Blink of an Eye

by Roy Johansen

  “I wanted this one.”

  “And I went along with it, didn’t I? But she wasn’t like that model in Paris that you made disappear two years ago. All it took was a fat check to have one of your mafia friends remove her when you were bored with her. But I knew people would notice this time.” Her voice roughened. “You were obsessed with her, and look where we are now.”

  “I was careful. I was smart. There was no reason why I couldn’t have her.” His voice was pettish. “You were just jealous. You thought I liked her too much.”

  “This is all very interesting,” Jessie said. “But would you like to explain to us just who Charlotte is?”

  “Charlotte Palker,” Noah said. “My parents hired her to take care of me when I was five. Then they promptly forgot I existed unless I did something extraordinary. Of course, I did that frequently.” He smiled at Charlotte. “I was never a good boy. But bad or good, she was always there for me. She lives at my house in London now…except when I get in trouble and need her.”

  “I won’t go to that island,” she said sourly. “Get rid of her. Get rid of both of them.”

  “We’ll talk about it.” His voice was soothing. “I admit it might save trouble.” He turned and headed for the door. “But now I need you to help me. You’ve only done half the job. We’ve got to get those stupid bastards stuffed away in one of those other planes before that jet gets here.”

  “We’ll manage,” Charlotte said brusquely. “There are only three, and I’ve set up carts to transport them.” She smiled. “But don’t expect me not to try to convince you to do things my way. It’s much easier to have everyone think that the kidnappers eliminated her and just drop her into the ocean once we leave here. Then you’ll be free of any suspicion.” Her voice was butter-soft. “Do what I ask. Let me help you as I always have before, Noah.”

  He hesitated as he looked over his shoulder. “Perhaps…We’ll talk about it after we finish.” He glanced mockingly back at Jessie. “You might not be needed after all. How sad for you.” Then the door slammed behind them.

  Dee drew a deep breath. “What an incredibly loathsome twosome. Being in the same room with them made me feel dirty. Charlotte Palker is a cross between Madame Defarge knitting at the guillotine and that hag-housekeeper who ruled the mansion in that movie Rebecca.”

  “And Noah is no better,” Jessie said quietly. “He was very defensive but there’s no doubt that he’s a psychopath. And you weren’t his first victim, Dee. There’s no telling how many others there have been. That Paris model you told me he was dating must not have healed his ego enough for him to keep her around.”

  Dee shivered. “And he has a mafia Good Fella on the payroll? No wonder he thought he could have anything he wanted.”

  “Apparently.” Jessie grimaced. “I believe Charlotte might genuinely care about him, but he probably uses her just as he uses everyone else. Either way, they’re both sickos who deserve each other. Agreed?”

  “Absolutely.” Dee began to work quickly at her manacles. “And I don’t know how much time we’re going to have to get away from here while they’re burying corpses. So we’d better get a move on while we have the chance…”

  Jessie tested her wrist restraints as she looked around the aircraft interior. “We need to get out of here. Noah said his plane will touch down in under an hour.”

  “I’ve already tried,” Dee said. “I couldn’t even crack these windows.”

  “They’re built to withstand thousands of pounds of pressure. There’s no way you could have—” Jessie looked at her. “Wait a minute. How could you get to those windows? Your restraints don’t give you that much room.”

  Dee smiled. “No, they don’t.”

  “So how in the hell—?”

  “I listened to you,” she said simply. “What you taught me. The only chance I had was when Dorset took me to the bathroom, and he must have thought I had one hell of a bladder infection to have to go so often. But every time I went to the bathroom, I did push-ups and got pumped up as much as I could. And when Dorset put the straps back on, I tensed up and swelled up my muscles a little more. Most times it got me to an extra hole on the strap buckle. After a while, when my arms shrank back to normal, I was able to work my way out. Didn’t you tell me Houdini used that trick?”

  “Wow. You always looked bored during my safety tutorials. I was never sure you were really listening.”

  “I always listened to you, Jessie. You were the only one I did pay attention to. But it hasn’t done me any good here. I couldn’t even slip out of these cuffs to help you. I was afraid I’d blow any chances for us to escape.” She shook her head. “And there’s no way out. The silver door they’ve been using is locked, and those forward aircraft doors don’t work.”

  Jessie tugged at her restraints. “I was unconscious when they put me in these straps, dammit. I wasn’t able to do the Houdini trick. Do you think you could get out now?”

  “Possibly.” Dee grinned as she waved with her free right hand.

  “Hallelujah! Get me out of these things!”

  Dee unbuckled the strap from her other arm, then released Jessie from her restraints. Jessie jumped to her feet and went to the front left aircraft boarding door. She moved the large lever from left to right.

  The door didn’t move.

  “See?” Dee said. “I think it needs power.”

  “No. These doors use compressed gases. A bottle of nitrogen makes it work.”

  Dee looked at her curiously. “How do you know so much about this?”

  Jessie knelt and examined the floor panels. “I told you, they used Airbus equipment in Afghanistan. For a while, I worked at the base machine shop when I was serving there.” She pried loose a floor panel in front of the door. “This one isn’t bolted down. The crew probably just left it that way after they mothballed this plane.”

  Jessie frowned as she looked down into the floor compartment.

  “What do you see?” Dee asked.

  “Not much that makes any sense to me…But I do see two loose hose ends. And some other loose parts rolling around in there. It looks like this plane was at least partially stripped. It’s a mess. Nothing but—” She inhaled sharply. “Wait!”

  “What is it?”

  Jessie pulled out a steel canister with a yellow tab on top. She rested it on the floor. “This may be the nitrogen.” She pulled out the hose ends. One of them had a yellow valve screw; one was red. Jessie attached the yellow hose to the canister screw top.

  A mild hissing sound came from the door for a few seconds, then silence.

  They both stared at the canister for a moment.

  “That’s it?” Dee asked blankly.

  “No idea. I didn’t say I was an actual mechanic. I just saw other people working on these things.” Jessie stood. “Okay, back up. I’m going to arm this door and pull the lever.”

  “What will that do?”

  “Assuming this works, the door will open by itself. If there’s still a slide in here, it may deploy. If there isn’t, we may have to jump, tuck, and roll. Got it?”

  “That’s a lot of ifs.”

  “It’s all we’ve got. It’s going to make some noise, so we’ll have to get out the second we can.”

  Jessie opened a cover and pulled down the switch to arm the door. She turned back to Dee. “Ready?”

  “Do it.”

  Jessie pulled down the door lever, and then…

  Nothing.

  “Shit,” Jessie muttered.

  A moment later, the hissing sound returned.

  “What’s happening?” Dee asked.

  The door slid open!

  With a deafening whoosh, the escape slide instantly inflated and shot into the darkness.

  “Now!”

  Dee jumped onto the slide and crossed her arms in front of her. Jessie was a second behind.

  They tumbled down the slide and landed in a heap on the desert floor!

  * * *

  Kendra’s
Toyota

  “Noah Calderon?” Lynch gave a low whistle of disbelief. “Are you sure?”

  Kendra nodded. “Pretty damn sure. It became clear when I heard the audio reconstruction your Swiss technical group did. Not even then until I went over and over it and finally I realized what I was hearing.”

  “You recognized her voice?”

  “No, I’m sure I’ve never heard it before. But I recognized the pattern of her voice, the suppressed consonants, the slightly elongated vowels, trace of a singsong lilt at the beginning of the sentences…It’s the pattern of someone from the northeast United States who has also spent several years in extreme northern England.”

  “As opposed to moderately northern England?”

  “Totally different sound.”

  “You’re not joking.”

  “No, it’s a sound I recognized in another voice lately. Someone who was born in Connecticut but spent several years attending a private school in Newcastle upon Tyne in northern England.”

  “Noah Calderon.”

  She nodded. “It’s really too close to be a coincidence.” She paused. “And there were other things…Remember how Jessie said that Noah had been taken care of by servants all his life wherever he was sent?”

  “So?”

  “If he was in partnership with this woman, they must have been very close, and they would have had to establish a relationship.” She paused. “And I know where they established that relationship. It was all on that call we listened to just now. Noah and his parents are American. So is this woman. Noah has traveled on the Continent; so has this woman. Possibly with him.” She went on. “But one place I’m certain she was with him was near his school in England. He attended that private school for a few years as a youngster, and I can tell by intonations in her dialect that she spent at least that amount of time there, too. I doubt if she was a teacher, though she sounds well educated. So that leaves a guardian of some sort who was paid to watch over wild Noah and keep an eye on him while he was at school.” She was frowning as she tried to put it together. “Of course, it’s all guesswork. She might be a relative, but I believe she was a servant.”

  “You’re certain of all this?”

  “I can’t be certain. Not yet. How could I be? But I’d bet it was him. Their nuances, intonations, phrasing, are like mirrors. They can probably finish each other’s sentences. They’ve been together a long time.” She paused before adding grimly, “Besides, there’s something else that cinches it.”

  “What?”

  “Pull up the pictures of Dorset’s body on your phone.”

  Lynch pulled up the photos and swiped his finger across the screen. “Any one in particular?”

  “A good shot of his face.”

  After a few more swipes, Lynch held up his phone. “Got it.”

  “Look at his upper cheeks. See a faint bruising there?”

  He increased the image size. “Very faint.”

  “It’s the same mark left by the lower edge of Noah’s stupid night-vision goggles last night. I just realized it when I started to think of all this in terms of him. He said there’s only a few of those in existence. He must have loaned them to his men who were charged with finding and plucking Jessie from the water.” She glanced quickly at his face. “If I’d had any doubts before about his involvement, it ended when I thought about that bruise. Maybe I’d accept the possibility of one coincidence linking him to the crime, but not two.”

  Lynch sat in silence for a moment. “It all makes sense. When you make the jump to Calderon, there’s even a reason for his demand for that twenty-five-million-dollar ransom.”

  She nodded. “Access. It immediately made him part of our team. He was there for most of the key moments of our investigation. Both money drops, but also the planning and coordination that went into them. It gave him an inside line on what we were doing and thinking.”

  He was frowning. “The tracking chips on the money bands…”

  “I don’t care about that right now,” she said impatiently. “We can figure it out later. Who knows what a paranoid nutcase like Noah would be thinking? All that matters is that we know he’s the one who took Dee and Jessie and that we have to go after him.”

  He shook his head. “That’s not quite all that matters. I know you want to rush forward and take Noah down. I’m not arguing. But it still leaves us with one major question.”

  “Why in the hell would he kidnap her?”

  “Yes. Noah Calderon is literally a man who has everything.”

  “Sometimes the man who has everything wants the one thing he can’t have. In the years since they dated, he’s watched Dee become one of the most famous and desired women in the world. And he wouldn’t be the first man to abuse his ex.” She reached out and grasped his arm. “He did this, Lynch. I know it. Don’t put roadblocks in my way.”

  His hand covered her own on his arm. “I wouldn’t think of it. Right or wrong, it makes too much sense not to go with your instinct.” Lynch picked up his phone and was swiping through the contacts. “But we need to loop Kelland in on this.”

  Lynch put his phone on speaker, and Kelland answered on the first ring. “Lynch, I hope this means you were able to talk Kendra out of barging into the Boneyard.”

  “You really don’t know her very well, do you, Kelland?”

  “I’m starting to. Give us a chance. We just got on the road.”

  Kendra spoke in the direction of Lynch’s phone. “Kelland, do you know where Noah Calderon is right now?”

  “No, he hasn’t been around today. Why?”

  “We need to find him. Now. Can you get some people on that?”

  “Maybe after you tell me why.”

  Kendra quickly filled him in. After she finished, there was only silence from Kelland’s side of the call.

  “Kelland? Are you there?”

  “Yes,” he finally responded. “I get what you’re saying, Kendra. It seems to make sense. But if you’re wrong about this, the shit’s going to come down hard. Noah Calderon maintains multimillion-dollar PACs for half the members of Congress. That’s what’s kept them from breaking up his company years ago. They could make life miserable for all of us.”

  “Man up, Kelland,” she said curtly. “Two women’s lives are on the line.”

  “I know that. I’m just trying to talk reason to you.”

  “Then while you’re at it, maybe you can reach out to the FAA. See if he or his company owns a plane in storage up in Mojave.”

  “Metcalf is here in the van with me. He’s already on it.”

  “Good. We’re less than ten minutes away. We’ll keep you posted.” She watched as Lynch pressed to disconnect. “Nothing like a little pressure,” she muttered.

  “Woman up,” he said. “You believe you’re right. We’re going to go with it. Screw Kelland and Noah’s super PACs.”

  CHAPTER

  ​13

  It’s eerie,” Kendra said as she gazed at the dozens of old commercial airliners silhouetted by the setting desert sun. The planes were arranged in neat rows, on thousands of acres adjacent to a remote airstrip. Most of them still wore airline logos and markings, and some were sealed by plastic covers.

  Lynch nodded in response to her observation. “Eerie is the perfect word for it. Eerie and a little sad.”

  They had pulled off State Route 14 into the parking lot of a roadside restaurant and an establishment that billed itself a “medical marijuana collective.” The Boneyard’s eastern perimeter was less than half a mile away.

  “It’s massive,” Kendra said. “Where do we even start?”

  “Kelland and the FBI tactical team will have infrared scanners with them. When they get here, we can sweep the planes one by one and see if anyone’s inside.”

  “I don’t want to wait. You and I should go take a look first, but we’ll have to be stealthy about it. If the kidnappers get wind we’re here, it won’t go well for Dee and Jessie.” Kendra cocked her head. “Oh, my God.”r />
  “What is it?”

  “Listen.”

  Above the sound of the howling desert winds, a rumbling engine became increasingly audible.

  Lynch turned to Kendra. “The sound on the phone call recording?”

  Kendra nodded. “The FBI thought it might be a tractor.” She pointed down to the hangar. “Close, but no cigar. It’s an aircraft tow rig.”

  Lynch looked at the white four-wheeled tug, similar to those used to tow planes to their gates at most large airports. The uniformed operator parked the tug at the hangar, exited the glass-enclosed driver’s compartment, and went into a wire-enclosed employee parking lot that was almost vacant. He climbed into a Ford sedan and started his car, only stopping to lock the gate before he drove away.

  “That’s our cue,” Lynch said. “The place appears to be pretty much deserted with only a token staff. We’ll probably have the place to ourselves, and we can look around without creating a disturbance. It’ll be dark by the time we get down there.”

  Kendra glanced down at the khaki trousers and white tunic shirt she was wearing. “And I’ll show up in that dark like a summer Popsicle. Not exactly the right apparel for hunt and chase. Let me grab my windbreaker out of the trunk.” The next moment she was opening the trunk of her car and picking up the navy-blue windbreaker. She stiffened and then smiled as something else caught her eye tucked in the corner of the trunk.

  “What is it?” Lynch was gazing at her expression.

  Kendra hesitated. Why the hell not? she thought recklessly. She slipped the object into the windbreaker’s large inside pocket. “Nothing. Let’s go.”

  She slammed the trunk lid closed.

  * * *

  “Come on!” Jessie jerked Dee to her feet and pulled her away from the airliner that had been their prison. “Noah had to have heard that loud blowout. We have to get out of here.”

  Dee looked at the rows of planes extending seemingly into infinity as she ran after her. “What kind of place is this?”

  “Airplane graveyard.” Jessie pulled Dee behind the landing gear of a weather-beaten Eastern Air Lines jet. “I’ve heard about this place. I thought that was probably where we were when I saw that Frontier Airline plaque on that Airbus. It’s like a maze. We have to find our way out.”