“Did you fellows consider that maybe that captain is trying to get fuel to fly on to the desert?” the President asked.
“Sir,” Roth continued, “we don’t know what he’s planning, but one possibility is that he’s planning to fly back west to the U.S. The problem is, we’ve already been through the mill with the question of where it’s safe to send him, and the only answer was Mauritania or a similar Saharan site. If he heads anywhere else, he’s a major threat to civilization. You remember the details from earlier.”
“I remember clearly,” the President said, “but what I haven’t heard are the results of the autopsy on the professor.”
Roth looked startled. “I … I’m sorry, sir, I thought you’d seen the note I sent up earlier.”
“Just brief me, Jon.”
Roth nodded. “There was an unauthorized leak from Keflavík that the autopsy proved the professor was infected. That didn’t come from our team up there. What they found was inconclusive. There was no evidence that clearly tied the virus into the apparent heart attack, but their findings were unable to prove that the professor wasn’t infected, and we just don’t have any way of knowing that he wasn’t infectious.”
“So where does that leave us?”
Roth pursed his lips and looked the President in the eye. “With the presumed presence of a Level Four pathogen that we can neither prove nor disprove. Helms was definitely exposed. No question. Even if he didn’t have an active case, he could have exposed everyone else on the aircraft. If we assume otherwise, we’re risking a world epidemic of historic proportions on a mere gamble. To tell otherwise, at least three more days would have to go by, and we’d need electron microscope results for the samples taken in Bavaria and Iceland.”
The President studied Roth’s face for several seconds. “What, precisely, are you suggesting, then, Jon?”
“Well, we’ve asked the Spanish not to let him leave, of course …”
“Of course. But if he does take off and heads somewhere else, what are our options as the CIA sees them? I’m giving you the lead advisory role on this because of the agency’s expertise with the international aspects of this virus. I’m told our Army Research Center at Fort Detrick is deferring to you because they have no idea what bug this is.”
Jon Roth looked down at his shoes briefly, then looked up and glanced over at the Air Force general with whom he’d discussed the options, then back at the President.
“Sir, if the captain of Flight Sixty-six refuses to cooperate and heads for any place but Mauritania, I don’t know any other way we can deal with him but force.”
The President unfolded his arms and stood away from the console, his mouth open.
“You mean, threaten to shoot him down ourselves if he doesn’t obey? Some damn terrorist has already tried that, and the whole world is hearing the details on CNN right now. You’re telling me we may have to threaten our own people with the same thing, and we’re not even sure they’re infected?”
Roth nodded, then began shaking his head. “Not just threaten, Mr. President. Given the very real biological threat they probably pose, and depending on where they try to go, we may actually have to do it.”
GRAND HYATT, WASHINGTON, D.C.—7:12 P.M. (0012Z)
With confirmation that Flight 66 was on the ground at Tenerife, Rusty Sanders decided to make an essentially dangerous call to an old friend in the Defense Intelligence Agency. The call was brief and over unsecured lines, and the fellow analyst was guarded and uncomfortable hearing from a CIA employee on the run from an alleged renegade group within the Company. Nevertheless, he took the number of Sherry’s handheld cellular phone and promised to monitor developments from the DIA’s point of view.
Rusty carefully omitted any reference to his continuous contacts with the captain of Flight 66.
“I wouldn’t do this even for you, Rusty,” the DIA man said, “if I wasn’t convinced your concern was legitimate. I know you’ve been working the problem since last night.”
“I appreciate it more than you know, Stan.”
“Well, only someone on the inside of that operation could know that you guys skunked us last night. It’s fascinating now to speculate why Jon Roth was so determined to beat us.”
“Just interdepartment rivalry at that point, I’ll bet.”
“I’ll be in touch.”
There was one more call to be made to Flight 66, but Rusty could see it was time to leave the Hollingsworths’ room. They had already heard far too much. He and Sherry thanked the couple and slipped into the hallway, noticing the housekeeper’s cart to their right. They turned left, hurriedly entering the fire stairwell at the end of the hall.
Instinctively Sherry put a finger to her lips and moved back to the small rectangular window to scan the hallway. There was no one in sight.
“What now?” Sherry asked.
“Did you turn on your portable phone?”
She nodded. “Where do we go? They’re still at Tenerife, right? Are they waiting for us to feed them any information?”
Rusty shook his head and glanced toward the hallway.
“No. Holland hadn’t decided where to go, though, or even whether to leave. I need to call again and find out what their plan is, in case we can help. We’re the only ones he can safely talk to for the next twenty hours!”
Sherry fell silent and scanned the hallway again, spotting a man in a dark suit leaving the elevator. He turned down the hall in the opposite direction from their stairwell, but she continued to watch as he passed the service cart of the housekeeper and knocked on a door near the far end, where he stood waiting. The man carefully looked in both directions before producing a key and unlocking the door. In a second he had disappeared inside.
Rusty had sensed her increasing nervousness.
“You thinking we’re targets?” he asked.
She nodded, still looking through the small window.
“So do I. I’ve had a gut feeling, Sherry, a very bad feeling that Roth is going to try to clean up this little problem by getting rid of us, or am I sounding like a raving paranoid?”
Sherry Ellis looked at him without expression for a few seconds, then cocked her head. “We suspect Jon Roth helped Aqbah target Flight Sixty-six, and we now know someone shot at them and managed to knock off an engine. We don’t know who it was, but you told Roth it was going to happen. If he really is responsible, you—and probably I as well—are loose ends. The Company doesn’t really assassinate people anymore, according to the official version of the rules, but if Jon’s done what we think, he’s not playing by the rules.”
“Which means?” Rusty prompted.
“Which means, no, you’re not paranoid. Anything can happen. Don’t forget the goons in your condo.”
They began moving down the stairwell without looking through the window again. Unseen, behind them, the man in the dark suit emerged from the room he had entered and walked the short distance to the housekeeper’s service cart. She was inside the adjacent room, and he reached up to knock on the open door to gain her attention. If someone was hiding on the fourteenth floor and refusing her services, she would know.
There would be a service elevator, Sherry assured Rusty, and they found it within a few steps of the stairwell as they exited on the fifth floor.
She was sure the elevator would open up on a basement service area, and she was right. They exited the service elevator and moved through the employee break room without challenge and up a back stairwell to the rear of the restaurant area.
“There’ll be a back entrance to the kitchen for supplies,” Sherry whispered. “We can slip out to the street from there.”
The job of watching the lobby and six different possible exit points at once had taken its toll on the leader of the two-man cleanup team dispatched to deal with Rusty Sanders. The leader spoke into his palmed microphone as he entered the service areas of the hotel to check the back exits once again. He was turning back when Sanders himself moved through the kit
chen and right past him, headed toward the rear exit, a woman in tow.
There was no time to alert his partner.
The majority of the kitchen staff were busy elsewhere. Sanders and the woman were in a back hallway with no one else around. The timing was ideal.
He stepped forward. “Excuse me! Sir! Ma’am! Could you wait a moment?”
Rusty heard the voice but decided to press on as if it weren’t meant for him. The second shout caused him to stop and turn. A man in his mid-forties approached with a broad smile on his face. Rusty was vaguely aware of the fact that Sherry had also stopped and turned and was now walking back to his side.
The man was smiling broadly, disarmingly. Probably hotel security, unhappy about their intrusion, Rusty concluded.
“Yes?” Rusty said.
“Could I ask for some identification, please?” the man said, expecting both of them to fumble for their cards. As Rusty reached for his wallet, the man reached into his coat and produced a silenced revolver.
“Rusty! Look out!” Sherry’s cry of alarm caused Rusty to look up, but too late. The barrel was aimed squarely at his chest, and Sherry froze as well, waiting for the inevitable sound of a muffled shot.
Instead, the man smiled again. Keeping the gun leveled at Rusty, he said, “Dr. Sanders, we’ve been waiting for you.”
“Who’s ‘we’? And put that thing down,” Rusty said.
The man shook his head. “You’ve had us quite frustrated trying to find you. You were supposed to call in.”
Roth’s team! Rusty concluded. Roth had told him to find a hotel and call in.
“Why the gun? If you’re Company, why the gun?”
The man raised his other hand and spoke into the palmed microphone, arranging for his partner to bring their car to the back door. That completed, he eyed Sherry while keeping the gun on Rusty.
“We’ll explain everything in due course.” He gestured to Sherry with the gun. “Who’s this?”
Rusty stayed silent. Sherry hesitated, then stepped forward.
“Jon Roth’s personal assistant. Who the hell are you?”
The man wavered. It was an insignificant, momentary waver, but for the brief period of a few seconds the entire mission was in doubt. Roth’s name had been spoken with authority. Roth had an assistant. What would she be doing here? If he took the wrong person …
As the questions ricocheted in his head, Sherry saw his fingers change their grip on the gun. The barrel dropped an inch or so. She began a broad, curious smile and raised her arms above her head to thoroughly distract his eyes at the moment her right leg gathered years of muscular training behind the singular goal of instantly emasculating the gunman before her.
She kicked him in the groin with all her might.
The man’s trigger finger had been momentarily removed from the trigger. Now it closed helplessly around the gunstock as a pain beyond anything he’d ever felt shot through his middle and instantly convulsed his abdominal muscles. The man pitched forward with eyes bulging, not even hearing his own yelp of agony as Sherry slapped the gun away, catapulting it to one side.
“Get the gun!” she ordered, and Rusty shook off his shock and scrambled to comply. He leveled it at the man, who wasn’t interested in fighting. She reached inside his coat pocket and ripped out the transceiver, checked for additional weapons, and then yelled at a kitchen worker.
“Call the police! This man’s accomplice will be at the back door in a few seconds with another gun. Lock him out!”
The confused worker looked frightened to death as Sherry placed the gun in his hand. “Cover the bastard! He’s an assassin.”
She grabbed Rusty’s hand and led him toward the front of the kitchen past other gathering workers and through the double doors, knocking down a waiter who had picked that moment to enter. They ran to the front entrance. There was a cab in the driveway and Sherry yanked the door open and jumped in. Rusty tumbled in after her.
“Drive!” she commanded.
“Where?” the cabby asked.
“Anywhere but here! Go west! Go toward Richmond.”
The elderly black man shifted to drive and tromped on the gas pedal as he wheeled the car into traffic.
Rusty caught his breath long enough to look at his companion.
“You … you probably ruined that guy, you know?”
“You didn’t understand the situation, did you, Doctor?”
“He was going to take us somewhere …”
“Yeah, to talk or to die. Remember I said we could expect anything? He could have had orders to dispose of us. Two shots to the head. No heart shot needed. The Covert Ops people are always talking about such techniques, usually to scare everyone else. But hell, show me the wrong end of a gun and I’m not willing to gamble.”
“You’re serious, aren’t you?”
She nodded. “Could be there was already a disposal point planned for the bodies. You and I, mister, would simply cease to exist. The Company would make all sorts of worried inquiries to preserve the public record while they quietly rewrote the private one.”
Rusty just stared at her.
She shook her head. “We’re in deep trouble, Rusty. Until we can expose Jon Roth, we’re targeted. Even if all that goon wanted to do was talk.”
The cabby was enjoying the challenge. He took a second corner at breakneck speed and Rusty leaned forward.
“Not that fast! We don’t want to be stopped.”
The cabby nodded, smiling to himself. The fare wanted a fast ride, the fare would get a fast ride.
There was a chirping from Sherry’s purse and she removed her cellular phone, handing it to Rusty.
“For you, I’ll bet.”
It was Rusty’s contact from DIA. Something had happened, he said, that disturbed him greatly. The Air Force and Navy were being tasked with a search and destroy mission. He was greatly afraid that the target was Flight 66.
“Search and destroy? What are you talking about? They’re on the ground in Tenerife. It was on CNN.”
“They were, Rusty. They flew away about twenty minutes ago without a trace. There’s a flight plan filed for Iceland, but no one believes it. They think he’s headed west. Maybe back to the States.”
“Jesus!” Rusty said. “Who’s giving the order to shoot him?”
“The White House, Rusty. I shouldn’t, of course, be giving you this heads up, but someone over there’s lost their mind! Can you imagine the fallout over this? I’ve got to go. See what you can do on that end.”
Rusty thanked him, punched the OFF button, and relayed the word to Sherry, who was massaging a bruised right hand, which was still hurting from slapping the gun away from the goon at the Hyatt.
“Try calling him,” she said. “We’re a moving target, and they obviously didn’t know who I was before. They won’t be tracking this phone yet.”
ABOARD FLIGHT 66
James Holland and Dick Robb had plotted the departure course before the last gallons were pumped into Flight 66’s tanks. They had also carefully calculated the ability of the aircraft to lift itself with nearly a full load of fuel on three engines. It would be marginal, but it was possible.
With the remaining three engines started, Holland encountered no resistance taxiing to the end of the runway for an east departure. He turned immediately and set takeoff power on engines two and three to begin the takeoff roll with symmetrical thrust, bringing in engine number one as the airspeed moved above eighty knots. Slowly, steadily, the 747 accelerated, reaching rotation speed just as the red lights at the end of the runway threatened to disappear under the nose.
Holland leveled at a thousand feet and turned north in accordance with the flight plan, keeping the transponder off and talking to no one. Fifty miles north of the island, Holland descended to one hundred fifty feet and began a long, slow, arcing turn back to the west. It was part of the plan. Pretend to be heading back to Iceland while in fact heading west.
Before takeoff, Rachael Sherwood h
ad leaned over his shoulder and asked, “Where have you decided to go?”
“Provided no one gets sick in the next ten hours, I’m going to take us to either Barbados or the Virgin Islands.” he told her.
Rachael looked shocked. “The West Indies? Why?”
“Close enough to Miami for the media. Within hours we’ll have dozens of TV cameras watching us. No one would dare hurt us with that kind of scrutiny, and as soon as it becomes apparent that no one aboard is sick or infected, it’ll all be over.”
“Can we just fly in and land?”
Holland nodded. “I thought about just popping up and landing in Miami, or maybe Charleston, or even Washington, D.C. But we still have coastal radar, and we’d be intercepted far enough out so if someone panicked, they could start shooting. Barbados or the Virgins should be wide open for an airplane running essentially on the surface. We’ll drop down four hundred miles out. It should work as simply as Tenerife did.”
The Iridium telephone had been placed by the window to Holland’s left. When it rang, he transferred control to the copilot and punched it on.
“Captain Holland? James? This is Rusty.”
The voice was garbled electronically, but Holland could make it out.
“This is James Holland. I’m having trouble hearing you.”
A wave of weird electronically generated noises pulsed over the line, followed by Rusty Sander’s voice. “… are you?”
“Where are we?”
“Yes.”
The line seemed to clear suddenly. Holland filled him in on their position, and their plan.
“You can’t, James! The Air Force and Navy are ginning up a search and destroy operation. I have information that they may try to shoot you down, and if you come anywhere close to the mainland of the U.S., they probably will!”
James Holland glanced back at Rachael. She was wearing an expression of grave concern. There was no time to explain to her what Sanders had said. There was an intermittent beeping now in the earpiece she could hear even a few feet away.
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