Deadly Dozen: 12 Mysteries/Thrillers (291 page)

He paced up and down the little room, the second hand sweeping around the face of his watch with frightening speed. He couldn’t even turn the ETG scopes on, never mind reprogram them, without a manual to follow. And there was nothing here.

Nick wondered where Air Force One was now. The president’s plane was getting close to Boston’s airspace. They were truly screwed.

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

Kristin Cunningham was not exactly what she appeared to be on the surface. Petite and pretty, with a face framed by wavy hair falling almost to her shoulders, Kristin had been defying the expectations of others ever since graduating high school in Manchester, New Hampshire, a decade ago. Her parents, not to mention her teachers and even her closest friends, had fully expected Kristin to go off to college after graduation and study something esoteric, like art history, or the rise and fall of the Roman empire.

It was a natural expectation. Kristin had earned outstanding grades in school her entire life; she loved reading and studying. Although she had played and been reasonably successful at a number of different sports, she was nobody’s idea of a tomboy and had always seemed more comfortable sitting in a study carrel than cavorting on a playing field.

This personal history made it all the more surprising when immediately upon graduating high school—during her graduation dinner, in fact—Kristin announced that she would not be attending college after all. A career in law enforcement was what she wanted to pursue, and she would begin working toward that goal right away. To say her parents were shocked would be an understatement, but Kristin was undeterred and eventually turned even her father’s skepticism into enthusiastic support with her hard work and unflagging energy.

She attended the police academy and was hired by the Manchester Police Department upon graduating and had never looked back. After spending five years on the force, the FBI came calling, prizing her for her independence and ability to think on her feet, two traits not always in abundant supply in government service, as well as for her fearlessness and spotless record.

Working out of the Southern New Hampshire field office, Kristin was able to live near her parents in the area she loved, while performing work that she knew was important and occasionally even made a difference. She never once regretted the decision to pursue a career path that diverged wildly from the one her friends and family had expected of her.

Now, with the barrel of a semiautomatic pistol pressed into her back, being pushed as a captive into the air traffic control facility she had been assigned to monitor, Kristin felt ashamed. She had allowed this moron to get the drop on her, and what had she been doing at the time? Mooning like some love-struck junior high girl about this Nick Jensen character. And now that lapse of attentiveness was probably going to cost both her and Nick their lives, assuming he wasn’t dead already.

She shook her head and mumbled, “Goddamn it” through clenched teeth.

The guy shoved her in the back with the gun. “Shut up.”

They approached the double doors, and the man reached around her to wave his stolen ID in front of the card reader. As his hand hovered momentarily in front of the reader, Kristin considered stomping on his foot or grabbing his hand and twisting it, hopefully taking the man to the ground and wrestling his gun away from him.

The only problem was, the man still had the gun pressed firmly into the middle of her back, and she knew there was no possible way she would be able to knock him down fast enough to disable him before he could fire at least one shot, which would probably kill or paralyze her, and what would that accomplish?

She took a deep breath and blew it out in frustration as the big reinforced glass door swung open and the pair entered the BCT. Kristin knew the ops room was on the second floor.

The man with the gun, though, steered her toward a glass-fronted conference room that looked out of place, like it had been lifted out of a decent-sized private corporation and plunked down in the middle of this federal government building.

Kristin could see a man pacing back and forth inside it. He was dressed in black from his watch cap to his combat boots, with dark greasepaint on his face. It was jarring and seemed almost surreal: these comfortable surroundings, about as nice as you could expect in government service, overtaken by armed thugs.

The man pushed Kristin through the door.

The moment they entered, the guy dressed in black said, “Are you kidding me? A chick? Are you sure this is the right person?”

“Christ. Of course it’s the right person,” the other man said dismissively, his voice dripping sarcasm. “I know what a fucking FBI ID looks like, okay? Besides, the back of her jacket has three letters on it. Care to guess what they might be?”

The other man looked unconvinced.

“What? You don’t think there are any lady FBI agents? Don’t you watch TV? They’re everywhere on the tube. It’s the latest thing.”

“I suppose. It’s just that she looks so …”

“Small?”

“Well, yeah.”

“Who gives a shit about that?” the man answered, his gun still poking Kristin in the back. “It’ll make her that much easier to control.”

Kristin could see immediately that the man stationed inside the conference room was the one she was going to have to work on to get out of this mess. He was barely older than a kid, and he seemed much less sure of himself, less hardened, than the other guy.

She turned to him and said quietly, “It’s not too late to put a stop to whatever it is you’re doing here. No one has gotten hurt yet—”

The man standing behind her laughed. “Oh, really? That’s a good one. Tell that to the two dead security guards or the two FAA guys who rolled up to the gate just before you and died about ten seconds later. Tell that to the electronics technician cooling in a pool of his own blood right now. You have no fucking clue what’s going on here, missy, so just shut your friggin’ mouth before I blow your pretty head off. One more dead asshole makes no difference to me whatsoever.”

Kristin’s blood ran cold. The man was dressed in a torn and filthy – and bloody – security uniform, which he had undoubtedly taken off one of the guards he had killed, so presumably he was telling the truth about the other dead as well. That meant these people had murdered at least five innocent men tonight. This changed everything. They had nothing to lose and thus could not be reasoned with. What could you offer a person like that?

Nothing.

She decided to try a different tactic: to gather a little information that she might be able to use to her advantage later, assuming she lived that long. “How many of you guys are in here? Is it just the two of you?”

The man behind her said, “Shut up. You’re not in charge here; we are. The only reason you’re still alive is because we can use you, but if you piss me off, I’ll shoot you in the back of the head right where you stand. One shot. End of pretty FBI agent. We can do what we need to do without you, so don’t go getting the idea that you’re going to stay alive just because you’re a cute little thing wearing a Windbreaker that says FBI on the back.”

Kristin swallowed hard and said nothing.

“That’s better, baby,” the man said mockingly. “Now, let’s do a little business, shall we?”

She didn’t answer, so he continued. “We know that you need to coordinate with your superiors and notify them that everything is hunky-dory up here in the sticks before President Cartwright’s plane enters Boston’s airspace. Do that now.”

With mounting horror, it dawned on Kristin that the armed invasion had nothing to do with this facility, at least not specifically. It was all about Air Force One. These men were part of a much bigger plot involving the president.

Shaking her head, Kristin said, “Come on, guys. Be reasonable. You know I can’t do that.” She smiled at the man in black and then turned the same reassuring, high-wattage smile on the man standing behind her.

He stepped around her and moved to the conference table, his gun never wavering. It was now pointed directly at her chest. With the pistol, he gestured at the cell phone hanging in a leather holster at her hip. “Make the call.”

She locked eyes with him. “I can’t do that.”

He nodded, taking two steps forward and then stopping. He was now standing directly in front of her, invading her personal space. He smelled of sweat and blood and death.

Kristin refused to look away. “I can’t do it,” she repeated.

Without another word, the man lowered his gun and shot her in the knee.

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

Nick was back in the technicians’ equipment room, searching with increasing desperation for something to use as a weapon against the man holding Larry hostage in the ops room. He had abandoned the ETG training room is disgust and backtracked, not knowing what else to do.

As he dug through the stockpile of tools and equipment, his gaze fell on a soldering gun, propped in its stand with the metal tip used to melt lead sticking straight up in the air. If Nick could get close enough, maybe he could use it to burn the man, but although it would certainly be painful to the guy, the soldering iron would not even come close to providing the kind of knockout blow Nick needed. If anything, it would probably just piss the man off, and he’d kill Nick slowly and painfully, instead of shooting him between the eyes.

He shook his head. The soldering gun was definitely out.

A pile of screwdrivers lay heaped in two big bins, one containing the standard, slotted kind and the other filled with Phillips head models. These looked a little more promising. Nick found several of both types of screwdrivers that were heavy and at least twelve inches long, clearly designed to allow the technician access to hard-to-reach areas. Maybe he could use one of these.

Still, Nick knew that the odds of him taking down an armed terrorist with a screwdriver were slim. Even if he was able to get close enough to bury the tool in the man’s head or neck, a possibility that seemed unlikely, what were the chances he could hit the exact spot he needed to incapacitate the man? Especially since he didn’t have any idea where that spot might be.

The basic problem was the same as it was with the soldering iron—he could probably inflict some damage on the man, but it would likely not be enough. Nick knew he would get only one chance. Once the advantage of surprise was lost, the fight would be over quickly.

A utility knife lay open on a workspace, its one-inch blade exposed. Whoever had been using the tool had never retracted the blade when he was finished with it.

He closed his eyes and pictured himself plunging the razor-sharp blade into the neck of the terrorist and realized that as tempting as the utility knife appeared to be as a potential weapon, it suffered from the identical problem as that of the screwdrivers: he would have to be much more precise than he was capable of in order to have any chance of success.

In the hands of a competent fighter, the utility knife or any of the other tools he had considered may have been able to subdue the terrorist in the TRACON, especially when combined with the element of surprise. But Nick knew he was far from a competent fighter. The last time he had even been involved in a physical altercation was in fifth grade when he had been thoroughly whipped on the playground. By a fourth grader.

Frustrated and afraid, Nick’s temper boiled over. He thumbed the metal switch to retract the blade on the knife, then turned and threw it as hard as he could at the back wall. It thumped into the opaque tarp hanging from ceiling to floor that was being used to segregate the construction zone from the rest of the room and fell harmlessly to the floor. The knife clattered onto the ceramic tile a couple of feet from Harry’s lifeless body.

Nick stared at Harry, overwhelmed by a feeling of desolate hopelessness. What had been done to the older man was horrific, brutal, the ultimate violation. Suddenly it seemed of utmost importance to cover him, to take some action to lessen the obscenity that had been perpetrated upon him. Eventually his body would be found, and the thought of countless investigators, all of them disinterested strangers, seeing this quiet, kind man lying on the floor where he had been brutally hacked to death, so horribly exposed, dried blood crusting the tile around him, seemed like an insult to the man’s memory. He deserved at least a little dignity.