Over the Edge (27 page)
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Twelve
“Who is she?” one of the British officials asked.
Teri didn’t mean to eavesdrop. But the observers’tent was small. And the sun was scorchingly hot this time of the afternoon, so she, like they, were beneath it, watching the SEALs practicing the takedown of the plane. It was kind of hard not to hear their conversation.
“Alyssa Locke,” Lt. Tom Paoletti answered. “Former Navy, currently with the FBI. Counterterrorism unit.”
“Ah,” said the one who looked like James Bond. Suave and sophisticated, charismatic and handsome with a touch of gray at his temples, he was obviously in command.
All three of the Brits were from the Secret Intelligence Service or SIS, although they’d probably never admit it.
“She’s quite good,” said the one who looked like a younger version of Q.
The SEALs had just completed another practice run, and, second time in a row, Alyssa Locke had killed one of the SEALs before being killed herself.
“This isn’t even her real strength. She’s one of the best snipers I’ve ever worked with,” Tom Paoletti said easily. “But her instincts are excellent across the board. It was a lucky day for the Teams when she went into the Bureau. I know I sleep easier knowing she’s part of the FBI unit backing up my men.”
All four of them were silent for a moment, watching as Alyssa and the others who’d been recruited to play mock terrorists came out of the plane—the real World Airlines 747 that had finally arrived.
As hot as it was out here, there was no doubt it was really heating up on board the aircraft.
And what it must be like on the hijacked plane with the doors locked shut and no working sanitary facilities was too terrible to try to imagine.
“Lieutenant Starrett’s still working the kinks out,” Paoletti continued. “Having Locke play tango would be a challenge for anyone. He’ll get her next time.”
As they watched, Alyssa Locke accepted a bottle of water from the senior chief with a smile. She opened it and drank deeply, nodding as he spoke to her.
“Lovely woman,” commented James Bond.
Alyssa Locke was lovely to look at. She’d changed her clothes since this morning when Teri had first officially met her. She’d put on some kind of lightweight jumpsuit that covered her from her ankles to her wrists as per the customs of K-stan. But the suit was belted, which accentuated her trim figure. She wasn’t a voluptuous woman by any definition, but in that outfit, surrounded by a crowd of testosterone, she was unquestionably, strikingly female.
It was more than obvious that Alyssa was old friends with Stan Wolchonok. But how old and how friendly Teri didn’t know.
She walked toward them, wishing that she didn’t have to check in with Lieutenant Starrett, knowing that it would look strange if she walked past Stan without saying anything, hoping it wouldn’t look as if she were checking out the competition if she stopped to say hello while he was talking to Alyssa Locke.
“Hey, Lieutenant.” Stan greeted her first, and her heart leapt at his welcoming smile. “Where’s your flack jacket?”
She rolled her eyes in exasperation. “Up by the observers’tent.”
“Better than in the helo but not by much. It belongs on your body. Hey, Mike Muldoon’s looking for you.”
Great. So much for leaping hearts. She didn’t stop walking. “Thanks, Stan.”
She headed away from him, toward Sam Starrett, who was deep in discussion with two other men.
“Hey, Lieutenant, how’s the head?” Jay Lopez asked as she walked past. He was sprawled in the shade of the wing, next to Cosmo and Silverman, but now he sat up.
“The head . . . ?” She was clueless.
“The bump,” he reminded her. “Uh-oh,” Silverman teased. “Amnesia strikes. That’s not a good sign.”
“No,” she said. “No, I’m fine. I just . . . It was so not a big deal, I didn’t even . . .”
Silverman was grinning at her. “Maybe Lopez should, you know, check you out again, as the team’s medical corpsman, huh? Like maybe during dinner tonight?”
Jay Lopez was a handsome man with heavily lidded brown eyes and exotic cheekbones that were flushing with embarrassment.
“You’re Reserve, Lieutenant, right?” Silverman continued. “Which means in a few weeks you’ll be a civilian again. Which means the fact that Lopez here is enlisted won’t matter. Which means—”
“Stop,” Lopez said. “Sorry, Lieutenant.” He met her eyes briefly, then glanced past her.
Teri turned to see that Stan had come up behind her. He wasn’t close enough to be part of the conversation, yet it was more than clear that he was there if she needed him.
But there was nothing threatening in either Silverman’s or Lopez’s eyes. Silverman was teasing, claiming that Lopez was interested in her. Although . . . was it possible this was just another exercise Stan had set up in advance?
But then Silverman suddenly looked as if he’d swallowed a pincushion as Cosmo said something into his ear. “I beg your pardon, Lieutenant,” he said. “I didn’t realize you and the senior were, uh, special friends.”
She glanced behind her again, uncertain how to reply to that with Stan listening in, but the senior chief was gone.
She murmured some nonsense—“Don’t worry about it”—and went to find Starrett.
A quick “I’m here if you need me, sir,” and she was heading back toward the observers’tent, trying not to be too obvious as she looked around for Stan.
But then there he was. Maneuvering Muldoon to an intercept point directly in her path.
“Hey, Teri.” Mike Muldoon really was remarkably good-looking. Even with a smudge of dirt on his face.
“Hey, Mike.” She forced a smile as Stan all but pushed Muldoon toward her. Dammit, Stan, don’t do this. “Sorry about this morning.”
Muldoon shook his head. “It’s not your fault that I choked.”
“Let’s go,” Lieutenant Starrett called. “Time out’s over. Let’s do this again, and let’s do it right this time.”
Muldoon looked about as relieved as she felt. Saved.
“See you later,” she said.
“Sure,” Muldoon said. “Ouch! I mean, do you, um, have plans for dinner?”
Teri hadn’t seen it, but she was pretty sure that Stan had stepped on the back of Muldoon’s boot. Hard.
“My only plan is to eat in the glorious basement of the hotel as usual,” Teri said. She included Stan in her reply, looking directly at him. “Maybe I’ll see you guys down there.”
“Great,” Muldoon said.
Stan said nothing. But he glanced at her. Just briefly.
She couldn’t begin to guess what he was thinking.
Which was probably just as well, since she wasn’t sure she really wanted to know.
“. . . let the passengers go?” Max was saying as Gina started awake. “Over.”
She was exhausted, it was hotter than hell with the sun pounding down on the plane, and the stench of humanity was close to unbearable. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d slept.
“Over,” Max said again, his rich baritone voice coming through clearly over the radio’s speakers. He’d been talking to her—and through her to the hijackers—nearly nonstop for more hours than she could count.
It was almost funny. She had talked more with Max than she’d talked to any other man—including the ones she’d slept with.
Trent Engelman was not the master of conversation, that was for sure, unless, maybe, he was talking about his new car or his microbrewery or his plans to get work as a musician with Wynton Marsalis’s touring band after graduation.
Yeah, right.
When Trent did talk, it was without listening. Gina got the feeling that when she spoke, Max listened with every cell in his body.
“Max, how old are you?” she asked now. Bob was dozing, anyway. And Max didn’t have to convince her to let the passengers go. “Over.”
He didn’t hesitate, the way some people might’ve at her non sequitur. “I’m forty. Over.”
Oh, man. Her own father wasn’t even forty-five.
“Are you married?” she asked.
His answer came back as quickly. “Nope.”
“Why not?”
“Because no one in their right mind would ever marry me.”
“Why? Are you hideous looking?”
He laughed. “Yeah.”
She smiled. “Warts and long, greasy hair?”
“Mostly it’s the fangs that keep the women away,” he told her.
She glanced at Bob. He was definitely asleep. Al was awake and glowering but he didn’t speak English. “Helga told me you’re really good-looking. I think the phrase she used was blindingly handsome.”
“Yeah, well, she’s good at telling people what they want to hear.”
“I didn’t want to hear that,” Gina told him, trying to get comfortable in her spot on the floor. She had to keep her legs crossed, tailor style, or her knees tucked in against her chest.
It wasn’t just that there was no room in the tiny cockpit. It was mostly the way creepy Al started drooling when she stretched out her legs. She alternated between wishing she were wearing jeans and being grateful as hell—because of the heat—that she had on her shorts. “I wanted you to be short and rumpled. Kind of like—you know, if they made a movie of this?—Richard Dreyfus would play you.”
She’d always had a major thing for Richard Dreyfus. Ever since she saw Close Encounters when she was ten.
“We’re getting a little off track here,” he said, his FM radio announcer’s voice like velvet in her ears.
“Bob’s asleep,” she said. “Will you meet me for a drink after this is over?”
That one made him pause.
And Gina knew. There wasn’t going to be an after, at least not for her. Max thought the hijackers were going to kill her. The senator’s daughter would certainly be the first person they’d shoot if commandos stormed the plane, that was for sure.
“They’re going to kill me, aren’t they?” She’d suspected it all along. She knew that her fate had been sealed from the moment she’d first stood up and told the hijackers she was Karen Crawford.
When Bob and Al and their buddies decided it was time to play hardball, she was going to be the ball. They were going to kill her, but first they were going to hurt her. Badly.
“No,” Max said now, “they’re not.”
She didn’t believe him. “I’m scared,” she whispered.
“I’ll meet you,” he told her, something different in his voice, something rough, something no longer so cool and collected. “All right? I will. It may not be until you’re back in New York, but I’ll meet you for a drink. No, for coffee. It has to be a cup of coffee. God damn it.”
Yeah, she was definitely going to die. He, like Helga, was good at telling people what they wanted to hear. “Max, after this is over, will you go see my parents?”
Another pause. When he spoke, his voice was relaxed again, but she knew he was working hard to get it to sound that way. “Hey, I really need you to stop thinking in terms of worst case scenarios.”
“Tell them it wasn’t as bad as they probably imagined. Tell them I wasn’t alone, that you were with me the whole time. Tell them because of that, I was okay.”
There was another long pause. Then, “How about you tell them that yourself? Because I’m going to get you out of there. Alive. In one piece. Trust me on that, all right?”
“Sure,” she lied. He could try to convince her all he wanted, but his hesitation earlier had told her all she’d needed to know. “But just in case . . . Thank you. For everything.” Gina cleared her throat, forced away her fear and self-pity. She wasn’t dead yet. “As long as Bob’s asleep, why don’t you give me a crash course in negotiating. Teach me how to talk these assholes into letting the women with babies get off this plane.”
The emergency exit over the starboard wing silently popped ajar under Muldoon’s expert touch, and Stan gave the hand signal to the surveillance team hidden among the dust and rocks a hundred yards away.
Two clicks over his radio headset was the ready signal, meaning Starrett and Jenk, WildCard and Lopez, and Cosmo and Silverman had all succeeded in quietly unlocking their various egresses onto the practice 747. They were set to rock and roll.
When they did this for real, Lt. Tom Paoletti would be the voice of God. He’d give the go command, his omnipotence coming from the surveillance teams’reports of the tangos’exact locations on the plane and from the information from the video cameras. Provided, of course, MacInnough had the cameras up and running by then.
Tonight. The cameras should be in place and working by tonight.
Tom Paoletti would give that go command from the negotiators’HQ, where Max Bhagat would be helping out. The chief negotiator would request that as many of the terrorists as possible gather in the cockpit to discuss some outrageous proposition that he had absolutely no intention of following up on. But he’d use his powers of persuasion and make it sound really good.
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