Authors: Ridley Pearson
Cut and Run (24 page)
“Is Homeland involved?”
“They'll be all over this once they hear about the aliases.”
“Let's delay that for now,” Rotem said. “Where's it scheduled to land?”
“That's what caught our attention. The pickup is Washington, Missouri. It's a small strip west of St. Louis, just big enough to handle a jet like this. And get this: no tower, no FBO. No witnesses. Sure-Flyte has never, let me repeat that,
never
, landed one of their jets at the Washington strip.”
“A private jet of dubious ownership,” Rotem repeated, “landing for the first time at a strip just out of town where no one is likely to see who gets on or gets off.”
“And the first time a passenger flight for this company did not originate in Seattle. Which is why I brought it up here in person rather than put it into the paper mill.”
Wegner lived in an office cubicle where the only light came from fluorescent tubes and the only smells from his armpits or the coffee machine. For a reward, Rotem felt tempted to bring him as a field-side spectator for the dayâto see his efforts in actionâbut decided he needed him on the front line of paperwork.
“You may have saved a life, Wegner.” Rotem watched as the man grew a few inches taller. “Maybe more than that. Maybe many more.”
Wegner lingered a little too long.
“Now get back to it,” Rotem said, already growing impatient with him.
A thunderstorm cracked wildly with twenty minutes to go
before the scheduled landing.
With the small girl bound and gagged in the trunk of the stolen car, Paolo sat off a farm road across a small poured-concrete bridge to the east of, and with a good view of, Washington Memorial Airport's landing strip. He'd rigged the car's jack to make it look as if he were dealing with a flat. In fact, he could drive away, leaving the jack behind if needed. By car, he was less than five minutes from the tarmac and the sole hangar. On foot, they would have to cross a farmer's field, ten to twelve minutes if the girl stayed on her feet; but this option would allow him to abandon the stolen car in the woods along the creek and thereby limit the evidence connecting the kidnapping to this airfield. He waited. Which would it be? He'd been told the pilot had his cell number.
He couldn't get the image of the girl out of his mind: dripping wet head to toe, caught between the motel bed and the TV, a stunned look of surprise as he came through the door.
He'd waited for her to say something. And she, him.
Finally, he broke the silence. “Get out of those clothes and dry yourself. You'll catch cold.”
She turned around and headed for the bathroom.
“I need you to do something for me,” he called after her.
She stopped just outside of the bathroom and turned to face him as if expecting more from him.
“It's the duty of every prisoner to attempt escape,” he said.
“Once,”
he added, “and only once. I'd have done the same thing.”
“I want my mommy.”
This stung him but he said, “I'll hurt you if you do that again. Hurt you bad. Count on it. But no one's going to kill you, Penny. Least of all me. That's a promise.”
The kid never flinched. “I want my mommy.”
“Get out of those clothes. The motel has a washer/dryer. You can wear one of my T-shirts.”
“I don't want to.”
His eyeball had swollen and blistered to deformity. Yellowish fluid leaked in bursts down his cheek. For a moment his eye would actually feel slightly better; then the stinging would return, escalating to unbearable pain, and then it would squirt out its foul juice, and the cycle would repeat itself.
“I need you to do something icky,” he told her. “Something's in my eye, and it has to come out.”
“I don't like icky things.”
“Neither do I. But you're going to have to do this.”
A few minutes later she had changed and opened the door for him. Her clothes lay in a heap by the front doorâall but her socks, which she refused to take off. She wore his Oakland Raiders T-shirt like a dress.
He mopped up the bathroom floor with a towel and had her sit on the counter while he held his damaged eye open to the bright light.
He described the melted contact lens and pointed to it. “You're going to have to pinch it, and pull it off,” he instructed. “I tried, but I couldn't see what I was doing.”
“I can't do that.”
“Yeah, you can.”
“No, I can't.”
“You act like this, and you're going back in the closet. You help me out, and there's ice cream and cartoons.”
“What if I hurt you?”
“You're going to hurt me, but it's not your fault. Just pinch and pull, okay?”
“It's disgusting.”
He tried to think of other kids he knewâkids who lived on the Romero compound. He said, “What if it was a kitty cat with something in her eye? Would you help the kitty?”
A reluctant “Yeah?”
“So forget it's me. Pretend it's a kitty cat, and you're the only one that can help it, the only one who can save it. Can you do that?”
“Maybe . . .”
“We're going to do this now. You and me. Ready?”
“I guess.”
“Okay.” He pried open his bad eye, gritted his teeth, and watched as the two little fingers converged, blocking what little sight he had.
A moment later he screamed. It stuck to her finger like stubborn mucus, and when she shook it off it landed on the bathroom floor, a little glob of yellowish goo.
“I got it!” she said. “I got it.” Without thinking what she was doing, she almost hugged him, then shrank back.
“You got it,” he said, swallowing a scream. His one good eye met hers, and for a moment, neither knew what to say.
The assigned hour of 2:37
P.M
. growing near, Paolo checked his watch repeatedly, his good eye rotating from the distant airfield to the airspace above the field, to the rearview mirror, and back again. He'd covered the injured eye with an athletic headband worn askew on his head, a makeshift eye patch.
Arrangements had been made immediately after reporting he'd lost all sight out of the eye. He'd hoped Philippe might simply decide to send him a partner, possibly with some medical supplies, so that he could complete the original assignment. The jet coming either meant anxiety over the hostage situation or a loss of faith in him, so he looked ahead to the landing sick with nerves. His future was in the hands of others, the outcome a plane ride away, and Paolo felt desperately out of control.
The first car he saw could have been nothing. It pulled off the two-lane road on the north side of the airstrip and into a dirt turnout in front of a farmer's maintenance shed or hay barn. When no one climbed out, Paolo kept his eye on it.
But it was a second vehicle, a dark four-door much like the first, that got his heart pounding. If he had it right, and he wasn't sure he did, he'd seen this same car already. It had driven past the airstrip's entrance. Now it had backtracked and entered. It drove up to the strip's only hangar, where a man wearing a sport coat climbed out. A moment later the hangar's electronic door opened slowly, and then this car pulled inside, meaning there was a second man behind the wheel.
Before the hangar door came fully shut, Paolo had his motor going. He rocked it off the jack and backed up across the small bridge. He took a rural road south, into farm country, having plotted this course as an escape route in advance. It was hilly and wooded out here, an easy place to lose a tail if necessary. He drove fast, but not too fast, his one good eye jumping from the road ahead of him to the road behind.
Cops or feds, it hardly mattered: Philippe had been clear about what he should do should anything go wrong.
Radio silenceâno phones, no attempts to contact the compound. No e-mail. No faxes. He was on his own, his only assignment to get the little girl to the compound as soon as possible.
Crossing the stream for the second time, Paolo slowed and tossed his cell phone out the window into the water, ending any possibility of triangulating his location. It landed with a small splash.
He and the girl were on their own now. Bad eye or no bad eye, he had an assignment he intended to carry out. He felt strangely relieved. By the grace of God he'd been given a chance to redeem himself, to prove his worth.
He crested a hill, already planning how to replace the stolen car in case it had been reported. He tried not to think of the implications of what he'd just witnessed at the airstrip, how close he had come to being caught.
Tried not to think of what he'd do if Philippe ordered him to kill the little girl.
In a surprisingly short time, Dr. Miller traced Markowitz's
Internet access backward from the university grid to a physical address in Florida. Armed with that address, and hoping the Markowitz-Romero-Penny connection would hold, Larson drove Hope to Springfield and chartered a King Air twin engine to Tampa, topping out his credit card and forcing him to call in for a “preapproved” home equity loan.
Late that same afternoon, Larson drove a rental car past a cattle farm's unmoving windmill that stood in a field of lush green grass intermittently shorn by gray longhorn cattle looking worse for the wear in the Florida heat.
Stretching high above the flat green horizon, eighty-foot-tall telescoping steel poles held clusters of powerful gas-vapor highway lights that trained down onto the cloverleaves and rest areas. A blessing in hurricane season perhaps, but an eyesore on any other day. The occasional building crane loomed in the distance, reaching for the rare cloud like a bony finger. Randomly placed cell towers also rose from the green jungle, looking for all the world like derelict oil rigs. The only other break in the perfectly blue sky came from a musical staff of high-voltage wires strung across the highway. These were images one absorbed on the flatness of Interstate 75, heading south from Tampa: orange construction cones; bumps of black road tar in a sea of powder gray concrete; a set of smokestacks belching in the far distance.
They passed a sign indicating they'd entered Manatee County. Larson upped the rental's speed, desperate now to reach their destination.
“You're not coming to Useppa with me,” Larson said, having delayed it as long as he could.
“Of
course
I am.”
“I've arranged something. A buddy of mine will look after you.”
“That's ridiculous.”
“At the end of this it would be nice if Penny had a mother.”
She bit her tongue and said no more.
Larson had left Dr. Miller both his own and Hope's original cell phone numberâthe number now call-forwarded to the Siemens he'd given her, and therefore it was impossible to triangulate. Miller and Hope spoke the same language; she would be the one called with anything technical.
“Tell me she's okay, Lars,” she said at last.
“She's okay,” he said.
“Tell me again.”
“They have not hurt her. Guys like this, it's all about profit and loss. There's no profit in that.”
She unstrapped her seat belt and moved over the gap between the seats so that she could lean against him.
Larson drove on in silence, holding his breath. With each mile, he pressed the rental a little faster, and she leaned more heavily against him. He could have just kept driving.
Ninety minutes later, now on the island of Gasparilla, a hotel bellhop, clad in khakis and a green golf shirt, awaited them with a brass luggage dolly and a look of impertinence. Larson's rental blocked the hotel's semicircular drive, other arrivals now idling behind him.
The night air rang behind a chorus of cicadas and tree frogs. The Gasparilla Inn's white antebellum facade loomed large before them. Hotel guests came and went, climbing into golf carts used on the island in lieu of cars, a parade of salmon and lime green Bermuda shorts, Tevas and leather deck shoes, spray-on tans eager for the real thing, diamonds and silicone.
“Tommy'll take care of you,” Larson said.
“I don't want Tommy to take care of me.” She turned intentionally childish.
Larson had bunked with Tommy Tomelson during a two-week in-service training at the FBI Academy a couple years earlier. He'd stayed in touch enough to know that the man had lost his wife to cancer and had subsequently taken a year's leave from the ATF, then a short nosedive into a rum bottle, and finally sobered up enough to live the grief-stricken existence of a charter-boat captain. He was currently operating a tarpon charter out of Miller's Marina, which served Larson's needs well.
Tommy was up there on the veranda, smoking a Marlboro and drinking something dark, watching the tight buns and the halter tops pass by while waiting for Larson to sort things out. He was a big guy, with a fisherman's tan and a quarterback's shoulders, his sun-leathered face covered now by a pervasive veil of discontent and loneliness.
“When and if I find her, you'll be the first to know. All right?”
She held on to his arm.
“Listen to Tommy and do as he asks.”
“At least take
him
with you, if not me. Please don't go alone.” She squeezed his arm.
“This is not heroics. It's simple numbers. Tommy stays with you.” He'd gone over this a dozen times in his head. The smarter call was to wait for Hampton or Stubblefield to fly down here. Maybe bothâto take on the house on Useppa Island with as strong a force as he could currently muster. But Markowitz logged onto the grid at nightâand with the meeting of known crime families called for the following night, the list had to be close to being fully decrypted. Larson didn't have twenty-four hours to wait.
“You call me the minute you know anything.”
“Same there,” he returned. “If Miller should callâ”