Glass House (43 page)

A Laurentian arrival team was on its way.
Waldoch hadn’t been able to get hold of Rupert or anyone else at
Laurentian itself for some reason, but he’d spoken with the
security men who always met him. They were a few minutes out and
would reach the meeting point by the time the Bombardier came to
the hangar. Then it was simply a matter of getting back to
Laurentian, where Waldoch was planning to have a long, payback
afternoon with Megan Davis.

The Bombardier rocked as it moved along.
Waldoch and Chilcott raised hands to the cabin ceiling to steady
themselves, but Megan and Finn, hands tied with plastic cords in
front of them, lurched against the seats at every bump or sway.

The four of them stopped near the head of
the cabin, behind the cockpit. The drone of the engines wound down
to a low whine, and the pilot gave an all clear. Waldoch waited for
an attendant, who pulled the lever release handle and started to
swing the door and its integrated stairs out and down.

_______________

When he woke up that morning, Kenneth
Schroeder hardly expected to finish the day in South Africa.
Schroeder was a Bureau agent stationed in Topeka. It was his second
posting, a move up from an earlier one in Arkansas, and he was glad
to have it. Topeka wasn’t exactly the forefront of federal crime
investigation, but it wasn’t Arkansas, either.

He’d known nothing about Jeremy Waldoch or
DMW or Laurentian Mines. He’d never heard of Megan Davis or Jackson
Hanley. But when Hanley’s call for expedited assistance came,
Schroeder went gladly. And when Hanley said they were going to
Africa, he followed along on that as well.

Schroeder was the first to the top of the
stairs that had swung out from the Bombardier, which had stopped
just outside the hangar. Hanley himself was three steps behind him,
and another Topeka agent, Sid Alexander, wasn’t yet to the bottom,
five steps farther down. They all wore the blue jumpsuits of tarmac
personnel, and they all held sidearms snugged against their
legs.

Schroeder was in the plane’s open doorway.
The angle to the aisle at his right was all wrong, the approach too
open and with no place for cover, and he’d crouched at the top
step. He lifted his Bureau badge. Only then did he wonder if he had
any authority at all here. Wherever
here
precisely was. He
pushed the question aside.

“FBI!” he shouted. The nose of the service
pistol was still pointed down, but he raised it slightly as he
angled back toward the cabin area and moved a few inches farther in
to allow room behind him. At a glance, he saw an attendant peeking
around the wall of a notched-out service area ahead of him.
Schroeder thrust his badge up, the pistol beside it, then frowned
as the man, wide-eyed, fled into the cockpit.

“We –” Schroeder didn’t get the chance
for another word.

Four people stood just inside the
Bombardier’s cabin. In the second he had in turning that way,
Schroeder saw that two of them – a man and a woman – were
bound at the wrists, that a large man farther back could be a
sizable problem if he wanted to be, and that the person in the
immediate front was Jeremy Waldoch. At least he thought it was.

Hanley had briefed them during the flight,
telling them Waldoch’s story and showing his picture. And the man
at the front of this collection of people certainly looked
something like the man in those pictures. But he looked completely
different at the same time.

This man’s face was burned raw. His eyebrows
and eyelashes were totally gone, his head bald in front and not
thick with hair, as it should have been. Red blisters ran down his
cheeks, the skin shining from ointment that was thickly applied to
them.

His left earlobe was missing entirely.
Someone had stitched the ear with black sutures at the point where
the lobe had been torn away. Probably the same person who had
bandaged a wound on his forehead and what looked to be a gash along
his neck.

Schroeder started at Waldoch’s appearance,
wasting all the time he had to act. He dropped the badge and
double-handed the gun, lifting it higher, but the big man behind
Waldoch was already coming around and reaching for the agent.
Schroeder could see that the man was dragging one of the others
along with him, and he was pulling Waldoch back at the same time.
Then the big man had Schroeder by the shoulder and was lifting him
into the air. He tossed him backward with a shove that seemed too
easy, toppling him down the stairs toward the asphalt of the
runway.

_______________

Waldoch heard Hanley before he saw him. The
other FBI agent was in the way at first. Behind that man and his
surprising badge, Waldoch could see the array of vehicles near the
hangar, some in place and some now charging toward the waiting
plane. He could pick out the SAPS emblem on two of those in the
lead, their lights starting up as they moved in closer.

But he hadn’t seen Hanley yet, and he didn’t
get the chance at first. Chilcott was reaching around him, dragging
Finn with him, and he caught Waldoch with a pull, then a shoulder
shove, plowing him aside. Chilcott clutched a massive hand on the
face of the FBI agent who was crouched in the doorway and sent him
tumbling back down the stairs.

Waldoch heard a yell from Hanley then, and
he stepped back up beside Chilcott and Finn. Hanley had stopped the
other agent in mid-roll down the steps. He was clambering over him,
working his way toward the Bombardier’s doorway.

“No!” Waldoch shouted. He pushed Megan back
toward the cabin and reached for the door’s close mechanism. He
squared his shoulder into the small of Chilcott’s back and leaned
his weight against the man’s substantial shape. Chilcott lurched
forward onto the top stair outside the plane, Finn going with
him.

Waldoch pulled the lever to close the door
it as he turned to the pilot in the cockpit. “Turn us around!”

The pilot leaned back to see him. “We should
refuel if we’re –”

“Get it around!”

The pilot hurriedly turned to the console.
His hands started to move over the controls, and Waldoch heard the
engines start to whine their way back up. The plane edged
forward.

The stairs weren’t closing. They wouldn’t
with the weight of the men on them.

Waldoch tugged at the lever, pulling it
again and again. He had only one thought as he did.

Where the hell is the Laurentian team?

_______________

Neria Motaung and a squad of SAPS cars
picked up the Laurentian arrival team before it made it onto the
field at Upington. They had three of the four cars walled off
before any of the security men realized what was happening. The
other one broke out and angled back toward the highway.

Hanley had called her from the plane,
telling her what happened and what he thought was still to come. He
wanted her help, but he left it to her beyond that, so she
collected every constable she could trust within SAPS, and she kept
word of what she was doing within that group.

Most were from Upington, with a mix of
others from Calvinia and Kimberley. They gathered a few kilometers
from the airport and waited, monitoring the approaches with a
handful of posted officers and a helicopter.

The Laurentian team had made it easy in the
end. It was an entourage more than anything, a too-showy parade in
the manner to which Waldoch likely was accustomed but that was
ill-suited to the arrival he was making today.

Neria tugged on the arm of the man driving
the SAPS squad car. “Closer!” she shouted over the roar from her
window. The window was down, her arm already out of it, and the
final Laurentian car was dropping back by her side as the power of
the SAPS car caught up. “Closer!” she shouted again.

The SAPS driver edged his car to the left,
narrowing the gap. Neria leaned precariously, practically climbing
from the window, and she emptied her pistol toward the right rear
tire of the Laurentian car.

The tire burst and flapped, shredding apart
as it first flattened and then tore under the pressure of the rim
and the speed. The Laurentian car tugged right, Neria jerking away
from it and hugging the SAPS squad car at the close pass, then the
Laurentians veered sharply left as the driver overcorrected. Their
car went onto its right wheels, hung there for a moment, and
slipped to a spinning slide on its side.

_______________

The Bombardier picked up a little speed. As
the plane turned to start back toward the runway, its door and
stairs hung out from it like the plank off a sailing ship. Chilcott
and Finn, still on the top step, gripped tightly on the rails as
the plane moved and the door bobbed with it.

Below them, Hanley was coming up. He climbed
over Schroeder, reached the top, and shouldered around the two men
who stood there. His pistol was still tight in his grip.

Chilcott reached to stop Hanley, but Finn
was on him before he could. He looped his bound hands around
Chilcott’s neck and pulled the plastic binding strap into the man’s
throat. Chilcott was tugged back, and Hanley fell inside the
plane.

Finn pulled tighter on Chilcott’s neck,
gouging the plastic cord into it, but he knew the bigger man had
the advantage. His size gave him that much. Chilcott was leaning
forward, pulling Finn off his feet and onto Chilcott’s back, and he
was reaching a hand into his jacket at the same time.

Finn thought he’d be shot at that point.
Chilcott would pull a gun from that jacket and kill him. That, or
he’d be thrown down to the pavement below.

But the plane was turning too fast now, the
stairs in the flipped-down door bounding too much. Behind Finn,
Schroeder had lost his weapon in his fall down the stairs, and he
gripped the rails with both hands at the motion. Chilcott hung on
with one, the other hand frozen half-in and half-out of his jacket
as both he and Finn swayed with the door’s momentum.

The plane lurched as it came around and
straightened toward the runway approach, and the men lurched, too.
Finn lost his grip on Chilcott and they fell against the side rail,
Chilcott’s gun tumbling out and down to the tarmac.

Chilcott straightened and turned. His hand
came off the rail.

His first blow caught Finn on the jaw,
pushing him backward until Schroeder, moving up a step, caught him
against a shoulder. The second found Finn’s temple, and he was
knocked to the side.

Schroeder reached around Finn to Chilcott.
He took hold of the man’s belt and pulled. Chilcott was tugged
forward down the stairs. He crashed into Finn, and they toppled
together into Schroeder. All three men fell off the dangling stairs
and onto the tarmac, the door finally starting to rise with the
weight now off it.

Chilcott was up first. He rose and reached
down to Schroeder, who was nearest him. Lifting him by the
jumpsuit’s collar, Chilcott drove the butt of his hand into
Schroeder’s nose, exploding it in a spray of red as Schroeder was
reaching – too late – to stop him. The agent screamed in
pain, his hands at his face, and Chilcott threw him down and turned
to Finn.

He lifted him. Clutching at Finn’s bound
arms, Chilcott slung him up and onto the Bombardier’s slowly
approaching wing, then hoisted himself up as well.

Finn lifted his hands to keep Chilcott off
him, but the man’s size was winning out once more. Finn’s hands
pressed against Chilcott’s chest, but the bigger man’s weight was
bearing down, and his reach was too great. He had Finn by the
shoulders, then by the throat. His grip tightened.

Finn didn’t catch a breath until the
Bombardier turned to the head of the runway and jolted to a stop
there. The wing bobbed up and down at the hesitation, and Chilcott
lost his grip. Finn fell and Chilcott staggered to the side, going
down beside him. Behind Chilcott’s still overwhelming form, Finn
could see the runway stretching out ahead of them, its path open.
The jet started forward.

Chilcott was climbing to one knee. He
glanced over his shoulder, noticed the motion, and propped a hand
to steady himself. Then he stood carefully and stepped toward
Finn.

Finn was out of time. Out of time with
Chilcott, out of time with the plane.

He rolled to one side. He came to his knees,
too. He didn’t stand. He didn’t even try. He moved to kneel on one
leg, and when Chilcott almost had reached him, he pushed with his
hands and legs, pistoning up and forward into the big man’s
belly.

Chilcott toppled back. He fell and rolled
toward the front of the Bombardier’s wing, his hands fighting for a
grip. The skin of his palms squealed in contact with the plane’s
smooth wing surface as he slid off it and vanished from sight.

Finn sat up. He heard Chilcott hit the
pavement, then the plane shuddered, pulled sharply to the left, and
lifted on that side as the man’s body jammed and then crunched
under the landing gear. The Bombardier jerked again and hung at
that listing angle, high on the left and down on the right. The
wheels caught and the plane started to pivot, stuck in a circle
centered on an unseen body beneath them.

_______________

“You’re not looking so good, Jeremy.” Hanley
stood at the head of the cabin, tucked away in the small service
area, the pilot’s door now closed behind him. The pistol was in his
hand, outstretched toward Waldoch, who held Megan before him in the
aisle that ran toward the rear of the Bombardier. “Had a problem
back in Kansas, did you?”

“Another gift from my friend here,” Waldoch
said. “First the trial. Then a little insult to injury above that.”
He tightened a grip on Megan’s arm. She winced at the pressure.

“So you get to kill her now?” Hanley asked.
“That’s the idea? You bring her all the way to Africa to get rid of
her?” He slowly stepped into the aisle. “Because we should get
started if that’s the case. It’s been long flights for everyone. So
let’s say you kill her, then I kill you, and we get this wrapped up
quickly, once and for all. I got a plane to catch.”