Hard Fall

by Ridley Pearson

  “What should I do? Do you have the authority to look it over, or do I have to check with Airport Police?”

  Kort delighted in her choice of tactics. Resentments and jealousies ran high between the various subcontracted security agencies and the ubiquitous Airport Police, who oversaw, but did not directly manage, all security subcontractors. By challenging this man’s authority, she forced him into a decision.

  “Let me have the keys to the trunk,” he said.

  She turned toward Kort and smirked. The guard popped open the trunk. As he did, Monique slipped out of the shoulder restraint, leaned forward, and grabbed Kort’s flight bag. She quickly unzipped the bag and placed the fire extinguisher between the bucket seats, in plain view. Charlie slammed the trunk shut and came around the car, peering into the back. When he reached the front and looked past Kort, he said, “What about that?”

  She replied, “For one of our trucks.”

  Apparently satisfied, he came around the front of the car and leaned down on one knee. Kort was thinking how simple it would be to run him over. A moment later he entered the guard booth and lifted the phone.

  “What now?” Kort asked.

  “He probably has to get permission from his people, but at least we kept Airport Police out of it,” she said in a self-congratulatory tone.

  It was only then that Kort realized the guard was all alone in the booth. He pointed this out to Monique.

  “That happens now and then. They must take turns going to the bathroom or something.”

  “I don’t like this phone call,” Kort said.

  “Be patient.”

  “He’s not even talking. What if he’s stalling?”

  “He’s not stalling. He’s getting permission.”

  “There’s nobody out here. I can take him out.”

  “Have some patience.”

  “I don’t like the way he’s looking at us.”

  “Please!” she scolded.

  Kort looked around quickly. They were at the far end of the field, a good quarter-mile from the center of activity. The nearest building had something to do with maintenance for one of the shuttle companies and it was at least fifty yards away. He didn’t like this phone call. He had plenty of patience, but this was taking too long. “Something’s not right,” he said. “He’s stalling.” He climbed out of the car. She leaned across the seat and grabbed for him, but missed. He checked the immediate area one last time. All clear. “Excuse me, sir,” he said. Charlie the guard was just hanging up the phone.

  “You see,” Monique said conspiratorially, still leaning toward Kort but seeing for herself that Charlie was off the phone. “Get back in here.”

  “Miss Cheysson,” the guard said, viewing Kort somewhat suspiciously. “If you’d just back it up and pull it over there, please. The line’s still busy. I can’t get through, and I’ve got to get an authorization number before admitting your car onto the field.”

  Kort put the first and only bullet necessary into the man’s nose, taking a piece out of the back of his head and knocking him down as if he were made of cardboard. Monique barked with horror but quickly controlled herself. Kort hurried to the guard booth. He hit the switch that opened the red-and-white-striped boom and waved Monique through. He stuffed the body inside, tripped the switch again, lowering the boom, and slid the booth’s metal door closed. He took one step toward the Toyota, reconsidered, and tried the plastic sign that was framed on the front of the booth. PLEASE HAVE IDENTIFICATION READY FOR GUARD, it read in big bold print. It moved. He slipped it out of its frame and flipped it over. GATE CLOSED. He returned it to the frame, ducked under the boom, and joined her.

  She drove away at an incredible speed.

  “Slow down,” he said. “No need to attract attention.”

  Her lower jaw was trembling. “They’ll find him.”

  “Maybe not for a while. These are the chances we take.”

  “And how do I get back out, please? You have the mechanic’s identification. You can slip out without any problem—”

  “Anyone can slip out without a problem. It’s getting in that’s the problem.” He placed the fire extinguisher back in the bag, and removing the coveralls from it, slipped them on. He clipped Boote’s ID crudely to his pocket, though he faced the man’s photograph against his chest so that only the backside of the ID showed. Identification tags, especially on baggage handlers and mechanics, often ended up clipped on this way, hastily returned to clothing after falling off. “Park it over by the terminal somewhere. You’ve got your ID. You can get out any door you want.”

  “You shouldn’t have done it.”

  “We’re fine. Five minutes is all I need. We’re going to lose the car, so we’ll meet at the Pentagon Metro stop in one hour.”

  That turned her head. “What, are you kidding?”

  “I want to see my work,” he said, motioning for her to pull over. The tailfin of the huge 959, with red-white-and-blue letters spelling QUIK-LINK, lay waiting for him, twenty yards to their left. It was scheduled for takeoff in a matter of minutes.

  42

  * * *

  Daggett arrived at the entrance to Quik-Link Couriers out of breath and in a full sweat, his watch showing less than five minutes of his estimated thirty remaining. To his frustration, he found himself in the midst of a shift change, at the back of a long line of fresh employees stretching from the company’s self-provided security check-in. He quickly broke out of the line and reached the bottleneck, where employees were individually showing their ID tags to either one of the two guards who manned the station. Daggett removed his ID and allowed it to hang open.

  “FBI,” he said loudly enough to gain the attention of the man closest to him. “It’s an emergency. I have to see whoever’s in charge.”

  “You carrying a piece?”

  Daggett removed his weapon and showed it to the man.

  “You gotta leave it with me.”

  “That’s absurd. I’m here on business. I’m FBI!”

  “I don’t care if you’re J. Edgar Hoover, pal. The piece stays with me.”

  “You know a guy named Henderson?” Daggett asked, recalling the name of the shorter of the two men with whom he had escaped the Bernard explosion. “Airport Police?” The guard’s brow furrowed. “Henderson, I think. Call him up. Now. I want that piece with me. Tell him Special Agent Daggett. He’ll okay it.” The guard put the gun out of sight, pointed to where Daggett could come through, and turned his attention to a waiting employee. Daggett grabbed the phone’s receiver, forced it into the guard’s hand, and repeated, “Henderson. Now.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” the guard said, slightly intimidated and beginning to dial. “Check back in a minute.”

  Thanks to a receptionist who seemed either frightened or impressed by his considerable lather, Daggett was led to a back warehouse filled with sorting equipment, bright blue mailbags, and a level of activity one expected to see only in television ads. The manager, a lanky man in his late fifties with an Air Force haircut and a drill sergeant’s charm, after hearing Daggett’s opening salvo, pulled him out of the way of a tug towing three trailers and said, “You got to be shitting me. First I’ve heard of it.”

  “All I’m asking is that you stall that plane long enough to speak with my superiors.”

  “Maybe I can do that.”

  “Maybe?”

  “I gotta check with my superiors first, right? Listen, I’m not trying to be a pain in the ass here, but I gotta check you out and I gotta check with St. Louis before I hold up the afternoon flight. You know how many bomb threats this company gets? You have any idea?”

  “This isn’t a threat. I’m FBI. I’m working on information. I’m telling you that your 959 isn’t leaving the ground, if I’ve got to see to it myself.”

  “Now let’s not get like that. Okay? You want to play fucking tough, friend? I can play fucking tough. Believe you me.” He tapped Daggett on the chest with a metal finger. “You come with me. We’ll m
ake some fucking calls.” He walked away, his face a bright red.

  Daggett saw the hole he had dug for himself. He’d been too pumped up by the run, too hot to act cool. “What about the plane? Can’t you at least hold the plane while we make the calls?”

  “One thing at a time, friend. One thing at a fucking time.”

  43

  * * *

  Kort hadn’t realized how close he had cut it. Having planned to sabotage the morning plane, he realized now that the afternoon information he had was off by at least half an hour. Holes in information troubled him. He took them as bad omens. In a perfect world, there were never any holes.

  Unlike the AmAirXpress flight 64, which he had so easily boarded during preflight maintenance, when he had experienced no cockpit activity and had gone about his task completely alone, this time he stepped into a hornet’s nest. At the plane’s starboard midsection, large mail sacks, some stuffed to the limit, others limp and mostly empty, were being unloaded from towed trailers and tossed onto an active conveyor assembly that shuttled them up into the fuselage, where they were presumably stowed and secured for flight. On the left side of the plane, as Kort climbed the steep stairway to the flight deck, another maintenance engineer hurried past him carrying a stainless steel coffeepot. “Fucking coffee machine’s down,” he said angrily. “See if you can do something.”

  I can do something, all right, Kort was thinking. What he did, once inside the plane, was place the flight bag down, remove the fire extinguisher, and step into the flight deck, where he unexpectedly encountered the two men he had come to kill. They were running through a checklist, each echoing the other with cryptic terms and busy fingers. Kort, whose unusual calm was rattled by finding the seats occupied, suddenly realized he was all but invisible to these two. They paid him no mind whatsoever. He dropped to one knee, fire extinguisher in hand, at which point the copilot said, “You got the coffee fixed yet?”

  “Working on it,” Kort answered.

  “What gives?” the man asked as Kort went about working in the cramped quarters beneath his seat, reaching in from behind. But the pilot demanded his attention as he threw another switch, and Kort avoided an answer.

  He unfastened the clamp holding the existing extinguisher, removed it, and replaced it with the one he had brought. Having earlier set the detonator’s timer to the exact time specified by Ward’s simulation of this flight—forty-seven seconds—he had nothing more to do. The beauty, as far as he was concerned, of Bernard’s detonator was that it didn’t require being turned on or activated. The pilots did that for him, first by pressurizing the airplane, and second by pointing the nose into the sky. At that point the clock would run, the gas would be released, and, at long last, it would all be over.

  Tasting success and victory, Kort slipped out of the flight deck and debated whether to place the extinguisher in his bag or not. He knew well enough that hesitation was an operative’s biggest enemy. The appearance of confidence was everything. He stuffed the extinguisher away and was just zipping the bag shut when the other mechanic came bounding up the stairs and stepped right past him. This man headed directly to the onboard coffee maker. As Kort stood the man asked, “You new?”

  It caught Kort off guard. Should he just leave? Did he dare? “Yeah,” he said, attempting to sound as American as possible. He turned to face the man.

  “Thought so.” He stuck his hand out. “Russ Kane. Good to meet you.”

  Kort shook his hand firmly, his mind going blank. He needed a name … His eyes found the airport identification tag riveted to the fuselage. “David Duhning,” he said.

  “Like the plane!” the other said. “I can remember that.”

  “Nice meeting you,” Kort said. He hurried down the steep steps, his feet driven by fear, the sweat under his arms beginning to run.

  44

  * * *

  “You got any kind of paperwork about this?” the manager asked, leaning his hard mouth with its broken teeth away from the phone’s receiver.

  “Paperwork? Are you listening to me? That plane has been sabotaged!”

  “Call you right back,” the man said into the phone, and hung up.

  Daggett had been in enough similar situations to know when to give up. He could argue himself red in the face, but John Wayne here wasn’t buying. “You’re never going to forgive yourself for this, you know that?”

  “So why don’t we talk to your superiors, Mr. Hot-fucking-shit Eliot Ness? Answer me that?” He picked up the phone. “You tell me who to call. You give me a number and a name.”

  Daggett knew that even if Lynn had reached Buzzard Point, even if she was meeting with Pullman at this very moment—which, given the traffic, seemed doubtful—Pullman was unlikely to support him on this without a hell of a lot more than intuition. The truth of the matter was that Kort’s plan had accomplished exactly what he had hoped it would. The machine of the FBI was moving in one direction, and you didn’t reverse it by simply throwing a switch.

  Daggett reached the door to the small office, which he swung open.

  “Listen,” John Wayne said earnestly, turning to Daggett so that he failed to see the man just entering the building, a man in coveralls carrying a flight bag. And out on the tarmac, beyond the huge plate glass windows, beyond the flurry of activity, the stairs were wheeled away from the plane as the TUG began the pushback. “We insure every one of those packages at full refund. ‘Positively, absolutely,’ and all that shit—that’s what we’re up against here. That’s our competition. I delay that plane, then every single one of those packages is going to be late tomorrow and that means something on the order of fifty grand out the window. You see my problem here?”

  “Your problem is, you’re not listening.”

  His pager sounded.

  He reached down inside his coat, to where it was clipped to his belt, so he could read its message. Maybe Lynn had made better time than he had thought. Maybe he now had the authority to stop that plane.

  The LED read: DUNCSAFE. He silenced the beeping, a sense of relief overcoming him unlike any he had ever felt. Tears welled in his eyes. He made a single, irrevocable promise to God and whoever else was listening that from this moment forward his priorities would change. From this moment on, it was all to be different.

  “You all right?” John Wayne asked.

  “Never better,” Daggett answered.

  Then he glanced to his right and saw that the plane was no longer there.

  45

  * * *

  Inexplicably, and yet automatically, as Anthony Kort heard the sound of a pager he jerked his head to find its origin. Perhaps it could be attributed to a keen sense of survival. As with a large cat on patrol in the jungle, the slightest unnatural sound caused an immediate state of alert. Whatever the reason, he glanced quickly and then just as quickly away, his bowels going to water and his headache returning as if someone had clipped him. Daggett!

  The first thought that occurred to him, since he was in a killing mood, was simply to pull out his weapon and gun the man down. But the two security guards only a few feet away would have to follow Daggett, and then who? It would get messy. Given such a bloodbath, it would be a miracle to make it out of here alive.

  His second thought, which came to him late and revealed to him just how personal this had become—since his first thought had concerned Daggett, not the success of the operation—was how the hell Daggett had known to come here. Panic stole into him. Daggett knew he wasn’t dead. Daggett knew about David Boote. There was no other explanation. And Daggett was knowingly risking his son’s life.

  These discoveries filled Kort with such a sense of dread and failure that he nearly gave himself away by failing to watch where he was going. He nearly crossed the security line at the wrong location, a mistake that would have certainly caused him added scrutiny, and might possibly have revealed his fraud.

  But if Daggett was here, then Daggett knew. And if Daggett knew, then he would stop the plane, and
everything Kort had worked for was over. An impossible consideration. He pulled himself out of the way of the others and watched as Daggett continued arguing with the man who looked like John Wayne, and the TUG cleared out of the way of the 959 and it began to taxi. Maybe not, he thought, taking another step toward his freedom. Maybe it was a perfect world after all.

  Then he watched as Daggett looked up and he, too, noticed the plane had begun its taxiing; he watched as Daggett sprinted to the large plate glass windows and stared out at the departing plane. Strangely, he could hear the man thinking; he could hear him trying to figure out how to stop the plane, and at that very moment Kort found himself faced with an instinct that had ruled the animal kingdom since time began: fight or flight. He could stay and attempt to stop whatever it was Daggett had planned, or he could take fifteen more steps toward the door and be gone from here forever.

  Another place, another time, his decision would have been simple, for he would have fled, resolved to return another day, for another operation. But given the unusual circumstances of the collapse of Der Grund, the limited nature of his cash reserves—enough for a year, two at the most—and, more importantly, the pain in his heart for what his few short days with Caroline had taught him about what it was he really wanted from life, he found his feet firmly planted. This operation had consumed him for the better part of eighteen months. Everything he had worked for—the end of EisherWorks, the death of Mosner—came down to the plane that was now taxiing toward takeoff. The deformity of his child, the loss of his wife and child, would finally be avenged. Five minutes? Ten? And the single largest act of terrorism on American soil would be burning on the television sets of a billion people worldwide. For days, even weeks, the newspapers, radio and television news broadcasts would speculate on the nature of the once secret meeting, would speculate on the government’s funding of chemical weapons programs. A few more precious minutes before the sweetness of victory.