Mrs. John Doe (26 page)

Her head didn't hurt anymore; she was the only relatively uninjured person in this car. The rain drummed on the roof, punctuated by distant thunder. It was 2:49. Eleven minutes…

“Okay,” she said, “what's the plan?”

They moved through the forest as quickly as they could, but it was difficult. The rain fell in rivers from the leaves and branches above their heads, and Josef's injury slowed him down considerably. Nora forged ahead, then stopped and waited for him to catch up. She clutched Jacques Lanier's heavy SIG Sauer, grateful that she and Josef had finally been able to talk her husband into remaining behind.

Jeff was in the backseat of the Focus, his injured leg stretched out, armed with the little revolver she'd used to kill Craig Elder. Only one round left in it, but he'd said he'd be fine. He knew that his incapacity would only get in the way of the mission, but it was maddening for him to be immobile while others were on the job.
His
job, as he saw it. The car was now concealed from view; Nora had driven it straight into the trees, some twenty feet in from the main road.

The paved drive into the airfield was on their left; she could see it now and then through the trees. After about three minutes of negotiating her body forward in the soaked tangle of bushes and tree trunks, she became aware of open space ahead of them, and she began to make out shapes, an enormous structure of some kind and a vehicle parked near it. As she arrived at the edge of the forest and dropped to her knees, she saw that the huge building was a hangar of corrugated tin spotted with rust, and the car parked on the near side of it was the gold Aston Martin. The big, bearded man named Mustapha stood next to the car, his back to her, holding up an umbrella to shield himself from the torrent. Nora saw the back of the hangar, a long metal wall with one metal door in the center; the front of the building, on the other side, faced the runway. On the farthest side of the hangar from here were a big, round metal tank beside two gas pumps, a blue pickup truck, and three small planes in a neat row, lined up in the grass at the edge of the tarmac.

In the distance beyond Mustapha, she could just make out a squat, fat airplane on the runway, perhaps fifty yards in front of her, its rear cargo door open. The two trucks were there, the rain bouncing off their canvas roofs. The men were just finishing with the last of the load. As Josef arrived to kneel beside her, the final two crates disappeared inside the plane. Moments later, the men who'd carried them reappeared and jumped down onto the tarmac. At a sharp command from their leader, the eight laborers climbed into the trucks and the drivers got into the cabs.

“Good,” Josef said. “They've finished their work here, so now they'll go. That's a lot fewer people to worry about. But where are Howard and the others? I should think—”

His question was answered before he could finish uttering it. As the trucks began to move away from the aircraft in the direction of the drive that led to the main road, a burly man in a blue poncho and a captain's cap appeared from the hangar, bent forward under an umbrella. He strode off past Mustapha toward the plane, but he suddenly stopped and turned around, apparently responding to a call from the building behind him. He shouted something to the unseen caller inside the building, then turned and continued on his way.

“Okay, I have to get over there,” Josef said, pointing toward the little back door of the hangar. “Howard and the others are still in there, but not for long. He's probably hitching a ride with Gamal and the crates—he won't wait for Elder, and he won't take a chance on the police arriving here before he's safely out of England. Gamal and his people are keeping to their timetable, so we don't have much time. I'll see what they're doing in there and try to figure out a way to stop them, or at least slow them down until we can get help.”

Nora looked out at the cargo plane. “Could you shoot out the tires?”

He shook his head. “There will be other tires in the hangar. No point in taking out the pilot either—the people who run this place will be licensed pilots. Mr. Howard would simply bribe them or force them to take his place. I can't shoot them all—they'd stop me first.”

“So, what are we going to do?” Nora asked.

Josef shrugged. “I'll have to think of something as soon as I'm in the hangar. You stay here until I—”

“No way,” Nora said. “I'm coming with you. There are at least four people in there, not to mention Mr. Cowper, or whoever, and his employees. You can't take them all alone, but two of us may be able to cause some sort of a distraction.”

She looked over at the wet face of the young man beside her, into his eyes. He clearly didn't like the idea of her getting that close to the action, and he knew her husband would have a fit, but he must have seen the wisdom in her words. After a brief moment of doubt, he nodded. “All right, but stay close.”

The two trucks had cleared the runway, heading toward the drive. As they passed Mustapha at the car beside the hangar, one of the drivers tooted his horn and waved to him. Mustapha waved back. The trucks rolled by the woods where she and Josef knelt, the sound of the engines fading as they reached the main road, turned, and drove away.

Josef rose to his feet and crouched down, leaning forward. Wincing in pain, he ran swiftly, smoothly out of the trees, heading straight toward the back wall of the hangar, the rain pelting him as he moved. Nora was behind him, gun in hand, imitating his crouch and his smooth running motion. It was tricky enough to sprint in this low position through a virtual curtain of water, but her progress was even trickier because she kept her gaze riveted on the man standing beside the car twenty yards to her left. His back was to her, but all he had to do was turn his head a few degrees and he would see them.

Josef had reached the building, and Nora was nearly there when a blinding flash of lightning washed over the landscape, immediately followed by a deafening crack of thunder. Mustapha moved his umbrella, looking upward for a moment, but he didn't turn around. Nora almost crashed into her companion, but he held out a hand to steady her. They sank to their knees and huddled against the wall, brushing the rain from their eyes and hair with their free hands as they gasped for breath.

The metal door was right beside them. Josef handed her his pistol, leaned toward her, and whispered, “Keep a lookout.” She nodded, and he rose to his feet, studying the door and the frame around it. Nora looked down the length of the wall, noting with relief that Mustapha and the car were now out of sight around the corner. Still, she watched that corner, just in case, as her companion went to work.

“No wires,” he muttered, pulling a set of keys from his pocket. “But get ready to run, in any case.” He selected something long and thin, clearly not a key, and inserted it into the lock on the doorknob. Mere seconds later, he carefully pushed the door open a few inches. They waited, but no alarm sounded. Nora shifted her attention from the far corner of the building to the door, where Josef already had his upper body through the opening. He pulled back and turned to her.

“Okay, five men and one woman, in a group, near the office in the front left wall. Howard, Gamal, the man and woman from Tripoli, and two locals. Two planes, some barrels and crates, a workspace with tools, not much else. The nearest barrels are on our immediate left. Follow me.”

He took his pistol back from her, pushed the door open a few more inches, and crawled inside. Nora followed, moving awkwardly on her knees. The wet SIG Sauer was freezing in her hand, but she didn't relax her grip. She crawled forward in darkness, blinking as her eyes adjusted. Josef's hand came out of the dark to touch her shoulder, and she stopped. They were kneeling behind a big cardboard barrel, the kind people packed with housewares for shipping. It was at the end of a row of barrels lined up along the back wall of the hangar. Josef reached past her and carefully pushed the door shut.

Now she became aware of the overwhelming noise. It seemed to be coming from everywhere in the dark around her, vibrating in the corrugated walls, and it took her a moment to locate its source some forty feet above her head. If every cymbalist from every symphony orchestra in the British Isles were here in this hangar, practicing their art in unison, they couldn't have produced a din as loud as this: hard, steady rain on the vast tin roof of a huge, hollow metal structure. She peered around the barrel at the room in front of her.

The two small planes stood in the center of the space, the closer one a twin-engine with the name Cowper Aeronautics on the side. The farther craft was a sleek red biplane with silver propellers and intricate wire riggings between the wings. She'd only seen planes like this in newsclips of aerial stunt shows or old movies about World War I.

The front wall beyond the planes wasn't really a wall; it was two huge, roll-up metal portals for the aircraft. Both doors were down now, with only wet darkness visible beyond their wide windows. Nora leaned around the barrel and craned her neck to see the far left side of the building. The six people were there, in a pool of light from a hanging fixture. As she watched, Bill Howard handed a credit card to one of the two men she'd never seen before. Both men were tall and thickly built in matching dark jumpsuits, and they looked nearly identical except that the one who took the card into the glass-enclosed office had white hair and a droopy white mustache, whereas his twin had brown hair and a droopy brown mustache. The Cowpers, she decided,
father and son.

She could feel the man beside her tensing, and she glanced over at him. He was studying the dark space along the back wall near where they crouched. She squinted, barely making out a long plywood worktable covered with objects: an electric saw, a power drill, hammers, smaller tools, a crowbar. He was formulating a plan, but Nora had no idea what it might be. She was about to lean over and ask him what he wanted to do when the older Cowper came back with a receipt.

The incessant rain above drowned out the sound, but Nora followed the pantomime. Everyone smiled and shook hands. Then Bill Howard led Nassim Gamal and his assistants over to a door facing the runway beside the rolling metal portals. They went out into the rain, and the Cowpers headed into the glass booth. The father sat down at a desk, and the son got busy with mugs and a pot of tea or coffee.

Josef's actions were swift and economical. As Nora watched, he crawled over to the worktable and reached up, grasping the crowbar. Then he ran silently forward in his crouching position, directly toward the office. Staying under the sight lines of the windows, he scurried over to the office doorway at the side of the structure. It was open, the door resting back against the hangar wall.

The two men inside became aware of the presence in the doorway and turned. Nora heard a shouted
“Hey!”
as Josef swung the door shut, slammed the hasp into place, and thrust the crowbar down into the hole for a padlock. She hadn't even noticed the office door or the hardware attached to it, but Josef was trained to take in every detail of his surroundings before he moved, and that was precisely what he'd done.

The Cowpers were now locked inside the office. They both began to shout, the younger man throwing himself against the door as the older one banged on the glass. From her position, their unholy racket was drowned out by the rain on the roof, but she remembered that Mustapha was just on the other side of that wall. If he heard the sudden noises…

Josef turned toward her. “Come on!” He pulled his pistol from under his jacket and headed for the front door. Nora was just about to rise and follow him when the door suddenly flew open. She watched as Josef stopped short, confronted by the huge, bearded man who now stood framed in the doorway, the umbrella in one hand and a gun in the other. The umbrella clattered to the floor. The two men faced each other ten feet apart, weapons aimed, and they fired simultaneously.

Josef's shot was silenced, but Mustapha's made a loud bang. Nora was on her feet, aiming the SIG Sauer at Mustapha, aware that he hadn't reacted at all to the shot Josef had fired, but Josef sank to his knees. She shouted and ran forward across the room, closing the distance between her and the men. She was too far away, she knew; she'd never be able to hit Mustapha from here. She fired anyway, grateful that it barely made a sound. Had the people out on the runway heard Mustapha's gunshot?

The big man looked over in her direction, peering into the darkness, swinging his gun around. Nora kept approaching, and she fired again. The second round struck him full in the chest, but he got off a loud shot before he fell backward, half in and half out of the doorway. She was still running, still firing. She arrived above him to deliver one final round into his forehead. He lay there staring up, the rain pelting his startled face. Only then, as she gazed down at him, did she notice the sharp stinging in her left arm.

She was aware of the pain, and of the two men who now stared from beyond the glass wall of the office. She glanced outside at the plane, aware that everyone was inside it now and the door was closing. She was aware that Josef was moaning, attempting to rise. Most of all, she was aware of the eyes staring up at her from the man she had just killed.

She dropped the weapon and bent down, grabbing Mustapha's nearest leg with her good right arm and dragging his heavy corpse inside the hangar. She slammed the door and leaned back against it, looking over at Josef. He was smiling at her as he struggled to get up, but then his eyes closed and he fell.

Nora knelt beside him. He was alive but unconscious. Outside on the tarmac, the engines of the plane came to life with a powerful roar that managed to override the deafening patter of rain on the roof. In mere minutes it would be taking off, rising up into the wet sky, bearing its dreadful cargo away to be utilized for horrors beyond her comprehension. Those people were on their way to destroy the world.

And she, alone, was left to stop them.