Terminal Run - Страница 2

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He walked down the stairs to the runway. Immediately his escorts pulled away the rolling stairway and the big jet rolled down the still-darkened strip, its navigational beacons only coming on after it had flown away into the distance. The night was eerily quiet after the plane left.

“Where in God’s name am I?” he asked, knowing he would have no answer.

He was led to a decrepit cinderblock building’s rusted steel door. The interior was lit by a single hooded, dim lightbulb, the building some kind of garage or storage area in a state of severe disrepair, one of the vehicle bay doors broken and hanging from a hinge. He was led to a staircase, down to a dusty cobwebbed subbasement, which led to a cinderblock walled hallway. One narrow door was opened, the broom closet cluttered with cleaning gear, a stained sink, and another rusted door. The suit shut the closet door behind them and opened the second door, revealing the gleaming stainless-steel interior of an elevator. The agent shut the steel door, put his ID card on a scanner, then pressed his thumb to a second scanner. The inner door glided shut, and the elevator descended silently for some time. When the door opened, Ericcson was led down another cinderblock hallway past several steel doors, the double door on the end opening to a Spartan conference room furnished with only a generations-old oak table and ten wooden chairs, the kind that looked like they’d come from a courtroom. He was directed to take a seat. He poured himself a black cup of coffee from the service in the middle of the table.

When it was half gone the door creaked open, and he stood to greet the newcomers. He didn’t recognize one, but the other was very familiar. It was John Patton, the boss.

* * *

When Kelly McKee opened the door of his house in the sprawling Virginia Beach suburbs, he found his chief of staff standing there in jeans and a T-shirt, carrying a bottle of Merlot. It was nearly midnight on Saturday, and she was two hours late. She said nothing, handing him a note that said:

...

Don’t say anything. Invite me in and turn on music in the den.

He looked at the note uncertainly, not sure whether to be annoyed or amused. He waved her in, took the wine to the den, and turned on a mellow disk. She frowned and produced her own music and inserted it. It was vintage head-banging rock’n’roll. She cranked the volume until he was about to complain, when she handed him the next note:

...

Don’t argue. Lie on the floor and fake a heart attack. This is all coming from the highest levels and will be explained to you.

He gave her a look of disbelief. Her expression was deadly serious, and he had known her for too many years and through too many battles to doubt her. He was no actor, but he handed back the note without a word, turned to look at the wine bottle, and suddenly grabbed his chest. With an expression of agony he sank to his knees, the wine bottle falling to the carpeting, McKee joining it. Above him she stood and calmly dialed her cell phone. When she spoke her voice sounded panicked, but her expression never changed.

“This is Karen Petri at 227 Hightower Road. The homeowner, Kelly McKee, is having a heart attack. He’s collapsed and in terrible pain. Yes! Please hurry. Yes.”

“Was that 911?” he asked.

“Quiet, sir,” she said, kneeling above him.

He waited, feeling absurd.

McKee was a slight figure, slightly shorter than Petri. He had a handsomely rugged face, beloved by the press, and which looked much too young to be worn by a man so senior, and it would look even younger without the trademark bushy eyebrows.

After what seemed forever but was perhaps only ten minutes a truck could be heard out front. Petri opened the door and admitted three paramedics. None seemed to care that his heart sounded perfectly normal. He was placed on a gurney, an oxygen mask strapped on, his shirt ripped open to expose his chest, a blood-pressure cuff strapped to his arm. The men rushed him out the front door to the waiting ambulance. Petri asked if she could go. The lead paramedic nodded, and she climbed in. The door was shut as the van accelerated out of the court and roared north.

“Somebody want to tell me what the hell is going on?” McKee said through his oxygen mask.

“Specific orders from Patton, sir,” Petri said. “And one of the orders is to keep silent until you’re where the boss wants you.”

“You’ve always wanted to be able to tell me to shut up.” He grinned at her, but her expression remained severe as she put a finger to her lips.

Once steady on the interstate, the first paramedic stripped off his uniform until he was down to his underwear. McKee lifted an eyebrow.

“Please remove your clothes, sir,” the nearly naked medic instructed. McKee shrugged, the order no more odd than the rest of the evening. The paramedic was McKee’s height and age, within five kilos of his weight, with the same skin and hair coloring. McKee traded clothes, the paramedic climbing onto the gurney.

“Put on a surgical scrub cap from the cabinet.”

McKee felt like a fool decked out as a paramedic, but did as he was told. The ambulance arrived at the emergency entrance to a hospital. When the door opened he and the other paramedics hustled the patient through the door, one of the other men shouting medical jargon to the receiving physicians. McKee glanced up, thinking for a moment that they had gone to Portsmouth Naval Hospital. A new face arrived, a middle-aged man in a suit holding a banker’s box under one arm.

“Follow me, sir,” he ordered. McKee followed the suit, Petri staying behind with the man on the gurney, who was being prepared to be rushed to the operating theater. McKee stood in an elevator that zoomed to the upper floors of the hospital building. The doors opened to the roof. The suit wearing agent waved him across a walkway to a waiting medevac helicopter, which was idling. “Put this on, sir,” he said, opening his box and producing an aviator’s helmet with an intercom headset inside. McKee strapped it on over the surgical cap and climbed into the rear seat, and as soon as the hatch shut the aircraft throttled up and lifted off, turning to the northwest.

McKee debated asking the pilots what they knew, but decided to wait. He glanced at his watch. It was half past midnight and he was flying over the eastern shore of Virginia in a speeding medical transport chopper with no idea what was going on. He settled in for the ride, knowing that this had to be urgent. After a half hour the helicopter settled slowly toward a landing site without lights. The chopper came to earth and the rotors spun down to idle. The copilot told him to remain seated. Ten minutes later another helicopter landed in the darkness. A man wearing a helmet climbed out and trotted to McKee’s helicopter and opened the door to join him in the rear.

By the dim wash of the cockpit lights McKee could see the man’s face under the visor of his helmet.

“Good evening, sir,” McKee said to John Patton. “Is there anything you want to share with me about this trip?”

“Nope,” Patton said without a smile. “Pilot, let’s go.” The chopper took off and flew for another half hour before touching down for a second landing in the dark.

* * *

John Patton’s evening had been as odd as Ericcson’s and McKee’s.

The afternoon’s two briefings had given him a sick feeling in his stomach. Things were much worse than he’d ever suspected. The first meeting had been with the Director of the National Security Agency, a man named Mason Daniels, who had nothing but bad news. The second meeting had been with the President, the Secretary of War, the National Security Advisor, the Director of Central Intelligence, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the situation room of the White House, where the news was even worse. He had immediate work to do with two of his chief subordinates, but both were being watched by the other side, their movements chronicled, the state of the military’s readiness judged by whether his men played golf or took Saturday emergency meetings at the Pentagon.

Mason Daniels helped Patton plan a rendezvous at a second-tier presidential evacuation bunker on the eastern shore of Maryland, a structure buried deep underground and surrounded by empty farmland, all of it owned by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The bunker had a concealed four thousand-meter runway, with two feet of topsoil and vegetation growing over the strip in movable pans controlled by a hydraulic system that would uncover the runway on command from the approaching aircraft. The problem was how to get his men to the bunker without the people tailing them becoming wise to an urgent meeting with their boss in Washington. Daniels had proposed how to bring in Patton’s men, and reluctantly he’d agreed. But then the matter was his own departure to the bunker, since he was watched even more closely by the adversary’s intelligence forces than McKee or Ericcson.

Daniels had arranged that as well. Patton had asked Marcy, his wife of twenty-five years, for a Saturday evening off to see some old Academy classmates, and had kissed her good night and taken a cab to a Georgetown pub. One of Daniels’ men brought the drinks that evening to a group of friends also cast by Daniels, and during the evening Patton appeared to take aboard too many beers, although not one contained a drop of alcohol. As the clock struck midnight, Patton’s face went pale. He excused himself and hurried to the men’s room, where a man wearing Western regalia waited for him in the back hallway. The cowboy gave him a Stetson ten-gallon hat and led him out the back door to a waiting black sedan idling in the parking lot. Feeling foolish, Patton got in the back seat and slouched down despite the blacked-out windows, the car roaring off to a small civilian airport, where a corporate jet helicopter waited. Before Patton left the car he traded the cowboy hat for a helmet with an intercom headset. The chopper took off and flew to a second airport, where he transferred to a second helicopter, then flew out over the Chesapeake, eventually landing where Kelly McKee’s helicopter waited.