Stanley Wolchonok had Marte’s smile.
As far as Helga could tell, SEAL Team Sixteen’s senior chief hadn’t stopped moving since his plane had set down in Kazabek, but she’d caught enough of a glimpse of him to see that he had his mother’s smile. And the glint of sharp intelligence in his eyes—that was pure Marte as well.
Out of all her regrets in her life, not searching more strenuously for Marte back in the 1960s, when they both would have been about the age Stanley was now, was exceedingly high on the list.
But Helga had been afraid it would hurt too much.
And here she was now, an old woman, forced to find Marte in her grown son’s smile.
She was going to come face-to-face with Stanley later. At a meeting with FBI negotiator Max Bhagat and the SEAL commanders, whose names she had to consult her memo pad to keep straight.
I know your secret.
Every time she opened her pad, the words Des had written there seemed to jump out at her.
Her secret. That she was losing her mind—her brilliant, wonderful, God’s gift of a mind.
Helga didn’t want to think about it, didn’t want to acknowledge it, hoping that if she didn’t call it by name, it would disappear.
Knowing that that wasn’t going to happen.
Des had said nothing more to her. But then again, he hadn’t had time to. He’d vanished upon arrival in K-stan, and she could only guess where he’d gone, whom he might be contacting, what he might be doing.
Because she knew his secret, too. He wasn’t formerly with Mossad. He was still with Mossad.
She tried to imagine him slinking around in the shadows like James Bond. Like the games Marte used to play—always moving silently and eavesdropping on everyone from the butcher to her sister, Annebet. She’d forced Helga to learn to climb out of her window and creep around without being heard.
“You never know when this will come in handy,” Marte had told her, in complete seriousness.
And it had. Her ability to move soundlessly had come in very handy on that night when her parents and Hershel had fought.
At first it had been all loud voices. Poppi shouting about gold diggers after the family money. Her mother outraged that Hershel would even consider any kind of liaison with a girl like Annebet Gunvald. She wasn’t even Jewish.
But then her mother stormed upstairs, leaving Hershel and their father. Their voices calmed and Helga had silently crept closer—close to the door of her father’s study.
“She’s a beautiful girl,” she heard Poppi say through the door. “Very tempting. Particularly if she offers—”
“She hasn’t offered anything,” Hershel cut him off, his voice tight.
“These girls at university,” Poppi continued, “freethinking young women who believe, what? That they’re actually going to be doctors ... ?”
“Yes,” Hershel said. “Annebet believes that, and I believe it, too. She’s wonderful, Father—”
“If it’s marriage you want—”
“Marriage? I just met her.”
“A man in your position must wait until marriage to ...” Poppi cleared his throat. “Still, you’ve become a man and a man has needs... .”
Hershel was silent.
“As you get older, you’ll learn to see beneath the obvious outward trappings of a girl like this. With age, you’ll see her coarseness, her ... lack of the more lasting virtues. Taking a girl like this as your mistress might seem like a good idea now—”
“Her name is Annebet, and I have no intention of insulting her by making her my mistress.” Hershel was angry. He usually didn’t get loud when he was very angry. He got quiet. Poppi didn’t realize that, but Helga did.
“Good. That’s ... good.” Poppi cleared his throat again. “Your mother and I weren’t intending to arrange a marriage for you, like our parents did for us. We hoped you would pick your own wife. But if you’re ... hesitant to approach a certain girl, a Jewish girl from another well-to-do family, we could speak to her parents and—”
“Well, that’s a hell of a reason to get married, isn’t it?” Hershel sounded strangled. “Simply to get laid?”
“Don’t use that language in my house!” Poppi exploded, and Helga shrank back from the door. “How dare you?”
“How dare you?” Hershel shot back quietly, intensely. “You don’t even know Annebet, and you assume because she’s not Jewish and because her family has to labor for a living that she’s less than we are. Well, she’s not. She’s more. She’s so much more. And I pity you for not being able to see that.”
“I forbid you to see her again!”
“Or you’ll do what?” Hershel asked. “Write me out of your will? Fair enough. Consider it done. I don’t want your money. I have better things to do than sit around counting something that doesn’t really exist.”
Hershel pulled open the door. He didn’t slam it behind him. He shut it instead with a much more final-sounding click. He took the stairs up to his bedroom calmly. If Helga didn’t know him as well as she did, she wouldn’t have guessed that he was furious.
She followed him up and into his room, watching as he started to pack, throwing his leather bag onto his bed and taking all of his undergarments from his drawer, putting them inside.
“I can’t believe he still thinks I’m—” Hershel cut himself off.
“What?” she asked.
He shook his head. “Never mind.”
“Are you really leaving?” Her heart was in her throat. “If you go back to Copenhagen, how will I know you’re safe?”
Hershel sat down on his bed, took off his glasses, and rubbed his eyes. He sighed, looking at his suitcase. “Annebet told me she’s not going back to university this term—I think the Gunvalds are struggling more than ever to make ends meet. If I leave, I won’t be able to see her again.” He looked at Helga. “I’m dying to see her again.”
“What does it mean—get laid?”
“You heard that, huh, mouse? Terrific.” He stood up, dumped the contents of his bag back into his drawer.
“You’re not going to tell me?” she asked, relief clogging her throat. He wasn’t leaving.
“No.”
“Are you sure? I suppose I could always ask Poppi ...”
He laughed at that—as she’d hoped he would—some of the tension leaving his face. But he didn’t tell her.
It didn’t matter. She’d ask Marte. Marte knew everything.
Helga turned to leave, but Hershel stopped her.
“Does Annebet ... Has she ever ... mentioned me?”
Helga shook her head. “I haven’t seen her since the day in the barn, and today in the store.”
He looked so disappointed. “But Marte says Annebet looks at you like she wants to kiss you,” she continued.
Her brother’s face lit up. “Yeah?”
“Mrs. Shuler? Mr. Bhagat is ready to see you, ma’am.”
Helga blinked.
An earnest young man stood in front of her. He couldn’t have been more than twelve. Okay. Twenty-five. He just looked twelve.
Helga flipped through her notepad, skimming the words written there in her own familiar handwriting.
Hijacked plane. One hundred twenty passengers. Terrorists from the People’s Party. Demanding release of prisoners, one in Israel. Max Bhagat—FBI negotiator.
I know your secret, in Desmond’s bold hand.
Merde. When had he written that?
She rose to her feet and followed the young man into the other room.
“They haven’t contacted us again,” Max Bhagat was saying. “Not since they spoke to the tower in Kazabek before they landed. We’ve tried to raise them a number of times, but they’re not talking.”
Stan stood near the door to this room in the airport terminal that had been set up as the negotiators’ headquarters. The building overlooked runway two, where the hijacked plane was parked.
This room had no windows, but just down the hallway was a waiting area with a floor-to-ceiling view of the 747. And, of course, the negotiators’ room had banks of video screens, upon which were broadcast images of the plane from every imaginable angle, courtesy of the cameras put into place by the SEALs in Jazz Jacquette’s surveillance squad.
They were out there right now, four men hidden on their bellies in the swampy grass surrounding runway two. Two teams of two on two-hour shifts, rotating out every hour.
“They haven’t pulled the window shades,” Bhagat continued, “so we’ve got a pretty clear look into the cabin. There appears to be only five terrorists—”
“I wouldn’t set that into stone just yet,” Lieutenant Jacquette interrupted. “Wait until we get the minicams and mikes into place in the body of the plane. I have a three-man team all set to move in after 0200.”
The SEALs in Jazz’s squad would approach the aircraft from its blind side—the rear—and work their way forward, staying beneath it. It would take time, moving slowly so as to make no noise, but they’d gain access to the luggage compartment and thread miniaturized cameras and microphones up into the passenger compartment and the cockpit of the plane.
Stan tried to stay focused, tried not to let his thoughts slip to Teri and Muldoon, who had surely finished dinner, even if they’d lingered over coffee. They were probably both in bed by now.
Maybe even together.
God damn it.
He was tired and cranky.
So what if Teri had hit it off so well with Muldoon that she had invited him back to her room? So what if he were there right now, skimming his hands and mouth across her naked body? So what if he were pushing himself inside of her as she clung to him, eyes closed and head thrown back, sweat glistening on her perfect breasts?
Ah, Christ. Stan wanted to double over from the longing and envy that gripped him. Instead he pushed it away, forcing himself to stand tall, to stand strong.
It would be great if Muldoon and Teri hooked up. He knew that was true. Because then Teri would be Muldoon’s problem. Stan could stop thinking about her once and for all. He could stop trying to figure out how the hell to help her deal with not just the big threats in her life, but the day-to-day ones as well.
Stan could be her friend, period, the end. No obligations, no responsibilities, no temptation. Yeah, all temptation would be gone. Because no way in hell would he mess around with Mike Muldoon’s girlfriend. No way. He could want her so badly he was bleeding from the ears, but he wouldn’t touch her if she were involved with Mike.
Lieutenant Paoletti and Max Bhagat were deep in a conversation about timing and best and worst case scenarios—nothing Stan didn’t already know. Still, he needed to pay attention, so he tried to wake himself up by standing a little straighter and resolutely pushing the last of the images of Teri Howe getting it on with Mike Muldoon out of his head.
Mrs. Shuler, the envoy from Israel, was watching him—apparently he wasn’t the only one whose attention had wandered. She gave him a smile and a nod before they both focused on Max Bhagat.
But then the conversation and the meeting was over. And Stan followed Paoletti to the door. If he were lucky, he’d encounter no more emergencies between this building and his hotel room pillow.
Please, God, let him get just an hour of sleep tonight... .
But Mrs. Shuler intercepted him, turning to greet him with a handshake in the hallway.
The Israeli envoy was a small, pleasantly round woman in her midsixties with soft gray hair that curled around a still-youthful face.
“I don’t want to take up too much of your time, Senior Chief,” she told him in an accent that reminded him sharply, sweetly of his mother’s laughter-filled voice. “I know you must be even more tired than I am. But I did want to meet you and introduce myself. When I was a little girl, back in Denmark, I was friends with your mother.”
Stan had to laugh. “No kidding?”
Mrs. Shuler nodded, warmth in her eyes. “Marte and her family—the Gunvalds—helped save my life when the Germans rounded up the Danish Jews in 1943.”
No shit? “She never talked about Denmark,” Stan admitted. “At least not to me, not in any depth. I mean, I knew her parents died there when she was pretty young, right after the war. And family legend has it that her older sister, Annebet, hocked an important piece of jewelry, some kind of heirloom, I think it was, to buy them passage on a ship to New York, but other than that ...”
“My brother’s ring.” Mrs. Shuler suddenly had to reach for the wall to hold herself up.
Stan took her elbow, afraid she was going to do a half gainer right on her face, this woman who had known his mother, who had known the grandparents he himself had never met. “Are you all right, ma’am?”
She looked at him with eyes that were no longer filled with energy and light, but instead were confused and frightened.
“Ah, Helga, there you are.” Her assistant, the tall black former operator, breezed down the hall toward them. “I see you’ve met Senior Chief Wolchonok—Marte Gunvald’s son. I’m sure there’ll be a more opportune time to talk after this situation has been properly dealt with.”
“Marte’s son,” Mrs. Shuler repeated, looking at Stan, her face now showing every single day of her sixty-something years of life.
“Is that okay with you, Senior Chief?” the assistant said. “Maybe you can share a flight back to London with Mrs. Shuler.”
“I’d like that,” Stan said. “You know, my sister’s name is Helga.”
Mrs. Shuler’s eyes filled with tears. “I didn’t know,” she said.
And then she was gone. Whisked back into the negotiators’ room.
Stan opened the door to his hotel room, peeling off his shirt and T-shirt and unfastening his pants as he went inside.
It was as freaking hot in there as it was out in the hallway. Hot and close. His vivid imagination conjured up the fragrant scent of the curried noodles and vegetables he’d ordered for dinner, back about a million years ago.
His stomach rumbled.
It was some realistic hallucination, because it overpowered the stench of his own clothes. He smelled like fatigue and nonstop stress, armpits and old feet. Tired, aching, stinky old feet.
He slapped on the light and sat down in one of the room’s tattered easy chairs to take his boots off. His left boot was off and in his hands before he saw it.
Dinner—main course covered with a metal plate warmer—had been laid out on the small table in the corner of the room.
And—holy shit!—Teri Howe was curled up in the middle of his bed, fast asleep.
He was wearing only his briefs. His pants were down around his knees, his T-shirt and shirt back by the door where he’d dropped them.
His fingers fumbled, and his boot hit the floor with a thump, and Teri sprang awake. It was remarkable to watch, at least for the part of him that wasn’t completely horrified by coming face-to-face with her in his current state of undress.
One instant she was sound asleep, and the next she was on her feet, back against the wall, staring at him, eyes wide, as if he were some flasher who’d dropped his pants in the park.
“Excuse me,” he said. “I didn’t realize I wasn’t alone.”
He stood to pull up and zip his pants—his turn to move fast. But then he was standing there, without a shirt on, his belt undone. As she edged even farther away from him, he quickly sat back down. Getting his shirt was a priority, but he’d have to walk past her to do it, and the last thing he wanted to appear was threatening to her in any way, especially when she was still off balance from sleep and on the verge of being extremely spooked.
As he watched, she looked around the room and got her bearings.
“Oh, my God,” she said as breathlessly as if she’d just run five miles. “I must’ve fallen asleep. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to invade your privacy. I just ... I heard that you had to go to a meeting, that you didn’t get any dinner, so I ordered room service, only they wouldn’t bring it here if someone wasn’t in the room, so I found Duke—Chief Jefferson—who has a master key, and he let me in so I could wait for it, only after the food arrived I couldn’t leave because I couldn’t get the door to lock behind me and I didn’t want to leave the room unlocked with your seabag in here.”
She finally inhaled as she pointed to his duffel bag lying on the floor by the door, where he’d left it when he’d first been assigned this room.
“I’m so sorry, Senior Chief,” she said again, as if she’d committed some cardinal sin.
She’d ordered him dinner. Stan didn’t know what to say. He couldn’t remember the last time someone had ordered him dinner. He was always the man in charge of making sure everyone else had everything they needed, and his own needs often went ignored. He cleared his throat. “I’m, um, going to put my shirt back on, okay?”
“You don’t have to. It’s hot in here and you don’t ... have to ...” Teri watched as he crossed the room and picked up his T-shirt, as he turned it right-side out and pulled it over his head.
“Did I say thank you yet?” Stan asked.
She shook her head.
“Thank you.”
“I probably broke all kinds of rules, being in here like this.” She was embarrassed as hell and looked as if she were ready to bolt from the room. “It really wasn’t my intention to be in your room when you got back, like some kind of ... of ... weird stalker or something.”
“Actually, the situation did have a Goldilocks and the three bears feel to it.” He tried to make his voice light as he jammed his foot back into his boot. “Only you brought the porridge with you and your hair is dark brown. By the way, to get the door to lock, you need to pull up on the knob, let the latch click into place. So how was the karaoke? Did you get up and sing?”
She laughed—a short burst of surprised air. “Me?”
Stan felt far more in control with most of his clothes back on. “Not your style, huh?”
He crossed to the table and lifted the metal lid to find a fragrant mountain of vegetables, noodles, and chunks of tofu. Thank you, Jesus and Teri. He touched it with his finger and found that it was still faintly warm. Life was good.
“To get up in front of a bunch of people I work with and make a total fool of myself?” She laughed again. “No, thanks.”
Stan glanced up at her. “Want some?”
She shook her head, her shoulders more relaxed now. “I had dinner.”
With Mike Muldoon. Yeah, he knew. And yet she was here in Stan’s room now.
If he hadn’t seen her holding Muldoon’s hand in the restaurant, he’d be wildly imagining a night filled with more than a good meal, a shower, and a few hours of deep, dreamless sleep. And okay, he had a very vivid imagination and it was going wild. But because he’d seen her with Muldoon, he knew reality was going to be very different from all he was imagining.
Still, he let himself enjoy the thought of Teri, stretched out naked on his bed, all long legs and full breasts and soft skin.
Oh, yeah.
As far as fantasies went, it was a good one.
She glanced toward the door. “I should go.”
Stan put the lid back on both his libido and his dinner. “I’ll walk you to your room.”
She laughed. “Don’t be ridiculous. You don’t need to walk me—”
“There,” he interrupted her. “That’s the attitude you need. Instead of shrinking when someone bigger than you so much as looks at you—”
“I don’t shrink.”
She was only pretending to stand her ground. Stan gave her two seconds to fold. “You wanna bet?”
“I don’t.” Her gaze shifted and she was done. “I mean, I try not to—”
“I’ve been watching you for a while, Teri.” He moved so that she had to look at him. “Your body language is all about retreating when you should be holding your ground.”
She looked down at the floor. He would’ve had to lie down to put himself into her line of sight. Or touch her, tugging her chin up so that she was forced to look into his eyes.
He did neither.
“Out in the parking lot,” he said as gently as he could, “with Joel Hogan ... You froze. I saw it. I kept waiting for you to whale him one, but you didn’t. And when Starrett told me about Admiral Tucker—”
“Oh, God.” She sank down onto his bed, eyes closed, defeated. “You must think I’m such a loser.”
Stan sat down next to her, making sure there was a good three feet between them. “I think you’re one of the best helo pilots I’ve ever worked with. I think you’re an extremely beautiful woman—for whom that’s probably been more of a curse than a blessing.” He also thought she’d probably been sexually abused as a child, but Christ, how the hell did you ask someone about that? “And I think all you need to do is to learn how to be a little less nonconfrontational when it comes to unwanted attention from men.”
She laughed then, but it was shaky. “You make it sound like I just have to enroll in a class,” she said. “Confrontational Behavior 101. God, I wish it were that easy. All I ever wanted to do was fly. Why can’t I just fly?” She finally looked over at him, something akin to misery in her eyes. “I hate it when they win. And they always win.” She shook her head. “I don’t belong here. That’s why I went into the Reserves, into the civilian sector, but I didn’t belong there either.”
Stan tried not to let her see how her quiet words had affected him. I hate it when they win. He blew out a burst of exasperated air. “Well, that’s bullshit I never expected to hear from you. You don’t belong? Who does? They always win? Fuck that. Learn how to beat ’em.”
The harshness of his language had done what he’d hoped it would. It had surprised her. Brought her a little bit out of her misery. “It’s not that easy.”
“Yeah? Tell me one thing that’s easy that’s worth having or doing.”
She wouldn’t look at him as she stood up. “Look, you don’t understand. And I just ... I don’t want to argue with you.”
He got up, too, blocking her path to the door. “No,” he said. “No running away. You run away a lot, don’t you?”
She didn’t answer. She just stood there looking at him as if he’d stabbed her in the heart.
He steeled himself. “You do. You run from confrontation. Not when you’re flying though. But the rest of the time. You were running away from Hogan when he caught up to you in the parking lot. But right now, you have to stick,” he told her. “You wouldn’t run if you were in a helo.”
“I’m safe there,” she whispered.
“You’re safe here, too,” he said, and her eyes filled with new tears.
Please, God, don’t let her start to cry. If she started to cry, he’d have to put his arms around her, and that would probably kill him. Not him holding her—that wouldn’t hurt at all. What would kill him was having to let her go.
Besides, if he pulled her into his arms, and she didn’t want him to touch her, he probably wouldn’t know it.
She certainly wouldn’t tell him, that was for sure.
What the hell was he going to do with her?
And suddenly—just like that—he knew. He looked at his watch. Seventeen minutes to ten. There’d just been a surveillance shift change. Perfect.
“You ever have allergies?” he asked her.
She blinked at his apparent change of subject. “No.”
“Neither have I,” he said. “But my sister had hay fever really bad, and she took allergy shots. What they did was inject a little bit of the pollens she was allergic to into her system. It worked to desensitize her. That’s what we’ve got to do for you.”
She wasn’t following him.
“You tired?” he asked.
“No.”
Yeah, right. “Are you lying?”
She looked at him and laughed. It was a real life laugh, not one of those forced, fake ones that she sometimes made. “No. I ’m not tired—I’m exhausted.”
Stan grabbed his key and opened the door. “Well, tough nuggies, Lieutenant. You’re with SEAL Team Sixteen’s Troubleshooters now, and exhausted is no longer part of your working vocabulary. On your feet, grab your flack jacket, and follow me.”
“Did you really just say tough nuggies?” she asked as she grabbed her jacket and followed him out the door.
“You want me to what?” The SEAL nicknamed Izzy was looking at the senior chief as if he’d asked him to set explosives and blow up the local orphanage.
Teri had to admit that everything about this was surreal.
Both Gilligan—Petty Officer Dan Gillman—and Izzy—she had no idea of his real name—had just come in from the swampy fields around runway two, where they’d laid low and watched the activity on the hijacked plane for the past two hours. Their faces were streaked with camouflage greasepaint and their uniforms were soaked with a malodorous mix of seawater and briny mud.
“Harass her,” Stan said, nudging Teri toward them, right there in the hotel stairwell, his hand at the small of her back. “Hit on her. Have at her. Try to intimidate her. She needs to practice being assertive.”
Oh, God.
“If you say so, Senior.” Dan Gillman couldn’t have been more than twenty-three years old. He was good-looking beneath his greasepaint, with dark hair and melting chocolate brown eyes, a square jaw, and a physique that could have been featured in a six-page spread in Men’s Fitness magazine. He took a halfhearted step toward Teri. “Um ...”
“Come on, Dan,” Stan said. He’d stopped touching her, and she missed the heat of his hand against her back. “Pretend you’re in the Ladybug Lounge. Crowd her up against the wall. Invade her personal space. Get much too close and say, Hey, babe, come here often? Give it your obnoxious best.”
Gilligan took one step and then another toward her, rather ineffectively attempting to herd her back toward the wall through his sheer size. But he stopped short. He didn’t touch her and his eyes were apologetic as he towered over her. “Hey, babe.” His voice cracked and he cleared his throat. “Sorry, Lieutenant.”
“Ah, Christ.” Stan pulled him away from her. “You’re about as threatening as little Cindy Lou Who.”
“I have a sister,” Gilligan protested.
“So do I,” Stan said, moving closer and closer, until Teri had to back up to keep him from bumping into her. “Watch me.”
Her back hit the wall, and still he kept coming, his eyes hard and colorless in the dim stairwell light.
As he put an arm up on either side of her, pinning her in, his muscles strained the sleeves of his snugly fitting T-shirt. She found herself hypnotized, thinking about his underwear.
The senior chief wore plain white, no-frills briefs.
That fit about as snugly as this T-shirt he was wearing.
It was an image that Teri was going to carry with her to her grave—Senior Chief Stan Wolchonok, all hard muscles and tanned skin and blue eyes and form-fitting white briefs.
Oh, God.
She felt him touch her, his chest brushing her breasts as he got yet even closer. It was exactly the kind of intimidating crowding that she hated, and yet he was being careful, she knew, to keep the lower half of his body away from her.
He leaned forward and she felt his breath hot against her as he spoke, his voice a rough whisper in her ear. “You know you want me.” They were the same words Joel Hogan had said to her in the parking lot.
He pulled back slightly to look down at her, and Teri stared up at him, unable to speak or move. Unable to breathe.
For a half second, he froze, too.
But then he pushed himself away from the wall, away from her. “That’s what I mean, Gillman. As stupidly obnoxious as you can imagine. Come on, do what I just did, and Teri ...” He looked at her. “Don’t just stand there. What are you going to do when he says that to you? What are you going to say? Have something prepared. Pretend you’re in your helo—that you’ve got that kind of control of this situation, that kind of confidence.”
Gilligan got close, still dubious. God, he smelled bad, kind of like rotting fish, and Teri started to laugh. This was just too absurd.
“Okay, good,” Stan said. “Getting laughed at by the woman you’re pursuing is an instant soft-on.” He caught himself. “Pardon the expression.” He cleared his throat. “Now, look him in the eye and tell him to get lost.”
“Get lost,” Teri said to Dan Gillman. It was easy to sound heartfelt. She wanted both him and Izzy to disappear. She wanted to be alone in this stairwell with Stan. You know you want me. He hadn’t been serious when he’d said that. He was only trying to be ... what had he called it? Stupidly obnoxious. But his words were so true. She wanted him.
“My turn,” Izzy announced.
Teri turned to him, forced herself to meet his gaze. “Get lost,” she said, and Stan grinned, his smile lighting him from within.
You know you want me.
Yeah, she did.
Badly.
“Got a minute?” Sam Starrett asked.
“Sure. What’s up?” Max Bhagat looked up from the conference table that had been pulled off to the side of the negotiators’ room.
He was pretending to be cool and calm in his three-thousand-dollar suit, but rumor had it the laid-back control was just an act. Rumor had it that Bhagat’s true nature would be revealed within a day or two. He’d wear a hole in this cheap wall-to-wall carpet from his pacing. He’d stop eating, stop sleeping, that jacket would come off, and his sleeves would get rolled up.
Rumor had it that Bhagat rarely lost his temper, but when he did—look out! It wasn’t a rumor but a fact that the man was the best negotiator in all of the FBI. He’d do whatever it took to buy the SEALs the time they needed to be as prepared as possible for the takedown of the plane.
Starrett could appreciate that. He had the utmost respect for the men and women who worked hard to support his team.
But so far the tangos—terrorists—on the hijacked plane hadn’t responded to any of Bhagat’s radio messages. Every fifteen minutes the man had broadcast a message to the plane. Down the hall, his team of assistants were placing bets as to when he’d get fed up enough to go out on the concrete runway with a bullhorn.
The silence was unnerving. It was a technique the negotiators themselves frequently used. Now we’ll just sit here and you can listen to yourself breathe and think about all the ways you’re probably going to die... .
“Your FBI observers,” Starrett said, trying not to sound as hostile as he’d felt just a few hours ago, out on the airstrip, and a half hour ago in the hotel restaurant when he’d gone to get dinner and found that Alyssa Locke was there, too. Everywhere he fucking went, she was watching him. “They’re distracting the hell out of my men. Me,” he amended. “Me and my men.”
Bhagat just sat there, looking at him coolly, letting him sputter and make noise. Kind of like what the tangos were doing.
He could imagine what Bhagat was thinking. Was it Alyssa Locke that Starrett had a problem with, or was it her gay partner, Jules Cassidy?
But Starrett couldn’t explain. As pissed off as he was at her, he’d promised Alyssa he’d never breathe a word to anyone about the night they’d spent together. It was a secret he was going to carry with him to his grave. His very cold and lonely grave.
“Do you mind if I ask them to observe from a slightly closer proximity?” he asked, and had the satisfaction of knowing he’d surprised Bhagat with his request. “I want to start working with warm bodies on the mock-up—people playing the parts of both passengers and hijackers. You have any objection to Locke and Cassidy getting involved?”
“None at all,” Bhagat said. “Watch out, though, Alyssa Locke is an extremely accurate shot.”
Understatement of the century. Along with being drop dead gorgeous and amazing in bed, Alyssa was an expert marksman, a world class sharpshooter.
“We’re working on getting you an actual World Airlines 747 to use for practice,” Bhagat said.
“We should’ve had it here this afternoon,” Starrett countered.
“Hello?” The voice came from the radio, and Bhagat jumped out of his seat.
“Radio contact!” one of the aides shouted as Bhagat reached for the microphone.
“Get the senator,” he ordered.
Another of the aides who’d been dozing in front of the surveillance equipment vanished down the hall.
“This is World Airlines flight 232,” the voice from the radio announced. Whoever it was, she was young, female, and American. No doubt about it, that voice was pure New York.
“Flight 232, my name is Max,” Bhagat said, sounding cool and unruffled. “Who am I talking to?”
As Sam stood there, the room came to life fast. All the empty chairs filled up and the bright overhead lights were switched on.
“I’m Karen,” the voice said. “Karen Crawford?”
“Hi, Karen. Are you all right?”
“Max, you’re not, like, the airport janitor or something, are you? Because that was a really stupid question.”
The entire room stopped breathing. All of the members of Bhagat’s team of agents turned to look at him. Sam guessed he’d been called a lot of things in his life, but stupid obviously wasn’t one of them.
He didn’t seem particularly perturbed, but then again, he never did.
“I’m trapped on a plane with five angry men,” the girl’s voice continued, “who are armed with seven different automatic weapons. Seven. Believe me, I know. I’ve counted them.”
Max Bhagat smiled. “Make a note, please—we’ve got eyewitness verification that there are five hijackers on the plane, all fully armed,” he said to his team. He was already pacing. “Good job, Karen. Tell us as much as you possibly can, but do it without putting yourself into additional danger.” He thumbed the key to the radio microphone, opening the frequency.
“I’m an FBI negotiator, Karen,” he said into the mike with his accentless, smooth, FM radio voice. “I apologize for the stupid question. I was hoping you could assure me that you and everyone else on board—including our hostile friends and the pilots and crew—are all in good health.”
“Two of the passengers have been injured,” her voice came back, loud and clear. “But I’m okay. They want me to talk to my, well, my father.”
Senator Crawford must’ve been sleeping on a couch in one of the other rooms. He came in as if on cue, with his hair a mess, Yale sweatshirt on in place of his suit jacket, blinking in the bright overhead light.
“They know who she is,” Bhagat told the senator, getting right to the point, no niceties. “They’re using her to speak for them. Remember, no promises at this point, sir.” He thumbed the mike. “Karen, we’ve got him right here. He’s anxious to talk to you, too.”
As Starrett watched, Senator Crawford nearly grabbed the microphone from Bhagat’s hands. “Karen, honey, are you all right?”
“I’m fine, Daddy. You know, I almost didn’t make this flight. In fact, my friend ... my friend Gina, she didn’t make it on board. Someone picked her pocket and stole her passport and they wouldn’t let her on the plane. I know her parents must be really worried about her, but they don’t have to be, because she’s not on the flight. She’s still back in Athens and—”
The look on the senator’s face was almost comical. “Who the hell—?”
Bhagat almost knocked the man over in his haste to get the mike away from him. For a guy in a suit, he could move pretty fast.
“Hey! I don’t goddamn know who that is,” Crawford continued hotly, “but she’s not Karen. She’s not my daughter. And I would appreciate a little more consideration—”
“Peggy, notify the American consulate in Athens,” Bhagat barked orders right over him. It seemed as if the rumors of Bhagat’s legendary temper were all true. “Karen Crawford’s probably there right now, trying to get a replacement passport. Get her to safety, quickly and quietly—no media. Not one reporter finds out about this. If she shows up on CNN, I will go there myself after this is over and personally escort everyone in the Athens office to hell, is that understood?”
It clearly was. “Yes, sir.” Peggy hauled ass out of the room.
Max Bhagat turned his glare back onto Crawford. “Another outburst like that, and senator or president or God—I don’t give a gleaming goddamn who or what you are—you will be out of this room.”
That, too, was understood.
Still, Crawford bristled. “Are you threatening me?”
“Do you really care?” Bhagat shot back at him. “This young woman—and I believe she just told us her name was Gina. George, get me the passenger manifest from World Airlines, fast—she just managed to inform us that your daughter’s not on that plane. Glory alleluia, it’s your lucky day. Your daughter is safe. But whoever the hell Gina is, she’s someone else’s daughter, and she’s taking a real risk here. If the hijackers find out she’s not Karen, they’ll kill her. I don’t doubt that. Now, when you get back on this radio, sir, you remember that. And you keep her the hell alive.”