Deadly Dozen: 12 Mysteries/Thrillers

by Diane Capri

  “Not really, Jackie. Since we’re being honest with each other, I have to tell you it makes me feel damned uncomfortable. It makes me feel like you’ve already decided what you’re going to do with me, and I’m afraid it’s something that I’m not going to like very much.”

  A genuine smile flitted across the man’s face and disappeared. “I like you. You’ve got balls. In a different life we could have been friends. It’s too bad I’ve got to do this. No hard feelings, okay?”

  In that instant Jim knew what was coming and tried to fling himself backward. The guard shack was small and packed with equipment, and there was virtually no place to take cover, but Jim was a sitting duck in that chair, propped up right in front of the killer with the Glock. He pushed off with his feet and launched himself up and over the back of the chair just as the first shot came. The pistol roared, and fire spit out of the muzzle. Jim screamed, and against all odds he almost made that first shot miss.

  Almost, but not quite.

  The bullet caught Jim in the right wrist, and blood splattered all over the far wall. For a split second Jim wondered whether they would take the cost of repainting the building’s interior out of his pay, and then the man fired again.

  This time his aim was true. Jim had run out of room.

  The bullet struck him in the center of the chest, opening up a ragged gaping hole and causing a gushing wave of blood to soak his uniform shirt.

  Jim found himself crumpled on his back on the console, his uninjured left hand resting just inches from the telephone. He reached for it instinctively, but before he could punch a single button, a third bullet pierced his neck, and the curtain came down on his world as rapidly and as completely as the end of a Broadway show, except there would be no applause. His last aching thought was of Lucy, and then the world disappeared.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  A rickety old Dodge Dakota pickup prowled slowly along Ocean Drive in Hull, Massachusetts. The road was mostly deserted at this hour. Abruptly Dimitrios extinguished his headlights and turned sharply left, leaving the road and striking out across the roughly three-quarters of a mile of empty marshland filling the space between the edge of the Atlantic Ocean and this portion of Ocean Drive.

  Dimitrios shifted the Dakota into four-wheel drive to navigate the loose, spongy terrain. Mud and water sprayed in all directions, caking the outside of the truck in a matter of seconds. It was slow going as they moved relentlessly toward the Atlantic. The truck jounced and slid, its tires sinking into the soft ground before the force of the drivetrain pulled them back out again.

  After ten minutes of muscling the pickup across the empty marshland, Dimitrios splashed to a stop roughly fifty feet from the water. He shut down the truck, and silence rushed in to fill the void left by the absence of the struggling engine’s whine. Low waves lapped at the rocky shoreline.

  The Dakota’s nose faced the water. Across the three-mile inlet was the southernmost edge of General Edward Lawrence Logan International Airport, an ancient field by aviation standards that had come into existence in the 1920s as a single 1500-foot cinder runway. The airfield, known originally as Boston Airport, began offering passenger service between Boston and New York in 1927.

  Expansion occurred on a regular basis over the decades, and now Logan’s traffic count made it about the twelfth busiest airport in the United States. Logan was rather unique among major airports due to its close proximity to the metropolitan Boston area. Flying into the airport serving most major cities often meant another thirty- to sixty-minute cab ride to actually get to the city. With Logan, the drive might still take that long thanks to traffic congestion, but the airfield itself was less than two miles from downtown Boston.

  The marshy area currently serving as a staging point for the Dodge was a small spit of land known as the Hull Peninsula, one of the main battlefronts in the long-running war between local community activists concerned about airport noise and aviation officials anxious to provide air service to the region. The peninsula sat just three miles across the water from the approach end of Logan’s Runway 33 Left, which meant aircraft landing on that runway would pass almost directly overhead, just a few hundred feet above the ground.

  At the moment, different runways were being utilized for Logan Airport’s arrivals and departures, so all was calm in the airspace above the truck. From their vantage point inside the cab, Dimitrios and Joe-Bob could see the seemingly never-ending stream of lights from the airplanes landing and departing Logan. It looked like a line of bees arriving on one side of a hive, with another line of bees taking off from the other side. The airplane noise from this distance was nothing more than a nearly continuous low rumble.

  Tony’s plan called for Dimitrios and Joe-Bob to get into position nice and early. He hadn’t wanted them to run into any unexpected difficulties and then not have enough time to set up. There would be only one chance to get this right.

  Everything had gone smoothly, so now Dimitrios and Joe-Bob were hunkered down in position a couple of hours early and could relax for a while. They would begin setting up the equipment in the bed of the retrofitted truck in half an hour. That would give them roughly ninety minutes to prepare before Air Force One came floating out of the sky with its big fat belly hanging in the air above them, exposed and vulnerable and waiting to be blown to a million scorched pieces along with everyone inside.

  Across the water, the bees continued to swarm, one long line of airplanes arriving, their yellow landing lights seemingly suspended in the air in complete defiance of the laws of gravity, and another line departing. The throaty roar of the departing engines floated across the water, shattering the stillness every couple of minutes like clockwork. Dimitrios and Joe-Bob smoked cigarettes and watched the aerial ballet in silence.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Nick glanced at the big clock hanging on the wall on the east end of the TRACON operations room. Amidst all the high-tech electronic gadgetry, the clock seemed anachronistic—a Flintstones timepiece in a Star Wars world. It was big and round, with clunky black hands fitted over an off-white face, an exact match to the clocks that used to hang in the classrooms of the Sydney Street Elementary School Nick had attended when he was a kid. He had always thought that a fancy digital display would have been much more appropriate to the air traffic control setting.

  It was 2:15 a.m. Airborne traffic in and out of Logan had slowed to a trickle, and that would remain the case until flights began gearing up for the new day, normally at around 5:15 to 5:30. Today would not be a normal day, of course, with the anticipated arrival of President Cartwright at about 5:30. The ops manager and the day shift supervisor would be stumbling in all bleary-eyed around five o’clock or so to stand around and look important, and the Secret Service or FBI would also be represented.

  Sitting alone at the Initial Departure scope, where the Boston area’s sectors were typically combined for the midnight shift, was Larry Fitzgerald. He looked like a lost little kid, manning one scope while surrounded by all the others dutifully displaying their boundary maps and traffic, but with no controller sitting in front of any of them. There was no need for more than one sector to be open in either the Boston or the Manchester area on the overnight shift, given the lack of traffic.

  Nick stood up from the supervisor’s console, where he had been reading a book and trying, mostly unsuccessfully, to stay awake. He strolled over to Fitz’s scope and saw one arrival in the entire Boston area airspace, an Atlas Airlines flight that had been delayed departing Tampa, thanks to a series of thunderstorms pummeling the west coast of Florida.

  “Fitzy, I’m going to grab a bite to eat, then I’ll be back to give you a break. Does that work for you?”

  “That works for me, boss. I’m pretty sure I can handle this solitary airplane all by myself.”

  Nick laughed. “Don’t kid yourself. You could have twenty airplanes, and I’d still be taking a break.”

  “Hah! Who needs you, anyway? Go ahead and abandon me. I’ll
face the onslaught alone.”

  “I’ll be back in like twenty minutes. Do me a favor and try not to kill anybody in the meantime.”

  This was how it went between Fitz and Futz, two veteran controllers who had been hooking airplanes in the Boston area for years. They were forever denigrating each other’s abilities, but both men knew that when push came to shove and the traffic was heavy and things were going to hell in the TRACON, they could trust each other implicitly. The bonds of shared experience were strong among air traffic controllers, and until you proved yourself time and time again under the intense pressure of busy traffic and poor weather conditions, you could look cool and sound sharp on the frequency and you would still garner little or no respect from your peers.

  Nick and Larry had been there. Each man knew he could count on the other when it mattered.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  The bodies of the two dead security guards lay side by side on the cold ground, tossed next to each other like trash piled on a curb awaiting collection.

  Jackie had thrown the second guard’s bleeding body over his shoulder and carried him to the security fence the team had breached just a few minutes before, where the rest of the small team huddled, waiting impatiently.

  “Took ya long enough,” Brian groused, stamping his feet to keep warm and lighting a cigarette. Tony had expressly forbidden smoking while both guards remained in play. Now, however, with the small security force eliminated, there was no reason not to light up. No residences or businesses populated the area immediately surrounding the BCT, meaning there would be no one to see the flare of a lighter or match. Even if a patrolling Merrimack town cop should happen to cruise past on the access road, he would see nothing, as the team had retreated into the relative safety of the thick stand of trees on the east side of the property.

  Jackie glared at Brian. “Oh, really? I didn’t ice this guy fast enough for you? Well, maybe next time you can do all the heavy lifting, and I’ll hide back here in the friggin’ forest and sit around complaining. How’s that sound to you, pretty boy?”

  “Shut your mouths and focus, both of you,” Tony cut in. “We’ve got work to do, remember? Or would you rather just stand around arguing like spoiled children the rest of the night?”

  The two men stared at each other for a moment. Finally they knelt next to Tony, who was busy rifling through the pockets of the guards. The most valuable item in each guard’s possession was not his weapon or his radio or his money or any of his personal effects; it was the picture ID hanging on a lanyard around his neck.

  Every BCT employee possessed a similar identification card, and embedded in each was a chip limiting BCT access to those portions of the property the employee had reason to use based on his or her job description. Electronic locks adorned the entrance to every sensitive area, but not every ID would provide access to every area of the building.

  As security personnel charged with protecting both the interior and the exterior of the property, however, the chips embedded inside the guards’ identification cards opened all locks and permitted access to every area within the BCT, and thus were keenly valuable to the terrorists. Tony took Morris Stapleton’s ID and hung it around his neck like an Olympic athlete displaying his gold medal. He then removed Jim Shay’s, lifting the dead man’s upper body off the ground to slide it off before dropping his head with a muffled thud. He handed the ID to Jackie, who placed it around his neck.

  They performed the same ritual with both men’s two-way radios; Tony kept one and handed the other to Corrigan. The guards’ weapons they ignored. The men were already heavily armed and had no use for more firepower. What they had brought with them would be more than enough to force compliance from the overnight skeleton crew of three air traffic controllers and one electronics technician, now unprotected inside the building for the next several hours.

  Brian smoked his cigarette as he watched the two men. The air was heavy and damp, thick with the promise of approaching rain, which had thus far held off exactly as the weather forecasters had predicted. He burned it all the way down to the end, flicking the butt into the trees and holding his breath to keep in that last puff as long as possible.

  “All right, let’s go,” Tony ordered.

  Brian reluctantly blew out the smoke in a slow, steady breath.

  The three men lined up and slid through the opening Brian had cut in the security fence. They made no particular effort to hide either the dead bodies lying on the ground or the damage that had been done to the chain-link fence. No one would make the gruesome discovery until a full complement of guards, controllers, and technicians began arriving for the day shift. By then it wouldn’t matter.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Dimitrios awoke with a start, confused. It took him a moment to get his bearings—he was slouched in the front seat of the Dodge Dakota parked in a marsh, a couple of miles across the water from the approach end of Runway 33 Left at Logan Airport. Dimitrios squinted at his watch. It was 4:00 a.m. He realized he had been dozing, snoring lightly, and he turned angrily to Joe-Bob. “Jesus, why didn’t you wake me up when I fell asleep?”

  Joe-Bob shrugged. “Why should I? There was nothing to do for a while, anyway. It doesn’t really require two of us to watch the airplanes come and go.” He nodded toward the windshield, grimy with dried mud that had been kicked up when they drove through the marsh.

  Dimitrios followed Joe-Bob’s gaze and saw that what had been a steady stream of arriving and departing airplanes had now petered out to almost nothing. The line of bees flying into and out of the hive had turned into an occasional lonely airplane descending the glide path to the airport or taking off and turning toward some unknown destination.

  “I suppose we should get to work,” Joe-Bob said languidly. It was clear he was tired and wished for nothing more than to sleep for a while, as Dimitrios had done.

  Now, however, there was no time left for a nap. They needed to begin preparing for the critical task they would complete as the sky was brightening over the Atlantic. In roughly ninety minutes, Dimitrios and Joe-Bob, along with the other three members of their little team thirty-five miles away in Merrimack, would change the course of history forever.

  They opened the doors of the pickup and plopped down onto the wet ground, instantly sinking six inches into the muck. It was no wonder this area had never been developed. Between the standing water of the marshland and the bustling activity of Logan Airport just a couple of miles away, no one in their right mind would want to live here, even though the view of the sea was breathtaking and oceanfront land a prime commodity.

  The two men splashed toward the tailgate in their waterproof boots. Joe-Bob stopped and cocked his head.

  “What is it?” Dimitrios asked.

  “You hear that?”

  Dimitrios shook his head, and as he did, he began to hear a low buzzing, almost like the sound a mosquito would make as it navigated its way to your head to begin munching. It wasn’t a mosquito, though, and the two men stared at each other incredulously as it dawned on them both at the same time.

  “Somebody’s driving out here,” Dimitrios said. He couldn’t believe his ears. Who the hell would come all the way to the northern tip of the Hull Peninsula in this swampy mess at four o’clock in the morning? His first thought was the police, but that was impossible. No one knew they were here; he was certain of that. If the authorities were aware of their presence, they would have been arrested and taken away hours ago when they first arrived.

  The two men hurriedly retreated to the cab of the Dakota.

  “Whoever is coming out here, we have to get rid of them,” Dimitrios whispered fiercely, as if concerned that the occupants of the four-wheel drive making its way slowly toward them with its lights off might be able to hear him.

  They stared at the advancing truck as it materialized out of the darkness. The vehicle was close enough now that they could see it was a Jeep, at least ten years old, and it was filled with young men drink
ing and partying.

  It occurred to Dimitrios that the Jeep’s occupants, who were clearly drunk and not paying much attention to their surroundings, might not even have noticed yet that they had company in the marsh. With a little luck, he and Joe-Bob could circle quietly behind them while they were busy carousing and eliminate them easily and quickly.

  No sooner had that thought occurred to him than the Jeep slid to a stop in the mud and its headlights blazed on.

  It was too late. They had been spotted.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Just after 4:00 a.m., Tony, Jackie, and Brian marched through the BCT’s two sets of double doors and into the building openly and brazenly, without even a halfhearted attempt at stealth. There was no reason to be overly cautious now, they had eliminated the two men who could reasonably be considered a threat and weren’t concerned about a couple of air traffic controllers and a federal government electronics technician.

  The men, clad from head to toe in black fatigues and boots, their faces covered with black camouflage greasepaint, moved single file across the terrazzo floor. Their semiautomatic rifles were drawn and held in both hands across their chests.

  For the moment the terrorists ignored the wide staircase on the left that led up to the second floor and the operational quarters. Accessing the radar room would come later. First things first. Walking swiftly, they bypassed the staircase and turned left. Tony lifted Morris Stapleton’s ID card and waved it in front of the card reader, unlocking the double doors leading to the technicians’ workspace.

  The card reader issued a loud beep, and the locks disengaged. Tony elbowed his way through the doors, holding his weapon in front of him at the ready. It was highly unlikely that the technician assigned the overnight shift was doing anything other than sleeping, but Tony wasn’t taking the chance of running into the guy in the hallway and being caught unprepared.