Hard Fall (47 page)

“FBI,” he said loudly enough to gain the attention of the man closest to him. “It's an emergency. I have to see whoever's in charge.”

“You carrying a piece?”

Daggett removed his weapon and showed it to the man.

“You gotta leave it with me.”

“That's absurd. I'm here on business. I'm FBI!”

“I don't care if you're J. Edgar Hoover, pal. The piece stays with me.”

“You know a guy named Henderson?” Daggett asked, recalling the name of the shorter of the two men with whom he had escaped the Bernard explosion. “Airport Police?” The guard's brow furrowed. “Henderson, I think. Call him up. Now. I want that piece with me. Tell him Special Agent Daggett. He'll okay it.” The guard put the gun out of sight, pointed to where Daggett could come through, and turned his attention to a waiting employee. Daggett grabbed the phone's receiver, forced it into the guard's hand, and repeated, “Henderson. Now.”

“Yeah, yeah,” the guard said, slightly intimidated and beginning to dial. “Check back in a minute.”

Thanks to a receptionist who seemed either frightened or impressed by his considerable lather, Daggett was led to a back warehouse filled with sorting equipment, bright blue mailbags, and a level of activity one expected to see only in television ads. The manager, a lanky man in his late fifties with an Air Force haircut and a drill sergeant's charm, after hearing Daggett's opening salvo, pulled him out of the way of a tug towing three trailers and said, “You got to be shitting me. First I've heard of it.”

“All I'm asking is that you stall that plane long enough to speak with my superiors.”

“Maybe I can do that.”

“Maybe?”

“I gotta check with
my
superiors first, right? Listen, I'm not trying to be a pain in the ass here, but I gotta check you out and I gotta check with St. Louis before I hold up the afternoon flight. You know how many bomb threats this company gets? You have any idea?”

“This isn't a threat. I'm FBI. I'm working on
information
. I'm telling you that your 959 isn't leaving the ground, if I've got to see to it myself.”

“Now let's not get like that. Okay? You want to play fucking tough, friend?
I
can play fucking tough. Believe you me.” He tapped Daggett on the chest with a metal finger. “You come with me. We'll make some fucking calls.” He walked away, his face a bright red.

Daggett saw the hole he had dug for himself. He'd been too pumped up by the run, too hot to act cool. “What about the plane? Can't you at least
hold
the plane while we make the calls?”

“One thing at a time, friend. One thing at a fucking time.”

Kort hadn't realized how close he had cut it. Having planned to sabotage the morning plane, he realized now that the afternoon information he had was off by at least half an hour. Holes in information troubled him. He took them as bad omens. In a perfect world, there were never any holes.

Unlike the AmAirXpress flight 64, which he had so easily boarded during preflight maintenance, when he had experienced no cockpit activity and had gone about his task completely alone, this time he stepped into a hornet's nest. At the plane's starboard midsection, large mail sacks, some stuffed to the limit, others limp and mostly empty, were being unloaded from towed trailers and tossed onto an active conveyor assembly that shuttled them up into the fuselage, where they were presumably stowed and secured for flight. On the left side of the plane, as Kort climbed the steep stairway to the flight deck, another maintenance engineer hurried past him carrying a stainless steel coffeepot. “Fucking coffee machine's down,” he said angrily. “See if you can do something.”

I can do something, all right
, Kort was thinking. What he did, once inside the plane, was place the flight bag down, remove the fire extinguisher, and step into the flight deck, where he unexpectedly encountered the two men he had come to kill. They were running through a checklist, each echoing the other with cryptic terms and busy fingers. Kort, whose unusual calm was rattled by finding the seats occupied, suddenly realized he was all but invisible to these two. They paid him no mind whatsoever. He dropped to one knee, fire extinguisher in hand, at which point the copilot said, “You got the coffee fixed yet?”

“Working on it,” Kort answered.

“What gives?” the man asked as Kort went about working in the cramped quarters beneath his seat, reaching in from behind. But the pilot demanded his attention as he threw another switch, and Kort avoided an answer.

He unfastened the clamp holding the existing extinguisher, removed it, and replaced it with the one he had brought. Having earlier set the detonator's timer to the exact time specified by Ward's simulation of this flight—forty-seven seconds—he had nothing more to do. The beauty, as far as he was concerned, of Bernard's detonator was that it didn't require being turned on or activated. The pilots did that for him, first by pressurizing the airplane, and second by pointing the nose into the sky. At that point the clock would run, the gas would be released, and, at long last, it would all be over.

Tasting success and victory, Kort slipped out of the flight deck and debated whether to place the extinguisher in his bag or not. He knew well enough that hesitation was an operative's biggest enemy. The appearance of confidence was everything. He stuffed the extinguisher away and was just zipping the bag shut when the other mechanic came bounding up the stairs and stepped right past him. This man headed directly to the onboard coffee maker. As Kort stood the man asked, “You new?”

It caught Kort off guard. Should he just leave? Did he dare? “Yeah,” he said, attempting to sound as American as possible. He turned to face the man.

“Thought so.” He stuck his hand out. “Russ Kane. Good to meet you.”

Kort shook his hand firmly, his mind going blank. He needed a name … His eyes found the airport identification tag riveted to the fuselage. “David Duhning,” he said.

“Like the plane!” the other said. “I can remember that.”

“Nice meeting you,” Kort said. He hurried down the steep steps, his feet driven by fear, the sweat under his arms beginning to run.

“You got any kind of paperwork about this?” the manager asked, leaning his hard mouth with its broken teeth away from the phone's receiver.

“Paperwork? Are you listening to me? That plane has been sabotaged!”

“Call you right back,” the man said into the phone, and hung up.

Daggett had been in enough similar situations to know when to give up. He could argue himself red in the face, but John Wayne here wasn't buying. “You're never going to forgive yourself for this, you know that?”

“So why don't we talk to
your
superiors, Mr. Hot-fucking-shit Eliot Ness? Answer me that?” He picked up the phone. “You tell me who to call. You give me a number and a name.”

Daggett knew that even if Lynn had reached Buzzard Point, even if she was meeting with Pullman at this very moment—which, given the traffic, seemed doubtful—Pullman was unlikely to support him on this without a hell of a lot more than intuition. The truth of the matter was that Kort's plan had accomplished exactly what he had hoped it would. The machine of the FBI was moving in one direction, and you didn't reverse it by simply throwing a switch.

Daggett reached the door to the small office, which he swung open.

“Listen,” John Wayne said earnestly, turning to Daggett so that he failed to see the man just entering the building, a man in coveralls carrying a flight bag. And out on the tarmac, beyond the huge plate glass windows, beyond the flurry of activity, the stairs were wheeled away from the plane as the TUG began the pushback. “We insure every one of those packages at full refund. ‘Positively, absolutely,' and all that shit—that's what we're up against here. That's our competition. I delay that plane, then every single one of those packages is going to be late tomorrow and that means something on the order of fifty grand out the window. You see my problem here?”

“Your problem is, you're not listening.”

His pager sounded.

He reached down inside his coat, to where it was clipped to his belt, so he could read its message. Maybe Lynn had made better time than he had thought. Maybe he now had the authority to stop that plane.

The LED read:
DUNCSAFE
. He silenced the beeping, a sense of relief overcoming him unlike any he had ever felt. Tears welled in his eyes. He made a single, irrevocable promise to God and whoever else was listening that from this moment forward his priorities would change. From this moment on, it was all to be different.

“You all right?” John Wayne asked.

“Never better,” Daggett answered.

Then he glanced to his right and saw that the plane was no longer there.

Inexplicably, and yet automatically, as Anthony Kort heard the sound of a pager he jerked his head to find its origin. Perhaps it could be attributed to a keen sense of survival. As with a large cat on patrol in the jungle, the slightest unnatural sound caused an immediate state of alert. Whatever the reason, he glanced quickly and then just as quickly away, his bowels going to water and his headache returning as if someone had clipped him. Daggett!

The first thought that occurred to him, since he was in a killing mood, was simply to pull out his weapon and gun the man down. But the two security guards only a few feet away would have to follow Daggett, and then who? It would get messy. Given such a bloodbath, it would be a miracle to make it out of here alive.

His second thought, which came to him late and revealed to him just how personal this had become—since his first thought had concerned Daggett, not the success of the operation—was how the hell Daggett had known to come here. Panic stole into him. Daggett knew he wasn't dead. Daggett knew about David Boote. There was no other explanation. And Daggett was knowingly risking his son's life.

These discoveries filled Kort with such a sense of dread and failure that he nearly gave himself away by failing to watch where he was going. He nearly crossed the security line at the wrong location, a mistake that would have certainly caused him added scrutiny, and might possibly have revealed his fraud.

But if Daggett was here, then Daggett knew. And if Daggett knew, then he would stop the plane, and everything Kort had worked for was over. An impossible consideration. He pulled himself out of the way of the others and watched as Daggett continued arguing with the man who looked like John Wayne, and the TUG cleared out of the way of the 959 and it began to taxi. Maybe not, he thought, taking another step toward his freedom. Maybe it was a perfect world after all.

Then he watched as Daggett looked up and he, too, noticed the plane had begun its taxiing; he watched as Daggett sprinted to the large plate glass windows and stared out at the departing plane. Strangely, he could hear the man thinking; he could hear him trying to figure out how to stop the plane, and at that very moment Kort found himself faced with an instinct that had ruled the animal kingdom since time began: fight or flight. He could stay and attempt to stop whatever it was Daggett had planned, or he could take fifteen more steps toward the door and be gone from here forever.

Another place, another time, his decision would have been simple, for he would have fled, resolved to return another day, for another operation. But given the unusual circumstances of the collapse of
Der Grund
, the limited nature of his cash reserves—enough for a year, two at the most—and, more importantly, the pain in his heart for what his few short days with Caroline had taught him about what it was he really wanted from life, he found his feet firmly planted. This operation had consumed him for the better part of eighteen months. Everything he had worked for—the end of EisherWorks, the death of Mosner—came down to the plane that was now taxiing toward takeoff. The deformity of his child, the loss of his wife and child, would finally be avenged. Five minutes? Ten? And the single largest act of terrorism on American soil would be burning on the television sets of a billion people worldwide. For days, even weeks, the newspapers, radio and television news broadcasts would speculate on the nature of the once secret meeting, would speculate on the government's funding of chemical weapons programs. A few more precious minutes before the sweetness of victory.

He couldn't allow anyone, certainly not Daggett, to take that away from him.

Daggett pulled open the door. Hot fumes engulfed him.

“You can't go out there,” John Wayne hollered. “You need field clearance.”

He spotted a car, a discolored and scratched Quik-Link logo on its door panel, just pulling up to his left. It occurred to him there was still a chance to stop this plane. If he could damage the landing gear …

He walked at first, because he didn't want to alert the manager too quickly to his intentions. But as he heard “Hey!” barked from behind him, and recalled the two security guards, he realized there was no room for subtlety, and broke into a run.

The keys were in the ignition, which confirmed there was a God, as far as he was concerned, and also confirmed that he was meant to stop this plane at any cost. It was only a matter of removing the fire extinguisher. Such a simple task, and one now so far from possibility. He should have acted sooner, he realized. He should have ignored protocol and headed straight to the plane. This realization flooded him with guilt. If that plane went down, it was his fault.

On the far end of the fuselage, just before the tail and the huge company logo, he could make out
Duhning 959–600
. He could recall from his trip to Seattle and his visit to the Duhning simulators exactly what it looked like inside the flight deck; he could recall from his late night in the FAA lab, from the voices recorded there, exactly what conversation was now taking place in the plane that lumbered along a hundred yards in front of him. Recollections so vivid, he found it hard to concentrate on his driving.