Final Vector (23 page)

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, taken over 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 says 'FBI.'

Who else would she 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 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.

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.

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 which 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 were able to get close enough to bury the screwdriver in the man's head or neck, a possibility that seemed unlikely in the extreme, 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 plastic 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 him was horrific, brutal, the ultimate violation. Suddenly it seemed of utmost importance to cover him somehow, 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 dis-interested 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.

Nick knew that he had bigger issues to worry about, things that at the moment were far more critical than some lame attempt at preserving the dignity of a man who was beyond caring about his appearance. Maybe this suddenly seemed so important because Nick was exhausted and the situation taking place just one floor above him seemed so utterly bleak. He was fresh out of ideas about how to handle the terrorist, so perhaps this was just a way for him to avoid dealing with the terrifying reality of the president's plane being shot down, with the corresponding likelihood that he would also be a casualty, another lifeless corpse leaking blood all over the federal government's property.

Regardless, whatever the reason, Nick could not ignore the growing feeling, the compulsion really, that he needed to cover Harry. It was risky, sure, because if a terrorist were to reenter this room and see Harry's body covered with a shroud, it would be clear that someone was here; there was a person running around the building unaccounted for. The terrorists would undoubtedly begin searching for him and would find him easily. The only reason he had avoided capture this long was due to the simple fact that they were unaware of his presence.

Still, what was the likelihood that they would return to this unimportant room tucked away on the ground floor? As far as the terrorists were concerned, they had eliminated the only potential threat: the technician who had been working down here. There was no one else alive in the building that they were aware of, and their focus was going to be on the Operations Room, especially now that Air Force One had to be getting very close to Boston's airspace.

The risk seemed relatively small, and Nick could not shake the feeling that it was critical he take care of Harry. He looked over at the tarp hanging just a few feet from the body. It would be perfect to drape over Harry, so he would not be on display like some gruesome mannequin out of a Roger Corman nightmare for every single person who came through here to gawk at when this was all over.

Time was of the essence. He should not be wasting what precious little of it he had left by worrying about Harry, who was beyond help. But to Nick, that lifeless, desecrated body represented every horrifying second that had passed since he saw the three men walking down the hall.

His mind was made up. Nick grabbed the utility knife and walked two steps to the tarp. Reaching as high as he could above his head, he sliced the heavy plastic in a horizontal line, stopping and sawing through the reinforced seam at each edge. The large piece of plastic drifted down, momentarily covering Nick and making him look like a poorly conceived Halloween ghost.

He turned and draped the tarp over Harry's body, choking off a sob as he did so. It was more than big enough to cover the entire area, including the puddle of blood that had worked its way a couple of feet in every direction from Harry's chest.

Nick knelt beside the body, now fuzzy and indistinct under the makeshift shroud, a shapeless lump on the floor. "I'm so sorry,"

he whispered, knowing the words were hopelessly insufficient but unable to stop himself from saying them.

For some reason, Nick felt better, more at ease, which was crazy. His situation was no better than it had been a few minutes ago; it was worse, in fact, because as he had been caring for Harry's body, the clock continued to tick. The president was now a little bit closer to Boston and a date with a Stinger missile, and Nick, Larry, and Ron were undoubtedly a few minutes closer to being massacred themselves.

Still, Nick felt irrationally calm and clearheaded. He stood and turned toward the door, and as he did so, his gaze swept across the construction site that had been cordoned off and concealed by the plastic tarp.

He stopped in his tracks and did a double take, then stood perfectly still and stared, frozen in wonder. Among the tools and supplies stored neatly on a rudimentary table made up of a two-by-eight plank placed across a pair of sawhorses was the weapon Nick had been searching for.

Larry's hands were shaking so badly he wasn't sure he would physically be capable of taking the handoff Boston Center was attempting to give him on Air Force One. As the high-altitude facility controlling traffic over all of New England, plus a portion of New York State, Boston Center was the last link before Boston's airspace in the air traffic control chain that had begun working the giant Boeing 747 from the time it began taxiing for departure at Andrews Air Force Base.

Giving and taking handoffs on airplanes in the NAS--the National Airspace System--was almost entirely an automated af-fair, especially at busy, high-density facilities. In order to transfer control of an aircraft to another facility, or to another sector within his own facility, the controller simply made a keystroke entry and then manipulated what was known as a "slewball," similar in design and purpose to a video game controller, to move a cursor across the radar scope to the target representing that airplane. Then he would simply punch a button on the keyboard, initiating the radar handoff.

The target would begin flashing on the receiving controller's radar scope and would continue flashing until the receiving controller used his own slewball to move his cursor to the target and press the button on his own console. The target would stop flashing on the receiving controller's scope and would
begin
flashing on the scope of the controller initiating the handoff, indicating that the receiving controller was now prepared to accept separation responsibility for that airplane. The handoff was then considered complete, and the airplane would be permitted to enter the receiving controller's airspace. Communications transfer would follow.

It was a simple automated procedure that controllers performed hundreds of times during the typical workday, so ordinary that to seasoned radar controllers it was as natural as taking a breath of air. See a flashing data block, observe the digitized radar target and recognize the airplane, and take the handoff.