Top Ten (32 page)

“Turn your pockets out.”

She sighed a breath and turned the one out from which she’d drawn the keys, exposing the linted innards of the white pouch.

“And the other...”

Awkwardly she reached across to her right front pocket, slipping her left hand in and hesitating through a single breath before tugging the material, exposing the inside and spilling the small pair of keys ringed together.

Michaelangelo’s smile did not fade, but now Ariel thought that it never had been that. Never had been an expression of pleasure, of satisfaction. She wondered if maybe it had simply been an icy expression of low, coming anger.

“With the others, please,” Michaelangelo told her, and Ariel picked up her spare set of handcuff keys—a spare set like all officers of the law carried just in case they were ever disarmed and had their own restraints employed against them—and dropped them in Michaelangelo’s still open palm. They joined her regular key ring with a clink and the hand began to close around them, long fingers folding over, flexing down, down. Down hard. Hard. Hard until it was a fist that...

...that Ariel barely saw as a flash when it snapped out in a fast arc and backhanded her across the face.

She reeled backward against the fuselage, her arm jerking painfully against its anchor and her free hand coming up to cover her face.

A few arm’s lengths forward, Mills spun suddenly out of his seat and was ready to launch himself at the madman when the gun snapped fast his way, planting a precise bead upon his chest. His center of mass. Heart, lungs, other vitals right there. Right there at a distance that a blind man could not miss at.

“
Sit down
,” Michaelangelo commanded Mills, but the order was not immediately heeded. “I can do worse to her, if you wish...”

Mills half stood there in the space between pilot and passenger seats, his hot stare shifting between Ariel and the madman. “You fucking touch her again...”

Now Michaelangelo did smile, truly smile, that dim twist curling his thin lips and letting the cabin’s faint light gleam off a few teeth. “So very brave, the pilot is, wanting to protect the princess.”

Ariel’s hand eased off her stinging face and she looked to Mills. “I’m okay.”

Still, Mills stood his ground, and to that defiance Michaelangelo pocketed the keys he’d been grudgingly give and returned to the open with something else in hand. A knife that flipped open with a snap and a shine.

“I think the princess might look better with a crown,” Michaelangelo threatened coyly. “Every princess needs a crown. And I do have experience...”

Robert Jack McCormack, Mills recalled. The fugitive made messiah by the madman. No...made
dead
, first.

“A nine point crown,” Michaelangelo suggested. “Maybe leave her a finger to scratch with. Hmmm?”

Mills gave Ariel another look, and her eyes implored him to retreat. To back off. And that he could do. That he would do.

“Good,” Michaelangelo said as Mills backed himself away and too his place at the controls of the Piper once more. “The pilot is a bright man. The pilot knows his limits.”

Mills belted himself into the seat and took the yoke in hand, if only to have something to hold. To grip. To bear tightly down upon. Because though he had retreated, he understood full well that there was a difference between that and surrender. He had backed down, but one more tactically inclined would consider it but a chance to regroup. To wait. To bide his time.

But for what? For what?

That he did not know. Not yet, at least.

“Take us away from here,” Michaelangelo said from behind. “We have somewhere to go.”

*   *   *

Arlo Donovan heard the plane’s engines spin up, their throaty whine rising until it began to move, lurching forward at first but then settling into an easy roll. It came at him a bit, then swung hard to the right, the harsh lights sweeping off of him and letting him see for the briefest of moments his son through the pilot’s side window. Their eyes did not meet. His boy was not looking his way. Instead he was focused. Focused ahead on what he was doing. On what he would have to do.

The plane turned full around, the propwash blasting dirt and debris at Arlo. He turned his head until the windy assault subsided, then looked back to see that his boy had the Piper lined up on the extreme left side of the runway, well clear of the body that lay near its long disappeared centerline. He did not want to roll over the obstacle, though Arlo doubted it was because of any gruesome sensibilities. It was because any obstacle, especially something as large as a man, and that body in particular, could damage a plane, and his son was too good a pilot, too careful a pilot, to let that happen.

And in that Arlo Donovan found his only solace of the moment, for a few seconds later the Piper’s engines came up to full speed and pushed the light airplane down the runway. It bounced a bit on the old surface as it gathered speed, moving faster and faster until the jittery glow it cast to its front smoothed out and tipped up, lighting the clouds from beneath until it rose into their misty depths and disappeared from view.

Thirty Five

Hecatomb

They were a minute in the air when the madman slouched his way into the cockpit and planted himself in the passenger seat.

Mills glanced his way, then back to Ariel who was sitting on the cabin floor, tethered to the Russian tac nuke that he had helped bring into the country. He thought suddenly that if any hint of foresight had been present in his genes, he would have ditched the plane, Gareth and all, in the deep water between Clarion Key and the good old U.S. of A. Let the sharks have at them. Let the Navy someday hoist up the thing Costain had sold for blood money. Let that all happen, as long as this would not have happened. Him, here, with her. And with the madman.

Mills looked back through the windscreen and out into the soup. “Do you just want me to fly?”

“That’s your way of asking where I’m going,” Michaelangelo observed. “You can fly west from here.”

“West,” Mills said, keeping the yoke back and power near full as the Piper climbed. He wanted to get above the clouds, above blind-flying conditions. Into clear air. To a place where he could see another plane coming. Away from obstacles. As far above innocents as he could possibly manage. “West is a big slice of sky. You care to narrow it down?”

Michaelangelo stared straight ahead. Into the gray nothing outside. But memory tunneled through the veil, past the weather, and across the miles to where he wanted to go. Across time to where he had come from. To where he was going to return. “Texas,” he said. “We’re going to Texas.”

Some feet to the rear, Ariel heard the destination given, and realization came to her with a stone cold shudder. She understood. Where he was going. And what he was going to do.

Do with the thing she was lashed to.

*   *   *

An easy, sweeping turn brought the Piper to a westerly heading, and the miles ticked off behind them, the feet beneath them. Five thousand, ten thousand, fifteen thousand, and higher still. The clouds broke at twelve, and by seventeen five there were a million and one stars dotting the black heavens above, but Mills gave the display of nature’s grand beauty only passing admiration. Powerful as it might be, it seemed frivolous in light of his present situation.

Correction, their situation.

“You okay back there?” he asked without looking, though Michaelangelo did consider him with a sideways glance.

“Yeah,” Ariel replied, without enthusiasm. There was little to be enthused about. Nothing had gone as she’d planned, or even hoped. She hadn’t gotten a break. Neither of them had. Not one thing had gone their way. And why was that?

She knew.

Yes, he was still out front. In the lead. Being
chased
. They were reacting to him. He asked for her gun, she tosses it away. He wants handcuffs, she produces them. He asks for keys, she
gives
him keys.
Twice
. And all she’d gotten so far was a closed-fist bitch slap that still stung.

Reacting
, she thought, angry at herself. Wishing she had spit in his face when he’d ordered her to turn her pockets out. He would have struck her, to be sure, maybe even done worse, but at least he would have been reacting to something
she
did.

They were still following his lead. And damn if that didn’t burn.

“Spit in his fucking face,” Ariel muttered softly, absently.

“What did you say?” Michaelangelo asked from the cockpit.

Ariel shook her head. She hadn’t meant to say anything. “Nothing. Not a damn...”

She stopped suddenly, the pause coming abruptly but almost unnoticeably. Coming when she realized something. Something so simple that the barest of breathy chuckles slipped from her, not enough to be heard but enough to bolster her. To convince her. To remind her what had just happened when she’d intended nothing to happen. He had
reacted
. To something she’d said.

Yes. To something she said.

She wondered. Wondered if she could do so again. And if she could, would it do any good?

A shudder of turbulence that rocked the Piper a minute later made her think that it could. That it maybe just could.

*   *   *

“You really hate that place that much,” Ariel said aloud and intentionally several minutes later. Several minutes that had seen her gather all she could from memory, every piece, every scrap, hoarding them like stones to be used in some childish rock fight.

In a way, that was not far from the reality of her plan.

“Are you wasting air back there?” Michaelangelo asked with insulting disinterest.

“Me?” Ariel shook her head and hoped that Mills would catch on. That he would catch on and act when the time was right. “I’m just trying to clear the air.”

Michaelangelo’s stare narrowed down, and he looked back to the cabin and his chained-up prisoner. “You’re obliqueness is tiresome.”

“Mills agrees with me,” Ariel said, and noticed his head tick a bit her way. “Don’t you?”

Michaelangelo’s gaze shifted to the man at the controls.

“Don’t you think we should clear the air, Mills?” Ariel asked. “Clear air is good for everybody, isn’t it?”

“What is she droning on about?” Michaelangelo asked Mills.

“I don’t know,” he said, quite truthfully in fact. Yet he knew she wouldn’t just be droning on. So what was all this about clearing the...

...air.

Mills looked back to her. His face was flat. Emotionless. Empty.

Clear air...

Ariel saw him look her way. At her. More importantly, she saw
how
he was looking at her. He was remembering. Connecting.

“Clear air,” she said, pausing as he turned away from her, back to the instruments, the controls. To what lay ahead. “All I want to do is get an appreciation why you hate that place.”

Michaelangelo ignored her and faced forward once more.

His deliberate disinterest lasted but a second, maybe two. Only until she spoke again. Spoke words of old.

“Why is it you feel that way about Calvert, Mickey D?”

Ariel swore she felt it before Michaelangelo turned back toward her, a chill rushing from him. Leaping at her.

“What did you say?”

She smiled, so very deliberately, so very childishly, as one much younger might to announce without words that a secret was no more.

“Was Calvert really that bad of a place? Bad enough to want to blow up?” She shifted up a bit, onto her knees. “That is what you’re planning now, isn’t it? Now that your other gig is up?”

His fingers pressed down hard ‘round the grip of Jack Hale’s pistol. He glared at her. At her insolence. Her ignorance. “Art changes. Artists adapt.”

“Right,” she said, nodding with exaggeration. “Your little hunt up the most wanted list is over...”

“For now,” Michaelangelo said, rebutting her.

“No, for good, Mickey D,” she countered.

“Don’t call me that,” he said, almost casually.

Ariel ignored his request. “Your house. Your name. Your picture. We have it all, Mickey D. Your little...”

“The name is Michaelangelo...”

“...game is up. I mean, how sad.” She shook her head, ready to hit hard now. To hit hard with what she’d learned from his yearbook, and from a full hour of fast phone calls on the flight down from New York. Calls to places, to people, who had known him. Who had known of Michael Angelo Strange. People who told her things. Explained the most horrid of things. Things that now she would use. The biggest, sharpest rocks that she’d gathered for this fight. “First you start lopping off men’s dicks, and that doesn’t seem to fix your problem, does it. I mean, you didn’t grow a new one, did you?”

Jack Hale’s weapon came up in the death grip which held it. Slowly up from Michaelangelo’s lap, moving and tracking an arc that passed over Mills and fell finally upon Ariel. “I think you should stop.”

Mills glanced sharply at the madman’s aim. “Don’t even think about shooting that in here, at this altitude. If you missed we—”

With a gun in hand it was no bitch slap. The more proper term was pistol whip, and it was that which Mills suffered without warning, a strike so quick, so hard, that when he was able to recover and look back from where it had come the weapon was pointed at Ariel once more. Rock steady as if it had never come off its aim.

“Fly the plane,” Michaelangelo instructed without looking to Mills, his full attention on the woman who was severely testing him. Quite nearly taunting him.

“I’m right, I gather,” Ariel continued, matching his stare with her own full of mocking contention. “No new growth. But that makes sense. One thing doesn’t work, you can’t make yourself a man that way, so you’ve gotta do something else. Take a different approach. Say, taking out your own kind.”

“I no longer think you should stop,” Michaelangelo said. His arm stretched out, putting the barrel of Jack Hale’s weapon that much closer to Ariel. “I am
certain
you should stop.”

“Clearing the air, Mickey D, that’s all I’m doing.”