Darkness (7 page)

Grimacing, she looked beyond him. Black and ominous, already halfway across the bay, the bulk of the storm hurtled toward them. The wind was now strong enough to pick up small rocks and send them flying across the beach. The waves crashing against the shore and sending spray flying skyward were huge. Even as she watched, the boat was caught up by the rising tide and pulled into the surf. A receding wave whirled it away.

He lay unmoving, inches from the surging foam.

Indecision rooted her to the spot.

If she left him where he was, he would die. If he didn’t get pulled into the surf like the boat and drown, the storm surge would get him. If nothing else, he’d certainly die of exposure.

Damn it to hell
.

Muttering every curse word she knew, Gina ran back toward the stranger’s prone form.

Chapter Seven

S
omewhere he’d read that freezing to death didn’t hurt, Cal reflected groggily. Whoever had written that was wrong. He was freezing to death as he lay facedown in the grit on that bitterly cold, storm-swept beach, and the process hurt like a mother. His skin burned as the icy blast of the wind froze his sea-soaked clothes to his body. His bones and muscles ached as if a dozen thugs armed with baseball bats had just worked him over. His head pounded unmercifully. His throat was parched and dry.

He didn’t think he could get up. No, he was pretty sure he couldn’t get up. It didn’t help that he didn’t see much point in it. He’d gotten a good look at the desolate terrain before the boat had pitched up on it and there was no shelter from the elements in sight.

If he did manage to get to his feet, he could stagger a few yards, even a few hundred yards, and
then
collapse and die.

Seemed like a lot of effort for the same result.

Upon discovering that his purported savior in the boat was a young woman, his first reaction had been a feeling of immense relief. He’d let go of the suspicion that she was a cog in the plan to murder Rudy and everybody who might be party to the information he had possessed, and accepted at face value his good luck at having an innocent civilian in a boat available exactly when and where he’d needed one.

Lying there in the bottom of her boat, he’d been so exhausted, so wet and cold and nearly drowned, in so much pain and, he saw now, so close to going into shock, that it had taken him a little while to remember that his luck had never been that good.

To remember that the world was a violent and unpredictable place where trusting anybody was a good way to wind up dead.

The last harrowing minutes aboard the plane had underlined that for him. He’d been in the back with Rudy, in the small, private, windowless, lockable room that the plane had been outfitted with for the precise purpose of transporting individuals like Rudy who were untrustworthy and needed to be contained. Some people might have called it a cell, but no one who had ever been in a real cell would have done so: this one had four big leather chairs that reclined into beds, with basically all the comforts of a very luxurious home readily available. He and Rudy were alone. Rudy was chatty, proud of his exploits and eager to talk about them. One of the reasons Cal personally had been tapped for this job was because of his background in avionic military weapons systems, something he’d studied at the Air Force Academy. He’d been tasked with evaluating Rudy’s claims as to what had happened to Flight 155. His opinion as to the plausibility of Rudy’s story would be included in the oral briefing he would give his employer upon handing Rudy over. He’d been prepared to coax/scare/bully the details out of Rudy, but as it turned out he hadn’t had to do anything but sit there and listen. Among a whole lot of nonessential information, Rudy told him exactly what he was claiming had happened to the plane.

“That Jorgensen guy was the target,” Rudy said. After a hearty meal (the equivalent of a TV dinner zapped in an onboard microwave) and a nap, he kicked back in a chair munching Peanut M&M’s like they guaranteed long life and happiness. Wearing a plaid flannel shirt with chinos, his dark brown hair hanging in an uneven bang across his forehead, he looked as comfortable as if he were sitting in his own living room. During the briefing he’d received before taking off for Kazakhstan, Cal had been given the NTSB report (which basically said that the plane had flown into a mountain for unknown reasons), along with a host of technical information and a dossier on the passengers and crew. On the flight to pick up Rudy, Cal had reviewed that material, and had watched a number of security videos, including one of the passengers passing through security and another of them boarding the plane. He’d done all that as part of his preparation for grilling Rudy later, because in his opinion what Rudy was suggesting had happened to that plane was all but impossible.

Of course, whether to believe Rudy wasn’t his call to make. His job was to get the guy out of Kazakhstan and bring him back to American soil, and add his opinion to all the other opinions and the rest of the material that was being gathered.

“Edward Thomas Jorgensen,” Cal said. He knew precisely whom Rudy was talking about. He’d read the guy’s bio, seen his picture, watched on video as he’d passed through security and boarded the plane. His first impression had been: Special Forces. Then he’d checked and been struck by the paucity of information on the man—no family listed, no employment, no military or criminal record—as well as by something indefinable in the way he carried himself. A constant alertness. An air of expecting trouble.

Cal realized that he recognized it because he moved through the world like that himself: it took one to know one. For those reasons, Cal had flagged him as a person of interest before Rudy ever mentioned him. Not that he meant to share that, or anything else, with Rudy.

His and Rudy’s conversation was strictly one-way.

Cal’s internal radar pinged in response to Rudy’s assertion that Jorgensen had been the target.

“Yeah?” Cal settled more comfortably in his chair and raised a skeptical eyebrow. He’d already learned that skepticism drove Rudy into paroxysms of revelations.

“Jorgensen’s not his real name.” Rudy tossed a couple more Peanut M&M’s into his mouth and crunched. “Steven Carbone. Former DIA, Navy SEAL. Left the military and the US under a cloud. Something about passing secrets. Anyway, after that he did some freelance work for some bad actors. Part of the team that took out Victor Volkov—you know, that Russian billionaire who challenged Putin for the presidency a couple of years ago but got killed in a car accident before the election? Let’s just say that wasn’t no accident. There’s a top-secret investigation going on into that and other murders of Putin opponents in DC right now, and Carbone was on his way to talk to them. Hand them the smoking gun, you might say, in return for a full pardon for anything he might have done in the past. He got whacked before he could.”

“So a whole airplane full of people was taken out to get rid of one guy.” Cal kept the note of skepticism going, although he was starting to get extremely interested in what Rudy was telling him. It meshed with certain rumors he’d heard. That Jorgensen/Carbone was formerly with the Defense Intelligence Agency and a SEAL tracked, too.

“If it wasn’t for me, you wouldn’t know that Carbone was the target,” Rudy pointed out as he tossed back more M&M’s. “No one would. It’s easy to hide a murder in the middle of a terrible accident with two-hundred-some-odd victims.”

True enough.

Cal got down to the nitty-gritty. “Who did it, and how did they do it?”

Rudy shrugged. “People loyal to Putin. What, I’m supposed to know their names? What I got is how. And I already told your bosses that.”

“Tell me.”

“They hacked the flight controls. Gained access through the plane’s entertainment system, went through a couple of firewalls, and voilà! They got control of the plane. Probably for a few minutes only, but when you’re flying over the Rocky Mountains, losing altitude for a few minutes is all it takes.
Boom-pow
.” The bag in his hand apparently empty, Rudy turned it upside down, shook it disconsolately, and asked, “Got any more M&M’s?”

Cal didn’t change expression, but he was thinking furiously. What Rudy described—it sounded more doable than he’d originally thought. A modern jetliner at cruising altitude is on autopilot, which means that it practically flies itself. If there was a program that could interfere with the autopilot . . . He felt his shoulders tighten with concern. “When you tell me what I want to know. And what I want to know are specifics. Everything. How the program works, who designed it, what kind of system it needs to run on. Who’s using it. Who has access to it.”

“It’s on the market as we speak. Anybody with the money to buy it can get access to it, what do you think? Course, that’s a short list, because a program like this is worth tens of millions to the right group. The FSB has it for sure, that’s how I found it. Also, at a guess, some factions of the Bratva.” Having clearly assumed that Cal knew that the FSB was the latter-day KGB and the Bratva was the Russian Mafia, Rudy screwed up his face in the pained expression of an expert conversing with the uninitiated as he moved on to describing the technical side. “As to how it works, it’s like a virus. All it takes is for one passenger to turn on his individual entertainment unit and it’s in the system. Then—” He broke off, frowning. “Look, it’s all on the flash drive I gave you. Steps A through Z, so simple a kid—no, that’s not right—a grandpa could follow it. It’s fucking amazing, let me tell you. I only wish I’d come up with it.” Cal got a glimpse of what looked like professional jealousy shining out of Rudy’s eyes before the other man continued, “Give it back to me, and get me a laptop, and I’ll walk you through it.”

The flash drive was secured at that moment inside Cal’s belt, which was of the type—offered by travel companies—that had an inside zipper in the back for the concealment of cash and small items. He’d been using it on various jobs for various purposes for years. The thing was so low-tech that it had never been compromised.

“Just talk me through it,” Cal said, because until he got inside a secure facility he wasn’t putting anything on a computer that he didn’t want the whole world to have access to. Rudy was a great hacker, but there were more just like him. Lots of people out there were looking real hard for Rudy, and one way to look for him, or the information he’d stolen, would be to scan the Web. Cal didn’t believe in taking unnecessary chances. He got the job he was hired to do done with a minimum of fuss, which was why he kept getting hired.

“You’re making this difficult.” Rudy frowned at him. Cal shrugged. Rudy sighed.

“Who created the program?” Cal said.

Rudy made a face. “I don’t know. What, you think it was signed or something? Whoever it was sold it to the Russkies. Or maybe they just took it. Whatever. From whomever. The point is, it’s out there, and there are people looking to buy it or get hold of it however they can. What happened to Flight 155 is almost foolproof.” He smirked a little. “Without me, it would have been foolproof. Nobody had a clue.”

Cal thought about that. His first reaction—why not just shoot the plane down, or place a bomb on board and blow it out of the sky?—was followed by a quick and terrifying answer. A missile strike would leave a heat signature; so would a bomb, not just on the plane itself but as a record on the satellites and other sensitive devices that monitored what was going on in the world. Investigators would figure out that the plane had been brought down on purpose, and would go hunting for the perpetrators. There weren’t that many with that kind of capability. The culprits would be identified.

But if the plane’s own systems were compromised, all investigators would be able to determine was that, for reasons unknown, the plane flew into a mountain.

Rudy was right: as a method of bringing down a plane, it was almost foolproof.

The hair rose on the back of Cal’s neck.

Rudy said, “What makes what I’m selling even more valuable is that there’s chatter it’s getting ready to happen again.”

Cal sat up straighter. “When? Where?”

“I don’t know. These kinds of people don’t exactly post up schedules. The talk is coming out of Ukraine. I figure your people are smart enough to track it down.”

“Tell me how it works,” Cal said through his teeth.

“All right, jeez. Don’t go getting mad at me. I’m the one who found the thing. I’m the good guy here.”

“Right.” His voice was dry. “How does it work?”

“Think of the program as a simple”—Rudy broke off, gripping the arms of his chair while the plane bucked through a pocket of turbulence; as the air smoothed out he continued—“repurposing of any basic remote control program. The program itself is not the trick. The trick is getting it on the plane. In this case, they used a private jet to get within range and then—” Without warning, the plane dropped like it was falling down an elevator shaft.

Rudy gasped out, “Holy moly!” and hung on so hard that his nails made visible indentations in the soft leather of the armrests.

As the seat seemed to drop out from under him, Cal grabbed for his armrests, too. Cruise altitude for this segment of the flight was thirty-three thousand feet. No way should there be this kind of turbulence at thirty-three thousand feet.

Even as he had the thought, the plane shimmied like a belly dancer, then dropped some more.

“Put your seat belt on and stay put,” Cal ordered, and got up to go investigate. As soon as he opened the private room’s door and stepped into the main cabin, the plane dropped so abruptly that he was almost thrown off his feet.

Grabbing hold of the nearest seat back, he made his way toward the cockpit. The interior was all plush beige leather and polished teak, with four additional passenger seats facing each other and a couch on the left side. Although it was the middle of the afternoon, Cal looked out the windows to see darkness encroaching on all sides. He frowned. The plane’s rocking and pitching gave him his answer: what he was seeing were storm clouds. The plane was flying through a storm.