And he remembered the devastated pilot who had pulled the trigger.
A small wave of shame washed over him, just as it had in the meeting with Alexander. His price of admission to a new life for himself and Anya was the murder of several hundred Americans, as well as the destruction of a beautiful 747-400 in flight.
But they are all going to die a horrible death anyway—slowly, painfully. Remember? This is an act of mercy. You must remember that! You must concentrate on nothing else!
He had seen the effects of germ warfare in the infamous Russian Army tests of 1972. Political prisoners were the guinea pigs, and the image of their suffering still tormented him occasionally in nightmares.
The man called Alexander had said the sickness aboard the target 747 came from a Russian lab. If it was anything similar to what he had witnessed in those tests, what he was about to do would indeed be an act of mercy.
Yuri shook the thoughts from his head and pulled the receiver to his ear as he dialed the appropriate numbers.
SIXTEEN
ABOARD FLIGHT 66, KEFLAVÍK AIR FORCE BASE, ICELAND—SATURDAY, DECEMBER 23—4:30 A.M. (0530Z)
The shooting of Lisa Erickson had instantly changed the mood of the passengers of Flight 66. Before, where there had been irritation and mild alarm, a deep, pervading fear now reigned.
“My God, if they’re that afraid of us …” had become a whispered theme throughout the aircraft, and many had been shocked into tense silence.
James Holland’s painful PA announcement about the shooting was heartfelt and moving—and desperately needed. Everyone could hear the agony in the captain’s voice as he explained what had happened at the back door, the mindless methods used by the security police force, and why Lisa’s sudden dash toward the red security line had triggered an instant and deadly response:
“Those young security troops out there, folks, have been told by their commander that all of us are extremely dangerous biologically because of the virus they think we’re carrying. I have great faith that this is going to turn out to be a false alarm, but in the meantime—until enough hours have gone by with no one getting ill—the attitude of the outside world toward us isn’t going to change. I know you’re worried. But please, let’s stay calm and cooperative. And please understand that we’re being controlled for at least a while longer by outside forces trying to keep us separated from the rest of humanity.”
Holland had tried to sound confident and optimistic. He’d tried to convince himself that optimism was justified. Yes, we’ll get out of this. Yes, it’s only a false alarm.
But the solid front of global rejection made such assurances seem ridiculous. Who was he to second-guess the rest of humanity?
At 3:20 A.M., Dick Robb recommended the crew be divided into an “A watch” and a “B watch,” each with a four-hour duty period, until they could depart Keflavík. An exhausted James Holland agreed.
With the plan explained, cabin lights were turned out, the shades were pulled, and curtains were drawn between the cabins. The upper-deck cabin was left lighted. Holland directed the B-watch flight attendants to find seats and get some sleep, and promised to do the same himself—having assigned himself to B watch.
Lying in one of the two pilot bunks in a tiny cubicle just behind the cockpit, James Holland pulled a blanket over his legs and closed his eyes, feeling emotionally numb. He was exhausted, but sleep wouldn’t come. In its place were the turbulent images of what had happened outside his aircraft, and the helplessness he’d felt watching his passenger run into a firing squad.
I should have tried to chase her! he told himself. They wouldn’t have shot me for trying.
Intellectually he knew better. If he’d tried to reach her in those last few seconds when she’d bolted toward the rope, his body would be lying out there too.
Yet maybe he could have tried harder.
After they had brought Keith Erickson back on board, he’d been gently guided to an empty row in the upper-deck cabin, and the flight attendants had taken turns sitting with the distraught man. Holland, too, had stayed with him for a while before returning to the cockpit. Now, sitting below in the dark, the yawning chasm of Erickson’s horror and grief was all Holland could think about.
He knew what it was like to lose a wife and lover—not to death, but to divorce. He remembered with cutting clarity the void Sandra had left behind when she’d reached the end of her patience with his solitary nature. It was a poor comparison, he chided himself. Sandra was still alive.
He thought of Sandra in the early days of their marriage, when they were so thunderously in love, and what it would have been like to have her snatched away in the middle of an Arctic night, her beautiful body mangled and ruined by a hail of gunfire—like Lisa Erickson’s.
He shuddered at the thought. What Erickson must be feeling is unfathomable!
He was wide awake, and it was useless to stay in the dark. Holland quietly got to his feet and opened the door. He hesitated at the privacy curtain that separated the cockpit and pilot rest facility from the forward section of the upper-deck cabin, then opened it. There was a small group around Keith Erickson at the back of the cabin. The gloom of the scene was cut only by the beam of light from an overhead reading lamp. Holland felt a powerful responsibility to go talk to him, but at the same time, he felt fearful of coming too close to the power and depth of Erickson’s grief. There was an aura of tragedy that surrounded the man now like the event horizon around a black hole.
In the role of captain, he could deal with Erickson’s loss. But on a personal level, it was too much, too close, too real. He’d spent a lifetime trying to shield himself from pain and sorrow and the sort of emptiness he’d felt so often growing up.
James Holland held on to the railing and turned away toward the windows on the right side of the cabin. He wished there was some compartment—some place—he could go and just be alone.
Utterly and completely alone!
He needed to close his eyes and be scared and miserable and guilty and a thousand other terrible feelings he couldn’t show. He probably even needed to cry.
But not as captain.
Holland took a deep breath and drew himself up to his full six-foot-three-inch height, turned, and walked toward Keith Erickson’s seat.
Two hundred fifty feet to the rear in the crew rest loft of Quantum 66, where they had relocated him, twenty-year-old Gary Strauss was trying to control the smile on his face. It was exciting enough that Stefani Steigal, the beautiful German girl he’d met in Switzerland, had turned up on the same flight, but to have her seated next to him across the aisle was too good to be true. Now she was climbing the top step into the crew rest loft to check on him. Her tousled blond hair cascaded around her athletic shoulders and perfectly framed her breasts in a way that had nearly driven him crazy with desire when they’d met on the ski slopes a week before.
“Hello, Herr Strauss!” she said with a smile and the pronounced German accent that tinged her melodic, slightly breathy voice.
“Wie geht es Ihnen?”
He cocked his head and feigned puzzlement. “Huh?”
“How are you, I asked.”
“I knew that! One helluva lot better now that you’re here,” he replied, grinning at her.
Stefani moved to his side and knelt down, knowing very well where his eyes had landed. She reached out and put her hand under his chin, raising his head up until his eyes met hers.
“You will stop looking at my breasts and look at me, ja?”
He smiled a bit sheepishly. “I have great admiration for your breasts.”
She ignored the remark. “Really, Gary, how are you feeling? Is this lying down helping?”
He nodded. “A lot, I think. Dr. Turnheir thinks he may need to cut the cast off, though. He’s worried about circulation. My leg has swollen so much, the cast is really tight.”
“I’m so sorry. Is there something I can get you?”
“Just stay within view and I’ll be fi
ne.”
“You’re terrible! Keep your mind on serious things.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Stefani looked back toward the ladder and sighed, her expression becoming serious.
“Gary, what do you think of all this?”
He thought about the question as he looked at her. She was athletic and tanned and a bit older than he at twenty-two, but there had been a serious mutual attraction from the first moment they’d met on the slopes. When she’d boarded and found him in pain with a broken leg, she was determined to mother him, but now her thoughts were turning inward, driven by apprehension.
Stefani turned back to him. “It frightens me, all of this. Those men out there, to kill a young woman like that just because she tried to cross a line …”
“As the captain said, Stefani, they’re frightened of us.”
“Are you?” she asked.
“What?”
“Are you afraid we’re going to get sick? Could this end up like The Andromeda Strain? I saw that movie years ago when I was little. It scared me.”
He shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know what to make of it. The crew here keeps saying it’s a false alarm.”
“I pray it is too, but I also think they’re scared.”
Gary reached out and took her hand, gently, delighted that she didn’t resist. She was a student at Yale, a senior. He was a sophomore at Princeton. There were railroads. He’d been making plans even in Switzerland.
But to find her now on the same flight! He was almost glad he and his parents had been forced to cut short their vacation when he broke his leg.
He winced as the pain shot up his leg beneath the cast.
Almost glad.
“Aren’t you going to spend Christmas with your family?” he asked.
She nodded. “Yes. My father works in the States. My mother died several years ago. I’ll be with him for Christmas … I hope.” She gestured toward the front of the aircraft. “If we get out of this.”
“I appreciate you coming up here, Stefani. Look, the best medicine is just to put it out of our minds. I’m sure the captain’s right. We’re in the middle of a classic governmental, military, diplomatic overreaction. There’s supposed to be a strange bug on board, so they go bonkers trying to keep us away from the rest of the world.”
She gave him a blank look. “What is ‘bonkers’? I’m not familiar with that?”
“Idiomatic usage. Slang. Means, ah, going crazy, or going nuts, or going bananas.”
She shook her head. The smile was gone.
“English is such a strange language …” Her voice trailed off as she glanced back at the doorway again.
“We’ll be okay, Stefani. Really.”
She worked at turning on her smile again. A thousand-megawatt smile, he decided.
“You need sleep, Gary. So do I,” she said.
He raised an eyebrow as he tried to gauge how much teasing he could get by with. “You, could … ah … sleep up here. I mean”—he gestured to his leg—“this bed’s big enough and I’m quite harmless like this, and there’s a privacy curtain.”
She wasn’t listening. The smile faded and she cocked her head.
“Why was your father so rude to me, Gary, when I asked if I could help you? Did I say something wrong?”
Endless paternal lectures on family history replayed all at once in his mind. His grandparents had been shipped to Auschwitz in the waning days of the war, and as a little boy his father had watched in agony from the other side of a fence as his parents were herded by in a long line of naked men, women, and children shuffling forward to be forced into a furnace—some without even the coup de grâce of a shot to the head. As a six-year-old male, little Abe Strauss had been saved for unspeakable purposes—but the Allies reached him first.
As a result, he hated all Germans, and all things German. He had been stunned and enraged that his family would have to change planes in Frankfurt instead of Paris for the unexpected early return home.
And he’d been none too pleased to find his son interested in a German girl.
“Stefani, we’re Jewish. Dad lived through Auschwitz as a child,” Gary said.
He heard her inhale suddenly and saw her eyes flicker away for a moment. She looked back at him and smiled weakly. “I understand, then. I’m sorry.”
She pulled away, and he reached for her hand and pulled her back, gently but firmly. “Stefani, that’s their generation. Not ours.”
She nodded. “I don’t want to cause trouble.”
He smiled at her. “You’re not. Unless you leave me alone up here, of course. Then all my wailing will keep everyone awake.”
She shook her head again. “As I said, you’re terrible. An oversexed baby. You’re obviously too young for me!” She pulled away and stood up, unconsciously arching her back in a way that emphasized her considerable bustline. He made a fist of his right hand and bit the knuckle of his index finger with a slight moaning sound, and she swatted him.
“If you’re in lust, I’m out of there,” she teased.
“The phrase is ‘out of here,’ and I’m not in lust, I’m in love.”
“Schweinehund! I’ll be back in a while to see if you’re dead.”
He watched her descend the ladder and disappear. Then he smiled and lay back, calculating the average travel time between universities and the possible advantages of transferring to Yale.
All worries about deadly viruses and broken legs had been temporarily displaced.
As Stefani returned to the main cabin, a balding, slightly overweight man in his late fifties excused himself from a window seat and retrieved his briefcase from an overhead bin before heading for the upper deck. He found an unoccupied row on the right and settled in, pulling out a small notebook computer. Several passengers glanced over and he smiled at them, aware that he wouldn’t be recognized. That was the advantage, he thought, of being both famous and invisible. As a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist with twenty years at the Washington Post, he had a byline that was known and respected. But in person he could blend in like a chameleon, observing at will and getting to know the people behind a story without becoming a center of attention himself.
Don Moses opened his computer and snapped it on. For hours he had watched and taken notes on those around him, principally out of boredom. Before the shooting of Lisa Erickson, the entire emergency seemed rather trivial—the usual governmental overreaction to a misperceived threat, as the captain had indicated.
But it had all changed suddenly, and the atmosphere of irritation had turned to apprehension.
He fed a series of keystrokes into the computer and decided on a three-page submission. When he finished the story, he could hook up the computer’s modem to the aircraft’s satellite phone in the seat back and download it to the newspaper’s computer back in Washington, ready to be edited.
He thought about his wife, Jaimie, waiting for him at the chalet they’d rented in Aspen. The kids should be there by now. Jill and Jake, together with their respective spouses and his grandkids, in their respective minivans. Thank God they’d taken well to his remarrying after their mother died, he thought, or Christmas together anywhere would end up a disaster. Jaimie, at thirty-four, was younger than his daughter, Jill, but everyone had embraced her as family.
Moses wrote a few lead lines setting the place and time, and let his mind roam back to the phone call he’d made to his family.
They’d been watching CNN’s continuing coverage of the crisis and were terrified.
He had been blasé, had laughed and minimized the risk of any illness, let alone anything approaching a lethal virus. Yes, he told them, there were guards around the airplane as CNN had reported, but that was nothing but typical Air Force overreaction. No one close to the action really believed that a quarantine was anything but precautionary.
That was before the Air Force security police had provided deadly evidence that Flight 66’s viral exposure was being taken with utter seriousnes
s.
Suddenly they had become a genuine story, and his journalistic instincts had become impossible to ignore. But more than anything else, playing the journalist set him apart from the terror he felt. He could watch and comment and write—engaging in the calming illusion that when the story was composed, he could walk away unscathed.
SEVENTEEN
CIA HEADQUARTERS, LANGLEY, VIRGINIA—SATURDAY, DECEMBER 23—6 A.M. (1100Z)
Rusty Sanders was not prepared for the alert he snagged from the CIA’s station in Cairo. Having quietly become a consummate expert with the Company’s computer systems in the previous two years, he’d loaded a special search program to look for any message traffic affecting Flight 66.
The Cairo communiqué had fallen into the net at 5:34 A.M.
Rusty caught Mark Hastings by phone in his office.
“I’ll print it out for you,” Rusty told him, “but the thrust of it is, Cairo has picked up information that Flight Sixty-six may be drawing the interest of a Shiite terrorist group. The report mentions rumors of terrorist efforts going on right now in Egypt and Libya to secure a military strike aircraft with a sufficient range to reach the western Sahara.”
“Jesus Christ!” Mark exclaimed. “They already know the flight’s destination field? Roth is going to have a coronary!”
“Can they move that fast? The Iranians, I mean?”
“Definitely, and they’ve got the money to back up whatever they decide to do, as well as the sophistication to do the job. Print a copy, I’ll be right down. I’d better tell Roth.”
When Mark had retrieved the message and left, Rusty reentered the computer and called the message back to the screen. Sherry Ellis had entered the room and moved in behind his left shoulder as he read it again.
“Print a copy for me too, would you, Rusty?” she asked.
He nodded, enjoying the faint scent of her perfume while his fingers worked the keys. Sherry scanned it as Rusty examined the various numbers and routing codes.
Pandora's Clock Page 19
