The Last Hostage

by Nance, John J. ;

  The ring of the cabin call chime caught them both by surprise.

  Ken answered it rapidly.

  “This is Annette, Ken. I’m … too stunned and numb to even make much sense, but I have a request.”

  “Sure, Annette.”

  “Well, you turned on the phones a while back and told everyone to make whatever calls they wanted, but when we landed here, the built-in seat phones wouldn’t work. Maybe I shouldn’t tell you this, I don’t know … I’m so damn confused … but you seem to want everyone to know what’s happening …”

  “Your point, please, Annette.”

  “Okay, okay. There’s a CNN correspondent back here about to have a coronary because he thinks he’s got the story of the century and I took all the cell phones away hours ago and the seat phones are out and he says they’re going to fire him, and on and on. If you want him broadcasting, give me back a cell phone or two. There is cellular service here in Telluride.”

  Ken rubbed his temple and closed his eyes momentarily. “I know. We’ve been using one up here. Okay, Annette. Come on up. Knock four times, but don’t forget, in case anyone back there has any ideas about trying to subdue me, I’m still holding this trigger.”

  When Annette entered, Ken pointed to the bag of cellular phones behind his seat. “Take four of them. Tell the reporter to tell the story loud and clear, and if he doesn’t believe us about the pictures, I’ll bring him up here and show him.”

  Kat looked around.

  “Hi,” Annette said. “I am—or at least was—the lead flight attendant, Annette Baxter.”

  “You still are the lead flight attendant, Annette,” Ken said, fatigue audible in his voice.

  Kat extended her right hand. “Katherine Bronsky. I, ah, don’t exactly have a ticket.”

  Annette shook Kat’s hand and leaned over to pull four of the cellular phones from the bag. She stood then, looking deeply troubled, as Ken watched her, convinced her look of utter disappointment was meant for him.

  He diverted his eyes. “I know, Annette. I know,” he said softly. “There’s no way I could ever adequately apologize—”

  “No!” she said sharply. “That’s not what I was thinking about. I … those pictures. You’re serious about those pictures? They’re really hardcore child pornography?”

  Both Ken and Kat nodded simultaneously, and Ken raised an eyebrow.

  “Why?”

  Annette sighed and looked at the ceiling momentarily. “I feel dirty, Ken. I feel dirty because I sat next to Bostich earlier.” She closed her eyes and shivered. “He touched me at one point when you told us to sit, Ken. He pulled me into a seat. Now, finding out what slimy things are in his mind, it makes my skin crawl.”

  Kat nodded agreement.

  Ken drew a deep breath. “You know what I cannot understand? I can’t understand the fact that Rudolph Bostich has a grown daughter named Annie, but he must have at least some memories of her at ten and eleven, as a little girl. How on earth could a father with such memories ever tolerate, let alone possess, pictures like what we found?”

  Kat exhaled suddenly and reached for the cell phone Ken had hooked into the aircraft’s intercom system.

  “What?” Ken asked.

  She began punching in a flurry of numbers before pausing to glance at him, then at Annette.

  “I’ve been sitting here being stunned when I should have been relaying what we found—what you found, Ken,” she corrected herself, “to other agents out there who can start asking the right questions.”

  “You mean, start an investigation right now into his possession of that filth?” Ken asked.

  “Well, yes. But what’s setting off alarms in my head is the unbelievable coincidence here.” She laid the phone in her lap without finishing the number. “To you, Ken, this just confirms he’s a liar. But you may be missing the fact that suddenly there’s an incredible connection between Bostich and Lumin no one knew anything about before now.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Annette was standing in the doorway, listening in silence.

  “Look,” Kat said with increasing excitement. “We know Lumin’s a pedophile with a long record. Pedophiles by nature sexually abuse, molest, or exploit children, and they’re often involved in creating and selling child pornography. Now, the only known connection that existed between Lumin and Bostich before today was the phone call he made to that detective passing the tip that Bradley Lumin was the murderer.” She looked at Ken for a few seconds in silence. “And yes, Ken, I do believe Bostich is probably lying about that.”

  He nodded gravely. “Thank you.”

  Kat inclined her head in response and continued. “Now, everyone assumes that as a U.S. Attorney, Bostich could only have obtained the information about Lumin’s crime through his job. Certainly Bostich could have no personal connections to the sick underworld of kiddie porn, right?”

  Annette was nodding. “Right. Just like with my first reaction, he’s a fine, upstanding, nationally respected U.S. Attorney.”

  “Okay,” Kat continued. “In other words, we would all assume some low-life informer, someone in the witness protection program, someone Bostich would only encounter professionally, had to have whispered in his ear the shocking information about Lumin, which Bostich then passed to the detective by phone. That makes sense. What doesn’t make sense is his trying to hide that fact later on, especially when he saw it was going to destroy the case against Lumin. Prosecutors live for the opportunity to convict, not acquit. However, if there’s a personal angle, some personal involvement in that sick world, then it might make sense that Bostich wouldn’t want a judge asking him questions under oath in a courtroom about where he got the tip that Lumin was the murderer. If he swears he never passed on such a tip, then he’ll have no questions to answer about its origin. So, suddenly, with what you found in his computer, there’s a second connection between the world of Bostich and the world of Lumin.”

  “Which is,” Ken interjected, his eyes wide, “that Bostich may have known Lumin because he buys kiddie porn?”

  Kat shook her head. “I doubt Bostich knew a slimy character like Lumin directly, but the connection is their mutual possession of kiddie porn.”

  Ken sat forward, his eyebrows raised. “Kat, you may not know they also found … the Connecticut police did … a picture …” He stopped and fought for control, diverting his eyes to the floor for a few seconds as he tried to get his voice steady again. “A picture of Melinda while Lumin had her, a picture he probably intended to sell to people as sick as he. They also found other similar pictures involving other little girls, none of whom they identified. It’s all in the record of what they confiscated.”

  Kat sighed and nodded. “No, I wasn’t fully aware of that, but it supports my theory. Lumin was a user, maybe even a provider, of the very sort of sickening smut we’ve just found in Bostich’s computer. Somehow, somewhere, their paths may touch a common denominator, a place, a market, a Web site, an e-mail address … something. Maybe even an individual they both know.”

  Annette shifted her position in the doorway, her eyes on Kat. “Are you saying that since Bostich and this Lumin character like the same filth, even if they didn’t know each other, Bostich may have learned about Lumin from … from someone else involved in kiddie porn? I mean, say he was secretly running in filthy circles like that, and someone said, ‘Hey, Rudy, one of my customers over there did that murder,’ or maybe, God forbid, someone offered him a picture of Captain Wolfe’s daughter, he recognized it, and was able to track it back to Lumin?”

  Kat turned to look Annette full in the face. “Absolutely, Annette. That’s a good theory, in fact. You can see how that sort of connection could easily explain why Bostich would elect to destroy the murder prosecution he, himself, started, rather than admit where he got the information.”

  Ken had turned to the front windscreen more in reaction than to search for air traffic, but the sudden movement of his head to the left caught Kat’s
immediate attention. A huge, gray Lockheed C-130 was in a turn to final approach runway nine, the opposite end of the runway they were occupying.

  “Oh, Christ!” Ken exclaimed as he yanked at the parking brake handle on the center console and shoved the throttles up.

  “Annette? Better go sit down or grab something. I’m going to have to move the airplane.” He reached up and snapped on the FASTEN SEATBELT sign.

  “Are we taking off?” she asked.

  “No, just taxiing fast.”

  Annette nodded and moved back out of the cockpit to grab the P.A. microphone.

  “This is Annette, folks. The captain is repositioning the aircraft, not taking off, but please brace yourselves.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  Aboard AirBridge Flight 90, Telluride Regional Airport. 3:45 P.M.

  As Kat Bronsky watched, the C-130 transport carrying the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team turned toward Telluride’s only runway, the long, straight wings of the powerful turboprop reflecting the afternoon sun with a sudden flash.

  “Ken, what are you going to do?” Kat asked, her eyes on the C-130 as it moved through the final twenty-five degrees of its turn.

  “Deny them the runway, Kat,” Ken Wolfe replied quietly, his right hand already shoving the 737’s two throttles forward as the Boeing began to move.

  The engines accelerated and the 737 began to accelerate, lurching to the left as Ken aligned the Boeing with the runway then reached up and snapped on the landing lights.

  The C-130 was leveling its wings, fully aligned with the runway and heading straight at them, about a mile from the departure end.

  “Call out my airspeed, Kat,” Ken commanded, and she found her eyes latching instantly onto the airspeed indicator, the words tumbling out of her mouth before she could mentally remind herself that a nonpilot wouldn’t necessarily know what he meant.

  “Forty-five knots, fifty, sixty, seventy knots, eighty knots, Ken,” she said. At the eighty-knot call he suddenly yanked the throttles back to idle, letting the 737 continue to roll down the runway, the midpoint coming up fast.

  The extremely bright landing lights of the C-130 now shone in their faces as the big four-engine turboprop hurtled into the last portion of its approach less than a half mile out.

  Ken deployed the speed brake and the thrust reversers as he stepped on the brakes, throwing them forward slightly, the 737 slowing as it neared the halfway point.

  The C-130 was still moving toward them, the two aircraft approaching each other with a combined speed of over two hundred miles per hour, the Boeing blocking all but the first thirty-five hundred feet of the runway.

  “Blink, dammit!” Ken muttered, his eyes on the approaching C-130.

  “Can he land and stop short of us?” Kat asked.

  “Not a chance at this altitude. Too much runway needed. Maybe lower.”

  “What if he tries? Could you get out of his way?”

  Kat saw a taxiway to their right leading to the terminal that looked like an escape route, but Ken was shaking his head no as the C-130 floated across the threshold of the western end of the runway, still bearing down on the concrete surface.

  “I don’t believe it!” Ken cried out. “He’s going to try it. He’s playing chicken.”

  Aboard Gulfstream N5LL, Telluride Regional Airport. 3:45 P.M.

  Dane had called to Bill North to come forward the second it was obvious the C-130 was going to attempt a landing. By the time he entered the cockpit, the 737 had begun moving down the runway in the opposite direction.

  “What have we got, Dane?”

  “A dangerous game, it appears. Wolfe is probably going to try to block the runway.”

  “He’s not trying a takeoff?”

  Dane shook his head. “God, I hope not!”

  Aboard AirBridge Flight 90, Telluride Regional Airport. 3:47 P.M.

  “Ken, they won’t try to disable you, honest. Go ahead and taxi clear. Let him land.”

  “No way! They’re not listening to you any more, Kat, remember? I wish they were. They’re here to attack.”

  She was shaking her head, the image of the C-130 now flaring less than three thousand feet ahead of them filling her mind. “They won’t risk the passengers, Ken.”

  “They’re risking them now!” he said, pushing the power up and releasing the brakes.

  The lights of the big Lockheed C-130 were growing huge before them. The aircraft had to be less than three thousand feet from the nose of the Boeing, the wheels not yet on the ground, the oncoming angle mixing with the bright landing lights in a confusing mix of images that obscured the sudden burst of smoke from the four turboprops as the aircraft commander shoved the thrust levers up and pulled back on his yoke, ordering gear up as the C-130 leapt back into the air.

  Kat had been holding her breath. She saw the C-130 begin to climb and exhaled loudly. Ken, she saw, was once again stepping on the brakes as the C-130 passed safely several hundred feet overhead with a thunderous roar.

  When the Boeing had slowed to a safe speed, Ken swiveled the nose wheel around and turned the 737 toward the opposite end of the runway to watch the C-130 climb out toward Telluride for a half mile, then begin a tight right turn to head back down the valley to the west.

  “What now, Ken?”

  “You had a phone call to make,” he said. “Please make it. I’m simply going to keep taxiing around to keep them off this runway.”

  She picked up the cellular phone with her eyes still glued to the turning C-130 and her mind in a quandary over whom to call. Frank was off the case, but could probably help. Yet, if she called Washington, maybe she could talk them into waving off this stupid assault effort.

  The number of Frank’s cellular was clear in her mind, and she entered it and jabbed at the send button, grateful to hear the sound of cellular circuits obediently connecting the call.

  Frank’s voice answered immediately, and she explained the C-130 first, begging his intervention with their FBI counterparts in D.C.

  “Kat, they consider you compromised and they’re not interested in my opinion either. I’ve tried. I, ah, assume the captain is listening to me as well?”

  She could see Ken nod in her peripheral vision as he worked on taxiing the aircraft and tracking the C-130.

  “He’s on as well, Frank, through his headset. He’s got this phone hooked into the aircraft’s intercom system. Frank, are you wielding a pen near some paper?”

  “Anything you need, Kat.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Just arrived back at our offices.”

  “You have unrestricted use of the normal channels?”

  There was a small snort from the other end. “Of course, Kat, I’m not the hostage under scrutiny. I’m just out of the loop.”

  “Not anymore. Listen closely. I need some creative telephone leg-work and probably computer searching. There’s a new connection between Bostich and Bradley Lumin.”

  She described quickly the digitalized pornography found on Rudy Bostich’s computer, the fact that she had not contaminated the evidence, and the apparent fact that the pictures had been downloaded over a phone line.

  “Jesus Christ! I’m stunned, Kat, and I don’t stun easily anymore.”

  “Frank, can I safely search the database on this computer for tracking information? If I could find an e-mail address or a World Wide Web site, something to track back, it could be the key, but I don’t want to ruin the admissibility.”

  Ken was looking at her suddenly, looking surprised. “You’re computer proficient?” he asked.

  She nodded. “I could have broken that password even faster than you did, Ken. I’m well trained.”

  Frank’s voice was in her ear. “I can’t hear you, Kat. Speak up.”

  She moved the phone back to her mouth, rearranging the cord that connected it to the aircraft’s communication system, and repeated the question.

  “Kat, if what you find now is simply part of a trail that leads us somewhere else,
I believe we’re okay legally. You were right about the picture files. But now that we know about them, this is like finding part of a body on the backseat of a car in plain view. That’s probable cause to continue the search. The pictures found by the captain are probable cause. Go to it.”

  “Great!” she said.

  “What can I do here?” he asked.

  “The number one question, Frank, is how to connect Lumin and Bostich. Could you dive into background checks, home towns, schools, proximity of residences, anything you can think of? Maybe Lumin worked for Bostich as a yardman or something. Maybe they did business with an unusual company and we could track the commonality through credit card records. Maybe the smut they’re buying came from a source on the Web that takes credit cards. Do anything you can think of, while I surf his database and look for any thread to follow.”

  “You’re convinced there’s a direct connection?”

  “Frank, you’re the one who keeps pounding into me the reality that few coincidences really are. If this was a coincidence, it’d be a doozy.”

  “Understood. How do I call you back?”

  She passed the number of the cell phone. “If that doesn’t work,” she added, “I’ll call you back in fifteen minutes.”

  “Kat, since Captain Wolfe is listening, would he consider just shutting things down there and waiting for us to get this down? After all, if we find this connection, we may be able to show Bostich was lying whether he signs a confession or not. I mean, we’re doing exactly what he’s demanded and more.”

  Ken’s voice cut in on the conversation, startling Kat.

  “Look, Frank, I don’t know your last name. This is Ken Wolfe. I’ll be happy to wait if you can get rid of this damn C-130 that’s trying to drop in here. I know they’ve got some sort of assault team on board, and I’m not going to tolerate any commando tricks while I wait for you people to catch Lumin.”

  The response from Salt Lake City was rapid. “I’m going to try, Captain, but you’ve got to keep those people safe and not harm anyone, even by accident.”