Zombie Team Alpha (6 page)
~10~
Dr. Martinez showed up in the tiny terminal building precisely two minutes before she was expected to arrive, which was ten minutes after the FBI had left in their black SUVs. She was carrying two bags. Both were draped over her shoulders and were not weighing her down in the least, which gave Cutter a small glimpse into her abilities. She was not the helpless, babe-in-the-woods type, which he appreciated. She exuded confidence and strength just in the way that she stood so tall. Trailing behind her was a polished metal case much larger than her two shoulder bags combined. It probably contained some sort of instrumentation.
“Dr. Martinez, I presume,” he said as he greeted her on the tarmac.
“Mr. Cutter.” She rather formally inclined her head a smidgen. “Are you fully prepared for this assignment?”
“There’s nothing we can’t handle.”
She grinned slightly and offloaded her bags onto him as if he were her personal manservant and stepped past him without uttering another word. He pivoted to watch her.
Hot damn.
She was wearing khaki cargo pants with plenty of pockets up and down the sides and a light-blue button-up shirt, sleeves rolled all the way to the elbows. The pants were tight in the butt and fit her generous curves, which was a trait Cutter both admired and appreciated. When his eyes made it down to her feet, he noticed she was wearing tan Timberline boots without a single scuff or scratch mark on them. That made him roll back a bit of his assessment of her as he realized that she’d probably just purchased the entire outfit off the rack at REI on her way to the airport. He was half-surprised that he hadn’t seen dangling tags still attached somewhere. Regardless, he continued to observe her with muted admiration as she headed for the plane.
Gauge came shuffling down the short stairway near the cockpit, and she nodded to him once in passing as he set foot on the tarmac. She stepped around him and headed up and into the plane with a bounce to her step. Gauge twisted to keep watching her as she disappeared inside the G4.
“Stop gawking,” Cutter said to the big man as he approached the plane.
“I am not gawking. Just making sure she gets safely onboard.”
“Is that so?” Cutter said as he offloaded all her bags onto Gauge and followed the good doctor onto the plane.
~11~
“
Gulfstream seven-four-niner-two, you are ordered to return immediately to ATL-twenty-seven-L.
”
Cutter sat in the pilot’s seat and stared out the front windshield of the G4. He kept the plane on its current heading, which would take them northeast on a trajectory of zero-three-zero. His head still hurt, but it was down to a manageable hurt. And what made matters worse was finding out there were not going to be any in-flight cocktails available.
“
Gulfstream seven-four-niner-two. Final warning. Return immediately to—
”
“Fat chance,” he said to the co-pilot over the headset before switching frequencies on the Honeywell TCAS II, fully intending to ignore any future warnings coming from those pesky US-based controllers.
He was in charge now, taking over piloting responsibilities from fake-Morgan, the former pilot who was currently in the hands of the FBI and probably being interrogated already. He almost wished he could see the lead interrogator’s face when he or she found out they had the wrong suspect in custody, and he was also hoping that it was a she, specifically the duck-lipped woman agent. Normally, he had a great love for all women. It didn’t matter if they were large or small, plump or thin, old or young. But every so often, he made exceptions.
The past few hours had been a big change for him. Being literally in the pilot’s seat again left him in total control of the team’s destiny after a year-long absence. If given half-a-chance, he would have relinquished that control already. It just felt wrong, and he wasn’t ready for the responsibility.
While Morgan had managed to throw the FBI off their scent temporarily, it had also meant that the team needed someone else who could step up and pilot the plane. Morgan and Gauge had never done it, and Cutter was not about to approach Dr. Martinez and ask her as that might seem a tad inappropriate, all things considered. And as soon as he had queried the co-pilot concerning the man’s abilities, he decided the guy was not the right one for the job.
Too skittish
. So, Cutter reluctantly had to assume that he was the right guy for the job, even with the lingering effects of alcohol poisoning dulling his reactions.
“Thought she said we had an hour?” he mumbled to himself as he checked their altitude and heading.
It hadn’t quite been an hour since the FBI had left them. Maybe more like forty minutes. Morgan was almost never wrong in these matters of estimation, but he had to admire her thinking. She must have altered the official profile picture the FBI had of her, which was a lot harder than they made it look on TV. And he was doubly surprised they had not grounded the plane under the auspices of some other trumped-up charge.
The co-pilot touched the controls, and Cutter glanced over at the man. “We should turn back,” the guy said over the headset. “They’ll scramble out of McGuire and intercept us if we don’t.”
“And do exactly what?” Cutter asked. “We’re okay. Don’t worry about it. I hardly ever crash these things.”
The co-pilot did not have an answer to that. The guy just swallowed thickly and stared ahead.
“Keep flying on this heading,” Cutter told the co-pilot. “You can do that for me, right? I’ll be back in a flash.”
The man nodded his affirmative, but the gesture reminded Cutter of a scared rabbit just about ready to bolt to safety.
“Don’t worry,” Cutter said reassuringly. He put a hand on the man’s shoulder and squeezed. “We do it like this all the time. We can fix it up good with the government types later.” Which, of course, was utter bullshit. This was a first for him and his team. Usually, he had the well-greased palms of leveraged government officials backing him. It was going to touch and go for awhile, at least until he got his feet back under him and a little cash and could start greasing those old wrinkled palms once more.
The co-pilot re-checked the heading and made a few minor adjustments of his own as he seemed to settle in behind the wheel. When their course did not change, Cutter unbuckled himself from the pilot’s seat and made his way back into the cabin area. Morgan shrugged at him and returned to typing on her keyboard.
He came to a stop next to her and squatted. “What’ve you got for me?”
She held up one finger to beg for a moment then went back to typing, keys clacking and rattling above the whine of the engines. He bounced on his heels and rolled his neck around in a circle to work out the kinks. When he moved it a little too far to the right, he winced. He’d somehow hurt himself falling off the barstool.
But that was only a small worry. The bigger one was his concern over the response to them leaving US airspace without a properly filed flight plan. In the day and age of overblown fears of terrorism combined with the silliness of political correctness, anything not under the thumb of government regulators could become a target. And even the slim possibility of getting blown out of the sky by an AMRAAM missile launched from one hundred miles away was not on his short list of planned accomplishments for the year.
“Morgan,” he repeated—this time with a little more urgency.
She kept typing.
Cutter glanced at Gauge.
How the hell can he do that?
The man was sleeping like a baby.
“Have faith in my abilities,” Morgan finally said. She finished typing and made a flourish of pressing the return key on her laptop. Cutter couldn’t quite see the screen, but he did see the canary-eating grin that broke out on her face.
“What’d you do?”
She waited a beat. “Get back up there and keep flying, Captain Skyjack. I told you I would handle it. And I just did. Just flip the squawk over to eight-four-one-three and climb to forty-three-point-one on heading oh-seven-zero. We are now VIPs from Templar Investments in route to London, England.”
Cutter didn’t dare ask what was in store for the real 8413 designated aircraft.
~12~
Four hours into the flight, Cutter felt a hand land heavily on his shoulder, causing him to wake from his stupor.
Morgan pulled aside his headset and whispered in his ear, “We need to talk, Jack.”
He rubbed the sleep from his eyes that he hadn’t realized had gathered there and stifled a yawn. Sadly, he also realized that he was now perfectly sober because his mouth tasted as if a rat had slept on his tongue, and perhaps had died there as well.
“I don’t think we can trust her,” she whispered to him over the droning whine of the engines.
Cutter had made the same jump in logic the moment he had met the doctor, but it was nice to get Morgan’s confirmation. Dr. Martinez was a very attractive woman, which didn’t necessarily make her bad. It was just something about her attitude. Arrogance and condescension were two traits he found terribly unattractive, and she had them in spades.
“Why?” he prodded.
“She’s got those eyes, you know? She’s up to something.”
“What eyes?”
“She’s got eyes for you.”
“Is that so bad?”
“Yes,” Morgan said, nodding. “I figure she is either nearsighted or just plain stupid. But that’s not what I wanted to speak to you about.”
“Go on.”
She hesitated. “I’m not sure we should even be doing this job.”
Cutter narrowed his lips and set his hands on his thighs. He tried to pivot in his seat, but couldn’t. He wanted to look at her and not have to stare up over his shoulder to do so.
What? It’s too late
.
How much more committed can we get? We can’t back out now,
he wanted to say, but he figured she knew that already.
So what the hell is this about?
The whole damn gig had been on her and Gauge. He stared out the window at the blue sky and gray soup below them.
“Yeah, Jack, I know the money’s good and all, but after doing a little more research, I’m getting an uneasy feeling about this. I mean, what do we really know about this artifact beyond what Sharon told us about it the first time around?”
At the mention of his wife, Sharon, he cringed a little. It still hurt to have others saying her name, especially now.
He ran his fingers through his hair and swept it back. “What we know is that we have four million on the line, and much as I appreciate your company, I could be back on the island curled up beside some—”
“I know that, Jack. But what I’m really wondering is—where did this new artifact come from? Is it going to be as dangerous to get to as the other one was?”
Cutter nodded in sympathy and shrugged.
Yeah, it probably was. So what?
“The money makes it easy to look past that. And it was you who insisted on coming.”
“Yeah, I know. Still. We were searching for this same kind of thing in Ecuador for Pete’s sake. How did another one just like it show up in Russia of all places? And how hard will this one be to find? Those things—the creatures we went up against? They were nasty. They reminded me of zombies, Jack. Like those Walking Dead brains, mmm brains, types.”
They weren’t that bad
.
If I had only—
She kept talking. “We know almost nothing about them too. Sharon was the expert. I just came along to handle the tech. And—”
She glanced out the front windscreen then back at him. “Why us, Jack? Why were we sent a second time and why now?”
Why, because we failed the first time?
he wanted to say but held his tongue.
When he did not respond, she squatted lower, next to him. “Why us?” she repeated.
Cutter leaned sideways and checked on the co-pilot. The man was staring forward, pretending to ignore the very appealing woman crouched beside him, and was struggling to do so. Morgan was an extremely attractive woman in her own way, but she was not interested in men.
He glanced back down the length of the plane. Gauge was still comfortably asleep in his seat. In the seat in the row behind him, Dr. Martinez had her headphones on and was staring down at her laptop, stern-faced. The screen reflected off her glasses, making twin blue dots in the lenses.
Leaning closer toward Morgan, Cutter touched her on the knee and said directly into her ear, “I never said I wanted you to go along with me on this job. Remember? I said I could do it on my own.”
When he pulled back and saw the hurt look his words had caused break out on Morgan’s face, he withdrew his hand from her knee.
“It’s just—” she started to say. “Why is it you always have to be so pigheaded about these things, you know? You’ve gotten worse at it too, Jack. You weren’t like this before. You were—” She glanced out the window. “Why can’t it be like it was back then?”
Never again
. It would never be like it had been before he’d lost Sharon.
Never.
He clenched his jaw. The world owed him a little breather for what it had taken from him—
didn’t it?
He groaned a little. “So what is it that’s really bothering you? Where are these negative impressions about Dr. Martinez coming from? Is it—maybe you find her attractive?”
“She’s not my type,” Morgan shot back. “Just so you know—the pilot. She and I—” She shook her head. “Never mind.”
Cutter nodded back.
Okay, I get it.
He let go of his budding anger.
Morgan asked, “What do you think of her?”
“The pilot? I thought she was a little too old for me.”
“She’s twenty-four, you perv.”
“A man has got needs, Morgan. A man has got needs.”
She shoved him. “No, I meant her.” She indicated toward Dr. Martinez with a tilt of her head.
“I think she’s way too old for me. Plus, I don’t think she likes me much either. But if you insist, I’ll do my best. What do you think she looks like naked?”
“Jack, I’m being serious here. Do you think we can trust her? We know absolutely nothing about her.
Nothing
. I’ve been investigating her background. I’ve seen her university bio, her bank account records, even the results of her last pelvic exam. All were squeaky clean.”
“Isn’t she okay then?” he asked with a bit of hesitation.
“I don’t know. I just have the creepy feeling we are being set up somehow, and that she is behind it.”