by Marc Cameron
Her eyes flicked open, fully awake.
“Tara Doyle,” she said out loud. “ The queen of West Texas bitches. She’s one of them.” The F-22 fighter pilot was a mole.
The television was turned to CNN, but the volume was down. The ticker across the bottom read Breaking News… Governors Island Wedding. Ronnie used the remote to turn it up. A dapper reporter with gelled hair and a black tuxedo spoke into the camera.
“… Clark and the First Lady will be arriving within the hour via the Marine One helicopter. Now, Rene, we haven’t seen the vice president or Mrs. Hughes yet this evening, but since it’s their daughter getting married tonight, we’re pretty sure they’re already on-site. And FYI, Rene, this wedding is shaping up to match Prince William and Kate as far as royal nuptials go. It could be the largest gathering of world leaders and celebrities we’ve seen in the U.S. since… well, I can’t remember when…”
Ronnie’s heart monitor went crazy as she reached for the telephone beside her bed.
Tara Doyle flew the most advanced fighter aircraft in the world. The wedding had to be her intended target.
Ronnie knew she couldn’t simply call in and report the threat. Doyle could have too many accomplices in high places. If the call was somehow received or even intercepted by one of the moles, Garcia might inadvertently move up the time line and put more people in danger. She had to talk to someone she was absolutely certain could be trusted. She beat her head against the pillow, racking her brain.
Ronnie had a good head for numbers, but realized she’d never actually called Quinn or Thibodaux. They’d always called her. She punched in the first number that came to her head.
“Three-five-four-three,” a male voice said. He had a familiar Virginia twang.
“Director Ross, please.”
“She’s not available. Who shall I say is calling?”
A vision of CIA Deputy Director Marty Magnuson, walking through the food court and shooting his coworkers in the head, flashed before Ronnie’s eyes. She hung up. How could she know who to trust?
She dialed information and got two more numbers.
“White House switchboard, may I help you?” It was a woman, polite, but all business.
“I need to speak with Winfield Palmer.”
“Mr. Palmer is unavailable. I’d be happy to take a message.”
“When would he get the message?” Ronnie bit her lip.
“Monday morning.”
“It’s important I speak to him right away. Could you have him call me?”
“I can certainly give him the message-on Monday morning.”
“Maldita sea!” Ronnie cursed. “I have to talk to him.”
“Ma’am, with all due respect, I get fifty calls a day from people who have to talk to someone here. Is this a matter of national security?”
“Yes, yes,” Ronnie said. “It is.”
“It’s always a matter of national security,” the woman said. Ronnie could almost hear her eyes rolling. “I suggest you hang up and dial nine-one-one.”
Ronnie slammed down the phone. She fell back against the pillow, catching her breath before dialing the next number.
“FBI.”
Ronnie clenched her teeth. It hurt her pride, but had to be done. “I need to speak with Director Bodington on an urgent matter-and please don’t tell me he’s unavailable.”
“Well,” the voice came back. “It’s Friday afternoon. He is unavailable.”
Ronnie wanted to scream. Her words spilled out in a breathy stream. “I can guarantee you he’ll want to talk to me,” she said. “I’m
… one of his informants…”
“Yes, ma’am,” the operator said, his voice cracking a little. “I can get you an on-call agent.”
Ronnie hung up without another word and pressed the call button at the side of her bed for the nurse. She was very near to tears, and that alone was enough to piss her off.
A bright-eyed brunette with a round, freckled face opened the door a few seconds later.
“You okay, dear?” she said, checking the heart monitor and oxygen output.
Ronnie nodded, willing herself to calm down so the nurse didn’t decide to medicate her. She had to get word to someone about Tara Doyle, but after all that had happened, she didn’t know who to trust.
“I’m fine.” She forced a smile. “Woke up from a bad dream, that’s all.”
The nurse, whose name tag said Beverly, lifted Ronnie’s wrist and checked the IV taped to the back of her hand. “Think you could eat some soup?”
“Maybe,” Ronnie said, wanting to appear compliant. Her head was still loopy from the pain medications they were giving her. “Have you got my cell phone anywhere?”
Beverly shook her head. “Nope,” she said. “You didn’t have anything like that on you when they brought you in.”
“Who brought me in?”
“Not sure, sweetie,” Beverly said. “I just came on duty a couple of hours ago. I’m glad you’re feeling better though.” She leaned in, whispering even though no one else was in the room. “Listen, I don’t know what you did, but you seem like a nice girl. There’s a plainclothes cop standing outside your room. If you want, I can ask him to come in and answer all your questions.”
Ronnie brightened. Maybe it was Quinn. “Dark hair, heavy five o’clock shadow?”
“No,” the nurse said. “Sorry.”
“Did he give his name?”
Beverly shook her head. “Sorry. I can ask him if you want. Looks kind of mean, though.”
Why would a cop be sitting outside her room? Could she trust him? She kicked herself for not memorizing Palmer’s cell number.
“No,” she said. “I’ll be okay. I just need some rest.” Ronnie swung her feet off the edge of the bed as soon as Beverly shut the door behind her.
“You can do this, chica,” she whispered, pausing long enough to let her head stop spinning.
She winced as she peeled back the sticky tape holding in her IV. Stumbling, and using the bed rail for support, she rifled through the drawers, settling for a cotton ball and piece of tape to stop the weep of blood from the back of her hand.
Thankfully, she found some clothes hanging in the closet-faded jeans, a black cashmere sweater, and a pair of Nike runners. She shucked off the thin, backless gown and ripped into the unopened packages of socks and underwear. Somebody was looking out for her.
Gingerly, she reached behind her back to touch her wound. She was surprised to find two more bandages, slightly larger than the first. Of course, the doctors had had to go in and repair the damage. One of the incisions was wet with blood from her exertions. She shrugged. Couldn’t be helped. She’d probably just pulled a stitch.
Tara Doyle, the “Queen of West Texas Bitches,” had to be stopped. And since she couldn’t trust anyone, Ronnie would do it herself.
She’d just zipped her jeans when the plainclothes cop walked in on her. He had blond hair and a wild, street-hardened look on his face-not much different than the boys in the caves where she’d been stabbed. He wore a white dress shirt with an open collar. A navy-blue sports coat covered the swell of a pistol on his belt. Ronnie had never seen him before, but there was something vaguely familiar in his eyes.
“Oh no, no, no, young lady,” he said, walking toward her with a raised hand, as if he was directing traffic. “You’re not going anywhere.”
CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE
“Can you put her down in the ball field?” Quinn said into his headset. Thibodaux sat across from him, strapped in to his seat forward of the cargo bay on V22 Osprey.
The pilot, a balding man with smiling blue eyes, turned to glance over the shoulder of his green Nomex flight suit. “I can set her down in the middle of Times Square if you want me to.” His name was Jared Smedley, an Air Force Academy squadron mate of Quinn’s. Smeds had gone on to flight training after the academy, graduating at the top of every class he took. He’d been a flight instructor for the last three years and had been br
ought in from the Eighth Special Operations Squadron at Hurlburt Field, Florida, to fly overwatch and rescue during the wedding. He gave a thumbs-up to his copilot, a waif of a girl with a blond ponytail hanging out below her flight helmet. She returned the gesture.
He had the swaggering confidence of a pilot and the skill to back it up. Quinn had always found it impossible not to like the man.
Capable of straight or vertical flight, Smedley’s aircraft, the tilt-rotor V22, made insertion possible in areas like Manhattan and Governors Island.
Quinn’s Bluetooth earbud chirped. He moved the boom mike of his headset away and tapped the device. It was Palmer.
“Homeland Security facial recognition just got a hit on an NYPD security camera on Mott Street. Looks like the doctor is buying cigarettes at a newsstand. I’m sending a still to your phone now.”
Quinn took the BlackBerry off his belt.
“Who’s the guy with him?” he asked, turning the screen to show Thibodaux.
“Look at that mop,” Thibodaux scoffed. “He’s Elvis’s evil twin.”
“Don’t know,” Palmer said, an edge to his voice that Quinn could feel. “We have intel that Badeeb’s wife is hiding out in a flophouse off Bowery. Looks like they’re heading to meet up with her.”
“Roger that,” Quinn said. “We’re about to touch down at a ball field in lower Manhattan. It’ll take us about ten minutes to get there on the bikes-”
Dust and leaves flew outside the windows as the huge rotors began to lower the Osprey onto the center of the baseball diamond. One of the two crewmen in the back told them to stand by and activated the lowering mechanism on the ramp at the rear of the bird, giving them a quick exit with their bikes.
Quinn stood from his seat along the bulkhead, working to release the straps on Mrs. Miyagi’s candy-apple-red Ducati 848.
“Don’t forget, Jericho,” Palmer said. “We need to take Badeeb and his wife alive. See who the other guy is. Do me a favor and try to keep from killing him.”
“If at all possible, sir.” Quinn nodded.
“Make damned certain it is possible,” Palmer said. “I’m pretty sure the president will go against my advice and come to the wedding no matter what the Secret Service or I say. He keeps reminding me that the terrorists have won if they get to dictate where we do and do not go…” There was a sudden blip on the phone-another call. “Hang on a minute…”
Quinn and Thibodaux sat, geared up and ready, on their bikes. The heavy rear ramp lowered the last few inches with an agonized hydraulic whine. Dust and litter swirled into the back of the aircraft as Palmer came back on the line.
“Jericho? You still there?” His voice was breathless, heavy.
“I am,” Quinn said, feeling a rise in the pit of his stomach.
“Jericho,” Palmer said. “It’s about Garcia.”
CHAPTER SEVENTY
Tara Doyle wiped the airmen’s blood off her hands and threw the wad of paper towels in the trashcan. A swatch of red painted the chest of her flight suit and the V of her neck. She didn’t bother with that. The smell of blood helped her focus on the matters at hand.
Her entire life, at least from the time she was nine years old, had been lived for the next few hours. The years of study, the decades of pretending to love her adopted family, to care for this country of dogs-it all led up to her actions this one night.
“I will cut the throat of the whore that is the United States of America,” she chuckled out loud to the cavernous hangar. “With one of her very best airplanes…”
Walking toward her jet, she had a fleeting thought of Jimmy. He’d been a toddler when her American parents had taken him in from the Indian reservation in Montana, too young to know she too was adopted. A good confidant-he’d caught her crying on so many occasions and come in to console her without once asking her why. She shook the thought from her mind. None of that mattered now. He was one of them, nothing more than a means to an end, someone to vouch for her citizenship and make her background more believable. She had to remind herself of that. Jimmy Doyle deserved to die like the rest of them-
“Major Tara Doyle, YOU ARE UNDER ARREST!” A muscular Air Force OSI agent wearing khaki 5.11 pants and a black ballistic raid vest stepped from behind the wheels of a nearby F-22 Raptor, Sig Sauer pistol at high ready.
Doyle spun, fillet knife in hand, but Ronnie Garcia rose up from her hiding spot behind the aircraft tug and hit her in the face with a crescent wrench.
The queen of West Texas bitches fell like a sack of wet sand. Garcia winced from the exertion, gritting her teeth against the searing pain in her back.
Moments later, the brightly lit hangar swarmed with OSI agents in black vests and thigh holsters. Everyone present had personally worked with Quinn and, for one reason or another, had his complete trust.
“We need to get a copy of the weapons load-out,” Garcia shouted. “Whoever signed for this payload of bombs is in this along with Doyle.”
“Got two dead in the back room,” an agent who’d been a year behind Quinn in the Academy yelled from across the open hangar. He stood at the door wearing a pair of blue nitrile gloves. “They got their pants around their ankles and their throats cut from ear to ear.” The agent shook his head. “It’s a mess.”
Garcia, still holding the wrench, looked down at the smear of fresh blood across the front of Doyle’s flight suit. “You really are a bitch,” she said.
One of the agents, a tan Colorado native named Judson who’d spent time in Iraq with Quinn, knelt to roll a moaning Doyle onto her stomach so he could handcuff her. He looked up at Garcia as he closed the cuffs with a ratcheting zip.
“You better sit down,” he said. “You look pretty pale.”
Maybe it hadn’t been such a good idea to come along considering what she’d been through. But she was just stubborn enough that whatever the cost, she wasn’t about to let a couple of holes in her back keep her away from something this big. In truth, Garcia thought she might be sick to her stomach at any moment.
“I got her,” a beefy man with mussed blond hair said as he took off his navy-blue sports coat and draped it over Garcia’s shoulders. The sleeves of his white button-down were rolled up to reveal a black octopus tattoo on his forearm. “Let’s get you back to the hospital, young lady. My big brother would never forgive me if I let anything happen to you.”
Garcia swayed on her feet, slumping into his arms.
Two Quinns… it was almost too much to fathom.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE
Quinn gunned the Ducati, shooting over the lip of the Osprey’s metal ramp. As he was accustomed to the longer travel in the GS’s suspension, the 848 jarred his fillings, landing with a stiff thud on the hard-packed soil of the ball field. His spinning tire gained traction almost instantly. Thibodaux, not to be outdone, revved his big GS Adventure, coming up even with Quinn on his right.
Palmer had briefed Quinn about the raid on the F-22 hangar at Langley. It calmed him some that Bo had been there to help look after Garcia.
That left the loose ends of Badeeb and his unknown acquaintance to clean up.
“We’re en route to Chinatown now.” Linked to Palmer via encrypted cellular, Quinn spoke into the mike inside his helmet.
“Outstanding,” Palmer said. “The problem is, with this sleeper jet jockey out of the picture, the president is determined to attend the wedding.”
“That’s not a good idea, sir,” Quinn said, splitting traffic to cut between two lanes packed full of bumper to bumper yellow cabs. “There has to be more to this than a single pilot. What about the brother?”
“He’s clean. Got several extended relatives from the reservation in Montana who vouch for him. Even has a couple of baby pictures and a footprint on his hospital birth record.”
“Still,” Quinn said, downshifting to shoot around a moving van. “It doesn’t pass the smell test. A target as ripe as that wedding has to have two shooters pointed at it.”
“I’m painfully
aware of that,” Palmer said. “I even used your little ditty on the boss-‘see one, think two.’ I’m afraid he remains unconvinced.”
Quinn swerved sharply, countersteering around a puttering delivery boy whose bicycle was piled head high with takeout boxes from a Chinese restaurant.
“Understood. We’ll be at the newsstand where Badeeb bought cigarettes in less than a minute. I can already smell the fish shops… I’ll call you when we have something.”
“Tally ho, beb,” Thibodaux’s voice came across Quinn’s earpiece, as they turned the bikes out of the honking, chaotic traffic of Bowery and into the cramped and twisting alley of Doyers Street. Gaudily painted green, yellow, and red brick buildings with rusted, zigzagging fire escapes rose up on either side of the narrow pavement, giving the place a kaleidoscope-tunnel-like atmosphere.
“See the guy with the cigarette under the neon sign?” Jacques pointed with his chin as he rode. “He look like our Pakistani doc to you?”
“Roger that,” Quinn said. His eye caught the movement of another dark figure striding purposefully through the door of a yellow six-story brick halfway down the block. He only caught a glimpse, but the upswept pompadour of black hair and the sure movements told Quinn this was the Evil Elvis in the photograph.
Badeeb stood in the grimy shadows under the tattered sign of the hand-pulled noodle shop. Even in the dim light, his oval face shone with perspiration. Twin black pebbles stared back from an enveloping haze of smoke from the cigarette that hung from his lips. He seemed oblivious to a couple of motorcycles, intent instead on the man who’d just disappeared into the yellow building.
