Jumper 1 - Jumper (38 page)

Cox was silent for a moment. "You wouldn't do that."

"Try me."

"I don't have to. We have your girlfriend and you don't know where she is. You wouldn't do anything to jeopardize her."

"Why not? You're willing to jeopardize the president."

"I don't think I'm risking anything. Come talk to us. Help us figure out how you do what you do. We can help you. You have the right idea with this antiterrorist thing. We can get you Rashid Matar—"

I hung up the phone.

The next morning there were more guards at Millie's apartment. I jumped them to Knossos, Muscat, and Zurich. I was getting to be quite the little travel agency. I hoped it cost the NSA plenty to fly them home.

When I checked Dad's place it was empty, locked up.

The subway took me within two blocks of the Pierce Building. A government building across the street had no security and I accessed its roof with no trouble. There was a view of the side of the Pierce Building and its back entrance, the one that led to the parking lot.

The parking lot itself was fenced, with a guard at the gate. Another guard was in a glass booth at the building door. Using the binoculars, I watched both guards examine credentials. The one in the glass booth had to push a button before the building entrance would open.

Mounted closed-circuit television cameras surveyed the parking lot, all sides of the building, and even the roof.

I jumped back to Union Station and used the phone.

"Let me talk to Cox."

There was the sound of papers rustling.

"Hello."

"Let's meet."

"Good. You can come to my office."

"Don't be stupid."

"Where, then."

"Go to the Capitol reflecting pool. Walk up the middle of the grass toward the Washington Monument. Alone."

"Who's being stupid now?"

I didn't care how many people he had with him. I just wanted him to think I intended to make the meeting.

"Well, you can bring one other, but leave your weapons behind. No long coats—nothing that could hide those nasty harpoon guns. He walks behind you."

We settled for two guards.

"When," he asked.

"Right now. As you know, I'll be there before you, so play it straight. It's pretty empty on the Mall right now. I'll be able to tell if you bring any ringers in."

I heard him swallow.

"All right. It will take us ten minutes."

I hung up the phone, jumped back to the rooftop, and took up the binoculars.

He came out of the building with six other men. Some of them carried the harpoon guns. Four of the men got into a car and the other two, wearing heavy sweaters but no coats, walked toward a different car, Cox trailing, careless, expecting the real confrontation to happen at the Mall.

One of the men opened and held the back door for Cox. That's when I took him.

Cox was big and heavy, but by now I'd perfected the art of tipping them off balance and jumping. Just before I disappeared from the parking lot, I heard the agent holding the door start to yell, the sound cut off in its earliest stages by my transition to Texas, fifty feet above the cold, hard water of the pit.

I jumped to the island to watch him hit.

Water geysered from the surface, drops of spray dotting my coat. He'd tipped forward after I released him and his impact, though feet-first, was followed by his front slapping down, stomach and chest. I heard him grunt as the air was forced out of him.

It took him a few seconds to claw his way back to the surface and even longer to draw breath.

I hoped it hurt.

He didn't seem as shaken up, though, as some of the others who'd made that drop. He sidestroked to the island and actually walked out of the water.

I pointed Barry's gun at him.

"If I'm not heard from fairly soon, things are going to get very unpleasant for your girlfriend."

I turned the gun slightly to the side and fired past him, at the water. The slug skipped off the surface of the water and chipped rock from the cliff face. The noise was deafening, a palpable shock, but I'd seen explosives go off in here. I knew what to expect. Even so, I flinched slightly.

Cox jerked and his eyes narrowed.

"Take off your clothes. Quickly." I moved the gun back in line with his body.

He shook his head. "No, thanks."

I felt frustration etching at my calm expression. I fired the pistol again, this time to the other side.

Again he flinched, but he gritted his teeth and shook his head.

More and more he reminded me of Dad.
Why not. He took away a woman I loved.
I lifted the pistol over my head and jumped, bringing it down on the back of Cox's head from behind, very hard.

He fell forward like a tree.

I took a very sharp knife from my pocket and cut his clothes off. He carried two guns, but what I was looking for was strapped to his thigh, one of the silver tubes with the antenna running all the way down to his sock. It didn't have the barbed point, but it was dangerous for all that.

I jumped forty miles south, to where the Rio Grande cuts through rock between the U.S. and Mexico, and threw the tube into the foaming waters. It barely floated and I could see it bobbing along, headed for Del Rio, via Big Bend National Park.

Back on the little island I finished cutting the rest of Cox's clothes off of him, and jumped them to Central Park in New York City where I left them in a trash can by the Sheep Meadow. The guns I put in the cliff dwelling.

There are enough guns in New York City already.

Back in the pit, I rolled Cox over and checked his pupils, holding his eyelids open. They seemed to be the same size and both reacted to the light. His body was covered with goose bumps but his breathing seemed all right. The sun was shining into the pit and the temperature was in the sixties. Cox was probably better off without his wet clothes on, anyway.

I jumped to K Mart in Stillwater, Oklahoma, bought a sleeping bag, and returned. It zipped all the way open. I spread it on the ground beside Cox, rolled him onto one half, then zipped it back up, around him.

There was a swelling on the back of Cox's head that seeped a slight amount of blood. It reminded me of my mugging, when I'd first got to New York.

Again, I hoped it hurt him, but the mean thought made me feel bad. It made me feel petty. It made me feel like him.

Shit. It made me feel like Dad.

Cox awoke to find the chemical toilet beside him and a sign that said, DON'T POLLUTE THE POND, IT'S YOUR DRINKING WATER. I also left a bottle of ibuprofen and a large glass of water. I watched him from the center of the island, lying on the ground under the mesquite bushes, and peering through the grass. I didn't want to be around him when he woke up.

Then why are you watching?

It reminded me of Sunday mornings at home. Dad would wake up with a hangover and I would walk on eggshells until he got his first two cups of coffee down. But I would hang around the house, because he needed me then. Needed me to fix his coffee, needed me to fix him breakfast. When he was hung over, there wasn't any danger of violence.

That would come later.

Cox was having trouble focusing on the note. He kept moving it closer and farther away. Finally, though, he put it down and took the ibuprofen. He moved very carefully, occasionally twisting his neck to one side, like it was stiff.

I jumped to D.C., to the subway stop at Union Station. I was going to call the NSA and start bargaining for Millie, but when I was dropping the quarter in the phone I saw a man reading a newspaper and waiting for the train. My first thought was that he might be an NSA agent, one of many scattered around the city, but then I saw the headline facing me.

"Shiite Extremists Hijack Cruise Ship." Below was a distant shot of a gleaming white ship. Side by side with that photo was a picture of Rashid Matar.

I jumped to New York and called MMM.

The operator said, "Ah, Mr. Ross, we have a lot of material for you. There's been a hijacking of a ship."

"I just saw a paper. Where?"

"It's off of Alexandria, in Egypt."

I gritted my teeth. I'd never flown into the little airport there. "There was a picture of Rashid Matar in the paper. Is he involved?"

"That is the Reuters report."

"Ah. Any numbers? How many passengers, how many terrorists?"

"At least five terrorists. One hundred and thirty passengers. One hundred and five crew."

"Why so many crew?"

"The
Argos
is a large luxury yacht. The cruise was booked by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, here in New York. It's mostly wealthy benefactors of the museum. Nearly all of them are American. There's one English couple. The crew is Greek."

"How far offshore are they?"

I heard the rustling of paper. "None of these say. The video of the ship was taken by a helicopter, but it didn't show the shore."

"Do you know where the media are? Where they're covering this from?"

"No."

"Okay, thanks."

I jumped to London. I had to change some money before I could use a public call box to dial the Reuters number on Corseau's card. A voice with a British accent said, "Middle East Desk."

I spoke quickly. "I have some urgent information for Jean-Paul Corseau. Do you know where I can reach him?"

"We can pass a message to him."

"This is for his ears only."

"I'm sorry, it's really not our policy to give out our reporters' whereabouts. If you give me a number, perhaps I can have him call you?"

"No." I paused. "I gave him a lift to Cairo recently. Does that mean anything to you?"

He was quiet for a moment. "That wild story? He was nearly fired. So you're the chap who stops hijackings?"

"Yes."

"Why not come chat with us? We'd love to do a story."

"Jean-Paul Corseau. Now."

"How do I really know you're the one?"

"I'm hanging up. Three... two... one—"

"Okay, okay. He's staying at the Metropole in Alexandria, but the media is covering the story from Fort Qait Bey on the eastern harbor."

"Thanks."

In Cairo the airport terminal swarmed with men who wanted to change my money at very favorable rates and children who followed me crying,
"Baksheesh! Baksheesh!"
At the information desk I asked when the next commuter flight to El Iskandariya was. The woman said the daily flight had already left but that the train was very comfortable in first class, only six hours from the Cairo railway station near Ramses Square.

From what I'd read, it could take over an hour to get to the train station in bad traffic and, in Cairo, there was no other kind.

A half hour later and three thousand dollars poorer, I was airborne in a Bell helicopter, traveling northwest at four thousand feet. I'd promised the pilot a bonus if we reached the eastern harbor in under an hour.

"That's Heliopolis," he said, pointing to a section just west of the airport and, to me, indistinguishable from the rest of Cairo's sprawl. "We're flying over Heliopolis in my helicopter."

George, the pilot, was Egyptian, but he was proud of his overprecise English. I pushed the talk button on my headset and said, "Heliopolis. Helicopter. Very witty."
Idiot.
I wasn't feeling very jolly.

While they'd fueled the helicopter George told me his usual passengers were oil executives heading east to the Sinai or very rich tourists who wanted to see Giza without risking Cairo's traffic.

The helicopter swung west and George said, "Abu Rawash." He pointed down on his side of the helicopter. I found it on the map spread across my knees. He was pointing at a pyramid, but I couldn't see it from my side.

"Why so far west?"

He pointed again, this time straight ahead at a thin dark line that stretched across desert. "We follow the pipeline. Direct route, very fast."

I looked down at the map again. The SUMED pipeline ran from the Gulf of Suez at Ain Sukhna to the Mediterranean just west of Alexandria, bringing Arab oil from the Gulf countries to Western markets. Egypt had very little oil of its own, but at least it could make some revenue from its transfer, both through the pipeline and through the Suez Canal.

Off to the east of our route, where the Nile Delta gave way to the desert, I could see vegetation that was startlingly greener than the brown scrub below, a visible line that said, "The water stops here." I tracked our progress by the secondary roads we crossed. Shortly after crossing Secondary Road 7 the desert turned to dunes and we headed due north, splitting away from the pipeline. Again we approached the edge of the Delta. On the horizon I began to see the ocean.

Alexandria grew, a long strip of city along the sea. It was backed by Lake Maryut so it almost looked an island from our approach; then we were cutting across a thin strip of land and running northeast, along the shore over petroleum docks, over the western harbor. Commercial traffic and ancient dhows spotted the inner harbor with cruise ships anchored or docked.

All of the cruise ships were too big to be the
Argos.

Then we pulled over an even thinner strip of land and passed over an ancient, weathered fort.

"El Atta," said George.

Only a little farther up the shore, on a small finger of land that protected the eastern harbor, another fort challenged the sea.

"Qait Bey." George pointed, checking his watch. I looked at mine. Fifty-seven minutes since we'd lifted off in Cairo.

"Good job," I told him, and he smiled.

He landed 250 yards from Qait Bey, at the helicopter landing pad at the Institute of Oceanography and Fisheries. I dug his bonus out of my bag, five hundred dollars, and gave it to him. Then I hit the talk button and said, "Another five hundred for one short flight."

"How long? I will need to refuel if it is very long."

"Less than fifteen minutes. Twenty at the most."

He nodded. "When? I cannot block their landing pad for very long."

I looked around the landing pad, acquiring it as a jump site. "Ten minutes."

The street was called Qasr Ras El Tin on the inset map I'd studied in the helicopter, but the street sign was in Arabic so I didn't know for sure. There was an English sign for the fort. The porter wouldn't take my admission fee in U.S. currency, so I jumped past him.