Thrillers in Paradise

by Rob Swigart

  She sighed. “What does he want? I don’t really know why Elliot was here. He said he was working on a story, but he always said that. I think he came to see me, like I told you.” Corinne began to fuss and she spent a few minutes soothing her. “It’s all right, duckling. It’s all right.”

  Linz rocked forward again. The movement seemed suddenly full of menace. “Mr. Ueda is an… associate of my company. He’s come from Japan on business. Now we find this emergency interfering. It could be bad for business, you understand. So we want to know what happened to Elliot, how he got sick. That’s all. We might be able to help.”

  “What kind of business?” She looked around the room, as if trying to divine what their business might be from its furnishings. She barely noticed the other man, the one who had been seated on the floor when she entered. Her eyes scraped lightly over him as he slipped back into the foyer. She could see the brightening from the hall as he slipped out the front door and closed it silently. The Japanese man had his back to the wall, and couldn’t have seen the man leave. Peter was facing her. She said nothing, letting her eyes drift back to Peter Linz’s face.

  Peter made a gesture. “The business is not important. Let’s just say that you and I have a mutual interest. We both want to see Elliot recover. And the others too, naturally. We want to see everything calm down here, get back to normal. That’s all.”

  She half-turned on the couch to look at Ueda, still against the wall before the calligraphy. If she noticed the puzzled look on Ueda’s face she made no mention of it, either. She looked back at Peter Linz, examined his face. She decided she didn’t believe a word he was saying.

  CHAPTER 17

  SAMMY HAD BEEN RIGHT. The airport was pandemonium.

  Cobb had to drive down the shoulder of the road around the traffic jam and park a quarter-mile from the terminal despite his flashing light. Cars, taxis, and shuttle vans clogged all lanes. He pulled off the road into a reasonably level patch and got out to survey the scene.

  The afternoon had passed routinely. Scottie had reported that the traffic log at the Coast Guard station in Nawiliwili had no record of a small boat leaving the island with three Japanese men on board. His requests for clarification from federal health authorities in Honolulu had produced nothing but frustration. A break-in at a small sporting goods and liquor store in Kipu had resulted in confusion and mixed reports of missing items, since the owner was at the airport trying to get a seat on a plane to Maui, where he had relatives. It appeared, though, that some guns might be among the items taken.

  It was late afternoon. Sergeant Handel had called in earlier that he was trying to make it to the airport tower, but that things were in such a state of confusion that he wasn’t sure he could get there. The road from Nawiliwili was jammed, and he was thinking of hiking around the airport.

  Cobb could feel a palpable tension in the air. People seemed to be trying to hold a collective breath, as if not breathing in the toxin would save them. Yet he knew that except for the four men in the hospital, the poison, if it existed at all, had touched no one. He shook his head, shifted the weight of his automatic to his hip, and trudged down the dusty shoulder past the mess of vehicles, many abandoned as others had done what he was doing and walked in carrying what luggage they felt was indispensable. There were, in fact, a couple of abandoned suitcases beside the road, dropped where they were. One had spilled open, gutted. The intimate refuse of human lives— a child’s blue flannel pajamas, strangely inappropriate for Hawaii, lay in the dust beside the Cordura case.

  People were shouting all around him. The sound was too loud and diffuse to make out individual conversations, only a general roar of anger and frustration. Some ticket counters were abandoned as well, the doors behind them closed. A major airline had posted a hand-lettered sign saying that all flights were oversold for the next four days, and reservations after that would only be accepted by phone.

  The main lobby was crammed with people on the brink of desperation. He heard, now that he was inside, phrases, isolated words, even, once, an entire sentence. The gist of this high-speed rumor mill implied that several hundred people had been poisoned. The hospital was overloaded. More cases were coming in every minute. The previous day’s rumors were flocking back like death crows to a ripe corpse. The coast was contaminated. The interior was a deadly swamp. Pestilence and Plague were here.

  He skirted the crowd and struck out down the road to the old tower, a quarter mile north of the new terminal. Even this road was jammed with cars up to the airport building itself, but deserted beyond it, so once he hit the road he could jog the rest of the way. The tower sat beside the old terminal, now abandoned and desolate. Only the weather office in a room on the north end was occupied.

  He pressed the buzzer beside the door and identified himself to the voice that answered. Inside a flight of steel steps spiraled up four floors. He took the steps three at a time, passing deserted offices on each floor.

  The room was about twenty feet square, with large plate glass windows slanting out on all four sides, offering a panoramic view of the east side of the island, from the ocean to the east, the runways and terminal to the south, the Saddle to the west, and the coastline toward Kapa’a to the north. Handel stood at the far end talking to one of the controllers. Cobb went past the other controller who was speaking in soft urgent tones into a headset microphone.

  Handel introduced him. “A small plane charter came into Port Allen two days ago about two-thirty in the afternoon. It could have been your Japanese men. The plane is registered to a company in Honolulu.” Handel handed Cobb a scrap of paper with the address and phone number on it.

  “These people didn’t arrive or leave by boat,” Handel said. “This has to be it.”

  “OK. The evidence is piling up, but it has not crossed the threshold yet.” Cobb turned to the controller, a young woman with her headset still on. “Thanks for your help.”

  The controller shook his hand. “Sure thing. Any time. They avoided Lihu’e, but the pilot did call in. They do, sometimes. Turned south along the coast. I didn’t think a lot about it. But it was the only flight in. I assume you checked airline passenger manifests?”

  “Of course,” Cobb answered. “They could have flown in commercial, I suppose, but it didn’t seem likely.”

  A phone rang on the counter. The other controller picked it up. After a moment he looked up. “Center says they’re picking up a transponder code from the ground here. A seven-five hundred.”

  “What’s Center, and what’s a seven-five hundred?” Cobb asked.

  “Honolulu Center. They manage interisland traffic. They also have the en route radar. Seven-five hundred is the transponder code for a hijacking; shows up on the radar. Unusual when they’re on the ground, but maybe they can’t talk on the radio. Any idea which one of those planes it is?” He gestured at the terminal, where three airliners sat on the ground.

  The woman looked out. “I’d guess it’s Aloha two-thirty-four. They were about to depart. The Air Hawaiian just got in and the Interisland was unloading.”

  As she spoke the telephone rang again. The man picked it up. He listened for a moment, then put his hand over the mouthpiece. “Lieutenant, you’d better take this one.”

  It was the airport security operations manager. A man with a gun was threatening an Aloha 737 if he didn’t get a seat on the plane. They had called headquarters but the road was clogged and no one could get through. Officers were responding on foot, but it would be awhile before they arrived, and in the meantime he was threatening to start shooting passengers.

  “I’ll be right there,” Cobb said, hanging up. “Let’s go.”

  Handel clattered down the stairs behind him and together they sprinted past the old terminal, over the new airport boundary fence and across a broad stretch of grass to the new terminal. They hit the noise inside like a wall. As they passed the United counter, they could hear someone announce that he owned a considerable amount of United stock, and
there would be serious repercussions if his VIP card were not honored for the next flight.

  “I’m very sorry, sir,” the agent was saying. “I’m afraid all flights are completely booked through next Thursday, oversold even. In fact, you’re far from the first holder of a VIP card here today. There’s nothing I can do.”

  The airport was mostly roof, with sides open to the air. They pushed their way through the crowd to the gate, where hands waved tickets, travelers checks, and cash in the air, straining for attention from the harassed gate agents. Cobb showed his badge and the agent waved them through.

  The airport PA system announced that all flights leaving the island were booked. The voice making the announcement sounded weary, as if this announcement had been repeated often without effect. It could barely be heard over the din of shouting. There was no mention of a hijacking in progress.

  The plane was parked on the apron with the stairs still in place. The interior was dark, and Cobb could not see inside. One of the gate agents slipped out behind him and closed the gate. It did nothing to diminish the noise, but it did keep back the crowd.

  “He’s on board,” she said. Lines of strain showed around her eyes and mouth. “I don’t know how he got by. The plane was nearly loaded. A lot of people got out on the apron near the plane. This place is a mess. Somehow he got out there, and once on board he showed the gun. Soon as we tumbled onto what was happening I called Ops. He’s threatening to make space for himself by shooting someone. Whatever this mess is, it sure had made people crazy.”

  “I was in the tower. The pilot apparently signaled somehow with his transponder. Any idea who he is?”

  She shrugged. “A tourist, I guess. He didn’t give us his name.”

  “No. Any idea what kind of weapon?”

  She shook her head. “A rifle, I think. Probably carried it under his coat. Small caliber.”

  “Has he fired yet?”

  “Not yet. So far just threats.”

  Cobb and Handel walked out onto the cement and looked up at the plane. There was no movement visible through the windows or in the cockpit. Cobb took off his dark glasses and wiped the lenses with the tail of his shirt. Then he tucked the shirt back in. “Well,” he said. “I suppose we’d better get on with it.” He walked to the stairs and began to climb. Handel gaped after him for a moment, then followed.

  When he got about halfway up the stairs a bullet whined past him, toward the terminal. Cobb paused for a moment, then continued climbing. Handel stopped to look behind him. There were no windows in sight. The round had vanished harmlessly over the airport.

  The sky was faultless. The sun hovered five degrees or so above the mountains to the west. Even the din of shouting from the terminal seemed to recede somewhat out here on the apron. A weird peace descended. Handel hurried up the steps after Cobb.

  Just as he reached him they heard another shot, followed by the swift whine of the bullet vanishing into the clear blue sky. Cobb paused again and shook his head. “Really,” he said. “Some people.”

  “Don’t you think we should take cover or something?” Handel hissed. “This man is shooting.”

  “Give me some backup, OK— at the bottom of the stairs. No indiscriminate shooting the way this fellow is doing, please. It gives visitors to our island a disquieting impression.”

  “Jokes,” Handel muttered as he backed down the steps.

  Cobb cleared his throat. “Excuse me,” he said in a neutral but firm voice. “What seems to be the trouble here?”

  “I’ll shoot them, I swear I will.” The voice was a tenor, thin with tension. “Don’t come in here. This plane is full.”

  “My name is Cobb Takamura. Who are you, please? I can’t very well carry on a conversation with a stranger, can I?”

  “Go away, Lieutenant.”

  “Look, I’ll stay right out here, all right? You can see me, I can’t see you. There can’t be any harm in that, can there?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve got to get out of here. We’re all going to die.”

  “Let’s just talk about it for a moment.”

  There was a long silence. Cobb waited patiently. Behind him the sun warmed the back of his neck underneath his hat. He could feel sweat begin to form.

  “All right,” Cobb said. There seemed to be something familiar about the voice. “You know we can’t let you do this sort of thing. Nobody wants to hurt you.”

  “We’re all gonna die. I gotta get out of here.”

  Cobb reached up, then paused. “I’m going to take my hat off. That’s all. I’m a police officer. No one is going to die on this island. I’m in touch with everything that happens here.” He wiped the back of his neck with his hand. “Listen. It’s kind of hot out here. How about if I…”

  “Don’t move!” The voice went up. “Don’t move. I’ll start shooting. I’m not kidding. It doesn’t matter anymore.”

  “There’s no need for that. No one has been hurt yet, have they?”

  “Not yet. But they will if something doesn’t happen soon.”

  “You don’t really want to hurt anyone. That’s not your style.”

  He looked down and saw Handel, gun drawn, crouched next to the stairs. Cobb waved his hand in a vaguely reassuring gesture as he threw away the sweat from his neck.

  “I don’t believe it. I know what’s going on. The plague is loose out there.”

  Cobb frowned. Whose voice was that? He almost had it.

  “Believe me,” he said. “I live here. I have a family here, friends, a home. I’m not trying to leave. These are rumors, not facts.”

  The sweat trickled down his back, under his collar. He turned to see the angle of the sun, disliking the exposure. It was nearly behind the terminal. Then he saw the uniformed policemen and airport security people at the gate, flattened against the wall inside the entry with weapons held muzzles up. Further back he could see someone handing out flak jackets, camouflage suits, and automatic weapons.

  “This is going to help the panic situation greatly,” he muttered. Behind the fence dividing the apron from the gate area he could see people pushing back, struggling to get out of the way. He called into the plane. “Listen, we have to help each other. You’re causing some excitement here. I’m getting worried someone might get hurt. Neither of us wants that.”

  “I want this plane to take off. I’ll give you five minutes.”

  “That may not work. There are other people involved in this situation now. I’m going to have to talk to them. I’m going back down the steps. I’ll talk to them, and then I’ll come back up here.”

  There was a silence. Cobb imagined the passengers, seated in terrified silence while a desperate man aimed a rifle at them. He had it now, though. The name. He took a chance. “Did you hear me, Grant?”

  The silence was profound and dark. Cobb thought he could hear the passengers breathing in, breathing out. What the hell was Welter doing in there? He shifted and the metal stairs creaked under him.

  “I heard you.”

  “OK, Grant. Just take it easy.”

  “No tricks! I want us to take off in five minutes.”

  “You’ll have to give me a little longer than that. These things take time.”

  “I’ll be watching.”

  Cobb backed slowly down the stairs. The shadow of the terminal building offered relief as he descended. When he reached the bottom he looked around. Handel, crouched against the stairs, looked at him questioningly. Cobb shook his head slightly and held out his palm, motioning him to keep his post. Handel nodded and drew back under the steps. He kept his gun pointed upward toward the open door to the airplane.

  Cobb walked slowly to the gate.

  Inspector Taxeira, chief of Investigative Services, was glowering at an airport security guard. “Just how,” he said in a controlled voice, “do you suppose this perpetrator got past security? I ask this out of curiosity, not out of any particular desire to know, you understand. But we do have an armed man, who has been givi
ng ample evidence of the sincerity of his intentions, attempting to hijack an Aloha airliner full of tourists in the middle of a developing but phony public health crisis. Really,” his voice rose, “I’m… just… curious.”

  The security officer was undoubtedly underpaid. He had a routine and boring job, since it was madness to think of anyone hijacking airplanes in Kaua’i; he neither saw nor expected trouble. Under the policeman’s glare he shriveled. “I do not know,” he said.

  Inspector Taxeira looked at Cobb. “He doesn’t know.”

  “There are a lot of people here,” the security guard explained. “This place is crazy. Everybody’s trying to leave. We don’t have enough staff to check all the luggage. We don’t have enough X-ray machines. We have to hand-check everything. How can we do this with all these people? He got through.”

  Taxeira nodded. “Yes. He got through. What is it, Lieutenant?”

  Cobb removed his porkpie hat and mopped his forehead and nape with a handkerchief. He replaced his hat. “I’ve been talking to him,” he said. “His name is Grant Welter. He’s a possible homicide suspect in the Linz case. Now he wants space on the plane. He’s panicked.”

  “Of course he’s panicked.” Taxeira, a large man with large ears and a no nonsense manner, ran his hand through thinning gray curls. “Damn near everyone on this whole fucking island has panicked. What a mess.” He looked at Cobb. He stopped stroking his hair and rubbed his cheek. He screwed up his eyes. He ran the ends of his fingers over the wide acne scars on his cheek. “God damn,” he said.

  “I need some time to deal with him,” Cobb told him. “He says he’s going to start shooting soon. He says a plague is loose; this in itself is food for more thought than I have time for just now. I told him I’d be right back.” He gestured at the uniformed officers and security people pressed against the wall. “I may be able to talk him out, but keep the others out of sight. He’s close to the edge.”