It felt as though he had been clubbed with a baseball bat.

  “Do it,”
the man commanded, his voice a harsh rasp.

  “I’m trying,” Larry answered desperately, wondering what it would feel like when the bullet crashed into his skull and began making scrambled eggs out of his brain. Sweat flowed freely down his face, and he vaguely registered the sound of heavy, ragged breathing, realizing dully that it was his own. He thought of his wife and two children and wondered if he would ever see them again, and if they could ever forgive him for contributing to the assassination of President Cartwright.

  One more attempt at taking the handoff. This time the cursor reached its intended destination and the flashing stopped.

  Air Force One entered Boston Approach Control’s airspace.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  The floor rushed up to greet Kristin, and she could feel blood staining the leg of her new dark blue pants, which had set her back nearly a hundred bucks. Now these pants are ruined, she thought crazily for a second, before a rolling wave of intense pain overwhelmed her, blotting out everything else, beginning at her right knee and radiating outward.

  Kristin was childless, but she had it on very good authority that the worst pain a human being would ever endure was that of childbirth. If that was really the case and bearing children was even worse than this, then she decided she was definitely out.

  When the terrorist demanded she call her team at Logan and tell them everything was okay here, she had known immediately that refusing to do so would earn her some sort of negative reinforcement—you didn’t have to be an FBI agent to figure that one out—but this was much more than she ever expected.

  She gasped and sucked in a breath through clenched teeth, trying to maintain consciousness in the face of her body’s rebellion against the sudden trauma inflicted upon it. She looked up from the floor and saw a man looming above her. It was the man who had shot her, and he was telling her something she could not make out, in a voice that seemed unnaturally reedy.