by Earl Merkel
Her name was Emily Sawyer and she had been visiting her father, an Air Force E-6 stationed at a base in Japan. Emily shifted as she slept, for a while leaning against the snoring man in the seat beside her. Her blond hair moved slightly in the fitful breeze of his breath.
Under the watchful eye of the flight attendant—a scrutiny that, in the end, was unequal to a danger far too minute to be seen—Emily was returning to her mother’s home in Milton, a small town a few miles from Fort Walton Beach, Florida.
• • •
It was an easy landing at Denver International Airport, a smooth glide toward the geometric concrete ribbons and graceful white-tented canopies of the sprawling complex.
The connecting flight from Mexico City had been uneventful. Around the cabin, a babel of English and Spanish rose in volume as the plane descended. Through the plastic window, blurred by the crosshatching of the inevitable fine scratches, the purple-and-brown majesty of the Rockies jutted into a pale blue summer sky. In comparison, Denver itself—thirty-odd miles in the distance—appeared a jumble of children’s blocks, carelessly strewn.
Denver’s old Stapleton Airport is only a memory now, closed since the mountain metropolis greeted the new millennium with this five-billion-dollar, technology-laden facility. It is a much longer drive to the city now, and the traveler no longer gets a bird’s eye view of the city’s streets and buildings that Stapleton’s close-in location offered. But landing at Denver International Airport no longer requires visitors to the Mile-High City to endure sharp banking turns and steep descents on final approach, nor the often-jolting touchdowns that were the inevitable result.
Neither are they required, as before, to look down upon the industrial expanse of the old airport’s closest neighbor, the Rocky Mountain Arsenal; like Stapleton, the Arsenal too is now closed, though space-suited workmen still swarm over its otherwise idle grounds.
Here, the aggressive remediation program has not removed a stubborn plutonium contamination, the legacy of half a century of nuclear weapons assembly and storage. In its heyday, the radioactive mega-tonnage that passed through Rocky Mountain Arsenal could have exterminated humanity many times over.
Had Anji considered all this—had he not been distracted, first by the bilingual tumult of his fellow passengers, and later by the lengthy delay while as he waited in queue at the car rental counter—he might have been struck by the irony.
Finally, his suitbag over a shoulder, Anji struggled across the tarmac of the massive parking lot. He studied the numbers on the rental agreement he held, scrutinizing the rows of freshly washed autos through which he passed. He also wondered if his shortness of breath was the result of the thin mountain air, or a first symptom of the lethal destiny he carried.
Thus distracted, the Japanese man did not notice the figure that followed him, moving quietly without appearing to do so.
Anji stopped short and dropped his bag to the pavement.
It was a Lexus, a pale gray mount for his final ride. As he fumbled with the key ring, Anji glanced over his shoulder in the direction from where he had come. There was no one to be seen.
He turned the key in the lock, and the trunk popped open. It was, he noted idly, surprisingly spacious.
“Excuse, please,” a voice said from behind.
Anji spun, startled as much by the trace of Slavic accent as by the interruption itself. For a split second, what might have been a smile of beatific delight flashed across his Asian features.
My Sensi! his mind cried out, knowing at the same instant it could not be.
And it was not.
He did not know the man who stood, carefully outside Anji’s attack radius, with a genial smile on his clean-shaven face.
Anji’s eyes dropped to an object the stranger held waist-high. It was oddly shaped—an awkward black-metal protuberance, vented on the sides and with what looked like a strip of masking tape affixed across the front of the tube. He had just recognized it as a weapon when the tape abruptly blew apart, leaving the edges frayed and tinged with black.
There was no sound, but Anji felt the shock of impact against his sternum. He staggered, catching himself for an instant; then his knees gave way and he felt himself tumble backwards. He crashed onto metal, his head bouncing hard against what felt like thin carpet. There was still no pain, but when he willed his hand to touch his chest, it came away warm and dripping.
The world swam redly for a moment; when his eyes cleared again, he was looking up at the pale blue sky, framed by the inside of the open trunk lid. A face moved into his vision, peered down at him without apparent interest. Then it disappeared, and he felt his legs being lifted and folded into the trunk where he lay. They seemed very far away, no longer a part of his body.
Then the trunk lid slammed shut, plunging Anji into a semi-darkness that, a few seconds later, became final and complete.
About the Author
Earl Merkel is the author of four suspense novels, including his latest: Fire Of The Prophet (Diversion Books, 2013).
A former newspaper journalist, columnist and talk-radio host, during his career Earl has dodged gunfire, teargas canisters, and verbal brickbats as a journalist (and on occasion as a private citizen, having somehow annoyed armed or vocal strangers). As the “more” on the nationally broadcast talk-radio program Money & More, Earl left the money-talk to the experts. He admits that he’s far more comfortable in other areas—talking with authors, arguing current events and even simply cracking-wise—than he is dealing with financial matters.
“In my own finances, I’m anything but a good example—but I’m a great bad example,” he laughs.
Earl is also the author of The Infamous Chicken Little Article, which is rumored to have gotten him temporarily banned from the op-ed page of a major American newspaper—but which subsequently has become an underground classic on the Internet among journalists, and which is regularly cited in journalism-school classes when a dose of cold (if, arguably, hilarious) reality is required.
As a ghostwriter, Earl has penned non-fiction books published by such major houses as Simon & Schuster and HarperCollins—without, he hopes, these houses ever knowing it.
Learn more about Earl’s exploits at www.earlmerkel.com.
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