The History Thief: Ten Days Lost (The Sterling Novels) (33 page)

He stared into her eyes; they stared back. They stared not at him, but through him: their life was gone.

Charney smiled at his latest trophy.

She had been so young and innocent with her lovemaking. She had been so giving to him. She had let him play with her in ways most women refused.

Standing, he walked to the other side of the bed, where his clothes sat neatly folded on the bedside table. He began to put them on. As he finished, he felt the slight vibration from his phone.

Pulling the phone from his coat pocket, he read the incoming e-mail. It was from Gerald, as promised—confirmation of his first condition, along with an itinerary that outlined his flight to Portugal.

Without looking at his prize again, Charney left.

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

FLYING IS FOR BIRDS
FLIGHT TP-0104
DC TO LISBON

L
eaning in toward Michael, the flight attendant placed her hand delicately atop his own. Michael could smell the perfume that she had earlier dabbed across either side of her neck. “Please, Captain, let me know if you need anything?” Smiling, she stood upright.

Michael forced a return smile and nodded his thanks, not concerned with the need for anything. He just wanted the flight to be over. He wanted the mess he was in to be over. He wanted to feel his wife in his arms. He wanted Sonia to be safe.

Michael hated to fly.

Loathed
is a better word.

It made this flight worse that he was impersonating a pilot, not to mention the fire that burned through his femoral artery.

The flight attendant walked away from him and toward the cockpit. Just as she turned the handle, she looked back at Michael and smiled invitingly.

He forced a smile back at her.
Shit,
he thought, holding in the grimaced look of pain he wanted to cast.

Michael reached into the seatback pocket in front of him and pulled out the heavy-stock laminated card that showed information about the plane: an Airbus A330-223, seating capacity of 293, 58.8 meters long, 16.9 high, and a cruising speed of 537 miles per hour.

Nothing more.

Michael folded the card and leaned back.
You’d better think fast, Michael
, he said to himself;
you don’t want your cover blown while in the air.

It was then that he felt the twin Pratt & Whitney PW4000 high-bypass turbofan engines kick-start to life. (Although he had no clue what make and model the engines were.)

Immediately his hands gripped tightly onto the armrests. His knuckles went white as the force of his grip increased.

Flight number TP-0104 to Lisbon, Portugal, had been cleared for takeoff. The Airbus A330-223 shot viciously down runway 1R-19L at nearly 316 kilonewtons of thrust. The 11,500 feet of hard concrete was not designed for comfort. Instead, the hard-pack of the runway cruelly vibrated against the wheels of the fast-moving aircraft and straight into the first-class cabin: straight through Michael’s leg. The pain in his leg radiated upward into the pit of his stomach.

He felt sick.

He wasn’t sure if it was from how much he hated to fly or from the pain that seared deep in his thigh, but Michael knew something wasn’t right. The plane climbed harshly, forcing his lungs into his throat, and then banked steeply to the right. The maneuver confused his equilibrium. As it leveled, the plane burst through numerous pockets of dense and thin air. The sudden, heavy turbulence mimicked a Coney Island ride. Michael wished he hadn’t had so much alcohol earlier.

A nauseating swirl of disequilibrium hovered overhead.

Soon, this would give him the help he needed.

After what seemed like an eternity, but was really not more than ten minutes, the Airbus leveled out and the mandatory seatbelt sign chimed off, giving the signal that they were approaching the plane’s service ceiling of forty-one thousand feet.

The cockpit door opened.

Michael swallowed the lump that had worked its way up his throat.

Here we go, thought Michael as he eyed the door; his pupils bounced left and right as his body fought off the small slap of vertigo. He pushed the flats of his feet harder against the floor seeking any semblance of still. His hands were still gripped tightly to the armrests. His fingers began to complain from the pain, but he refused to let go.

A heavy ball of cold nausea reached up from his stomach, trying to grab at the lump in his throat. Michael fought to keep it there.

Michael never looked forward to flying. He preferred a parachute on his back and his life not in another man’s hands. He may have been an Army Ranger; he may have been with the clandestine services of the CIA, but he still hated to fly. Flying was unnatural and meant to be feared.

The plane flew easy now, and Michael tried to force himself to relax.

The captain had already stepped through the cockpit door. He eyed Michael and walked straight toward him.

Michael sat up and forced a return smile, not realizing just how feeble it was.

The closer the captain was to Michael, the sicker Michael felt.

Luck was on his side—in a manner of speaking.

The captain was directly in front of Michael; his hand reached out to greet him.

Michael couldn’t move.

The captain cocked his head to the side, and through a thick Portuguese accent, asked, “Captain, are you all right?”

No, Michael wasn’t.

The Portuguese captain saw Michael’s face morph from flushed to white and then to an odd shade of green. The transition of colors occurred in only moments.

The burning in Michael’s leg was unbearable; the wave of knotted pain in his stomach torture. It was inevitable. Michael had been drinking earlier when he was forced to flee, twice, from the CIA. This, and its dehydrating effects, combined with his fear of flying, the turbulent takeoff, and the burning from the tracking device embedded into his femoral artery led to the only thing the body was biologically trained to do.

Michael vomited.

It happened without warning. Projectile is the word often used to describe this type. Michael could taste the Johnny Walker as it passed his lips. Now he knew why it was called Black—this was how it tasted.

The Portuguese captain held his hands out to his sides as if this would have helped in some kind of way. He looked at Michael and mumbled a few Portuguese obscenities and abruptly turned and marched back to the cockpit; he was no longer interested in offering a courtesy to his fellow captain.

Michael slumped back into the thick recesses of the first-class cabin seat. The few other first-class passengers began to catch wind of the smell and started to hold their noses; some of them even stood and walked back to the coach cabin.

The horrified flight attendant quickly returned with a number of warm towels: some for Michael and some for the floor.

Gingerly, she held one out for Michael to take; she was careful to not get too close, but she noticed that none of the bile seemed to have landed on him.

He took one anyway and offered her a shrug along with a weak, “Sorry, must’ve had some bad airline food.”

As the flight attendant worked to quickly rid the cabin of Michael’s leftovers, he closed his eyes, relieved that his ruse just might work.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

THE BIGGER THEY ARE…
AEROPORTO DA PORTELA
LISBON, PORTUGAL

G
ently she tapped his arm.

He didn’t move.

She gave it another tap, this time a little harder.

Michael’s left hand sliced through the air and firmly clamped onto her wrist; it took less than a moment for him to remember where he was.

Letting go, he immediately offered his apologies. “I am so sorry. I must have fallen asleep.”

More like you had passed out,
she thought.

Michael continued, both embarrassed and genuinely concerned. “I didn’t mean to hurt you. Are you okay?”

The flight attendant was rubbing her narrow wrist, but replied, “It is fine, Captain, I am fine.”

Reaching down, she picked up the empty glass with half-melted ice and the two travel-sized bottles of Grey Goose.

“We are landing, Captain, please if you would,” she said, pointing to his tray table.

“Oh, of course,” said Michael as he lifted the tray table and put it back in its place. “We’ve arrived in Lisbon already?”

“Yes, Captain, we have,” she answered, more than happy that he would soon be out of her way.

Michael’s eyes were striated with the small, red lines that told of one’s recent inebriation or lack of sleep. It was more the latter than the former. Michael rubbed the bridge of his nose between his forefinger and thumb.

In the cockpit, the captain—the real captain—opened the COM panel and set the autobrakes to 1 and then closed the COM panel.

He lowered the flaps on schedule until they were at twenty-five degrees and then lowered the landing gear.

Michael couldn’t have been happier when he heard the grating noises that vibrated through the cabin, signaling the wheels were fully extended.

The captain armed the speedbrake, turned on the taxi and landing lights, and sat back as the autopilot completed the landing sequence.

The plane’s wheels touched the asphalt tarmac of runway 03/21 with a slight screech and raced down its 12,484 feet; Michael let out a short sigh of relief. Landings were the worst part, when most accidents happened. He couldn’t get off the plane any faster.

In the airport, Michael was grateful once more to find this one, too, brimming with activity. He melted in with the crowds and darted into the first bathroom that he could.

Soon he had ditched the captain’s uniform and was on the other side of the airport getting into a cab.

Michael’s Portuguese was severely limited, but he told the driver, “Cidade Universitária, Hospital de Santa Maria.”

“Okay, mister,” responded the driver through a crooked smile. Clearly he understood that his passenger wouldn’t—couldn’t—say much more. Michael’s rough accent declared his limited grasp of the language.

The taxi sped down the road, and Michael reached into his pocket and pulled out the medallion. He toiled for a moment over how three men could knowingly end their lives to ensure that he received the medallion and escaped.

Eyeing its inscription, he silently read:
From Four to Fifteen: Ten are Lost Forever.

He had no idea what it meant.

Then he read the other engraving:
They Amount to the Same
.

This one he understood. Tanto Monta. They amount to the same.

It was the motto of Isabella I of Castille and Ferdinand II of Aragon, the late-fifteenth century husband and wife Catholic monarchs who had set the foundation for Spain’s unity.

Engraved into the medallion were a yoke and fasces of arrows, both were symbols of the monarchs. If the translated words, along with the yoke and arrows were ambiguous, it was made much easier to identify the meaning of the simple phrase and to whom it belonged by the letters “Y” and “F,” which were also engraved on the medallion. They stood for the spelling of Ysabel—Isabella in its archaic form—and Ferdinand.

Although her husband was king, together the two ruled as a pair and the motto “Tanto Monta” made it clear that her influence was the same as his: They Amount to the Same.

Her influence was and is still apparent, and it carried more weight in modern times than was taught. It was Isabella who finally agreed to the terms from an almost sycophantic, begging Columbus to finance his voyage west; a grossly, if not embarrassingly, miscalculated voyage to Asia that landed him instead on the islands of Hispaniola and Cuba—thousands of miles away from his preached intent. Gold was what he sought, but it was the slave trade (and eventual genocide) of the peaceful Arawaks upon which Columbus had settled in an effort to repay his debt to the crown.

Earlier that same year—1492—Isabella would balk at the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, citing economic reasons, but it was her husband who convinced her that it was necessary. Ultimately, Isabella would see the Inquisition become institutionalized through Spain.

Michael leaned his head on the seat’s headrest and gathered his thoughts. While he was certain that he understood one half of the engraving, the other half left him confused. Opening his eyes, he gazed at the medallion as he flipped it over and over between his fingers.

He was in the wrong city, the wrong country really, but it had been necessary to come to Lisbon first; it was an unavoidable waypoint. It was the city nearest to Granada, in which he had an undocumented safe house; it was off the CIA’s books and would give him the unadulterated time he needed to formulate his next steps. It was also a city that had a large medical center, a place where he might be able to figure out what was embedded and burning in his leg.