Mission Critical
The distant gunfire had trailed off to nothing.
Court nodded to the flight attendant as he stepped back over her, then leapt out of the jet and down onto the taxiway. The two backpacks made his movements uncoordinated and strained, but soon he began running over towards the flight line of tiny propeller aircraft. He recognized them all as Grob G 109s, an introductory power glider used as a simple trainer, and though he’d never flown one, he’d piloted more sophisticated piston engine planes and was confident enough in his abilities to get one of these tiny craft into the air.
He was just twenty yards from the closest plane when an electric cart came around from behind the row of aircraft and jolted to a stop in front of him.
A burly mechanic in his sixties sat behind the wheel. He shined a flashlight in Court’s face. “What the hell is happening?”
Court said, “I’m going to need an aircraft. You have the keys to any of these?”
The man looked at Court as if he were insane. “I can’t just give you a bloody glider, mate!”
Court started walking again towards the row of trainers. He said, “Trust me, you don’t want me to take it from you.”
The older man climbed out of his cart and pursued Court on foot. He grabbed him by the shoulder. Court turned back to him, sighed, then started to reach for the SIG, but he stopped himself. “A quarter mile down that taxiway there are a dozen or so good men dead and wounded. There are two more dead and an injured flight attendant in that G-Four. She needs your help, and I need to go after the assholes that did this to them. Can we work together on this?”
The older man looked out at the burning SUVs in the distance, to the Gulfstream, and then back at Court. “Who did this?”
“I don’t have the first clue, sir, but I’m going to take one of these planes and go find out.”
“I’ve been warned that when you CIA boys land your jets here I need to stay the hell away. I guess I now know why.”
Court knew if the locals were aware the CIA was doing handoffs here, then it stood to reason that some bad actors could find out the same information.
It was quiet an instant, and then Court said, “The bad guys are getting away, and the good guys are bleeding to death.”
A nod from the mechanic. “Tail number forty-three. Third from the end. I’ve got the keys on me, I just refueled it.”
“Let’s go.” They climbed back in the cart and the older man drove.
As they approached the aircraft Court pointed to the northwest. “What road is that way that they might use to escape?”
“Loads of roads. Depends on where you’re goin’, doesn’t it?”
“My guess is they want to get some distance fast, stay out of cities at this time of early morning because they won’t be able to blend in like they would during the day.”
“Ah, then they’ll either be takin’ the A41 northwest or the A525. With the A41 they’ll be all the way to Liverpool in an hour. If they go east on the A525 it’s quiet. Smaller towns to Stoke-on-Trent, and then they could do the A50. That would get them all the way past Nottingham, into the East Midlands.”
Court realized he needed to get into the air as fast as possible to find the vehicles before they reached the decision point. Seconds later he climbed into the Grob G 109 self-launching motor glider, squeezing his backpacks in with him.
* * *
• • •
At ten thirty p.m. at the CIA safe house in Great Falls, Virginia, the woman locked in the small and spartan room in the basement lay in bed on her back with her eyes closed.
Zoya had finished her debrief with Brewer just after eight, and then she was brought back to her room by William and locked inside for the night. She drank bottled water out of her mini fridge and watched a half hour of bad TV before stepping into the bathroom to change into sweatpants and a T-shirt.
She’d gone to bed just after that, and she’d remained still on her back the entire time, her eyes closed.
But she did not sleep. She thought about Court, a man she’d only known for days, a man she hadn’t seen or heard from in months, but a man she was certain was the one person in this world she could trust. She missed him but knew there were two huge barriers preventing them from reuniting.
For one, she was locked up in this safe house till the CIA cleared her and put her to work for them. And secondly, Court was a freelance agent working from time to time at the behest of the CIA, and she was certain the two of them, both in the same line of dangerous work, would always be on the move, with security concerns that would mean they’d rarely, if ever, find themselves in the same place at the same time.
She forced herself to put the man she barely knew out of her mind and then she thought about her father. Another man she barely knew. He’d been gone fourteen years now, not that she’d seen all that much of him before that.
Her eyelids flitted as she thought about old memories of him, trying to reconcile the living man with the dead body in the photos she’d looked through tonight.
The memories were slow to return, but finally they did. She spent minutes lying there thinking about him, every little detail that remained in her mind over the years, like pulling an old photo album off the shelf.
* * *
• • •
William Fields reclined in his chair, his feet on his desk and his eyes on the wall of screens in front of him.
Or to be more precise, he monitored just one screen. Camera twelve, the device positioned in the upper corner of the holding room at the end of the hall.
He’d spent the last half hour watching Zoya lie in bed through the infrared vision built into the camera, her chest slowly rising and falling, her hands clasped in front of her while her five-foot-seven-inch frame lay still.
Watching Anthem nearly constantly through the night hours wasn’t his mandate . . . He saw it rather as a perk of his job.
He had just taken a sip of Diet Coke when Zoya’s eyes opened suddenly, glowing in the infrared. He’d thought her to be asleep, but now he watched with the can close to his mouth as she stared at the ceiling. He zoomed in on her face. Her eyes seemed to narrow, as if she were deep in thought.
She did not move for a minute more, and neither did the man studying her, but just as William started to take another sip of his soda she sat up, kicked her feet out of the covers, and rolled out of the twin bed.
She rose and walked towards the door to the room in her stocking feet. She pressed the call button on the wall by the overhead light switch, and instantly a tone sounded in the monitoring room. He watched her as she stood there, looking out the small viewing window at the well-lit hallway in front of her.