by Ward Larsen
“Once Tuncay’s identity was nailed down, we redirected ONYX to the other six names from our Iranian forgery mill. We uncovered images of the second pilot, but the quality was marginal and we still can’t confirm his identity. We had more luck with the shooting victims I mentioned in the last briefing. The fatality in Malta was a man named Stanislaus Kieras—former GROM, Polish Special Forces. After leaving the military he took a series of private security jobs in the Middle East, then last year he fell off the grid. The victim in Zurich was Gregor Stanev, a former Bulgarian army sergeant. He also had Special Forces training, and did some recent private security work for the Afghan government.”
“So we’re talking about mercenaries?” Davis prompted.
“Essentially. Another from the list was confirmed as being gunned down in Wangen, Switzerland. So far, we don’t have any leads on his identity.”
“It seems pretty unhealthy to be a part of this little Group of Seven,” Davis remarked.
“Yes. And there’s one other intriguing connection.” The wall behind Sorensen went to a map of Europe with three highlighted circles: Malta, Zurich, and Wangen. “These are the locations of the three shootings. We’re following the investigations closely, and in each case, by either witness statements or surveillance video, there is a rough description of the shooter. We’re almost certainly talking about the same man in all three events.”
Coltrane’s eyes narrowed. “You’re saying one man has killed three of the people on your list—in three different European cities?”
“All in five days.”
“Any idea who he is?”
“This began in Malta, and the man police have zeroed in on there was reasonably well-known. He’d been living there for about a year, working as a stonemason. By all accounts he lived a very quiet life until last week.”
“A stonemason,” the director repeated.
“That’s what they say. He was actually on a job when three or four men—clearly from our Group of Seven—came after him with guns blazing.”
“And he’s been involved in two more shootings since then,” Coltrane surmised, “but nobody can find him?”
“It’s not for lack of trying. Police and security agencies all across Europe are looking for this man, and we’re doing our best to help.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t be,” interjected Davis. All eyes in the room went to him. “We’re busting our butts looking for an airplane that could be used as a weapon of mass destruction. One by one, the seven people who stole it are becoming an endangered species. Seems simple enough to me.”
“You think this man, whoever he is, is on our side?” Coltrane asked.
“I wouldn’t go that far. But clearly there are some parallel interests. Maybe he’ll finish the job for us. At the rate he’s going—what, one every couple of days?—he’ll be done by the end of the week.”
Davis couldn’t quite read Coltrane’s expression, but he thought there might have been an underlying smile.
The director said, “As intriguing as all this is, none of it changes our immediate focus. How goes the search for our missing airplane?”
Sorensen said, “I’ll let Jammer cover that.”
Davis made his way to the head of the table. “We haven’t found our jet, but I think I know why, so I’ve suggested some refinements to our search. We’ve been scouring airports big and small, and our assets are stretched thin. We should concentrate on smaller airfields in backwater countries, but watch them more closely.”
“More closely?” Coltrane asked. “What good will that do us?”
“Here’s my logic. This crash ruse was never going to hold for long. A few days, maybe a week at best. So whatever these people are planning, they’ve got a narrow window—it’s going to happen soon. Once I factored that in, I realized where the ideal place is to hide a big airplane—you keep it in the sky.”
“Is that possible?”
“To a point. We suspect there are two pilots, so they could alternate flying and resting. If it was me, I’d navigate to some quiet corner of the world, a place with lousy radar coverage, maybe near an ocean. Make up a holding pattern, fly at max endurance airspeed, and you could stay up ten, maybe twelve hours between fuel stops. That’s the only limitation. They could land twice a day, spend thirty minutes getting refueled and maybe adding some engine oil, then go right back up in the sky where they’re more or less invisible.”
“How long could this go on?”
“I see only two limitations: something vital on the airplane breaks, or the pilots lose their sanity. A few days would be easy. Maybe a week. But not indefinitely.”
Coltrane nodded as if the idea made sense.
“So,” Davis reasoned, “the way to find them is to narrow things down. You look for long runways in out-of-the-way places, an airport that’s not busy but has the infrastructure to refuel a big jet with thirty thousand gallons of kerosene.”
“Kerosene?” Sorensen repeated.
“That’s essentially what jet fuel is. Of course, you could go to all these places and ask questions. You could talk to fuel contractors and air traffic controllers. But that would take time. Satellites are still our best bet. Wherever we have coverage, we should take pictures of these airfields on a thirty minute cycle—with any luck, we can catch the airplane on the ground.”
“That’s still a lot to cover, isn’t it? How many airports are we talking about?”
Sorensen responded, “My team estimates we’re still talking about a thousand airstrips, and we can’t cover them all on Jammer’s thirty-minute cycle. But we have figured out a way to narrow the search further.”
This was news to Davis, who’d been planted behind a computer for hours. He listened with renewed interest as Sorensen said, “We found an image of our targeted aircraft—it was captured two months ago at the airport in Santarém. This airplane has a unique appearance on satellite, a dark blue paint scheme on the upper fuselage in a pattern that’s distinguishable on most imagery wavelengths. We’ve started filtering for the same scheme.”
Coltrane was about to speak when Davis cut in with, “You didn’t tell me this.”
Sorensen, clearly taken aback by his accusative tone, managed, “Well … it’s something we only came across a few hours ago. You were busy.”
“So busy that you didn’t bother to—” He stopped right there, knowing what he was about to say would do no good for either the investigation or his relationship with Anna Sorensen. Apart from that, a new angle began brewing in his head. Davis got up to leave.
“Where are you going?” Coltrane asked.
“I need to make a phone call.”
FORTY-SIX
In a disturbing new habit, Christine found herself fingering back slats on the blinds of her second-floor window whenever she was alone. She was under strict orders not to do so—according to Stein, the inherent risk was too great. Her inherent fear was more compelling.
She scanned the lawns and sidewalks all around, but invariably her eyes settled on Ed Moorehead’s place. From her upper bedroom window Christine saw the house on a diagonal, framed perfectly between a pair of leafless maples. The light in the central upper window was always illuminated. Other lights in the house came on intermittently, but the second-floor window was constant, day and night. She’d once seen movement behind the slatted window covering, and on another occasion, for a fleeting moment, she swore she saw someone peering back at her.
“What are you doing?”
She let the slat drop, and saw Stein standing in the doorway. She felt like a teen caught smoking a cigarette in the attic.
“I think that’s obvious.”
“Please stay away from the windows.”
She didn’t reply.
Stein shifted to a more conciliatory tone. “Did something alert you?”
“What do you mean?”
“You live here—you’d probably sense something out of the ordinary before I would.”
“No, everything
is fine.” Davy coughed twice. She’d moved his playpen to her room, and he was there now, sleeping softly under a circus-art mobile, clowns and horses drifting over his head. “I heard your phone go off a while ago,” she said. “Anything I should know about?”
Stein began wandering the room. “No, just a call from a friend, nothing to do with my being here.” He paused at her closet and looked inside. “I should have asked earlier, but did David keep any weapons in the house?”
She answered without hesitation. “When he moved in I asked him not to. And before you ask, I’ve never owned a weapon in my life. Wouldn’t know what to do with one.”
Davy stirred in his slumber, and Stein nodded toward the door. They headed downstairs, and in the living room she began picking up toys. “Have you seen anything of my new neighbor across the street?” she asked.
Stein stopped at the dinette and opened his laptop computer. “No, I’ve been keeping a close eye on the place. There’s definitely somebody there, but it seems quiet.”
“The light upstairs is always on.”
“Is that suspicious?”
“I don’t know. I guess it’s the timing that bothers me. He only moved in a week ago, right before … before all this started. And I’ve still never seen the guy.”
“How do you know it’s a guy?”
“My neighbor saw him.”
Stein began helping with the cleanup. He tossed a plastic truck into the toy box. “You never told me that. Which neighbor?”
“Annette next door, the one who watches Davy when I’m at work.”
“Did she get a good look at him?”
“I don’t think so. She saw him in the garage, but it was dark.”
“Too bad. With a good description we might be able to rule him out as our man.”
Christine stood with a stuffed bear in her hand. “I could call and have her come over. You could ask her about it.”
“No, too many complications. Our story is that you’re sick, and her seeing me here would only raise questions. Like I said, I’ve been watching the house—whoever’s inside hasn’t left.”
“Isn’t that odd?”
“Not really. Honestly—the guy we’re worried about wouldn’t rent a house and watch his target for a week or two. The al-Zahari sect is far more direct.”
“Is that supposed to comfort me?” she said sarcastically.
“Relax, Christine. Pretty soon this will all be over. I’ll be out of your life and you can get back to what you were doing last week.”
“Until it happens again?”
Stein walked over and put a hand on her shoulder, an effort to ease her tension. The moment turned awkward, and Christine sensed something wrong. The realization came slowly, like a late-winter sunrise. Something was missing. And she knew what it was.
The other kind of tension.
Christine Palmer was no narcissist. She was also not a fool. She was a decent-looking woman—not in the bold way of a runway model, but a more simple, austere attractiveness. For better or worse—and she’d visited both camps—men found her attractive. It was a part of her life that had largely gone off-radar, suppressed by a tumultuous year in which she’d gained a child and lost a husband. There was still the occasional offer, most recently from Dr. Mike Gonzales, which implied she hadn’t completely gone to pot.
Yet from Yaniv Stein there had been nothing.
Stein was unmarried, that much she’d learned. She was the widow of a comrade in arms. They were two vibrant young people at the crest of life, even if those lives had been battered by a common menace—the Israeli intelligence machine. Discounting the chance of homosexuality on his part—something she strongly doubted—Stein had shown not the slightest trace of attraction. No glimmer of an inquiry, no mildly leading question about their respective futures. Not once had she felt his eyes linger on her nightdress. He never asked if her clogged sink needed fixing. As far as Christine could remember, the steady hand now on her shoulder was the first time he had touched her. She looked at him quizzically, and when the answer came her thoughts stilled like a stopped metronome.
Christine tried to bury the idea, but it only surged back. If she were honest, an idea that had been delivering glancing blows since Stein’s surprise arrival in her life. No, she thought, even before that. It had been born over the last year, conceived by an endless series of unanswered questions.
Was it possible?
Christine stepped back and her gaze came sharp. She saw concern in Stein’s expression.
“My God!” she whispered.
“What is it?”
She didn’t answer at first, not knowing how to say the unsayable.
“What?” he implored.
“He’s alive, isn’t he?”
Stein only stared in reply, her shock seeming to transfer to him. Which was an answer in itself.
“David is alive,” she said accusingly. “He’s the one who sent you here.”
FORTY-SEVEN
Slaton needed to establish exactly what had been in the storage closet. He could think of only one way.
He walked to Geitawi Hospital, and at the main entrance encountered a reception desk staffed by a pair of young women, one of whom was talking on a phone. Slaton approached the other, and said, “I’m looking for Dr. Nassoor.”
The woman replied in the English he’d started, “I’m sorry? Who did you say?” Her accent was heavy, but at least he wouldn’t have to suffer through Arabic.
“Dr. Nassoor,” he repeated. “Can you tell me where to find him?”
“There is no doctor here by that name.” When the second woman hung up the phone, she asked her, “Do you know of a Dr. Nassoor?”
A blank stare, and then, “You mean Moses?”
“Yes, that’s right,” Slaton said.
“I rarely hear him referred to as a doctor, but I suppose that’s what he is. Do you have an appointment?”
“He’s expecting me later this week, but I was forced to move up my schedule.”
“Of course. Basement level, you’ll find his office on the right.”
“Thank you.”
He took the elevator down, turned right, and when he reached the correct door Slaton saw why his question had so confused the women. The name and title were placarded in bold block lettering: MOSES NASSOOR, PHD., HEALTH PHYSICIST. Nassoor was not a medical doctor, but a physicist. Slaton noted radiation warning symbols on the thick walls, and nearby were two treatment rooms fronted by massively heavy doors. If the signs on the doors were accurate, one sheltered a linear accelerator, and the other something called a gamma knife. It was situated here, Slaton imagined, because the machines likely weighed tons, and because the building’s foundation and surrounding bedrock would serve to shield stray emissions of radiation.
He was standing directly in front of Nassoor’s office door when it opened abruptly. A lab coat nearly ran him down, in it a smiling midsized man with shaggy black hair and thick glasses.
“Pardon,” they said at the same time, one in Arabic and one in English.
Slaton edged aside, but caught the name on the man’s hospital ID badge as he passed. Slaton continued down the corridor and turned into a restroom, holding the door ajar with his shoulder once he was out of sight. He waited. Seconds later the elevator chimed, and Slaton heard the door slide open. When it rattled shut, he walked briskly to the stairs and followed Dr. Moses Nassoor.
* * *
They all watched the broom handles snap like twigs.
“You see?” said Tuncay. “I told you it wouldn’t work. We must use something stronger.”
“I am a chemist,” replied an irritated Ghazi, “not a mechanical engineer.”
They were standing in the MD-10’s cargo bay, staring down into the empty holding tank. Ghazi had rigged the clamshell doors so that when they opened the gap would be restricted by three wooden dowels they’d sectioned from a broom handle. The idea was to limit the doors to less than an inch of travel instead of the ful
l five-foot chasm they were designed to provide, thereby metering the dispersal of the solution. The broom handle modification was a complete failure.
“You should have considered this more thoroughly,” Tuncay said, his annoyance bristling through.
Ghazi nearly snapped back, but then relented—he knew there was a degree of truth in the accusation. Directly behind them was the lead castle, a four-foot stack of brick shielding that would protect him when he opened the canisters. Reaching out of that was the pump and hose assembly meant to transfer the primary solution to the main tank. Ghazi had given extensive thought to safeguards, solubility, and agitators, not to mention the dispersal experiments he’d undertaken with the children. Clearly he had not given enough thought to the matter of re-rigging the doors.
It was always the simplest problems that gave the most trouble.
Ghazi circled around the three big bladders in the cargo bay, now filled to capacity with water, and at the forward entry door he descended the ordinary painter’s ladder that took the place of boarding stairs. Tuncay followed him down, and together they padded across the chipped concrete ramp to view the problem from underneath. As they walked toward the airplane’s midsection, both men eyed their surroundings cautiously. They had landed just before sunrise, and Tuncay parked the jet where the other old relic had been only hours before. Exactly where it had been, in fact, its tires within inches of the same placement, and the jet’s nose pointed to within one degree of the correct compass orientation—Ben-Meir had taken pictures of the old Tri-Star when he’d come to arrange its demolition, and even gone as far as to paint reference marks on the tarmac. It seemed a mad idea, to cut up and remove an old hulk in the middle of the night and park CB68H in its place, yet they had gone about it meticulously.
So far it seemed to be working.
“I don’t like it here,” Tuncay said. “It feels too open. I climbed up on the wing at first light and saw a road in the distance. Anyone traveling it can see us as well.”
“We need only one day,” said Ghazi, although not with conviction. “Ben-Meir is certain we will be safe until nightfall.”
