Velocity (32 page)

Corey stares at Judd for a moment.

‘Please.’

‘If it gets dangerous or in any way doesn’t feel one hundred per cent funky-dory we’re out of there.’

Judd nods. ‘One hundred percent funky-dory or we’re gone.’

Corey works the controls, points the Loach towards the Galaxy. ‘Okay, what’s the plan?’

‘The dog.’

‘That’s a terrible plan.’

‘No, no,
your
dog.’ Judd points at the desert far below.

Corey follows Judd’s finger. In the distance Spike gallops after the Loach, barking all the way. ‘Sorry, mate, you can’t come along on this one.’

There’s a definite tinge of sadness in his voice.

**

45

Rhonda flexes her arm. She ignores the deep pain in her wrist because the plastic tie is now very loose. Within the suit’s sleeve she pulls on her wrist. It slips under the tie. Hallelujah! Her arm is free.

She draws it down the sleeve and prepares to execute the most difficult part of the plan. She needs to get her arm out of the sleeve and position it in front of her chest so she can unzip the front of the flight suit. There’s only one way she can do it.

Straighten, tense, roll. Hold her arm straight, tense it and roll it clockwise while pushing down at the shoulder. There will be a snap, her shoulder will pop out of its socket and there will be great pain. Purple pain, Judd called it. She had spent years making sure it didn’t happen accidentally but now must do it on purpose.

She takes a breath, reminds herself that the pain will be worth it, that in a moment she’ll be out of this chair and the Frenchman will be out like a light. She doesn’t want to kill him, in spite of everything he’s done. No, she wants to knock him unconscious so she can watch him fry in court.

Before any of that can happen she must distract him. If she can get him talking he won’t hear what she’s doing behind him. It’s a great theory, just as long as he doesn’t turn and look at her as he speaks. She’ll just have to hope he doesn’t because she doesn’t have another option.

‘There’s something I don’t understand. If you’re all professional mercenaries and you really were involved in 9/11, why go to the trouble of stealing a shuttle and doing whatever you plan to do to punish the government? Don’t you do this kind of stuff all the time? Why take it so personally?’

The Frenchman turns, fastens his eyes on hers. ‘Because my pregnant wife was in the North Tower.’

**

Corey looks at Judd. ‘
That’s
your plan?’

‘That’s my plan.’

‘Well, it’s just awful.’

‘No, no, it’ll work.’

‘Not even accidentally. Mate, really, you’re havin’ a lend of yourself.’

‘I don’t know what that means.’

‘It means you’re fooling yourself and then you’ll die, is what it means.’

Judd ignores him, searches the floor of the Loach. Corey shakes his head in frustration, scans the horizon and picks up the Galaxy in the distance. It
is
slow and they are catching it. Carrying the shuttle and using only three engines is clearly a big handicap. If the Yank is right about that then maybe he’s right about this half-baked plan too.

‘Yes.’ Judd holds up two hooks Corey uses to move hay bales. They’re rusty but solid, each about 12 centimetres long. He can comfortably hold one in each hand.

‘Okay, let’s say we do catch it, are you even sure she’s on board?’

‘Tango in Berlin said she was.’

‘There’s a reliable source.’

‘If there’s any chance she is I have to try. I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t.’

Corey can’t argue with that. He’d told Judd that he didn’t want to be ‘caged’ but in truth the women he dated thought he was crazy as soon as he spoke to the dog. So from painful personal experience the Australian knows how hard it is to find ‘the one’ and won’t stand in the way of Judd being reunited with the woman he loves. ‘Okay.’

‘Thank you.’ Judd unlocks the lever on the winch and pulls out the blue Dynamica rope, roughly measures it as he goes, gets it all out so he can see the end tied around the axle. He tugs on it, makes sure it’s secure. ‘Okay, we got a bit over thirty metres.’ He looks at Corey. ‘You ready?’

‘Not at all, but let’s do it anyway.’

**

The Frenchman studies Rhonda. ‘That’s why I’m doing this. Operatives within the US government were responsible for 9/11 and therefore responsible for the death of my wife, who was five months pregnant.’

Rhonda hears the pain in his voice, wants to say: ‘I’m sorry for your loss.’ She doesn’t. This guy executed one of her crew in cold blood and plans to deploy a dirty bomb. She won’t let herself feel sorry for him. ‘If you faked the Shanksville crash site why didn’t you warn your wife about the Twin Towers?’

‘We didn’t know about it, or the Pentagon, until after it happened.’

‘So what happens now?’

‘We proceed on our current course. Once we are in range I will release
Atlantis
from the Galaxy and we will crash into the designated target.’

We.

Something cold and awful turns over in Rhonda’s stomach. She’s not sure what’s worse, that her shuttle will be used as a weapon of mass destruction or that she’ll be aboard. ‘What do you need me for?’

‘You will be my conduit.’

‘I still don’t know what that means.’

‘You will soon enough.’

She takes a breath, frustrated. ‘At least tell me what the target is.’

‘A house. In McLean, Virginia. Edgar’s house, to be precise.’

‘Who the hell is Edgar?’

‘It’s a nickname, after the puppeteer and ventriloquist Edgar Bergen. He had a show on American television many years ago.’

‘So who is it?’

‘The man who once controlled your government. A man who now spends his time surrounded by secret service agents tending the rose bushes in his garden, in McLean, Virginia.’

‘I don’t know who you’re talking about —’

‘He’s the man who conceived, funded and managed 9/11. Your last vice-president.’

**

46

Atlantis
is close. Judd balances on the Loach’s left skid, one hand clasped to its front strut, the other to the doorframe, a hook held in each. Shirt pasted flat against his chest, he bows his head against the blast of freezing air.

He turns and nods at Corey in the Loach’s cockpit. The little yellow chopper dips towards the expanse of white thermal tiles on the top of the shuttle’s fuselage.

Ten. Six. One metre away. The twin viewports in the roof of
Atlantis
’s flight deck are right in front of Judd. He leans to look inside, can’t see anything through the reflection off the glass. He shifts position to get a better angle, tries again.

Rhonda. She sits in the second row of the flight deck. Alive. The relief is overwhelming. Judd wants her to look up, to see him, to know he’s there. She doesn’t. There’s no way she can hear the chopper so there’s no reason to look up.

He nods at Corey, who gives him a thumbs up and moves the Loach lower. The skids kiss
Atlantis
’s soft thermal-tile skin and Judd swings the left hook down.

It slams into a tile, slices down until nothing but its shank protrudes. He pulls on it. It seems to be wedged in tight. ‘Seems’ will have to do. The moment of truth has arrived. He has no reservations. Seeing Rhonda has only strengthened his resolve.

Judd lets go of the doorframe and drives the second hook deep into the shuttle’s thermal-tile skin, a foot to the right of the first. He pulls on it. It’s tight. He grips both hooks as hard as he can then rolls onto the shuttle’s fuselage.

The air instantly catches his chest, pushes him up. His head whacks the underside of the Loach. The hooks squirm in the tiles. Judd uses all his strength to lever himself downwards, his cauterised wound aching from the effort.

Both hooks rip free and Judd is swept backwards —

He slams both hooks down as hard as he can, drives them deep into the tiles. He stops dead and his arms jolt. It feels like his shoulders will pop their sockets. He pulls himself flat then raises his head, sees the viewports are now three metres away.
Three metres!

He twists the right hook from the tile, slams it down at an angle. It bounces off. ‘Come on!’ He swings again, angles it. It cuts into the tile. He drags himself forward. He yanks the left hook free, lunges forward, drives it down. It slices into the tile and he wrenches himself forward again.

**

‘You seriously believe the White House was involved in 9/11?’

Henri regards Rhonda. ‘Just the one with the power, the one pulling the strings. Edgar. His president didn’t know, didn’t understand much of anything, as it turned out. He was kept in the dark to maintain plausible deniability.’

‘How could you possibly know this?’

‘The same way I found out who hired us for the job in the first place. I followed the money.’

It hadn’t been
quite
that simple. Dirk and Nico had kidnapped an upper-level manager at the Department of Defense and tortured him until he gave up his access codes to the encrypted files on the DoD servers, after which he was killed, his severed body parts dumped in the Potomac and, surprisingly, never found. Even with unfettered access to the servers it took six months of forensic investigation before they could locate the funds that bankrolled 9/11. It had cost just over three hundred and twenty million dollars to stage and they traced it to the office of the vice president.

‘So you’ve done all of this, to what, kill someone who
used
to be the vice president?’

‘Not kill. He won’t be at his house in Virginia. He’s travelling to South-East Asia today. Only his family will be present.’

‘You
don’t
want to kill him?’

‘I want to take away his life without killing him. I want to destroy his community, his home, his family, irradiate it with something terrible that can never be washed away, deliver him a sadness he can never escape, just as he did to me and so many others.’

Rhonda looks incredulous. ‘You blame this man for your wife’s death, yet you’re about to do the same thing to God knows how many others.’

‘What I will do pales in comparison.’

‘But still, why do it?’

‘Because the truth must be known.’

‘Come on, don’t dress it up as anything other than revenge.’

‘Of course it’s revenge, but it’s more than that. The world must know what happened and the man responsible must be held accountable for it. If innocent people are hurt along the way, well, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.’

‘You’re quoting
Star Trek
at me? Seriously?’

He can’t help but smile. It’s like arguing with his wife.

‘And why use my shuttle? Why not just fire a missile at his house and be done with it?’

‘Because it must be a grand gesture so people take notice. And what grander gesture is there than destroying the space program, one of the few institutions your country still has pride in?’

‘I gotta tell you this “grand gesture” will be lost on pretty much everyone but you.’

‘No, it won’t, because you will tell the world the truth. You will be my conduit.’ He reaches into the backpack that sits on the chair beside him and extracts a small Sony camcorder.

Rhonda looks at it. ‘You’re going to film me?’

He nods. ‘Then upload it to the net with the satellite phone. It will be online before we reach our target.’

‘I won’t do it.’

‘Oh, I think you will.’ He pulls a satellite phone from the backpack.

She glares at him. ‘I won’t.’

‘Then I will instruct my men to visit your parents when this is over. They live in that little Michigan town near the Canadian border, don’t they? Port Huron. Seventeen Baker Street, Port Huron, if I’m not mistaken. Sky-blue house, one garage.’

Rhonda flinches.

‘You will tell the world the truth, including where all the files detailing Edgar’s conspiracy can be found. And they will listen to NASA’s golden girl, the one who would have been first on Mars.’

‘They’ll know you forced me.’

‘Of course, but they will still hear the truth.’ Henri turns back to the controls.

**

Corey watches Judd drag himself towards the viewports.

The Australian scans the instrument panel. Their altitude is fine. They’ve only just reached 6000 feet and the Loach’s ceiling is over 15000, though the air gets too thin to breathe above 8000 so he needs to watch that. No, his concern is the Galaxy’s acceleration. The Loach is quickly approaching its maximum speed of 225 knots.

They have a couple of minutes at most. After that Corey won’t be able to keep up. ‘Hurry up!’ Corey shouts it, even though he knows Judd can’t hear.

**

47

Rhonda doesn’t know if she believes Henri’s stories of the 9/11 conspiracy but she’s certain of one thing - Martie Burnett did. She had lost her mother when the second plane hit the World Trade Center. Martie might have been one of the smartest women at NASA but she was also deeply
Mississippi,
southern, where ‘an eye for an eye’ was an accepted form of Old Testament-style justice. Over the years she had sometimes spoken, in vague terms, about taking revenge on those who had killed her mother. Rhonda now understood why.