Countdown

by Ruth Wind

  Snow fell more heavily now, and she was half-frozen from the drive through the Chicago streets in a broken-down car with a shattered window.

  Her torn and battered ear throbbed. Without breaking stride, she scooped a handful of snow from the hood of a nearby car and pressed the icy ball to torn cartilage.

  As she approached the front doors of the FBI building, a group of men erupted into the parking lot, rushing toward cars and vans. They shouted directions to one another, pulled on gloves, carted cases and rifles.

  All headed, no doubt, for the television station. Kim ducked into the shadow of a truck, watching, her mouth hard. She could tell them that their rush was futile, but they wouldn’t listen to her now any more than they had earlier.

  No, if she had any chance of success, there was only one man for the job—Lex Tanner. She’d believed in him before this morning.

  She spied him toward the back of the group, carrying a metal suitcase. His dark hair was cut very short, the nose surprisingly recognizable from the pictures she’d seen, and he was quite tall. At least six-four. Rangy, lean and muscled, with shoulders big enough to shelter her from the wind.

  As he neared her spot, she stepped out of the shadows. “Lex Luthor, I presume?”

  He started, narrowing his eyes and sizing her up. Recognition washed over his features. “Valenti?” He looked more alarmed than pleased. “Where the hell have you been? I’ve been calling all afternoon.”

  “Long story. Right now, I need you to bring your little bomb kit and come with me to the airport.”

  “I can’t. I’m on my way to UBC. There’s a terrorist—”

  “Yeah, yeah—” she waved a hand “—never mind. That’s not the problem.”

  “They’ve stolen a bomb they’re threatening to detonate—”

  “It’s not at the station.”

  “They’ve got hostages.”

  “I know.” She took a breath. “Look, I don’t have time to explain everything, but the drama at UBC is a smoke screen—the bomb is at the airport.”

  “It’s not there! Don’t you get it? We’ve been over it a hundred and forty-seven times.”

  She pulled out her gun, using her body to shield it from the sight of the others, and poked the barrel into his ribs. “I didn’t want to do it this way, but you won’t listen.”

  “What—?”

  She glared at him. “Don’t make me hurt you, Luthor. I liked you until today.”

  “This is crazy.” He glanced toward the men entering their trucks.

  “Don’t even think about it.” She jabbed the butt into his ribs, harder. “I am dead serious.”

  “You’re going to fuck up your career doing this.”

  Kim met his eyes. They were extremely blue. She’d read somewhere that extremely blue or green eyes showed a highly sexual nature.

  Furious was more the word at the moment.

  Oh, well. “Get in the car, and I’ll explain.”

  “You won’t shoot me. I know you won’t.”

  “I won’t kill you,” she said. “But I will hurt you if you don’t come with me. Now.” She pushed harder.

  He resisted. “Explain.”

  She met his eyes with an icy lift of her own eyebrow. “Walk.”

  He glanced over his shoulder. No one was looking at them. Kim nudged him. “I tried to go through channels, but none of you has given me the respect I deserve, and because of that, people may die unnecessarily.”

  “If I go against orders, I’ll be fired.”

  “I’m not talking anymore.”

  His nostrils flared in fury.

  “It’s killing you to have to listen to a girl, isn’t it?”

  “No, I—”

  “My mother was a nurse in Vietnam. Did you know that? She was taken hostage once for three days, and it’s something that has given her nightmares the rest of her life.”

  “Why the hell would I care, Valenti?”

  “Because you can trust that I am very, very sincere when I say that I hate the whole hostage game. I would do anything to free hostages—but I won’t let other people die. Do you understand?”

  He narrowed his eyes. Damn.

  “Luthor, I’ve had a very bad night. My ear is killing me. There are a couple of bastards at that television station who may or may not kill hostages, but there are law enforcement officials on scene to deal with them. They also don’t have a bomb at the station, and that’s what I need you for.”

  “How is it, Kim, that you’re so much smarter than the entire federal law enforcement community?”

  She blinked. “I don’t know, Lex. You tell me. Maybe I’m just smart. One thing I know for sure is that I do know what I’m talking about because—by the way did I tell you I speak Arabic fluently?—I overheard them talking at the television station. There is a bomb or a suicide bomber headed for the airport or at the airport, and people will die if we don’t go now. I don’t know how to defuse a bomb. You do.”

  “You finished?”

  “Yes.”

  “Let’s go. You can explain the rest in the car.”

  Chapter 8

  Lex started the car and turned on the heat to warm it up, but he didn’t immediately put the car in gear. “Before I get my ass fired, how ’bout you tell me everything you know?”

  “Fair enough.” Kim gave Lex a rundown of the evening, the players, everything she knew. He listened, asking questions for clarification now and then.

  Without a word, he then picked up his cell phone and called in the details. “I’m going to check it out,” he said into the phone, and put the car into gear.

  She’d done something to her ankle—probably sprained it jumping from the ceiling—and sitting down now without any need to focus on driving brought the pain out. To join the ones in her face and ear and shoulder.

  Tomorrow would so not be any fun.

  “There’s aspirin in the glove box,” Lex said.

  “How did you know?”

  “You keep groaning.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  He looked at her.

  Kim opened the glove box. “How embarrassing.”

  “Don’t worry about it.” He flipped on the radio. “Pretty rough in there tonight, huh?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it. If any of you had just listened to me, I wouldn’t have had to try to figure it out on my own. I could be back at the NSA, drinking coffee, basking in saving the day like Nancy Drew.”

  He chuckled.

  Kim’s head jerked up. “It’s not funny.” She hit his arm hard.

  “Ow. Ow!” He grabbed her hand when she did it again. “Ow! Quit it. That hurts!”

  “It’s supposed to.”

  “You don’t hit like a girl at all.”

  “No kidding. I have four brothers.” She blinked at the snow outside the windows. “Three,” she amended. “They showed no mercy, trust me.”

  He put a small red light on top of his car and headed up the freeway. “How much time do we have?”

  She looked at the digital display. “About thirty-four minutes.”

  He raised his brows. “Cutting it a bit close, aren’t you?”

  “Go to hell, Luthor.”

  He winked. “Just kidding. I’ll get us there.”

  Traffic was light because of the late hour, but the weather slowed it down. Kim saw a car that had slid into a median. “Must be getting pretty slick.”

  “Yeah, but I’ve been driving here since I was twenty. This ain’t nothing. Trust me.”

  And it did seem as if he knew what he was doing, smoothly swooping down the dark, snowy highway, his big hands confident on the wheel. He smelled like cedar, she noticed, and she liked his profile. It was hawkish without too much exaggeration.

  “What happened to the fourth brother?” he asked.

  “That’s pretty straightforward,” she returned. “Some might even say rude.”

  He didn’t apologize. “I don’t see the point of beating around the bush. Y
ou lost a brother. I asked what happened. It’s the normal response.”

  “Yeah, I guess.” She blinked. “He would have said, ‘Get over yourself.’”

  Lex grinned. “My kind of guy.”

  “He was a soldier in Iraq. He was taken hostage by some rebels and they beheaded him, then gleefully sent the pictures home.”

  He made a noise of sympathy and horror. “Brutal.”

  “Yeah. Well, that’s war for you.”

  “I’m sorry. Was he older, younger?”

  “One year older. He was a good soldier. He really loved it.”

  “How’d your mother feel about that?”

  “She nearly killed him when he enlisted.”

  “I can imagine. A combat nurse sees a lot of damage.”

  Kim nodded.

  He switched lanes, glanced at the clock, shifted. “We’ll be there in about five minutes.”

  “Good.” The adrenaline of the evening was draining away, leaving her achy, exhausted and ready for a stiff vodka and a hot bath. Taking in a deep breath, she focused away from her body. Lex was handy, something to focus on.

  Or so she told herself. It wasn’t as if it was a hardship. There was drama in his face. His right eyebrow was sharply arched, very dark. His eyes were a little larger than normal, much bluer. His nose was aggressive, his mouth wide, the lips sensual, with the upper just a little bigger than the lower. A sign of generosity in love.

  He glanced at her. “You all right?”

  “Fine.”

  “I have three sisters,” he said. “All older.”

  “Oh, God. I should have known. You were spoiled rotten, too, weren’t you?”

  “You better believe it. Damn!” He downshifted suddenly, and Kim’s attention jolted forward. There were lines of red brake lights ahead, coming too fast through the swirling snow.

  Lex downshifted, braked lightly, glided to a stop. “No way,” he muttered. “Hold on. We’ve got to go around.”

  He nosed across the lanes, the flashing light giving them access to small breaks in the sea of vehicles. He edged through, all the way across six lanes, then onto the shoulder, which was largely clear.

  Kim looked for the accident, and there it was, of course: a tangle of cars, none looking seriously damaged, blocking every single lane. Drivers were out of their cars, some shouting at each other, gesturing, some on cell phones.

  “Gonna be some missed flights tonight,” Lex said.

  “I’m surprised how much traffic there is so late,” Kim replied. The anxiety in her chest trebled.

  “It’s a busy airport.”

  “Let’s just get there.”

  The clock on the dashboard said 11:32 when Lex slid into the departure area and left the car. “C’mon.”

  Kim dashed out behind him, wincing at the bright lights inside after so long an evening. They hurried toward the security lines, where a short line of people waited to go through the X-ray machines. A woman in a wheelchair blocked their way through a narrow area, and they paused, waiting for her to get through.

  Lex glanced at Kim. “You look like hell, Valenti. That’s gonna be a shiner and a half tomorrow.”

  “Won’t matter if we don’t find the—uh—package, will it?”

  The number of milling human beings was not huge, not as it would have been at noon or at 6 p.m. It was enough, though. More than enough for a cataclysm. The guard, a young woman with a long yellow braid, waved the wheelchair woman through. Kim flashed on her ordeal at the Baltimore airport earlier today.

  Only today?

  It seemed years ago.

  Lex obviously knew his way around. He lifted his hand at the girl with the braid. She didn’t flirt, as Kim might have suspected. Her eyes were trained on a television playing by a bank of telephones and vending machines. The screen showed an aerial shot of the UBC station, surrounded by police cars.

  Kim’s ear throbbed. She put a hand up to cover it protectively.

  Lex waved her through ahead of him, leading her down a hallway. “You really do look terrible,” he said. “No offense.”

  “I assure you that however terrible the appearance, the reality is quite a lot worse.”

  He quirked his lips, holding open a door for her to go through ahead of him. “I’ve got a claw-footed bathtub at my place. You could soak up to your ears.”

  She winced. “Don’t say ear.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind.” She shook hair out of her eyes. “Where’s Monihan landing? Do we know that?”

  “Concourse E. There’s a special area for VIP landings like this.”

  “Where’re we headed, then?”

  “Cameras. We can get a look at the airport as a whole, see if we can get a handle on who or what we might need to explore by looking at the waiting areas.”

  “Hmm. Very smart.”

  He grinned. The teeth were large and white. A dimple flashed in his left cheek.

  Wretched thing. “I’ve done this once or twice,” he said.

  She glanced at her watch—11:41.

  “Chill, sweetheart. Getting tense gets you nothin’ but jittery.” He tapped his temple with one finger. “Cool and sweet leaves the brain intact.”

  “Whatever.”

  Lex knocked and was given access to a large room behind a heavy steel door. Banks of television screens showed dozens of views of the airport—security lines at the mouth of each concourse, gate areas, hallways, restaurants and bars, bookstores and shops. Kim stared at the vastness of them, the numbers of places to look, the dizzying number of people. Even a glance at each one would take way too long.

  “Now what?”

  “Now, darlin’,” he said, “you access that brain of yours and see if you can see anybody who might fit a pattern. Don’t get too caught up in what you think you know. Let your gut talk to you.”

  “Gotta narrow it down,” she said, blinking her grainy eyes. “Anybody have any Visine or anything?”

  A guy in a security uniform grabbed a bottle from his desk. He tossed it at her. Kim dropped her head back and let the drops cool and soothe her overheated eyes.

  Lex swore.

  Kim glared at him, blinking. “What?”

  But he wasn’t looking at the screens. With one long-fingered hand, he reached out and lifted up the hair that covered the side of her face. He whistled. “They’ll call you Cauliflower Kim after this,” he said with a grin. “You’re tough, ain’t ya?”

  She tilted her head away, and he dropped her hair. She looked back to the screens. “Couple questions. Is the president gone?”

  “No. Air Force One is on the ground,” said a man with wild grizzled eyebrows and a serious paunch. “Not here, though. He’s flying out of a private airfield twenty miles away. Standard procedure.”

  “Good. How about Monihan?”

  “He’ll dock here.” The man pointed to the end of the screens, then waved a finger around to the gates—most of them empty—that were close by. “These gates are pretty close. He’ll come in on the lower level. This is upstairs.”

  Lex frowned.

  Kim said, “I think we’re probably looking for a man and a woman, or maybe two women.”

  “That narrows it down.”

  She peered at one gate after another. Anxiety ratcheted up in her gut, burning through her esophagus.

  Or maybe that was hunger. She rubbed her diaphragm. “Why can’t we just clear the airport?”

  “Presidential edict,” the security boss said. “After what happened in Spain, we’re trying not to overreact to terrorist demands. Ever.”

  “I hardly think closing the airport is overreacting. Not when there’s strong evidence that a suicide bomber could be ready to kill hundreds of people.” She turned to meet his eye. “Is it?”

  He lifted a shoulder. “It’s not my call, unfortunately.”

  One of the other security guards cleared his throat. “All right, so if they got a bomb through security, how could they do it? We’re x-raying, s
earching, swabbing, everything. How could they?”

  “I don’t know that answer,” Kim said.

  “Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” Lex said. Again she noticed the timbre of his voice. Rich. He put his hands on his hips as he examined the screens. “The trick is just to work around the paradigms.”

  “What’s that mean?” the kid asked, offended. “What else can we do?”

  “Nothing,” Lex said. “Don’t be offended. It’s just a way of looking at reality.”

  Kim peered at one screen after another, seeing nothing at all amiss. A man in a shiny, waterlike robe and a binding around his head caught her eye. He strode with an arrogant lilt toward one end of the concourse. A small girl danced along beside him, and a woman with a child on either side was just behind. Her gut said, no.

  And it made her feel faintly ill to be profiling like that, anyway, looking for Middle Eastern sorts of faces—a vast region and a vast number of people and countries. Only a handful had caused trouble for the United States.

  Behind her, Lex said, “A paradigm is just a way to think about things. Like before 9/11, nobody questioned the wisdom of agreeing to the demands of a hijacker. It was the smart thing to do, right?”

  “Sure,” said the kid.

  “The reason those hijackers could overtake the planes was because they worked with that paradigm. Now, the paradigm has shifted—you never give in to a hijacker—and because of that, nobody can hijack a plane. The passengers won’t allow it.”

  Kim felt an inkling itch through the back of her brain. “So, to get a bomb through security, somebody just has to think outside the box.”

  “Exactly.”

  She turned back to the screens. “I think we might be looking for a woman,” she said, and quoted the phrase they’d found repeatedly in the e-mails, “‘Good women are obedient. They guard their unseen parts because Allah has guarded them. Surah 4:34.’”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It was in the e-mails we decoded. It’s from the Koran.” She frowned. “Something happened earlier today that made me feel there was some intelligence about women that might not have been passed on.” She lifted an eyebrow. “By accident, I’m sure. We know all information is equally available to all agencies.”