The White House: A Flynn Carroll Thriller (23 page)

“So when I'm on the flight line, I can get in a plane at random?”

“Of course not, Flynn. You'll have a plane and crew assigned. A flight plan filed.”

“Scratch that. I'll tell them where they're going once we're rolling.”

“But not a random plane. That I cannot do.”

As was his established procedure, he left without saying anything to anybody—not a goodbye, not a word. He never, ever forgot that his life depended on his skill at deception, and Aeon was very damn good at seeing past most of his tricks.

This time, he would use a new procedure. Instead of going to the parking garage and pulling out the car that was kept there for him, he'd take a company car to Dulles, signing in under one of his working aliases, Richard Kelvin. Kelvin had retired two years ago, but his identity had not retired, and could still be used for chores like acquiring a car and driver.

He waited in the vast, sterile lobby until the car pulled up in front. Head down, he walked quickly to the vehicle. He instructed the driver to take him to the Silver Spring Metro station, then sat back with his eyes closed and, as far as was possible, blanked his mind. But of course, the mind keeps on, and that's what Aeon's surveillance experts counted on. Once they had a DNA signature—and they had Flynn's—they could find a person by the electromagnetic pattern generated by his brain, the same pattern that we measure with an electroencephalogram. Worse, they could do this from an unknown distance, probably from Aeon itself. A unit in the National Reconnaissance Office, as secret as their own, was supposed to be searching for some sort of base in our solar system, but so far nothing had been found.

As he hurried down into the Metro station, a cold, wet autumn wind blew reefs of leaves down the street. People huddled past in coats and jackets. The station was crowded, which was good. He boarded a train bound for Union Station. There, in the echoing hall, he bought a Greyhound ticket to Pittsburgh, using cash. The bus would leave at 7:55 and get in at 2:15 in the morning. He then went to a newsstand, where he found throwaway cell phones for sale. He bought four, again with cash. He used one of them to call Cassey Air Charter at the Allegheny County Airport, chosen at random. The GSMK phones were possibly secure, but only when calling other phones that were similarly equipped. He had taken one of them with him, but he wouldn't use it unless he had no choice.

“I'm looking for a flight to Dayton. I need it at three fifteen.”

“Not a problem. Name, please?”

“I mean this morning. Not tomorrow afternoon.”

“Oh. Hm.”

“Does that create a problem?”

“No, it's just … What are you carrying?”

“Just myself. My dad is dying.”

“Oh, jeez, I'm sorry. We can get you a plane, sure. Cost triple-time money, though, for the pilots.”

“I gotta be at my dad's bedside.” Flynn gave him credit card information from one of the aliases he carried. He waited as the card was run.

“Your plane will be waiting. You know how to get here?”

“I do.” Flynn closed the phone. He then went into a men's room and opened it. He fished out the SIM card and flushed it, then threw the rest of the remains in a trash bin. There was still half an hour before the bus left, so he entered a stall and waited there. Unless necessary, he would not expose himself for more than a few minutes in any public place, not given that there was an active assassination effort under way.

He told himself that he wouldn't worry about Di, which started him worrying about Di. Now that she was in the facility, surely she would stay there until they got some kind of a handle on this thing. But was the facility secure enough? Could everybody be trusted? There were no biorobots in that shift, but what if some of them were implanted? The whole staff was checked weekly, but maybe somebody had been hit in the past few days. And what about the other two shifts?

He left the john. It was too confining. It felt like a trap. His mind swam with worry and indecision. Maybe he should return to the White House. He'd faced the fact that killing Greene would gain nothing and cause all hell to break loose, so he needed to both protect him and prevent him from carrying out some kind of nuclear strike, but he also needed to figure out why Aeon even wanted to induce a nuclear war.

Watch the president. Check out the missiles. Which one mattered most?

He decided that the missiles were the best move. Greene was being such a jerk, he needed to come back to him with rock-solid evidence.

Of course, the deeper question had to be asked: Was Greene under mind control, or was he still free? And there was no way to get him into an MRI scanner, given his attitude.

The time crawled. Crept. People came and went, trains were called, buses were called. Finally, he was able to get aboard.

He took a seat in the back row and leaned up against the window so his face couldn't be seen from the outside. As the other passengers came aboard, he watched them. Elderly couple, black. Young woman, cheap coat, gum, furious eyes. Couple of guys, looked like college kids. Why were they on a bus to nowhere? A mother with a baby in a carrier. The baby was asleep. For now. Over ten minutes, the bus filled. That was good; it made it easier to be overlooked. The only better alternative would have been if he was alone. Alone, just him and the driver, what could go wrong?

He abandoned that train of thought. Any damn thing could go wrong. Anything could go wrong now.

Taking a bus was an ordeal, but he felt that it was absolutely necessary. In fact, of all the modes of transportation he'd used in the past, buses had been the safest. There had been only one incident, and it hadn't been major. By contrast, purchasing a car for cash had been extremely dangerous. They'd found him fast and come damn close. Using a small private plane had been even more nearly lethal. He hoped that this unlikely mode of travel and the fact that he was clean of implants would set them back. But he sat, tense, his shoulders hunched, compulsively feeling his weapon, the modified Raging Bull that hung under his arm, a heavy and reassuring hunk of pure power.

The bus wheezed along. The minutes crept into hours. The bus seemed to stop at every other gas station. People came and went, with the number of passengers dropping steadily.

When the driver called out “Pittsburgh,” he awoke, his eyes flying open and his right hand going for the pistol. He'd been asleep. Dead asleep. And all that time, he'd been horribly vulnerable.

The bus entered the station on 11
th
Street and emptied quickly. To his surprise, Flynn found a cab easily enough, meaning that he didn't have to waste another of the throwaway phones. He gave the driver the address out at the airport. The driver didn't ask questions and Flynn was glad. When he traveled, the talkative troubled him. He always told them that he was an accountant. Their eyes would glaze and silence would fall, blessed silence.

He got out of the cab. Cassey Air Charter was in a trim aluminum structure. Nothing fancy, but it didn't look like a sty, either.

As the cab drove away, he went to the door, which was locked. He knocked, then rang the buzzer. For a horrible moment, he thought that he'd been ditched, but at length he saw a shadow coming toward the door. A man in a gray coverall appeared and looked out at him suspiciously.

“I have a charter waiting,” he said.

The man opened the door. “You that plane out there? Come on in, sorry, we don't get many riders this time of night.”

“My dad's dying. I've got to get to Philly.”

“Oh, my, I'm sorry. Well, your plane's ready to go.”

He went through the empty facility, past a softly rumbling Coke machine and a row of plastic chairs, then through a double door and onto the tarmac, where an elderly Lear 23 stood with its windows glowing. A generator roared under the nose, and as Flynn climbed aboard he saw the lone ground crewman unplug it. The lights flickered as the plane went on batteries. He entered the cabin.

“I'm Gene Curtis,” the pilot said. “Sorry about your dad.”

“It was very sudden. We were golfing two days ago.”

“That's rough. Look, we're gonna just go straight across. There's some weather north and west, but it's not moving fast enough to catch us, doesn't look like. We'll be landing in an hour and fifteen minutes.”

As the man spoke, Flynn watched him. Too bad he couldn't use the temperature sensor he had with him, but he just could not see how to explain that. He couldn't afford to raise suspicions. He needed this flight to happen.

He gave the sad sort of smile a grieving son might offer. “Thank you.”

The pilot went into the cockpit. Before he closed the door, Flynn glimpsed the copilot, a woman. A recent hire or not?

He stood and knocked on the door.

The pilot opened it.

“I'm just wondering—I'm sorry to ask—but I'm an uneasy flier, and—”

“I've been pushing iron through the sky for thirty years,” Curtis said.

“So have I,” the woman added. “I'm Cassey. The wife and the company's namesake.”

Flynn took a seat and belted himself in. Maybe they were OK.

The plane started moving at once, and was soon bouncing along the runway. The 23 had not been produced since the 1960s, so this aircraft had to be pushing fifty. Maybe Aeon wouldn't need to come after him. Maybe the plan would simply fall apart.

Once they were airborne, he sat listening to the shriek of the engines and feeling the uneasy trembling when they encountered pockets of rough air. But that ended quickly. Since 23s cruise at forty-five thousand feet, the air was soon as still as glass, the plane seemingly motionless.

They had been flying for under half an hour when the pilot came back. His face was pale and his eyes full of worry. “There are numerous aircraft out there declaring general emergencies,” he said. “ATC is saying they're losing instruments.” He fixed steady eyes on Flynn, who looked back with what he hoped was the blank stare of the ignorant passenger.

“Are you saying to turn back?”

“I'm telling you what's happening. Turn back, keep on, I have no idea. Just want you to know, we could get real busy up front.”

Flynn rarely felt fear, but he felt it now. This was Aeon, had to be, doing this. They knew he was out here somewhere, but not where. In hope of getting him, they were going to strip the sky of planes. “Let's land right now.”

“Dayton's our closest field.”

“Will we make it?”

“I've never seen anything like this in all my years of flying, so I don't know. So far we're OK, but I might have to put this baby on the ground wherever we happen to be. I just want you to know that.”

Flynn said nothing. He'd been a damn fool to even try flying, but how could he avoid it, and what about the longer flight ahead from Wright-Pat to Minot?

The pilot returned. “Four affected aircraft have landed, two have lost contact.”

“Are they down?”

“Out of contact may mean down. ATC isn't saying.”

“How many are still in the air?”

“Six. Four affected, two unaffected—us and a Cinci flight out of Louisville. A Citation.”

“Do you know anything else about the affected planes?”

“A couple of UPS haulers, an air force whatever—we don't get told—some other charters. No sardine cans this time of night.”

A stall horn went off in the cockpit. Curtis turned and hurried back. A moment later, the horn stopped.

The lights went out. From the front, Flynn heard, “Shit!” They flew on. The darkness was absolute, like being in a cave. Only the windows revealed anything—a few stars and, far off, lightning.

The intercom crackled. “We're having avionics issues, sir. Please remain in your seat. Do you know how the brace position works—” The intercom crackled again and then was silent.

Would he die now? It seemed likely. If so, would the world die with him? That thought made him break out into a sweat. It made him feel both helpless and essential. Maddening.

He felt the plane shudder, then slow. For all he could tell, a normal descent had commenced. A moment later, though, they wallowed to the right, the right engine screamed, and they straightened out. Then the same thing happened as they wallowed left.

Curtis was guiding the plane with engine thrust. He didn't have his vertical rudder. What else didn't he have, then?

Flynn could see lights below. Dayton? No way to tell, no way to ask. The plane pitched, the engines dropped back, the nose fell, and the stall horn sounded. Again, the engines screamed. The stall horn stopped. The engines cut back and in a moment the horn was blaring again.

It went on like this as they dropped lower and lower. Flynn now understood that they had no hydraulics and no backup electrics. Wherever they were, this was going to be a very dangerous landing.

Lower they went, and lower still, the engines alternately screaming and cutting back as the plane pitched and yawed and wallowed across the sky like a leaping sea creature.

Immediately below them, Flynn could now see a runway, a wide one. Fire equipment pulled in beside them and dropped back as the plane failed to lose speed. They were coming in much too fast.

Flynn leaped out of his seat and went to the rear of the plane, where he took the seat closest to the bulkhead. He fastened the belt and braced himself wrapping his arms around his knees and bending as far forward as he could.

A roar, the tube of the fuselage twisting, a haze of smoke and fire, then a ferocious pull to the right and a long, screeching slide that never seemed to end.

His head took a blow, he saw flashes of light, then another blow, then he was thrown to one side with such force that he blacked out.

Orange light. Pain in his face. Heat. More heat.

Screams, long and awful with despair. A specter wreathed in fire, dancing across the runway. Then it fell. It kicked, it shook, its fists hammered the air.