Final Winter

Silence. Lots of raised voices and phone calls from outside the office, from the floor of the Operations Center. Then Brian’s pager and Monty’s started going off, but the two of them ignored the noise.

Monty said, ‘All this about Adrianna… Aliyah. How did you find that out?’

‘She told me.’

Bocks was incredulous. ‘She told you? When? How? And why in God’s name would she tell you?’

Brian said, ‘She told me a couple of hours ago. And I think she told me because she wanted to brag, wanted to tell somebody before it was too late. And she told me in her hotel room, just before she shot me.’

The fourth guy in the room said, ‘She shot you? The hell you say.’

Brian opened up his shirt, displayed the bruise marks that were going to be an ugly green and yellow in a few days. ‘I was wearing a Kevlar vest. She tapped me twice in the chest and I fell off a balcony — landed like some freak circus performer on an awning. And now I’m here to tell you what happened… Monty?’

‘Yeah?’ Monty was looking at his Blackberry pager with a grim look, toggling through whatever text message had been sent to him.

‘We’ve got to get the rest of the team here. Victor and Darren.’

‘Going to be hard to do that, Brian,’ he said.

‘Why?’

Monty shook his head. ‘Check your pager. Darren’s been found dead, back in Maryland: broken neck and stuffed in our food freezer.’

Brian said, ‘Jesus Christ.’

~ * ~

Monty looked at the three men in the office, knew it was starting to slide away, knew he had to step in before things got lost and more time vanished.

Keeping his voice cool and level, he said, ‘All right. We got hosed. Adrianna did a spectacular job. When the Congressional hearings and special commissions are done with this one, we’ll all probably be doing jail time, especially me.’

And it came to him in a flash. Those missions over the past months — hell, years — meeting those characters in London, Bali, Jenin, and Lahore. A setup. A goddamn setup. All that chatter that had been discussed earlier — shit, he had helped get that chatter going! The type of planning and pure malevolence that had gone into what she had done…Amazing.

Monty sighed. ‘Yeah. Especially me. To quote a famous mayor, “the bitch set me up.” I’ve gone places and killed people, all apparently on her behalf, all to help her sell the idea of an anthrax attack to us and the higher-ups. Goddamn.’

And he slapped a hand on the table. ‘All right. That’s my mea fucking culpa, and I’m done with it. We’ve got to move on. First,’ he said, looking to the stranger sitting with Bocks and Brian, ‘sir, I’m afraid I don’t know who you are. Would you…?’

The man stuck his hand out. ‘Randy Tuthill. Head of the machinists’ union local. And probably an unindicted co-conspirator when this hits the papers.’

The man’s grip was strong. Monty liked that, showed he wasn’t going to pussyfoot around. ‘General, before we proceed, I’m going to need another member of our team to be here.’

Bocks said, ‘The doctor who came here with Aliyah — Adrianna — and the detective?’

‘Yep. He knows this stuff, and I don’t want to be dealing with somebody that doesn’t have the background. It’ll take too long to get up to speed. Brian, any idea where he is?’

Brian said, ‘Probably at home, in Maryland. Might take a while to get him out here. Can you do it?’

Monty said, ‘Man, get me to a phone, you’ll be surprised at how fast things can happen.’

~ * ~

Carrie didn’t like the expression on Sean’s face. He turned to her and said, ‘Carrie, you’re not going to believe this but the line is busy — I can’t get through to Dispatch.’

‘Busy? You sure you got the right number?’

‘Christ, of course I’m sure. Dispatch’s number is busy — shit, I’ve never heard that happening before. Either things are seriously fucked-up on the ground or there’s a whole bunch of AirBox flights trying to talk to the ground.’

She wiped her moist hands across her uniform pants leg, checked the autopilot again to make sure it was still keeping them on their holding pattern. ‘See if you can’t get a text message to the ground using ACARS. Tell them to get off the damn phone. Then try setting up that phone patch again.’

‘You got it.’

Sean leaned to the left, started working the ACARS terminal, laboriously typing in a message using a single finger, one letter at a time. Carrie went back to the instrumentation, back to the windscreen, and—

Something caught her eye.

A flash of light.

She looked off to the left, tried to swallow.

‘Sean.’

‘Yeah?’

‘We got company.’

‘Huh? Where do you— Oh, shit.’

Off to port, flying about two hundred feet out and a bit below and forward, was an F-16 single-seat fighter jet. Its flashing red anti-collision strobe lights were on and the cockpit was illuminated, so Carrie could make out the shape of its pilot.

Sean said, ‘Got another one, to starboard.’

‘Yeah.’

They flew on for long moments, neither one saying anything, until Sean said, ‘You know what this means, don’t you?’