The sun had traveled beyond the horizon now, pulling the last glow of solar radiance from the sky. Twilight began its brief presentation, with the scent of night close behind. The jet appeared more ominous in this light, more like a living thing that killed to survive.
Absently keeping his hand on the prop’s nose cone, Allen maneuvered to the other side of the Piper, made an insincere attempt to examine a propeller, then broke away and strode for the Cessna. He tried to appear casual—just a fellow pilot admiring a beautiful flying machine, or airport security ensuring satisfaction with the accommodations. He’d have to decide which he was if he happened to be challenged before he could tamper with the jet’s entry door—thereby becoming a threat, aka the new player. He pulled the gauntlet from under his Windbreaker and held it against the side of his upper leg. He cringed at the gravel crunching loudly under his feet.
Now that he was close, he tried to appear “sneaky, malicious, and knowledgeable”—Julia’s words again. He bent his knees a bit and glanced around quickly, thinking these things fell under the “sneaky” category. He hoped he’d only have to rattle the door latch and run; no problem—what ten-year-old hadn’t done that? If that didn’t stir whoever was inside—Oh Lord, let it be a pilot, not Atropos—he wasn’t sure what he’d do. Rattle-and-run was one thing; it was something altogether different to slap on a deer suit and tromp down to the watering hole during hunting season. He tucked the gauntlet back inside his Windbreaker. Nerves would have him extracting and replacing it every ten seconds if he let them.
He skirted around the jet’s fiercely pointed nose and found himself standing in front of the closed door. He turned the latch, and the door sprang open, a portion hinging up, a section with built-in steps coming down. An air-conditioned breeze blew past him, tinged with a faint sweet fragrance—aftershave or overripe fruit. The interior was dark except for the grayish-blue strobing he’d seen through the windows. He leaned in. A galley with sink and cupboards sat opposite the door. The cockpit to the left. Leaning farther, he saw the cabin was set up like a studio apartment. He took a step up. The strobe came from a big plasma TV on the back wall. It was flashing through channel after channel, waiting for just the right show to appear, but no one was watching it. The plane was too small for hiding places. Allen knew that some pilots turned on lights or radios or other electronics when they left their unhangared planes to give the appearance of occupancy. A channel-changing plasma was something new, but he
supposed it was effective. But why would a security-minded person leave the door unlocked? Only one reason came to mind: because he had stepped out for only a moment, maybe just to the GA building for a vending machine snack or newspaper.
He backed off the step and crouched to look under the plane toward the general aviation building and terminal. No one in sight.
He stood and went into the plane. The light from the TV was enough to guide him to a small desk, where a laptop computer, a printer, and scattered papers lay. His heart shrank in his chest, a painful movement that left him hyperventilating. Printed on the top page was a picture of Julia, a brief description printed underneath. Scratchy, handwritten notes in the margin: pistol—under left arm, tactically evasive, carries duffle—why? He pushed it aside and saw his own picture, from his driver’s license. Dr.—will mend wounds? Major ties to Chatt. Next: a picture of Steven. Big, strong—tae kwon do? Hesitant—weakness? The next page appeared to be a work order or invoice. Under the word Objectives, their names and one item were listed numerically:
1. Julia Matheson
2. Allen Parker
3. Stephen Parker
4. Memory chip (see desc.) and any known copies Then:
Package price, $500,000. All or none.
Warning: Other teams involved; well trained, well armed. Bonus, $20,000/per.
Next to the last line was a handwritten notation: Kendrick Reynolds.
Kendrick Reynolds. Maybe the old man was right—a shared enemy made him a friend. Kendrick had “teams” involved. To find Julia, Allen, and Stephen? To stop Atropos? He scanned the sheet. No addressee. This plane could belong to Atropos or another of Litt’s hit teams or both. One thing was clear: someone other than Kendrick Reynolds wanted them dead.
A toilet flushed.
That minijet-engine sound familiar to every post-diaper human in the developed world.
He looked back toward the plasma, past it to a small alcove, where a door opened.
He grabbed a handful of papers and bolted for the exit. Something crashed behind him, then something else. His head cracked against the top frame of the opening. He ducked under, fell, missed the steps completely, and landed on the tarmac, wrenching his shoulder, pulling muscles in his back. The papers blew out of his hand and whipped away. He scrambled under the plane, came to his feet, and ran.
Like an auditory shadow of his own footsteps came the rhythmic footfalls of his pursuer, close. He bolted past the Piper Saratoga. He swerved around another plane and sprinted with all his might toward the third hangar. It sounded as if the man behind him slammed into a plane, crashed to the ground, and returned to the pursuit, all in the space of four seconds.
Allen flashed under the Airplane Crossing sign and promptly crashed into a mechanic who’d stepped into his path from between the hangar doors. Before he was ever really down, he was back up again, the mechanic still rolling and hollering.
Past the first hangar.
One more and he’d—
A bullet slammed into him. No noise—just the pinpoint force of a locomotive. He went down, hitting a patch of oily tarmac face-first, feeling gravel bite into his flesh, gouging deep furrows and ripping away a two-inch slice of beard.
I’m shot! shot! shot!—the only thought wailing through his head like a siren.
His lungs burned for air, his mouth gasped in vain. Finally a dusty cloud roiled in, at once relieving and torturing his lungs. His spine felt crushed. He tried to move, and did—but not well and not without a giant’s hand painfully squeezing his torso.
He cursed the bulky Kevlar vest under his clothing.
This thing doesn’t work!
He screamed and got his legs under him. He leaped forward. The gauntlet spilled out, and he knocked it aside in a mad scurry to put distance between him and his would-be killer. Fire radiated between his shoulder blades, but he pushed it aside.
Run! Just run!
Pounding behind him …
Then nothing.
The gauntlet must have slowed him. Yes!
Then he realized: his pursuer had stopped to aim. Allen zagged to the right, then veered left. He heard a plunk against the hangar by his shoulder, like a rock tossed at it. Not a rock, he knew: a bullet. He was almost at the alleyway between the hangars, wondering if he’d make it down the narrow corridor without being picked off, when he saw light slicing the twilight from an opening in the hangar doors. That was the way. Shut the doors behind him. Of course, it would have a lock or latch or something …
He made for the opening.
Almost there …
Another bullet punched him in the back. His face hit the edge of the door. He bounced off, hit the ground, rolled to push himself up.
The impenetrable bulk of a gauntleted arm encircled his throat and yanked him up.
sixty-four
Julia heard a scream and had just followed Stephen into the alley through the hangar’s side entrance when the big sliding door in front clattered as if someone were pushing it open. She stopped in her tracks, holding on to the door.
“Stephen!” she called. “He’s in here!”
Then she was back inside, dodging around planes and taking an infuriatingly circuitous path toward the front.
He’s all right, she thought. He made it back.
Shortly after Allen had left, it became too dark to maneuver safely through the hangar, so she had flicked on the overhead lights. Now she watched for approaching shadows on the painted gray floors. She expected to collide with
Allen at any moment. She cleared the last plane and froze solid.
Outside the big doors, illuminated only by a strip of pale light, Atropos held Allen in a death grip. Allen’s head was yanked backward, his arm twisted grotesquely around his back, where Atropos gripped his wrist and hair in one black fist. The killer spun to glare inside, jerking Allen around like a doll. His other hand clutched Allen’s exposed neck.
Dressed in black that faded into the darkening night, his skin white in the hangar’s glow, Atropos resembled Julia’s nightmare vision of Dracula—if Dracula needed vision correction and a comb. He smiled at her, a victorious grin. She fought the urge to back away.
Then he moved—maybe it was no more than a twitch—and she knew he was about to make his escape.
She raised her gun, centering the sights on his forehead. He stared back into her eyes.
Allen was gagging, strangled. He rolled his eyes toward her, and she realized that he was not gasping for air; he was trying to speak. He mouthed the words silently.
Stephen ran up behind her.
“Stay back,” she told him.
His heavy breathing seemed right at her ear.
Movement—Atropos’s arm shot out and pulled the hangar door shut.
She couldn’t fire, not with Allen out there. She ran to the door. Sounds came from the other side. The squeal of a hinge, rattling metal. A lock! She pulled at the door. It wouldn’t budge. She listened. Silence. She backed away, aimed at where she thought the lock was, fired. A second later, two holes ripped through the sheet metal. Atropos was shooting through the door. She spun away.
“This way!” Julia shouted, retracing her route to the side entrance. She pushed through into the alley beyond. She was on her second bounding stride when muzzle flashes erupted from the front of the alley. Bullets zinged past, rattling the metal walls as they struck. No gunfire. He was using a sound suppressor and subsonic rounds, the same rig he had the night before. If it was outfitted with a laser sight, he hadn’t turned it on.
She returned fire, aiming high. She wanted Atropos to think twice about shooting at them, but she couldn’t risk hitting Allen.
Stephen crashed through the door.
“Down! Down! Down!” she yelled.
More flashes and explosions as their enemy shot at Stephen. He bounded off a wall, landing heavily on the ground.
She laid down cover fire, hoping Atropos would believe he was in jeopardy of being hit. She looked back and saw in the brief light of the closing door Stephen sprawled in the dead center of the alley. He wasn’t moving.
“Stephen?” she growled, panic cinching her throat.
“Yeah?” Low, quiet.
“You hit? You all right?”
“We can’t just lie here. He’s got Allen. We gotta—”
He didn’t finish. She heard scraping against the concrete, the faint rustle of clothes. A shadow shifted to her right, moving past.
“Stephen—!”
Thu! Thu! Silenced gunfire.
Bullets sailed around them, punching holes in the metal walls, tearing chunks out of the wood fencing that sealed the alley behind them. The deafening reverberations seemed to last forever.
Finally Stephen whispered, “I’m okay.” He was just ahead of her, on the ground. “He’s trying to pick us off.”
“We can go over that fence behind us, try to come circle him.”
“He’ll see us.”
She thought about their options. She ejected her spent magazine and replaced it with the one she kept with her shoulder holster.
“Why isn’t Allen fighting?” he asked.
“Atropos had him in a death grip,” she said. “He may have passed out.”
“Or he’s already dead.” Stephen’s distress was obvious. He was on the verge of doing something rash.
“If we rush him, then we all die.”
He said nothing, then: “I’m going over that fence. You stay here. He can’t cover us both.”
“Wait a minute.” She watched the disappearing rectangle of near-black at the head of the alley.
“What?”
“Just a sec.” She tossed the empty magazine against the opposite wall, fifteen feet in front of their position. There was no response from their attacker. She stood and began walking slowly forward, keeping to one side. “Keep your eye on that door,” she whispered, indicating the hangar’s side entrance. She moved faster up the alley.
Near the end of the alley, she moved out from the wall in a wide arc. She pictured the area to her left: the tarmac in front of the last hangar, an open space leading up to the parked planes, then the jet. To her right, far past the hangar she’d just exited, were the terminal buildings and … She didn’t want to think about what else they might find crumpled on the ground before the hangar doors. Atropos would be on the left. She braced herself for action as more and more of the area on the left side of the opening came into view.
Fully expecting to find the assassin pressed like a malicious shadow against the hangar wall, she poked her head out of the alley, drew it back in fast. Clear. Hesitating only slightly, she glanced in the other direction. Despite their situation, some of the tension she’d been holding in her neck and shoulders drained away—Atropos had not deposited Allen’s twisted body on the tarmac. She found hope in that.
She signaled for Stephen to join her. When he had, they stepped into the open together. They saw it at the same time—
The Cessna.
Beyond the parked planes, it was taxiing over to the runway.
“Oh no!” She was too shocked to say anything else.
Stephen said it for her: “Allen! Atropos is taking him!”
She ran—not directly for the plane, but straight out from the alley, parallel to the jet. She would cross the tarmac and meet up with it at the runway. Far off to her left now, it would have to come back in her direction to take off. She tried not to think, only to run.
Amazingly, Stephen kept pace, then actually pulled ahead. The jet’s speed increased as it turned onto the runway. Neither of them saw the wide expanse of grass that separated the parking and maintenance tarmac from the runway. Stephen hit the edge of it first and went down in a tumbling mass of dirt and grass and groans. Julia hurdled him and pushed harder. She was on a direct trajectory to intercept the plane in about twenty seconds.
She squeezed her fist, feeling the gun. The jet picked up speed fast.
She wasn’t going to make it. She leaped over a runway light and hit the pavement just ahead of the jet. In seconds it would pass.
Do something!
She leveled her pistol and sent a volley of lead into the cockpit windshield. Little plumes of glass dust marked her direct hits—
Then it streaked by: whining jet engines piercing her skull, gusts of turbulence slapping her face.
She ran after it … ten yards … twenty … No use.
“Nooooo!” she wailed. She watched it become airborne, grow smaller, and disappear.
sixty-five
Pain … blinding … screeching …
Unbearable.
Allen’s right shoulder felt as though a knife had been plunged into it. Flames of agony fanned out from it in hot waves, causing perspiration to erupt from his pores, drenching his hair, stinging his eyes.
He slowly swung with the movement of the jet. Handcuffs ripped into the flesh of his wrists and lower hands as the weight of his body attempted to slip his hands through the cuffs, slung over a hook in the cabin’s ceiling. Streaks of blood ran down his arms. He would have used his legs to support himself had they not been hog-tied and pulled backward by a rope that looped around his neck. Relaxing his legs, allowing them to droop, pulled the noose tight against his trachea. So, through the maddening pain, through the bouts of light-headedness, he held up his legs.
But nothing compared to the excruciating pain in his shoulder. Atropos had nearly wrenched his arm off when he’d seized him outside the hangar, yanking and twisting it high behind his head. C
ertainly, he had torn it from its socket. Delirious, Allen pictured an anatomical chart showing the head of the humerus pulled free of the glenoid cavity, the rotator cuff crushed, the coracohumeral ligament snapped. Meticulously detailed, those charts were coldly indifferent to the suffering they described. Dangling by his arms now was like probing a gunshot wound with a shovel.
The heavy punching bag Atropos had knocked from its hook in order to hang Allen like a side of beef rolled lazily across the carpeted floor toward him. He squeezed his eyes shut and gritted his teeth. He braced himself for the jolt of fresh pain that would ignite within his shoulder when the bag bumped his knees, which were, he guessed, about six inches off the floor. After a minute, he opened his eyes to see that the bag had reversed directions and was resting against what looked like a black body bag. Vero, Allen thought. He remembered hearing that the assassin had taken the corpse.
His abduction and bondage had been a blur of murky images, viewed through ripples of pain and fear and confusion. Atropos’s iron stranglehold had discouraged, through immediate piercing agony, all attempts to break free and rendered him a puppet under the assassin’s control. He’d heard the hangar door slam … gunshots … then nothing. Atropos must have knocked him unconscious, for the next thing he knew he was flying through the plane’s portal like a piece of luggage … Time stuttered … then a body fell to the floor beside him: no, it was a punching bag … Cuffs sharp against his wrist, feet tied …
Can’t breathe!
… a noose! How long had it taken for him to realize that it was the weight of his own legs strangling him? It had finally dawned on him, even before full consciousness. When his head had cleared, it throbbed—and told him he was in big trouble.
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