Crashers

by Dana Haynes

  Susan started to tidy up the room. “Everyone remember to eat and get some rest. We have a long, long way to go.”

  Glumly, the fatigued group trudged out and headed to their rooms.

  Nobody had planned it this way. It was a complete coincidence that Tommy and Kiki ended up on the same floor of the hotel, their rooms right across the hall from each other’s. It was just after 10 P.M. when they fumbled for their keys and stepped off the elevator together. The corridor was abandoned, the other guests asleep. Tommy’s hair stood on end and the bags under his eyes were turning the color of eggplant.

  “This is me,” Kiki whispered, halfway down the hall. She matched the number on the envelope of her magnetic swipe-key card with the number on the room door.

  “Huh. I’m right across the hall.”

  Kiki said, “Guess so. Well . . .”

  Tommy shrugged. “Yeah.”

  They stood for a moment. Tommy played with his key.

  Finally, Kiki let out a soft, quiet laugh at their predicament.

  Tommy grinned. “Yeah. See you in a couple.”

  They turned away from each other and opened their doors.

  In his room, Tommy fell onto his bed, fully clothed, the key in his hand, and fell asleep instantly.

  28

  THE BEVERLY HILLS HOME of Abdul-Hakam Bakshar Farouk Abdel-al was massive, and a huge amount of the space had been turned over to the luxury of the staff .

  O’Meara’s people found walk-in closets that ran the length of the building, featuring literally hundreds of suits, from polo uniforms to evening clothes to a wide array of business attire. Everyone on staff was expected to dress impeccably, and even the massive Johnser Riley found a Calvin Klein suit that fit his frame. When they emerged from the dressing rooms, Daria Gibron directed them to the immaculate kitchen and told them to help themselves.

  “This is the fucking life,” Feargal Kelly said around a mouthful of turkey and havarti on rye.

  Down in the south wing, in one of the spare bedrooms, Daria discovered that the consul general liked the beautiful young things (accent on young, as in legally underage) who were draped on his arm at social events to be dressed to the nines. There were enough clothes to be found in the room-long wardrobe to handle a decent-size fashion show.

  Daria slipped on a snug pair of black leather jeans. She had stripped down to her bra and held up two tops, a gray-and-black sweater and a maroon jacket that buttoned to the neck. She held each up in front of her, studied herself in a tri-fold mirror. Either would complement her small, athletic frame, she thought. Spikes should have been a must for the leather trousers, but Daria planned on doing some running in the next few days, so she toed around in the floor of the closet for something a bit more sensible, found a pair of black leather boots with a Spanish heel.

  My God, she thought. I’m enjoying myself way too much.

  “You look the fucking ride.” O’Meara startled her, speaking from the doorway of the dressing room. He wore gabardine trousers in a natty camel brown, with wingtip shoes to match. He wore an undershirt. He’d thrown a plain white shirt and brown tie over his arm.

  Daria said, “Is that a compliment?”

  O’Meara gave her that same crooked smile she’d seen when they first met. Then he raised his other hand and pointed the silver Colt Python at her midsection.

  “You’ve helped us this far and I’m grateful. But I don’t trust coincidences. And you showing up like that, kicking the shite out of your FBI lad, that was just too coincidental for my taste.”

  Daria nodded knowingly. “Besides, they’re looking for four men and one woman. Changing our look helps, of course, but killing me also alters the group profile. That’s smart.”

  O’Meara hesitated, a little crease forming on his forehead. He hadn’t thought about “changing the group profile” but he understood what she meant. And her passionless, logical recitation of why killing her made sense was unnerving.

  “You have been helpful,” he admitted, stalling as much as anything else.

  Daria sighed and tossed both tops onto the bed. “Keeping me around would be a tactical error. I understand thoroughly.”

  She reached behind her back and unsnapped her bra with a casual flick of her thumbnail. The cloth fluttered to the floor. “If only I could think of a good reason to keep me around.”

  O’Meara grinned. “You figure, flash a man a bit of that and he’ll think with his dick?”

  She pretended to think about it a bit. “Yes,” she said with a decisive nod.

  The grin widened. “You may be right. Let’s even the odds a bit.” And he produced Lucas Bell’s handcuffs again.

  . . .

  Downstairs, Keith O’Shea finished off a sandwich and twisted the cap off an expensive microbrew. “Where’s O’Meara, then?”

  “Probably shagging your lass there,” Johnser replied, snorting a laugh.

  “Jay-sus, you!” Feargal Kelly threw the remains of his turkey and havarti sandwich at the big man. “O’Meara’s a professional, isn’t he? Don’t you worry, lads. His mind’s on the game.”

  29

  ON WEDNESDAY, THE 6 A.M. briefing started on time, in the same executive-level briefing room of the FBI headquarters as before. Once again, Donal O’Meara’s photo was being projected onto the wall. This time, it was a surveillance shot courtesy of British intelligence.

  Lucas Bell stood at one end of the table, holding the remote control for the projector and a laser pointer. He was the least senior of the agents and executives in the room, which was packed. He wore a double-breasted black suit with a perfectly pressed white shirt. The overall look was smooth enough to cover the swollen lip and discolored mark on his jaw. The hunt for the Irishmen had just become top priority for the entire Los Angeles field office, and Lucas Bell had been the top man on the Ireland Watch unit back in the 1990s, charged with looking for illegal, partisan activities in the United States.

  “O’Meara,” he said and nodded toward the face projected on the wall. “Donal Liam O’Meara. Age forty-two. Born and raised on the west side of Belfast, within the shadow of Belfast Castle.”

  He tapped the remote. Another photo of O’Meara appeared. He was walking through a city street, glancing over his shoulder in the direction of the long-distance lens, smoking a Silk Cut cigarette. “He never made it out of what we’d call high school. He started out as a juvenile delinquent with no specific political inclinations. Arrested for assault at age sixteen, arrested twice for armed robbery before he was eighteen. He did a year in a juvenile jail for armed robbery, after he knocked over a grocery store with a sharpened screwdriver. O’Meara hooked up with right-wing Protestant paramilitary groups while in juvie. When he got out, he started joining Ulster groups during the marching season. He was suspected of kicking a couple of Catholic boys to death, but that was never proven. He did two more years for assault. After that, he drifted further and further to the right, eventually joining a cell of the Red Fist of Ulster, a rabid anti-Catholic fringe group that opposes the Good Friday Accord.”

  Lucas checked his legal pad. “After the power-sharing agreement was put into place, the Red Fist went quiet. I’ve talked to some guys in MI6 who think the crew just drifted into drug running and prostitution. There was always a fine line between the most radical elements in The Troubles and would-be mafiosi.”

  “How long has he been in the U.S.?” someone asked.

  “Unknown. Maybe for weeks.”

  “Who’s he running with?”

  Another face popped onto the wall. “Riley, John Padraic. Forty, from Belfast. Three arrests for murder, including beating to death a Protestant woman who married a Catholic man. She was pregnant at the time.”

  Click; another face. “Kelly, Feargal. No middle initial. Thirty-five. From Derry. He allegedly threw a grenade into a Catholic bar, killed two, and injured twenty more. He’s supposed to be a gifted marksman. In fact, he was trained in the Irish army.”

  Click. “O’S
hea, Keith William. Also thirty-five. From the northeast coast, up near Scotland. His father and brother were killed by a Catholic bomber. He started out as an enforcer for a bookie; just a classic knee breaker with a penchant for knives. Somewhere along the line, he drifted into the Red Fist movement. His rap sheet is a little long to go into here, but it includes rape and assault and murder.”

  The executives glanced at one another around the table. “Are these terrorists or street thugs?” someone asked.

  “In the anti-Catholic movement, those are two sides of the same coin,” Lucas explained. “I did three years on an exchange program with British intelligence, based in Belfast, before the power-sharing agreement. Some of the paramilitaries really did care about the religious conflict, but for a lot of them, Protestant and Catholic, the fighting was just a good excuse to rob banks and kick people to death. The Good Friday Accord took away a lot of their fun.”

  Someone asked, “What about the Gibron woman?”

  Lucas cleared his throat. He wished Ray were there; Ray could tell her story a lot better.

  “Special Agent Ray Calabrese has been her liaison,” he said, casting a picture of Daria onto the wall. The photo was five or six years old. She looked all of twenty-five and wore the uniform of an Israeli soldier, her night-black hair chopped short and lacking all style, her face more rounded, more girlish, with a hint of an overbite, her front teeth showing white against her dark complexion. Her eyes seemed much more innocent, Lucas thought.

  “According to Agent Calabrese, she’s one of the good guys. I . . . believe he’s right. She sucker punched me yesterday to save me. We think she’s running with the Irish cell. We haven’t turned up her body yet, and we have her place staked out. If she is with O’Meara, Agent Calabrese is convinced it’s to keep an eye on him for us.”

  “What do you think?” asked Assistant Director Henry Deits.

  Lucas took a moment, adjusting the files in front of him.

  “I agree, to a point. She brought O’Meara to our attention to begin with, and she may represent our best chance of reacquiring him.”

  “But . . . ?” Deputy Director Liz Geddes pushed.

  “Trust but verify,” Lucas said. “I think we should take everything we hear from her with a grain of salt. She could be perfectly accurate. She could be feeding us disinformation planted by O’Meara. Or she could be on his side. Agent Calabrese doesn’t think so and I trust his judgment. I’m just saying we should be careful.”

  “Agreed,” Deits said. “That’s if we hear from her.”

  “She’ll have to find a way to contact us. Agent Calabrese seems convinced she will. We’ve put an active trace on his cell phone, his home phone, and his desk phone.”

  “And as for Calabrese,” Deits spoke to the room at large, “he should be halfway to Oregon by now.”

  “So we’re sure these Irishmen knocked that plane from the sky?” an administrator asked.

  Deits said, “No. But there’s enough evidence to suggest it. We don’t have that nailed down yet, so we’re going to let the NTSB keep the investigation. Calabrese is going to be our point man with them until we declare this a terrorist incident. Then he’ll take command of the crash investigation.”

  More questions were peppered at Lucas and he answered as best he could: the CIA and Los Angeles police were in on this; the FAA had been informed of their suspicions; the National Transportation Safety Administration was brought in and their Washington headquarters knew. In a few hours, the crash investigators would know. Until then, Los Angeles was being bottled up and every resource was being thrown into finding the Protestant Irish cell.

  As the meeting broke up, Deits cornered Lucas. “Has Ray seen these guys’ jackets? Does he know how bad they are?”

  “He knows.”

  “Jesus,” the assistant director moaned. “He has this image of himself as the Gibron woman’s rescuer, kind of a father-figure thing. He must be going through hell.”

  Deits walked out of the room. Lucas whispered to himself, “Father figure my ass.”

  LAX

  Ray Calabrese pinched the bridge of his nose and willed himself to calm down before he started busting heads. He was not a man given to bad moods. Today was the exception.

  “Listen to me, please. I am an FBI agent. This is my ID. I really, truly have to be in Portland, Oregon, as soon as possible.”

  The woman in the blue blazer and red ascot behind the service counter gave him her most non-organic smile. “Yes, sir. Everyone has to be somewhere. But Flight Seven Twenty-five to Portland and Seattle has been grounded with a minor mechanical problem. There’s nothing I can do.”

  “Can you get me on another flight?” Ray forced his voice to remain even and low. She was the third person he’d asked. Hope springs eternal.

  The woman studied a screen at Ray’s belt line, on her side of the counter. “Umm . . . N-no. No, I’m sorry. We don’t have another flight to the Pacific Northwest until one this afternoon.”

  “Oh, God.” Ray glanced at his watch. It was almost 6:30 a.m. He couldn’t wait half a day in limbo.

  “You’re the third airline I’ve tried. Look, can you get me to Denver? I’ll try my luck there.”

  “Let’s see . . .” Ray could see the reverse image of the computer monitor flickering on her glasses.

  “Excuse me?” A man in the navy blue, Eisenhower-cut jacket of CascadeAir stepped up beside Ray. “Did I hear that right? You’re FBI and you need to get to Portland?”

  Ray nodded, hope flaring. “Have you got a flight to Portland?”

  The captain smiled. “You could say that.”

  30

  TOMMY TOMZAK AWOKE WITH a mouth lined with pool table felt and a head that weighed more than a boat anchor. He had a severe cramp in his right wrist, which came from gripping a scalpel too hard for too many hours.

  He scored aspirin from room service and downed six of them, not caring that they’d burn through his stomach.

  He stripped and stood yawning in the shower until the cobwebs cleared away, then changed into his “flying clothes”—comfortable khaki trousers, driving mocs, a weathered denim shirt with many pockets. It was the ensemble he wore whenever he had to fly significant distances and wanted to be comfortable.

  He wondered where the clothes he’d worn to the trauma conference had ended up. He remembered changing into a firefighter’s suit. But he couldn’t remember what he’d done with his clothes.

  A little restaurant downstairs just off the lobby offered selected pastries, coffee and tea, and juices each morning. Tommy headed there and grabbed a plain bagel and a plastic container of low-fat cream cheese with a plastic knife. He was in line for coffee when Kiki Duvall skimmed past the window outside, her tawny hair held in a ponytail, an iPod strapped to the elastic band of her running shorts. She must have risen before dawn for her morning run, Tommy thought. A flash memory skittered through his brain: the way Kiki smelled in the morning after running. It was a clean, musky scent. A sexy scent. Tommy ground his teeth together, told himself to concentrate on the job.

  He grabbed a cup of coffee and just about dropped it when the muscles in his right hand cramped. Tommy had never worked such an arduous autopsy schedule before, not even in Kuwait. He found a round, iron table near the window and set down the cup as fast as he could, then flexed his fingers, spreading them wide, forcing the muscles to tense and relax, tense and relax.

  He dug into a jacket pocket and came up with a small notepad, the size of his palm, opening it and scanning the notes he’d made in the middle of the night. Looking for parallels, looking for errors. He picked up the coffee cup gingerly and sipped.

  “Cramping up?” Kiki plopped down in one of two chairs at the table. A hotel towel hung around her shoulders and she’d wiped the sweat off her face and arms. She wore a navy sweatshirt, the sleeves ripped off, with teal shorts and cross-trainers. She swept her feet up onto her chair, her knees sticking straight out in either direction of her torso.


  Tommy said, “Hey,” and sat.

  “Hey, yourself.” Kiki had grabbed a glass of grapefruit juice and a poppy-seed muffin on her way in. She gulped the juice, picked off a minute bit of the muffin and chewed on it.

  “No tall decaf mocha with cocoa sprinkles?” Tommy asked.

  Kiki grinned. “You remembered. Not right now, but I bet I’ll find one before the day is out.”

  Tommy sipped his coffee, using his left hand. He scanned his notepad again, shaking his head at something.

  “You still look exhausted,” Kiki said. “Did you get any sleep?”

  “I’m good.” Tommy put the pad aside. He was well aware that he looked more like a cadaver than some of yesterday’s patients. The skin under his eyes resembled three-day-old bruises. He’d turned over and over throughout the night, trying to find a comfortable position, but his lower back hadn’t wanted to play ball. He’d almost fallen asleep standing in the shower that morning. In fact, he suddenly realized Kiki’s relative calm and the healthy flush lighting up her cheeks after her run mildly annoyed him. How dare she look so good when he felt like death on melba toast? The fact that her good health was a source of annoyance only made Tommy feel guilty, and guilt on top of fatigue on top of annoyance made for a nasty combination. Snap out of it, he spat silently at himself.

  Kiki said, “What?” and nibbled on her muffin.

  “What, what?”

  “What-what’s buzzing around in that thick skull of yours? Something’s on your mind.”

  She licked pulp off the edge of her glass and Tommy made an effort not to stare at her darting, pink tongue.

  “Just hoping everyone gets their act together today,” he said.

  “They didn’t yesterday?”

  “Peter Kim,” Tommy said. “That was the amateur hour, going after that cracker farmer like he was invading Normandy. Did you see the local paper this morning? We look like the Marx Brothers.”