Final Vector (21 page)

The driver of the car flipped off his high beams, then shut off the vehicle's headlights entirely, per the nighttime protocol posted outside the guard shack. This allowed the security personnel to get a good look at the occupants of the vehicle before they stopped in front of the gate.

Procedure dictated that everyone entering the BCT stop at the gate to show his or her ID to the guard. When satisfied, the guard would wave his own ID in front of the reader installed next to the security building, raising the gate and allowing the vehicle to access the parking lot. The gate would then automatically lower behind the vehicle.

A large, dark sedan approached the building slowly, coasting to a stop at the wooden gate next to the side door of the security shack, the same door Jackie had stood in when he gunned down the guard a little while earlier.

Jackie strolled outside in his ill-fitting uniform to see two middle-aged men sitting in the front seat of the car, each holding a Styrofoam cup of steaming coffee, a box of donuts on the seat between them. Tony had briefed Jackie that an ATC supervisor as well as an operations manager--the supervisor's supervisor--would be arriving shortly before 5:00 a.m. to oversee the facility and feign importance while the president was inside Boston's airspace.

This car obviously contained those two men, who had apparently decided to carpool to work. Jackie decided that had been very thoughtful of them, because now he didn't have to worry about one of them driving up to the gate while he was eliminating the other.

It was like a two-for-one special!

The driver's side window rolled smoothly down with a barely discernible whir
.
Peering out the window at him was a man with silver hair and glasses, holding a federal government ID out for inspection. It was obvious he was familiar with the routine. He blinked owlishly up at Jackie and said, "Hey, buddy, haven't seen you before. New on the job?"

Jackie ignored the question and the ID the man was persistent-ly waving in his face, instead sticking his head through the open window and asking, "Do either of you drink your coffee black?"

The two men looked at each other, confusion evident on their faces, and the man on the far side of the car said, "Well, yeah, mine's black. Why do you ask?"

"Just curious, I guess. And to answer your question, yes, it's my first day. Only been here for an hour or so. I gotta tell ya, I think this is going to be my last day, too, because this is one boring fucking job." Then he raised his pistol and fired point-blank into the driver's face.

The man's head exploded, spraying bright crimson blood--

interspersed with chunks of bone and brain matter--on his passenger, who was obviously so shocked he didn't react at all. He just sat there, caught in a sudden downpour of blood and human tissue without an umbrella.

Jackie flicked the barrel of his gun a fraction to the right, and it suddenly seemed to dawn on the passenger that he was in danger.

He dropped his coffee and scrabbled for the door handle in a desperate attempt to flee. His hand slipped on the blood coating the interior of the car, and instead of yanking the door open, his hand flew up and he nearly punched himself in the face. Jackie shook his head sadly--that was one pathetic display--and fired again. The passenger's head exploded just like the driver's.

Jackie opened the driver's side door and reached across the driver's dead body, plucking the passenger's coffee cup off the bench seat where it had fallen when he had made his abortive escape attempt. Hardly any coffee had leaked out through the secure plastic lid, and although the outside of the cup was soaked in blood and unidentifiable gore, Jackie was undeterred. He had never been what anyone would consider a picky eater. He wiped the cup as clean as possible with the sleeve of his grimy stolen guard's uniform and drank deeply, savoring the rich Colombian brew.

Planting his left foot on the pavement outside the car door, Jackie used his right combat boot to shove the driver's body into the corpse of the passenger, slumped against the door. Then he pushed both of them to the floor. Blood was everywhere; the interior of the car looked exactly like what it was--the scene of a brutal double murder--but that wouldn't matter. By the time anyone saw the carnage, this job would be over and Tony and his team would be dead like these two or well on their way to safety. Jackie was laying two to one odds on dead over escaped, but he didn't much care either way.

Now that he took a good look at the car, Jackie could see that it was dark blue. Midnight blue, he thought they called it, which in his considered opinion was stupid. He figured if you were going to name a color midnight, it should be black, not blue.

He slid into the car and closed the door. Blood soaked into the seat of his uniform trousers immediately. He reached out through the window and waved the guard's ID in front of the card reader.

The gate rose, and Jackie eased the big car straight past the security shack and into the employee parking lot, where he parked the vehicle off by itself on the west side of the lot.

The passenger side window had shattered, apparently from the force of the second victim's skull smashing into it when he had been shot, so Jackie was unable to lock the car. With a broken front window, what would be the point? Instead, he simply closed the door and walked away.

He took another deep pull on the coffee. It was still hot and strong, containing only the tiniest hint of that distinctive coppery blood taste. Jackie walked leisurely back toward the guard shack fully awake, his senses tingling. It was good to be alive.

Maybe that crazy towelhead Andretti had known what he was doing after all when he gave this assignment to Jackie. There was no way Brian could have handled it, the weak-assed surfer dude pussy, and besides, Jackie had enjoyed it far too much to allow anyone else to handle it. Now all he had left to do was hang out at the guard shack for a few more minutes. The next victim would be cruising up to the gate anytime now.

Nick was reluctant to leave the relative safety of the small space underneath the floor of the Ops Room. It was highly unlikely the terrorists were aware of its existence, and even if they were, their minds were on other things, so the likelihood of Nick being discovered as long as he was holed up inside that workspace was slim.

The problem, of course, was that as long as Nick remained here, hidden out of sight, he would be neutralized, unable to do anything to stop the inevitable tragedy that was gathering momentum like an out-of-control freight train.

He moved slowly back through the cool, quiet equipment room where Harry's body lay facedown in a pool of his own blood.

Nick passed Harry purposefully, telling himself to avoid looking at the murdered technician but not managing to do so. Harry's blood was congealing where it contacted his clothing or the floor like thick dark maroon water gradually freezing and hardening into black ice.

After arriving at the first-floor hallway and the damaged exit door he had tried unsuccessfully to escape through earlier, Nick crossed quickly, paying no attention to the useless exit. Instead, he opened another heavy metal door on the opposite side of the hallway and started up a flight of stairs. These stairs were exactly the same as the ones he had descended earlier after first seeing the men in the black fatigues; they were simply located on the opposite side of the building.

The stairs and handrails were metal, and there were metal pipes running along the ceiling and down the side walls. All this metal combined to form an acoustic nightmare, an enclosed area where the slightest noises echoed and boomed. One man climbing the stairs might sound like an army, and that was something Nick wanted to avoid at all costs--unless, of course, he could actually find an army to climb the stairs with him.

He reached the second floor without incident and opened the door leading to the carpeted hallway running adjacent to the ETG lab, a small radar training room consisting of five scopes.

Inside this room, new controller trainees, called developmentals, were given computer-generated scenarios to run involving the airspace and procedures peculiar to Boston, allowing the controllers to become as familiar with them as possible before beginning their training on live traffic.

Nick slipped into the cubicles across the hallway from the lab where the contractors who performed briefings and conducted training for the FAA were stationed during administrative hours.

He gazed across the hallway, trying to decide how he could access the lab without being seen, or more to the point, without being heard by someone carrying a gun who might want to use it on him.

The ETG lab, like most areas inside the BCT, was accessible only by swiping an employee's ID card in front of one of the ubiq-uitous card readers. Nick's ID would get him into the lab; that would not be a problem. The problem would be the annoyingly loud beep that accompanied the reader's recognition of an ID and the associated unlocking of the door. If one of the terrorists was anywhere in the vicinity, he could not help but hear the sound and would undoubtedly come running.

If the men had somehow gotten ahold of an ID and had been able to access the outside entrance of the BCT building--and Nick assumed they had; the very fact that they were in here seemed to prove it--they would also be able to enter the ETG lab, and then the game would be up. Nick would be trapped. He would be captured or killed and, worse, whatever admittedly slim chance he had of somehow stopping the assassination of President Cartwright would be gone.

Nick checked his watch, frustrated. Air Force One had departed Andrews and was in the air, and the minutes were passing by with astonishing speed. If he was going to put his hastily contrived plan into effect, he had to get into that lab
now.
He took a deep breath, then walked across the hall.

At a donut shop a mile from the BCT, Kristin stirred her usual three creams and five sugars into her coffee, breathing deeply, enjoying the rich aroma which she hoped would help wake her up.

She was ten years into her law enforcement career, with the last five spent as an FBI Special Agent, so working all hours of the night and day was nothing new to her, nor were uninteresting assign-ments like the one she had been given today.

Her entire workday would consist of hanging out at the Boston Consolidated TRACON. It was standard procedure for at least one agent to be present inside every affected ATC facility when the president was flying, so of course another agent would be monitoring the situation inside the control tower at Logan Airport as well. The controllers in the tower had jurisdiction over the actual pavement on the ground at Logan and the airspace immediately surrounding the field, out to a distance of five miles.

Normally, United States Secret Service agents were assigned this duty, and in fact there would be a Secret Service presence in the tower at Logan, but, as with government agencies everywhere, money was tight, so the bureaucrats in charge had elected to use their own people to patrol the area immediately surrounding the president in Boston, farming out the chore of monitoring the BCT

to their brethren at the FBI.

As an agent relatively low in seniority, Kristin had inher-ited this duty, meaning she would spend the next twelve hours or more drinking coffee, eating way too much food that was way too unhealthy, and fending off the advances of air traffic controllers. It must be the temperament required to control airplanes, she thought--being responsible for giant aluminum tubes hurtling at each other at dizzying speeds all day, each with hundreds of people on board. Her limited experience with male controllers had been enough to convince her that they all thought they were God's gift to women.

The exception, she thought as she took a tentative sip of her coffee and was pleased to discover it tasted perfect as it rolled down her throat--she felt better already--seemed to be Nick Jensen.

Although they had talked for only a few minutes and the conversation had been all business, Nick seemed more humble than the typical controller, which she thought was strange because she had been told he was one of the best. But then again, finding out your wife had been murdered would certainly shake you, so maybe he was still in shock from that tragedy.

Kristin walked out of the donut shop and slid into the front seat of her car. She started toward the facility and found herself looking forward to seeing Nick again. She had reviewed the roster of controllers who would be working at the BCT when she arrived and noticed his name.

Jeez
, she thought,
what does it say about me that I'm looking forward to seeing the poor bastard whose wife just got killed?
She shook her head in disgust but couldn't help how she felt.
Doesn't matter
anyway. It's
going to be all business for both of us. Maybe sometime
when he's gotten over the trauma of losing his wife, we might be able
to see each other socially. Who knows?

She swung off the access road and headed toward the security building at the edge of the BCT property. The guard shack was constructed from the same puke yellow bricks that had been used to erect the facility itself. She wondered whether the federal government had gotten a discount on the masonry because of its hideous color. Based on her personal experience with government service, it seemed unlikely since they never seemed to buy anything at a discount, but why else would anyone have intentionally used such a nasty shade of mustard? It was off-putting, the architectural equivalent of a grimace.

As she questioned the mental acuity of the BCT's designer, she pulled up to the gate in her seven-year-old Monte Carlo and waited for the security guard.

Finally the rent-a-cop slouched through the door, his uniform wrinkled and filthy, and what looked like a big piece of fabric ripped off the sleeve and hanging down at his elbow. Very strange. Kristin had been here several times in the past, and each time previously the guard had been waiting at the door to the security building when she arrived, uniform creased and shoes shined, standing erect in an almost military fashion.