Final Vector (18 page)

Are you following me so far?"

Larry choked off the reply he wanted to make, "Of course I'm following you; I'm not an idiot." Instead, he simply said, "Yes." His throat felt dry and scratchy. He wished he had some water.

"In my study of those hundreds of hours of radio communications, along with familiarizing myself with much of the equipment you use in this very impressive control room, I feel confident making the statement that I will know immediately if you attempt to alert anyone to our presence or if you say anything even slightly outside the boundaries of what would be considered normal air traffic control phraseology. Do you understand what I am saying?"

"Yes."

"Good. Because I'm sure you are aware that it would be very unhealthy for you to ignore what I have told you. On the other hand, if you approach this situation with the seriousness it deserves and you do exactly as you are instructed, you will not be harmed in any way; you have my word on that."

It took all of Larry's self-control not to laugh at the last statement. The word of a man with a gun pressed scant millimeters away from his brain, with the expressed intention of blasting a bullet into it if his instructions were not followed implicitly, didn't seem to mean much, at least not the way Larry read the situation.

He suspected there was virtually no chance that he would ever leave the BCT alive unless one of two things happened. Either Nick was still alive and had managed to get word out that they needed help, or Larry could find a way to get the drop on this well-spoken but extremely scary and possibly psychopathic dude.

Larry was an outstanding air traffic controller, one of the best in the BCT in fact, but no kind of an expert at anything else, especially self-defense or counterterrorism tactics, so he seriously doubted the second option was going to happen. That left him fervently hoping that his buddy Nick was already outside the facility, well on his way to alerting the police, the FBI, the Secret Service, and any other law enforcement agencies he could think of to the potentially deadly situation developing inside this building.

The president's plane was due to fly into Logan in roughly sixty minutes, and Larry didn't have a clue what the intentions of these terrorists were at the BCT, but he knew the two scenarios had to be related in some way, so it was obvious that time was running out. And he had no idea what to do.

He stared straight ahead at his radar scope, which was clut-tered with sector maps and final approach courses but lacking in airplanes. One thing he did believe was that this lunatic was telling the truth about understanding the basics of aviation communications. Most of the language was not that difficult to understand; a lot of it was pretty intuitive. If the man had really listened to hundreds of hours of controllers and pilots yakking at each other, he would undoubtedly know if Larry tried to use code words to notify a pilot or anyone else to what was going on here.

The funny thing was Larry had no freaking idea what sort of code he might be able to use even if he thought he could get away with it. He had never received any kind of training for dealing with this situation. As far as he was aware, there was no protocol developed for it, at least not in the FAA's Air Traffic Organization.

He was completely on his own. It was not a comforting thought.

Nick eased the door open a few inches, looking first to the right, where the side wall of the building loomed only a few feet away.

A plastic tarp hung from the ceiling, blocking access to approximately the northernmost six feet of the room, which seemed to be in the middle of a construction project. Nick could see through the opaque plastic that no one was in there. It appeared as though work had been halted for the weekend and the area had been sealed up tightly.

As Nick peered cautiously around the heavy door, he could see that he had been right about this being the technicians' equipment room. Half a dozen replacement radar scopes were lined up on the far wall like soldiers ready to be sent into battle. Stacked high on a wire rack running the length of the wall immediately to Nick's left were various electronic components. They were clearly the innards of equipment the technicians worked with all the time--why else would they be here?--but what functions any of them might perform he had no idea.

All these things registered dimly in Nick's consciousness as he scanned the room, looking for anyone or anything that might pose a threat. He saw nothing. Nick was becoming more and more convinced that the three men he had seen must be inside the Ops Room, since there had been no other sign of them.

In one sense that was good. Nick felt he was in little or no immediate personal danger, at least for now. That meant that the opposite, however, was true for fellow controllers Larry and Ron. If the men with the rifles and handguns had entered the Ops Room, then his two coworkers were in big trouble and maybe already dead.

With this grim possibility weighing on his mind, Nick pushed the door open wider and stepped through it into the equipment room. As he did so, he tripped over something pliable lying in front of the door. Nick sprawled face-first onto the cool tile floor, trying his best to make as little noise as possible as he fell.

He absorbed most of the fall on his elbows, landing on them hard and bruising both of them, but thankfully he managed to avoid splitting his skull open on the unyielding floor. When Nick forced himself to his knees and looked back toward the door, he gasped involuntarily, clamping down his jaw firmly in an attempt to avoid being sick.

Facedown on the ceramic tile floor was electronics technician Harry Tanner. Instantly the pain in Nick's elbows was forgotten.

He scrambled on his hands and knees to Harry's side and placed two fingers lightly on the man's neck behind his earlobe, searching desperately for a pulse and finding none. He stared at the puddle of blood that had soaked through Harry's plaid work shirt and pooled on the floor beneath his body. There was a lot. He was amazed he hadn't stepped in it.

He turned Harry over onto his back and gagged again, watching in horror as the blood of the man who had worked for the FAA even longer than he had--Harry was well past minimum retirement age and had planned on leaving next spring--began spreading sluggishly across the floor, no longer trapped under his clothing. It was just beginning to congeal thickly in spots.

Nick slapped Harry's face as if to wake him from a trance and realized the futility of his actions. Harry was dead. Either he had been working in this room when the fuckers with the guns had come in and surprised him, or else he had seen them and made a desperate attempt to outrun them.

Judging by the shocking amount of blood on the floor, it looked as though Harry may have been stabbed to death rather than shot, although Nick was by no means an expert on the subject. Maybe gunshot wounds could cause all that blood, too. But the thought that the men might have come at old Harry with knives rather than the guns they were carrying seemed somehow more horrifying to Nick than if he
had
been shot. The intimacy of the violence implied a level of bloodthirstiness that went beyond just killing the man to further their goals. It almost looked as though the killers had viewed it as sport.

A desperate, high-pitched keening noise filled the room, and Nick realized it was coming from him. He was breathing heavily, almost panting, dangerously close to hyperventilating. His hands were shaking as he knelt over the lifeless body of Harry Tanner.

Controllers and technicians didn't normally hang out together at work, but Harry and Nick had had numerous long conversations over the years, and Nick had come to know the man as a gentle soul who loved his wife, his kids and grandkids, and hunting and fishing, in that order.

The initial burst of shock and terror Nick had felt at seeing the armed intruders strolling down the hallway of the BCT as if they owned the joint began morphing into something else. He felt a powerful surge of rage and bitterness and the intense desire to avenge Harry's death, although he had no earthly idea how he might manage to do that.

Nick knew he was reacting not just to the current bewildering and terrifying situation but to the murder of Lisa as well--to the immense jagged hole that had been torn open in his heart with the loss of his wife, a hole he knew he would never be able to close completely. She had been murdered simply because she had stumbled onto something far bigger than she had been prepared to deal with.

It was a lot like the situation Nick found himself confronted with now.

He gently eased Harry's eyes closed. Time was of the essence, of course, but if the killers had not found him by now, their main area of concern was obviously not this section of the building, and he was probably relatively safe, at least for a while. Nick swore softly that he would not allow these killers to escape; one way or another he would provide some semblance of justice.

Nick was surprised to discover he was crying softly. Tears dripped down his nose and fell onto Harry's shirt, mixing with all the awful blood that was beginning to darken and thicken into a sludgelike goo. He whispered, "I'm sorry, Harry." Even in his state of confusion and anger and fear, he knew he was really talking to Lisa, expressing to his dead wife the overwhelming pain and regret he felt, the baseless guilt that ate at him every day, saying it should have been him and not her lying in the ground.

He wasn't sure how long he stayed in that kneeling position, sobbing and kneeling next to Harry's body. Eventually the tears dried, and Nick knew he was leaving himself horribly exposed, sitting out in the open on the bloody floor of the equipment room. If the men who had butchered Harry returned, he would be a sitting duck, and although by now he didn't particularly care whether he lived or died, he found himself burning with the desire to make a statement to these people to whom life clearly meant nothing.

Nick rose silently and padded across the room toward the door. It was time to get help.

"Connors 712, cleared visual approach Runway 4 Right, contact Boston Tower 123.7." Larry was sitting ramrod straight at the scope. He had just worked a single arrival into Logan, glad for the momentary distraction from the tangible layer of tension that was building inside the TRACON.

He thought about it and almost chuckled, a surprising and unlikely achievement considering the fact that his nerves were strung tight and he felt like he might puke at any moment. "Tangible layer of tension" was the understatement of the decade. It was a goddamned cluster fuck, and the clock was ticking. Hopefully Nick had been able to make it out of the facility and go for help, because the president's plane would be leaving Andrews Air Force Base in less than an hour, and from there it was a short hop to Logan and directly into whatever shit sandwich these lunatics were planning on serving.

The man pointing the gun at him had not said in so many words that Air Force One would be targeted, but what the hell else could it possibly be? Why these guys were all the way up here in Merrimack instead of in East Boston was the question, although with nothing much to do except sit and think, Larry suddenly had a thought that didn't make him feel any better about things.

Who was to say these guys didn't have a group of conspirators in or around Logan? He began to feel woozy and ill when he realized what the plan might be. It was simple and perfect.

The man now lounged next to him in one of the controller chairs, feet propped up on the console in front of the radar scope to his right. The gun pointed steadily in his direction, but at least it wasn't still sticking into his neck. It would be just as deadly if the guy pulled the trigger, but somehow it didn't feel quite as terrifying this way.

He was apparently the man in charge, and earlier he'd had a short, intense conversation with the second terrorist. Larry had been unable to decipher anything, even though they had been standing less than two feet behind him. Then the second terrorist had backtracked out the main entrance to the Ops Room, the same way they had come in.

Where that man had gone and what he was doing now, Larry couldn't guess. Searching for Nick, maybe? Larry supposed it all depended upon whether they believed his lie about Nick calling in sick and the FAA not wanting to pay a controller overtime to cover the midnight shift.

That part was mostly true; they wouldn't have wanted to spend the money. But in the current incarnation of the FAA, where the animosity between management and the controller workforce was all-encompassing, they likely would have forced one of the controllers scheduled to work tomorrow's day shift to come in and work the mid instead, then work short on the day shift.

Allowing the Boston Area to be staffed with less than two controllers on a midnight shift was considered a big no-no, although the Manchester Area--which did the same job in the same room as Boston, albeit with less traffic--worked every single overnight with just one. Larry had no idea why that was, but it had always been that way. He hoped that this guy so casually waving a gun in his face wasn't aware of that fact, although he certainly seemed to have a pretty thorough knowledge about ATC in general and the Boston Consolidated TRACON specifically.

Suddenly a sickening thought occurred to Larry that was so obvious he wondered why he hadn't had it sooner. He was assuming Nick had seen the terrorists when they entered the building and had been able to avoid them somehow, that even now he had escaped the building and was well on his way to calling the authorities.

But how likely was that, really? Wouldn't a much more credible scenario be that Nick had been wandering down the hallway on his way back to the TRACON from the break room, bag of corn chips in one hand and coffee or soda in the other, when these Rambo-looking dudes had come around a corner with their fatigues and their black greasepaint and their guns and put a bullet in his brain?